Ex Officio

by Donald E. Westlake

  It was a tight squeeze for the three of them. There were several buttons, marked with Chinese characters.

  The elevator took them down three levels, and stopped. The officer opened the door to show an identical corridor with the one above, except that this one had rooms on both sides. Again, all the doors were closed, and most of them were marked in Chinese.

  “For now,” the officer said, “we think that you would both prefer an opportunity to rest. Wash, change clothes, perhaps sleep. Tomorrow is time to get started.”

  “I agree,” Bradford said. “It’s been a grueling trip.”

  “Yes.” The officer opened a door. “This is your suite. And Mrs. Canby across the way.”

  “I think I’m ready for sleep,” Bradford said. “Evelyn? Unless you want to talk.”

  “No, you sleep. I’m tired, too.”

  “Then I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “In the morning,” she agreed.

  Bradford stood in the open doorway—past him she could see a pleasant-looking apartment, apparently several rooms in extent—and watched, smiling, as the officer opened the door across the hall and bowed for Evelyn to enter.

  There was nothing else to do. “Thank you,” she said. She stepped into the room, the officer closed the door behind her, and Robert stood up from the chair in the corner and came toward her, smiling, arms outstretched.

  She said, “What—”

  “It’s all right now,” he told her, and put his arms around her, and held her close.

  The Final Glory

  1

  WHAT IS IT? WHAT’S happening?” Evelyn asked a hundred times, and every time Robert would only say, “Let Wellington tell you, not me. Let him tell you.” Then there was a knock at the door, and the Chinese officer entered to say, “It’s okay, he’s going to bed.”

  “Come on,” Robert said. “I’ll take you to Wellington.”

  She and Robert and the officer rode back up in the elevator to the ground floor, and along the corridor to one of the doors with Chinese lettering on it, and into a long room spartanly furnished with folding chairs and one wooden table, on which sat a tape recorder.

  There were five men in the room: Wellington, standing behind the wooden table; Joe Holt, sitting beside James Fanshaw, the psychiatrist who was taking care of BJ; Howard; and her brother, George.

  The room itself was amazingly rough-hewn. There were no interior walls at all, you could see the supporting two-by-fours on which the outer wall and the corridor wall were attached. The room was long, long enough to have four doorways to the corridor, but only the door they’d come in by was functional, the other three being nailed and propped into place. It was a fake of a room, as seen from backstage.

  Evelyn said, “What is this place? Where am I?”

  “The simplest way to explain,” Wellington said, “is to play you this tape.” And before she could protest, or ask a specific question, he had pushed a button on the machine and a voice said, “The contradiction that has plagued us is that we have to keep Bradford from traveling without him knowing he’s being kept from traveling. That’s an impossibility on the face of it.” The voice, she suddenly realized, was Wellington.

  Another voice—Howard?—said, “Are you saying there is no answer?”

  Wellington’s voice said, “No. I’m saying there is an answer, but it’s a difficult one, and an expensive one.”

  Somebody, possibly Joe Holt, said, “I don’t think anyone here cares about the expense, that isn’t important.”

  Wellington: “I hope you’re right. So here, in essence, is the plan. We intend to convince Bradford he already has traveled to Red China.”

  Somebody: “That’s impossible.”

  Somebody: “If you mean a kind of hypnosis, you can’t indefinitely—”

  Wellington: “No, I don’t mean anything like that. I mean that Bradford has to be institutionalized, it boils down to that, he can’t be allowed to run loose. So what we have to do is convince him that the institution is in Red China.”

  Joe Holt: “You mean create a fake environment of some kind?”

  Wellington: “Create it, send Bradford traveling, convince him his travels have ended in Peking, and maintain the artificial environment for the rest of Bradford’s life.”

