Criminals (7 page)

Often the thing the expelled girl had done was something Amy herself commonly did, though in the end she was trying to hold herself back, she had to, because of a disturbing suspicion that she had a vocation. A vocation. Acts to perform that were brave, wild, wildly brave,
heroic
.

But if you were protected, if you went under an umbrella of protection, then not heroic. Was it a blessing to be protected, to be skipped?

The tile was cool to her feet as she crossed from room to room and stepped out into the dark. The porch light had burned out but she could see the great slow-winged moths at the windows, and then a bat. In the grass by the path something stirred, but there was no moon to show it. Gradually the white frangipani blossoms melted forward out of the dark as she breathed their scent.

Mother!

Mother, if you are out there I'm asking you to leave everything alone. Don't save me. Don't let someone else get my punishment. I'm asking you.

After a while she could hear John. He was coming on foot; she could hear his step on the gravel, with the hitch from the sprained ankle. All she could see was his white shirt wavering toward the gate.

Let the snake be.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
Let whatever happens happen. But not to him. Don't let him die. Or his son. His child! Don't let his son die. I'm asking you.

She sank down and sat against the wall of the house, making the face of crying but not crying, just passing her hand over the ground at the edge of the flagstones, digging with her nails. She rubbed the dirt between her fingers, and on her leg.

Pure earth. Pure earth.

Outside the
lorong
, which had no streetlights, she knew the dark lost its surrounding softness, its hugeness, and let itself be broken up and moved back like the dark in any city. Here, in the fuller dark, John's white shirt swelled like cloth in water as he unfastened the gate. In a disconnected piece of her life she had climbed the steep streets of a coastal town after a tidal wave. She remembered being shown the jellyfish swirling along the esplanade or left glued to walls, as she walked at night exalted and calm from digging out a family alive and being kissed and blessed by them, after days of lifting and hauling and counting the dead.

astride

T
here was an incident, the summer I worked in the Pentagon. My supervisor vanished.

That summer I didn't know any better than to take the job offered me. I knew nothing. My father worked in the Commerce Department and raised a few Angus in Virginia, in that wide grass circle, not then covered with suburbs, that poured civil servants and in summer their college-age children into the offices of the government. I remember the commute. In the morning you would pass combines and dairy herds and girls up early schooling horses in the wet grass. I was newly appreciative of the green beauty of my state, the Old Dominion, because I had come back to it after being away at college for the first time.

I took a typing test and not long afterward I walked up the steps of the Pentagon. I did that. I have no excuse.

One morning toward the end of that summer my supervisor's door was standing wide open when I arrived, and all that was left of him was the straight-backed wooden chair he had brought from home. He never came back. He had a high security clearance, though that was downplayed because the official reason given for his disappearance was thwarted passion.

This was early in the sixties, in the days before anyone came to levitate the Pentagon. Certainly no one had attacked it. Its enchantment was internal and impervious. Whatever else has changed since then, I know the vast building must still be filled, despite the throngs inside it, with the same cathedral air, of hushed, guarded, exquisite knowledge. No photograph really shows it as the massive thing it is, a stone wheel covered with portholes, an inhabited wheel, spun down into Virginia swampland and fallen on its side, to be cordoned and protected forever.

It was a city, with sloping ramp-avenues leading to a vast city square of shops and restaurants, the Concourse. The Concourse had the feeling of a great hotel as well as that of a department store. Dignitaries were led along it, parades marched through it, shoppers crowded the aisles of pottery and books. Other countries may give their generals villas, but surely they are outdone by this bazaar of flowers and souvenirs and cosmetics, of pastries, crystal, and the scented wood of carvings, available to everyone, right in the heart of the fort.

In the seventeen miles of corridor, which radiated in spokes and revolved in concentric rings, pedestrians flowed aside for motorized carts carrying men with brooms and buckets, or sometimes tanned young lieutenants in summer uniform, calmly steering little vehicles among the civilians on foot. Little boys saluted them. There were crowds of children there, headdresses, saris floating. Regular tours came through from schools and embassies.

It was never clear which individuals were not important. Always disputable. A janitor could be going through the wastebaskets on the orders of a foreign government.

