Missionary Stew Read online

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  missionary

  stew

  Ross Thomas

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS

  ST. MARTIN’S MINOTAUR NEW YORK

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin's Press.

  MISSIONARY STEW. Copyright © 1983 by Ross Thomas. Introduction © 2004 by Roger L. Simon. AH rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  ISBN 0-312-32706-4

  First published by Simon & Schuster.

  First St. Martin's Minotaur Edition: March 2004

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  introduction

  by Roger L. Simon

  Numerous times over the years I knew Ross Thomas—when we were off with fellow mystery writers in some domestic or foreign port, sitting through some interminable pretentious literary event—I had the opportunity to see him put on what his wife, Rosalie, liked to call “his pleasant look.” This was a form of poker face Ross would acquire when someone said something particularly ridiculous (usually another author pontificating about his work or making an absurd political assertion from the Dark Ages). These were occasions when a hothead like me would wave his hands in the air and snort loudly in disgust, but Ross would simply put on a slightly bemused demeanor as if this were just another fleeting moment in the great human comedy. And he was right, of course.

  This “pleasant look” was also one of the reasons I often speculated that Ross Thomas had been a spy, although it was hard to think of any government good enough for his deeply moral convictions. Still, his pre-crime writing career took him all over the world, including Africa and havens of the espionage game like Bonn. He worked for NGOs with odd-sounding names and did public relations for labor union officials in sore need of a sprucing up. Those are classical spook gigs, although I’ll never know for sure if he was one. I never had the nerve to ask him directly. Ross was a courtly gent and you didn’t do such things. Out of bounds, you know.

  But if he wasn’t a spy he would definitely have made a brilliant one because he was one the most acute observers of human behavior I have ever met. That pleasant look was actually the mask of a scientist at work, but not a cold and unforgiving one because he was also one of the most generous people I have ever encountered, especially to his fellow writers. If it sounds as if I’m making him out to be a saint, well, so be it—as far as I know he never beat his dog.

  His works, however, absolutely flat-out brilliant as they are, and prize winning, have never been as well known as those of some of his better selling—and in my estimation vastly inferior—contemporaries. (I won’t name names. These are crime writers and you never know what they’ll do.) This republication of Missionary Stew should help rectify the situation because it is one of Ross's finest books.

  The premise is pure Thomas: a journalist (always a suspect career in the Thomas canon—but what isn’t?) is hired by a political kingmaker (even more suspect) to investigate a cocaine war (is that what it really is?). And that, as they say in Hollywood, is when the fun begins. (Actually it begins even earlier when we meet the lead character, Morgan Citron, climbing out of a cannibal's stew pot.) The plot, also pure Thomas, is as convoluted as it gets. And I mean convoluted in the good way—it makes sense in the end.

  Ross is perhaps our best chronicler of the nefarious activities of politicos, and Stew is one of his wittiest concoctions in that regard. (Did I write that? Stew? Concoctions? Oh, well… let it stand.) Irony was his stock in trade and it's hard to say which he was more, a comic artist or a thriller writer—probably a little of both. But, as with most great comic artists, he would probably say he was funny by accident. He was never trying to make us laugh, just to tell the grisly truth as he saw it. It's the comedy of “grin and bear it,” a cross between Evelyn Waugh and Lennie Bruce with a little John Le Carre thrown in for suspense.

  I miss Ross now because he was one of the clearest observers around of the passing parade and the parade gets stranger with each passing day. It's hard to know what he would have made of the War on Terror and the other extraordinary confabulations of our time. But one thing is sure: whatever he said would have been interesting and unexpected. The novels of Ross Thomas guarantee us that. If you don’t believe me, read on.

  missionary

  stew

  CHAPTER 1

  He flew into Paris, the city of his birth, on a cold wet November afternoon. He flew in from Equatorial Africa wearing green polyester pants, a white T-shirt that posed the suspect question HAVE YOU EATEN YOUR HONEY TODAY? and a machine-knitted cardigan whose color, he had finally decided, was mauve.

  The articles of clothing, possibly Oxfam castofffs, had been handed to him out of a green plastic ragbag by Miss Cecily Tettah of Amnesty International, who had apologized neither for their quality nor their fit. The mauve sweater must have belonged to a fat man once—an extremely tall fat man. Morgan Citron was a little over six-one, but the sweater almost reached mid-thigh and fitted his emaciated 142-pound frame like a reversed hospital gown. Still, it was wool and it was warm and Citron no longer cared greatly about his appearance.

  It was in a cheap hotel room near the Gare du Nord that Citron had been born forty-one years ago, the son of a dead-broke twenty-year-old American student from Holyoke and a twenty-nine-year-old French army lieutenant who had been killed in May during the fighting at Sedan. Citron's mother, obsessed with her poverty, had named her son Morgan after a distant cousin who was vaguely connected tothe banking family. Citron was born June 14, 1940. It was the same day the Germans rolled into Paris.

