Missionary Stew

by Ross Thomas

  Citron moved back to the table, sat down, picked up his cup, and drank the rest of his coffee. There was another silence as he felt his worm of curiosity stir again. He wondered what he would say next and was faintly surprised to hear himself say, “How much?”

  “Five hundred a week?” Haere said.

  “Cash?”

  “Sure. Why not? Cash.”

  “I’ll need an advance—to buy some things.”

  “What?”

  “A typewriter. A small tape recorder.” He paused. “Maybe a suit. I don’t have any clothes. Or a bank account.”

  “Two thousand do it?” Haere said, adding, “Cash, of course.”

  “Fine,” Citron said. He looked first at Haere and then at Louise Veatch. “You know what you’re getting, don’t you?”

  “I think so,” she said.

  “What you’re getting is a little unused, maybe even rusty. I’m not sure it even functions anymore.”

  Louise Veatch smiled, then nodded contentedly, as if what she saw was little short of perfection. “Mr. Haere and I have been in this peculiar business for some time, Mr. Citron—do you mind if I call you Morgan? Mr. Haere is very good at sizing people up, but I’m even better, and what I see sitting across the table from me I like, probably because there seems to be almost no bullshit about you. Anyone who tells me he’ll take the job provided I buy him a new suit can’t be much of a bullshitter, and in this town that's as rare as green snow. What I’m really trying to say is that we’re glad you said yes—right, Draper?”

  “Right,” Haere said, marveling as always at how Louise Veatch by tone and gesture, if not by the words themselves, could convince people of their own immense self-worth and the enormous esteem in which she seemed to hold them.

  Citron smiled again, but only slightly, and looked at Haere. “How many political due bills have you people got in Washington?”

  “You mean the three of us?” Louise Veatch said.

  Citron nodded.

  She turned to Haere for the estimate. He thought for a moment and then answered carefully. “Would plenty be enough?”

  “Maybe,” Citron said.

  An hour later, Draper Haere's secretary called Citron and told him she was, to use her participle, “messengering” him out $2,000 in cash. Citron thanked her, hung up the phone, picked it back up, dialed information, and asked for the number of the FBI.

  The number was 272-6161. When the woman operator answered with “FBI,” Citron said, “May I speak to Agent Richard Tighe, please.”

  There was a brief hesitation and then the operator said, “Let me give you verification.”

  After another pause, another woman's voice said, “Verification,” and then gave her name, which Citron didn’t catch.

  “Agent Tighe, please. Richard Tighe.”

  This time there was no hesitation. “We don’t have an agent by that name,” she said.

  “I see,” Citron said. “What about Agent Yarn—Y-A-R-N, first name John, middle initial D?”

  “We don’t have an agent by that name either,” the verification woman said.

  Citron said thank you and hung up with the conviction that he was already earning his money.

  CHAPTER 8

  He had decided to cross at Mexicali. The long bus ride up from Mexico City had tired him and made him look much older than his sixty-three years until he found a barber who gave him a shave, a massage, and a haircut for less than $2. On the way to the border entry, he bought a cheap sombrero, the kind a tourist might buy, and settled it firmly on his head. From his reflection in a plate-glass window he saw that it made him look ridiculous, which pleased him because that was exactly how he wanted to look.

  He strolled up to the U.S. immigration official, who gave him the quick practiced glance of an experienced sorter. “Business in Mexico?”

  “Just rubbernecking.”

  “Place of birth?”

  “Ohio,” he said, lying automatically. He had been born in Indiana. In Terre Haute.

  The immigration official nodded and Drew Meade walked across the border into his native land, the country which he felt had betrayed him, although he never thought of it in quite those terms. When he railed to himself alone at night in cheap hotel rooms, he railed against having been handed the shitty end of the stick, which, arguably, is a form of betrayal.

  The first thing Drew Meade did upon returning to the United States after an absence of thirteen years was to seek out a McDonald's and order two Big Macs, a chocolate shake, and an order of French-fried potatoes. After gobbling it all down he talked one of the sullen sixteen-year-olds behind the counter out of a couple of handfuls of change and then spent an hour walking around Calexico looking for a pay phone that worked.

