Ex Officio

by Donald E. Westlake

  Wellington said, “Wouldn’t we all? In the last analysis, wouldn’t we all?”

  Holt said, “What do you mean?”

  Those blurred eyes turned to him again. “Hypothetical instance,” Wellington said. “You have a gun in your hand. Bradford is across the way, getting aboard a plane to take him to Peking. Would you shoot, or would you let him go?”

  “I’d let him go,” Holt said promptly, and was surprised to see surprise in Wellington’s eyes. What sort of values did the man have?

  Howard apparently wondered the same, because he said, “Of course we’d let him go. Wellington. Wellington, wouldn’t you?”

  It seemed to Holt that Wellington’s head turned the way a tank’s gun turret swivels, and he could no longer remember why Wellington had always seemed so bland and dull in the past. Wellington said, “I’m not sure. To kill a great American? I would be reviled and vilified, of course, but would Brad? Having been stopped before he could do anything to smear his own record? He’d be given a hero’s burial, wouldn’t he? You people want to keep him from shame. I am his son, I would be willing to take his shame on my own shoulders.”

  “We’re not talking about killing,” Sterling said, although they were. “We’re talking about saving Brad from himself.”

  There was a small silence after that, and Holt knew it wasn’t because of what Sterling had said, but because of what Wellington had said before that. He couldn’t take his own eyes off Wellington, and he sensed that Howard and Eugene and George and Meredith Fanshaw were all gazing at him, too. Not staring, and not even shocked, really. Just gazing, studying, listening to Wellington’s words, listening to what words can do to facts. Two minutes ago, the thought of killing Bradford Lockridge—killing Bradford Lockridge!—was inconceivable, it was an enormity the mind instinctively shrank from. Now words had been said, tentatively, reluctantly, without passion, and something had happened to the sharp edges of revulsion. The concept of murder was suddenly blurred and hard to see clearly, like Wellington’s eyes.

  George broke the silence at last, saying, “I want to ask a question.”

  Everyone looked at him in relief—anything to distract the mind—and George said, “This may be stupid, but are we sure Bradford is wrong? I mean, what if he did go to China? Could he really be a force for peace?”

  “Not for a minute,” Meredith Fanshaw said.

  George turned to him and said, “How can you be sure? Bradford is still an important man, a well-known man. If he managed to explain his motivations, how can we be sure it wouldn’t do any good?”

  Howard, sitting on George’s other side, said, “You answered that one yourself, George, a couple of months ago.”

  “I did?”

  “After you taped the interview, we talked about television images as opposed to real people. Remember?”

  “Vaguely,” George said. “I believe I started drinking around then.”

  Howard said, “I asked you what television would do if somebody like Bradford Lockridge did something crazy, and you said television would have to destroy him. In order to make it acceptable to the viewers.”

  George frowned. “I did? Well, I’m not sure I was right. People like drama, television likes drama. What Bradford is talking about is personal statesmanship of the highest order. You know, he just might be able to bring it off.”

  “No,” Wellington said. The word thumped like a bag of laundry in the center of the table, and for a few seconds no one else spoke. Then Sterling said, quietly, “I think Wellington’s right. It would be just too far off the beaten track. Once he did it, Brad would be branded as a crazy man no matter what he said or how fine his motivations.”

  “He’d be Rudolph Hess,” Howard said. “That’s the exact parallel. In fact, Hess had more going for him than Brad has. He was still a young man, so he couldn’t be accused of senility. And he wasn’t retired, he was an active high-level member of the Nazi government. He had an impeccable reputation, perfect position and the most noble of motivations. But the instant his parachute opened over England he was a nut and nobody was ever going to take him seriously again.”

  “That’s right,” Sterling said. “And not only did the Germans publicize the idea he was crazy, the English themselves took it for granted he’d had a mental breakdown. Everybody took it for granted. You can’t go that far from normal behavior, no matter what the reason, and still be considered sane.”

