by Ross Thomas
He seemed to be expecting some sort of answer, so Haere said, “Right. Absolutely.”
“And the first thing you know the Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of Works and Progress, who's been getting to work in his five-year-old VW, if he's lucky, suddenly starts showing up in his brand-new chauffeur-driven BMW that he thinks nobody's going to notice the way they would a new Mercedes, which is what he and his wife and his girlfriend really had their hearts set on. I’m making myself clear, I take it?”
“I thought Congress made them tax-deductible. Bribes, I mean.”
“Not if it's against the law in the country where you hand out the grease. And I’m not talking about tipping the headwaiter. I’m talking about corruption. Big bucks.”
“You’re also exaggerating.”
“A little. But not much. Not much.”
“It's an old story anyway,” Haere said.
“Old as the Pyramids—and the Acropolis and El Tajin and the fucking hanging gardens of Babylon. Nothing public ever got built clean. Not even by the WPA. I’m convinced.”
“So what happens?”
“So what happens is that I’m awarded the contract. And maybe four or five months or even a year later, I’m back out there where it's hot in my air-conditioned suite at the Inter-Continental—it's almost always the Inter-Continental, for some reason—and I’m trying to find out why my cement is still a little soupy, or why my steel I-beams are maybe a touch brittle—and the phone rings.”
“The phone rings,” Haere said.
“If it's working that day, yeah. And on the phone is the second secretary or maybe the commercial attache at the embassy who wants to know if he can drop by for a minute.”
“Whose embassy?”
“Ours.”
“Right. Ours.”
“Well, he shows up in his Haspel seersucker and his black knit silk tie and his lace-up cordovans and no, he doesn’t think he’ll have a drink because it's still a tiny bit early for him, but I should go right ahead, if I really want one, and he’ll just have a Perrier, if I have it, but if not, no problem, club soda will do just fine. Well, already I’m a morning lush. So he talks about this and that for a while and then wants to know if there's anything the embassy can do for me, because if there is, all I need to do is holler, except he doesn’t say holler because he went to Princeton or Yale or Harvard, like you, and Har-vards don’t say holler much.”
“I say it all the time.”
“Yeah, but you’re weird. Anyway, there's a little more tiny talk and then right at the end, almost like a throwaway, he says, by the way, isn’t it delicious about old Iskander Soedibio, or Mohammed al-Harbi, orwhatever the name is of the poor sap who's driving around in the new BMW. Well, the Yalie's got it all, of course—dates, time of day, and how much the juice was down to the dime.” “You mean the spook from the embassy?”
“Yeah. The spook. And, of course, he claims Langley is just terribly sympathetic and fully understands and appreciates the problems of doing business in the hot countries, but frankly they’re rather concerned that neither Justice nor the SEC nor Congress—especially Congress—would understand quite so readily. That's how they all talk. Well, not really, but something like that.”
“Then what?” Haere said.
“Then the quid pro quo, what else? I know damn well what would happen if some of Langley's trained seals in the Senate or the House got hold of the fact that Replogle Construction was bribing permanent secretaries and ministers and their various cousins and brothers-in-law. What would happen is that I wouldn’t be rich anymore and you and me couldn’t shoehorn maybe one or two ugly but halfway honest guys into Congress every two years or so. I might even be poor like you. How’d you ever manage to stay so poor?”
“It's a knack—like anything else.”
“It must be. Well, what they always wanted me to do—”
“Langley.”
“Yeah. Langley. What they always wanted me to do, and this has happened, with variations, maybe five or six times over the past fiff-teen years or so, is to put one or two of their guys on my payroll in some country where the weather's hot. It's not going to cost me anything because they’re going to feed it all back to me, the money, through the Somesuch Corporation in, let's say, Liechtenstein. And the Langley guys on my payroll might even do a little work—maybe empty the pencil sharpeners or something.”
“You’re their cover, then?”
“Replogle Construction is.”
“How many?”