  Wellington, in the flesh, reached out and pushed a button to cut off his recorded voice. “There was a long argument following that,” he said. “I won’t bore you with it. The point is, that discussion took place the day before Elizabeth’s funeral. I told everyone present what I wanted to construct, how much it would cost each of them right now, how much it would cost each of them annually, and how much we could get out of the government. I had to have an answer—”

  Evelyn said, “From the government? You mean you haven’t kept this in the family.”

  Wellington pointed to the tape recorder. “Where do you think I got that? Wake up, Evelyn, do you think anything can happen to anyone in this country, anyone who matters, without some branch of the government getting wind of it?”

  “You knew they knew.”

  “Of course. I was their chief spy into family councils. Their chief non-electronic spy. Just as I was the family’s chief spy into their councils.”

  “But you never told anyone. Anyone on our side, I mean.”

  “What good would it do? Once I’d brought everything into the open, the people behind me would simply have taken the problem out of the family’s hands. Wait. Before you say anything else—” he pushed the re-wind button, and the tape began to whir on the machine “—let me play you another tape.”

  Evelyn turned to Robert. “You knew what was going on?”

  “Not for a long while,” he said, but he looked guilty.

  “You knew before I left.”

  “Yes. I knew from the day before Elizabeth’s funeral. Not the exact details, but approximately.”

  “And you didn’t say anything to me.”

  “Wait,” Robert said. He looked pained. “Hear Wellington out, before you make up your mind.”

  Wellington had another reel on the machine now, and he said, “This time, I think you should listen all the way through. It lasts about ten minutes. After Elizabeth’s funeral, a group of us gathered upstairs in Sterling’s house. Earl’s wife; his widow, actually. Harrison and Patricia. Your brother George and his wife. Joe Holt, Senator Fanshaw, Eugene White and myself. This is the latter part of what was said.”

  He pushed the play button, and at once Patricia Lockridge’s irascible voice came on: “We shouldn’t have had to go through this.”

  Somebody (Eugene White?): “Of course we shouldn’t have had to go through this. Nobody wants to be involved in this situation. But it’s with us, and we—”

  Patricia: “Why? Why do we have to be in this? The man’s crazy, isn’t he? Why can’t we admit he’s crazy, just admit it, and lock him up, the way you would with any other man?”

  Joe Holt: “Because he isn’t any other man.”

  Evelyn listened, she heard the argument rage back and forth, heard Patricia and then Marie insist they would not make the payments their husbands had agreed to at the meeting in Boston the day before, heard Wellington put on his little show with the drivers across the street and then explain who they were and what the true situation was. She looked at Wellington when she heard his voice on the tape say, “. . . there are offices within the governmental structure which will not permit an ex-President of the United States to publicly enter a mental hospital.”

  Patricia: “What do you mean they won’t permit it?”

  Wellington: “I mean they won’t permit it. I mean they will kill him first.”

  Evelyn closed her eyes. Standing there in self-imposed darkness, she heard Wellington slowly and methodically convince the others of the truth of what he’d said. But she opened her eyes to look at him again when she heard his recorded voice say, “If you force me to kill my father, I will, because I long ago gave up the idea that I should have att
itudes about the orders I was given to carry out. But through whatever small channels of influence I may have constructed for myself over the last twenty-three years, I will make sure that every one of you regrets it.”

  Harrison: “You can’t put that kind of responsibility on us!”

  Wellington: “I can’t?”

  Click. Wellington had switched off the machine. They were all looking at Evelyn. She said to Wellington, “Why wouldn’t you tell me? You told everybody else, you browbeat them into helping you, or persuaded them, you did whatever you had to do. For God’s sake, Wellington, you’re the only one in the family who fought for Bradford as much as I wanted to, and all you’d do was make an enemy out of me!”

