Ex Officio

by Donald E. Westlake

  Uncle Joe had also seen Dinah, and he said, “You know, if I’d had a daughter, that’s the one I would have wanted.”

  “I haven’t been giving her enough of my attention,” Evelyn said. She was still waving, but something inside the house suddenly attracted Dinah’s attention and she disappeared from the window.

  Uncle Joe gave a surprised laugh and said, “Who have you been giving it to?”

  She dropped her arm and reluctantly looked away from the window. “What?”

  “Who’s been getting your attention, if not Dinah?”

  “Oh, myself, I suppose. And of course, Bradford.”

  “Of course.” Was there a touch of irony in his voice? But why should there be? Particularly when he immediately added, “Especially in Paris. I’m counting on you there.”

  “I’ll do my best,” she promised.

  iii

  THE FIRST PRESS CONFERENCE had been at Kennedy International Airport in New York, and the second one was at Orly International Airport in Paris, but except for the language difference they might both have been taking place in the same location. The sites were strikingly similar, both long bare naked rooms with linoleum floors, bare cream-colored walls, and ceilings covered with acoustical tiles. Both rooms contained one long wall consisting mostly of large windows looking out at the taxiways, high-nosed planes rolling ponderously and silently back and forth out there, their keening silenced by the shut windows and the pervasive hush of the air-conditioning.

  The major difference was in the time of day. The flight had taken five hours, in addition to which they had lost five hours in crossing the time zones, accelerating the day like a record played at the wrong speed. The windows in the Kennedy conference room had faced east, and a 9:00 A.M. sun had streamed through to touch the standing group of reporters with yellow and white. And now, five hours later, they were in an identical room, but with westward-facing windows, so that a 7:00 P.M. setting sun painted orange and red another group of reporters, these too standing, notebooks in hand, their faces and their clothing and their questions all the same as the first group, an ocean away.

  Bradford’s answers were the same, too, with slight variations in the phrasing. “As some of the more elderly among you may remember, as President I never much went in for what is called personal diplomacy. I didn’t believe in it, I thought it smacked of grandstanding and rarely had any but the most temporary of effects. My attitude hasn’t changed. I am not here now to engage in personal diplomacy, I’m not really here to engage in diplomacy at all. My only purpose here is to try to keep open one of the thin slender conduits of communication between ourselves and the people of Communist China.”

  He reminded them, as he had reminded their twins back at Kennedy, that he was still the only American President to have had an actual face-to-face meeting with an official of the Red Chinese government. That meeting had been of extremely limited scope, but out of it had developed a personal relationship with the Chinese official that had been maintained over the years through intermittent correspondence. “I wouldn’t say we were friends precisely, nor that we’ve found much to agree on, but we are a bit more than acquaintances, and the one thing on which we are in agreement is that our respective countries must learn to live together on the same planet. And it won’t happen without communication.”

  The official lines of communication, he reminded them, for the most part truly didn’t exist. There was no organization, from the UN down to a copyright convention, to which both nations belonged. Neither had any sort of diplomatic staff on the soil of the other, nor was there any real communication possible through such neutral nations as Sweden or Cambodia, since the Chinese tended to distrust the neutrality of Caucasian nations and the United States tended to distrust the neutrality of Oriental nations. Communication wasn’t even possible through the Soviet Union or any of the Warsaw Pact nations, since the Chinese were frequently also at odds with them.

  “The key to world peace, in my opinion, is the curing of paranoia. The arms race was and is the result of paranoia. Several of the bush league brushfire wars we’ve gotten ourselves entangled in these last two decades have been directly or indirectly the result of paranoia, in fact the whole domino theory that directed our Asian policy for so long was entirely paranoid in character. Now, paranoia will continue to exist as long as men continue to exist, but it can be kept within bounds. Our national paranoia about the Soviet Union has eased considerably in the last ten to fifteen years, and so has theirs about us. At the moment, the only large nation, the only nation of global importance that exists almost totally in a state of paranoia is Communist China, which doesn’t find one single nation on the face of the earth worthy of its trust. It is China’s paranoia which is keeping the pot boiling more than any other single factor, and it is China’s paranoia which may someday result in the pot boiling over and destroying us all.