  It took several conversations with various operators, but Meade finally got the number he wanted. While it was ringing he dropped in $2 worth of quarters against the long-distance operator's stern advice. The number was answered on the fourth ring by a hollow hello. It was a woman's voice.

  “Mr. Replogle, please.”

  “Oh my God,” said the hollow voice that belonged to the newly widowed Maureen Replogle.

  “Is Mr. Replogle there?”

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know?” Meade growled. “Know what? Is he there or not?”

  “Jack's…gone.”

  “Gone? Gone where?”

  “Jack is…dead.” The news was followed by a sob.

  “Well, shit,” Meade said.

  Maureen Replogle refused to hear that. “The funeral was early this afternoon,” she said. “This very afternoon. He had a host of friends. They’ve been so very kind. I’m all alone now, of course. All alone.”

  “When did he die, Mrs. Replogle?”

  “It was only yesterday. Yesterday morning. He and Draper were driving up to Breckenridge. We have a lodge up there. Jack likes to ski, but I’ve never really cared for it. There was an accident. Poor Jack. Dear Jack.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “You know, in the car.”

  “You said Draper was with him. Is that Draper Haere?”

  “Do you know Draper? Draper didn’t stay for the funeral. He doesn’t go to funerals, you know. I’ve always found Draper rather strange, even as a child.”

  “Where's Haere now?”

  “He flew back to California.”

  “Frisco, L.A., where?”

  “No, not Los Angeles. Santa Monica. Well, Venice actually, I suppose. The air is ever so much better there.” “Okay. Thanks.”

  “It was very kind of you to call. So many people have been so very kind.”

  Drew Meade hung up. The phone rang. He picked it up and cautiously said hello. It was the long-distance operator, advising Meade that he owed an additional sixty-five cents. Meade told her to fuck off and hung up again.

  At the Calexico bus station, the first Trailways out was bound for Redlands. Meade bought a ticket. From Redlands he would bus his way up and over to Santa Barbara and then come down into Los Angeles from the north. With any luck he would be there late that evening or, at the outside, early tomorrow morning. The bus to Redlands would leave in ten minutes. Meade bought provisions for the trip. They consisted of two packs of Camels, a giant-size Mr. Goodbar, and a pint of Jim Beam. The sombrero he shoved into a waste bin.

  They had performed their early-afternoon sexual acrobatics in the Sir Galahad, a beachside motel on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica just south of Pico. They had giggled for a while at an X-rated film the motel supplied for $3.50 over its closed-circuit television system. The film involved a threesome, and while it was still running they had made love for almost thirty minutes. Now both lay naked on the bed, watching the film with a kind of clinical detachment.

  “You want to see how this shit ends?” he said.

  She shook her head. “Not especially.”

  Draper Haere rose, crossed to the TV set, and switched it off. He turned and smiled down at Louise Veatch.
“You are, without a doubt, the best-looking naked lady I ever saw in my life.”

  “Pretty just happened.”

  “Pretty and smart with it.”

  Louise Veatch smiled. “They used to say that down home. ‘She's pretty and smart with it.’“

  “I know,” Haere said, sat back down on the edge of the bed, and lit one of his occasional cigarettes.

  “How’d it go in New York?” she said, reaching down for her panties on the floor. “All I got out of Baldy was a satisfied grunt.”

  “The guy was a toe tester.”

  “You mean he stuck his toe into the political waters and found them lukewarm?”

  “He thought they were lukewarm, but Mommy thought they were ice-cold. If he’d jumped in with a big splash, she would’ve said wonderful and whipped out her checkbook. But he didn’t, and she won’t.”

  “Then he's out.”

  “He's out.”

  As they talked, they dressed slowly, unhurriedly, as if it were morning and they had risen early and had been married for twenty years.

  “You mean out in ‘eighty-four or all the way out?”