  “Because,” he said, “I knew too much, and you knew too little. Evelyn, if I had said to you, ‘We are going to put Bradford in a cage. We are going to play the cruelest hoax you can imagine on that poor man. We are going to put him in an airplane and fly him this way and that, and when the plane lands at Thule, Greenland we’ll tell him it’s Prince Rupert on the west coast of Canada, and when the plane lands at Martinsburg, West Virginia, we’ll tell him it’s Peking. And we will take him in a closed truck and put him in a hole in the ground and tell him it’s a security measure, and surround him with Vietnamese claiming to be Chinese, who will pretend to film and record his speeches, and who will bring him fake newspapers reporting the effect he’s having in the world, and we will keep him in that hole in the ground for the rest of his life, because the only way we can keep him from going to China is by convincing him he’s already in China.’ If I had said that to you, Evelyn, you would have thought I was some sort of sadist, some evil creature, and you would have gone to Bradford and warned him against me!”

  “But—” She stopped the protest, uncertain, looking at him, no longer sure of anything. “Would I have? But if I would then, why wouldn’t I now?”

  “Because before it was done, you would have been able to see nothing but the cruelty, but now that it’s a fact I think you’ll be able to see the kindness in it. We are not only saving Bradford’s life, we are not only avoiding a national scandal and a family embarrassment, we have found the only way to make Bradford’s last years happy ones.”

  Joe Holt said, “Evelyn, Brad is going to feel useful and valuable again. He’ll write speeches, articles. He’ll feel he’s doing something. He may even go back to his memoirs, though he probably won’t have a long enough attention span for that. But it’s possible. And one thing is certain; he’ll enjoy life, and this is the only solution where that is true. Certainly not if he’s murdered. Certainly not if he’s being turned into a fool and a cat’s paw in Peking. And certainly not if he’s institutionalized and knows he’s institutionalized.”

  “But you should have told me! Somebody should have told me somewhere along the line!”

  Wellington said, “We couldn’t take the chance of your love for him blinding you to what was best.”

  “But why do it this way, why torture me? Tell me I’m going to Paris for a week, two weeks, then start all this mysterious shuffling around so that I’m half out of my mind not knowing whether it’s your people or the Chinese. I almost called for help in Paris, I almost blew up your whole scheme right there.”

  “That’s why I called you,” Wellington said. “What I told you on the phone in Paris was true, Edward Lockridge’s son did tell our plans, what he knew of them, to the Chinese. Fortunately, he knew only about the Paris trip, what we originally intended to do there, and nothing about any of this. But I started to tell you about the change, and you left the phone.”

  “Bradford was out of my sight.”

  “Whatever the reason. Then, afterward, one of my men in Paris told me he’d spoken to you and you seemed to understand the situation and feel all right about it.”

  “What he said was so ambiguous, it could have been a Chinese agent just as well.”

  Robert said, “Do you mean you really thought you were in China?”

  “Yes! I was almost dying of fright!”

  Robert said angrily to Wellington, “That wasn’t the way you said it was going to be. That wasn’t what I agreed to.”

  “Everything changed so fast,” Wellington said. “We’ve done this whole operation off-balance. I’m sorry it didn’t go smoothly, but the point is, he’s here. We did the job, and now Bradford is safe from everybody, from the Chinese, from his own government, from everybody.” He looked at Evelyn. “Depending, of course, on you.”

  “On me?”

  “You’re in China with him.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  James Fanshaw, the psychiatrist, came forward saying, “Let me explain that part of it. If Bradford were left completely alone down there, with only the so-called Chinese around him, there could be bad mental reactions, of a wide variety of types. But with one familiar figure around, he has a touchstone of reality, an anchor if you will. A completely artificial environment, no matter how cleverly put together, is going to have seams and blank spots and anomalies in it. Only God can create reality. So your job will be to re-confirm the reality of the world he sees, primarily by simply being a part of it.”

  “You mean stay here? Live here with him?”

  “You wouldn’t actually have to be around Brad much more than you usually are,” Joe Holt said.

  James Fanshaw said, “Don’t make up your mind now. You’ve had a terrible ordeal, you’re exhausted, your nerves are shot. Get a good night’s sleep, let me give you something to help you calm down, and in the morning we’ll all get together again and talk it over in a sensible way.”

