Missionary Stew (23 page)

“Why?”

“What do you know about Tucamondo? I mean, what do you know for a fact?”

Haere looked at Citron. “You’re the writing traveler.”

“Well, it's larger than El Salvador, smaller than Belize, much poorer than both, and it's in a mess. But then it's always been in a mess ever since the Spanish first dropped anchor there in fifteen-something-or-other.”

MacAdoo shook his head. “It's more than a mess. It's a virtual anarchy. I mean that. There is no government.”

“There’re the generals,” Haere said.

MacAdoo began shaking his head again. “There are thirty-two generals who rule principalities, fiefdoms, some of them as large as fifty square miles, a few as small as twelve city blocks. There is no law. None. No accepted currency other than American dollars, gold, and drugs. The soldiers have become highwaymen, road agents, whatever you want to call them. The countryside is a deathtrap. Only the capital is relatively safe, and that's because it's ruled by a colonel-general called Carrasco-Cortes. He has the money to pay his soldiers.”

“Where’d he get it?” Haere asked.

MacAdoo shrugged. “We estimate that Carrasco-Cortes has enough money to last another three weeks, perhaps only two.”

“Then what?”

MacAdoo only shrugged again. “Chaos.”

“You didn’t answer Haere's question,” Citron said, “so let me put it another way. Where did this colonel-general, this Carrasco-Cortes, lay his hands on enough money to pay his troops?”

“I have no idea,” MacAdoo said. “None.”

“You know,” Citron said. “You have to know.” He turned to Haere. “And now we know what they don’t want us to know.”

“We’ve got some questions is all, but no answers.”

“Same thing,” Citron said.

“Maybe,” Haere said and turned back to MacAdoo. “What’re you, anyway, the stopper?”

MacAdoo smiled his loose-lipped Texas grin again. He had very white teeth that seemed almost perfect. “I’m just a cautioner, Mr. Haere. I’m only here to suggest that you folks go on back home and forget all about that little bitty country down there that nobody gives two hoots in hell about.”

“You could stop us easily enough,” Citron said. “All you’d have to do is have State yank our passports.”

“Well, sir, if we did that, then Mr. Haere might kick up all sorts of fuss in Washington—right, Mr. Haere?”

“I might.”

“What I really don’t understand,” Citron said slowly, “is why you’ve said what you have. You must know what we want, and now you’ve as much as told us how to go about getting it.”

MacAdoo produced his final smile. It's his good-bye smile, Haere thought, all thin and cold, all Princeton and Presbyterian. It was a smile of bleak predestination and sorry ends.

“We are fully content with having cautioned you,” MacAdoo said, a bit of piety creeping into his tone from which all trace of Texas again had fled.

“Content,” Haere said. “That's a funny word.”

“Our contentment, Mr. Haere, stems from our utter certainty that should the three of you continue your journey to Tucamondo, then— well, we’ll never be bothered with you again.” MacAdoo glanced at his watch and rose. He frowned regretfully, as if late for some less enjoyable engagement, examined each of the seated trio in turn, seemed saddened by what he saw, and then said, “Good-bye, all.” After that he turned and left the paneled room in long strides that were almost a lope.

Haere turned to Citron. “Well, what d’you think?”

“I think we should have another drink.”

As Haere signaled for the old waiter, Velveeta Keats turned to Cit
ron, gnawed on her lower lip, and said, “I don’t know, Morgan, maybe I should’ve said something.”

“About what?”

“That colonel-general he was talking about.”

“Why?” Citron said. “I mean, why should you have said something?”

“I talked to my mama this morning down in Miami?” Velveeta Keats made it a question. Citron nodded. She looked at Haere, whose full attention she now had, and then back at Citron. “Well, I asked about Papa like I always do and she said he was in a meeting and—” She broke off to gnaw on her lower lip some more.

“And what?” Citron said.

“Well, Mama said Papa was in a meeting with a man and the man was a general and his name was Carrasco-Cortes.”

“Jesus,” Draper Haere said.

CHAPTER 26

When the telephone rang at 1:00 that same afternoon in Gladys Citron's living room, the blue-eyed man who sometimes called himself John D. Yarn rose from the wingback chair in which Drew Meade had died, crossed to the telephone, picked it up, and said hello. The voice that screamed into his ear made him wince, lower the phone, and press it against his chest. He turned to Gladys Citron.

