Ex Officio

by Donald E. Westlake

  He stopped the car at the door, climbed out, and came around to help her through that awkward moment of balance in getting out of any low-slung car. With his hand for support, she flowed naturally up out of the car and into his arms. They kissed, and she whispered, “You’re my first date in a hundred years.”

  “Let down your long hair, lady, I’m here to save you.”

  Did he mean that? She was too afraid it was merely gallantry, she couldn’t take him up on it. She slid backward out of his arms, saying, “I do have to go in. And my first date was a beautiful one.”

  “Only a sample,” he said. “What are you doing tomorrow night?”

  “You can’t do that,” she said. “It’s over a hundred miles, you can’t drive two hundred miles every day.”

  “Why can’t I?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t want you to get tired of me. I’m not free until—next Friday.”

  “A whole week? You won’t remember who I am by next Friday.”

  “Oh, yes, I will,” she said. “Believe me, I will. This was the happiest—I will, that’s all.”

  “Tomorrow night,” he said.

  “No.” She shook her head, saying, “Definitely not. Really. We’ll talk on the phone tomorrow, and I’ll see you next Friday.”

  He was reluctant, but she was determined, and she had told him the truth about her reason. She didn’t want him to tire of her, to have too much of her too soon. She didn’t want him to lock himself into a pattern of driving hundreds of miles three and four times a week, and get sick of all the driving—as he would, as anyone would—and go on doing it because the precedent was already established, and from there on it would be a short but rocky fall to the finish. From out of nowhere Robert Pratt had become very important to her, and even if it turned out they wouldn’t be together very deeply or very long, it was still true that he was in the process of rediscovering for her the possibilities of living. (The specter of Ann Gillespie, fading away in the shade in Paris under Carrie’s capacious wing, still haunted Evelyn’s mind, and two or three times had even directly entered her dreams.)

  They agreed at last that she would call him tomorrow morning and he would come take her out again next Friday night. “This time I’ll be ready when you get here,” she said, and he said, “Make me wait for you, it’s good for me,” and kissed her again, and she went into the house.

  She stood with her back against the door a moment, hearing the Jaguar roar and then recede. It was all too tremulous, she was afraid to smile for fear the house of cards would come tumbling down. Robert Pratt. Unfortunate, that last name, not that it mattered. But, still. Robert Pratt. She wondered why no one ever called him Bob, and decided he was too big to be a Bob. He’d been a football player, of course, he’d almost played with a professional team. But also a runner. Big, but lean. Broad, but hard. Too male to be called Bob or Bobby. But was Robert right for him? Shouldn’t he be a Matt, or a Jack, or a Mike?

  No, because there was a serious side to him, too, an intelligent side, the history teacher. Robert was a good name, all in all, a perfectly acceptable name. It was the Pratt that was unfortunate.

  Evelyn Pratt.

  “Oh, don’t be stupid,” she said aloud, and started walking, mostly to distract herself. Evelyn Pratt! For Heaven’s sake, they’d had one date.

  She went upstairs and looked in on Dinah, as she always did when she’d been out for the evening, and the child was peacefully sleeping, her security blanket wrapped as usual around her left arm. Evelyn tiptoed from the room and was about to go down the hall toward her own room when she noticed the light shining through the crack of the slightly-open door of the back library. Curious, she walked down the hall and pushed the door farther open, and Bradford was in there, reading.

  “Bradford?”

  He looked up. The only light in the room was the floor lamp just behind him and to his left, putting his face in shadow. He looked very tired, the darker right side of his face seeming actually to droop. “Is that you, Evelyn?”

  She came into the room, saying, “Why are you still up?”

  He closed the book and rubbed a palm over his face, saying, “I couldn’t sleep. Perhaps I can now.”

  “Was it because of what happened this evening?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I still don’t know anything about it,” she said. “Robert and I just saw their car when we were going out. They were Chinese, weren’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Communist Chinese?”

  He nodded. He put the book on the table to his right.