  Evelyn said, “But stay here? In the hole in the ground? You’ve buried Bradford, and you want to bury me with him, like a slave in a pyramid!”

  Howard said, “Evelyn, don’t you know where you are?”

  “No!”

  “You’re in Eustace.”

  Wellington said, “The construction site you stumbled on the other day, this is it.”

  Robert said, “Evelyn, you’re less than a mile from your own bed.”

  ii

  THURSDAY, THE TWENTY-SECOND OF November. Evelyn awoke at ten-thirty with her mind still full of bits and pieces of her dreams; coffins and labyrinths, quicksand and caves. She got out of bed and went over to the window and looked out on a cold clear day with a washed-blue sky and high small bright yellow sun. Three days ago she had left here for Paris with Bradford. How the world had twisted and turned in those three days, culminating in last night’s horror and its incredible release, when Peking turned into Eustace and Robert had driven her home through the woods in his old yellow Jaguar.

  She washed and dressed and went downstairs for breakfast. As she was finishing the meal, Howard came in and sat down opposite her and said, “I wish I knew whether Wellington meant for you to go through that hell or not.”

  “He didn’t,” she said wearily. Her body was refreshed, but her mind still felt drugged. “It was what he said, the whole thing was done off-balance. We were amateurs, he was our only professional, and none of us liked him or trusted him or would believe in his answers.”

  “Maybe. Do you feel like talking?”

  “I suppose.”

  She walked with him to a ground-floor parlor where everyone from last night was waiting for her, with the exception of Wellington. Her brother George, her uncle Joe. Robert. And the psychiatrist, James Fanshaw.

  She sat down, and they explained things to her. They had solved the problem of confining Bradford while still giving him public appearances. The Vietnamese technicians would tape long interviews and speeches, and George would then edit for usable material, interpolating himself as the interviewer. Either Evelyn or one of the Vietnamese would ask specific questions whenever it was necessary to have a statement from him on a certain topic.

  As to his well-being, two of the Vietnamese working with him were doctors, and both Joe Holt and James Fanshaw would stop by at least once a week to observe him through the closed
-circuit television that was now in the process of being installed. (The place was so incomplete now because they’d anticipated at least ten days additional construction time during Bradford’s stay in Paris.)

  Howard would be attempting, with indirect assistance from Bradford—or direct assistance, if Bradford could be persuaded to go back to work on them himself—to keep the steady flow of memoirs alive. Meredith Fanshaw and other family members in Washington social circles would in more subtle ways (“When I was visiting Brad last week . . .”) keep questions and suspicions from arising. With a little care, the fiction of Bradford Lockridge as a free agent and a continuingly healthy elder statesman could be maintained indefinitely.

  As to feedback, Bradford would be shown occasional American magazines and newspapers with dummy pages containing stories about his Chinese exploit, mostly couched in terms of grudging respect. The “radio” in his apartment was actually only a speaker connected to a tape recorder supplied with tapes of Chinese broadcasting; occasionally he would be able to hear the re-broadcast of one of his own speeches.

  And should he want to go outside, or to travel to other parts of ‘China,’ as he probably would, they’d simply explain to him that security measures still wouldn’t permit it, that the danger of assassination was still too great. He had already accepted the idea that the American government would attempt to silence him, so there should be no trouble convincing him that the danger had not as yet abated. Barring something unforeseen, the deception around Bradford was seamless and leakproof.

  But it all depended on Evelyn. Would she tell him the truth about what they’d done to him, or would she work with the rest of the family to support the lie? Which is to say, would she spend some time every day with Bradford, would she pass on to him whatever suggestions or questions might come up, would she be in effect their ambassador to Bradford’s private world. For the length of his life, not her’s.

  “Let me think about it,” she said, and they all said of course and left her alone. But she could feel them in the house, in this room or that room, hovering, waiting for her answer.