by Ross Thomas
You, Otherguy and Georgia, one hundred thousand each.”
“Sounds plump, if not fat,” Stallings said.
“The client retained our firm’s services for a nonrefundable twenty-five thousand pounds. But that money’s earmarked for back salaries, debts and overhead.”
“You must’ve passed through a dry spell, Artie.”
“Bone dry.”
“If my addition’s right,” Stallings said, “the figures you mentioned, not counting the retainer, add up to seven hundred thousand, not seven hundred and fifty thousand.”
“That remaining fifty thousand will be held in reserve for contingencies until the job’s done. If there aren’t any contingencies, it’ll be split into five equal shares as either a bonus or getaway money.”
“Or both,” Stallings said.
“Or both.”
“You’re beginning to make it sound kind of interesting. What do we have to do to earn it?”
“Find two missing hypnotists.”
“What else?”
Voodoo, Ltd. —48
“That’s the goal, but to reach it we’ll probably have to travel the usual twisty byways.”
“Where’re these byways located?”
“Los Angeles and environs.”
“Well, shit, I was kind of hoping for London and environs.”
“The weather’s better in L.A.”
“There’s that,” Stallings agreed.
After the briefest of pauses, Wu said, “Can you talk?”
“Georgia’s not up yet.”
“When did she get out?”
“Yesterday afternoon. I picked her up at the Women’s Correctional Institution in Mandaluyong in a Mercedes I rented from the Peninsula.
Even brought along flowers and a bottle of champagne. She drank some champagne but left the flowers in the car when we got back to the hotel.”
“How is she?”
“Doesn’t look much different.”
“Mentally?”
“Quick as ever. Maybe even quicker. But I suppose there’re some emotional dents that need smoothing out.”
“What’ve you told her?”
“Just that you and Durant have something going and want her, Otherguy and me to help out.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said it sounded like more nursery games.”
“That all?”
“That’s all so far.”
“She may need a large helping of reassurance.”
“Tell me something, Artie. How d’you reassure someone with a rock-solid ego?”
“You’ll find a way,” Wu said and paused. During the pause Stallings heard a faint click from twelve thousand miles away, which he assumed was Wu’s lighter. The click was followed by either a sigh or the sound of exhaled cigar smoke. Then Wu was saying, “I have a little news and a little clarification. The hypnotists are a rather bent British brother-and-sister team who’ve been involved with Ione Gamble.”
“America’s heartthrob,” Stallings said.
“She really called that?”
“Mostly by old crocks like me who find comfort in the clichés of their youth. Truth is, Artie, I haven’t kept up with Hollywood much since Sheilah Graham died.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —49
“Then you may not’ve heard that Ms. Gamble has been indicted for the murder of William A. C. Rice the Fourth.”
“They deliver USA Today right to your hotel room door all over the world. I saw the headlines, but can’t say I’ve followed it closely.”
“Then you may want to do some research on it.”
“Okay.”
“My news is that Ms. Gamble has retained your son-in-law to defend her.”
“I’ve got two sons-in-law,” Stallings said. “One of ‘em’s too dumb to pour piss out of a rubber boot and isn’t a lawyer anyway, so you must be talking about Howie Mott, right?”
“Yes.”
“You know Howie? I guess you do since he’s the one who recommended you guys to me back in eighty-six.”
“We’ve never met,” Wu said. “But we seem to have a number of mutual friends.”
Stallings only grunted and said, “When d’you want us in L.A.?”
“Can you leave tomorrow?”
“First-class?”
“I think Georgia deserves some first-class.”
“So does she,” Stallings said. “Anything I can do in L.A.?”
“Yes. Rent us a furnished house, something ostentatious in the Palisades or Malibu. One that’s large enough to accommodate the five of us. Rent it for a month with the understanding that we can extend for another month. I’ll wire-transfer fifty thousand in your name to the Bank of America—the branch on the old Malibu Road. Establish a regular checking account with you, Quincy and me as signatories, draw what cash you need and ask the bank manager to recommend a real estate agent.”
“Who am I?” Stallings said.
“You’re the permanent representative of Wudu, Limited, Eight Bruton Street, Berkeley Square, London west one. You were formerly our permanent representative in the Middle East, headquartered in Amman, where you conducted research, surveys ad nauseam.”
“Speaking of ad nauseam,” Stallings said, “has Otherguy shown up?”
“Quincy’s giving him dinner—or supper—and telling him pretty much what I’ve told you.”
“I bet Otherguy tells Quincy he knows Ione Gamble personally.”
In London, there was either a sigh or more cigar smoke being exhaled before Artie Wu said, “The wonderful thing is, he just might.”
◊ ◊ ◊
Voodoo, Ltd. —50
After the room service waiter had rolled in the breakfast cart and left, Booth Stallings crossed the suite’s living room, heading for Georgia Blue’s closed bedroom door. Before he reached it, the door opened and she came out, walking on bare feet and wearing one of the hotel’s white terry-cloth robes.
