Missionary Stew by Ross Thomas Page B

attempt with his bandaged hands. After freeing Hubert, Haere got into pajamas, robe, and slippers. Next year, he thought, a tasseled nightcap.
    His wondrous refrigerator's automatic icemaker and cold-water dispenser enabled him to mix a Scotch and water without too much difficulty. He had just taken the second long swallow when the downstairs buzzer rang. Haere crossed to the intercom, pressed the button, and asked: “Who is it?”
    “This is the FBI, Mr. Haere,” said a man's voice made thin by the small speaker. “We’d like to talk to you.”
    “Who's we?”
    “I’m Special Agent Yarn. Special Agent Tighe is with me.” “How do you spell Tighe?” The voice spelled it for him.
    “What do you and Special Agent Tighe want to talk to me about at eleven o’clock at night?”
    “We’d rather not discuss that down here on the street.”
    “Who's in charge of your San Francisco office?”
    A name was offered promptly. It meant nothing to Haere, but because there had been no hesitation he pushed the button that sounded a buzzer and unlocked the downstairs street door. A moment later he could hear the footsteps on the uncarpeted stairs that led up to his apartment.
    FBI agents were no novelty to Haere, not since the early fifties when they had started coming around to investigate his father's old friends. In the sixties they had come around wanting to know if some of Draper Haere's older friends were really fit to serve in the higher reaches of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. By the early seventies the agents were back wanting to know about the bomb-throwing tendencies of some of the children of those older friends.
    But back in the fifties, FBI agents to Haere had seemed stern elders of the law, sober-sided, grim, forbidding. They grew younger over the years, of course. The two who appeared on Haere's doorstep that night were mere tykes, neither a year over thirty-two. One was blond, the other brunette.
    “Mr. Haere?” the blond one said.
    Haere nodded, and they whipped out their folding ID cases and offered them for inspection. Haere reached for both with his bandaged hands and took his time examining them.
    “There was a man I knew in Washington once,” Haere said, still examining the credentials. “Back in the late sixties. A psychologist. He was hired by the FBI to put agents through sensitivity training. It seemed that when some of you guys got home, instead of kissing the wife, you’d whip out your ID at her and say, ‘Carson, FBI.’“
    Special Agent Tighe looked at Special Agent Yarn. “I do that all the time, don’t you?”
    “Sure,” Yarn said. “Every night.”
    Haere handed back their ID cases and told them to come in. The blond one was Yarn, John D. Tighe's first name was Richard. He had no middle initial. Their hair was neither short nor long. Yarn wore asuit and tie, Tighe a gray herringbone jacket, dark-gray slacks, and no tie. Haere noticed that both wore loafers with rubber heels. Yarn was a little over six feet tall, Tighe a little under. Neither was handsome, neither was ugly. Only their eyes were alike: steady, watchful, and curious. Extremely curious. All four eyes, two brown and two blue, were now taking in Haere's enormous room.
    “Just the one big room, huh?” Yarn said.
    “That's all.”
    “Interesting.”
    “Different,” Tighe said.
    “Sit down,” Haere said.
    Yarn sat down on the leather couch that had once graced the Washington office of Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon. Tighe chose the padded walnut armchair that had been in Henry Agard Wallace's Capitol office when Wallace was Roosevelt's Vice-President. Haere sat in the old high-backed easy chair he almost always sat in, the Baton Rouge chair, which a dealer in Opelousas had sworn was the last chair Huey Long ever sat in before he was gunned down in 1935. Haere collected political furniture. Political mavericks’ furniture, to be precise. For a year now he had been dickering with a man in Tulsa for a brass