Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (68 page)

 
          
 
They sat on the bed, eating Vietnamese food
that Hal had ordered according to Eva's meticulous guidance.

 
          
 
"What time is it?" asked Eva.

 
          
 
"Three minutes later than when you asked
last," Burnham replied. "
Seven forty-eight
." He said to Hal, "What's it like
out?"

 
          
 
"Raining. It's been raining all
day."

 
          
 
Burnham and Eva had not been out of this room
in more than thirty-six hours. Hal had brought them razors and toothbrushes and
shampoo and deodorant, had used Burnham's bank card to collect several hundred
dollars in cash, had taken all their clothing to a one-day cleaner. They had
read and watched television and made love and watched more television and made
love.

 
          
 
"Shall I pour gasoline over you and set
you afire?" Burnham had asked as they reclined on the rumpled sheets.

 
          
 
"If that turns you on," Eva said.
"But why?"

 
          
 
"It's appropriate, don't you think? Here
we are in a bunker, waiting to see if we'll live or die, and your name is Eva,
and—"

 
          
 
She bit him on the shoulder. "No Hitler
jokes. I'm a very sensitive person."

 
          
 
"You're the only kid on the block who can
object to Hitler jokes because they make your mom look bad."

 
          
 
At
seven fifty-seven
, Hal plugged in the portable TV and brought
it over to the bed. "You care what network?"

 
          
 
"ABC," Burnham said. "They've
got the ammunition, so they'll fire first."

 
          
 
The presidential news conference began exactly
at
eight
o'clock
. Epstein
had attempted to schedule the news conference for last night, as Hal had
requested, but two of the three networks had complained bitterly about the
short notice: One had scheduled a live prime-time special featuring every pop
singer in the world (most via satellite) in a simultaneous rendition of the
song "Food, Glorious Food" as a tribute to the starving multitudes in
Africa; the other was locked into a baseball Game of the Week that promised to
gamer great numbers because of the participation of the Mets' rookie pitcher
Corns McGinty (already 10-0 on the season), who pitched in one baseball shoe
and one ballet slipper due to an agonizing pediatric affliction which he
refused to have corrected for fear it would disrupt the perfection of his
balance on the mound, a refusal supported by his opponents as well as his
teammates, for Corns threw a baseball faster than Kevin Curran could serve a tennis
ball (somewhere around 130 miles an hour), and if his balance were to be
disrupted to the point where a pitch got away from him, the batter would likely
spend the rest of the season in a dark clinic.

 
          
 
Burnham supposed that he could have forced the
news conference for last night, but the risk was that only one network would
broadcast it, which would have meant that seven-eighths of
America
wouldn't have watched it.

 
          
 
The President looked tired and, it seemed to
Burnham (though he was aware that he might be projecting his own feelings onto
the President), a little sad.

 
          
 
He opened with a short statement about
Honduras
. He reiterated his pledge never to send
American boys to fight in a foreign jungle unless and until he discerned a
direct threat to the security of the
United States
. He refused to impose the American
democratic ideal on people who showed no inclination to embrace it. He
described the aid packages he had proposed for
Honduras
and
Nicaragua
. He said he had directed the Secretary of
State to schedule "full and frank discussions" with
Honduras
,
Nicaragua
and the
Soviet Union
, and that he hoped to meet soon with the
Soviet premier. Finally, he said he recognized that there were some in the
Congress and in the country at large who advocated a stronger, more
confrontational stand against socialism in general and the Russians in
particular, and he wanted to reassure them that he was not giving the forces of
revolution a free hand to poison this hemisphere. He recalled the Cuban missile
crisis of 1962 and pledged to respond to any similar challenge with similar
force. For emphasis, he closed with a couple of the more stirring lines from
John F. Kennedy's inaugural address.

 
          
 
Exactly as Burnham had urged him to do.

 
          
 
A frisson of pride made the hair stand up on
Burnham's arms, and he took Eva's hand.

 
          
 
Then the President invited questions.

 
          
 
As always, the first question was from the
senior wire service correspondent, a blowsy woman who liked to ask outrageous
questions ("Is it true, sir, that you've been seeing a psychic?")
that attracted attention from the fringe media (Paul Harvey, Entertainment
Tonight, The National Enquirer) and made her a celebrity worthy of inclusion in
People's list of Washington eccentrics.

