Read Online Criminals by Valerie Trueblood - Free Book Online Page A

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 theair-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 carbonribbons 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?”