Missionary Stew (30 page)

Jacques and Cecilio parked and locked the van. They entered the park and, after a few inquiries, were directed to Captain Vadillo, who sat dozing in the sun, conserving his strength for the battles yet to come.

Jacques addressed the captain by name and said, “We have a strange request.”

The captain eyed them with absolute suspicion. “And it is what?”

“We come from the Inter-Continental Hotel, where a crazed North American paid us a small fortune to deliver a case of Scotch whisky and three cartons of Marlboro cigarettes to a friend of his. The friend is another North American with a rare name.”

“What is the friend's rare name?”

“Morgan Citron.”

“And where is he supposed to be?”

“In the Presidential Palace,” Cecilio said. “Detained for some minor irregularity.”

“Are you Cuban?” the Captain said. “You speak like a Cuban.”

“Do we look like Cubans?” Cecilio said.

“There are many black Cubans.”

“We are Haitian.”

“I would not help you if you were Cuban.”

“We would not expect you to.” Cecilio smiled at the captain. “Shall we say two bottles of Scotch whisky and two cartons of Marlboro cigarettes?”

“Three,” the captain said. “Three each.”

“Done.”

“Wait for me here,” the captain said.

He returned from the Presidential Palace in fifteen minutes and told them, “The North American is no longer in the palace.”

“Ah,” Jacques said. “

He is in the federal prison.”

“Well.”

“He is to be shot tomorrow morning.”

“A pity,” Cecilio said. He looked at Jacques, who nodded sadly at the news. “Then we must surely get his whisky and cigarettes to him today,” Jacques said.

The two Haitians turned and started in the direction of the rented van. Jacques turned back with a smile. “Coming, Captain?” he asked.

The captain hurried after them and the promised whisky and cigarettes.

Morgan Citron stood with his back to the high stone wall and watched the squad of soldiers fumble with their rifles. Something was wrong with their barrels, which were bent like candles left in the sun. A woman's voice said, “You are still far too thin.” He turned and looked up at the top of the wall. Miss Cecily Tettah of Amnesty International sat astride the wall as she lowered a rope ladder with glass rungs. Citron was worrying about whether the glass rungs would bear his weight when he awoke in the cell of the federal prison.

He sat up on the edge of the stone bed. He was not surprised that he had slept. Almost half the time he had spent in the Emperor-President's prison had been spent in sleep—in fast time, as prisoners everywhere called it. He reached into the plastic bucket and brought out the gold Rolex. He wiped it off on the trousers of the suit he had bought at Henshey's in Santa Monica. According to the watch, he had slept an hour.

It took Citron only two minutes to remove the gold expansion band from the Rolex. He put the watch itself back into the waste bucket, rose, moved to the barred door, and started calling for the guard.

After five minutes the guard shuffled down the corridor and stopped in front of the cell door. He was a round-shouldered, bleak-eyed man who had the beginnings of a potbelly. His uniform no longer fitted him. Citron estimated the guard's age to be a few years
past forty, which was good. Ambition had gone, or was going. A younger guard might still have hope.

“You do not have to scream,” the guard said. “My post is only a few meters away.”

“How was I to know?” Citron said.

The guard thought about it and then nodded. “True.” He paused. “What do you want?”

“I want food and beer and coffee.”

The guard almost smiled. “Perhaps a nice steak?”

“I will pay.”

“With what?”

Citron held up the watch band. “With gold.”

The sight of gold produced its usual response. The guard smiled and squinted and licked his upper lip. He looked quickly to his right and left, and then back at the gold band that swung in a small arc from Citron's fingers. “Real gold?” the guard whispered.

“Eighteen-carat.”

“Perhaps some beans and rice with your steak?”

“And beer and coffee,” Citron said.

“Yes, of course. Beer and coffee. I will be back in thirty minutes.” He turned to leave but stopped at the sound of Citron's voice.

“Wait.”

“What?”

“Do you have any relatives?”

“Yes. Many.”

“And some of them perhaps plan to emigrate soon to the States?”

“My youngest sister and her cousin.”

“Bring me a notebook and a pen and I will write in it. When your sister and her cousin get to the States they can take the notebook to a man in California who will pay them for it. He will pay them at least two thousand dollars.” Citron paused. “Perhaps more. The man is generous.”

The guard hesitated. “What will you write? In the notebook?”

Citron smiled. “A story,” he said.

After the guard returned with the food and the drink and the notebook and the ballpoint pen, and after he bit into the gold band to test its quality, and after the food was eaten and the beer and the coffee drunk, Citron settled down on the stone bed with the notebook. He opened it and on the first page wrote Draper Haere's name and address in Venice and then: “Draper: Please pay the bearer (or bearers) $2,000 for this—or more, if you like their looks. Regards, Morgan Citron.”

After that, Citron wrote steadily for four hours. And because it was a strange tale that demanded a cold and logical style, he wrote in French.

When Gladys Citron arrived at Miami International Airport, she went to a phone booth and used her telephone credit card to call a man at his home in Middleburg, Virginia. The man was retired now from government service and had been for nearly four years. Gladys Citron had known him for nearly forty years. She had once saved his life in 1944 near Cannes. When the man seemed reluctant to do what she asked him to do, she reminded him of 1944 and Cannes.

“Gladys,” the man said, “looking back on it all, you didn’t really do me any favor.”

“Come on, Harley.”

“You really want to do me a favor, you’d come up here and we’d have a few drinks, and then I’d hand you my shotgun, that Purdey I bought in ‘forty-five in London, remember? And then you could do me a real favor.”

“Call them, Harley.”

The man sighed. “Call me back in thirty minutes,” he said and hung up.

Gladys Citron entered an airport cocktail lounge and ordered a martini, the first martini she had tasted in five years. A forty-year-old Cuban with eyes the color of hot fudge tried to pick her up and it
helped pass the time. She ended it by paying for both her and the Cuban's drink, went back to the pay phone, and again called the man in Middleburg. He answered the phone on the first ring.

“I’ve got bad news,” he said. “You ready?”

“I’m ready.”

“According to a cable they got from the charge down there, a guy called Rink, not a bad guy, by the way, well, the good general court-martialed your son today and they’re going to shoot him tomorrow morning at six A.
M
., which would be seven A.
M
. Eastern Standard Time.”

“I see,” Gladys Citron said.

“That's my Gladys,” the man said. “Tell her the fuckin’ world's coming to an end at noon and she says, ‘I see.’“ “

It's solid, this information?” she said.

“They read me the fuckin’ cable, Gladys. This guy Rink says he thinks the general himself maybe due for the drop. They got a counterrevolution going on down there and Rink thinks it just might work.”

“I see,” she said. “Well, thank you, Harley.”

“For what?”

After she hung up, Gladys Citron sat in the phone booth for at least two minutes until she dropped another coin in and dialed B. S. Keats's number from memory. When Keats answered she told him she had just arrived at the airport and suggested they meet in one hour at the place where they usually met when they didn’t want anyone to know they were meeting. Keats asked if she had heard anything. Gladys Citron said she had and that was what she wanted to talk about.

She drove in her rented Chevrolet past the Bob's Big Boy restaurant and parked a block away. She walked back to the restaurant, went in, ordered a cup of coffee, and took it over to the booth where B. S. Keats sat with a Coca-Cola in front of him.

Gladys Citron put the coffee on the table and sat down in the booth across from Keats. She held her large Coach purse in her lap.

“Well?” Keats said.

“They’re going to shoot him in the morning. My son.”

“That ain’t so, Gladys.”

“He's going to have him shot. Our friend, the general.”

“Never happen. Never.”

“Did you set him up—my son?”

“Me? Christ, I got my little girl down there. I even sent my two French niggers down just to make sure nothing happened to her or him. It's gotta be some kind of fuckup, Gladys. That's what it's gotta be.”

“I know you set him up, B. S.” she said, took the .32 caliber Colt automatic from her purse, and shot him under the table three times. Keats clutched his stomach, said something she couldn’t understand, slumped forward over the table, and knocked over his Coca-Cola. Gladys Citron rose and shot him through the head, then turned and walked out of the restaurant. There were three other customers in the Bob's Big Boy restaurant, plus the staff. None of them tried to stop her.

She turned in the rented car at the airport and checked on the earliest flight out. It was American's Flight 138 nonstop to Kansas City. She paid cash for a first-class one-way ticket and gave her name as Mrs. Gordon Percy.

