The Inner Circle

20

"Beecher, it’s me…” Orlando says in the message, his deep voice showing just a crack of flat Wisconsin accent.

My legs go numb, then my chest.

“Beecher, lookit this!” Tot yells behind me, though I swear to God, it sounds like he’s talking underwater.

“Tot, gimme one sec,” I call back.

My Lord. How can-? Orlando. That’s… Orlando…

“You need to see this, though,” Tot insists, shuffling toward me with a thick stack of paper held by a binder clip.

Still gripping the phone, I lean forward in my chair, lurching for the keypad and pounding the 3 button. This isn’t… focus!.. start over… just focus…

Beep.

“Beecher, it’s me,” Orlando begins again. He pauses a moment.

“Y’ever see this?” Tot interrupts, waving the pages.

“Tot, please… can it wait?”

I hit the 3 button again to buy some time. The phone’s not near my ear, but I still hear Orlando’s opening. “Beecher, it’s me.”

“You want to know if that was George Washington’s dictionary or not?” Tot asks. “Just listen: When George Washington died, Mount Vernon made a list of every single item in his possession-every candlestick, every fork, every piece of art on his walls…”

I hit 3 again. “Beecher, it’s me.”

“… and of course, every one of GW’s books,” Tot says, tossing me the copy of Entick’s Dictionary. It hits my desk with a dead thud.

“Okay… I get it, Tot.”

“The more you rush me, Beecher, the slower I’m gonna talk.”

“Okay, I’m sorry, just… please.” I press 3 again. “Beecher, it’s me.”

“The point is,” Tot continues, “the only way to find out if this is really GW’s book is to first find out if he even owned a copy.”

I hit 3 again. “And?”

“According to this, he had one.” He points to the list. One copy. Entick’s Dictionary. “Though if this is even the same copy, that still doesn’t explain how it found its way here.”

“Or even if it found its way here,” I say. “For all we know, this isn’t even part of our collection.”

“Actually, that’s easy enough to find out.” Stepping toward my computer, Tot shoos me from my seat. “C’mon… Up!.. Old man needs to sit,” he says as I hop aside, stretching the phone cord to its limits. He’s already clicking at the keyboard. Perfect. I turn my attention back to the phone…

“Beecher, it’s me,” Orlando begins again. He pauses a moment. “Crap, I don’t have your cell phone.” He pauses again, then his voice picks up speed. “I need you to call me. What you did…”

What I did?

“Just call me,” he finishes.

I hit the button and replay it again.

“Crap, I don’t have your cell phone.”

He pauses after that. Is that panic? Is he panicking? Is he sick?

“Crap, I don’t have your cell phone.”

I listen closely, but I was wrong before. His voice isn’t picking up speed. It’s fast, but no faster than usual.

“I need you to call me. What you did…”

There it is. The only moment his voice strains. Just slightly on the word did. I hit the rewind button again.

“What you did…”

He means finding the dictionary.

“What you did…”

There’s definitely an emphasis on the last word.

“What you did…”

It’s just three syllables. Three dumb words. It’s no different than looking at a photo of a happy, grinning child and then being told he died in a brutal car accident. No matter what you want to see, all you see is… it’s not just loss or sadness. To hear these words… uttered by this-this-this-ghost…

“What you did…”

All I hear is blame.

“Just call me,” Orlando finally says at 4:58 p.m. yesterday.

As his voice fades, I feel my body churn, straining for its own equilibrium. It doesn’t come. I’m squeezing the phone so hard, streams of sweat run from my fist down the inside of my wrist, seeping into my watchband.

It’s not until I look down that I spot Tot arching his head toward me, studying me with his good eye. If he heard…

He stares right at me.

Of course he heard.

I wait for him to judge, to warn, to say that I need to get rid of Orlando’s message.

“You’re not alone in this, Beecher.”

“Actually, I kinda am,” I say as I hear a beep on the other line. I look down at caller ID, which reads Security. I don’t pick up. The last thing I need right now is Khazei quizzing me again about Orlando’s death. Instead, I forward Orlando’s message to my cell and delete it from voicemail.

Tot shakes his head. “I’m telling you, you’re not alone. You need to hear that.”