“On my payroll now? About fourteen.”
Haere turned it over in his mind for a moment or two and then said, “Then what's the problem?”
“With Langley? None. Well, not yet anyway. I stumbled across something out in Singapore. Something really shitty. Something that could blow those fuckers out of the White House in ‘eighty-four.” Replogle paused, and then went on. “If things were normal, I might just sit on it—to cover my own ass. But then I thought, what the hell, you’ll be dead soon, so what can they do? So I waited until the elections were over and then got in touch with Veatch. I figured Veatch and you’d know how to run with it best.” Replogle glanced at Haere as if expecting encouragement.
“Go on,” Haere said.
“Well, it was in Singapore, like I said, and this time I was staying at Raffles instead of the Inter-Continental. You ever stayed at Raffles?”
“I’ve never been to Singapore.”
“Well, I sometimes stay there because it's old and it's nice and I keep hoping I’ll run into some gorgeous Eurasian beauty I can run off to Bora Bora with, or at least bump into somebody tragic and seedy with stories to tell, but all you bump into at Raffles nowadays are the Japs and the blue-rinse set from Santa Barbara, because they’re about all who can afford it.”
“Except this last time,” Haere said.
“Right. He knocked on the door and there he was, right out of Maugham—shabby old suit, three-day beard, gin for breakfast— everything.”
“Who?”
“Meade.”
“Drew Meade.”
Replogle nodded.
“Jesus.”
Draper Haere had been barely twelve years old when Drew Meade, revealing himself for the first time as an undercover FBI agent, appeared as the star witness before an investigating U.S. Senate subcommittee. Meade swore that Haere's father, the overage former private first class in the Americal division and, prior to that, a youngish lieutenant in Spain with the Lincoln Battalion (not brigade, kid, battalion), had been then and was indeed even yet a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the Communist Party (U.S.A.).
Out of more than mild curiosity, Draper Haere had kept track of Drew Meade over the years, finally losing both interest and Meade's trail in the late sixties.
“I heard he went with Langley,” Haere said. “I heard he crossed over in ‘sixty-one or -two—around in there.”
“ ‘Sixty-one,” Replogle said. “He wound up in Laos in ‘sixty-nine and by then he was maybe four or five years away from retirement, but he went into dope instead and Langley dumped him, very quietly.”
“He was dealing?” Haere said, unable to keep the surprise out of his tone.
Replogle nodded. “In a big way. But when I talked to him he was flat broke.”
“Where was this?”
“Up in my room. He knocked on my door, I opened it, and there he stood—just what I was hoping for: somebody to tell me a story.”
“How much did he want for it?”
“His story? Fifty thousand, but I knocked that down to ten grand pretty quick.”
“It still must be some story.”
“Yeah,” Replogle said, “it is.” He paused for a moment and then continued in his most precise engineering manner. “Meade came to me because, one, he remembered how close your dad and I always were; two, because he knew I could use what he was going to tell me; and three, because I could pay for it. Pay pretty good, in fact. That was the most important. Well, I ha
d to give him the money first, and that meant a trip to the bank. Then he had to have a few drinks before he’dfinally sit down and tell me how it all began six months ago down in Miami when Langley—”
Replogle never finished the secondhand story because the big blue Dodge pickup honked and pulled up on the left. Haere looked over. There were two persons in the pickup. Both wore ski masks. The pickup and the station wagon had reached a sharp curve in the deep canyon. On the station wagon's right, some fifty or sixty feet below, was a frozen creek.
The pickup swerved, and its right front fender slammed into the station wagon, which went into a skid on a patch of ice. Haere later thought they must have been counting on that—the ice. Replogle did everything he was supposed to do. He kept his foot off the brake. He steered into the skid. He swore.
The station wagon plunged over the side. On either the first or second roll the right-hand door popped open and Draper Haere popped out. He landed in a snowbank. The station wagon somersaulted two more times, end over end, and smashed against some immense boulders at the creek's edge. Two seconds later the gas tank exploded.
