Missionary Stew

Chapter 4

The name that Jack Replogle signed to checks and contracts was John T. Replogle. The T stood for Townsend. He built things. Or rather Replogle Construction, Inc., did. With its headquarters in Denver and offices in Jidda and Rome and Singapore, it built things all over the world — roads, docks, airfields, hospitals, pipelines, virtually anything. Replogle was the firm’s president and chief executive officer. He was both very rich and very smart, and if he had a hobby, it was politics.

Over the years Replogle had come to specialize in political fund-raising, which he always called “shaking down the flush-bottoms back East” — although back East to Replogle could mean Dallas or Tulsa or Kansas City or Chicago. Over the years he had shaken them down for close to forty million dollars.

It was around 10:00 when he and Draper Haere stopped in Idaho Springs for breakfast, a meal Haere had never been able to do without. Although he regularly skipped lunch, Haere could never deny himself breakfast, which was invariably the same: two eggs over easy; bacon or sausage; toast and hash browns, or — if he was in the South — grits. He had grown fond of grits in Birmingham.

Haere noticed the big high-sprung dark-blue pickup truck when they pulled into the café. It was a Dodge. He noticed it because of the angle parking that made it almost impossible not to read the sticker plastered across the pickup’s tailgate. The sticker read: “Is There Life After Death? Fuck with This Truck and Find Out.”

Replogle ordered only coffee, which he scarcely touched. He told Haere he didn’t eat much anymore and that the drugs he had to take made everything taste like brass. For some reason, however, the drugs didn’t affect the taste of liquor, so he was drinking more than he probably should, although at this point in his life he didn’t think anyone was bothering to keep score.

Back in the station wagon, Replogle again buckled his seat belt, and again Haere didn’t. But this time Replogle failed to go through the fighter-pilot-goggles business, either because he forgot, or because he thought that once a day for the old joke was enough.

They drove in silence for five minutes or so admiring the scenery. It had also snowed the night before in the mountains, and there was a seasonal accumulation of three or four feet on level ground and much deeper than that in the drifts. The snowplows had already been through that morning, and the highway was clear and even dry in places where the sun had managed to get at it.

Replogle lit another of his cigarettes and said, “When they told me they were going to have to cut, I decided to take a little trip.”

“How little?”

“Not so little. Around the world. I started in Jidda, where I fired a couple of guys and brought in three more. Then I doubled back to Rome, where I didn’t fire anybody because you can’t beat those Italians for hot-weather construction. I even hired a couple of real finds there and then flew on out to Singapore. That’s where it happened. In Singapore.”

“What?”

“What I’m going to tell you about, which is the reason you’re here.”

“Okay.”

“You know about me and Langley.” It wasn’t a question.

“No,” Haere said. “I don’t.”

“At least you suspected.”

“All right. I suspected.”

“You never said anything.”

Haere shrugged. “It wasn’t any of my business.”

“When’s that ever bothered you?”

“Okay,” Haere said. “I presumed.”

That seemed to mollify Replogle. “Okay, let’s say you also presumed that before anything gets built in some country where the weather’s hot and the people’re poor there’s going to be some graft — some dash, baksheesh, whatever you want to call it. Otherwise, the poor folks aren’t going to get their shiny new doctorless hospitals, or their four-lane highways going nowhere, or their brand-new international airports where they can go out every Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday and watch a twenty-year-old DC-8 drop in — maybe. At least none of these things — without graft — is going to be built by Replogle Construction. Instead, they’re all going to be built by the British or the Italians or those fucking Koreans, who’re getting to be a real menace. So. I’ve spread a little money around — right?”

He seemed to be expecting some sort of answer, so Haere said, “Right. Absolutely.”

“And the first thing you know the Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of Works and Progress, who’s been getting to work in his five-year-old VW, if he’s lucky, suddenly starts showing up in his brand-new chauffeur-driven BMW that he thinks nobody’s going to notice the way they would a new Mercedes, which is what he and his wife and his girlfriend really had their hearts set on. I’m making myself clear, I take it?”

