Ex Officio

by Donald E. Westlake

  “But Eddie’s four years younger than Charles,” Evelyn said.

  “Charles isn’t strong-willed,” Ann said. “I suppose he got that from me, God help him. Anyone can push either of us around.”

  Eddie Lockridge was a radical, it seemed, of the type which had flowered briefly a few years before in the United States. It was an extremely nihilistic radicalism, craving apocalypse for its own sake, and it had not taken root in the eternally optimistic American soil. European history, however, leads almost inevitably to at least a recognition of some sort of nihilistic philosophy, so this new wave of youthful nihilism had not worn itself out on rock music and drugs and teen-age sex play, as it had in the United States, but had gone almost directly into the arena of anti-political action, with the Scandinavian Provos showing—but not necessarily leading—the way.

  So long as Charles had had Princeton, the influence of Eddie Lockridge had been only sporadic and temporary, giving Charles merely transient periods of feeling that he should be “doing” something, the something never quite defined. But last month Charles was graduated, and now he had come to a decision point in his life. Ann, of course, wanted him to go on to graduate school, as did Carrie.

  But now Eddie Lockridge’s evil influence was at last coming into its own. Eddie wanted Charles to give up schooling—in the brave new world after the apocalypse, what would a master’s degree be worth?—and to stay in Europe, in Paris. There was some sort of group to which Eddie belonged, and he wanted Charles to join it. They were going to “do” things. What things? No one would tell; no one seemed to know.

  Evelyn asked, “Haven’t you talked to Eddie’s father?”

  “Of course. Edward doesn’t take it seriously. You know him, he doesn’t take anything seriously.” She sounded bitter, and Evelyn could hear in her voice that over the years Edward Lockridge had failed to take Ann Gillespie seriously on more than one subject. “He says,” she went on, “you have to let children go their own ways, make their own decisions. Up to a point, of course, he’s perfectly right. But it is possible to ruin one’s life, one can make wrong decisions.”

  Evelyn looked at her, and Ann’s words seemed to spread like an opening, ever-widening umbrella, covering far more than she had intended or would ever suspect.

  Evelyn returned to the hotel in the early evening with weary feet—the Louvre, with its endless miles of halls lined with paintings, exercised the legs much more fully than the eyes or the mind—and a depressed emotional attitude, the afternoon with Ann having held up the same cruel mirror yet again.

  Bradford was there when she arrived, and this time he too was depressed. They went out to dinner—the restaurant was world-famous for its decor, but because Bradford was also world-famous they had to eat in a private room—and during the meal he told her what his second meeting with Kwong Lan Quey had been like.

  “I suppose I made a mistake,” he said. “I pushed. I’m out of practice, I know better than that, particularly with an Oriental. He’ll come out in his own time, but, God, it’s a painful process, waiting.”

  “Was it the same today? Reminiscences?”

  “Not very much. Mostly today it was philosophy, in as abstract terms as possible. He would describe a Chinese attitude toward something, and then ask for the equivalent attitude in our part of the world, but he used such vague general terminology I sometimes had no idea what on earth he was trying to say. Then he would get irritated if I didn’t have a Western philosophic concept to contrast with whatever it was he’d been talking about, so finally I asked him what it was all leading up to, what was the point, and he closed right up. We went on for another twenty minutes, but it was just weather and airlines and restaurants. Then he declared the meeting closed.” Bradford shook his head, looking at the food he hadn’t started to eat yet. “I’m too rusty. I should know better than that.”

  Tuesday Bradford met with the French Premier and three members of his cabinet, and Evelyn went shopping with Janet Lockridge, the terrible Eddie’s mother. Janet Lockridge had been born Janet Canby, the elder sister of Evelyn’s dead husband, and there was a strong familial resemblance between the two that Evelyn found at times troubling and depressing, but not today. Janet was a bubbly open woman, the perfect counterpart to her amiable husband, and the shopping spree was Evelyn’s most enjoyable day so far in Paris.

