by Ross Thomas
Ramsay’s right hand shot up, palm out. A traffic cop’s warning. Wu stopped talking and the headmaster said, “Do I have your full attention, Mr. Wu?”
Wu nodded.
“Splendid,” Ramsay said. “I’ve been trying to gain it by telephone and post without success these past two months.”
Wu’s expression shifted into one of mild polite interest. His tone grew bland. “Oh. That.”
“Yes, Mr. Wu. That. Or more precisely, those. The fees. They still haven’t been paid.”
Artie Wu took the cigar from his pocket again, stuck it in his mouth, clamped down hard, then eased the clamp just enough to growl, “Was there a fight?”
“Exactly as described,” Ramsay said. “The twins, by all accounts, were formidable.”
Wu beamed around the cigar, removed it and said, “I seem to recall Mrs. Wu taking care of the fees with a check some time ago.”
The dam containing Ramsay’s exasperation broke. He almost sprang from his chair, but caught himself, rose more slowly and, with palms planted flat on the desktop, leaned toward Artie Wu. “The reason I wanted you here in this very room, seated in that very chair, was to inform you, sir—no, guarantee you—that unless the fees are paid today, not tomorrow, but today, the twins will accompany you back to London this after—”
The telephone rang. Ramsay snatched it up, snapped out an irritated hello, listened, frowned, said, “One moment,” and offered the instrument to Wu.
Voodoo, Ltd. —17
After Wu rose, accepted the phone and said hello, he heard Durant’s voice: “I hold here in my hand a certified check drawn on Barclays for twenty-five thousand pounds from our new client, Herr Enno Glimm.
The check will be deposited in approximately six minutes and you’ll again be solvent.”
“And what exactly is required of us?”
“We have to find a pair of hypnotists, a brother-and-sister act, who’ve gone missing.”
“Where?”
“Who cares?”
“A most sensible attitude,” Wu said. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”
“We meet Glimm here at two.”
“I’ll be there,” Wu said, turned and handed back the telephone.
“Good news?” Ramsay asked.
“So-so,” said Wu as he took a checkbook from a suit pocket, placed it on the desk, absently patted his other pockets for something, then smiled at Perkin Ramsay and said, “Do you have a pen?”
In Carriages Bar of the Caledonian Hotel in Princes Street in Edinburgh, the sons of Artie Wu sat in a booth across from their father and watched him sign his name to a check for the second time that day. Arthur and Angus had half-pints of lager in front of them. In front of their father was a large and yet-to-be tasted whisky.
Wu tore out the check and handed it to Arthur, the older son by nine minutes. He glanced at the amount, raised an eyebrow and passed the check to his brother.
Angus studied it and said, “Four hundred quid,” letting a dubious inflection raise the specter of insufficient funds.
“It won’t bounce,” Wu said. “And it should get you through to the end of next month when I’ll send more. Now all you guys have to do is finish the term, bum around the Continent this summer and head for Princeton in August.”
Angus gave the check back to his brother and carefully examined his father before asking, “Have you really thought about what it’ll cost to send us through four years at Princeton?”
Wu sipped his whisky and ran some figures through his mind.
“About a hundred and sixty grand,” he said. “That’s for four years without frills. If you want frills, try poker.”
“Like you and Durant did?” Angus said.
“We played a few hands.”
“Durant says you two averaged six hundred a month from stud and draw,” Arthur said. “And that was back when the dollar was worth three or four times what it is now.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —18
“We got by,” Wu said.
“He also claims there were a lot of rich fish around Princeton then who were more than willing to sit down to an evening of cards with the pretender to the Chinese Emperor’s throne and his silent, ever-present bodyguard.”
Wu smiled and nodded, as if remembering. He was instead studying his sons and discovering yet again, with almost embarrassing satisfaction, that they looked as much like him as they did their mother.
They had his height but their mother’s rangy build. His slow smile and her lithe walk. His black hair and her gray eyes, which, along with Wu’s epicanthic folds, gave the twins what they called their all-Amerasian preppy look.
