Ex Officio

by Donald E. Westlake

  It was only a ten minute drive from Robert’s place to Eustace, and then a very few more minutes up the private road to the house. Evelyn took this last stretch at a fairly slow speed because sometimes there were deer on this road at night, particularly at this season. But tonight there were no deer; tonight there was a man in black clothing and a darkish strange face that at first she took to be American Indian but suddenly realized was Chinese.

  He was standing just at the edge of the blacktop as she came around a curve, half a mile before the gate, and he stepped forward as though he’d been waiting for her. She automatically took her foot off the accelerator, because there was someone moving in front of the car, and it slowed, and then her brain caught up with events and she thought, Oh, my God, they’ve come to take us away tonight!

  But it wasn’t her he wanted, after all. He shaded his eyes with one hand, peering at the car through the glare of its lights, and she saw his surprise when he made out the line of the Mustang. At the same time, she was rescinding the earlier order to her right foot, she was telling it to mash down on the accelerator now, to take her away from there.

  They both acted at the same time, so that just as he ducked to the side, running off into the trees, the car surged forward, and all at once he was gone and she was past the spot where he’d been. And in the rear-view mirror there was nothing but a faint red-tinged darkness of road and tree trunks, dimly illuminated by her tail lights, the picture turning clearer and more red as she pressed down on the brakes and brought the car to a stop.

  She rolled down the side window. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear. The man was gone, he might never have been. But she felt cold and nervous, and the empty black night just beyond the open window was too frightening. She rolled the window up again, and drove on.

  The young night man came out of the guard shack to open the gate for her when she reached it. She rolled the window down again and asked him, “Was everything quiet tonight?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. He was cheerful, but mostly silent, a local youth who was probably in awe of the wealthy and famous people whose gate he guarded. “Same as every night,” he said.

  She couldn’t tell him, of course. She couldn’t tell anyone who didn’t know the situation. But was there any danger for him? What was the Chinese man doing on their road, in the middle of the night?

  In the end she said nothing, and drove on through the open gate and toward the house. She would tell Howard in the morning.

  A few lights were always kept burning at night in the house, and now she could catch quick glimpses of them through the trees. Unconsciously, she drove a little faster.

  6

  HOWARD SAT ALONE IN Bradford’s office, at the desk, the manuscript of The Coming of Winter spread out before him. So far as he could see, Brad had done nothing on the manuscript at all in the month since he’d last looked at it. And he very much doubted that Brad ever would do any further work on it in the future.

  “It’s a God damn shame,” he said. He had the habit, when working, of talking to himself, which he never did at any other time. But there was something about sitting at a desk with a manuscript laid out in front of him to be worked on that seemed to call for commentary, for a kind of oral footnoting of his relationship with the book at hand.

  And his relationship with this particular book was a sad one, summed up in what he had just said. It was a shame, a God damn shame, and he felt a helpless bitterness over the abandonment of this book by its author. They had been building something here, Brad had been building it and Howard had been helping him, and now the construction was to be left forever incomplete.

  What a fine plan it had been, too. The most comprehensive memoirs of any American President, seven volumes of careful detailed accurate reconstruction of the political life of one of the most important individuals of the twentieth century. There would have been nothing in American literary or political history to match it, nothing anywhere to match it except the memoirs of Winston Churchill. It was Churchill, in fact, that Howard had kept for his model from the very beginning, prodding Brad toward substance and truth whenever the older man would have been contented with a mere recital of facts. And though he’d known Brad’s books would never approach Churchill’s in eloquence, he had hoped that otherwise they would have emerged Churchill’s equal. And he believed they would have, and he’d been delighted and inspired—probably more so than Brad himself—at the thought of taking part in the books’ creation.

  Naturally, they had always known Brad might die before the seven volumes were completed, but death was a natural enemy, an expected interruption, and therefore acceptable, however much it might be regretted. What was not acceptable was what had happened; to have Brad still available in this world, and yet unavailable, no longer interested, no longer really Brad in any sense that mattered.