  Now on that wet, cold November afternoon in 1981, Citron went through customs and immigration at Charles de Gaulle Airport, found a taxi, and settled into its rear seat. When the driver said, “Where to?” Citron replied in French: “Let's say you have a cousin who lives in the country.”

  “Ah. My country cousin. A Breton, of course.”

  “He's coming to Paris.”

  “But my cousin is poor.”

  “unfortunately.”

  “Yet he would like a nice cheap place to stay.”

  “He would insist upon it.”

  “Then I would direct him to the Seventh Arrondissement, in the Rue Vaneau, Number Forty-two—Le Bon Hotel.”

  “I accept your suggestion.”

  “You’ve made a wise choice,” the driver said.

  When they reached the Peripherique, Citron confided further in the driver. “I have a diamond,” he said.

  “A diamond. Well.”

  “I wish to sell it.”

  “It is yours to sell, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “You know anything of diamonds?”

  “Almost nothing,” Citron said.

  “Still, you have no wish to be cheated.”

 
; “None.”

  “Then we shall try Bassou and you will tell him that I sent you. He will give me a commission. A small one. He will also give you a fair price. Low, but fair.”

  “Good,” Citron said. “Let's try Bassou.”

  Three days before, Citron had watched in the early-morning African hours, already steaming, as Gaston Bama, the sergeant-warder, brought in and ladled out the famous meal that eventually was to help drive the Emperor-President from his ivory throne.

  Bama was then an old man of fifty-three, corpulent, corrupt, and slow-moving, with three chevrons on his sleeve that testified to his rank, the same rank he had held for seventeen years. For nearly all of the past decade he had been chief warder in the section d’etranger of the old prison the French had built back in 1923, long before the country was an empire, or even a republic, and still then only a territory of French Equatorial Africa.

  The foreigners’ section was in the small, walled-off east wing of the prison. That November it held not only Morgan Citron, but also four failed smugglers from Cameroon; a handful of self-proclaimed political refugees from Zaire; six Sudanese reputed to be slavers; one mysterious Czech who seldom spoke; and an American of twenty-two from Provo, utah, who insisted he was a Mormon missionary, although nobody believed him. There were also three rich young Germans from Dusseldorf who had tried to cross Africa on their BMW motorcycles only to break down and run out of money a few miles outside the capital. Because no one had quite known what to do with them, they were clapped into prison and forgotten. The rich young Germans wrote home every week begging for money and uN intervention. Their letters were never mailed.

  It was largely because he was bilingual in French and English that Morgan Citron had been elected or perhaps thrust into the position of spokesman for the foreign prisoners. His only other qualification was his gold wrist watch, a costly Rolex, that he had bought in Zurich in 1975 on the advice of a knowledgeable barkeep who felt that gold might be looking up as an investment. Just before the Emperor-President's secret police had come for him in his room at the InterContinental, Citron had slipped the watch from his left wrist and onto his right ankle beneath his sock.

  That had been nearly thirteen months ago. Since then he had traded the gold links in the expansion band one by one to Sergeant Bama for supplementary rations of millet and cassava and fish. Infrequently, no more than once a month, there might also be some red meat. Goat, usually. Elderly goat. Citron shared everything with the other prisoners and consequently was not murdered in his bed.

  There had been thirty-six links in the watch's gold expansion band originally. In thirteen months, Citron had parted with thirty-four of them. He knew that soon he would have to part with the watch itself. With his gold all gone, Citron was confident that his term as spokesman would also end. If not drummed out of office, he would abdicate. Citron was one of those for whom political office had never held any attraction.

  Sergeant Bama watched as the skinny young private soldier put the immense black ironstone pot down near the bench on which Citron sat in the shade just outside his cell.

  “There,” Sergeant Bama said. “As I promised. Meat.”

  Citron sniffed and peered into the pot. “Meat,” he agreed.

  “As I promised.”

  “What kind of meat?”

  “Goat. No, not goat. Four young kids, tender and sweet. Taste, if you like.”

  Citron yawned hugely, both to express his indifference and to commence the bargaining. “Last night,” he said, “I could not sleep.”

  “I am desolate.”

  “The screams.”

  “What screams?”

  “The ones that prevented me from sleeping.”

  “I heard no screams,” Sergeant Bama said and turned to the private soldier. “Did you hear screams in the night? You are young and have sharp ears.”

  The private soldier looked away and down. “I heard nothing,” he said and drew a line in the red dirt with a bare toe.

  “Then who screamed?” Citron said.

  Sergeant Bama smiled. “Perhaps some pederasts with unwilling partners?” He shrugged. “A lovers’ quarrel? Who can say?”

  “They went on for half an hour,” Citron said. “The screams.”

  “I heard no screams,” Sergeant Bama said indifferently and then frowned. “Do you want the meat? Four kilos.”

  “And the price?”

  “The watch.”

  “You grow not only deaf in your old age, but senile.”

  “The watch,” Sergeant Bama said. “I must have it.”

