Q Clearance by Peter Benchley
"But—"
"Of course, I may be underestimating you." Teal leaned forward, his elbows on the table, his hands folded, his eyes bulging under their lids and making him look even more like a reptile. "Maybe you're gonna tell me that you've turned Dennis Duggan or Mario Epstein or—sure, why not?—Benjamin T. Winslow his very self. Are you?"
"Not—"
"Because if you are, I'm gonna have you sent to the funny farm."
Never in his life had Pym struck another human being in anger, but now he had to clutch his knees to keep his hands from flinging the table on top of this impudent weevil.
"Listen here, you . . . you . . . horrid little know-it-all . . ."
Teal blinked. In his time he had probably been called every street name ever coined. But "know-it-all"?
Pym shoved his copy of US into Teal's lap and snatched Teal's copy of People from the table. "You look at those papers. If they're worthless, then you can put a black mark through my name and forget I ever existed. But if any brains are growing under that toupee of yours, you'll appreciate what I've given you, and you can call me." Pym rolled up the magazine, pushed back his chair and stood.
"Toupee?" said Teal. "Toupee?" He grabbed a handful of yellow hair and pulled at it.
Pym could hear his phone ringing as he turned his key in the ground-floor door. It was still ringing when he arrived at the second-floor landing, but then it stopped.
He wasn't worried. Teal would call back every ten minutes. That was the established routine in such cases. Besides, it might do the insufferable snot good to be kept waiting.
Assuming, that is, that the caller had been Teal. Perhaps it had been Eva. Or Ivy. Perhaps . . .
He poured himself a glass of sherry and sat on the couch.
It had to have been Teal. The documents were good. Good? They were sensational! A mental defective could see that they were dynamite.
Dynamite. Perhaps Teal had concluded that he, Pym, was dynamite, too quick-tempered and unpredictable to be reliable. He shouldn't have mouthed off. Perhaps Teal was this very minute arranging for Pym to be hit by a taxi.
Stop it.
He took a sip of sherry and looked at his watch.
The phone rang.
"Hello."
"Teal."
"Mallard."
"The hostess wants you to know that your hors d'oeuvres tonight were very good. Very, very good."
Control yourself, Pym commanded. Don't shout "hooray" or say something stupid like "I told you so."
But it was difficult, for Pym felt proud, redeemed, alive. He said, "That's very nice to hear."
"She hopes you will be able to do more catering for her. Soon."
"I'm sure I will. I don't know exactly when, but please tell her I'll be in touch."
Pym was about to sign off, when he remembered Ivy. He said, "I have to pay one of my . . . suppliers."
"The hostess will give you an advance. How much?"
"It's not money. It's ..." How could he say this in catering code? He couldn't. He had to be specific. But suppose somebody was listening. Nobody was listening! But suppose ... He decided to speak quickly, as if speed would boggle the mind of any interceptor.
"I need a high-school diploma from a genuine, accredited public or private high school in the District of Columbia, this year's graduating class, along with a grade transcript showing high marks in all subjects, especially computer courses, made out in the name of Jerome Peniston." He spelled "Peniston."
"And I need it fast."
There was a silence. He hoped Teal was writing down the details of the request.
"Look in your mailbox at eleven tomorrow morning," Teal said.
TEN
Hair. All Burnham could smell, all he could see, was long blond hair. It cascaded over his face, slipped between his lips, tickled his nostrils.
He held his breath, willing himself fully awake, afraid that this was another dream.
No, this was real. Through the strands of gold he saw the drab green YMCA wall, and the shafts of dirty light that seeped through the window washed the world in gray.
He buried his face deeper into her hair, touching her shoulder with his nose and smelling the rich scent of her warm skin.
They lay like silverware in a presentation case, perfectly matched, his front molded to her back. Had either one made a sudden move to either side, he or she would have tumbled out of the narrow bed.
He touched his tongue to her shoulder and made tiny circles with its tip, savoring the taste of salt and mystery.
Between his legs, a morning glory awoke to greet the day.
"Mmmmm," Eva said, wriggling back against the gentleman caller. "Hello to you, too."
"I'll go brush my teeth."
"Why?"
"I smell like a dragon."
"I don't think you want to walk down the hall with that thing waving in the wind." She pressed backward with her hips, and, like a horse turned loose after a long day's ride, Burnham's beast charged for home.
Eva whirled, straddled him, locked her mouth on his, and guided him into her.
Burnham was transported. He thought of nothing, which, when he realized he was thinking of nothing, amazed him: For years, he had assumed that elaborate fantasizing was a critical key to his capacity for making love.
She had taken him to another exotic restaurant—Pakistani, this time—and once again had ordered for him. He had been edgy, almost anxious, for there could be no deluding himself about the initiative: He had made the move, and, in his mind, that made him a brother to Faust—^the irredeemable sinner. But rationalizations were pounding on his mental door, pleading for the chance to soothe him. He was the wronged innocent, cast out by an unreasonable harridan. He was a human being in need of solace, and if home was not where the heart was, then he could—should—explore other vineyards.