  “All right,” said George. Holt, looking at him, nearly smiled at the realization that George had seen himself, for one glorious moment, as the interviewer with the inside track to the savior of mankind. The dream died hard, but it died, and George said, “You’re right, I guess. He couldn’t do anything but hurt himself.”

  It was time to come back from the tangent. Holt said, “That’s why it’s up to us to decide what to do about it. It’s up to the family to protect him and make sure he doesn’t do himself an injury.”

  Eugene, at the head of the table, said, “And our problem is complicated by the fact that we have to keep it a secret from Bradford, too. Whatever we do, we do it without his cooperation.”

  “Without his knowledge,” Holt said. “If he discovered what we were up to, he could stop us in ten seconds flat.”

  Meredith Fanshaw said, “How?”

  Robert told him, “When I talked with Bradford, he warned me not to try to stop him, and not to tell anybody else. If he becomes aware of any attempt to keep him in this country, he intends to pick up a phone and call a reporter and have a news conference.”

  Fanshaw said, “To announce what?”

  “His intention to go to Peking.”

  “He wouldn’t! What good would it do him?”

  “He believes the glare of publicity would keep the people from stopping him.”

  “It wouldn’t,” Wellington said, and everybody looked at him, amazed to hear Wellington volunteer an opinion. There was a little silence, but Wellington had nothing else to say, so finally Eugene said, “No, it wouldn’t. Bradford would be officially detained at once, that’s only natural. And committed to some sort of institution.”

  Howard, in his most dry and bitter manner, said, “There’s a full glare of publicity for you. Bradford publicly crazy in front of a news conference.”

  Turning to Holt, Sterling said, “Joe, we keep using the word crazy. I haven’t seen Brad since last spring, which is apparently before all this happened. Is he crazy?”

  “That isn’t a question you can answer,” Holt started. “He’s had—”

  Howard interrupted, saying, “Yes, you can. What if I asked you if I was crazy? What would you say?”

  “I’d say no.”

  Howard pointed at Sterling, across the table from him, and said to Holt, “Is my father crazy?”

  “No.”

  “All right. Is Brad crazy?”

  “I can’t do it that way,” Holt said. “I’m sorry, I know what you’re trying for, but it just can’t be done that way. Brad is somewhere on the spectrum between sane and insane. He’s had—he’s probably had, I have to see him to find out for sure—he’s probably had recent brain damage. It doesn’t seem particularly severe or particularly extensive. He still behaves and performs much as he always has. To some degree his judgment has been affected, but that seems to be all.”

  “It’s enough!” Harrison said.

  Sterling said, “The reason I asked, I wanted to know if Brad could still make public appearances without his condition being obvious.”

  Holt said, “So far as I know, he hasn’t deteriorated since that interview was shot, two or three months ago.”

  Fanshaw said, “What about simply tucking him away somewhere, holding him incommunicado?”

  “Sooner or later,” Howard told him, “some reporter would want to find out why Bradford Lockridge doesn’t grant interviews any more, doesn’t come to the phone any more, doesn’t attend any more party functions, hundred-dollar-a-plate dinners, that sort of thing. Sooner or later, someb
ody in the news media would smell a story in it, and find it.”

  Sterling said, “Robert, how long do we have? When does he plan to leave?”

  “I don’t know,” Robert said. “He wants Evelyn to go with him, and she hasn’t given him an answer yet, but I think he knows the answer’s going to be no.”

  Eugene said, “It should be yes. She should tell him yes, and make him believe it.”

  Robert glanced at him and nodded. “You’re right. So he’ll keep her informed of his plans.”

  Holt said, “Could she convince him? It would be worse if he saw through it.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” Robert said.

  Fanshaw said, “In the meantime, what about the rest of us? There doesn’t seem to be anything to do. Bradford has to be stopped, but we don’t know how.”

  “That’s one thing we’ll all have to do,” Eugene said. “Try to think of a way to stop him.”

  Wellington said, “And intercept his correspondence.”

