“That’s not exactly what we’re doing,” he said.
“It feels like it.” She finished her coffee.
“The people who gave him those passports,” Robert said, “they’re the ones taking advantage of his illness.”
“Well, they don’t know it’s because he’s ill. But you’re right, I know what you mean. Do I have everything?”
They both looked around. “I think so,” Robert said. “I’ll walk you down to the car.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t. I want to.”
She smiled at him. “It was so nice to fall asleep here,” she said.
“I liked it myself,” he said. “I don’t know why it is, but I sleep best with your head on my shoulder.”
“I’m your teddy bear.”
He grinned, and patted her behind. “You’re a lot more fun than a teddy bear.”
“Am I?” But at the look in his eyes, she stepped quickly away, saying, “No, we better not start. I have to get back before morning.”
They left the room together. It was on the third floor, and opened onto a stairwell and hall lit by twenty-five watt bulbs in ceiling fixtures, two on each floor. In the dim light, the wallpaper looked even more decrepit than it was, but the old wooden banisters and stairs were given rich tones they lacked in daylight.
The street outside was deserted, Evelyn’s Mustang being one of only four cars parked on this block, and the newest. It was just out front, and they stood beside the car in the chill air for a moment to whisper together, and kiss, and whisper some more. They kissed a second time, this one long and lingering, and then she opened the car door and got in and drove off. In the rear-view mirror she could see him standing on the uneven sidewalk looking after her still as she turned the next corner.
It was only a ten minute drive from Robert’s place to Eustace, and then a very few more minutes up the private road to the house. Evelyn took this last stretch at a fairly slow speed because sometimes there were deer on this road at night, particularly at this season. But tonight there were no deer; tonight there was a man in black clothing and a darkish strange face that at first she took to be American Indian but suddenly realized was Chinese.
He was standing just at the edge of the blacktop as she came around a curve, half a mile before the gate, and he stepped forward as though he’d been waiting for her. She automatically took her foot off the accelerator, because there was someone moving in front of the car, and it slowed, and then her brain caught up with events and she thought, Oh, my God, they’ve come to take us away tonight!
But it wasn’t her he wanted, after all. He shaded his eyes with one hand, peering at the car through the glare of its lights, and she saw his surprise when he made out the line of the Mustang. At the same time, she was rescinding the earlier order to her right foot, she was telling it to mash down on the accelerator now, to take her away from there.
They both acted at the same time, so that just as he ducked to the side, running off into the trees, the car surged forward, and all at once he was gone and she was past the spot where he’d been. And in the rear-view mirror there was nothing but a faint red-tinged darkness of road and tree trunks, dimly illuminated by her tail lights, the picture turning clearer and more red as she pressed down on the brakes and brought the car to a stop.
She rolled down the side window. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear. The man was gone, he might never have been. But she felt cold and nervous, and the empty black night just beyond the open window was too frightening. She rolled the window up again, and drove on.
The young night man came out of the guard shack to open the gate for her when she reached it. She rolled the window down again and asked him, “Was everything quiet tonight?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He was cheerful, but mostly silent, a local youth who was probably in awe of the wealthy and famous people whose gate he guarded. “Same as every night,” he said.
She couldn’t tell him, of course. She couldn’t tell anyone who didn’t know the situation. But was there any danger for him? What was the Chinese man doing on their road, in the middle of the night?
In the end she said nothing, and drove on through the open gate and toward the house. She would tell Howard in the morning.
A few lights were always kept burning at night in the house, and now she could catch quick glimpses of them through the trees. Unconsciously, she drove a little faster.
6
Howard sat alone in Bradford’s office, at the desk, the manuscript of The Coming of Winter spread out before him. So far as he could see, Brad had done nothing on the manuscript at all in the month since he’d last looked at it. And he very much doubted that Brad ever would do any further work on it in the future.
“It’s a God damn shame,” he said. He had the habit, when working, of talking to himself, which he never did at any other time. But there was something about sitting at a desk with a manuscript laid out in front of him to be worked on that seemed to call for commentary, for a kind of oral footnoting of his relationship with the book at hand.
And his relationship with this particular book was a sad one, summed up in what he had just said. It was a shame, a God damn shame, and he felt a helpless bitterness over the abandonment of this book by its author. They had been building something here, Brad had been building it and Howard had been helping him, and now the construction was to be left forever incomplete.
What a fine plan it had been, too. The most comprehensive memoirs of any American President, seven volumes of careful detailed accurate reconstruction of the political life of one of the most important individuals of the twentieth century. There would have been nothing in American literary or political history to match it, nothing anywhere to match it except the memoirs of Winston Churchill. It was Churchill, in fact, that Howard had kept for his model from the very beginning, prodding Brad toward substance and truth whenever the older man would have been contented with a mere recital of facts. And though he’d known Brad’s books would never approach Churchill’s in eloquence, he had hoped that otherwise they would have emerged Churchill’s equal. And he believed they would have, and he’d been delighted and inspired — probably more so than Brad himself — at the thought of taking part in the books’ creation.
Naturally, they had always known Brad might die before the seven volumes were completed, but death was a natural enemy, an expected interruption, and therefore acceptable, however much it might be regretted. What was not acceptable was what had happened; to have Brad still available in this world, and yet unavailable, no longer interested, no longer really Brad in any sense that mattered.
Bradford Lockridge had loomed large in his nephew Howard’s life for as long as Howard could remember. His father, Sterling, had always deferred to Brad, and in many ways owed him his position in the world. Howard himself, though he’d chosen a career remote from politics, had found the ways eased by his relationship to Senator Lockridge, and then President Lockridge, and now ex-President Lockridge. And it was in this relationship that he’d found his greatest satisfactions; as compiler and annotator, editor and friend, and ultimately he hoped as biographer, Howard had made the reconstruction of Brad’s life the central purpose of his own existence.
So it was his own meaning to himself that was now being threatened by whatever had happened to Brad, and he couldn’t help a mournful frustrated bitterness as he looked at this abandoned manuscript spread out on the desk, left behind like a dead pony along an Indian trail. And he couldn’t help an optimism he knew to be illusory, the doomed hope that when Joe Holt arrived here Tuesday he would discover Brad’s problems to be temporary and reversible. They were not, they were permanent and irrevocable, but he went on hoping.