Missionary Stew by Ross Thomas Page A

He turned and smiled down at Louise Veatch. “You are, without a doubt, the best-looking naked lady I ever saw in my life.”
    “Pretty just happened.”
    “Pretty and smart with it.”
    Louise Veatch smiled. “They used to say that down home. ‘She's pretty and smart with it.’“
    “I know,” Haere said, sat back down on the edge of the bed, and lit one of his occasional cigarettes.
    “How’d it go in New York?” she said, reaching down for her panties on the floor. “All I got out of Baldy was a satisfied grunt.”
    “The guy was a toe tester.”
    “You mean he stuck his toe into the political waters and found them lukewarm?”
    “He thought they were lukewarm, but Mommy thought they were ice-cold. If he’d jumped in with a big splash, she would’ve said wonderful and whipped out her checkbook. But he didn’t, and she won’t.”
    “Then he's out.”
    “He's out.”
    As they talked, they dressed slowly, unhurriedly, as if it were morning and they had risen early and had been married for twenty years.
    “You mean out in ‘eighty-four or all the way out?”
    Draper Haere tucked in his shirttails. The shirt was a white oxford-cloth buttondown. It was almost the only kind of shirt Haere ever wore except for exact copies in blue. “Out in ‘eighty-four,” he said. “After that, who can say?”
    “You still think Baldy's got a real no-shit chance?” Louise Veatch asked as she buttoned up the simple silk cream-colored blouse that went nicely with the simple straight-line light-gray skirt that was complemented by the simple dark-gray double-breasted cashmere jacket. Haere estimated that all that simplicity cost three or four timesthe price of one of his blue pinstripes, and Haere spent $550 on his suits at Lew Ritter's.
    “Baldy's got a chance,” Haere said, after giving it some thought. “Not much of one, but a chance—provided things break just right for him, and provided he turns out to be just one hell of a governor.”
    “But you’re talking about ‘eighty-eight, aren’t you? Not ‘eighty-four.”
    “I figure ‘eighty-four is the jinx year.”
    “Oh, hell, Draper.”
    “Look. ‘Eighty-eight's his best shot. Four years as governor, and then he gets re-elected in ‘eighty-six. He's got a record he can point to with pride. The old hacks will have dropped out from exhaustion and Baldy’ll be what by ‘eighty-six—forty-six?”
    “Forty-seven,” she said.
    “Not too young and certainly not too old. He starts out after it in ‘eighty-six and leaves you behind to run the state.”
    “Draper,” she said, “he's not going to wait.”
    “He’d better.”
    “Okay, what would it take to get him the nomination in ‘eighty-four—besides money and luck? You can get him the money and he's got all the luck in the world. So what else would it take?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Bullshit,” she said. “What about this Replogle stuff that Citron's going after? This dynamite that could blow them out of the White House? Isn’t that what Jack Replogle said?”
    Haere sighed. “He said it could blow those fuckers out of the White House in ‘eighty-four. An exact quote. Almost, anyway.”
    “And you believed him?”
    Haere started knotting his tie. “Jack Replogle, when it came to politics, was a man much given to understatement. Hyperbole in almost everything else, but not in politics.”
    “Then it is dynamite, isn’t it?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Which is just what Baldy needs.”
    “It wouldn’t do him any harm,” Haere admitted as he crossed to the bathroom and looked behind its door to see if anything had been left hanging there. He did it out of sheer habit, for they had checked into the room empty-handed. After his inspection, he looked down at his still-bandaged hands and said, “Funny thing about dynamite, though.” He looked up at her. “Sometimes when it gets old it gets unstable.”
    “It could blow up in our faces, right?”
    He nodded. “Right.”
    “Well, that's the