  Bradford Lockridge had loomed large in his nephew Howard’s life for as long as Howard could remember. His father, Sterling, had always deferred to Brad, and in many ways owed him his position in the world. Howard himself, though he’d chosen a career remote from politics, had found the ways eased by his relationship to Senator Lockridge, and then President Lockridge, and now ex-President Lockridge. And it was in this relationship that he’d found his greatest satisfactions; as compiler and annotator, editor and friend, and ultimately he hoped as biographer, Howard had made the reconstruction of Brad’s life the central purpose of his own existence.

  So it was his own meaning to himself that was now being threatened by whatever had happened to Brad, and he couldn’t help a mournful frustrated bitterness as he looked at this abandoned manuscript spread out on the desk, left behind like a dead pony along an Indian trail. And he couldn’t help an optimism he knew to be illusory, the doomed hope that when Joe Holt arrived here Tuesday he would discover Brad’s problems to be temporary and reversible. They were not, they were permanent and irrevocable, but he went on hoping.

  In the meantime, what was to be done? About a third of The Coming of Winter was in complete manuscript form, another sixth was in Brad’s rough first draft, and a full half existed only in notes, outlines, isolated pages and folders full of researched facts. It might be possible for Howard to finish the construction of this volume, though the second half would be much skimpier than the first, would lack the first-hand details that lifted these books above the level of simple history texts, but what about the remaining two volumes? The Servant of the Nation and Toward Tomorrow were barely in seed, each book now no more than a thick folder of outlines, correspondence and lists of questions to be checked. Those books could be created, no doubt, by a team of researchers and ghost writers with Howard at their head, but they would be valueless. No, that was an overstatement; they would be run of the mill, there would have been no real purpose in having done the work. Without Brad, they would not have the breath of life.

  The other title Brad had introduced, The Final Glory, existed in Howard’s mind only as an irritation, a source of anger. The title did not refer to any book; so far as Howard was concerned, The Final Glory was the title of the tragic and humiliating last chapter of Brad’s life, and a nastily ironic title it was, at that.

  His feeling of helplessness and frustrated rage had driven Howard into this room this morning after breakfast, but the same feelings now kept him from actually doing any work on the manuscript. He had looked at it, he had shuffled the parts of it back and forth, but aside from observing its abandonment he had done nothing, and he’d been here now for over an hour.

  Brad had poked his head in a while ago, and had seemed to find amusement in the sight of Howard sitting there at the desk. “Hard at work?” he’d said. “Fine. Keep at it.”

  Before Howard could think of a response, Brad had gone away again, and since then Howard had been alone with his thoughts and the dead embryo of manuscript. He knew he shouldn’t really stay in here, he should be out and around, he had more important things to do. Primarily, he was supposed to seek ou
t the lines of communication between Brad and the Red Chinese, that was his first purpose in being here. And, since Evelyn had told him last night about the phony passports, there was a certain urgency about the task.

  But still he sat here, brooding over the manuscript. In a way, this was a wake, he was paying his last respects to a dead idea, the idea that had animated the last eight years of his life.

  When the door opened, he thought it was Brad again, and he steeled himself not to be angry, but when he looked over at the door it was Evelyn coming in, the first he’d seen her today. “Hello,” he said, and guiltily stood up from the desk, as though he’d already intended not to waste any more time.

  She shut the door behind her and said, “Bradford just left for another walk.”

  “He could be meeting them again.”

  “I saw one last night,” she said.

  “Saw one? One of the Chinese?”

  “Yes. I—stayed late at Robert’s.” She showed a sudden touching embarrassment, and hurried on. “When I drove back, a little after three, there was a man standing beside the road. He was Chinese, and he was dressed all in black.”

  “On the private road?”