 
          
 
Tonight, though, she knew that the eyes and
ears of the nation would be on the burgeoning spy scandal, and so, with a
malevolent leer at ABC's gadfly Sam Donaldson, she stole his precious air and
said, "Mr. President, ABC's been telling the world they're about to prove
you've got spies working under your nose right here in the White House. What
d'you have to say to that?"

 
          
 
"Sally," the President said,
favoring her with the recognition of her name and then turning to the
television cameras and—more in sorrow than in anger, it seemed—addressing the
American people, "there are times when every President wishes that the
First Amendment could be put on 'hold' for a little while."

 
          
 
A nervous titter rippled through the audience,
for these were the high priests of the cult of the First Amendment, and any
suggestion of an assault on their sanctum was a sacrilege.

 
          
 
"But as soon as he thinks that, he
chastises himself, for he knows that a free press is the bulwark of a free
society."

 
          
 
Having thus made suitable obeisances at the
altar of investigative reporting, the President felt at liberty to proceed.

 
          
 
"I wish ABC had come to me before they
reported that story—that rumor, 'cause that's what it was and it didn't become
a story till a lot of people chose to believe it without checking on it—'cause
I would've told them what really was going on and appealed to them to let it
run its course. But they didn't and that's their right."

 
          
 
A few reporters coughed in polite disbelief.

 
          
 
"That's good," Burnham said. "I
wonder who thought of that."

 
          
 
"I did," said Hal, beaming. "I
reminded Mr. Epstein that there was no way to confirm what never happened, so
the President might as well take the offense."

 
          
 
Burnham smiled. "You must've had a good
time."

 
          
 
"A fiesta."

 
          
 
"... sick of having rumors fly around,"
the President was saying, " 'cause a rumor uncontradicted grows up into a
kind of fact, and before you know it it's an accepted truth.

 
          
 
"So here's what happened—the unvarnished
facts: We'd been hearing for some time that there were leaks coming out of the
White House. Nobody said they were intentional, nobody said they were serious,
but if there's one piece of real estate that
America
can't afford to have leaking, it's the
White House."

 
          
 
"Is that true?" asked Eva.

 
          
 
"Yup," Burnham said. "It's what
he'd been told, and it makes sense, so it must be true."

 
          
 
"And so, unbeknownst to any other member
of the White House staff, I brought in an agent to work directly for me—he was
a staff assistant, sort of a jack-of-all-trades—and I arranged for him to have
access to the topmost of all top secret documents ..."

 
          
 
"Unbeknownst to him, too," Eva said.

 
          
 
"No," said Burnham. "He's
convinced he was following his instincts. He knew I was working on some secret
mission all along, and now he's being proven right."

 
          
 
"... spurious, of course," continued
the President, "excellent replicas of the real thing that would have—and
did— convinced anybody, including the Soviets. This assistant was encouraged to
handle the documents in a routine, even careless fashion, for we were eager to
see when and if their contents surfaced."

 
          
 
"He can't believe that!" said Eva.

 
          
 
"Oh yes he can." Burnham smiled.
"Remember, Lyndon Johnson said his grandfather died at the
Alamo
, which was utter horseshit, but he believed
it because it was important to him."

 
          
 
". . . did begin to surface," the
President said, "in another piece of
Washington
real estate, this one owned by our friends
from the
Soviet
Union
. How did we
know? Well, with today's technological wonders, it's almost impossible to keep
a secret unless you keep it right here"—the President touched his
temple—"and never tell another soul. Some of you may remember the
typewriters in our embassy in
Moscow
. The Soviets put sensors in those
typewriters that read what was being typed and broadcast it to them as it came
out of the typewriter. You'll be glad to know we have gremlins of our own.
Every electronic signal the Russians send out of their embassy is intercepted
by us and decoded and examined before we send it on its way. This is
oversimplified, but I'm sure you understand. They prob'ly have some we don't
know about, and we won't know about 'em till we find 'em, but we will fmd
'em."

 
          
 
"Mario briefed the hell out of him,"
Eva said.

 
          
 
"Everything Mario holds dear was on the
line—his job, his access, his power. Besides, Hal briefed the hell out of
him." Burnham assumed a presidential tone and said to Hal, "You did
good, son."

 
          
 
"... month or so," said the
President, "we found that the leaks were in our standard routing
procedures for documents. Too many things are classified these days, so the
currency of classification has been devalued. When requisitions for toilet
paper are classified 'secret,' it's hard to take secrecy seriously. Some
documents were misplaced. Some were thrown in the trash instead of being
shredded. They all became bait for the scavengers the Soviets have planted
around every capital city in the Western world.