Missionary Stew (8 page)

“I think it was Gable mostly.”

“Clark Gable?”

“Right,” Haere said. “If you closed your eyes when Eisenhower talked, he sounded exactly like Clark Gable. That must have been awfully reassuring to most people.”

They both looked up when Louise Veatch returned to the table wearing a pleased smile. Veatch rose to let her in. She slid into the booth, looked at both men, said, “Morgan Citron,” and waited for their reaction.

Haere was first. “The
Chicago Daily News
. A long time ago.”

“Not so long,” Veatch said. “Eleven years. Ten maybe.”

“How old is he now—fifty?” Haere asked.

Louise Veatch shook her head. “Craigie says forty or so—if that.”

“I thought he was older,” Haere said.

Baldwin Veatch looked up at the ceiling, his expression thoughtful. “There was something,” he said slowly, “something about a Pulitzer, wasn’t there?”

“He was nominated,” Louise Veatch said, “and everyone thought he was going to get it, but then they changed their minds, or something like that.”

“Why?” Veatch said.

“I don’t remember.”

“I remember his stuff, though,” Haere said. “There was this one long piece he wrote for
The New Yorker
about Togo and Dahomey— about four or five years back. Very sad, funny stuff.”

“That's not quite what I had in mind,” Veatch said.

“Wait a minute,” Louise Veatch said. “I recollect now. About the Pulitzer. He was in Vietnam. It was a series he did on corruption. They threw him out of the country.”

“You’re right,” Haere said. “So where is he now?”

“You know Craigie's place down on the PCH in Malibu?”

Haere shook his head.

“Well, that's where he is. He's Craigie's new super.”

“Jesus,” Veatch said.

They kept the governor-elect out of the approach to Morgan Citron. They kept him out for the usual reasons: so that he could deny he knew anything about it, so that he could attend yet another breakfast meeting with his transition team at the Beverly-Wilshire, and so that Haere and Louise Veatch could steal an hour to thresh around in bed together. Veatch at first was not at all sure he wanted his wife in on the approach to Morgan Citron until she crisply reminded him of her admittedly uncanny ability to spot hidden defects of character, faith, and morals.

“Remember that banker up in Redding—the one you were going to make chairman of your campaign finance committee?”

Veatch nodded glumly. “The child molester.”

“Well, who spotted him right off?”

Veatch sighed. “Okay. Go ahead. You and Draper size him up and if he looks good, hire him.” He turned to Haere. “But he’ll be working for you—not me. Understand?”

“Perfectly,” Haere said.

Morgan Citron was slicing some carrots into his new batch of
pot au feu
when they knocked on the door of Unit A. Still carrying the knife and the carrot, he crossed to the door and opened it. Louise Veatch stood there, smiling. Draper Haere was just behind her.

“Mr. Citron?” she said.

Citron nodded. “Somehow,” he said, “I don’t think you two’re the Jehovah's Witness folks.”

“My name's Mrs. Veatch,” she said, extending her hand. “Mrs. Baldwin Veatch.”

“I know,” Citron said, accepting her hand.

“And this is my friend and associate, Mr. Haere.”

Citron looked at Haere, who moved his still-bandaged right hand in a small apologetic gesture.

“Draper Haere, right?” Citron said. “The money man.”

Despite himself, Haere was pleased by the recognition. He smiled and said, “We were wondering if we might talk to you.”

“All right,” Citron said. “Come in.”

Louise Veatch and Haere entered the apartment and looked around. What they saw made them keep their expressions carefully neutral. Citron smiled. “Not exactly your basic Malibu sybaritism.”

“Not exactly,” Louise Veatch said.

“Sit down,” Citron said, waving them to the Formica table and its molded plastic chairs. “Coffee?” “If it's no bother,” Haere said.

“It's instant,” Citron said and moved to the Pullman kitchen's small stove, where a pot of water was boiling. He spooned instant coffee into three mismatched mugs and poured the water. “I’ve got sugar, but no cream.”

Louise Veatch said she drank hers black; Haere asked for sugar. Citron served the coffee, sat down at the table, leaned back in his chair, smiled slightly, and waited for the pitch to begin.

“Craigie Grey told me you were looking after her place,” Louise Veatch said. “Have you known Craigie long?”

