Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (9 page)

 
          
 
Afflicted by conscience at not being able to
serve his country, Foster volunteered to work in the U.S.O. in
San Diego
, where he learned to cook, and for the next
three-and-a-half years he traveled from Naval base to Army post, from U.S.O. to
canteen, helping out wherever he could.

 
          
 
Now that the war was over, he hoped to be able
to put his skills to work making a living. His culinary quiver contained one
special arrow, a holdover from his early years in the
Nebraska
wilds: He was a dynamite duck chef.

 
          
 
He tried the story at his first (and, as fate
would have it, last) job interview in Washington, and while he was pleased that
his prospective employer found no flaws in his tale, Pym knew that the man
wouldn't have cared if he had introduced himself as the Wadi of Hunza: The man,
who called himself Herbert Dickinson (a name Pym's fine ear discerned as being
about as genuine as the name Foster Pym), was looking for a white, polite,
articulate, all-American type who could take orders and keep his mouth shut, to
be the outside man for his food-supply and catering business, and Pym fit the
bill perfectly.

 
          
 
Pym saw the catering business as the ideal
conduit for his primary mission—gathering intelligence. If he were to become a
businessman or a civil servant, a publicist or a journalist, a salesman or a
restaurateur, he would have access to a limited circle of Washingtonians. He
would be on some party lists but not on others, could never aspire to
Georgetown
salons or receptions at the Shoreham or
candlelit dinners in
McLean
. By becoming a caterer serving an
international array of gourmet foods, he could cross all social, political,
cultural and diplomatic barriers. He might not be invited anywhere, but he
would be present everywhere. Until such time as he was given a specific mission
to fulfill, he could work at becoming acquainted with the rich and powerful, at
gathering gossip and at familiarizing himself with the labyrinth of
decision-making in the nation's capital.

 
          
 
He began by learning the business; he finished
by owning it. The first took six months. The second, once he had assembled all
his tools, took five minutes.

 
          
 
With research help from associates with whom
he was in contact mostly through dead-letter drops, Pym discovered that
Dickinson
had been Heinrich Himmler's personal chef.
He had cut a deal with the American OSS, whereby he ratted on several former
colleagues now eager to deny ever having heard of the SS, in return for which
he was guaranteed immunity from prosecution and provided with a new identity.

 
          
 
Pym typed out a note, addressed it to himself
at work, and opened it in front of
Dickinson
. It said: "Do you know who you're
working for?"

 
          
 
By five that afternoon,
Dickinson
was on a train heading west. As lagniappe
for keeping his lip buttoned, Pym was given title to Plat du Jour.

 
          
 
Financially, Pym did well. He could afford to
move out of the Northeast neighborhood, from which whites were fleeing like
rats from a fire and into which blacks were streaming like roaches to a moldy
kitchen. But he felt comfortable on familiar turf, was accepted by the local
merchants and policemen and enjoyed being inconspicuous. Only once had he
briefly contemplated moving. That was when he was married to Louise.

 
          
 
He had met Louise at a time when the fighting
was winding down in
Korea
, at a small political gathering in a row
house in
Alexandria
. Though no one would have thought to use
the term, the gathering was, in fact, a bund meeting—one of the first seeds
that would sprout into the belladonna known as the American Nazi Party. He had
sought out the right-wing fringe groups during the height of the McCarthy
frenzy because no one paid attention to them (all eyes were focused on the
other end of the political spectrum) and because they showed promise of someday
sowing violent discord in
America
.

 
          
 
Louise was a plain girl—fine featured, by no
means ugly, but rather blah—who was searching for a cause that would light up
her life. Almost anything would have served: Saving the snail darter or
preserving the environment or stopping nuclear proliferation, had they been
issues then. But as it was, suburban
Virginia
was a hotbed of inchoate fascism, so
fascism was what Louise embraced.

 
          
 
Louise and Foster lurched into a relationship
based on loneliness, ignorance of and curiosity about sex, and a shared (or so
she thought) passion for the perpetuation of the Thousand-Year Reich. They
slept together at his apartment every Tuesday (bund night) and Saturday (movie
night) for six months. Louise announced that she had missed her period. There
were endless conversations about examinations, options, embarrassment for her
parents (her father was a senior official with the Census Bureau), with whom
she lived. There were tears, a couple of insincere declarations of love,
several more nights of thrashing on the sheets. Louise announced that she had
missed another period.

 
          
 
They got married.

 
          
 
The marriage lasted almost a year, which, on
reflection, Pym appraised as quite a success, considering that it was a
loveless union punctuated by mistakes, misapprehensions and lies. Louise was
not pregnant; she had a polyp on one of her ovaries. She hated having to heed
the welfare of anyone but herself; she had always had a room of her own and was
unaccustomed to a lack of privacy, had always had meals cooked for her and was
a fumble-fingered calamity in the kitchen, had no skill at feigning interest in
Foster's health, happiness or day at the office. And she continued to be fervid
in her affection for Fascist blather, which had always been offensive to Foster
and now became oppressive.