  Eugene turned to him, saying, “Of course. You’re absolutely right, his correspondence with the Chinese.”

  Howard said, “I’ll move out to the house, I can do that without making him suspicious. I’ll see what I can find.”

  Holt told him, “I’ll be there by the end of the week, Howard. I’ll have to make an excuse to give him a medical onceover.”

  Sterling said, “Robert, I think we should arrange a leave of absence for you from the university, and that you should take a place in Eustace or Chambersburg, somewhere close by, so you could be reached in an emergency.”

  “Fine,” Robert said.

  “As for the rest of us,” Eugene said, “at the moment I think there’s nothing for us to do but cudgel our brains. We want to stop Bradford without publicity, and we’ll have to do it without his cooperation, which is a tall order. I’m willing to serve as a clearing-house for ideas, a sort of liaison within the family. I don’t know if we’ll want any more large meetings like this, but if we do I can handle the arrangements. For now, I think we should adjourn for lunch and start to think things out. Unless there’s something else to say?”

  They were all silent, waiting for someone to speak, and in their silence Holt heard a strange small sound, a kind of rustling or scuffing. He glanced around for the source of it, as others also started to do, and then he saw Howard and George looking across the table, and when he followed their eyes he saw that BJ was crying.

  It was the damnedest thing. There he was, the total military man, ramrod-straight, strong-faced, iron-gray hair brushed straight back, uniform severe and immaculate amid all the civilian business suits, and he was crying. Seated at attention, the way he always was, shoulders back, spine straight, head erect, hands flat on the table, and he was crying. His face was red and distorted, tears were wet on his cheeks, the odd scuffing sound was his labored breathing, but through it all he made no movement. His hands didn’t go to his face, his head didn’t bow, his shoulders didn’t fold inward, he made none of the physical adjustments that people make when they weep. But he was crying.

  Holt felt vast embarrassment and pity, and didn’t know what to do. There was nothing to do. BJ faced front, meeting no one’s eye. He seemed oblivious of the nine men around him.

  None of them knew what to do. When Holt finally looked away from BJ he saw that everyone else had also been staring at him, embarrassment and pity were on every other face, and they were all equally helpless to find something to do.

  But at least he could be left alone. Holt slid his chair back, and though the move made practically no sound on the carpet, everyone immediately turned to look at him. He got to his feet, saying nothing, looking at no one, and walked around the table to the door. As he did so, Eugene and Robert got to their feet, and then Howard, and then Sterling and Wellington together, and then Meredith Fanshaw, and then George, and finally Harrison. They all walked silently out to the hall, leaving BJ in there, sitting at attention, hands flat on the table, eyes straight ahead, crying.

  In the hall, they didn’t look at one another. Eugene said, “This way,” his voice muffled, and they all followed him down the corridor.

  4

  WELLINGTON HAD LUNCH WITH Meredith Fanshaw, who didn’t really want to talk about the problem of Brad, but who wanted instead to talk about another problem, one involving a defense appropriation that was having some unexpected trouble in the Senate. Wellington understood that Meredith was simply on another of his fishing expeditions, trying to find out exactly where Wellington stood in the Washington hierarchy, where his protection was, essentially, and he parried the leading questions with the deadpan skill of long experience. Still, coming right after this morning’s bombshell, it was more of a strain than usual, so as unobtrusively as possible he cut the luncheon short. Besides, he’d be getting a phone call soon, and he wanted to be home for it.

  “Remember me to Carol,” Meredith said. Wellington was married to a niece of Meredith’s, but blood was all the two had in common. Wellington said he would, knowing he wouldn’t, and also knowing that Meredith didn’t really give a damn whether he did or not.

  It was a cloudy day, and getting cooler. Wellington, who drove a Chevrolet station wagon, turned on the car radio for the two o’clock news and heard that rain was anticipated toward morning. For the first time this season, Wellington switched on the car’s heater.

