Ex Officio

by Donald E. Westlake

  Now, in apparent response to a phone call from the receptionist, the impressive doors of that law firm opened and out came a short, stocky man of about thirty-five, who introduced himself as John Bloor, shaking hands around and smiling in a muted fashion, as though already in rehearsal for tomorrow’s funeral. He told them that most of the others were already present, and then led them down a series of airy, carpeted halls with off-white walls. Small functional cubicles could be seen through every doorway. From the bareness of the walls, this was one of the firms that maintained an approved list of pictures and other items that might be hung in the cubicles.

  The screening room, trapezoid-shaped, was about half full. Wellington and Eugene, both being speakers, moved to the front row, Eugene exchanging half a dozen greetings on the way, Wellington moving more invisibly. The room had gray fabric walls, a pockmarked baffle-filled ceiling that looked like a futuristic city model upside down, and a featureless heavy-looking gray curtain closed over the screen.

  Wellington did not sit, but stood in a front corner, considering the men in the room. They were his raw material, and he studied them carefully before starting to deal with them. He had two things to do with them today: first, to organize them into an effective defense for Bradford at the funeral tomorrow, and second, to convince them that his plan for Bradford’s future was not only feasible but the best possible answer. On the latter questions, he would have to do so even though he couldn’t state to them directly that the alternative was Bradford’s death, though he would attempt to make them understand that allusively. Unfortunately, people tend to disbelieve the possibility of violence in their own spheres, and several of these men would not be able to think about much of anything but the drain Wellington was proposing to put on their wallets.

  The door opened again, and a final group came in: Howard Lockridge, Robert Pratt, Gregory Holt. Wellington, having done a head count, went over to where Eugene was chatting with Edward Lockridge, and said, “We’re all here, Gene.”

  “Are we? Good. I’ll introduce you in just a minute, all right?”

  “Fine,” Wellington said, and went to sit down in a corner of the first row.

  Gene called the meeting together. He thanked them for coming. If Wellington were a smiling man, he would have smiled; by exerting pressure in one direction, he had stalled this meeting for over a week, and by exerting pressure in the other direction he had brought the meeting into existence in less than a day. He wondered how Howard would react to that, if he knew it. Badly.

  Gene spoke briefly. All of them in the room now knew about Bradford, so that explanation didn’t have to be gone through yet again. Gene’s opening remarks were therefore very short, finishing with, “Because he has something important to say to us, I’d like to start by turning the floor over to Wellington Lockridge.”

  Wellington got to his feet, and turned with slow reluctance to face the eighteen pairs of eyes out there. He was voluntarily giving up a kind of named anonymity for the first time in his life, and the experience was difficult and unnerving. He was used to creating his effects indirectly, through others, after quiet private conversations, but now a situation had come along that was forcing him to change his style. There wasn’t time to handle this in his usual way; besides, in this case he wouldn’t trust anyone else to carry the ball.

  He thought briefly of his superior, in Washington, and of his statement of yesterday: “If it hadn’t been your father, you would have been the first to see the only sensible thing to do was kill him.” Sensible? The man didn’t know the half of it, he didn’t know how Wellington’s secret soul hated the exposure he was bringing on himself now. Sensible? Had it been anyone but Bradford, Wellington would have seen him boiled like a lobster before doing this.

  But none of it showed. Wellington, as usual, looked merely stocky, quiet, calm, uninteresting, and slightly rumpled. His voice carried without strength as at last he began to speak:

  “I have two things to tell you about today. They both have to do with Bradford. One has to do with a plan for a more permanent way to contain Bradford than the one we’re using now. I’ll explain it to you in a minute, and I hope you’ll agree to it. Unfortunately, we have very little time, and the agreement or disagreement must come now, at this meeting. We can’t go home and think about it for a week. If we’re going to go ahead with this plan, there’s a certain amount of preparation that must be done. There’s also expense involved; I’ve made up a tentative list of what each of us should be able to contribute.”

  There was a stir at that, as he’d known there would be. Hit a man’s wife, burn his flag, slap his face, (rape his daughter) but don’t touch his wallet. Wellington didn’t permit the agitation to build, but continued talking into it, saying, “If we’re going to go ahead with this plan, I’ll have to make a phone call today, at the conclusion of the meeting. If we’re not, I hope someone out there has another plan to suggest, because time is getting short and we desperately need a realistic method for keeping Bradford contained. Very soon, we aren’t going to be able to hold him any more with the methods we’re using now.”

  Mortimer Wellington, stockbroker from New York, forty-three, distinguished-looking, raised a hand and said, “What methods are you using now?”

  It was a digression, but Wellington was willing to take a little time if it meant building their interest. “Primarily,” he said, “Bradford’s granddaughter, Evelyn Canby, whom he asked to go with him, has agreed to go, so that he’ll keep her aware of his plans. He has been in direct contact with the Communist Chinese, who were maintaining a small base in the woods near his Eustace estate. We have replaced those men with Orientals in our employ, who so far have managed to keep Bradford reasonably content with a series of delays.”

