Missionary Stew

by Ross Thomas

  “I had an audience with the Emperor-President this morning.” She sniffed. “I suppose that's what one should call it—an audience. He has agreed to release all of the foreign nationals—all except you.”

  “Why not me?”

  “Because he thinks you’re a spy, as I said. He wants to see you. Privately. Will you agree?”

  Citron thought about it and shrugged. “All right.”

  “Not to worry,” Cecily Tettah said. “We’ll get it sorted out. Now then. How’ve they been treating you?”

  “Not bad. Considering.”

  “What about food? You look thin.”

  “There was enough—just barely.”

  “Today, for instance. What did they feed you today?”

  “Meat and rice.”

  “What kind of meat?”

  “Monkey.”

  Cecily Tettah pursed her lips in approval, nodded, and made a note. “Monkey's not bad,” she said. “Quite nutritious. Almost no fat. Did they feed you monkey often?”

  “No,” Citron said. “Only once.”

  The Emperor-President's anteroom was an immense hall with no chairs or benches and a once magnificent parquet floor now ruined by cigarette burns and boot scars. The room was crowded with those who wanted to petition the Emperor-President, and with those whose job it was to prevent his assassination.

  There were at least two dozen uniformed armed guards, plus another dozen secret police. The secret police all wore wide gaudy ties and peered suspiciously out at the world over tinted Ben Franklin glasses. The guards and the secret police stood. The threadbare petitioners sat on the floor along with a host of preening sycophants, a squad of sleepy-looking young messengers, and a pair of Slav businessmen in boxy suits who spoke Bulgarian to each other and tried to look forbidding, but whose wet friendly eyes betrayed their optimistic salesmen souls.

  Citron also sat on the floor, his back to the wall, guarded by Sergeant Bama, who amused himself by shooting out his left wrist to admire his new gold Rolex. The sergeant smiled at his watch, then scowled at Citron.

  “You will be alone with him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do not lie about me.”

  “No.”

  “If you lie, then I might have to reveal what was in the morning pot. There are those who would pay well to learn its contents.”

  “Monkey,” Citron said, knowing it wasn’t.

  The sergeant smiled a quite terrible smile that Citron felt he might remember for years. “It was not monkey,” Sergeant Bama said.

  “Last night,” Citron said. “The screams. They sounded like children's screams.”

  Sergeant Bama shrugged and gave his new watch another admiring glance. “Some got carried away.”

  “Who?”

  “I will not say.” He glanced around quickly, then leaned closer to Citron. The smile reappeared, even more awful than before. “But you helped destroy the evidence,” he whispered and then giggled. “You ate up all the evidence.”

  Citron stood throughout his audience with the Emperor-President, who sat slumped on the throne that had been cleverly crafted in Paris out of ebony and ivory. Citron thought it looked uncomfortable. He also thought the Emperor-President looked hung over.

  “So,” the Emperor-President said. “You are leaving us.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Some say you are French; some say American. What do you say?”

  “I was both for a time. Now I’m American.”

  “How could you be both?”

  “A matter of papers.”

  “Documents?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ahhh.”

  The Emperor-President closed his eyes and seemed to nod off for a moment or so. He was a chunky man in his early fifties with a big stomach that bounced and rolled around underneath a long white cotton robe. The robe resembled a nightgown, and Citron thought it looked both cool and eminently practical. The Emperor-President opened his eyes, which seemed a bit inflamed, picked his nose, wiped his finger somewhere on the throne, and then beckoned Citron. “Come closer.”

  Citron moved closer.

  “Closer still.”

  Citron took two more steps. The Emperor-President looked around suspiciously. They were alone. He beckoned Citron with a single finger. Citron leaned forward until he could smell last night's gin. Or today's.

  I wish to send a secret message to the Presidents of France and the United States,” the Emperor-President whispered. “No one must know. No one.” He waited for Citron's reply.

  “I’m not sure,” Citron said carefully, “how soon I will be seeing them.”

  The Emperor-President nodded his big head, as if that were exactly what he would expect a spy to say. “My message is brief. Tell them—tell them both that I am ready for reconciliation—on their terms.”

