Ex Officio

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Yes, she would,” Evelyn agreed.

  “So you think about it. Either way is all right with me.”

  “But you think I should leave her here.”

  “It would probably be best for the child. But how would you feel, in exile, never able to see her again for the rest of your life?”

  “Miserable,” Evelyn said honestly.

  “Of course, it might not be that bad. I don’t expect a miracle, you know, I don’t expect to arrive in China and have the heavens at once open and rain peace down on all the world. But I do think I can start a gradual thaw, and it might be that within a very few years you could come back here after all. It might even happen soon enough for me to come back, though I’m not counting on it.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Evelyn said, and got to her feet. Then, remembering another matter, she said, “About Uncle Joe.”

  Bradford grinned. “I thought you’d never ask. I phoned him today, I told him we were thinking of taking a Thanksgiving trip to California, and I wanted a check-up before I left.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” Evelyn said. “I’m glad.”

  “He’ll be here Tuesday. He was ready to drop everything and come right away, but I told him there was no emergency, it was just a check-up, and knowing how Howard is the first few days he’s here it wouldn’t do Joe any good to show up anyway, so he finally agreed on Tuesday. If I forget to tell Howard about it tomorrow, you remind me, will you?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “I want him to have a few days to get used to the idea. And you do some thinking about Dinah.”

  “I will,” she promised.

  iii

  THE NEXT DAY, FRIDAY, Howard came, arriving at about four o’clock in the afternoon. The white Mercedes came driving up to the door in the thin autumn sunlight and Howard emerged with his battered old black suitcase, like an unsuccessful salesman of religious articles stepping out of absolutely the wrong car.

  Evelyn met him at the door. “Bradford’s gone for a walk. He said to tell you the manuscript is in his office and he hasn’t done any work on it.”

  “The manuscript?” Howard put his suitcase down and opened his topcoat, while Evelyn shut the door. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, naturally, the manuscript. I keep forgetting that’s why I’m supposed to be here.”

  “If you don’t pester him about it, the way you usually do, he’ll suspect there’s something going on.”

  “I’ll try to remember.” He peered at her and said, “This must be a hell of a strain for you, leading a double life all of a sudden.”

  “I’m supposed to be thinking now,” she said, “about whether or not I want to bring Dinah along.”

  “To China?”

  “Yes. I can’t make up my mind what to tell him.”

  But Howard was suddenly thinking about something else. “They rhyme,” he said.

  She frowned at him. “What does?”

  “Dinah and China. What do you suppose a psychiatrist would say about that? Bradford’s wife Dinah dies, and he wants to go to China.”

  “She’s been dead almost three years,” Evelyn pointed out.

  “Yes, I suppose.” He shook his head, making a crooked grin of self-mockery. “I have the wordsmith’s mentality,” he said. “Language explains everything. What are you going to tell him?”

  Now she was at a loss. “Tell him about what?”

  “About Dinah and China. Your Dinah, taking her along.”

  “Oh. I don’t know. I’m going to see Robert this evening, I thought I’d ask him. And I’ll call Joe from Robert’s place. By the way, Bradford wanted me to tell you that Joe’s coming here Tuesday to give him a check-up. The idea is, you’re supposed to start getting used to it now, having Joe break into your work schedule.”

  “Mm. I suppose I’d better act irritated about that, too.”

  “It gets easier to play-act after you’ve done it a while.”

  “I hope so. Robert’s moved, has he?”

  “Yes, he’s in Chambersburg. I have his address and phone number written down. I’ll give them to you.”

  “Good. I’ll want to talk with him. If you’re going in there this evening, maybe I’ll come along.”

  “All right,” she said, but something must have shown in her face, because he looked at her and grinned suddenly, saying, “Two’s company?”

  “No, no, that’s all right.”

  “I can talk to him tomorrow,” Howard said. “You have your evening with him.”

  “No, that isn’t right, this is important. We shouldn’t be—”

  “But you should be,” he said. “Everybody should be, as often as possible. That’s my theory of world peace. If everybody did, every time they wanted to, there’d be no more war. Come on, show me my room.”

  She returned his smile, despite herself, and said, “Oh, all right. Come along.”

  He picked up his sagging suitcase and followed her up the stairs. “Besides,” he said, as they climbed, “you might forgive me, but Robert never would. I may be a bleary-eyed old married man, but I know top-grade woman when I see it.”

  “Howard,” she said, not even trying to hide her pleasure at the compliment, “has anyone ever told you you were incorrigible?”

  “Incorrigible? Or encourageable? If you mean I can be encouraged, you’re absolutely right. But not by you, you’re going with a friend of mine.”

  “A man of honor,” she said, laughing, and led the way down the hall to the room she’d had made up for him.

  “Completely honorable,” he agreed. “Also, Grace has this vast network of spies.”

  “You’re good for my spirits,” Evelyn said. “I can’t tell you how glad I am you’re here.”

  He plopped his suitcase on the bed. “Which brings me to a serious subject,” he said. “My main reason for being here. Not what Bradford thinks, but the true reason.” He shrugged out of his topcoat and tossed it on the bed beside the suitcase. “I’m supposed,” he said, “to try to figure out how Brad’s communicating with these people. We want to be able to intercept the messages if we can, so we’ll know exactly what’s going on.”