“That’s fine-and I appreciate when someone says something nice to me, Tot, but… I’m just… I don’t think I can do this.”

“Do what?”

“This. Any of this. Tracking old books that’re hidden for Presidents… playing Spy versus Spy… getting guilt and spooky messages from dead people…”

“Guilt? What’re you talking about?”

“Didn’t you hear Orlando’s message? When he said, What you did… — heart attack or murder-he might as well have added… when you caused my death.”

“You really think Orlando was calling you for some bitter scolding?”

“What else am I supposed to think?”

At his jawbone, just below his ear, Tot twirls a few stray hairs of his wizard beard between his thumb and pointer-finger while eyeing the gutted copy of Entick’s Dictionary. “Maybe he was amazed you found it. Maybe he just realized the consequences: What you did…” He lowers his voice to sound like Orlando: “… you just uncovered something no one knew existed. President Wallace was… God knows what he was up to, but you found it, Beecher. You’re a hero.”

“A hero? For what? For spilling coffee? For trying to impress a girl from high school in the hopes of forgetting about my fiancee? I mean it, Tot. I woke up this morning with my feet sweating! Name one hero who has sweaty feet!”

I wait for him to answer-for him to pull some historian nonsense and tell me that Teddy Roosevelt was known for his sweaty feet, but instead Tot just sits there, still twirling his beard.

My phone again starts to ring. Like before, caller ID reads Security. Like before, I don’t pick it up.

Nodding his approval, Tot takes a deep breath through his nose. “Beecher, y’know what the best part of this job is? For me, it’s this sheet of paper,” he says, picking up a random sheet of paper from my desk and flapping it back and forth. “On any given day, this sheet is just another sheet in our collection, right? But then, one day-9/11 happens-and suddenly this sheet of paper becomes the most vital document in the U.S. government.” He tosses the paper back to my desk. “That’s what we’re here to witness, Beecher. We witness it and we protect it. We’re the caretakers of those sheets of paper that’ll someday define the writing of history.”

“Tot, I think you’re being a little dramatic about paper.”

“You’re not listening. It’s not just with paper. It also happens with people.”

At the far end of the office, the front door opens and there’s a quiet metallic clunk on our magnet board. Like a periscope rising from a submarine, I peer above the cubicles and spot my fellow archivist Rina, who offers a surprisingly warm Mona Lisa smile considering how pissed she was yesterday at coming in number two in our internal rankings.

“You okay?” Rina asks me.

“Huh?”

“Yesterday-I saw you downstairs. With Orlando. You were friends, no?”

“Yeah… no… I’m okay. Thanks,” I tell her as she heads toward her own cube.

Lowering periscope, I turn back to Tot. “Rina,” I whisper, quickly adding, “So in this analogy, I’m the sheet of paper?”

“You’ve been here a few years now, Beecher-you should know history isn’t just something that’s written. It’s a selection process. It chooses moments, and events, and yes, people-and it hands them a situation they should never be able to overcome. It happens to millions of us every single day. But the only ones we read about are the ones who face that situation, and fight that situation, and find out who they really are.”

“And now you’re the one not listening, Tot. I know who I am. I fought for this life. And I spent two full years taking 140,000 photographs of overpriced wedding cakes, and grooms who think they can dance, just to make sure that I didn’t have to go back to Wisconsin and say that life outside my mother’s house was just too tough for me. I got further than my father, and his father, and every rotten classmate who used to aim for my head in dodgeball even though they knew headshots didn’t count. But whatever history supposedly handed me… whatever we did find in the SCIF… I don’t know what it is… I don’t know where to start… I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking for!”

Once again shaking his head, Tot turns back to my computer and hits the enter key. Onscreen, I see the Archives’ history for Entick’s Dictionary. Yes, we have a copy. Yes, it’s in this building. And according to this, it’s currently…

“Signed out,” I blurt, reading from the screen.

It’s the first good news I’ve had all day. Every day at the Archives, hundreds of people come to do research. To make it easier, once you register as a researcher, you can fill up two carts and keep them on hold, stored in our research room, for three days. And from what it says here, Entick’s Dictionary is currently on hold for a researcher named… Tot clicks to the next screen.

