Donald E. Westlake (aka Timothy J. Culver)
Power Play
(Original title: Ex Officio)
1
There was a hansom cab at the airport. Looking over her grandfather’s shoulder, Evelyn Canby saw the black and red cab rolling out across the tarmac toward their plane, pulled by a discouraged-looking gray horse. She looked to see, but it wasn’t Uncle Harrison at the reins. Of course not; it had been private irony to consider he might be.
Three-year-old Dinah said, “I can’t see. Mommy?” And tugged at Evelyn’s wrist.
But it was Bradford who turned around and said, “Well, of course you can’t see. And there’s a horse out here to look at. Why aren’t you up in my arms, where you belong?”
Evelyn said, “Yes, that’s a good idea, Dinah. Go with Grampa.”
Bradford Lockridge, once the President of the United States, and now at seventy an elder statesman who retained the politician’s touch, picked up his great-granddaughter in his arms and stepped out smiling and waving onto the platform at the top of the stairs. “See the horse, Dinah? Wave to the horse. Wave to the people.”
There weren’t many of them. A chain-link fence separated the tarmac from the airport building, and a thin line of people stood waving and calling along the other side of that fence. There were so few of them that they gave the impression of not having come out to greet ex-President Bradford Lockridge at all, but of being merely the earliest arrivals for something of more importance that would occur later on this afternoon.
Evelyn watched Bradford’s back, still straight and lean, saw his arm up in the characteristic wave that used to be parodied so much on television, and marveled that her grandfather could still treat the smallest gathering like an assemblage of thousands. He couldn’t have — and wouldn’t have — given a heartier greeting if all of California had come out to meet him.
They were the only passengers, Colonial Airport not yet having any regularly scheduled flights in from Los Angeles — or anywhere else — and this privately owned Lear jet having been borrowed by Uncle Harrison for the occasion from one of his business friends.
The hansom cab had come to a stop at the foot of the stairs, and Evelyn now could see that it was driven by a bored young man dressed in what somebody must have thought was a colonial manner. His shoes and trousers, both brown, were undoubtedly his own, but his jacket, a flaring black affair with brass buttons and broad lapels and broader cuffs, carrying with it a vague reminiscence of Benjamin Franklin, had undoubtedly come from the same costumer who had furnished the tri-cornered hat.
As to the cab itself, one would have thought Bradford Lockridge was running for president all over again. Pictures and posters and slogans were thumbtacked all over it, in the inevitable red and white and blue. BRADFORD LOCKRIDGE. WELCOME OUR GREATEST PRESIDENT. GEORGE WASHINGTON, CALIFORNIA, WELCOMES THE GEORGE WASHINGTON OF THE 20TH CENTURY.
Remaining a minute longer inside the shadow of the plane, looking out at the poster-bedecked hansom cab and the waving people, Evelyn found herself feeling again that same half-embarrassed excitement she’d always felt while accompanying Bradford during his campaigns. The first Presidential campaign, when he’d won the office, she’d been thirteen years old, in fact her fourteenth birthday had come two days before the election, and that whole summer and fall had passed in a glittering confusion of bands and bunting, airplane trips and speeches and hotel rooms and cheering crowds. She supposed now that Bradford had brought her along so often mostly for political reasons, for the points to be gained by displaying the attractive children in his family, but at the time her reaction had been pure delight, undimmed by any questioning of motives.
When she thought about the happy times of campaigning these days, it was always that first election that came to her mind, and not entirely because Bradford had lost the second one, four years later. That second campaign had been uneasy and troubled throughout. There had been a feeling of defeat in the air all through it, which no brave speeches could quite hide. There had been the fight at the convention at the very beginning — an incumbent President very nearly denied his party’s re-nomination! — and the ever-present pickets throughout the campaign, and the trouble in Los Angeles when so many demonstrators had wound up hospitalized. There had been all the bickering among the managers and speech writers and advertising men. And there had been Bradford himself, without his famous sense of humor, marching grimly through the paces of the campaign, frequently not even recognizing family members or close friends standing right in front of him.
And of course Evelyn herself had changed by then. She’d been seventeen that fall, the arguments at home were at their very worst around that time, and the campaign trail had not been something joyous she was moving toward but simply a means of escape from the intolerable situation at home. Climaxing not in the disaster of election night, but on the Friday three days later when she’d walked out on the birthday party her mother had organized, a party consisting exclusively of relatives — all still depressed from the lost election and not at all in a party mood — and with her own friends completely excluded.
That was the first time she’d actually stayed at Bradford’s place outside Eustace, Pennsylvania. Of course, Grandma Dinah was still alive then, and there’d been no question of Evelyn’s moving in on any kind of permanent basis. It had taken several deaths to affect that. That first time, Bradford had roused himself from his own post-election lethargy and arranged a reconciliation between Evelyn and her parents. She could still remember him, after he’d taken her home, showing a thin crooked smile and saying, “It seems I am a peacemaker, after all.” And she’d known he was thinking of the picket signs that had been waving in his face the last year or more.
But that was nine years in the past now, and there were no more pickets. Not for Bradford Lockridge, at any rate. No more pickets, no more campaigning, and very little enthusiasm from the mass of people, most of whom these days would rather stay home than go out to the airport and wave at Bradford Lockridge. Bradford Lockridge? He still up and around?
Which made the gaudy hansom cab something of a cruel joke, though Evelyn knew Uncle Harrison hadn’t meant it that way. It had just been his own particular brand of insensitivity at work again.
Out there in the sunlight, Bradford had stopped waving and had started down the stairs, still carrying Dinah. Evelyn followed after them, squinting in the direct sunlight, sorry she hadn’t put her sunglasses on. But she didn’t want to fumble in her bag for them while going down the stairs, so she just squinted and felt her way. I’m becoming a fussy old maid, she thought. A fussy old maid at twenty-six. A fussy old maid with a child.
Bradford had reached the bottom of the stairs. He now swung Dinah up into the hansom cab and followed her up, moving with the litheness of a man twenty years younger. The cab jounced with every movement, and Dinah was pleasurably alarmed.
Bradford turned back to give Evelyn his hand. It was only at moments like this, when the past had been evoked, that she realized how astonishingly fit he still was for a man seventy years of age. His grip was firm, and she felt the strength of him as he lifted her up into the cab.
Dinah insisted on a seat to herself, so she sat facing the rear, with Bradford and Evelyn in the seat facing front. The driver had been watching them with a kind of expressionless gloom, and now Bradford said to him, “All ready, young man.” The driver nodded, and turned front to cluck at the reluctant horse.
“This is all so silly,” Evelyn said. She felt embarrassed, riding away from an airport in a hansom cab.