  “Yes, Robert told me.”

  He looked at her. “You don’t have any ideas?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I don’t. I haven’t seen anybody suspicious around here, any strangers or anything like that, not since that first time the Chinese came here in the limousine.”

  “Well, while I’m not making believe to be a tough editor concerned with his manuscript, I’m supposed to pussyfoot around here pinching maids to see if they have notes hidden in their girdles.”

  “That should be interesting work,” she said. She went over to one of the windows to raise the shade, and said, “Here comes Bradford.”

  “Back from his walk?”

  Howard came over to the window with her, and they both watched him coming up through the near orchard, surrounded by the twisty nearly leafless trees. He had his walking stick with him, a gnarled old ash stick presented to him during his state visit to Ireland when he was President. He still had a good stride, long and springy, and with his tweed jacket and his hiking shoes he looked as hale and healthy as any man alive.

  Howard said, “What’s that he’s carrying?”

  Evelyn had seen it, too, a small brown package tucked under his free arm, slender and flat. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Did he have it with him when he left?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”

  Howard frowned, and watched Bradford stride closer, and then disappear around a corner of the house. “Does he go for hikes a lot?”

  “He always has, whenever the weather’s good. He’s been doing it less lately, he seems to spend almost all his time in the library, reading. He’s given up a lot of things he used to do.”

  “But he still walks.”

  “Sometimes. You think he goes out to meet a messenger from the Chinese?”

  “It’s possible, isn’t it?”<
br />
  “Someone on the property, right here on our land? It doesn’t seem possible, but I guess it is, isn’t it?”

  Howard said, “Go on down and see if you can find out what’s in that package.”

  “I’ll do my best,” she promised. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Right.”

  She left his room and went down the front stairs and through the house toward the kitchen, meeting Bradford in the hall on the way. The package was still under his arm, but he’d left his jacket in the closet by the rear door. She came toward him, wondering how to ask what that was he was carrying, but he made the question. “There you are,” he said. He looked pleased and secretive. “Come on upstairs, I have something to show you.” With his other hand, he patted the package.

  “Something to show me?”

  “Come along.”

  She went with him, retracing her route as far as the second floor, where he turned toward the back library. As they walked down the hall she said, “Howard’s here, he just arrived.”

  “Yes, I saw his car from the ridge.” But he didn’t seem very interested in Howard right now.

  They went on into the library, and Bradford carefully closed the door before unwrapping the wrinkled brown paper from around his package and taking out the contents, two flat pamphletlike things with dark-green pebbled covers. United States passports.

  He was grinning like a boy. “They finally came,” he whispered, opened one to glance inside, and handed it to her. “Here you are, this one’s yours.”

  Yes, it was. It was exactly like her own passport in almost every way, the differences few but crucial. Like the name: Ann Thornton, it said. And the occupation: journalist. And on the page listing those parts of the world where American citizens were currently forbidden to travel, an official-looking stamped permission appeared, giving her the right to travel in and to Communist China. The People’s Republic of China, it said.

  “You’ll have to sign it,” Bradford said. “With that name, of course. Here, I’ve got a pen over here.”

  She went over to the desk, carrying the passport, sat down, took the pen, wrote Ann Thornton. She kept thinking, The People’s Republic of China, and it suddenly seemed as though she really were going there, a conveyor belt of some kind had just been activated and she was sliding slowly but inevitably forward, and nothing was going to stop it after all, not the family, not anything, and at the far end was spread The People’s Republic of China, and darkness, and a future she couldn’t imagine.

  Bradford said, “Like to see mine?” His boyish pleasure still showed in his smiling face as he extended his new passport toward her.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  The Chinese had them unrelated. Marshall Allan was to be Bradford’s new name, and he too was now a journalist. And he too had the rubber-stamp permission to travel to The People’s Republic.

  “It won’t be long now,” Bradford said.

  “No, it won’t.”

  “You’ll have to make up your mind about Dinah very soon.”

  “I will, I promise.” Then she looked at the passport again and said, “But can I take her? A journalist traveling with a little girl, would that look all right?”

  “I don’t see why not. It would be unusual, I suppose, but no one will pay us that much attention. We’ll simply be a pair of journalists on an assignment, and you’re taking the opportunity to show your daughter a bit of the world. If you decide to bring her along.”

  She said, “Well, I have till Tuesday anyway.”

  “Tuesday? Why till then?”

  “That’s when Joe’s coming to give you the check-up” She looked up at him with sudden frightened suspicion. “We aren’t going before Tuesday, are we?”

  He grinned, teasing her. “That would be something, wouldn’t it? Duck out on Joe before he even got his stethoscope stuck in his ears.”

  “But we won’t do that, will me?”

  “No, dear,” he said, and in an odd gesture reached out and patted her head. “Don’t worry, we won’t run out on Joe. I’ll have him put your mind at rest before we go anywhere.”

  iv

  “EVELYN! HEY, EVELYN!”