“It's him,” Yarn said, “and he's not happy.”

Gladys Citron glanced first at the brown-eyed man seated on the couch, the one who sometimes called himself Richard Tighe. He shrugged. She put down her drink, rose, crossed to the phone, and accepted it from Yarn. She removed a pearl earring, put the phone to her left ear, and said, “Well?”

“Goddamnit, Gladys!”
The voice was loud enough to be considered a yell, and it belonged to B. S. Keats, who was yelling from Florida.

“ ‘Goddamnit, Gladys’ isn’t going to get us anywhere, B. S.,” she said and motioned for Yarn to hand her the drink she had put down. Yarn gave her the glass and then lit a cigarette, which he also handed her.

“You claimed that kid of yours was gaga,” Keats said, almost screeching the words. “That he had scrambled eggs for brains.” The
screech dropped back down to a yell. Tighe had risen from the couch and moved over to stand by Yarn. Gladys Citron had lifted the phone away from her ear. Both men had heard Keats's voice quite clearly. It sounded like tin being torn.

“I told you he was disturbed, B. S. That's all. That he was suffering from depression.”

“Depression, huh? Well, your melancholy baby who wasn’t supposed to be able to find his ass with both hands sure as shit seems to have snapped out of it. You know where he is right now?”

“Probably on a plane.”

“And you know who's with him?”

“Your daughter.”

“My daughter, the nut case.”

“I met her this morning,” Gladys Citron said and paused to take a swallow of her drink. “I found her rather sweet and charming in a fey sort of way.”

“You did, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Well, guess who they took along as keeper, my fruitcake daughter and your Sad Sam son?”

“Keeper?”

“That's right. Keeper.”

“Who?”

“Draper Haere.”

There was a long silence that was finally broken when Gladys Citron said, “I see.”

“You fucked up, Gladys.” Keats was no longer shouting. His voice had grown soft and almost tender. Gladys Citron interpreted the new tone as a threat, a quite serious threat.

“We warned Haere off,” she said.

“We? You mean those two gigolos of yours? Shit, they couldn’t warn flies off a peach.”

“You’re wrong.”

Keats sighed. “I hate to say this, Gladys, but it sure looks like you just went and fucked up everything.”

“I don’t fuck things up, B. S. I straighten things out. Let me remind you of a couple of items. More than a couple. When your daughter was playing Crazy Mary down in Miami, and about to go to the police, I lured her out here with an invitation from a movie-star landlady to come live on the beach in Malibu. And after Colorado, when we suspected Draper Haere would start looking for a professional snoop, I managed to lumber him with my own son, who, I felt then and still feel, is so emotionally damaged he's virtually useless. Then let's not forget old Drew Meade. I took care of that little problem, too. So now we have another one: Draper Haere. But he's really no big problem. My people can leave this afternoon and be in Tucamondo early tomorrow morning.”

There was a silence from the Florida end and then Keats said, “Well, you did use your own kid, I gotta admit that.”

“And one more thing, B. S. I brought you in on this deal, which is something else you might remember occasionally.”

“I don’t forget anything.” There was another brief silence which lasted until Keats said, “I’ll give you credit, Gladys, it's one sweet deal.”

“How's the general?”

“He's all set and on his way back.”

“Then there's no reason why we can’t proceed.”

“None except for this Haere fella.”

“I’ll take care of that.”

“Gladys.”

“What?”

“I don’t want Velveeta hurt.”

“No. Of course not.”

“I mean, I don’t want her touched.”

“She won’t be.”

“Well, just to make sure, I’m gonna be sending my two French nig
gers down there tonight, and you might as well know if anything happens to Velveeta, well, my two niggers will have to take care of that boy of yours.”

“I see.” She looked up, studied the ceiling for several seconds, then sighed and said, “B. S., I’m going to say something very simply and I want you to listen most carefully.”

“I’m listenin’.”

“If your people touch my son, I’ll kill you.” She slammed down the phone and finished her drink in three long swallows.

Yarn grinned at her. “Think he believed you?”

“Hell, I believed her,” Tighe said. “Why wouldn’t he?”

She looked first at Yarn, then at Tighe. “There's a three
P
.
M
. flight to Miami.”

“We’ll be on it,” Tighe said.