Haere got up and made himself stumble through the snow down to the burning car. He tried to open its front left door, but it was either jammed or locked. Haere burned his hands trying to get the door open. He finally could stand neither the heat nor the pain, so he moved backward, tripped over something, and sat back down in a snowbank. He jammed his scorched hands down deep into the snow and sat there watching Jack Replogle burn to death if, indeed, he wasn’t already dead. In either event, there was nothing Draper Haere could do about it.
CHAPTER 5
After his hands were treated by a doctor in Idaho Springs, Draper Haere talked to a trio of policemen that consisted of a fiftyish Clear Creek County deputy sheriff and two mustachioed, look-alike investigators from the Colorado Highway Patrol.
Haere described the blue Dodge pickup and its two masked occupants as best he could. He also said he didn’t think it was an accident: that as far as he could tell it had seemed intentional. The policemen nodded somberly, looked thoughtful, and marked it down as hit-and-run. Haere didn’t mention Jack Replogle's tale about the CIA and Singapore and Drew Meade, because he could see no purpose it would serve.
Since Haere no longer went to funerals, he didn’t stay for Jack Replogle's. Instead he called Maureen, Replogle's wife, to express his condolences. Maureen was appropriately tearful and, as always, excessively dramatic.
“Tell me he didn’t suffer, Draper,” Maureen Replogle said.
“He didn’t suffer, Maureen.”
“That man was my life—my entire life. How can I live without him? How can I possibly go on living without him? I’m thinking ofkilling myself, Draper. I’ve got some sleeping pills. I’ll just take those and when I wake up I’ll be with Jack.”
“I don’t think Jack would really want you to do that, Maureen. He’d want you to go on living for as long as possible.”
There was a silence and then Maureen said in a very small voice, “Do you really think so?”
“I’m sure of it.”
There was another silence and then the tears started again. “Do you know what I am, Draper? I’m—oh, my God—I’m a widow”
Maureen hung up without saying goodbye, and Draper Haere went aboard the United flight to Los Angeles. There, in the first-class section, even before the plane took off, he asked for and was served a martini, which he drank through a couple of straws because of his lightly bandaged hands.
During the two-hour flight to Los Angeles, Haere stared down at the occasional lights six miles below and thought about death and dying and the last funeral he had attended, which had been that of his father twenty-five years before in Birmingham, Alabama.
Father and son had moved to Birmingham from Denver in 1954, when the senior Haere had managed to secure a job on the copy desk of the Birmingham News.The News didn’t seem to care whether the senior Haere was a communist or not as long as he was a competent journeyman who would work cheap. Haere was just finishing his junior year in high school when his father—on his day off—started going down to Sylacauga on the bus. Haere at first thought his old man had found a lady friend, until father invited son to go along. They got off the Trailways bus at the combination depot and five-and-dime and walked three miles out of town to a small farmhouse, where they sat on the front porch with a man of about the same age as Haere's father. Haere drank lemonade. The two men drank beer. Nobody said much. The other man had also served in Spain, and his left leg was gimpy. They sat there in the warm spring afternoon in a not uncomfortablesilence that seemed both to separate and embrace what surely were the only two veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Alabama. A Sunday or so later, when Haere's old man asked him if he’d like to go down to Sylacauga again, Haere said no.
On March 25,1957, Haere was summoned to the office of the high school principal and informed that he was being offered a full four-year scholarship to Harvard. “That's in Cambridge,” the principal said. “In Massachusetts.” Haere told the principal he would have to think it over.
It wasn’t until years later that Haere learned that it wasn’t his straight-A average that had won him the Harvard scholarship. Instead, it had been Jack Replogle calling in a political debt. Replogle had called Big Ed Johnson of Colorado, who had called Big Jim Folsom of Alabama, who had called a Birmingham banker who had earned both his B.A. and M.B.A. at Harvard. Big Jim as governor kept large sums of the state's money interest-free in the banker's bank. The banker was one of Harvard's unofficial scholarship scouts. It took only a few minutes for the banker to decide that Draper Haere would do wonderfully well at his alma mater.