“Did you like it—Princeton?” Arthur asked.
Wu stared suspiciously at Arthur—then Angus. “Whenever you two want something, you always take me by the hand and try to lead me back down Reminiscent Row. So let’s hear it. What’s up?”
The twins traded quick looks and Angus won the invisible coin toss.
“We know where we can make a lot of money this summer.”
Wu stuck a fresh cigar in his mouth and, just before lighting it, asked, “Doing what?”
“It’s sort of a summer intern program,” Arthur said.
Once the cigar was lit, Wu said, “Summer intern jobs never pay a lot of money.”
“These will,” Angus said.
“Where is it and what is it?” Wu said. “Be specific.”
“Kuwait,” Angus said. “Or it will be when the war’s over next week, next month—whenever. There’ll be a ton of money floating around during reconstruction and this consulting firm we heard from already has a lock on a lot of it. But the firm needs bodies, American bodies, and it’s willing to pay for them.”
“What’s the firm?” Wu asked.
“Overby, Stallings Associates.”
Artie Wu’s eyes narrowed and his face grew still. Nothing moved.
Then his lips moved just enough to say, “Overby as in Maurice Overby?”
Arthur grinned. “As in Uncle Otherguy, Pop.”
Agnes Wu sat before the dressing table in the Caledonian Hotel room, brushing her hair and listening to her husband’s word-for-word account of his telephone call from Quincy Durant.
Wu packed while he talked. He packed automatically, almost without thinking, folding whatever needed to be folded and wadding up whatever needed to be washed. It all went into an abused leather Voodoo, Ltd. —19
satchel with brass fittings that she called the Gladstone and he called the bag.
The hair that Agnes Wu brushed was still the palest of pale gold, which she kept that way with only minimal assistance from her hairdresser. She now gave it what she hoped was its one-hundredth brush stroke, turned from the mirror, looked at Wu with her large clever gray eyes and said, “That was a hell of a coincidence—Quincy calling at that precise moment.”
After removing his partially smoked cigar from an ashtray, Wu said,
“Coincidences are seldom more than good or bad minor accidents that happen all the time. Quincy’s call was neither. He got the check from Glimm, knew we were broke and picked up the phone.”
Agnes Wu rose from the dressing table’s padded bench, went to a window, stared down at Princes Street with its handful of half-frozen pedestrians and asked, “Can we really afford it—Princeton?”
“That’s an August-September problem. This is February. But you can’t very well send two kids to Princeton at the same time unless you’re in the top two or three percent income bracket—which I trust we’ll have reentered by September.”
“Then you’re counting on Herr Glimm?”
“Somewhat.”
“Perhaps you’d best find out whether you should.”
Wu blew a fat smoke ring. “You can do it faster.”
Agnes Wu turned with an answering grin that transformed her face.
The cool, even remote look changed into something reckless, merry and even a trifle sly. “Cousin Duncan?” she said.
“Mon
ey knows money,” Wu said. “If Glimm has it, Duncan will know.”
“I really should see him now that I’m up here,” she said. “I could brag about the kids, slip Duncan some London gossip and find out whether he’s still cross with you and Quincy for not letting him invest in Wudu.”
“Since we kept him from investing in a damn near bankrupt outfit, he’s got nothing to be cross about.”
The first cousin with nothing to be cross about was Sir Duncan Goriach, the 62-year-old titular chief of the Goriach clan, who had been knighted in 1984 for services to the Crown—services that consisted largely of making enormous profits for himself and a few carefully selected others during the North Sea oil boom.
Agnes Wu said, “Duncan wouldn’t’ve cared about the money. He thinks you and Quincy lead spicy, eventful lives and merely wanted to buy himself a vicarious slice. So I’ll call him and invite myself up to Aberdeen for a long weekend.”