Gladys Citron looked at her watch. It was 1:10. “Well,” she said, “nap time.” She reached up and ran her forefinger gently down Yarn's right jawline, turned, and went down the hall that led to her bedroom. Yarn started to follow, but paused at the entrance to the hall, turned back, and looked at Tighe. “Coming?”

“Yeah, sure,” Tighe said. “In a second.”

The only other passengers on Tucaereo Flight 9 to the capital, Ciudad Tucamondo, were a thirty-four-year-old American and a young, drably dressed Venezuelan woman who tried to make herself invisible and who, Haere suspected, was a mule for some cocaine smuggler now homeward bound.

The American and the Venezuelan woman had thriftily bought tourist seats, but were promptly moved up into the first-class section once the plane was in the air. There, all five passengers were cosseted by the purser and the five flight attendants until they could eat and drink no more. Finally convinced they could do nothing else for their
passengers, the crew gathered in the front of the first-class section and either slept or gossiped among themselves for the rest of the four-hour flight.

After his opening conversational gambit was rebuffed by the young Venezuelan woman, the American went looking for someone else to talk to. His glance fell on the face of the melancholy saint who sat by himself across the aisle from the remaining two passengers, the man and the woman who slept leaning against each other. The American moved down the aisle and stopped at the seat of the saint, who was staring out the window into the dark.

The American cleared his throat. Draper Haere looked up at him.

“First trip down here?” the American said.

“Very first.”

“Mine, too,” the man said and slid into the seat next to Haere. He held out his hand. As Haere reached for it, the man said, “I’m Jim Blaine.”

Haere brightened. “Any relation to James G. Blaine?”

“That's my full name, all right. Where's the James G. you know from?”

“From Maine,” Haere said. “A long time ago. He wanted to be President but never quite made it.”

“All my relatives are from Kansas. Not too many Blaines in Wichita, where I’m from, but there’re a lot over in Kansas City, except most of that's in Missouri, you know.”

Haere nodded his understanding and asked, “What takes you down to Tucamondo?”

“Well, it's sort of a funny story. I’m a doctor, an M.D., and I’m going down there for the Friends—you know, the Quakers?” Haere nodded again.

“The folks down there need doctors,” Blaine said. “They need’em real bad from what I hear.” He shook his head regretfully. It was a largish head with a high forehead, made even higher by a rapidly retreating hairline. Blaine had grown a blond mustache beneath his snub
nose, and under the mustache was a small, almost prim mouth that rested uneasily on a sledgehammer chin. Blaine's eyes went with the chin rather than the mouth. The eyes were sky-blue, almost unblinking, or perhaps just steady, and curiously skeptical. Haere wondered what Blaine specialized in and decided that whatever it was, he must be good at it.

“Are you going to work in a hospital?” he asked.

Blaine gave his big head a decisive shake. “A clinic out in the boonies. The Friends set it up a couple of years back. It did okay until about two months ago when somebody disappeared the guy who was running it.” He shook his head almost angrily and the big chin seemed to take an apparently fearless swipe at the world. “He was a friend of mine,” Blaine continued. “Joe Rice. We started out in the first grade and went through med school together. So when they disappeared him, I thought, well, the hell with it. I got in touch with the Friends, farmed out my patients to some other guys, kissed the wife and kids goodbye, and here I am.” He smiled. “Damn fool thing to do, I guess.”

“It sounds more dangerous than foolish,” Haere said.

“I’m not a Quaker, you understand,” Blaine said, then paused. “Hell, I don’t guess I’m anything. Haven’t seen the inside of a church in twenty years. Didn’t even get married in one. But Joe Rice, he was a Quaker.” Blaine smiled. “When we were kids, real little kids, I used to try and knock it out of him.” He chuckled. “He’d beat the shit out of me. Some Quaker.”

“There's no word about what happened to him?” Haere asked.

“Nothing. One day he started off for the clinic in his car, and zap. That was it. They never even found the car. There's no law down there, you know. I mean, they got soldiers and what they call federal police, but there's no law.”

“So I hear.”

“Well, maybe I can cure a few sick folks. Set a few broken bones. Deliver a few babies. Old Jim wrote me once that he was getting to be
a specialist in gunshot wounds. Maybe that's why they took him. He patched up the wrong people.”