When Haere told his old man about the scholarship offer, the senior Haere had grinned and said, “No shit? You going to take it?”
“I don’t know,” Haere said.
“I don’t see why not.”
“I’ll think about it,” Haere said.
He reached his decision four weeks later when his father died from heart failure, seated in front of the radio listening to the detested Fulton Lewis, Jr. He also would have detested anyone's calling it heart failure. “Heart failure kills everybody,” he sometimes told Haere, quoting one of his favorite copy-desk maxims. “But people die from heart attacks and heart seizures. Remember that.”
There was just enough money to bury him in a cemetery called Memorial Park. There were no services of any kind. The man from Sylacauga came up for the burial. He and Haere rode out to the cemetery together in the funeral-home car behind the hearse. No one from the paper came. Haere never did know why. Perhaps, he told himself, they just forgot.
There were two funeral-home attendants in the hearse. They, along with Haere and the man from Sylacauga, were to carry the casket, the cheapest available. At the last moment another car, a 1949 Hudson, pulled up and a man in his late forties got out. Wordlessly, he took hold of one of the handles and the five of them carried the casket to the open grave, into which it was lowered by a pair of gravediggers.
The man who came late turned to Haere. “I knew your father,” he said. “I admired him.” The man had a European accent of some kind. He didn’t say anything to the man from Sylacauga. Haere thought they might not have known each other, or it might have been that they did know each other but the man from Sylacauga simply ignored the stranger the way he ignored almost everyone.
“Would you like me to say a few words?” the man with the accent said.
“Sure,” Haere said. “If you want to.”
The man with the accent reached down, picked up a clod or two of red clay, and tossed the earth down on the casket.
“I knew this comrade,” said the man with the accent. “He was steadfast in the pursuit of justice all his life.”
The man from Sylacauga snorted in disgust, turned, and walked away. Draper Haere never saw either man again.
At virtually the same time that Draper Haere and his bleak thoughts were passing ove
r the Grand Canyon on their way to Los Angeles, Morgan Citron was parking his 1969 Toyota sedan on the edge of the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.
From the highway, Craigie Grey's apartment building didn’t look like six million dollars to Citron. Or five million. Or even four. It was only two stories in height and a bare fifty feet in width. Its architecture was mineshaft modern, and it was protected from Valley marauders by a seven-foot-high redwood fence that had a locked gate. Citron tried the key Craigie Grey had given him in the gate's lock and was mildly surprised to find that it worked.
He went through the gate and into a small bricked patio. The bricks were used and divided into squared-off sections by old railroad ties. The patio also boasted a small green jungle of potted succulents and ferns illuminated by an outside floodlight that was mostly focused on the gate. From the light Citron could determine that the apartment building was constructed of redwood and shingle, which would burn quite merrily when one of the periodic fires swept down from the Santa Monica mountains and hopped the highway. If the place was really worth upward of four million dollars, Citron decided it must be because of the sound caused by the bang and crash of a heavy surf, which was so loud he could scarcely hear the highway traffic.
The grungy downstairs back apartment seemed to be Unit A. Using the same key he had used on the gate, Citron unlocked the apartment door and went in. He felt for the light switch, turned it on, and found himself in a one-room studio with a large single window overlooking the patio. The furnishings were sparse: a phone, a couch that he assumed pulled out into a bed, a round Formica-topped table with four chairs made out of bent iron and molded plastic, a shabby armchair that seemed to be of the reclining variety, and an old seventeen-inch black-and-white General Electric television set. The floor was covered with linoleum of the speckled-white-and-gold kind. It was almost worn through in the space in front of the Pullman kitchen. On the walls there was nothing. Not even a calendar.