 
          
 
But Foster Pym was not about to spark a scene
that would cause any lasting bitterness. It would be one thing to be a
middle-class caterer with an angry ex-wife pecking at him through the legal
system, quite another to be a Soviet spy with a revenge-crazed ex who hung
around with a band of loud-mouthed Nazis.

 
          
 
So one evening, after a silent, sullen supper,
of day-old moo goo gai pan, Foster said cheerfully, "Don't you think you'd
be happier at home?"

 
          
 
There was no artifice to Louise, which made it
easier. She didn't say something maudlin like, "But this is my home!"
or burst into tears and lament their failures. She just looked up, surprised, and
said, "I sure would!"

 
          
 
They agreed on a one-time payment of $10,000.
They agreed that Louise would change her name back to Whelan. They did not
discuss what her parents' reaction might be to having their baby back in the
nest. Louise didn't care what her parents felt. She believed Robert Frost: Home
is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

 
          
 
They agreed about everything, so quickly and
with such good humor that they felt a new glow of fondness for each other, a
glow they fueled with a bottle of Canadian whisky. Finally, bibulously, they
agreed that the occasion called for a goodbye screw, and they tumbled into the
sack.

 
          
 
And Louise got pregnant.

 
          
 
She waited almost six months before telling
Foster. She hoped to be able to entice a Nazi into her bed and pin the
pregnancy on him (she had dreams of spawning a Fuhrerlet who would crown her
Queen Mother of the Reich), but none of the SS trolls, with their acne-pitted
foreheads and dyed blond hair, would succumb to her charms.

 
          
 
Louise didn't suggest that she and Foster
reunite. She was happily ensconced in her old room in her parents' house. She
didn't suggest an abortion: By now it was too late, and, besides, her father
had assured her that he would pitch her into the street, with "whore"
branded on her lips, if she so much as hinted at an abortion. She didn't
suggest putting the child up for adoption. She made no demands for
child-support payments.

 
          
 
Her proposal was simplicity itself: She would
sell the child to Pym.

 
          
 
Her logic was unassailable. She didn't want a
baby. It would be a burden on her and her parents. She wanted money, which
would lighten the existing load on her and her parents. Furthermore, she
pointed out, Foster's devotion to Nazism (that is, what he had encouraged her
to perceive as devotion) had been waning over the past year, as his catering
business had been waxing. She wasn't criticizing: She understood that there
wasn't much call for Fascist food. Surely it would be embarrassing for Foster
to be the acknowledged (albeit divorced) father of a Nazi W under kind.
Wouldn't it be better for him to have the child, to raise it as he saw fit?

 
          
 
Foster recognized blackmail, and he
appreciated it: It was his kind of plan. Besides, he rather liked the idea of
rearing a successor in his own image. He even permitted himself to fantasize
about creating a dynasty of homegrown spies. He agreed.

 
          
 
Two days after the baby was born, he traded a
cashier's check for $25,(X)0 (he had mortgaged his business) for a seven-pound,
four-ounce girl already legally named (Louise's Parthian volley) Eva, after Eva
Braun.

 
          
 
Foster never communicated with Louise again,
though he did see her twice, both times in the newspaper, standing in the
background at news conferences behind George Lincoln Rockwell. After Rockwell
was shot, Louise dropped from sight for good. Whenever he thought of her, which
was almost never. Foster surmised that she was working as a secretary at
something like a used-car agency and that she spent her evenings plotting in
damp basements. He half-expected her to turn up next on a 60 Minutes report on
the search for Josef Mengele, whose purported death in
Brazil
he regarded as a splendid fraud. Maybe as
Mengele's nurse.

 
          
 
Eva became the joy of Foster's life, a bouquet
of posies amid the weeds of Foster's humdrum existence. A clever, sunny child,
she was blessed with impossible looks: The crossing of a plain woman with an
utterly forgettable-looking man had somehow produced a stunning
child—corn-blond hair, gray-blue eyes, high, proud cheekbones and assertive
chin. It was almost as if Louise had willed her Aryan fantasies to overcome her
and Foster's drab genes.

 
          
 
Foster continued to live in the Northeast,
where there was a ready supply of inexpensive, kindly black labor, which suited
Foster politically as well as personally: A sociologist might have labeled him
an eccentric ethnic Calvinist (or a racist), for he believed that each ethnic
group had a preordained place in society and that black people's place was to provide
inexpensive, kindly labor.

 
          
 
If parents received grades, Foster Pym would
have given himself solid B's.

 
          
 
Spies, on the other hand, do receive grades of
a sort, and it was a source of annoyance and consternation to Pym that while he
thought he deserved high B's or low A's, those who judged him consistently gave
him C-minuses.

 
          
 
Had an inquisitor demanded that he enumerate
his successes, he would have listed at least four:

 
          
 
He had learned about the
Bay of Pigs
invasion a full twenty-four hours before it
occurred, by overhearing a tipsy New York Times correspondent brag to a comely
maiden that President Kennedy had asked the paper to withdraw its scheduled
story.