  “I see.”

  “Can you remember that?”

  “Yes. I believe so.”

  “Here.” The Emperor-President fumbled into the folds of the long white gown, found the pocket, and brought out a clenched fist. “Hold out your hand.”

  Citron held out his hand.

  “Palm up.”

  Citron turned his palm up. The Emperor-President unclenched his fist. A two-carat diamond dropped into Citron's open palm. He automatically wrapped a fist around it.

  “A token,” the Emperor-President said. “A gesture.”

  “A token gesture.”

  “Yes. For your trouble.”

  “I see.”

  “You are free to go.”

  “Yes. Well. Thank you.”

  Citron turned and started toward the tall double doors, but stopped at the sound of the Emperor-President's voice. “Wait.” Citron turned.

  “I understand they fed you monkey today.”

  Citron only nodded.

  “Did you like it?”

  “I ate it.”

  “So did I,” the Emperor-President said and began to chuckle—adeep bass chuckle that seemed to rumble up from his belly. “We both ate monkey today,” the Emperor-President said and then went back to his chuckling. He was still at it when Citron walked through the tall double doors.

  Miss Cecily Tettah counted three hundred French francs onto the plain table, picked them up, and handed them to Citron. He put them into the envelope that contained his Air France ticket to Paris and his American passport.

  “How was he?” she asked. “You never said.”

  “He laughed a lot.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “He still thinks I’m a spy.”

  “Really? I thought we’d got that all sorted out. Are you still quite certain there is no one you wish us to notify in the States?” “No. No one.”

  “Not even your mother?”

  Citron shook his head. “Especially not her.”

  CHAPTER 2

  It was almost a year to the day after Citron sold his diamond in Paris that Draper Haere, the money man, flew into Denver from New York. He arrived late, just before midnight. Because Haere had experienced a couple of uncomfortable rides with Denver taxi drivers in recent years, he carefully examined the man behind the wheel of the taxi at the head of the rank and was pleased to discover that he was Mexican and apparently a very sunny fellow.

  Two years before when Haere had caught a taxi at Denver's Staple-ton Airport, the driver had turned out to be a disgraced lieutenant governor from Louisiana who had taken to drink, but was now on what he called his rocky road to recovery and wanted to tell Haere all about it. The second time, almost a year later, another taxi driver had been a former Teamsters business agent from St. Louis who had been caught with his hand in the till. The former business agent was philosophical. “What the hell, Draper,” he said. “I took a chance and I got caught.” Haere sometimes wondered if taxi driving in Denver was a mystical restorative experience that somehow helped the fallen to climb back up onto the stool of redemption.

  Before flying to Denver, Haere had been stayin
g in New York at the Pierre, talking to a man who was toying with the idea of running forPresident—provided it didn’t cost too much—and provided his mother gave him permission. But when the man who would be President seemed incapable of making up his mind, Haere had made a date with the mother.

  They had tea at the Plaza. Or rather she had a vodka martini and Haere had tea. It took only five minutes, perhaps four, for them to agree that forty-three-year-old Sonny wasn’t quite ready to be President, at least not in 1984, and probably not even in 1988. After that they spent another pleasant half hour or so talking politics.

  Haere discovered she had one of those shockingly brilliant political minds that sometimes crop up in such places as Texas and Wisconsin and even Nebraska (Norris came to mind), but rarely in New York and not quite never in California. She was from West Virginia and had married steel. Big steel. When Haere told her it was too bad she couldn’t run for President herself, she had shrugged and smiled, more than a little pleased. Haere didn’t bother to call Sonny, who, he decided, would probably rather get his bad news from Mommy.

  When the Mexican driver in Denver wasn’t smiling about some nice secret, he hummed to himself and seemed to feel that all conversation was superfluous. So while the driver hummed, Draper Haere stared out the cab window and remembered the Denver of his childhood and early adolescence when it had been a quiet, sleepy, strangely green town content to nestle at the base of the Rocky Mountains under the collective thumb of the banks and Colorado Fuel and Iron and Great Western Sugar. Back then, Haere recalled, lungers from the East were still coming to Denver for its air. Now nobody came for the air. If they wanted clean air, they stayed in Pittsburgh.