  “What did they want?”

  “They wanted to give me a copy of Kwong Lan Quey’s suicide note.” He put his head back and looked up at her, and his eyes looked hollow. “They said it was a suicide note.” His shoulders moved in a small shrug. “They wanted me to know, if ever I had anything to say to China, I could say it to them.”

  4

  GEORGE HOLT CAME WALKING over the teetery narrow boardwalk between house and car, knowing just how incongruous he looked. The Atlantic Ocean was behind him, appropriately aquamarine, beneath an azure unclouded sky. The house he had just walked up to and was now returning from, having spoken briefly with Grace through the screen door, was a tilty A-frame redwood summer cottage. Sand surrounded him, tufted with coarse weed-bunches. And how was he dressed? In a narrow dark gray suit, a stiff white shirt, a narrow black tie, shined black oxfords, elasticized black socks. He looked like a New Yorker cartoon and knew it, and found a half-smile in the idea of looking down beneath his feet for the caption. What would it say?

  Another of the things he couldn’t share with Marie. He could visualize that conversation. He’d slide into the car again, behind the steering wheel, and say, “It suddenly occurred to me while I was walking back that I looked like a New Yorker cartoon.” There was a straight line, if there ever lived one. She’d cut his head off in ten words. He couldn’t guess ahead of time exactly what ten words they would be, any more than he could think up a caption to go beneath his feet, but that was all right. He knew he wasn’t clever. Everyone else was much more clever than he, he had to make do with reliability. Good old dependable George Holt.

  He reentered the maroon Chrysler, and the icy lifeless air inside the car was a shock after the warm but flavorful sea breeze outside. Perspiration he hadn’t been aware of suddenly cooled on his collar, chilling his throat. He thought briefly and wistfully of shutting off the air-conditioner and rolling down the window, but he knew Marie would hate it.

  She was hating everything today. She didn’t want to go back to the city, but she’d refused to be left behind in East Hampton. She gave no sign now of awareness of George’s return, but continued to glower, arms folded, out at the sunlit pastel day.

  “Howard’ll be out in a minute,” George said, tentatively, but when that news produced no response he said, more directly, “Let’s stop fighting now, okay?”

  “Oh, you’re ridiculous,” she said savagely, and kept staring straight front.

  “I suppose I am,” George said, with the gentle irony that was his only real counter-weapon—his audience was supposed to understand that he was negating the possibility by appearing to absorb it—and turned to see the screen door opening and Howard coming out with his brood. If Marie were to die, would George find someone nice like Grace for his second wife? But on the other hand, Howard’s first wife, Beatrice, had also been nice. (She’d died giving birth to Howard’s first child, Donald, now twelve and the tallest of the three boys in bathing suits bounding around their father as he kissed his plump wife goodbye and came walking toward the chilly car.) The implication seemed clear to George; if Marie were to die, he would marry another one just the same. Or maybe worse. The devil you know, he thought, and was pleased at how angry she would be if she knew what he was thinking. But his thoughts always ran in complex chains, it was impossible to clip out one link and arrange it into a coherent one-liner. How did other people do it?
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  Howard was dressed more appropriately for the season, in a blue blazer and gray slacks, white shirt open at the throat, blue-and-gray ascot, black loafers and black socks. His and George’s sunglasses both had black frames, Marie’s had orange.

  Of course, Howard could dress any way he pleased, he wasn’t going to be on camera. It might be August twenty-first out here, but in front of that camera in Manhattan it would be some time in October, and George had to dress accordingly.

  Would Bradford? The question hadn’t occurred to him till now, and all at once he got a picture of the interviewer in autumnal gray asking questions of an elder statesman in a Hawaiian shirt, and all he could think was how much mileage Marie would be able to get out of it.

  Phone? Too late, Bradford and Evelyn had left Eustace yesterday and were at their hotel now. If Bradford hadn’t brought along anything appropriate, a last-minute panic call from George just before the interview could disrupt the whole tone of the proceedings. He’d have to simply hope for the best.