And so on and so forth, until at last he decided to take refuge in a facile Hemingwayesque conclusion, that good is what makes you feel good.
The first course looked as though it had been pre-chewed and sprinkled with yellow dust. It tasted delicious, but even before the plates were removed he began to feel depressed, a heavy, leaden sense of unfocused gloom that made him slump in his chair and fight to keep from weeping.
Eva noticed immediately. She must have been studying him.
"Are you all right?"
"No."
" 'S the matter? Sick?"
"Dead. Just dead."
"Huh," was all she said. She summoned the waiter and, pointing to several items on the menu, commanded him to bring them as quickly as possible. Then she smiled and took Burnham's hand and said, "You'll feel better."
"Who cares?" He thought it would be polite to smile back at her, but all he could manage was a lugubrious grimace. Anyway, he didn't give a damn.
The second course looked like loam sprinkled with raisins, and eating it was like gnawing on a sponge. He didn't want to eat it, all he wanted to do was be buried at sea, but she coaxed and prodded him as if he was an infant.
No more than two mouthfuls had found their way to the pit of his stomach, when the curtain of despair began to rise and a vista of broad sunlit meadows opened before him.
"Good God!" he said, grinning. "What have you wrought?"
"We are what we eat." She shrugged modestly.
"I guess so! Have you ever considered being the personal dietitian to the free world?"
"I'd be happy being ..." She paused, and her eyes lowered. "... personal dietitian to you."
"You've got it! Never leave my side. Infuse me with goodness at every step." He looked at his hands, as if they might give a clue to this sudden surge of well-being. "Damn!"
He ate more, and the more he ate the better he felt, and the better he felt the more he talked. He told her about his past, about how he got the job at the White House, about how he met Sarah, about his marriage and his children, about the problems with his marriage (they seemed distant and unimportant), about the Pres
It wasn't until he had finished his monologue that he realized that Eva had been holding one of his hands in both of hers. "This is very embarrassing," he said.
"What is?"
"I think I'm falling in love with you, and I'm not exactly in a position to—''
"You're not falling in love with me."
"I'm not?"
"No. You're in love with the way you feel, and you think I had something to do with it." She toyed with his fingertips. "I'm flattered, though."
"You didn't just have something to do with it. You did it."
"Well, maybe a little." She raised one of his fingertips to her mouth, and she breathed on it.
Burnham had never realized that the neural network included a highway from the fingertip to the loins, but he did not have to close his eyes to imagine—to feel, to know—that it was not his fingertip that she was breathing on, not really.
"I do know one thing," she said softly, "that'll make you feel good, that'll make us both feel good."
Guilt never reared its inhibiting head that night. Burnham had no time to entertain it. In fact, he didn't even have time to remove his socks.
Now, SUPINE, pressed into the rickety iron bed by Eva collapsed on top of him, stroking the fine hairs at the base of her spine, feeling her heart pumping as fast as his, he wondered if he felt guilty.
Sort of, he decided.
What did "sort of" mean?
Well, he had to feel guilty, because he had broken his troth to Sarah. On the other hand, he couldn't possibly feel regret, not at the wonderful thing that had happened or at the wonderful way he felt. But—
"Don't think," Eva said into his neck. "Feel."
She was right, of course, so that's what he resolved to do. Feel.
They parted at the comer of 17th and Pennsylvania. The walk had been no more than a block, but Burnham had had to struggle not to take Eva's hand and lace his fingers into hers and stroke her palm.
When they stopped, he did take her hand. "Can you have lunch?"
"Want to play squash?"
"I don't know if I can. Or when. I told you, things are weird over there. But they won't starve me to death. Can you come to my office?"
"Okay. When?"
"Twelve-thirty? One?" Burnham didn't know what to tell her. He had no idea when he'd be free. He had no idea what he'd be doing. He had no idea, period. "I don't know!" he said, too loudly.
Startled, she took a step backward.
"No, no," he said, squeezing her hand. "It's just I don't know what to tell you, and I can't expect you to hang around all day."
"Maybe another—"
"No! I have to see you." It occurred to him then that he was almost raving, on the comer of 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. He breathed deeply, and smiled, and said, "You know what you've done, don't you? Turned me into a junkie."
"Really? What are you hooked on?"
"What do you think? You!"
Eva laughed. "You're sweet," she said, and she patted his cheek, "but you sound like a song from the sixties. By somebody like The Temptations. I don't think that'll go over very well in the White House."
"No."
"Tell you what: I'll come around twelve-thirty, and if you're busy, I'll wait, and if you're still busy at one-thirty or two, I'll leave. Fair enough?"
"You're an angel." He bent to kiss her.
She pulled away. "Stop," she said.
"You're right."
"I'm serious."
"Okay." He dropped her hand and held his own up in capitulation. "No more Cyrano."
"How do I get in there?" She nodded at the gray stone wedding cake that was the E.O.B.
"I'll clear you at the front door. Just give your name."
