Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (56 page)

 
          
 
"That's crazy! They'd be ratting on
themselves, admitting they're spying."

 
          
 
"Don't you understand, Eva? They're
allowed to spy. Those are the rules of the game. They're supposed to spy! All
they'd be doing is acknowledging the obvious and proving that they're better at
it than anyone else. It's nothing for them to be ashamed of. They'd crow!"

 
          
 
When Eva still didn't say a word, Pym decided to
drive the last nail. "Mr. Burnham would go to jail, probably for life.
He'd deny everything, but the evidence against him would be overwhelming. I'd
go to jail too, and there I would die of old age unless, someday, the Americans
offer to trade me for some low-level American diplomat—or perhaps a tourist—
arrested in
Moscow
or
Leningrad
. Then I'd be sent home— it's funny, I don't
think of it as home any more, haven't for years and years—where I'd be
interrogated and, most probably, shot." He saw her hands jump in her lap,
and he continued matter-of-factly. "Yes, they certainly wouldn't treat me
as a hero for refusing to carry out an assignment. As for you, I really don't
know. It depends—"

 
          
 
"Stop," Eva said.

 
          
 
Pym looked at her. She was pale and rigid.
"I'm sorry," he said. "But it's true. All of it."

 
          
 
"How long?" she asked.

 
          
 
"I can't be sure. Until your Mr. Burnham
loses his access to the President, I imagine, which is bound to happen sooner
or later—they say this President is fickle that way—or until you lose your
access to Mr. Burnham; perhaps his wife summons him back to the nest."

 
          
 
"She's filed for divorce."

 
          
 
"Ah. In that case—"

 
          
 
"I can't pump him for information."

 
          
 
"Why not?"

 
          
 
"One of the main reasons he trusts me is
that I never ask him anything, ever. As far as he knows, and the President too,
I know nothing about anything important, and I care less. If I start asking him
questions, he'll get suspicious, and he's hardly the suspicious type, not in
his state of mind."

 
          
 
"What state of mind is that?"

 
          
 
"He's in love with me."

 
          
 
"Good."

 
          
 
"Even if I wanted to, and I don't, I
couldn't. He trusts me."

 
          
 
Pym frowned. "What does that have to
do—"

 
          
 
"I can't betray him. I can't!"

 
          
 
"You're not betraying him now?"

 
          
 
"That's different. I'm just reading his
mail, right? It's not him. He doesn't ever have to know. It's not—"

 
          
 
“And your state of mind?" He wanted her
to say it. "You're falling in love with him."

 
          
 
She looked at him, defiant, but he saw that
she was gripping one index finger so hard that the knuckle shone white.
"Yes."

 
          
 
"Don't," he said.

 
          
 
" 'Don't'? Oh, that's helpful. Thanks
very much. I—"

 
          
 
"You mustn't! You have to keep doing what
you're doing. Nothing more, just photographing his mail, and I'll tell them
they'll have to wait for any extra tidbits. They'll buy that. They won't want
to lose the pictures. By and by, if we're lucky, the President will tire of Mr.
Burnham and adopt someone else. Once our source dries up, we can stop."

 
          
 
"Why will they let us?"

 
          
 
"There'll be no advantage to them to
expose us. As far as they're concerned, we're still trustworthy, we pose no
threat to them. You don't throw agents to the wolves without a reason."

 
          
 
"And Timothy?"

 
          
 
"They'll certainly want to leave him
alone. He's perfect! He doesn't know what he's done. Five years from now, or
ten years, perhaps he'll be a Cabinet officer or an ambassador or the president
of a large company that makes high-technology components or even a prestigious journalist.
He'll have a fat salary and a fine family and a life he'd do anything to
protect. Suppose he receives a visit from someone who hints that there might be
a few things in his past that he'd rather not have revealed, perhaps shows him
photostats of some of the mail he never bothered to read, with a big
Q-CLEARANCE stamp on it. Do you think he'd be willing to do a favor or two for
this visitor?"

 
          
 
"So he'll never be free."

 
          
 
"I'm not saying that will happen, only
that it will be worth their while to leave him in blissful ignorance. He may
never be the wiser.''

 
          
 
"I feel sick."

 
          
 
"You can't afford to be sick. Not now.
That's why it's so important that you don't fall in love with him."

 
          
 
"Too late," she said, with a crooked
smile. Her eyes glistened like blue marbles in a pool of rainwater.
"You're sure they'll let us go?" Her voice was clogged.