  “Yes. On the other side of the gate.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I think he was waiting for somebody, and he thought I was them. Then, when he saw I wasn’t, he ran off into the woods.”

  “Did you tell anybody?”

  “No. There wasn’t anybody to tell. I asked the man on the gate if there’d been anything happening, and he said no.”

  Howard walked around the desk, frowning. “Three o’clock in the morning. What the hell are they doing out there at three o’clock in the morning?”

  “Maybe they’re going to kidnap him.”

  “No, they wouldn’t. They don’t have to, he’s cooperating. It’s easier for them to let him do it himself.”

  She said, “Then why was he there?”

  “I don’t know. Which direction did Brad take?”

  “Off through the orchards. North.”

  “I’ll take a walk myself,” Howard said.

  “Shall I come with you?”

  “No, you stay here. I’ll be back in a little while.”

  “All right,” she said, and her reluctance affected his own attitude, and he left the office and went downstairs thinking, What am I doing here? I’m thirty-seven years old, I’m overweight, I’m a book editor, I wear glasses, I am not a counterspy. What am I doing here?

  It was the kind of crisp fall day when the sun keeps ducking behind fluffy clouds and then reappearing, chilling by its absences but never quite warming with its presence. There was a slight breeze, and Howard was glad he’d stopped off for a mackinaw on the way.

  There’d been two or three night frosts so far, none of them deep, and the ground was still soft as Howard set off away from the house through the orchards in the general direction that Brad had taken. He walked with his shoulders hunched inside the mackinaw, his hands in the pockets, and he kept looking around in all directions as he walked. From time to time he glanced at the ground, thinking that Indians and other trackers would undoubtedly be able to follow Brad’s trail with no difficulty at all, but he himself saw nothing there to be read. I’m a ground illiterate, he thought, and found himself possessed by a passing regret that he hadn’t taken more interest in the Boy Scouts as a youth. One never knew what expertise would turn out to be helpful.

  Past the orchards was meadowland, virtually clear of trees, and tending upward on a slight slope toward a ridge half a mile or so away, where the woods began. The meadow grass was slightly damp underfoot, and far off he could hear the faint sounds of birds. The feeling was bucolic, the atmosphere seemed to say, “There are no problems. Rural simplicity is the only truth. The true purpose of a walk in the woods is enjoyment, not the chasing of Chinese spies.”

  It also made him think of Thanksgiving, now less than a month away. Pumpkins, mince pie, hayrides. His last hayride had been twenty-two, twenty-three years ago, when the family had lived in Indianapolis. Long before Sterling became president of Lancashire University. Long before anything.

  The ridge. Ahead of him, the land sloped down again, this face covered by trees and underbrush. To the left the ridge slanted downward, to the right it slanted upward. He turned right, following the high ground. A montage of childhood memories was filling his mind, and as the echoes of his boyhood relationship with woods and fields came back to him he gradually felt less foolishly out of place here. His stride became more assured, he took his hands out of the mackinaw pockets, and he looked around with both more confidence and more pleasure.

  The ridge came to a sort of peak at last, with woods on only one side, and sloping meadowland on the other three, so that he had a clear view in three directions. He could see the house, quite far away now beyond the stunted tree shapes of the orchards. He could see over the wooded lowlands to the next ridge. But no matter where he looked, he saw no one, nothing. No movement.

  He wasn’t quite sure what to do at this point. Brad’s estate covered several square miles; it would be pointless to just keep tramping back and forth, hoping to stumble across something. He knew Brad had come out in this general direction, but that was all.

  He stood there for three or four minutes, and suddenly Brad himself appeared, far down the ridge, coming out of the woods and striding along toward the house. His walking stick moved in a jaunty but purposeful manner, and even from here Howard could tell, in the way Brad moved and held himself, that he was pleased, he thought things were going well.

  Howard had marked the spot where Brad had emerged from the woods, and now he moved in that direction himself, going a few steps down the far side of the ridge first so as to be out of Brad’s sight. He moved briskly along, his route generally downhill, and when he reached the spot he turned right and entered the woods.