She hesitated for a second, and a trace of a frown wrinkled her brow. Then she said, "Okay."
He watched her until she had crossed Pennsylvania and turned into Lafayette Park. He knew he was behaving like a fool, captive of an adolescent infatuation that could, if it got out of hand, be very, very expensive.
So what? No pain, no gain, right? What was it Browning said? "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" He probably wasn't talking about reaching for heaving bosoms and steamy loins, but what the hell ...
He turned into the E.O.B. and skipped up the steps, feeling like Frankenstein's monster, a hollow man suddenly jolted back to life.
He flashed his pass at the police officer at the desk, left Eva's name on a list of noon-hour guests and walked smartly down the long hall, enjoying the click-clack of his footsteps resounding off the marble. At the end of the hall he turned right and descended the staircase that ended fifteen feet from his office door.
He walked directly into the office, not pausing long enough to notice that the brass nameplate-holder beside the door was empty.
Dyanna wasn't at her desk. He looked at his watch: 9:30. Curious. Was she sick?
Then he sensed something awry. It wasn't a look or a smell but more an atmosphere, or a lack of something intangible, like the feeling in an apartment when its resident has died.
The personal paraphernalia on Dyanna's desk was gone— the bud vase, the pictures of her and her parents, her calendar and her Rolodex.
He stepped to the nearest file cabinet and yanked it open. Empty.
Oh shit.
It couldn't have happened. This wasn't Hollywood, where you went out for lunch and returned to find that your name had been painted over on your parking space. They had to give you notice.
Didn't they?
He stepped into his office. The furniture was there, and the paintings and the curtains and the carpet. But his television sets were gone, and his desk had been swept clean: no IN box, no blotter, no appointment book. There were marks on the wall behind his chair, where his personal pictures had hung.
No one lived here.
He felt sick.
Now what? Where did he go to collect his things? His effects. Just like a dead man.
Wait a minute. Why hadn't they lifted his pass? That was the first thing they did when they fired you. He remembered hearing about a writer who had gotten drunk at lunch and had decided that his planets were in the proper alignment for deposing Mario Epstein. He had marched into the Mess and announced to all and sundry that Epstein (who was lunching with the Prime Minister of Italy) was the bastard son of Golda Meir and Al Capone. By the time the writer had reached the door to the West Basement on his way back to the E.O.B., the word had reached the guard, who pulled his pass and escorted him out onto Pennsylvania Avenue.
And why had they fired Dyanna, too? They couldn't blame her for what he had done. Whatever that was. Maybe she had been transferred to the Census Bureau.
Who could he ask? Cobb? No. If Cobb didn't know why he had become the President's darling, he wouldn't know why he had been magically changed into a turd.
Evelyn Witt. Maybe she had witnessed the chain reaction that culminated in the presidential explosion that cost him his job. What was her number? Where was his White House directory? Gone.
He picked up the phone and dialed the operator. "This is Timothy Burnham."
"What are you doing there?"
Christ! he thought. Everybody knows.
"Trying to figure out what's going on," he said.
"Would you like me to connect you with your office?"
"I'm in my office."
"No, you're not."
"I'm not?" He looked around. What, was he on the wrong floor? No. "Sure I am."
"It says here you're on twenty-three-oh-six."
"Where's that, the Bureau of Indian Affairs?"
"Not exact
"Where, then?"
"Ground floor of the West Wing."
Burnham didn't know what to say, so he said, "Oh."
"You want me to ring?"
"No. No. Thanks." He hung up and sank into the chair behind the desk.
The office was between Epstein's and the President's. It was the office of the President's Appointments Secretary. Or it had been.
Unless Burnham had been promoted to Appointments Secretary.
No. Please, God. No.
Dyanna sat at her new desk. Her bud vase held a fresh white rose. Her Rolodex and her calendar and her pictures were all in perfect symmetry, as if they had been arranged by a computer. She was flushed and excited. She clasped her hands in front of her, then touched her hair, then clasped her hands again. Her eyes kept darting to her enormous telephone console, as she awaited her first Important Call.
"Good morning, Mr. Burnham!" she trilled.
Burnham felt ashen. He assumed he looked ashen. "When did all this happen?"
"Isn't it fabulous?"
"Where's what's-his-name? The Appointments Secretary."
"They tell me Mr. Dilworth moved into the East Wing."
"But why?" Burnham waved his arm. "We don't need all this!"
Dyanna smiled. "Somebody thinks we do."
Burnham walked into his office. It was smaller than his office in the E.O.B.—but then, the only offices bigger than that one were in the Kremlin and Versailles—though still large enough to accommodate two easy chairs, a sofa, a coffee table, two end tables, a desk, a swivel chair and a full-size American flag that stood between the two huge windows overlooking the South Lawn. And whereas his E.O.B. office had been decorated with cast-offs from the General Services Administration, this office had had the attention of the curator of the White House. Some of the furniture was from the Smithsonian collection. All the paintings were from the National Gallery.