Ross Thomas: Missionary Stew

“But you will see her?”

“She’s not sick or anything?”

“Oh, heavens, no. Fit as a fiddle. You know Gladys. Well?”

Citron was not at all sure that he really did know Gladys, and even less sure that he wanted to. His mother had always been a remote figure, almost the Mysterious Stranger that parents were said to warn their children about. Two months earlier he would have refused to see her. A month earlier he would have hesitated. Now he shrugged and said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

“She’ll be so pleased. Shall we go in my car? I’ll drive you there and back. It’s such a nice day and I’ve got the top down and I do so love Malibu, don’t you?”

Citron didn’t bother to answer as he followed Winder out into the patio. At the gate, Winder turned and smiled. He had a good tan and nice white teeth and a dimpled cheek and a left eye that was slightly bluer than the right. “I’ve just been dying to ask you. Was he really a cannibal?”

“Sure he was,” Citron said. “Missionary stew every day.”

“Oh, my God, I can’t stand it!” Dale Winder said and shivered with delight.

The West Coast bureau of The American Investigator occupied half of the twelfth floor of a three-sided building that rose up out of the old Fox back lot in Century City, but it resembled no newspaper or magazine office Morgan Citron had ever seen.

What surprised Citron, perhaps even saddened him, was certainly not the walnut paneling or the thick taupe carpet or the beautiful blond twin sisters who held down the antique partners’ desk in the reception area. Nor was he overly impressed by the wonderfully faked Miro and Chagall and Braque that hung on the reception area walls, or even the signed Daumier engravings (authentic) that lined the corridor leading to the West Coast bureau manager’s office. Rather, what really bothered Citron was the cryptlike silence as he followed Dale Winder down the corridor. There were no ringing phones. No typewriters. No teletypes. No voices. There were only closed doors behind which Citron suspected perfectly god-awful fibs were being carefully concocted. He even thought up one himself: TOT LOCKED IN FRIDGE GNAWS OFF TOES, although he wasn’t at all sure he hadn’t cribbed that one from a copy of the Investigator he had scanned once while standing in line, food stamps in hand, at the checkout counter of Boys Market in the Marina del Rey.

It was a long corridor, and when they neared its end, Dale Winder smiled reassuringly over his shoulder. “We’re almost there,” he said and pushed through a door. It led into a small reception room that had only a brilliant copy of a blue Picasso clown on its walls. There was also another antique desk with nothing at all on it but the folded hands of a striking young Chinese woman.

“The prodigal,” Dale Winder said.

“Really.” She smiled at Citron. “Please go in, Mr. Citron. She’s expecting you.”

“I’ll run you home whenever you’re ready,” Dale Winder said. “Just give me a shout.”

“Right,” Citron said, moved to the door, put his hand on the knob, sighed, turned it, pushed the door open, and entered the office of Gladys Darlington Citron, who, he immediately saw, had changed scarcely at all.

She still wore her Chanel suits, he noticed. She had more than a dozen of them, and several were at least twenty or twenty-five years old. The one she wore that day was a dusty pink. And as always in the lapel was the red ribbon of the Legion d’Honneur, which de Gaulle himself had presented her in late 1946 for her remarkably bloody service in the Resistance. Citron knew it was why she almost always wore suits: so she would have someplace to display the decoration.

At sixty-two her hair was the color of silver. Old expensive silver. She wore it looped down near one cool green eye, her left, and then back and up into what was supposed to be a careless chignon. Yet not a strand was out of place. Citron could not recall when one ever had been.

Gladys Citron had kept her figure through diet and exercise: no more than 1,350 calories a day with no exceptions and thirty minutes a day every day devoted to the Canadian Air Force exercise regime. She was blessed with those facial bones that helped keep her flesh from sagging. There were a few lines, of course, and wrinkles, especially around the corners of her eyes, but her chin was firm, her long dancer’s neck still fairly good, and she remained all in all very much the beauty.

“You may kiss me, Morgan,” she said, “unless you feel it would be overly demonstrative.”

She offered her cheek. Citron kissed it lightly and said, “How are you, Gladys?”

“Splendid,” she said. “Absolutely splendid.”

She was sitting behind an almost bare two-hundred-year-old desk that might have come from the cabinetmaker yesterday, or possibly the day before. She opened a drawer and took out a small gray box. She pushed the box toward Citron.

“Do sit down, Morgan. Please.”

Citron sat down. She examined him thoughtfully. “You look well. A bit thin, but well. And, dear God, you do look like him. Your father.” She tapped the small box. “For you. A present for your fortieth birthday.”

Citron didn’t touch the box. “I’m forty-two and my birthday was in June.”

She dismissed the discrepancy with a graceful wave. “Go on. Open it.”

Citron opened the box. In it lying on a bed of black velvet was a gold Rolex Oyster, almost exactly like the one he had traded, bit by bit, to Sergeant Bama for supplemental rations. Citron stared at the watch for a long moment, then removed it from the box and slipped it over his left wrist. Before he could thank his mother, she asked, “How long has it been now — five years, six?”

“Six, I think.”

“You could’ve written.”

“I could have.”

“I was worried.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t suppose I’ve really been much of a mother to you, have I?”

“No,” Citron agreed, “not much, although at forty-two I don’t see how that’s particularly important.”

“You never forgave me, though, did you?”

“For what?”

“For dumping you with the Gargants during the war.”

Citron shrugged. “You had all those Germans to kill, and by the time I was five and old enough to be aware of anything, I was very fond of the Gargants. They had a lot of cows.”

“But afterwards, when you were seven.”

“You mean England.”

“It was supposed to be a very good school.”

“It was, but I had sort of a French waiter’s accent, and I also missed them.”

“The Gargants?”

“The cows.”

“I’d like to make it up to you, Morgan.”

“Now?” He paused, the wonderment on his face mingling with suspicion. “Whatever for?”

She smiled. “Atonement.”

“What’s the real reason, Gladys?”

“You’re my son.”

“I’m just somebody you met a few times over the years. How’d you find me, anyway?”

“Were you trying to hide?”

“No.”

“Craigie Grey mentioned your name to someone who mentioned it to someone else who mentioned it to us. I’d been trying to locate you for more than a year — ever since those wire-service stories moved out of Paris. I even talked to a Miss Tettah with Amnesty International in London, but all she had was a post-office-box number in Venice. Then we tracked down that young man in Provo.”

“The Mormon missionary.”

“He told us about your watch. He said you were a saint.”

“The Mormons always were saint-happy.”

“He said you saved his life.”

“He exaggerated.”

She picked up a gold-plated letter opener and experimentally pressed its sharp point against the ball of her thumb. “Was he really a cannibal like they all said — or was it just French propaganda?”