“I thought Congress made them tax-deductible. Bribes, I mean.”

“Not if it’s against the law in the country where you hand out the grease. And I’m not talking about tipping the headwaiter. I’m talking about corruption. Big bucks.”

“You’re also exaggerating.”

“A little. But not much. Not much.”

“It’s an old story anyway,” Haere said.

“Old as the Pyramids — and the Acropolis and El Tajin and the fucking hanging gardens of Babylon. Nothing public ever got built clean. Not even by the WPA. I’m convinced.”

“So what happens?”

“So what happens is that I’m awarded the contract. And maybe four or five months or even a year later, I’m back out there where it’s hot in my air-conditioned suite at the Inter-Continental — it’s almost always the Inter-Continental, for some reason — and I’m trying to find out why my cement is still a little soupy, or why my steel I-beams are maybe a touch brittle — and the phone rings.”

“The phone rings,” Haere said.

“If it’s working that day, yeah. And on the phone is the second secretary or maybe the commercial attaché at the embassy who wants to know if he can drop by for a minute.”

“Whose embassy?”

“Ours.”

“Right. Ours.”

“Well, he shows up in his Haspel seersucker and his black knit silk tie and his lace-up cordovans and no, he doesn’t think he’ll have a drink because it’s still a tiny bit early for him, but I should go right ahead, if I really want one, and he’ll just have a Perrier, if I have it, but if not, no problem, club soda will do just fine. Well, already I’m a morning lush. So he talks about this and that for a while and then wants to know if there’s anything the embassy can do for me, because if there is, all I need to do is holler, except he doesn’t say holler because he went to Princeton or Yale or Harvard, like you, and Har-vards don’t say holler much.”

“I say it all the time.”

“Yeah, but you’re weird. Anyway, there’s a little more tiny talk and then right at the end, almost like a throwaway, he says, by the way, isn’t it delicious about old Iskander Soedibio, or Mohammed al-Harbi, or whatever the name is of the poor sap who’s driving around in the new BMW. Well, the Yalie’s got it all, of course — dates, time of day, and how much the juice was down to the dime.”

“You mean the spook from the embassy?”

“Yeah. The spook. And, of course, he claims Langley is just terribly sympathetic and fully understands and appreciates the problems of doing business in the hot countries, but frankly they’re rather concerned that neither Justice nor the SEC nor Congress — especially Congress — would understand quite so readily. That’s how they all talk. Well, not really, but something like that.”

“Then what?” Haere said.

“Then the quid pro quo, what else? I know damn well what would happen if some of Langley’s trained seals in the Senate or the House got hold of the fact that Replogle Construction was bribing permanent secretaries and ministers and their various cousins and brothers-in-law. What would happen is that I wouldn’t be rich anymore and you and me couldn’t shoehorn maybe one or two ugly but halfway honest guys into Congress every two years or so. I might even be poor like you. How’d you ever manage to stay so poor?”

“It’s a knack — like anything else.”

“It must be. Well, what they always wanted me to do—”

“Langley.”

“Yeah. Langley. What they always wanted me to do, and this has happened, with variations, maybe five or six times over the past fifteen years or so, is to put one or two of their guys on my payroll in some country where the weather’s hot. It’s not going to cost me anything because they’re going to feed it all back to me, the money, through the Somesuch Corporation in, let’s say, Liechtenstein. And the Langley guys on my payroll might even do a little work — maybe empty the pencil sharpeners or something.”

“You’re their cover, then?”

“Replogle Construction is.”

“How many?”

“On my payroll now? About fourteen.”

Haere turned it over in his mind for a moment or two and then said, “Then what’s the problem?”

“With Langley? None. Well, not yet anyway. I stumbled across something out in Singapore. Something really shitty. Something that could blow those fuckers out of the White House in ’eighty-four.” Replogle paused, and then went on. “If things were normal, I might just sit on it — to cover my own ass. But then I thought, what the hell, you’ll be dead soon, so what can they do? So I waited until the elections were over and then got in touch with Veatch. I figured Veatch and you’d know how to run with it best.” Replogle glanced at Haere as if expecting encouragement.