  As always, Haere was pleased to see that nothing much had happened to the Brown Palace Hotel in the past ninety years or so—other than the new west wing they had added on in the sixties. The room prices had changed, of course, and Haere still felt uncomfortable about paying $100 or $125 or $150 a night for a room. But Haere was one of those who still compared the price of everything with what hehad paid back in the economic benchmark year of 1965—a silly, unbreakable habit that he often found extremely depressing.

  The Brown Palace even had a bellhop on duty, an elderly one, who took Haere up to his room and accepted a $5 tip with polite thanks. Twenty seconds after the bellhop left, the phone rang. Haere knew it had to be the Candidate. It could be no other.

  The Candidate was actually the forty-one-year-old governor-elect of California, calling from his Santa Monica house, working his phone calls west. It was now 2:00 A.M. in Washington, midnight in Denver, and 11:00 P.M. in Santa Monica. Soon the Candidate would have no one left to call but his fellow Californians.

  Haere always thought of the governor-elect as the Candidate because no sooner was he elected to one office than he began lusting after the next. His name was Baldwin Veatch—which rhymed with wretch, as Haere was fond of pointing out—and beginning in his twenty-third year he had been elected in rapid succession from Los Angeles's suspiciously liberal west side to the state assembly, the state senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, and finally the governorship of the nation's most populous state. The White House was the only conceivable next step up, and Baldwin Veatch, not yet sworn in as governor, was already taking his first cautious preliminary soundings.

  After Haere picked up the phone and said hello, the governor-elect said, “Well?”

  “She doesn’t think he should run.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  There was a pause. “Is she as bright as they say she is?”

  “Brighter.”

  Another pause. “Well, that's one down.”

  “And a half-dozen or so to go,” Haere said.

  “Replogle will meet you in the lobby at nine tomorrow,” Veatch said. “He wants to go up to his lodge in Breckenridge.”

  “Okay. How’d he sound?”

  “Like a man dying of cancer, and cancer of the prostate at that, which is not exactly the most pleasant way to go.”

  “He still thinks that what he has is…interesting?” Haere said, choosing his ambiguous words carefully.

  “He thinks it’ll blow them out of the water in ‘eighty-four,” Veatch said.

  Draper Haere sighed. Despite repeated efforts, he had never been able to convince Baldwin Veatch that the telephone was not a private means of communication. Veatch loved to call people, all sorts of people, and offer praise, encouragement, and chatty, surprisingly sensible advice. Just before the fall campaign began in earnest, he and Haere had spent the Labor Day weekend up in Veatch's summer shack in French Gulch. Among those Veatch had called and talked to (if briefly) had been Schmidt of Germany, de la Madrid of Mexico, Hussein of Jordan, and Rose of Philadelphia, who was in a slump.

  “Baldy,” Haere said, “you know something?”

  “What?”

  “You talk too much,” Haere said and hung up. He turned to his bag, took out a bottle of Scotch, poured some into a glass, added water from the bathroom tap, crossed to the window, and gazed out across Broadway at the tall bank building, which now stood on the site of the long-demolished Shirley-Savoy Hotel, an old pols’ hotel in whose rooms Haere recalled more than a few sexual and political adventures. For some reason, sex and politics for Haere had always gone hand in hand.

  Deciding he didn’t really need or want any old memories that night, Haere finished his drink, brushed his teeth, and got into bed with his illicit bedtime reading, which had been flown to him in New York by Purolator Courier from Sacramento.

  It was a special bootleg copy, fresh off the Xerox machine, of a precinct-by-precinct breakdown of the voting in California during the just-over election. It was also nothing but a long, long list ofnames and figures, although to Draper Haere it was a wonderful tale of glorious victory and ignoble defeat, which he read avidly until he fell asleep just before he reached Ventura County.