  Howard was carrying a black attaché case, the only visible sign that he was bound for New York. With his free hand, he opened the rear door of the Chrysler, letting in a rush of heat and salt and the shouts of his three boys, and tossed the case ahead of himself onto the back seat. He followed it, slammed the door, and waved through the window at Grace, shading her unsunglassed eyes back by the house. (Grace made no secret of the fact that she couldn’t stand Marie.)

  George put the car in gear at once, and they started off. They weren’t late, exactly, though Marie had dawdled as long as she could before leaving the house, but George liked to be on the safe side.

  After Howard said hello to Marie—George suspected him of having, like most men, a low-intensity letch for Marie—and she had responded with neutral warmth—having learned long ago that the one way to push George too far was to flirt with other men during a domestic quarrel—a silence settled down on the car. In it, George heard the snaps of Howard’s attaché case click open, and then a rustle and sigh of papers. “I’d like to mention a few points I think you ought to stress in your questions,” Howard said. “If you don’t mind.”

  In front of Marie. “Not at all,” George said amiably, and even smiled at Howard’s brisk reflection in Cinemascope in the rearview mirror. No one on earth would suspect how much he hated Howard at this moment.

  ii

  THE MIDTOWN TUNNEL. IT turned out that neither George nor Marie had a second quarter, so Howard’s freckle-blotched hand stretched forward with plug’s lovely counterfeit, the silverless twenty-five cent piece. True to Gresham’s word, no pre-65 quarter was any longer in circulation. At least, though, they couldn’t blame Bradford for that.

  There was enough in any case to blame Bradford for, from his one term in the Presidency. He was blamed for the on-going mess in Asia, along with Johnson and instead of Kennedy. He was blamed for the continuing (though currently simmering) racial unease, along with Nixon and instead of Eisenhower.

  But Howard would prefer that George not get onto that sort of topic, and so would Bradford, and so undoubtedly would Coe-Stark Associates, the packager for whom George worked. (Usually a producer, George was occasionally also an interviewer, particularly in the case of his ex-President grandfather. On the current project he was wearing both hats, and would get a co-writing credit in addition, for making up his own questions. Bradford would get no writing credit at all, though he would be expected to make up his own answers.)

  Where did all the trucks go? All the way in across Queens they had thundered around the chilly Chrysler, but once through the tunnel and actually on the island of Manhattan George found himself virtually alone. The city broiled empty in the August heat. The occasional bright yellow cab was painful to look at in all that sun.

  The studio was across town and up, on Broadway in the seventies. Once a movie theater, the building had been converted to a supermarket during television’s first heyday (an epidemic had swept away many of the nation’s neighborhood movie houses then) and its marquee had heralded asparagus for nearly a quarter of a century, before the television/film industry, constantly in need of more and more space, rousted the rutabagas and laid miles of cable under the new floors instead. Now the marquee read BACK PAGES, the name of a soap opera taped there five mornings a week.

  An extra advantage was the parking garage half a block away. George gave an involuntary grunt when he opened the car door and the city’s magnified heat fell in on him like an invisible bale of old newspapers. “Good God,” he said, and beside him Marie said, “Oh, I love to be in the city in August.”

  They would have liked to hurry to the studio, which would be air-conditioned, but hurry was impossible on the granite griddle of the sidewalk. They swam the half-block, George even too hot to take off his suit jacket, and went gratefully through the glass doors and into the cool dim interior. They stripped off their sunglasses as they passed through the empty lobby, like temple worshipers performing a ritual disrobing, and then George led the way down the hall to the right and then to the left, and into the Naugahyde-and-hunting-prints reception room, where they would all meet and collect themselves before getting to the actual taping.

  Bradford was already there—in conservative suit and tie, thank God—and so were George’s sister Evelyn and a tall, somewhat burly man introduced as Robert Pratt, who seemed to have no function.