  It had apparently been so for Bradford as well. Even though his meeting with the Premier had been an afterthought, window dressing, they had in fact discussed two or three substantive issues—overlapping French and American spheres of influence in Central Africa, for example—and Bradford had come away with specific proposals to present to the State Department on his return to the States.

  That evening they dined at Edward Lockridge’s. Eddie was not present, and Evelyn took the opportunity to hint at Ann Gillespie’s concern about Eddie’s influence on her son Charles. Edward, as expected, brushed it all off as harmless boyhood rebellion, but Janet took it much more seriously, to the point that she and Edward tensely skirted a bitter family argument right at the dinner table, with Bradford and Evelyn both embarrassed and making attempts to gloss it over and change the subject, which at last they succeeded in doing without any resolution of the Eddie-Charles problem at all.

  They changed the subject by segueing to Chairman Mao, the recently-dead Premier of China, and the semantic probability that Mao would remain alive as part of the language for some time to come, in the word Maoist. As Edward said, “There are people around to this day calling themselves Trotskyites, and half of them hadn’t been born yet at the time Trotsky was killed. The same thing will happen to the word Maoist, you wait and see.” This change of subject had come about when Edward mentioned casually that the group his son belonged to considered itself Maoist without having any real idea what a Maoist philosophy entailed.

  “Maoism in the West,” Bradford said, “has never meant the same thing as Maoism in Asia. There it’s expansionist, doctrinaire, favoring a strong central government. Here it’s fragmentary, almost entirely devoid of doctrine, and opposed to government in virtually all its forms.”

  From this, the talk moved to the probable future of China without Mao, and the only thing they could agree on was that it was impossible—given the almost total lack or communication between East and West—for a Western observer to guess which way China would turn now. The political situation apparently remained unsettled there, but what would finally shake out when a new equilibrium was reached? Another strong central figure like Mao, or an essentially faceless bureaucracy, as Russia tried for a while after Stalin? No one would even risk a guess. Bradford said, “You know Eugene White, don’t you? He’s with Asian Affairs at State. He told me they’ve been giving serious consideration to taking on tea leaf readers.”

  Laughing, Edward said, “Appropriate, anyway.” The fight with his wife was safely gotten by, and the rest of the evening was pleasant and amiable.

  Wednesday was the meeting with the former Italian Premier, which took place in the garden of the Italian Embassy. The Premier was an incredibly ancient and shriveled old man, who walked with a stick, and whose hands trembled all the time. Evelyn had come along for this meeting, and she felt both disgust and pity when the old man insisted on the gallant gesture of kissing her hand, his own hand communicating its tremor all the way up her arm.

  The meeting was fairly brief, the discussion taking place with an interpreter, and in the limousine afterward Bradford looked at Evelyn with a proud smile on his face and said, “That man is two years older than I am.”

  They dined Wednesday night at the home of the American Ambassador, with a dozen other guests, all American diplomats, including Edward and Janet Lockridge. Evelyn recognized three of the women she had seen at Carrie’s last Saturday.

  She herself returned to Carrie’s Thursday afternoon, Carrie having phoned to say that this was a special occasion, an entirely different type of person today, “not that dull group you saw last week.” Being a
t loose ends with Bradford off for his third meeting with Kwong Lan Quey, Evelyn promised to come.

  And it really was a different group today, led by an internationally known Italian movie producer, a short round man with a bushy black moustache, plus his internationally known Swedish movie star wife, a tall voluptuous blonde with little English and apparently nothing of any other language, plus the internationally known male American movie star who was to appear opposite her in her husband’s next Italo-French co-production, to be shot in Yugoslavia in September. They were all in Paris for contract-signing, and were at Carrie’s because there was apparently some sort of semi-secret past acquaintanceship between Carrie and the producer, both of whom spent the afternoon making broad hints and shushing one another.