Underneath the building was an enormous depot with the green and white buses of Washington and the red buses of Virginia, and even Greyhounds, pulling up to dozens of stations and surging away with echoes and grinding of gears. In the late afternoon I descended a numbered stairway to get the bus to Commerce where I would meet my father, whose day was longer than mine. Hundreds waited with me on hot platforms with puddles steaming where the
air-conditioning dripped. In the gloom you looked through open hangars to the white air of Virginia. The buses shimmered one last time as their backs crossed into the shade. Blue exhaust, islands of pink gum on the concrete, at every station people just down from the Concourse with their bags and packages. Anything could have been carried into or out of DOD, as we called it, the Department of Defense.

What really happened to my boss, Mr. Orlenko, was that he was accused of a security violation. All of us knew we stood to lose our clearances, even our jobs, if we failed to take every precaution with classified material. But we knew, too, how unlikely it was that our little errors would hurt us, we knew we were innocent.

From the secretaries—“Mr. Or
lenk
o, what a pain!”—we knew he had a wife still in shock from the DP camp after years in this country. He was Ukrainian. He hated the Soviet Union with a devotion of hatred. At the mention of Khrushchev his heavy-lidded eyes would grow sinister. From his window he would scout the wide parking lots as if he could see the hammer and sickle creeping in a liquid Disney shadow across them. He hated the president, whose inauguration was still fresh in everybody's mind, mine in particular because of the raising of a
poet
to the dais, white-haired Frost, pure as his name—nobody then knew of meanness in a poet—the poet I had studied all the spring before, in my freshman year.

I was a clerk-typist. Somebody read through records and newspapers every day looking for certain references, then gave the marked passages to the typists to type into lists for Mr. Orlenko, who was able to enter each item into lists of his own.

Mr. Orlenko was an analyst. Subjects he analyzed were apt to be already classified and to move up to a higher classification because they had been worked on by him. His desk was a haystack of legal pads and folders stamped “Secret,” and like all the offices his had its safe, that is, a filing cabinet—in his case two of them—with a combination lock and a steel rod dropped through the drawer handles and padlocked.

The theme of our summer was National Security.

The theme covered everything from the aims of the Soviet Union to our own missteps and oversights. At that time, one-use carbon
ribbons preserved everything we typed in a readable form; although the letters jumped and skittered unevenly along the tape, a spy could unfurl the ribbon and read your whole document. Of course the college students with summer jobs were the poorest at remembering to take out their ribbons and lock them up at the end of the day.

Considering that we were there not to help them but to spring into jobs above their heads at a later stage, the real-life secretaries were lenient about our carelessness and indeed about everything, including the job of proofreading what we typed. “You passed the typing, hm?” Typing was the major part of the test we had taken to rule out nepotism in our placement.

That summer no matter what we actually did at our desks we were called interns, and heard lectures in one of the small, dark, deep-chaired auditoriums to be found in the building, like chapels, though there were actual chapels as well, filled in wartime, we heard, with praying employees. At any rate men spoke to us in a comfortable chamber, gray-blue, soundproofed because some of the movies shown there were about ordnance, or materiel. We all liked the word materi
el
, and liked to throw it into conversations. “But did you have any materi
el
on you?” The movies were presented as entertainment, as none of the interns that summer was an engineering student who might go into materiel. We were an unpromising group; most were English majors, displaying volumes of poetry or existential novels on our desks. The girls typed, the boys shadowed a deputy assistant for the summer. No history majors; only one in political science. The light went down and a blue glow stole out from a recess above the paneling. A silver cone crossed the screen to the music from
Exodus
.

During the showing of the films, we looked around and picked out people to have coffee with afterward. Romances began.

One stood out, flourished, for the first few weeks of the summer: Holly, a senior, tall and blond, and Alex, younger than she was, but from Yale. He was the one majoring in political science. They were the two glamorous ones. Holly, for Hollis, was graceful and Southern in a way that those of us who lived in the grass circle outside Washington
were not. She had made her debut and gone to school in Paris. Her family was an old Carolina one, we heard, her father a general.

With every explosion on the screen Holly covered her eyes, and finally she looked between her fingers and said, “Doesn't matter
who's
doing it, I can't stand it.” The boy from Yale looked over irritably but when he saw the blond hair hanging down he moved a seat and sat forward to talk to her, putting his body between her and the screen.