  Draper Haere tucked in his shirttails. The shirt was a white oxford-cloth buttondown. It was almost the only kind of shirt Haere ever wore except for exact copies in blue. “Out in ‘eighty-four,” he said. “After that, who can say?”

  “You still think Baldy's got a real no-shit chance?” Louise Veatch asked as she buttoned up the simple silk cream-colored blouse that went nicely with the simple straight-line light-gray skirt that was complemented by the simple dark-gray double-breasted cashmere jacket. Haere estimated that all that simplicity cost three or four timesthe price of one of his blue pinstripes, and Haere spent $550 on his suits at Lew Ritter's.

  “Baldy's got a chance,” Haere said, after giving it some thought. “Not much of one, but a chance—provided things break just right for him, and provided he turns out to be just one hell of a governor.”

  “But you’re talking about ‘eighty-eight, aren’t you? Not ‘eighty-four.”

  “I figure ‘eighty-four is the jinx year.”

  “Oh, hell, Draper.”

  “Look. ‘Eighty-eight's his best shot. Four years as governor, and then he gets re-elected in ‘eighty-six. He's got a record he can point to with pride. The old hacks will have dropped out from exhaustion and Baldy’ll be what by ‘eighty-six—forty-six?”

  “Forty-seven,” she said.

  “Not too young and certainly not too old. He starts out after it in ‘eighty-six and leaves you behind to run the state.”

  “Draper,” she said, “he's not going to wait.”

  “He’d better.”

  “Okay, what would it take to get him the nomination in ‘eighty-four—besides money and luck? You can get him the money and he's got all the luck in the world. So what else would it take?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “What about this Replogle stuff that Citron's going after? This dynamite that could blow them out of the White House? Isn’t that what Jack Replogle said?”

  Haere sighed. “He said it could blow those fuckers out of the White House in ‘eighty-four. An exact quote. Almost, anyway.”

  “And you believed him?”

  Haere started knotting his tie. “Jack Replogle, when it came to politics, was a man much given to understatement. Hyperbole in almost everything else, but not in politics.”

  “Then it is dynamite, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Which is just what Baldy needs.”

  “It wouldn’t do him any harm,” Haere admitted as he crossed to the bathroom and looked behind its door to see if anything had been left hanging there. He did it out of sheer habit, for they had checked into the room empty-handed. After his inspection, he looked down at his still-bandaged hands and said, “Funny thing about dynamite, though.” He looked up at her. “Sometimes when it gets old it gets unstable.”

  “It could blow up in our faces, right?”

  He nodded. “Right.”

  “Well, that's the chance we’re all willing to take, isn’t it?”

  Haere again looked down at his hands and then back up at Louise Veatch. “Sure it is,” he said.

  Morgan Citron came through the redwood gate carrying a large sturdy shopping bag that held a used Olivetti Lettera 32, a new Sony hand-held tape recorder with various attachments, and a box containing a $159 light-brown mohair suit that he had bought on sale at Henshey's department store in Santa Monica.

  Citron noticed the envelope lying on the floor when he entered Unit A. It was a square, off-white envelope, and when he picked it up he saw that it was made by the Crane people out of some very expensive paper. On its front his name had been written in black ink by someone with a broad-nibbed pen and a sound knowledge of the Palmer method. The carefully written message inside said: “Come to dinner tonight at 7 or I’ll throw myself in the ocean.” It was signed “Velveeta.”

  Citron was hanging up his new suit in his one closet when the knock came at the apartment's door. He went to the door and opened it. The man who stood there was slender, graceful, more pretty than handsome, and not much more than twenty-four.

  “My name is Dale Winder,” he said, “and I work for your mummy.”

  “Christ,” Citron said.

  “She wants to see you.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Don’t you love your mother, dear boy?”

  “No,” Citron said. “I don’t love anybody.”

  Dale Winder actually clapped his hands once in apparent joy. “Oh, you can quote it! I just somehow knew you could. May I come in?”

  “Sure,” Citron said. “Come in.”

  Winder glided into the apartment and looked around, hands on hips. He wore a white cashmere pullover, but no shirt, very tight jeans and Gucci loafers, but no socks. Citron had the feeling that Dale Winder thought anyone who would wear socks with his loafers was hopelessly out of it.