  It happened that Evelyn had met the American movie star several times already—a tall rugged man with the necessary cheek-wrinkles to allow him to head the cast in westerns—which he clearly didn’t remember and about which she didn’t remind him. The meetings had taken place during Bradford’s second Presidential election campaign, the one he lost. Presidential campaigns have an irresistible fascination for movie stars, who can be found lurking in the wings behind every candidate, impatient to get close enough to tell him which is his good side. This gentleman had been among the Hollywood contingent of Bradford’s last campaign, had made several contributions of gratifying size, had gone on brief speaking tours, and had signed whatever was put before him. No one likes to be reminded of the losing crusades one has returned from, so Evelyn acknowledged the introduction as though it truly were their first meeting, and he responded with a kind of hearty automatic gallantry that would probably have been as offensive to a European woman as last week’s Frenchman’s oiliness had been to Evelyn. But hearty automatic gallantry is a frequent fact of American life, and Evelyn hardly even remarked it this time.

  Thursday evening, Bradford was more depressed than she’d ever seen him before. “I played him well,” he insisted grimly. “I haven’t lost that much, dammit, I know when I’m doing well and when I’m doing poorly. I played him as well as I’ve ever handled anything in my life, and there’s just nothing happening. I’m fishing, and there’s no fish in that lake.”

  Later in the evening he said, “But why would he set this up if he didn’t have something to say? There has to be fish in the lake, or why did he invite me to come fishing?”

  Friday they drove to Deauville, where a beach estate had been put at Bradford’s disposal. Evelyn swam in the Channel, in the Cote Fleurie, and Bradford sunned himself and tried to put aside his depression. It was just the two of them—plus the servants who came with the house and the inevitable guards—and it was almost like being at home in Eustace. For the first time, Evelyn truly missed Dinah.

  It was two hundred kilometers back to Paris—one hundred twenty-five miles—and they left Sunday morning because Bradford’s final meeting with Kwong Lan Quey was to be today, beginning at one. On the drive back, Bradford said, “A dreadful possibility has occurred to me, and I only hope I’m wrong.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ve been trying to understand why he would want these meetings unless he had something to say. But there might be a reason. God alone knows what the political situation in China is at the moment, without Mao. Is it possible he thinks it will do him some political good at home if he’s had publicized meetings with an American, even an unofficial American like me? Is that all there is to it? God, I hope not.”

  “What good could it do him?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head, and she saw that the suspicion was weighing on him, aging him. If he was right in what he suspected, he was being cruelly used, but far more than that, his high hopes, his desire to be useful and to have still some small part in increasing the possibilities of peace, had been pointlessly and brutally mocked. She wished there were something she could do, at the least something helpful she could say, but there was nothing.

  She waited for him at the hotel, since he’d said this final meeting would definitely not last as long as the others, and it did not. He was back by two-thirty, grim-faced. “I was right,” he said, and would talk no more about it.

  They took a late-morning plane the next day, Monday. Bradford had refused to speak to the press in Paris, although at Kennedy he agreed to make a statement but not to answer questions. While Evelyn stood to one side, watching him with helplessness, he grimly announced the results of his meetings with the Chinese official. He told of his growing suspicions, and of his finally having stated those suspicions to the Chinese, who neither admitted nor denied them. “He only suggested that unless I wanted to appear a gullible fool in the eyes of the world I would not repeat my conclusions in public. Well, I am a gullible fool. I was gullible in the quest for peace, and I cannot think of a nobler gullibility. But Kwong Lan Quey was also gullible, in that he thought he could use an American politician to further his own political career, and his gullibility contains not the slightest element of nobility. I may lose a little face as a result of all this, but I am an old man, and retired, and I don’t much matter anyway. But if Kwong Lan Quey was hoping to use the Paris meetings to further his career by demonstrating his ability to deal at a diplomatic level with Americans, he has failed. After this, there isn’t one American, I doubt there’s one European, who would be interested in talking with Kwong Lan Quey on any subject whatsoever.”