  She struggled upward from deep deep sleep, her head muffled in pillow and darkness and almost palpable layers of slumber, swathing her head like soft black cotton. Someone was joggling her shoulder, annoyingly, causing her discomfort, dragging her up from sleep. And calling her name.

  She’d been dreaming of wooden stairs, with wooden railings, up the clapboard side of a building. Like a building in an old western town, but endlessly high, and the outside stairs going up and up along the side of the gray clapboard building. No windows. Stairs going up, old wooden stairs, and the sky far above, and nothing below. Not a frightening dream, but like a dream of duty.

  She didn’t know her eyes were open until she noticed the slightly paler black rectangle of the window, and then at once Robert re-entered her memory, and she recognized the voice, she recognized the presence of the man beside her in the bed, shaking her shoulder, and she sat up, abruptly awake, saying, “What’s the matter?” Thinking, Bradford’s gone, he left without me.

  Robert said, “We fell asleep.”

  The statement made no sense. She knew she’d been asleep, why talk about it? The point was Bradford, had he gotten away or had somebody stopped him? She sat there in the dark trying to assemble words into a coherent question, and her eye was caught by a moving green circle in the darkness. When she understood that it was the luminous dial of Robert’s watch she was seeing, her fright and confusion fell away like seed husks and she said, “Oh. I’m supposed to be home.”

  “It’s after three o’clock,” he said. “I’m going to turn the light on now. You ready?”

  She put a hand over her eyes. Ready.

  The bedside lamp he switched on was very small, giving off a minimum of illumination, but at first it hurt her eyes anyway. She squinted in what seemed like a glare, looking at the seedy room they had now twice made home, and beside her Robert was pushing the covers off, was getting to his feet, was padding naked across the room to pull down the window shades.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” she said, blinking, gradually getting used to light and to being awake. But she did know how it had happened; she had wanted the uncomplicated pleasure of going to sleep here, of acting as though there was nothing terrible waiting for her anywhere.

  This afternoon Howard had arrived at the estate, and then Bradford had come back from his walk with the false passports, and she had spent the rest of the afternoon and the dinner hour in a state of nervousness and near-hysteria. Those passports, with the real faces and the empty-sounding names and the glib smoothness of the rubber-stamped lies, had lifted her awareness of the situation to a new level, frightening her to the point where rational thought was almost impossible. A short conversation with Howard had helped somewhat, calming her enough so that she could make her departure from the house quiet and unsuspicious, but it had been Robert who had really restored her to herself. And, in a long telephone call, Uncle Joe. Until at last she and Robert had come back to this bed, and switched out the troubles of the world around them, and now it was three in the morning.

  Robert said, “Do you want coffee? Instant.”

  “Yes, thank you,” she said, and got out of bed, and padded off to the bathroom.

  A shallow alcove off his main room contained what the landlady called a kitchenette, being a sink, a narrow oven, a two-burner stove and a low freezerless refrigerator. When she returned now from the bathroom he was just coming from that alcove with two cups of coffee. She took hers, thanked him, sipped at it, and in silence they both dressed.

  He was ready first, and said, “What will you tell him, if he’s still up?”

  “He won’t be,” she said. “But if he asks tomorrow, I’ll tell him I had a blow-out. I’ll tell him I went to a movie in Hagerstown and had a blow-out coming back.” She put on her second shoe, and stood. “
It’ll be all right,” she said. “He really doesn’t pay that much attention these days. To details.”

  “I suppose that’s a part of it,” he said. “The effect of the stroke, I mean.”

  “That’s awful, isn’t it? Taking advantage of his illness.”

  “That’s not exactly what we’re doing,” he said.

  “It feels like it.” She finished her coffee.

  “The people who gave him those passports,” Robert said, “they’re the ones taking advantage of his illness.”

  “Well, they don’t know it’s because he’s ill. But you’re right, I know what you mean. Do I have everything?”

  They both looked around. “I think so,” Robert said. “I’ll walk you down to the car.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I know I don’t. I want to.”

  She smiled at him. “It was so nice to fall asleep here,” she said.

  “I liked it myself,” he said. “I don’t know why it is, but I sleep best with your head on my shoulder.”

  “I’m your teddy bear.”

  He grinned, and patted her behind. “You’re a lot more fun than a teddy bear.”

  “Am I?” But at the look in his eyes, she stepped quickly away, saying, “No, we better not start. I have to get back before morning.”

  They left the room together. It was on the third floor, and opened onto a stairwell and hall lit by twenty-five watt bulbs in ceiling fixtures, two on each floor. In the dim light, the wallpaper looked even more decrepit than it was, but the old wooden banisters and stairs were given rich tones they lacked in daylight.

  The street outside was deserted, Evelyn’s Mustang being one of only four cars parked on this block, and the newest. It was just out front, and they stood beside the car in the chill air for a moment to whisper together, and kiss, and whisper some more. They kissed a second time, this one long and lingering, and then she opened the car door and got in and drove off. In the rear-view mirror she could see him standing on the uneven sidewalk looking after her still as she turned the next corner.