  It was cooler in here, and damper, and a bit darker. There was also more of a muffled feeling, as though sound wouldn’t travel as well. Howard moved more slowly, looking all around, and doing his best to keep going in a straight line. One of the things he did remember from his boyhood was how easy it was, in the woods, to wind up walking in a circle.

  He traveled for ten minutes, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, and suddenly emerged onto another meadow. He moved out across it, and came to a narrow dirt road that crossed his path from left to right.

  This would be the perimeter road, marking the edge of Brad’s property. Howard looked both ways along it, and saw nothing. But then he sniffed, catching an odor that didn’t blend with his memories of Thanksgiving and hayrides and childhood expeditions in the woods: automobile exhaust.

  He looked down at the dirt road, not expecting to be able to read tire tracks any more readily than footprints, but saw something better; a smudge of black on the weeds between the dirt ruts. He hunkered down and touched the black, and it was still damp.

  They’d been here. An automobile of some kind had been here. It had been stopped long enough for oil to have dripped down onto the weeds from the engine. And then it had gone.

  Howard straightened, still smelling the faint acrid stink of automobile exhaust, looking at the black smudge on his fingertip. Everything around him was very silent.

  ii

  THE BLUE COACHMAN WAS an excellent restaurant, and therefore did a brisk weekend trade. Downstairs was very public, with the tables close enough together for no conversation to be truly private, but upstairs was a darker, quieter room, with thick-cushioned high-backed booths, and it was one of these Howard had specified in making the reservation, knowing they would be able to talk in complete privacy there.

  Robert had not yet arrived when Howard and Evelyn got there. They sat facing one another in the booth, ordered a round of drinks, and ate rolls while waiting. Howard didn’t feel much like small talk and apparently Evelyn agreed, so they sat there together in a comforting silence.

  Robert and their drinks reached the
table at the same time. He ordered Jack Daniels on the rocks, sat down beside Evelyn, and when the waitress left he said to Howard, “From what you said on the phone, I got the idea there’ve been developments.”

  “Small ones,” Howard said. “I’m sorry if I tantalized you with that call, but I thought I shouldn’t say too much over a pay phone.”

  “No, I understand,” Robert said.

  Evelyn said, “I hate it that we can’t call you from the house.”

  “But we can’t,” Howard said. “We don’t know who’s on the extensions.”

  Evelyn nodded. “I know that.”

  “Tell me what’s happened,” Robert said.

  So Howard told him about Evelyn seeing the Chinese last night, and about his own walk in the woods this afternoon. When he was done, Robert said, “That seems almost too simple. He walks from the house to that dirt road, they drive up in a car, there’s a conversation, they give him passports, and that’s it. You’d think somebody would see them at it. It shouldn’t be that easy.”

  Howard said, “Why not? It’s isolated out there, no one ever uses that road—” he caught a quick glance between Robert and Evelyn, but ignored it for the moment “—and nobody else lives anywhere near there.”

  “They have to have a base somewhere,” Robert said. “They can’t just drive around in cars and lurk in the woods all the time, they have to have a base of operations. And they have to be able to go to and from it. How are they doing that? How can they operate in the middle of rural Pennsylvania, a group of who knows how many Chinese, traveling back and forth between their base and Bradford’s estate, and nobody notice them? Look, I’m only one man, and I’m Caucasian at that, but I couldn’t take a chance on staying in Eustace because I’d be wondered about. How are these Chinese doing it?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Howard said. “That’s one of the questions we’ll have to answer. Here comes the waitress.”

  They were silent as the waitress arrived with Robert’s Jack Daniels and three menus. After she left, Evelyn said, “What I want to know is why that man was waiting beside the road at three o’clock in the morning. What did he want there? He wasn’t planning to meet Bradford, not there and not at that time of night.”