  He went on to say that there were hopeful signs in the affair, that if a Chinese politician thought it worthwhile to demonstrate himself capable of diplomatic relations with Western politicians it was a fairly good indication of some sort of thaw in China, of at least the possibility that China was beginning to be ready to come out of her shell and meet with the rest of the world. With at least that small hopeful conclusion to offer, he didn’t consider his trip to have been entirely worthless after all.

  When he was finished, a reporter stood and said, “Mr. Lockridge, you said you didn’t want to answer questions about your trip. But would you answer a question about this?” He held up a newspaper.

  Bradford squinted at it. “I’m sorry, I don’t know to what you’re referring.”

  The newspaper was passed forward, from hand to hand. Evelyn could see only that it was The New York Times, but could read none of the headlines.

  Bradford looked at the paper, and his expression, if anything, grew even more grim. He shook his head and looked up and said, “This is the first I’ve seen of this. I don’t have the facts, of course, but I would naturally presume his innocence. I’ll be in touch with him at once. In the meantime, you can understand I don’t want to say anything else on the subject.”

  They thanked him and trooped out, and Bradford turned wordlessly to hand the paper to Evelyn, who held it in two hands and looked at the headline, top left, one column:

  HARRISON LOCKRIDGE INDICTED IN CALIFORNIA

  Innocent of All Wrongdoing, Says Ex-President’s Brother

  9 Others Indicted in Land Transaction

  viii

  THE CAR WAS WAITING at the airport in Hagerstown, and when he boarded, Bradford asked the chauffeur to turn the radio on and find a station that would fill its between-news interludes not too offensively.

  He’d phoned Harrison from Kennedy, but Evelyn hadn’t asked him about the conversation and he hadn’t volunteered. In the old days in the White House, whenever he was angry with the failure of a subordinate, Bradford had never looked angry in the normal sense, but only jaw-clenched determined, as though thinking not about the man who had failed but about some extremely difficult task that he himself had promised himself to perform. He had that look now, and the flight from New York to Hagerstown had been mostly a silent one.

  News came on the radio shortly before they reached Chambersburg. It mentioned Harrison, but only the bare bones of the story, not even as many details as had been in the first two paragraphs of the Times. After the news Evelyn finally broached the subject, saying, “What happens
with Harrison now?”

  “God knows,” Bradford said. He stared straight ahead. “He’s the same damn fool he always was, of course, he’d like to bluff it through if he could. Of course he can’t, the only thing for him to do is admit that he was wrong, he was hasty, he went into the thing without finding out the true facts of the case, and now that he knows he can only hope to help the courts in finding an equitable solution.”

  “Doesn’t he want to do that?”

  “Of course not. It’s the sensible thing, so he’s against it. How many times have I been on the phone with him the last few months? But he wouldn’t get out of it, he wouldn’t get out of it. And now he still won’t get out of it. It would be disloyal to his partners, for God’s sake. There’s a case of late-blooming and terribly misplaced loyalty if there ever was one. They’re going to sink, the lot of them, and he has a chance to avoid sinking with them, and I’m having to beg him to take it.”

  “Do you think he will?”

  “Harrison usually manages to get himself rescued in the nick of time. We’ll see if he works the trick this time. I’ve told him to come see me next week.” He turned his head to give Evelyn a smile of condolence. “It means having that whole incredible family descend on us,” he said, “but it is important.”

  “Oh, I realize that,” she said, and smiled back, saying, “Besides, if it gets too bad I’ll just take Dinah and go visit somebody else.”

  “What?” he said, in mock alarm. “And leave me alone with them all?”

  She patted his arm, smiling now in deep affection. “I won’t leave you alone,” she said.

  6

  SIXTY PERCENT OF ALL cerebral thrombosis, the most common form of stroke, occurs either during sleep or shortly after arising. In Bradford Lockridge’s case, the thrombosis heralded by his previous transient ischemic attacks struck at twelve minutes past three on the morning of Tuesday, the tenth of July, the night after his return from Europe. The attack was swift and harsh. At its onset Bradford groaned in his sleep, he frowned, the skin of his forehead wrinkled, but he did not awaken.