Read Online Criminals by Valerie Trueblood - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Valerie Trueblood
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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 Washingtonwere 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, âDoesnât matter whoâs doing it, I canât stand it.â 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.
Hollyâs 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 werenât 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. âAll I want to know is where somebody thin got those,â 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.
âAlex is going into politics,â 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 Hollyâs 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, broughtto 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
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 Washingtonwere 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, âDoesnât matter whoâs doing it, I canât stand it.â 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.
Hollyâs 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 werenât 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. âAll I want to know is where somebody thin got those,â 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.
âAlex is going into politics,â 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 Hollyâs 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, broughtto 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
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