Q Clearance

by Peter Benchley

  Mr. Pym learned about the dilemma during idle chitchat at his apartment one afternoon, and he said simply, "Give them to me." Said he had a client who traveled to Bermuda all the time and the customs people trusted him.

  Lo and behold! The tapes arrived in Bermuda duty-free, delivered to Ivy's sister, Doris, by a shy white man in a dark suit and a gaudy Sportshirt. They were the hit of the season.

  She owed Mr. Pym one. No, she owed him a bundle, if she counted all the little favors he'd done for her—like giving her free pain pills for her bad knee—since that day a year ago when he'd seen her coming out of work and her shopping bag had hemorrhaged and spilled her watch and her lunch box and her support hose and her Odor Eaters all over the avenue. Most people passed her by, but Mr. Pym collected her stuff and found her a new shopping bag and accompanied her all the way home.

  She wanted to pay him back for all his favors, but there wasn't any way. She couldn't offer him money. She couldn't cook a pie for him: He had professionals cooking pies for him all day long.

  He said he didn't want anything, and he seemed to mean it. He seemed genuinely interested in her, in who she was and what her life was like, now and before, and where she worked and whom she worked for and what she liked and didn't like about everything. He said he was a collector of "people trivia," and he encouraged her to notice funny offbeat things that happened at work.

  The trouble was, the people she worked with were a bunch of downtrodden whiners with whom Ivy had nothing in common, and their problems were neither funny nor offbeat— children in jail, children on drugs, hardhearted landlords and afflictions of every orifice and organ of the human body.

  If she was going to call Mr. Pym and ask for help with the high-school diploma problem, she wanted to be able to bring him a present, and if she had any hope of rooting out a tidbit that might brighten his day, it would have to concern the people she worked/or.

  Coincidentally, today might be a good day for such a discovery. Normally, all the offices had been dusted, swept, scoured and waxed, had had all loose papers removed, bagged and burned by the time she set to work on the hallway floors. But when she worked the early shift, it was she who cleaned some of the offices and removed the papers during the last couple of hours of her work day, and because of the high-level goings-on that always crackled around the building it was common for several people to work late. If she kept her eyes and ears open, she might be able to pick up something that would help balance her relationship with Mr. Pym.

  Ivy looked up and found herself in Lafayette Park. She checked her watch. Still early. She had plenty of time to make herself a cup of tea in the employees' locker room and look up Mr. Pym's Plat du Jour Caterers in the Yellow Pages. She crossed Pennsylvania Avenue and turned right.

  As she passed through the tall wrought-iron gates, she reached down the front of her dress and fished out the plastic card with her name and picture on it that hung around her neck on a chain of little steel beads, and she let it fall outside her dress so the guard couldn't possibly miss it.

  Then she walked up the long, ornate staircase into the Old Executive Office Building that housed the bulk of the White House staff.

  FOUR

  Are you gonna answer the phone or what?" Mrs. Miller shrilled around the comer from her cubicle outside Foster Pym's office.

  Pym sat at his desk and stared at the yellow light blinking on his telephone.

  Peniston, Peniston, Peniston, Peniston . . .

  He urged his mind to summon name after name of client after client. There was no Mrs. Peniston. He turned his mental Rolodex to creditors, wholesalers and former employees. No Mrs. Peniston. No point in searching his file of friends, for neither of them was a Peniston. And there was no file of lovers, for there hadn't been any, unless one counted long-gone Louise, and that marriage had not been exactly a passion play.

  "She's waiting!"

  "I can't!" Pym said. "I don't know who she is."

  "Answer the phone. You'll know."

  "Why will I know?"

  "Because she'll tell you. Trust me. I know people."

  Ha! Pym sneered silently. You don't know people, Mrs. Miller. You don't know people or typing or bookkeeping or accounting or common courtesy. You don't know anything but deceit. Had I known you were Jewish, I never would have hired you.

  Foster Pym didn't like Jews. He also didn't like Catholics, pregnant women, Arabs, cocker spaniels, garlic, Manx cats, left-handed people, people with dentures, Greeks, black people, lotteries and Chinese food—all for different reasons involving, variously, childhood experiences, reading, hearsay, personal contact and slights (real or fancied).

  One problem with Jews was that they took too many holidays—more than banks, public schools and mackerel-snappers. The calendar, Pym was convinced, had been invented so Jews could take time off.

  Pym punched the flashing button and said, "Hello," and as soon as he heard the first few syllables of "Mr. Pym, this is Ivy and I'm very sorry to be bothering you at work," he knew exactly who Mrs. Peniston was and why he hadn't recalled her name: The card file in his head did not have her listed under "P" for Peniston or even "I" for Ivy but under "B" for Black Woman Who Works in the White House Complex. Now that the mnemonic had been triggered, he saw her face, her background, her address, her phone number, her taste in music and the current state of their relationship.

  What he could not see, and what disquieted him, was any reason for her to be calling him at his place of business. She could not have good news to relate, for she could not know what would be good news to him, at least not news good enough to warrant a phone call to him at work. On the other hand, the prospect of her having bad news for him—truly bad news—was so farfetched as to be ludicrous.

  Suddenly, Pym felt an adrenaline rush in his arms and his neck and the pool of his stomach, and he smiled to himself. A conditioned sensory system had activated somewhere within him, and it was reacting like a Geiger counter closing on a uranium pile. He had been cultivating this woman for months, and now, he felt certain, she was about to bear fruit.

  "Ivy!" he said. "How good to hear from you!"

  "Yes, sir. I'm sorry to be bothering you at work."

  "Never a bother to hear from you, my dear."