“Go on,” Haere said.

“Well, it was in Singapore, like I said, and this time I was staying at Raffles instead of the Inter-Continental. You ever stayed at Raffles?”

“I’ve never been to Singapore.”

“Well, I sometimes stay there because it’s old and it’s nice and I keep hoping I’ll run into some gorgeous Eurasian beauty I can run off to Bora Bora with, or at least bump into somebody tragic and seedy with stories to tell, but all you bump into at Raffles nowadays are the Japs and the blue-rinse set from Santa Barbara, because they’re about all who can afford it.”

“Except this last time,” Haere said.

“Right. He knocked on the door and there he was, right out of Maugham — shabby old suit, three-day beard, gin for breakfast — everything.”

“Who?”

“Meade.”

“Drew Meade.”

Replogle nodded.

“Jesus.”

Draper Haere had been barely twelve years old when Drew Meade, revealing himself for the first time as an undercover FBI agent, appeared as the star witness before an investigating U.S. Senate subcommittee. Meade swore that Haere’s father, the overage former private first class in the Americal division and, prior to that, a youngish lieutenant in Spain with the Lincoln Battalion (not brigade, kid, battalion), had been then and was indeed even yet a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the Communist Party (U.S.A.).

Out of more than mild curiosity, Draper Haere had kept track of Drew Meade over the years, finally losing both interest and Meade’s trail in the late sixties.

“I heard he went with Langley,” Haere said. “I heard he crossed over in ’sixty-one or — two — around in there.”

“ ’Sixty-one,” Replogle said. “He wound up in Laos in ’sixty-nine and by then he was maybe four or five years away from retirement, but he went into dope instead and Langley dumped him, very quietly.”

“He was dealing?” Haere said, unable to keep the surprise out of his tone.

Replogle nodded. “In a big way. But when I talked to him he was flat broke.”

“Where was this?”

“Up in my room. He knocked on my door, I opened it, and there he stood — just what I was hoping for: somebody to tell me a story.”

“How much did he want for it?”

“His story? Fifty thousand, but I knocked that down to ten grand pretty quick.”

“It still must be some story.”

“Yeah,” Replogle said, “it is.” He paused for a moment and then continued in his most precise engineering manner. “Meade came to me because, one, he remembered how close your dad and I always were; two, because he knew I could use what he was going to tell me; and three, because I could pay for it. Pay pretty good, in fact. That was the most important. Well, I had to give him the money first, and that meant a trip to the bank. Then he had to have a few drinks before he’d finally sit down and tell me how it all began six months ago down in Miami when Langley—”

Replogle never finished the secondhand story because the big blue Dodge pickup honked and pulled up on the left. Haere looked over. There were two persons in the pickup. Both wore ski masks. The pickup and the station wagon had reached a sharp curve in the deep canyon. On the station wagon’s right, some fifty or sixty feet below, was a frozen creek.

The pickup swerved, and its right front fender slammed into the station wagon, which went into a skid on a patch of ice. Haere later thought they must have been counting on that — the ice. Replogle did everything he was supposed to do. He kept his foot off the brake. He steered into the skid. He swore.

The station wagon plunged over the side. On either the first or second roll the right-hand door popped open and Draper Haere popped out. He landed in a snowbank. The station wagon somersaulted two more times, end over end, and smashed against some immense boulders at the creek’s edge. Two seconds later the gas tank exploded.

Haere got up and made himself stumble through the snow down to the burning car. He tried to open its front left door, but it was either jammed or locked. Haere burned his hands trying to get the door open. He finally could stand neither the heat nor the pain, so he moved backward, tripped over something, and sat back down in a snowbank. He jammed his scorched hands down deep into the snow and sat there watching Jack Replogle burn to death if, indeed, he wasn’t already dead. In either event, there was nothing Draper Haere could do about it.