  Howard Lockridge said, “He’s losing patience now. He’s getting very annoyed.”

  “That’s part of why we’re running out of time,” Wellington said. “Another reason is that the Chinese, upset at having lost direct contact with Bradford, mean to kidnap him tomorrow during Elizabeth Lockridge’s funeral.”

  That got the reaction he’d expected, and he stood back now and watched them grow excited and gradually absorb what he’d told them. And as he watched, it seemed to him impossible to turn this group into an effectively functioning counter-operation arm by tomorrow. It was true there were nineteen of them, including himself, but of the nineteen only six were under thirty-five: John Bloor, thirty-four; Robert Pratt and George Holt, thirty-one; Albert Bloor, Jr., twenty-eight; Thomas Wellington, twenty-five; and Gregory Holt, twenty-three. Though most of the nineteen had gone through some sort of military training, only Thomas Wellington and Gregory Holt had done so recently enough for it to matter. They were not, after all, among the most promising of material.

  When they finally sorted themselves out, now, at least three of them asked the inevitable question: “Are you sure?”

  “My information is positive,” he told them. “There is no question of its accuracy.”

  A half dozen, in various wordings, next asked him what they should do about it. He said, “The important thing to remember is that we won’t have Bradford’s cooperation. We can’t tell him we know what’s going on. If he knew what was up, he’d be in favor of it, he’d want to be kidnapped. So we have to take care of this without his help, and even without his knowledge. Not only can’t the Chinese capture him, we can’t let them get near enough to say a word to him.”

  “How?” The question was general.

  “We’ll have to discuss techniques,” Wellington told them. “But before that, I want to get back to the first subject, the plan for a really permanent solution to this problem.”

  They wanted to stay with the kidnapping, and a number of them said so, but he shook his head and said, “I told you about that when I did because I wanted you all to understand the urgency of the situation and the danger we’re all in until we have Bradford safely and permanently controlled. But I want to talk about the plan now becau
se I have to make that telephone call if we’re going ahead with it. There’s a lot that will have to be done.”

  “All right,” Howard said irritably. “What’s the plan?”

  “Yes,” Wellington said. He looked at them all, their faces cautious, curious, but at least potentially skeptical. He took a deep breath. He started to talk.

  9

  LIKE MOST TOWNS OF consequence dating from Colonial times, Lancashire, Pennsylvania, was founded on the banks of a river, that being then the most natural means of transportation. The river in this case was the Susquehanna, which meanders across the southern tier of New York State, down through eastern Pennsylvania, across a corner of Maryland, and empties at last into the top of Chesapeake Bay, between Baltimore and Wilmington.

  The town of Lancashire, population thirty-four thousand, stands on the west bank of the Susquehanna, twenty-five miles north of Harrisburg, where the Turnpike goes through. Its principal products are canvas sporting goods and plastic dinnerware. It is the home of Lancashire University, a large multi-colleged state-supported educational center with twelve thousand students.

  Seen from the air, Lancashire appears as a patchwork quilt, bunched against the curve of the river bank on its eastern edge, and then spread out to the left of that as though to dry. The cluttered, bunched-up section is downtown, with its old storefront buildings packed tightly together, its main street with angle parking on both sides, the recent black oblongs of parking lots, and the one unexpected swatch of green in front of City Hall. Away from downtown and the river, the town is composed of neat houses and neat lawns on a neat gridwork of streets. The high school, with its football field in back and concrete parking lot in front, stands out markedly from the rest of the grid, as do Lancashire Memorial Hospital and the two cemeteries, Holy Cross and Greenland.

  Lancashire University is outside the town proper, making its own smaller grass-green and brick-red quilt on the southwestern outskirts. A north-south road, following the river, twice blessed with route numbers (11 and 15), separates the campus from the Susquehanna before entering the town to become River Street, the main downtown thoroughfare, and then emerging again at the north end of town, traveling between the river and Greenland Cemetery before passing the city limits and heading on northward for its mitosis across from Sunbury.

  Within a forty-square-mile rectangle north and west of Lancashire, bordered by four secondary roads, one of them not even numbered, there is nothing but woods and an occasional farm. In a farmhouse in a wooded fold of hills in this section on the morning of Friday, the ninth of November, ten men sat and discussed their plans for the day. Two were Chinese, eight were American. The Americans were a dissident splinter group formed by recent disruptions within the Progressive Labor party, one of the old-time American Communist party schisms that had come into an unexpected belated flowering of prominence in the late sixties. Throughout the sixties, while Stalinist and Trotskyite schisms saw themselves fading into irrelevance and obsolescence, Progressive Labor was firmly Maoist, hitching its wagon to the star from the East and riding the wave of polarization into the seventies. China was Progressive Labor’s heaven then, as Russia had been for the equivalent radicals of the thirties. (“I have seen the future, and it works.”) With the death of Chairman Mao, and with China now in a strong anti-Mao reaction—much like Russia’s de-Stalinization period—Progressive Labor and the other American Maoist groups now considered China merely one more enemy in a world already swarming with opponents.