  Wellington’s home was a large white structure on an acre and a half of clipped greenery in Bethesda. As he drove up the precise blacktop he reached into his glove compartment for the remote control box and depressed the button, and ahead of him the middle garage door (of three) retracted smoothly upward. He drove the station wagon inside, noticing that both other cars were out—Carol would be shopping, seventeen-year-old Deborah was at school—and pressed the button again to shut the door behind him.

  The housekeeper was in the kitchen, sitting at the table with a cup of coffee that probably contained a dollop of rye, a copy of Ebony open before her. Wellington said, “If there are any calls, I’ll be in the den.”

  “Yes, sir.” She barely acknowledged his presence. Wellington suspected that she knew about Carol’s affair with the Congressman from Kentucky, and therefore despised Wellington. Assuming—as Carol did, as the Congressman did, as everyone always did—that he knew nothing and was therefore a fool. Did they suppose his life could be private? The OA maintained a dossier on Carol’s extramarital affairs—four, in nine years—as a matter of course. Wellington hadn’t ordered it, but couldn’t stop it, nor could he stop himself from reading the dossier from time to time.

  The den was a small many-angled room on the third floor of the house. The ceiling was the underside of the roof, and slanted down at various angles. There was a dormer window that began at the floor, and the available spaces of vertical wall had been covered with bookcases, all hammered together by Wellington himself. The books were as various and nondescript as the contents of a used bookstore on a side street in an old city, ranging from the Kuran and The Mayor of Casterbridge to The Wind in the Willows and The Story of O.

  One shelf contained two dozen dark blue loose-leaf binders. Within the binders was Wellington’s stamp collection—North American, mostly, plus a few specialties like Andorra and the Third Reich—as well as his only secret. The one thing no dossier knew about him, nor ever would.

  Entering the den now, he reached unhesitatingly for the seventh blue binder from the left and carried it across the room to the small battered desk near the dormer window. A wooden kitchen chair stood before the desk, a telephone and a water glass full of pencils and ballpoint pens stood on it.

  Wellington sat down at the desk and opened the binder. Canadian stamps, mountains and moose. The formation of the binder was this: Within a clear plastic sleeve the stamps were mounted on sheets of white paper, two sheets in each sleeve, back to back. There were approximately fifty plastic sleeves in each binder.

  Wellington flipped about halfway through the volume, then turned a f
ew pages more slowly, studying the stamps. At last he stopped, and inserted his fingertips into one of the sleeves, and pulled out the sheets of paper. Separating them, he revealed a third sheet, containing hand-printing in neat lines with ballpoint pen, reading:

  In what misery the eagle waits

  The crag, the crevasse, the furthest sway,

  The night of falling.

  The death of death the eagle nears,

  The sound of rushing river in the black

  Blank underground.

  The world of rope the eagle knows,

  How long to reach, how wide, how far to burn,

  Squeezing his genitals for wine.

  Wellington read over several times what he had written, then opened a side drawer of the desk, and took the top sheet of a stack of yellow paper lying there. Lifting a pencil from the glass, he bowed his shoulders over the sheet of scratch paper on the desk, and slowly began to write.

  For the next twenty minutes, he was totally absorbed. When he was finished, he had used three sheets of the yellow paper, he had crossed out line after line, and he had written three more stanzas, which he now carefully transferred to the original sheet of white paper, beneath the first three:

  And down below the eagle’s beak

  The windows in the tops of trees

  Shine yellow pornographies.

  And though he knows the eagle’s name

  The wren, electric black and touched with death,

  Leans in the lee of the stones.

  While far above the eagle’s head

  The cleansing storms of violet night

  Trace his narrow wisdom.

  Done with the copying, he slowly reread the entire poem, moving his lips, his head moving also with the rhythms. Satisfied, he put that sheet between the two sheets containing stamps and returned the whole sandwich to the plastic sleeve. Moving the binder to one side of the desk, he withdrew another sheet of yellow paper from the drawer and began to write again in pencil: