Missionary Stew

Chapter 31

Draper Haere walked back to the Inter-Continental from the American embassy. It was a four-mile walk that led him past the Presidential Palace. He paused to examine the bullet holes in the wall where the President had been executed and wondered if the generals might someday commemorate the spot with a plaque.

Haere walked slowly, because it was hot and because the leisurely pace enabled him to gawk at whatever caught his interest: a three-hundred-year-old Spanish colonial house, a pair of eleven-year-old prostitutes, a forty-one-year-old Buick Roadmaster taxi, and a man in his late twenties who played the guitar while his five-year-old son sang a sad song about how desperately poor they were and held out an International Harvester cap into which no one but Haere dropped any money.

Across the square from the cathedral in a large crowded outdoor cafe, Haere found a vacant table and ordered a cup of coffee. He was halfway through the cup when a man sat down beside him. The man was young, somewhere around twenty-three or twenty-four, and wore a white short-sleeved shirt and dark pants. Haere thought he looked vaguely familiar.

“Naturally, you do not remember me,” the man said in English which had almost no accent.

“You look familiar.”

“Really? I’m surprised.”

“Why?”

“Busboys are rarely remembered.”

It came to Haere then. “At the hotel last night. You replaced the napkins that didn’t need replacing.”

The man smiled politely as though Haere had remarked upon the weather. “We are being watched. In a moment a taxi will arrive. I will get into it. You will remain here. They will follow me. Agreed?”

Haere nodded. “What’s the problem?”

“Please listen carefully,” the man said and looked up at the sky as if to check on the chance of rain. “The man your Mr. Citron met with this morning has been murdered. Smile, please.”

Haere made himself smile. “And Citron?”

The man smiled back. “He was taken to the Presidential Palace by two North Americans. In their early thirties. They shot and killed the man who murdered our leader. Please laugh a little.”

Haere chuckled and nodded.

“Very good,” the busboy said. “The man who killed our leader arrived with you on the flight yesterday.”

“He called himself Dr. Blaine.”

“We have reason to believe he was a hired killer, one without politics, who was sent to kill both you and Mr. Citron. Another small laugh, if you can.”

Haere chuckled appreciatively. “The two North Americans who took Citron to the Presidential Palace?” he asked, still chuckling.

The busboy grinned broadly and wagged his head. “One had blue eyes, one had brown. That’s all I know.” He looked at his watch. “Please remain here until I’ve gone.”

Haere tried, but failed, to keep smiling as the busboy rose with a grin and made his way through the tables to the sidewalk. A taxi pulled up. Haere noted that it was the same 1941 Buick Roadmaster he had seen earlier. The busboy reached for the rear door handle. He had his hand on it when two men in open-necked shirts, sport coats, and blue jeans moved up to him from behind and jammed short-barreled revolvers into his back. The busboy tried to wrench the Buick’s door open, but the old taxi was already pulling away when the two men with the revolvers began firing.

One man shot the busboy three times; the other man shot him twice. The old Buick sped away and a woman screamed. Some café patrons rose and began to race toward the cathedral, either to hide or to pray. Others ducked beneath the café tables. There were more screams and shouts. One man cursed steadily in a low, calm voice. Haere watched as one of the two gunmen knelt by the fallen busboy and shot him through the neck. Haere wondered why, since the bus-boy already seemed quite dead.

The kneeling man rose and said something to the other gunman. Both turned to look at Haere. Still staring at him, they slowly put their short-barreled revolvers away in small belt holsters. They entered the café, made their way through the tables, and stopped at Haere’s. He saw that they were younger than he had thought, neither of them much more than twenty-five. Their black eyes seemed bottomless. Neither wore any identifiable expression, although one of them, Haere noticed, was a mouth breather. The mouth breather was the one who had knelt and shot the busboy through the neck.

“Do you understand Spanish?” the mouth breather asked.

Haere nodded. “A little.”

“Good. Leave our country. Today.”

“Do you understand that?” the other one asked.

“Yes,” Haere said. “I understand.”

“Good,” the mouth breather said. They stared at Haere for a moment longer, then turned and walked back through the tables to the sidewalk and over to where the busboy still lay. A new green Volvo sedan pulled up. The driver popped the trunk latch. The two gunmen bent down, picked up the dead busboy, and folded him away into the Volvo’s trunk. They slammed the lid down, turned, gave Haere another thoughtful look, and then climbed into the rear seat. The Volvo sped away.

Haere rose. His knees felt as if they were going to give way, so he leaned on the table, his head down, gulping great gasping breaths. When the trembling finally subsided, he looked up. People were staring at him. They had all edged away until none was closer than twenty feet. Haere moved slowly through the café tables and onto the sidewalk. He looked down at the spot where the dead busboy had fallen. There was a large thick smear of blood. Haere stared down at it for several seconds, then slowly turned and started walking west toward the Inter-Continental.

In the Presidential Palace, Morgan Citron had been kept waiting for almost an hour in an anteroom just outside a pair of sixteen-foot-high doors through which Tighe and Yarn had gone. Citron did not wait alone. Seated across the room from him were a young uniformed captain and an even younger lieutenant, both armed with M-16 rifles. The rifles were pointed at Citron, one at his head, the other at his stomach. The fingers of the two young officers were on the triggers. The safeties were off. Citron sat virtually motionless, remembering that the last time he had gone through such a pair of doors, he had been given a diamond. This time he expected no gift.

One of the sixteen-foot-high doors opened and Tighe appeared. “Okay, Morgan.”

Citron rose and followed Tighe through the immense door and into a room that was too large for any conceivable purpose other than a state ball. It was a dark room, made even darker by the heavy curtains that covered a long row of windows. Citron suspected the windows looked out over the grounds that led to the street. The entire room was paneled in a wood so dark it seemed almost black. The paneling only added to the gloom.

Citron followed Tighe across several large, old, and very expensive looking oriental rugs and past a long library table that held the current issues of the Economist, Business Week, Time, National Geographic, and People. Citron read the magazine’s names as he moved past the table and toward the desk at the room’s far end. The desk was the size of a dining table that would seat twelve comfortably and seemed to have been carved out of the same dark wood used to panel the room.

On the front right corner of the desk, his legs crossed, his hands clasping one knee, perched Colonel-General Rafael Carrasco-Cortes. Three leather armchairs were pulled up in front of the desk. Yarn was seated in one of them. Carrasco-Cortes smiled at Citron and gestured toward the center chair. “Please,” he said. Citron took the center chair and Tighe sat down next to him.

“So,” the General said. “You are Gladys’s son, hmm?”

Citron nodded. The general sighed. “Whatever are we to do with you, hmm?”

“Why not put me on the next plane out?”

The general smiled and eased himself off the edge of the desk. He was not wearing a uniform. Instead, he wore a dark-blue pinstripe suit with a vest and a white shirt and a blue-and-gray-striped tie. As he moved around behind the desk, Citron wondered if the general and Draper Haere bought their suits at the same store.

The general sat down, opened a drawer, took out a piece of Kleenex, removed his rimless bifocals, and began to polish them. Without the glasses, his eyes looked almost bewildered. Citron knew that they weren’t.

Still polishing away, the general said, “I’m going to ask you to do something, Morgan.” He looked up. “I hope you don’t mind if I call you Morgan, but I’ve known your remarkable mother for so many, many years that calling you Mr. Citron makes me feel — well, old.” He smiled and slipped the glasses back on.

“What’re you going to ask me to do?” Citron said.

“I’m going to ask you to tell me exactly what you told our two friends here earlier.”

Citron looked at Yarn. “This isn’t quite the way it was supposed to go.”

Yarn shrugged. “All bets are off.”

“You see, Morgan,” the general said, “what I’m trying to decide is whether to have you shot. I must confess that at the moment I’m leaning in that direction. This little session here will be, in effect, your trial — although I suppose court-martial would be more accurate.”

Tighe turned to Citron with a grin. “I’m your defense attorney.”

Citron nodded, turned to Yarn, and said, “What’re you — the prosecutor?”

“Right,” Yarn said.

“What’s the charge?”

“We’re going for espionage and see what happens.”

The general took a large gold watch from his vest pocket, snapped its cover open, and placed it on the desk. “Could we begin with your statement, Morgan, hmm? I do have a rather busy schedule today.”

“I don’t have much choice, do I?”

“None,” Tighe said.

“You put up a great defense.”

Tighe shrugged. Citron looked at the general, who was now leaning back in his chair, his hands steepled in front of him. “All right,” Citron said, “I’ll tell you what I know, what I think I know, and what I suspect. A lot of it’s conjecture.”

“Of course,” the general said and nodded encouragingly.

“After you lined the President up in front of the wall out there and shot him, you found that the coffers were bare. The country was bankrupt and you needed money. As I recall, before your coup the country was divided, mostly for administrative purposes, I guess, into two states or regions — the Eastern Region and the Western Region. You carved it up into thirty-two regions and parceled them out to the other generals according to seniority. You kept the largest region — the capital — for yourself.”

“All this is common knowledge,” the general said.

“A lot of what I know is only that — common knowledge.”

The general nodded. “Continue.”

“You needed money,” Citron said. “You needed it for yourself and to pay your troops and to keep a semblance of order. But because of your human-rights record, which I think is usually called ‘appalling,’ Washington was out. They couldn’t lend or give you a dime. Congress wouldn’t let them. So you turned to your friends in the CIA. You do have friends in the CIA, don’t you, general?”

The general smiled. “A few.”

“Well, even the CIA couldn’t slip you that kind of money under the table, but they came up with something just as good, although God knows where they got it. They came up with a ton or two of cocaine.” Citron looked at Yarn. “What was it, one or two? I’m not sure.”

“Two tons,” Yarn said. “And they got it by calling in some past favors.”

“Two tons of cocaine will fetch how much now?” Citron asked.

Tighe thought about it. “Seven hundred and fifty million a ton on the street,” he said. “But wholesale, about thirty-five to fifty million a ton.”

“Which wasn’t quite enough, right?” Citron said. No one answered, so he asked again. “Right?”

“Continue,” the general said.

“So you decided to buy the two tons of coke from the CIA with government money, steal it from yourselves, and then wholesale it in the States. And that’s what you did. All of you.”

Citron stopped talking. After seconds passed, Yarn turned to him. “I think the general would like a few more details.”

“I have to ask a question first,” Citron said.

The general nodded.

“How long have you known my mother?”

“Years. Twenty-five at least. We met in Barcelona.”

“Then you knew her when she was still with Langley.”

The general smiled his acknowledgment. “We were dear friends.”

“I can imagine,” Citron said. “So you went to her, described what you had in mind, and — I suppose — offered to cut her in. She put you in touch with an ex-big-time coke dealer called B. S. Keats. And Keats lined you up with just the people you were really looking for — the Maneras brothers, Jimmy and Bobby. Or Roberto and Jaime.”

“Bobby was just in on the edge of things,” Tighe said.

“Right. So let’s talk about Jimmy, who was B. S. Keats’s son-in-law. He was also a double agent of sorts working for both Cuba and the FBI, and Jimmy must’ve been the one who brought you two in.” Citron looked first at Tighe and then at Yarn. Both men nodded slightly.

“You three worked out the details, am I right?” Citron said.

“The three of us — plus the general, of course.”

“I’ll bet you even had a name for it.”

“We thought we’d call it the Spookscam,” Yarn said, “but it never came to that.”

“It was cute, though,” Citron said. “The idea. The FBI supposedly would catch the CIA red-handed selling cocaine to finance the operation of a repressive Central American dictatorship. Imagine the flap.” He looked at Tighe. “What was in it for the Bureau — South America?”

“Sure,” Tighe said. “It was the Bureau’s peapatch originally, and they’d very much like it back. Central America, too.”

“So that’s how you sold it to them: catching Langley with its hands dirty. Very dirty. And that’s how you got that ton of money you needed to make the buy.”

Yarn smiled. “We just borrowed that from the narcs at DEA. It was confiscated money. We took about all they had.” The memory made Yarn smile some more.

Citron looked at the general. “I have one more question,” he said. “What’s my mother’s connection with B. S. Keats?”

“You don’t know?” Tighe asked.

Citron shook his head.

“She works for him,” Tighe said. “When B. S. got out of the coke trade a few years back, he had all these millions sloshing around, so he set up this dummy corporation and bought himself a going business, or controlling interest in it anyway. He bought the American Investigator.” Tighe paused. “He also bought himself a chain of shoestores, but they’re not doing so hot.”

“Please continue, Morgan,” the general said.

“Well, it’s pretty simple from here on. These two and maybe a half-dozen or so other special agents flew down with the money to make the buy. The CIA, of course, believed they were legitimate drug dealers. These two here stayed on the plane, I’d say, and loaded the coke on while the other FBI innocents paid over the money and then tried to arrest the CIA people. Well, from what I understand, the CIA wasn’t having any. The shooting started. Nine people died: four FBI agents and five CIA people. But the CIA still got what it was after: the money. So the ones who weren’t dead loaded the money up and delivered it here. You did get your money, didn’t you, general?”

The general only smiled.

Citron looked at Yarn. “And you two flew back with the coke, dumped it off with B. S. Keats to peddle, and then went on to Washington with your sad story of how you’d lost not only the coke and the money, but also four men in a shootout with the CIA. And then the cover-up started.” Citron shook his head dubiously. “Did they really believe you in Washington?”

“They didn’t have any choice,” Yarn said. “They couldn’t press charges or the whole story would’ve come out. So they made us swear a blood oath of silence and then fired us. Can you imagine that?”

“What about the other FBI agents — the ones who survived?”

“We took care of them financially — and the pilot,” Yarn said. “If you’ve got enough money you can take care of damn near anything.”

“Except one thing,” Citron said. “Jimmy Maneras. Something had to be done about him before he slipped what he knew to Cuba.”

“B. S. took care of that for us,” Tighe said. “He finally let Jimmy catch him in the sack with what’s-her-name, that daughter of his.”

“Velveeta,” Yarn said.

“Old Jimmy went wild, pulled a gun, and B. S. shot him dead.”

“In self-defense, of course,” Yarn said piously.

Citron nodded. “So that left only brother Bobby — a very scared brother Bobby who skipped to Singapore, where he sold what he knew to a washed-up old hack called Drew Meade who immediately peddled some of it to a political type called Jack Replogle. Replogle knew exactly what he wanted to do with it, only he got killed up in the mountains of Colorado before he could tell what he knew to Draper Haere.” Citron looked first at Yarn, then at Tighe. “Who killed Replogle — you two?”

Tighe nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“So, Morgan,” the general said, “what now, hmm?”

“Now?”

“Yes. Your prediction of events to come.”

“Well, now, I suppose, you take your millions and run. I don’t think you can hold this country together much longer. No one could. Another month or so and they’ll drag you out of here and put you up against that same wall out there.”

“I shall be long gone before that happens. I’ve almost decided on La Jolla — at least, for part of the year.”

“La Jolla’s nice,” Tighe said. “We’re kind of thinking of Buenos Aires.”

“Of course,” Yarn said, “the Bureau, and especially Langley, still aren’t too happy with us, but as long as we help keep it all under wraps, well, they’re not going to be too difficult. They’ve scratched the kitty litter up over worse than this.”

No one had anything else to say for almost a minute. Finally, the general sighed heavily and said, “You know, Morgan, sitting here listening to you just now, one phrase kept popping into my mind: loose cannon.”

Citron said nothing.

Again, the general sighed, even more heavily than before. “Gladys will never forgive me, but I’m afraid I’m going to have you shot.”

Citron only nodded and looked away. As usual, he thought, the prisoner showed no emotion. He merely shriveled up inside. Death in a very hot country. It was not an altogether unexpected end. Ever since Africa, he realized, he had been anticipating it somehow or, perhaps more accurately, dreading it.

“Well, at least you won’t rot in jail,” Yarn said.

Citron looked at him, still wearing no expression except for a certain deadness in the eyes. “Yes,” Citron said. “There’s that.”