  George was about to take command when Howard did, saying, “Brad, I went over some of the topics with George, some of the things we want to cover. Just remember that the point of all this is The Temporary Peace. The book will be just out when this interview is shown, and that’s what we want the viewers to think about. Right, George?”

  George smiled his soft smile and said, “Well, up to a point, of course, the book publication is what gives us our topicality. But I don’t think Bradford wants to come on peddling his new book like some exposé writer on The Tonight Show.”

  “This time, I do,” Bradford said grimly, and when George looked at him in surprise he said, “I think it’s important, George, I think people should read this book. Not the first three, they’re dead as the Pharaoh, but The Temporary Peace is about what’s starting to happen all over again right now. The same clampdown that occurred twenty, twenty-five years ago is coming right back, repression under the guise of protection of our institutions.”

  “Wait till I get you in front of a camera,” George said, having seen interviews die more than once because the interviewee talked himself out before the cameras even started to roll. “I don’t want you to say it all ahead of time,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” Bradford said. “I can’t run dry on this topic.”

  iii

  INTERVIEWER: YOUR NEW BOOK, The Temporary Peace, concerns itself with the decade immediately following the Second World War, does it not?

  PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: Directly, it does. Indirectly, it concerns itself with any time when the people become too afraid to take a chance on freedom.

  INTERVIEWER: Afraid of what?

  PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: They don’t know. Communists, they said back in 1950. Some of them still say Communists. Today, most of them say black revolutionaries or student revolutionaries. Some of them say they’re afraid of fluoride, or sex.

  INTERVIEWER: Um. Yes. You were in the Senate during the period covered by The Temporary Peace, weren’t you?

  PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: Yes, I was. And today I’m not much of anything at all, which is a pity, because I think I can warn my fellow Americans about a mistake it looks like they’re getting ready to make all over again. Whether they’ll listen to an old fogey like me or not I don’t know.

  INTERVIEWER: Is this, uh, warning about the future included as a part of the book?

  PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: It’s implicit. This volume is concerned with hysteria and paranoia at one particular point in American history, and it tries to show that American ideas of freedom cannot co-exist with hysteria and paranoia. The book leaves the reader to
draw any parallel he wishes with what’s going on today. In talking about the book, I draw the parallel myself, out loud.

  INTERVIEWER: I see. And you—

  PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: I never did at the time, you know. None of us did. In both parties, we just sat around and waited for Eisenhower to do something, and he never made a move. We would have been brave, every last one of us would have been brave, but only if somebody else was brave first, and the somebody else had to be Eisenhower.

  INTERVIEWER: Yes. Well, of course, no one knows better than you yourself the complexity of—

  PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: The reason none of us said anything then was the same as the reason you don’t want to say anything now. We had jobs, we had careers, we didn’t want to throw it all away in a lost cause. Hysteria and paranoia were in the air, and the wise man kept his head down.

  INTERVIEWER: Well, of course, you did speak out at the time against—

  PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: I didn’t do a tenth what I wanted to do. None of us did. History is made by good Germans, and we were good Germans. This isn’t in the book—I don’t know why I didn’t put it in there—but if I’d done what I wanted to do in the late forties and early fifties I never would have been elected President. I never would have been nominated. I wouldn’t even have kept my seat in the Senate.

  INTERVIEWER: Is that why you would say you weren’t reelected to a second White House term? Because you did follow your convictions?

  PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: No. The people threw me out because I made two very large blunders, one foreign and one domestic. I was in the process of correcting them both when the election came along, but they threw me out anyway, and it could be they were right. But that’s a different book, I haven’t written that one yet.

  INTERVIEWER: Is that the next in the series?

  PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: No, the next is The Coming of Winter, about the Cold War. If The Temporary Peace is about national paranoia, The Coming of Winter will be about international paranoia, in our relations with the Soviet Union. Another current parallel is our relationship with Communist China. We’re so afraid of them and they’re so afraid of us I’m surprised we haven’t blown ourselves all up just by shaking so hard.