  Draper Haere awoke at 6:30 the next morning, which was when he always awoke regardless of jet lag and changing time zones. At forty-two, Haere was a deceptive-looking man who wore a martyr's face atop a natural athlete's body. The face he found useful, but the body had gone largely unexploited because Haere had long since decided that all vigorous physical activity, other than sex, was by and large a waste of time. It had been at least twenty years since he had last shot a gun, mowed a lawn, washed a car, painted a wall, caught a fish, or hit a ball of any kind. However, Haere did walk, often as much as seven or eight miles a day. He walked because it was a sensible way to get somewhere, because it gave him time to think, and because he was one of life's great gawkers.

  The sad brown eyes, the weary mouth, the delicate nose, and the sturdy chin had somehow melded themselves into a long-suffering look that many mistook for past tragedy, but that was actually chronic exasperation. Because of his almost saintly looks, Haere was the first person trusting strangers turned to with their tales of despair and their questions about how to get to Disneyland. Haere could have been a world-class confidence man. He had instead gone into politics on the nuts-and-bolts side, and nearly everyone agreed that he was the best there was at his particular specialty, which was writing letters to people and getting money back in the mail.

  After Haere awoke he noticed that it seemed strangely quiet until he looked out the window and discovered it had snowed during the night—not much, perhaps five or six inches, which was hardly anything in Denver because the sun usually came out and melted it by midafternoon. In New York, Haere knew it would have created chaos;in Washington, panic; and in Los Angeles, well, in Los Angeles five inches of snow on the freeways could only have signaled Armageddon. In Denver they didn’t even bother to put on the chains.

  Haere, still wearing the Jockey shorts he had slept in, got out the three-cup pot and the instant Yuban. The pot boiled three cups of water in less than sixty seconds and Haere had bought it at Marshall Field's in Chicago five years before after paying, for the first time, $12 plus tip for two cups of roo
m-service coffee in the Ritz-Carlton. Although he realized that of such small economies are crotchety bachelors made, the pot now went with him everywhere. He also brought along his own mug, spoon, and sugar.

  After the coffee, the three cigarettes, the shave, and the shower, Haere dressed in what he always dressed in, a blue three-piece pinstripe suit, and took the elevator down to the lobby, checked out, turned, and got his first shock of the day, which was a three-quarter profile of Jack Replogle as he stood in the lobby and did what everyone does in the Brown Palace—gaze up at the splendid hollow core around which the hotel is built.

  Replogle had lost weight—at least twenty or thirty pounds. He seemed to huddle down in his Antartex coat. For a moment it also seemed as though he had lost two or three inches in height, which would have brought him down to Haere's own five eleven and a half. Haere then realized that Replogle was bent over, angled down and to one side, and apparently couldn’t look up by throwing his head back, but only by twisting it around on his neck.

  Replogle's deep-set green eyes had burrowed even farther back into his head, and under them were twin dark smears. His skin seemed to have the color and texture of newsprint. He was an obviously sick man, so Haere went up to him and tapped him on the shoulder. When Replogle turned, Haere said, “You look like hell.”

  Although the pain had etched itself across his face, Haere saw that Replogle's smile was still the same—the smile of a man who has longknown some very funny secret he has finally decided to divulge to you and none other.

  Replogle looked Haere up and down carefully, nodded as if satisfied, or at least reassured, and said, still smiling, “I don’t need your fucking sympathy.”

  “Hurts, huh?”

  “Yeah, it hurts. Let's go.”

  Replogle turned and started toward the west entrance of the hotel. Haere followed with his bag through the door and out into the street, where a Jeep station wagon was parked at the curb. Haere saw it was the four-wheel-drive kind, which he thought was called the Wagoneer.

  Replogle got behind the wheel and fastened his seat belt. Haere didn’t. He never did. And then Replogle did what he had always done whenever Haere had ridden with him—and this went back more than thirty years to when Haere had been only a child. Using one hand, his right, Replogle slowly pulled an imaginary pair of World War II flying goggles down over his eyes. Even after thirty years it still got a smile out of Haere.