Missionary Stew
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also by Ross Thomas
The Cold War Swap
The Seersucker Whipsaw
Cast a Yellow Shadow
The Singapore Wink
The Fools in Town Are on Our Side
The Backup Men
The Porkchoppers
If You Can’t Be Good
The Money Harvest
Yellow-Dog Contract
Chinaman's Chance
The Eighth Dwarf
The Mordida Man
Briarpatch
Out on the Rim
The Fourth Durango
Twilight at Mac's Place
Voodoo, Ltd.
Ah, Treachery!
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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.
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.
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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 H
AVE
Y
OU
E
ATEN
Y
OUR
H
ONEY
T
ODAY
? 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 to
the 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?”