“Not long.”

“Craigie's—well, Craigie's unique.”

“She seems to be.”

Haere took up the indirect interrogation. “You were in Africa not too long ago.”

“It's been a little more than a year now.”

Haere nodded as if grateful for being corrected on some minor point. “I remember reading about it—when you got back to Paris. It was a wire-service story, I think. AP.”

“They all moved it,” Citron said. “AP, UPI, Reuters. And then it died. Thank God.”

“You never wrote anything about it yourself though, did you?” Louise Veatch said. She looked around the room again. “This looks as if it would be a good place to write. Maybe even a book.”

“I’m not writing a book, Mrs. Veatch.”

Haere nodded, this time sympathetically. “It must’ve been a lousy experience—being in jail there, I mean.”

“Yes,” Citron said. “It was.”

“My father was a newspaperman,” Haere said, wondering why he even mentioned it. He then uncharacteristically tacked on yet another autobiographical note. “Down South. In Birmingham.”

Citron smiled pleasantly.

It was Louise Veatch who asked the question Citron had been anticipating. “Was he—well, was he really a cannibal?”

Citron shrugged. “That's what a lot of people say, anyway.”

Louise Veatch leaned back in her chair. She looked at Citron and smiled slightly. Haere took it to be her stamp of approval and decided to get to the point. “You don’t have anything scheduled right now, then?”

“No,” Citron said. “Nothing much.”

“Would you be interested in taking something on?”

“It depends.”

“Of course. ButwhatImeanis, areyou free to takeonsomething?”

“I’m free.”

Louise Veatch leaned her elbows on the table and dropped her voice down into a lower register. It made her tone throaty and confidential. It sounded to Citron something like a born conspirator's voice. “A friend of ours got killed up in the Colorado mountains just
outside of Denver yesterday.” She paused and looked at Haere. “Was it just yesterday?”

Haere nodded.

“We think he was murdered.”

“Well,” Citron said because she seemed to expect him to say something.

“His name was Replogle. Jack Replogle.”

“Replogle Construction?” Citron said.

Haere looked surprised. “You knew him?”

Citron shook his head. “I used to see his signs in some of the countries I moved around in.”

“The hot countries.”

“Right,” Citron said. “The hot countries.”

Louise Veatch looked at Haere. “Tell him what happened, Draper.”

Haere again repeated everything Jack Replogle had told him about Singapore and Drew Meade and how Meade, according to the two FBI agents, had gone missing. Citron listened, made no notes, but asked Haere to repeat the names of the FBI agents. When Haere had finished, there was a silence, which was broken when Citron shoved his chair back, rose, and moved to the stove, where he picked up the knife and resumed slicing the remainder of the carrot into the
pot au feu
.

“Smells good,” Haere said. “What is it?”

“Stew,” Citron said, put down the knife, turned, and leaned against the sink, his arms folded across his chest as he examined the attractive, well-dressed woman and the man with the despairing face. Citron sensed that they were more than mere political colleagues. They spend a lot of time in bed together, he told himself, and was mildly surprised to find that he approved of the notion. It had been two years at least since Citron had last approved or disapproved of anything.

“What you want then is just the political stuff—the dynamite this guy Meade said he had.”

“That's right,” Haere said. “Just the political stuff.”

Citron looked at Louise Veatch. “Who’d I be working for—your husband?”

“For me,” Haere said.

Citron continued to stare at Louise Veatch. “But for your husband really—at one remove.”

“My husband, Mr. Citron, knows nothing about this.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“If you believed it,” she said, “Mr. Haere wouldn’t hire you.”

Citron smiled. “Deniability, I think they’re calling it.”

“Or covering our ass,” Haere said.

Citron looked at Haere. “You don’t care who killed him?— Replogle, I mean.”

“I care,” Haere said. “I care very much, but Jack Replogle was dying of cancer, so whoever killed him put him out of his misery. We’ll let the cops and the FBI do their job and we’ll do ours. And if the stuff that he bought from Drew Meade does what he hoped it would do, it can be his memorial.”

“You’re sure it wasn’t just a hit-and-run accident and nothing more?”

Draper Haere looked down at his bandaged hands. “I’m sure.”

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.”