Ross Thomas: Missionary Stew

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.”