  “That is why the few tenuous links we do have with the Communist Chinese must be maintained, why the lines of communication, scant as they are, have to stay open. The Chinese, for their own good and the good of all mankind, must cure themselves of their paranoia, and they cannot possibly do that in isolation and ignorance.”

  He was asked if the current meeting had been his idea, a question he’d already answered several times in the last two weeks, but he patiently answered it again: “No. Kwong Lan Quey requested it, in his last letter to me. He did not say what purpose he wished the meeting to serve, but he did say that the request was not an official act and was not made at the instruction of his government.”

  This conference was taking longer than the one at Kennedy. It wasn’t that it was covering more ground, but that extra time had to be taken for translation between French and English of everything that was said. Evelyn, watching Bradford’s face, saw that he was getting tired and she moved forward to put a hand on his elbow. When he turned his head she said softly, “Uncle Joe would tell you to stop now.”

  He considered revolt, she saw it in his face, but then she saw him also remember that an airport press conference was nothing to risk one’s health for. He nodded, and faced the reporters again, saying, “One more question, ladies and gentlemen, and I think that will be all.”

  The last question was, “Given that yours is only one voice, and that the number of voices reaching China are few, what is the likelihood of this Chinese paranoia ever being cured?”

  “Well, it must be,” Bradford said. “That is the next major world goal, and I insist I am not being melodramatic when I say that our future depends on our reaching that goal. I don’t mean what type of future we will have, or our children will have, I mean whether or not we will have any sort of future at all. China is a global power, an industrial nation with a huge land mass, vast untapped resources, and one-quarter of the entire world’s population. She is also a nuclear power, and from what Chinese politicians and scientists have been saying since the early sixties, she is the only nuclear power with no true understanding of just how lethal nuclear power really is. She is also an isolated power, with scant practice in the arts of diplomacy and very little reason to like or trust Caucasians. It’s an explosive combination, quite literally. Either we break through China’s isolation, her pride, her mistrust and her paranoia, or the day will come when a Chinese tantrum destroys us all.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President.” Spoken in English.

  Bradford smiled at the man who had said that. “Thank you,” he said, and Evelyn saw that he was still smiling when he turned away to take her arm and walk with her to the waiting car.

  iv

  AT FIRST, WHEN HE walked into the room, Evelyn thought it was Howard, and she thought, Has he really come traipsing across the Atlantic with his endless manuscripts? But then she saw that it wasn’t Howard after all, but his older brother Edward, Sterling’s other son, a man of about forty, attached to the permanent U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Paris. Edward was a bit heavier than Howard, a bit softer, with a bit less hair, but they could almo
st have passed for twins.

  “Hello, Evelyn.” He came across the hotel room, hand outstretched, a broad smile on his face. He was as sunny as Howard was sour, as optimistic as Howard was cynical, and as unflappable as Howard was panicky. And yet, he never gave an impression of shallowness or silliness. He was a man both cheerful and thoughtful, a rare combination.

  “Hello, Uncle Edward.” She was always pleased to be in Edward’s presence, and had been looking forward to seeing him during their stay in Paris. “I haven’t seen you for almost two years.”

  “During which,” Edward said, holding her hand, “I have grown ten years older and you have grown three years younger. What is it that keeps the Lockridge women so beautiful?”

  “The flattery of the Lockridge men,” she said, laughing. She had been born a Holt, and she had married a Canby, but within the family she was a Lockridge woman, through her mother. The sense of family held by the Lockridges, their unconscious division of all the world into Lockridges and Outsiders, Evelyn occasionally found depressing, but even this was a cheerful manifestation in Edward. She said, “Bradford isn’t here. He’s gone to the first meeting.”