 
          
 
"Positive," he said.
"Absolutely." He turned away, wishing he were a better liar.

 
          
 
BuRNHAM closed the connecting door, walked
across his office, shedding his loafers one by one as he went, and fell onto
his couch.

 
          
 
He needed a drink. The longing was stronger
than it had ever been. He craved the cool, satiny feeling as the elixir coated
his throat and numbed the little nerve endings, the delicious warmth as it
pooled in his stomach, the few seconds' wait for liftoff, and finally—most of
all—the release as the circuits tripped one after another and shut down the
thoughts that spun like pinwheels in his brain. He needed to give his brain a
holiday, to let it float free in sweet nothingness.

 
          
 
Did the President drink? Burnham had seen him
sip a watery bourbon now and again, but that wasn't drinking. Booze wasn't a
toy, it was a tool, and anyone who treated it like a toy shouldn't be allowed
to play with it. "Social drinking" was an oxymoron, a term coined to
sanitize the socially unsavory. Dr. Johnson knew what booze was for: "To
get rid of myself, to send myself away."

 
          
 
No, the President didn't drink. Not enough
anyway.

 
          
 
If I were President, Burnham thought, I'd make
it a point once a week to lock myself in a room with no phones, only a TV set
that showed reruns of I Love Lucy, and knock back a fifth of vodka. Just to
give my brain a break.

 
          
 
How could the President keep all that crap in
his head? Yes, no; right, wrong; black, white; night, day. Maybe he didn't keep
any of it in his head, maybe he just let it happen around him and waited for a
few drops of distillate to fall into a cup and become a decision.

 
          
 
The Secretary of Defense had said that the guerrillas
in
Honduras
were intent on establishing a totalitarian
Communist regime.

 
          
 
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said
that two-thirds of the country was already under a totalitarian Communist
regime.

 
          
 
Dennis Duggan puffed on his pipe and said that
Tegucigalpa
reminded him of
Saigon
near the end, an isolated enclave.

 
          
 
The Secretary of State said that this put him
in mind of 1954, and didn't the President agree that there was an awful lot of
Red-baiting going on?

 
          
 
The Secretary of Defense said that if the
Secretary of State was accusing him of McCarthy ism, the Secretary of State
should watch his mouth or he'd find his paisley tie jammed up his puckerhole.

 
          
 
The Secretary of State said he thought things
were getting out of hand and the time had come to break for cocktails and a
light lunch.

 
          
 
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recommended a
preemptive strike against guerrilla positions in the north.

 
          
 
Mario Epstein said that the guerrilla
positions were changing every fifteen minutes, and that "preemptive
strikes" were code words for turning
Honduras
into a parking lot.

 
          
 
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs asked Epstein
if he meant to compare him to Curtis LeMay.

 
          
 
The Secretary of Defense reminded his
colleagues that Curtis LeMay hadn't been all wrong.

 
          
 
Dennis Duggan asked Epstein, in an aside, who
Curtis LeMay was.

 
          
 
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs brought out
an enormous color-coded chart that separated all of
Honduras
into thousand-hectare slices and proceeded
to detail the guerrilla activity in each slice.

 
          
 
The President asked Burnham if he wanted a
Fresca, and Burnham said. No, sir, but he did ask for a Coke.

 
          
 
He needed the sugar.

 
          
 
And on and on it went, for three hours, ending
only when the President had to depart to brief the Congressional leadership on
his current thinking about
Honduras
.

 
          
 
Burnham suggested that the President tell the
leaders that this was an immensely complex situation, with potential
repercussions that could last for generations, and that he had learned from the
mistakes of his predecessors and was determined not to fly off half-cocked on a
course of action that all Americans would come to regret.

 
          
 
The President liked the suggestion: It
insulted everyone from Johnson Democrats to Reagan Republicans, let them know
that their man (and, by association, they themselves) was responsible, at least
in part, for the mess
America
was in and from which he was trying to
rescue it, without mentioning anyone by name.

 
          
 
Lying on his couch, lamenting the loss of his good
friend John Barleycorn, Burnham wondered if there was a pill he could take. Not
a happy pill, just a goodbye-see-you-later pill. He knew little about pills,
and what he did know he didn't like. ,

 
          
 
He decided to try meditation. He hadn't
meditated in a year, but he remembered how. He closed his eyes and told his
mind to instruct his muscle groups to relax, one at a time, and he imagined
himself in the safest place of all, his childhood bedroom. He saw his bed and
his hockey stick and his Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra posters and—