“There’s something we need to talk about first.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —20
Agnes left the window to sit on the edge of the bed next to the leather satchel. She clasped her hands in her lap and settled a carefully neutral look on her face. It was the look she assumed when anticipating terrible news. She had worn the same look during her marriage more times than she thought really necessary.
After Wu remained silent for a number of seconds, his wife said,
“Well?”
He blew another smoke ring, this time at the ceiling. “The boys’ve been offered summer jobs.”
“Where?”
“Kuwait.”
“By whom?”
“Otherguy Overby.”
Agnes Wu’s neutral look vanished. Her eyes lost their cool remoteness and seemed to turn a hot smoky gray. Her voice dropped into a lower register, which transformed it into an urgent warning when she said, “Don’t tell them no. If you do, they’ll be off like a shot.”
“They’ll go no matter what I say. To them, Otherguy’s the crown prince of fun.”
There was another brief silence as Agnes Wu considered what must be done. After reaching her decision, she issued a command—
although it sounded as if she were merely asking her husband to please pass the salt. But Wu knew better and it gave him a small erotic thrill when she said, “Stop him, Artie.”
Artie Wu blew a final smoke ring at the ceiling and smiled up at it.
“I’m not going to stop Otherguy,” he said. “I’m going to hire him.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —21
Five
The only coats and ties in the bar of the Inter-Continental Hotel in Amman were worn by two men who sat at a table drinking Scotch and water. Most of the other drinkers were European and American correspondents who were either bunched up together at one end of the long bar or scattered about at tables in reclusive twos and threes.
Nearly all of them wore quasimilitary desert gear, much of it obviously ordered by mail from either Banana Republic or Eddie Bauer. Safari jackets, or their first cousins, seemed to be the universal favorite.
Along with his coat and tie, the older of the two men also wore a thick cap of short-cropped pewter-gray hair and a well-seamed face that easily could have belonged to the board chairman of some small hungry international firm that dealt in esoteric and even suspect services. The younger coat and tie had dark brown hair shot with gray; bleak eyes; a guarded expression, and might well have been the older man’s chief executive officer, who hired, fired and looked after the bribes.
The older man swallowed the last of his drink, rattled his ice cubes, looked at the younger man and said, “Tell me about the rabbits again.”
The man who wanted to hear about the rabbits was Booth Stallings, expert on terrorism, doctor of philosophy, author of Anatomy of Terror, onetime White House consultant and recognized adept at grantsmanship, who, five years before at age 60, had abandoned it all to go adventuring.
“What rabbits?” asked Maurice Overby, also known to a number of law enforcement agencies as Otherguy Overby. Over the years, Overby had protested—with notable success—that it was never he, but some other guy, who had done all that stuff the cops wanted to question him about. Usually involved in a variety of enterprises, some of them legitimate, Overby was by trade a journeyman confidence man and much admired by his peers.
After Overby denied any knowledge of the rabbits, Stallings shook his head sadly and said, “If you don’t know about Steinbeck’s rabbits, then tell me again about those wonderful job offers from Artie Wu that’ll materialize any second now.”
“Why d’you want to hear it again?”
“Reassurance.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —22
Adopting a weary tone, Overby said, “Okay. Remember when we bumped into Count von Lahusen here in the bar last week?”
“An evening with the Graf von Lahusen is not easily forgotten.”
“So he’d had a few. What if you’d just spent two months in the GDR, or what used to be the GDR, trying to reclaim your ancestral estates only to be told, ‘Go fuck yourself, Count’?”
“At the sad tale’s third telling, I took to my bed.”
“And missed the best part,” Overby said. “Look. Me and the Count and Artie and Durant’ve known each other for years and even went in on some things together a time or two, know what I mean?”
“Where?”
Overby nodded in the general direction of the South China Sea.
“Mostly out there,” he said. “On the rim. Where else? Anyway, the Count tells me he’s in Berlin about a week or ten days ago, staying at the Am Zoo, when he gets a call from some guy called Enno Glimm.”
“German?”
“What else would he be with a name like that?”
“Austrian. Possibly Swiss.”