  “Yes, I know.” Edward winked and laid a finger beside his nose, being one of the few men alive who could actually make that gesture without looking stupid. “There’s intrigue afoot,” he announced, his voice hushed. “Brad called Janet and said you were moping around the hotel, and we were slyly to do something about it. So I’ve been sent to come take you away to Carrie Gillespie’s. Janet will meet us there.”

  “I’m not moping,” Evelyn said, though she knew she had been. She’d been sitting at the window, looking out at the rooftops and the bits of traffic she could see, worrying about Brad in one way and Dinah in another, and if that wasn’t moping, what was it? But moping isn’t something one can admit to, so she said, “Honestly I’m not. I was even thinking of doing some shopping this afternoon. We only got in last night.”

  “Shopping, in Paris, on a Saturday? You must be joking.” Edward waggled a finger at her, another gesture at which he was uniquely adept. “On Monday,” he said, “you and Janet will do the Galeries Lafayette from top to bottom. It’s a shopping spree Janet has been looking forward to since we first heard you were coming.”

  Evelyn laughed and shook her head, saying, “Galeries Lafayette is closed on Monday, I remember that from last time.”

  “Then on Tuesday. On Monday you’ll have your hair done. But today—” he pointed a finger at her “—today you come with me to Carrie Gillespie’s.”

  The thought was cheering—Edward himself was cheering—but a moping mood is hard to break. Evelyn spread her hands helplessly, looking down at herself. “I’m not dressed. I’d have to change.”

  There was a newspaper in Edward’s suitcoat pocket, jutting up against his elbow, and he now plucked it out and waggled it in the air. “The exact reason,” he said, “I brought along Le Monde. Take all the time you want, I read French as slowly as ever.”

  The mope abruptly dissolved, like salt in water. Evelyn smiled and said, “I’ll be ten minutes.”

  v

  CARRIE SMITH GILLESPIE WAS what is known as a character. She had all the money she would ever need, so when her husband George had died four years before she’d moved permanently to Paris, to this spacious airy apartment on Boulevard Anatole France, overlooking the Bois de Boulogne, where she’d determined to set herself up as a hostess in the grand manner, with a salon that would be second to none. The desire was a bit old-fashioned, but the strength of Carrie’s personality kept it from being foolish. And if her guests ran heavily to American diplomats and lightly to European artists and intelligentsia, it was still a reasonable facsimile of what she’d had in mind. Better, in a way, since this way her guests tended to speak in a language she understood, her French being next to nonexistent.

  Howard had once said of Carrie that she looked as though she dressed herself out of the costume room at Madame Tussaud’s, and it was true that veils and ribbons and trailing swatches of material made up a great proportion of her usual apparel. He had also once said that when she walked she sounded like a tin can factory falling down a hill, and it was equally true that she tended to drape herself in a superfluity of necklaces and bracelets and earrings that jangled. But somehow she was all of a piece, the apartment, the clothing, the tinkling jewelry, the round cheerful face, the hoarse but loud voice, the endlessly inquisitive acquisitive manner as though a magpie had been crossed with a kitten and the result blown up all out of proportion, but none of it false or affected, all fitting nicely together and amazingly producing a person who was eccentric without being ludicrous.

  Possibly because she was so totally without pretension. She might have craved a living room full of Sartres, but she never pretended to be a de Beauvoir. She was a Boston-born girl, from a family who owned a downtown department store, and she’d married a Boston-born corporation attorney and given him two sons and a daughter. Another young attorney in the same law firm, Bradford Lockridge, had eventually gone on to become President, but Carrie was not one to bask in reflected glory. She preferred to be the star in her own life story, and she handled the part to perfection.

  She came forward now into the small front parlor to greet Evelyn and Edward, jangling as usual, trailing wisps of nylon and lace, her round face beaming, her arms outstretched. “Evelyn! You lovely lovely child, let me look at you!”