  "I wonder if I could stop by and see you for a minute tonight after work."

  Before he said, "Of course, my dear," Pym paused long enough to convey the impression that he was consulting his crowded schedule. "Nothing wrong, I hope."

  "Matter of fact ..."

  "Jerome's all right?"

  "For now. That's what I want to talk to you about."

  "Always glad to help."

  "I know," Ivy said, "and I appreciate it, too. And don't think I don't know I already owe you one big favor, and I'm not a person lets her debts go unpaid."

  "Helping is reward enough. What time will you be by?"

  "I get off work at six."

  "Say six-thirty. See you then."

  Pym hung up the phone and, clucking smugly, leaned back in his chair to contemplate the possibilities. Perhaps it's true, he thought: All good things do come to him who waits.

  That credo had been one of his favorites for the almost forty years he had served—quietly, diligently, assiduously self-interestedly—as a Soviet spy in the United States.

  Fyodor Michaelovitch Pinsky had been one of the first chosen, first recruited, first trained and first sent. He didn't know why. If he had been forced at gunpoint to guess, he would have guessed that one of his primary-school teachers had detected an ear for languages in the child. Nor did he care why he had been selected. He was, simply, pleased that while scores of millions of his compatriots were being turned into dog food by Stalin or Hitler—if one didn't get you, the other was bound to—he was learning how to be an American in a big old dacha in Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea, where the closest he came to armed combat was reading propaganda posters about the vile and vicious Hun nailed to the wall of the cafe where he spent every
one of his few unsupervised moments.

  Commerce didn't boom in the Soviet Union during the war: Nobody had any money, and if someone came upon some money, he found there was nothing to buy with it. The law of the marketplace was barter. Pinsky had one prized commodity, his increasingly fluent English. With it he could read English-language newspapers smuggled by a sturgeon fisherman across the Caspian from Bobol, in Iran, and this tool, according to the proprietor of the cafe, could be used "to shove the light of truth up the dark asshole of Mother Russia." The proprietor (not owner; nobody owned anything) had opened the cafe under the pretense of serving the people of Astrakhan their midday meals, but his true ambition was to use it as a conduit for acquiring foods other than potatoes and fish. So he kept a flock of ducks, which he tended with loving care and cooked with Gallic panache and shared with

  Pinsky in return for Pinsky reading aloud to him translations of the English-language newspapers.

  From the proprietor Pinsky learned to appreciate food, which, though he couldn't know it at the time, would become his life's work. His superiors didn't discourage him, for they knew that whatever employment he engaged in would be but the cover for his real life's work.

  When his trainers deemed him to be sufficiently American to pass as an American (which turned out to be not quite the case—some Americans accepted him as an American but one who had spent his entire life in an institution, and others accepted him as a person recently arrived from Pluto), sufficiently reliable ideologically to keep the Communist faith indefinitely anywhere in the world (which turned out to be true generally, though with modifications that would have given Lenin apoplexy) and sufficiently skilled in the arcana of spycraft (which turned out to be a matter of opinion: He thought he was doing a bang-up job, but others in the trade were less appreciative), they revealed to Pinsky his destiny: The Kremlin assumed that as soon as the war in Europe ended, the United States and the Soviet Union would fall to squabbling. And since the squabble had all the ingredients of a conflict long-lived, bellicose and perhaps apocalyptic, it was important for the Soviet Union to have moles working underground in America, establishing themselves as Americans, perhaps acquiring bits and pieces of intelligence data, perhaps an agent here and there, perhaps just standing by until such time as they would be called upon to serve the homeland. Pinsky would go to America as one of the hundreds of thousands of young men returning from the European Theater of Operations, would assume an identity, find work and settle down. He would be an American. He would never again see his family and friends, for he would never again return to the Soviet Union unless he was apprehended by the American authorities and uncovered before he could kill himself, in which case, even if the Americans did send him home, his homecoming wouldn't be joyous since he would be shot as soon as he disembarked.

  He was infiltrated aboard a hospital ship as a "John Doe," a soldier with amnesia resulting from shellshock. After an uneventful crossing, during which he stole several hundred dollars from non compos fellow patients, he jumped ship in what he assumed was New York but was in fact Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the ship had stopped to unload Canadian wounded.

  Like a Canada goose with the coming of fall, Pinsky moved gradually southward. Everywhere he stopped, be it for a few days or a few weeks, the doors that opened quickest for him had to do with food. In Philadelphia, he worked as a busboy at Bookbinder's. In Annapolis, he was introduced to—and initially terrified by—softshell crabs, which he had never heard of and which looked to him like giant spiders.

  By the time Pinsky's migration landed him in the District of Columbia, he was far more versed in the techniques of selecting, preparing and serving food than ninety-eight percent of the American people. He determined to construct a career in the general field of victuals.

  He had also settled, at last, on a credible but vague background that he would keep ready for the day when he would have to explain himself. That day might never come; so far, he had found Americans to be astonishingly credulous. In the Soviet Union, there were papers to attest to everything—birth, education, employment, armed service, address, marital status, party affiliation—and they were demanded by every petty official one encountered. In America, it seemed, no one ever challenged anything anyone said about himself.

  He molded, fired and glazed into permanence a biographical core that began with birth in a Nebraska farm town (no one outside Nebraska knew what a Nebraska accent sounded like, so he was safe). His parents had both died in the terrible winter of 1939.

  The young Foster Pym had moved around the Midwest, living with this cousin and that great-aunt, spending a term or two at the public high school wherever he was. He had tried to enlist in the Army on December 8, 1941, but was turned down because of ''bad lungs."

  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 gatherin
g 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.