  Citron swallowed most of the saliva that had been created by the smell of the meat. “I will give you two links—the last two—provided there’re two kilos of rice to go with the meat.”

  “Rice! Rice is very dear. Only the rich eat rice.”

  “Two kilos.”

  Sergeant Bama scowled. It was as excellent bargain, far better than he had expected. He changed his scowl into a smile of sweet reasonableness. “The watch.”

  “No.”

  Sergeant Bama turned to the private soldier. “Fetch the rice. Two kilos.”

  After the private soldier left, Sergeant Bama squatted down beside the ironstone pot. He dipped his right hand into its lukewarm contents and removed a small piece of meat. He offered the piece to Citron. For a moment, Citron hesitated, then accepted the meat and popped it into his mouth. He chewed slowly, carefully, and then swallowed.

  “It is not goat,” Citron said.

  “Did I say it was goat? I said kid—young and tender. Does it not dissolve in your mouth?” “It is not kid either.”

  Sergeant Bama peered suspiciously into the pot, fished out another small piece of meat that swam in the brownish liquid, and sniffed it. “Pork perhaps?” He offered the piece to Citron. “Taste and determine. If it is pork, you will not have to share with the Sudanese, who are Muslim.”

  Citron took the meat and chewed it. “It is not pork. I remember pork.”

  “And this?”

  “This is sweet and tough and stringy.”

  Sergeant Bama giggled. “Of course. How stupid of me.” He clapped a hand to his forehead—a stage gesture. “It could only be monkey. A rare delicacy. Sweet, you said. Monkey tastes sweet. There is nothing sweeter to the tongue than fresh young monkey.”

  “I’ve never tasted monkey.”

  “Well, now you have.” The sergeant smiled complacently and looked around. The other prisoners were seated or squatting in the shade, none of them nearer than six meters, awaiting the outcome of the negotiations. When the sergeant turned back to Citron, the scowl was again in place and a harsh new urgency was in his tone. “I must have the watch,” he said.

  “No,” Citron said. “Not for this.”

  Sergeant Bama nodded indifferently and looked off into the hot distance. “There will be a visitor this afternoon at fifteen hundred,” he said. “A black woman from England who is a high functionary in a prisoners’ organization with a rare name.”

  “You lie, of course,” Citron said, wiping a thin film of grease from his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Sergeant Bama looked at him and shrugged. “Believe what you wish, but she will be here at fifteen hundred to interview the other foreign scum. It is all arranged. You, of course, will be transferred to the isolation block and thus will miss the black Englishwoman. A pity. I am told she is a marvelous sight. Of course…” The sergeant's unspoken offer trailed off into an elaborate Afro-Gallic shrug.

  “The watch,” Citron said, understanding now.

  “The watch.”

  Citron studied Sergeant Bama for several seconds. Over the sergeant's left shoulder he could see the private soldier approaching with a big pot of rice. “All right,” Citron said. “You get the watch—but only after I see the black Englishwoman.”

  He was surprised when the sergeant agreed with a single word: “Good.” Sergeant Bama rose then and turned toward the other prisoners. “Come and eat,” he called
in near English, adding in rapid French, which not all of them could follow: “We want you fat and sleek for when the black Englishwoman arrives.”

  The prisoners rose and started filing past the pots of meat and rice. The sergeant presided over the meat, the private soldier over the rice. The sergeant used a gourd ladle to dish meat into the prisoners’ plastic bowls.

  “What's this shit?” the young Mormon missionary asked.

  “Monkey,” Citron said.

  “Oh,” the Mormon said, hurried away with his food, sat down in some shade, and ate it quickly with his fingers.

  Miss Cecily Tettah, who worked out of the London headquarters of Amnesty International, had been born on a large plantation in Ghana just outside Accra forty-two years before, when Ghana was still called the Gold Coast. After the war she had been sent by her cocoa-rich father to London to be educated. She had never returned to Ghana, never married, and, when asked, usually described herself in her splendid British accent as either a maiden lady or a spinster. Many thought her to be hopelessly old-fashioned. The few men lucky enough to find their way into her bed over the years discovered not only a magnificent body, but also an acerbic wit and an excellent mind.

  Still a handsome woman, quite tall with graying hair, Miss Tettah, as she rather primly introduced herself to almost everyone, had been granted the use of Sergeant Bama's tiny office to interview the foreignrisoners. She sat behind the plain wooden table, a thick file open before her. Citron sat in the chair opposite. Cecily Tettah tapped the open file with a pencil and looked up at Citron with wide-spaced, bitter-chocolate eyes. She made no effort to keep the suspicion out of either her tone or gaze.

  “There is no record of you,” she said, giving the papers in the file a final tap with her pencil. “There’re records of all the others, but none of you.”

  “No,” Citron said. “I’m not surprised.”

  “They claim you’re a spy, either French or American. They’re not sure which.”

  “I’m a traveler,” Citron said.