Seated in the first-class section of the DC-9, drinking the second martini she had had in five years, Gladys Citron came to the sensible conclusion that she might have gone quite mad. Her mind turned then to the comforting thought of suicide. When she arrived in Kansas City, she would check into a nice hotel, perhaps the Muehl-bach, if it was still functioning, order dinner and a good wine up to her room, take a long bath, and think about suicide some more. It just might get her through the night. The thought did, in fact, get her all the way to Kansas City, where she was arrested by two homicide detectives as she came off the plane.

CHAPTER 34

Draper Haere and Velveeta Keats walked back to the Inter-Continental from the U.S. embassy. They walked because all taxis seemed to have disappeared and because Haere said he wanted to. The streets were almost deserted except for Jeeps and army trucks filled with soldiers, most of whom seemed to be sixteen years old. Sometimes Velveeta Keats would take flash pictures of them with her Polaroid camera. None of the pictures turned out very well. Velveeta Keats didn’t seem to mind. After she examined each picture and showed it to Haere, she threw it away.

“Why take them?” he said.

“I like to see if what I see is what other people see.” “And is it?”

“I don’t think so. I think other people see more than I do. When I look at the pictures I see a lot of things I missed. That's why I use a Polaroid. I don’t like to wait. Not for anything.” She stopped, turned, and aimed the camera at Haere. He looked into its lens, unsmiling. She pushed the red button. The camera whirred and the picture rolled out. They continued walking as Velveeta Keats watched the picture develop.

She stopped and looked from the picture to Haere and back again. “You really are sad, aren’t you? I mean, way down deep inside.”

Haere smiled, took the picture from her, and looked at it. “Is that what you see?”

She nodded. “I thought it was just the wayyour face grew, you know, sort of accidental. But you really are sad. Not depressed. Just sad.”

Haere could think of nothing to say, so he gave the picture back to her. She said, “I think I’ll keep this one,” and put it away in her purse. They walked on in silence, listening to the distant gunfire.

“How far away are they?” she asked.

“A mile maybe. It could be less.”

“I wonder what Morgan's doing.”

“I don’t know.”

She stopped again and stared at Haere. “We’re not going to let them shoot him, are we? I mean, we’re going to get him out. Somehow.”

“Sure we are,” Haere lied. “Somehow.”

The lobby of the Inter-Continental was jammed with print and television reporters and their crews. Most of them were Americans, but there was also a sprinkling of Europeans. They were all bunched around the reception desk, shouting their demands, elbowing each other out of the way, cursing the hotel management, and declaring their individual and corporate importance.

“Jesus,” Velveeta Keats said. “Where’d they all come from?”

“I guess they want in on the kill,” Haere said. He looked around the lobby and spotted a tall, mournful, almost middle-aged man who stood leaning against the wall as he sipped reflectively from a pint of Smirnoff vodka. Haere turned to Velveeta Keats. “Why don’t you go on up to your room and I’ll try to find out if these guys know anything.”

Velveeta Keats headed for the elevator. Haere went over to the tall man and said, “You’re a long way from St. Louis, Nessie.”

The tall man turned and from his six-foot-five height stared down at Haere. Surprise replaced his mournful look. He even smiled.
The man was Nestor Leed, and for almost as long as Haere could remember Leed had covered Midwestern politics for the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
.

“Draper,” he said. “My God. So you’ve sunk to this—fomenting revolutions in banana republics.”

“Not me,” Haere said. “I’m a tourist. What the hell do you know about Central America?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's a learning experience. I’m joining management next month and they thought I could use a little foreign seasoning. I suggested London, but when this flared up they shipped me off down here—on the cheap.”

“You fly in with the rest of them?”

“Just barely. We all chartered a plane out of Miami. At first, they wouldn’t let us land. Then the rebels took the airport and so here we are.”

“When’d they take it—the airport?”

Leed looked at his watch. “About two hours ago. After we landed they held a press conference—the Committee of a Thousand Years. They claim they’ll have the whole city by morning. Noon at the latest. For such a ragtag bunch, they seemed awfully confident.” He offered Haere the pint of vodka. Haere had a sip, handed it back, and said, “It should be a hell of a story.”