Overby ignored the suggestions. “What Glimm wants from the Count is a rundown on Voodoo, Limited. At first, the Count thinks he knows jack shit about Voodoo, Limited, until it hits him that what Glimm means is Wudu, Limited, the outfit Artie and Durant set up in London just before they took their big bath in the eighty-seven market.”
“They should’ve invested their funds more prudently—as did you and I.”
“Don’t start,” Overby said. “It took you less’n twenty days to make that million you flew out of Hong Kong with and about eighteen months to lose it. Or most of it. For a while there, on paper, you were worth two, almost three million.”
“Cold comfort, Otherguy,” Stallings said. “Very cold. How much did Wu and Durant lose?”
“I hear half a million apiece.”
“I feel better. Now you can continue with what the Count told Herr Glimm.”
“Well, von Lahusen’s not about to bad-mouth Artie or that fucking Durant either so he gives them a big buildup. But Glimm’s not satisfied and wants to know who else he can check with. The Count tells him to call me here at the hotel and that’s what he did.”
“Then what?”
“Glimm asks me about Artie and Durant and I ask him why he wants to know. He’s not about to tell me, of course, but I can guess it’s something pretty fat. So I tell him that Wu and Durant are top of the line—although Durant can be a mean bastard. Glimm says that’s exactly what he’s looking for, thanks me and hangs up. So I think for a Voodoo, Ltd. —23
couple of minutes, then call Artie’s twin boys, Arthur and Angus, at their school just outside Edinburgh. That’s in Scotland.”
“Thank you,” Stallings said. “And now you’re going to tell me why you called them, aren’t you?”
“To offer them summer jobs in Kuwait City after the war’s over—
jobs that’ll pay them three thousand U.S. a month each.”
“Sweet Jesus,” said Stallings.
The smile that Overby gave Stallings should have been, by rights, hard, calculating and even cruel. Instead it was benign, almost gentle, and strangely contented. Stallings had seen it before and always thought of it as The Smile of the Christian About to Devour t
he Lion.
Much of it was still in place when Overby said, “I offered them jobs on the condition that they’d check it out with their folks, especially their mother, Agnes, and that’s why Artie’ll be calling any minute now with the job offer.”
Stallings shook his head slowly. “For once, Otherguy, I fail to follow.”
“It’s simple. The twins are seventeen or eighteen. They’ll tell their folks about Kuwait and Agnes’ll go ape and tell Artie, very quiet-like, the way she does, that her sons will not, by God, spend a summer in the clutches of Otherguy Overby.” He paused, as if to check his logic, nodded comfortably and continued. “Of course, none of this’d play if I didn’t know how Artie’s mind works.”
“And how is that?” Stallings asked, resigned to his role of interlocutor.
“Artie’ll never tell his kids not to do something he’d’ve done at their age. But he also has to keep Agnes happy. So what he’ll do is move the pieces around till they form a new pattern.”
“You being one of the pieces?”
Overby nodded. “And you, too. Artie’ll decide to hire me and that’s when I’ll tell him you’re part of the deal. He’ll agree and I’ll call the twins and tell them the Kuwait jobs fell through but maybe we can aim for something next summer. That way the kids don’t get their feelings hurt, Agnes is happy and Artie gets himself a couple of guys he can trust on the Glimm deal, whatever it is.”
Booth Stallings rose slowly and stared down at Overby with awe. He was still standing and still staring when he said, “Minds like yours really do exist, don’t they?”
After giving it some thought, Overby said, “Yeah, I guess there still must be a few around.”
At 1:08 A.M. The next day, Booth Stallings was awakened by the pounding on his hotel room door. After he opened it, Overby strolled in, exuding even more confidence than usual.
Voodoo, Ltd. —24
“I just talked to Artie,” he said as he crossed to the room’s desk and poured himself a measure of Stalling’s whisky.
“And?”
“I go to London day after tomorrow and you, well, you’ve gotta be on the next flight to Manila.”