Holly's loose shifts, in shades of blue and lilac, were the style of that year. On most of us these were a neutral fashion, but on her they had a slipping, mussed air; they weren't ironed, or the armholes were big on her thin arms, or a button was missing just where the sharp shadow went down between the surprising breasts she had. “All I want to know is where somebody thin
got
those,” one of the secretaries said, once they knew her.

Alex was tall too, with a shaven, silken, lean-cheeked face. Their eyes fell naturally on each other. Day after day, Holly brought a little more of her dreamy attention to bear on the blue eyes behind his glasses, the tanned fingers firm on his manila folder or his book, forefinger marking the place.

“Alex is going into politics,” Holly told me. He had finished his freshman year at Yale, whose elevation above her college in Lynchburg was of no moment to her. He too was rich, we learned. His father managed a company making aircraft components.

Alex was always being called away from whatever he was doing and introduced to visitors by his supervisor, who was said to know more than anyone else in Washington about the missile gap. But when Holly walked by the door he would leave the friendly important men and rush to lean his arm on Holly's in one of the little stand-up coffee bars.

Soon they were walking out to the parking lot and she was folding her legs into his MG after work and telling me about the horse shows they went to on weekends so his family could get to know her.

I have never seen work done with the feverishness with which it was done in the Pentagon. People say bureaucracy, make-work, nothing gets done, etcetera. But vast projects are undertaken, brought
to the verge of completion, redesigned completely, completed, cancelled. Thousands upon thousands work late into the night day after day, sweating and smoking, or they did then, coughing, drumming their fingers. Hundreds come in every few days while they are on vacation, just to keep up.

Mr. Orlenko was one of those workhorses. By the time we knocked on his door he would have been reading for hours, standing up, massaging his back, a bulky man in a white shirt and a tie with a silver clip, with dark hair going gray. He would lower himself onto the straight-backed chair he had brought from home, where he would write in longhand for hours more without stopping.

He would stand too close to us and order us, in his accent at once haughty and intimate, to type his tables of figures with their crossed sevens and curled nines. Few men typed at that time. Mr. Orlenko wrote with a fountain pen, making a lacework of corrections, holes rubbed and stuck through the paper where he used a typewriter eraser with a stiff brush. “Why not
pencil
?” we all groaned. With this pen he also doodled trees, all over his DOD blotter and in the margins of the legal pads he wrote on, and then scribbled them out.

He never took sick leave or even his full two weeks of vacation, despite the wife. There were children but they were thought to be grown. Nevertheless, the secretaries acted them out, saying, “
Da
, Papa!” and banging their heels together. His fingers were a deep saffron and the thumb, too, because he curved it under and petted the end of his Camel while he was thinking. Above his heavy, carved features flew thick black eyebrows.

From his brushed hair came a breath of nutmeg when he bent over your desk. He was very clean, and that—not all that common in those from his part of the world, the secretaries said—was because of the DP camp. He would shake out a white handkerchief and hold it as he worked. He kept a drawer of them, ironed, according to the secretaries. His wife ironed the shirts he wore, of which the garment bag on the door, they said, held extras for when he worked overnight. He never appeared tired, and kept his erect posture, arrogant and foreign. When a secretary had checked our lists and we took them in to
him, his eyes meeting ours never lost their intense warning, though a moment before he would have been squinting into one of his folders with a kind of tenderness.

“You know, I'm intrigued by Mr. Orlenko,” Holly said one day. “He seems like such an interesting man.” We made fun of her accent, the way she said “intrigged,” and “Mayan” for man, though indeed Mr. Orlenko was from another time. “So European,” she said. “He
works
so hard. The N. is for Nazar, did you know that? Nazar. Nazar Orlenko.”

Often when there is a gruff temperament in the office the gentler ones will find something touching in it, I did learn that. They will cosset a man who chews Maalox and slaps his blotter and bangs his telephone receiver. In the Pentagon we saw women attentive as mothers toward some bitter GS-9 who had to park in the farthest lot and walk in, and be spurned by the younger secretaries. But Mr. Orlenko did not have one of those office mothers, and in fact had nobody except his never-seen wife, for whom the accepted word was “pitiful.” Nobody until Holly in her freedom—as Frost tells us the lovely shall be choosers—chose him.