  “Wonders—just wonders could be done with this place with so little effort,” Winders said regretfully and even clucked a couple of times when he noticed the worn linoleum in front of the Pullman kitchen.

  “How’d you find me?” Citron said.

  “It wasn’t hard.”

  “What does she want?”

  “Just to say hello. After all, it's been a while, hasn’t it?”

  “Not long enough.”

  “But you will see her?”

  “She's not sick or anything?”

  “Oh, heavens, no. Fit as a fiddle. You know Gladys. Well?”

  Citron was not at all sure that he really did know Gladys, and even less sure that he wanted to. His mother had always been a remote figure, almost the Mysterious Stranger that parents were said to warn their children about. Two months earlier he would have refused to see her. A month earlier he would have hesitated. Now he shrugged and said, “Okay. Let's go.”

  “She’ll be so pleased. Shall we go in my car? I’ll drive you there and back. It's such a nice day and I’ve got the top down and I do so love Malibu, don’t you?”

  Citron didn’t bother to answer as he followed Winder out into the patio. At the gate, Winder turned and smiled. He had a good tan and nice white teeth and a dimpled cheek and a left eye that was slightly bluer than the right. “I’ve just been dying to ask you. Was he really a cannibal?”

  “Sure he was,” Citron said. “Missionary stew every day.”

  “Oh, my God, I can’t stand it!” Dale Winder said and shivered with delight.

  CHAPTER 9

  The West Coast bureau of The American Investigator occupied half of the twelfth floor of a three-sided building that rose up out of the old Fox back lot in Century City, but it resembled no newspaper or magazine office Morgan Citron had ever seen.

  What surprised Citron, perhaps even saddened him, was certainly not the walnut paneling or the thick taupe carpet or the beautiful blond twin sisters who held down the antique partne
rs’ desk in the reception area. Nor was he overly impressed by the wonderfully faked Miro and Chagall and Braque that hung on the reception area walls, or even the signed Daumier engravings (authentic) that lined the corridor leading to the West Coast bureau manager's office. Rather, what really bothered Citron was the cryptlike silence as he followed Dale Winder down the corridor. There were no ringing phones. No typewriters. No teletypes. No voices. There were only closed doors behind which Citron suspected perfectly god-awful fibs were being carefully concocted. He even thought up one himself: TOT LOCKED IN FRIDGE GNAWS OFF TOES, although he wasn’t at all sure he hadn’t cribbed that one from a copy of the Investigator he had scanned once while standing in line, food stamps in hand, at the checkout counter of Boys Market in the Marina del Rey.

  It was a long corridor, and when they neared its end, Dale Winder smiled reassuringly over his shoulder. “We’re almost there,” he said and pushed through a door. It led into a small reception room that had only a brilliant copy of a blue Picasso clown on its walls. There was also another antique desk with nothing at all on it but the folded hands of a striking young Chinese woman.

  “The prodigal,” Dale Winder said.

  “Really.” She smiled at Citron. “Please go in, Mr. Citron. She's expecting you.”

  “I’ll run you home whenever you’re ready,” Dale Winder said. “Just give me a shout.”

  “Right,” Citron said, moved to the door, put his hand on the knob, sighed, turned it, pushed the door open, and entered the office of Gladys Darlington Citron, who, he immediately saw, had changed scarcely at all.

  She still wore her Chanel suits, he noticed. She had more than a dozen of them, and several were at least twenty or twenty-five years old. The one she wore that day was a dusty pink. And as always in the lapel was the red ribbon of the Legion d’Honneur, which de Gaulle himself had presented her in late 1946 for her remarkably bloody service in the Resistance. Citron knew it was why she almost always wore suits: so she would have someplace to display the decoration.

  At sixty-two her hair was the color of silver. Old expensive silver. She wore it looped down near one cool green eye, her left, and then back and up into what was supposed to be a careless chignon. Yet not a strand was out of place. Citron could not recall when one ever had been.