  Not all the members of Progressive Labor, however, agreed with this policy. The cult-of-personality specter was raised again, party meetings grew louder and less coherent, and by now Progressive Labor was progressively factionalizing itself out of existence. The radical left, after a heady period of national and international influence in the late sixties, was bickering its way back into its more usual irrelevance.

  The eight Americans in the farmhouse northwest of Lancashire were members of the Twelfth of July movement (TOJ), a splinter of a faction from a schism of Progressive Labor, so far removed from its origin that Progressive Labor hadn’t yet bothered to denounce it. The Twelfth of July movement, named after an obscure event in radical politics during the period when Progressive Labor was taking over the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), saw its true allegiance not to Mao, and certainly not to Progressive Labor, but to China, which it saw as the source of a world-wide revolutionary movement for peace and freedom and the end of capitalism.

  The eight TOJ members were all young men in their early or middle twenties, all Caucasian, all looking like normal upper-middle-class young men, with neat clothing, cropped hair and shining beardless jaws. Until yesterday, however, they had looked much different: bearded, hairy, dressed either dirtily or extravagantly. They considered themselves to be currently in disguise, and all were proud of the sacrifice they had made in shaving and getting crew-cuts, and yet their faces, their personalities, their backgrounds, who they were, shone through much more clearly now than they had done before yesterday.

  Their histories were all more or less the same. All had been college students during the sixties, all had been caught up in the adventure and challenge of a society to be changed by its brightest young, all had suffered police violence and arrest, most had been expelled from at least one college, all had made their sacrifices light-heartedly and without any real understanding of the consequences, and all by now understood what those consequences were. Society, in effect, had cast them out. There were no blacklists, there was no longer any organized harassment, but there didn’t need to be. They had police records, and they lacked college degrees, a combination that automatically closed the door to any employment appropriate to their class. With the working class firmly right-wing since 1968 and becoming more so with every passing month, it was very difficult for them to find jobs of any kind; no union would accept their membership applications, and no right-thinking American workingman (flag decal on car window) wanted to be associated with them.

  It was no wonder they, and the thousands like them, clung to the idea of revolution; only after a total upheaval of society would there be any chance of their returning to their original favored position in the social structure. In refusing the plea of some Senators the year before to pass a general amnesty for the political prisoners and the exiled war protesters and all the other shattered remnants of the American Revolution of 1968–69, Congress had sown a wind that could yet give these eight men the social catastrophe their blighted lives required.

  In the meantime, their present hopes lay with China, which meant that when they’d been approached by Chinese agents to assist China in her undercover work within the United States—with the assurance that they would never be asked to cooperate in anything against the people (as opposed to the government) of the United States—they had agreed at once. Their help until today had taken only minor forms, but today they would assist in a major way.

  They’d been shown the correspondence between Bradford Lockridge and the Chinese. The conversion of this man, formerly one of their most-hated enemies, had delighted them, was one of the most hopeful signs in years of their eventual victory. The information that Lockridge was being forcibly detained by his family confirmed their ideas of Establishment villainy, and they were proud to assist in wresting Lockridge from its clutches.

  The two Chinese were middle-aged men, seasoned agents who knew how to take available amateur material and turn it into a useful short-term force. Their base was six hundred miles farther north, in Montreal, where an extreme radical offshoot of the Free Quebec separatist movement was also in active cooperation with Chinese espionage, and where a plane was ready to take Lockridge to Vancouver for transfer to another plane for the flight to Peking. From this farmhouse to Montreal, Lockridge would travel in safety and comfort in the rear of a delivery van now parked behind the farmhouse. The van was marked Penn-Can Delivery Service, and bore New York State license plates. Ontario plates were stored in the van, ready
to be put on after they had crossed the unguarded border on one of the back roads above Malone, New York. The interior of the van had been carpeted, and furnished with an easy chair, two tables and a reading lamp. There were also magazines and books for Lockridge to read, including a picture book of the area around Peking. A chemical toilet had been installed in one corner, and an intercom system would permit Lockridge to speak, if necessary, with the driver.

  Inside the farmhouse, the two Chinese agents were going over the plan one last time with the eight Americans. The Chinese would not take an active part in Lockridge’s rescue, because of their high visibility in a Caucasian city, but would wait here at the farmhouse for the eight—and Lockridge—to return.

  Now they were ready. They solemnly shook hands all around, and the eight left the house. Outside were three automobiles—green Chevrolet, tan Mercury, maroon-and-black Pontiac—into which the eight sorted themselves, and drove away, down the deserted dirt road through woods and past other abandoned farm houses to the blacktop road which would lead them to Lancashire.

  ii

  THE HOUSE OF THE President of Lancashire University was a large rambling brick structure across the highway from the campus itself, between the highway and the river. The sloping lawn leading from the rear of the house to a wooden dock and broad concrete steps at the river had been one of Elizabeth’s joys, though of course these days the river was polluted and no longer useful for swimming and fishing. But the view was still beautiful, at every season.