“Dustin Gyrich,” we both whisper as my phone rings for the third time. For the third time, I ignore Security.

“This guy Gyrich from us?” I ask as I pull open my top drawer and start flipping through our staff list. A… B… C… G… H… I… No one named Gyrich.

“I don’t think he’s a pro either,” Tot adds, referring to the professional researchers people can hire by the hour.

Across the office, the door again swings open. “Beecher, you here!?” a familiar voice shouts.

Even without raising periscope, I smell the pipe smoke on Dallas. On most days, he ignores me. Today, his footsteps head right for me.

“Beecher?” he adds, sounding almost concerned. “You there or not?”

“Yeah… right here,” I say, stepping out from my cube.

“Dammit, then why didn’t you say something!? Security’s worried-After Orlando-Don’t do that!” he scolds, all his concern already faded in anger. “Next time someone calls your sorry ass, pick up the damn ph-”

Dallas cuts himself off, stopping midstep as he reaches my cube. He’s not looking at me anymore. He’s looking at what’s behind me. I spin around, worried he sees the dictionary. But the dictionary’s already gone-tucked away by the person still sitting at my desk.

“Hey, Tot,” Dallas offers, scratching at his starter beard. “Didn’t realize you were there.”

Tot doesn’t say a word. He just stares at Dallas, unblinking. It’s nothing personal. When he turned seventy, Tot decided there were ten rules for living a happy life. The only one he’s shared with me thus far is that, as an archivist, he won’t make friends with anyone who says FDR knew about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor, since there’s not a single sheet of paper in our building to back up that claim. I know another of his rules has something to do with white cotton panties and the keys to a great sex life (I made him stop talking because-just the thought of it made me want to be blind). And from what I can tell, there’s a third rule that enshrines a venomous hatred for bullies-especially those who curse at Tot’s friends.

The best part is watching Dallas take a half-step back. Even the most stubborn of cubs knows when the big cat’s around.

“I was just saying…” Dallas stutters, “… I was telling Beecher I was worried about-”

“How’d you know someone was calling him?” Tot challenges.

“Pardon?”

“When you came in,” Tot says. “You said Security was calling. How’d you know they were calling?”

“I–I was there,” Dallas says.

“In the Security Office?”

“No… at sign-in… with the detectors,” he says, referring to the check-in desk on the Penn Avenue side of the building. “They have a visitor for Beecher who’s pretty insistent that she see him…”

“She?” I ask.

“Your friend. From yesterday. The one with the nose pierce…”

Tot shoots me a look. He’s already called her the daughter of Lee Harvey Oswald. The last thing he wants is me bringing her in again.

“Clementine’s downstairs right now?” I ask.

“Why do you think they keep calling you?” Dallas says. “They saw you check in at the garage, but when you didn’t answer your phone-”

I glance at Tot, who doesn’t need help putting the rest together. The only way to get Clementine into this building is if I personally go down and sign her in. And while the last thing I need right now is to put myself higher on the suspect list because I’m helping out the daughter of a killer, the less time I let her spend with Security, the safer I’m gonna be.

“Tot…” I say with a glance as I run for the door.

Go. I have it, he replies with a nod. It’s never taken me more than three minutes and twenty-two seconds to get to the sign-in desk. And while I need to get Clementine, priority number one is still finding out who Dustin Gyrich is and why, on the same day the President was set to arrive here, Gyrich requested this old dictionary.

“I’m old and hate small talk,” Tot tells Dallas as he turns back to my computer. “You need to leave right now.”

As Dallas heads back to his desk, I pick up speed and make a sharp left toward the office door. But as I pull it open and bound into the hallway, I nearly smash into the chest of the tall man. And his shiny Security badge.

“Beecher, you know the one thing that really ticks me off?” Deputy Security Chief Venkat Khazei asks as I crane my neck up to see him. “When people here-people sitting right at their desks-don’t return my calls.”

He puts a hand on my shoulder, but all I can think is that he’s the only other person in the entire building who knew Orlando was in that SCIF.

“Is there something I can help you with?” I ask.

“That’s generous of you, Beecher,” Khazei says. “I thought you’d never ask.”