  People usually found themselves overpowered by Carrie, and Evelyn was no exception. She stood there like a slave on the block, an awkward smile on her face, while Carrie grasped her by the elbows and looked her up and down. Meanwhile Edward was saying, “I don’t suppose Janet’s here yet.”

  “Of course not, silly boy.” Carrie gave Evelyn a look of mock-frustration and said, “Husbands will never understand that wives must dress. But how charming you look! You’ve been shopping already. You bought that dress here.”

  “No, actually, I got it in New York. In March.”

  “Incredible. You make me want to go back, but I’ll resist. But why didn’t you bring Dinah?”

  “I thought it was too long for her to be away, ten days.”

  “So selfish. You know she’s the one I really wanted to see. She’s four years old now, I haven’t seen her since she was two.”

  “That’s right,” Evelyn said. She was always surprised at Carrie’s memory for details. Who would expect her to keep track of the age of an unrelated child a continent away?

  “Well, never mind, you’ll remember to send me photographs, and next time you’ll bring her. Now come along, we have some very interesting people here.”

  But they weren’t. Carrie’s parlor was large, bright and full of comfortable places to sit. Floor-to-ceiling windows faced northeast, three stories up, with a beautiful view of the Bois de Boulogne, lush and green with summer. There was no direct sunlight, but the room was bright enough without it, the park across the way reflected in the plants scattered everywhere throughout the room.

  There were ten people present. Five were wives of American diplomats, two were a tourist couple from Boston, one was a slender young Frenchman with a vaguely oily look about him; and the last were an American computer company executive, currently stationed in Paris, and his wife. The five diplomat wives wanted nothing more than to gossip among themselves about people unknown to everyone else present, as though Carrie’s apartment were a beauty salon. The tourists wanted to be amused, but not to participate. The Frenchman wanted desperately to establish some sort of connection with anyone at all, but seemed not to know how to go about it. And the computer couple preferred to talk about the increasing inequity of the American income tax.

  Edward was the only saving grace, and Evelyn told herself ruefully that she could have stayed in her hotel room and listened to Edward and been well ahead of the game. Edward had decided to explain Paris to the tourists, and in so doing had separated the city into so many multi-leveled Parises that he was obviously getting
confused himself after a while. There was the tourist Paris. There was the American Paris. There was the business Paris. There was the Parisian’s Paris, subdivided into several other Parises depending upon income, occupation and background of the particular Parisian. There was the Real Paris. There was the bohemian Paris. There was the lustful Paris. There was the gourmet Paris. It went on and on, Edward cheerful and voluble and totally baffling throughout, his audience laughing as much at their own confusion as at his performance.

  After a while Evelyn was distracted from Edward’s monologue by the Frenchman, who had circled half the room to get to her side. He asked, in a mutter usually reserved for the sale of obscene postcards, if she were unattached. He didn’t quite meet her eye.

  “Not really,” she said. “Excuse me, would you?”

  Carrie’s apartment was large, with room upon room. Evelyn had been in it a dozen times or more in the last few years, but she was never quite sure about the layout. She left the parlor now, and because the entrance was to the left she turned right instead.

  She was looking for Ann. Carrie’s oldest son, Daniel Gillespie, had died a retread in Korea, leaving a pregnant wife, Ann, who had moved in with Carrie and her own then-living husband, and who was still living under Carrie’s roof, she and her son Charles having made the move from the Maryland horse ranch to Paris when Carrie’s husband died. Ann was quiet, retiring, very shy, and tended to avoid the parlor when Carrie was entertaining. But she was pleasant to talk to, particularly when the parlor was dull, or when it contained a slightly oily Frenchman who wanted to know if one was unattached.

  The first room she tried was occupied, but not with Ann Gillespie. Instead it contained two young men, one of whom she recognized at once as Charles, Ann’s son. “Hello,” she said. “I’m looking for your mother. I didn’t know you were home.”