Stallings noticed for what must have been the seventh time in less than twenty-four hours that she still moved with the same graceful stride on those long, long legs that made her stand five-ten in her bare feet and at least six-even in heels. Her light green eyes skipped over Stallings to the breakfast cart. When she reached it, she lifted up lids and sniffed hungrily at each dish. Just before reaching for a serving spoon, she ran her hand through her short reddish-brown hair that now boasted a short streak of white less than an inch wide. It had turned white in prison shortly after her thirty-fifth birthday not quite two years ago. The streak was centered above her high broad forehead, behind which, Stallings had long thought, lurked far too many brains.
As Georgia Blue stood there, heaping scrambled eggs, sausage and tropical fruit onto her plate—wearing no makeup, her hair brushed and combed by that one swipe of her hand—Stallings tried to decide whether his infatuation with her had finally turned into an obsession.
He had just decided he didn’t really give a damn what it was when she added two soft rolls to her plate and said, “Christ, Booth, you ordered enough for six.”
“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day if you listen to the hog growers, cereal manufacturers and the butter and egg folks.”
“Milk,” she said, pouring herself a glass. “I never thought I’d dream about milk.”
She carried the plate and glass over to a small dining table, set them down and returned to the cart for a fork and spoon, ignoring the knives. Once seated, she attacked the food, sending an occasional wary glance at Stallings, who was filling his own plate with bacon and eggs.
He looked at her, noticed one of the wary glances and said, “Slow down, Georgia. Nobody’s going to snatch it away from you.”
She ignored him and went on with her rapid eating.
Stallings sat down opposite her, buttered a roll and asked, “Why didn’t you lose any weight?”
“Because I took food away from the smaller and weaker women.”
“Wonder they didn’t get together and be
at up on you.”
“By then I was the mean gang’s number one ass-kicker.”
Although her plate was still half-full, she put her fork and spoon down, leaned back in the chair, stared at Stallings and said, “If we’re going to leave tomorrow for Los Angeles, I have to buy some stuff.”
“Don’t think I said anything about leaving tomorrow.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —51
“Artie did. I picked up his call between rings, just like the Secret Service taught me, and listened to you two fretting over me like a couple of old-maid aunts. Whatever shall we do about Georgia, poor thing? Well, the first thing you can do is get me some stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?” Stallings asked.
She smiled at him. “You think I mean dope, don’t you?”
“Whatever you want.”
“Look, I’m a convicted felon with a commuted sentence, not a pardon. If I’d been convicted in the States, I couldn’t vote or serve on a jury or be elected President unless one of the states restored my civil rights—although the only civil right most felons in California want restored is their right to own a gun. But I was convicted in another country and I’m not sure what the law is, although I’m damn sure the American embassy isn’t going to bust its collective gut to supply me with a fresh passport or the piece of paper it gives felons who want to go home.”
“How come you weren’t deported?”
“That was part of the deal I cut—no deportation.”
“Okay. You need a passport. What else?”
“Clothes.”
“Get dressed and we’ll go across the street and take care of the passport photos. Then I’ll give you some money and you can buy what clothes you need while I go find you a passport.”
“You know how?”
“I know how.”
“Must’ve been quite a learning experience—hanging out with Otherguy for what—five years now?”
“About that.”
“How is he? Not that I give a damn.”
“As ever.”
“Why’d Artie and Durant send you to fetch me and not Otherguy?”
“Because Artie thinks I’m still stuck on you.”
“Are you?”
“What d’you think?”
“I hope not because I can’t give you anything but sex,” she said and then tacked on a perfectly neutral, “baby.”
“Maybe that’s all I want,” Stallings said.
Voodoo, Ltd. —52
Eleven
After his third taxi ride, Booth Stallings made his fourth telephone call, this time from the lobby of the Manila Hotel. It was answered on the first ring by yet another Filipino-accented voice, a woman’s, who told him the pickup would take place in exactly six minutes, one hundred meters south of the hotel on Roxas Boulevard. Stallings was there at 12:08 P.M. And a minute later was climbing into the rear seat of a 1974 Toyota sedan that had a young Filipino driver and failed air-conditioning.
Next to the driver was his equally young wife, girlfriend or even, Stallings suspected, the other half of a New Peoples Army hit squad, which the Filipinos, with their love of nicknames, had dubbed sparrow teams. The pair gave Stallings a sweltering, aimless and mostly silent tour of Manila that lasted exactly fifty-nine minutes.
Stallings was surprised, if not shocked, by how much the sprawling city had decayed since he was last there in early 1988 with Otherguy Overby during their attempt to make a financial comeback after their losses in the stock market crash of 1987.
It was only after Overby explained his scheme again and again, step by step, that Stallings had agreed to buy into the syndicate then being formed to search for the five or fifty or even one hundred tons of gold bullion that, according to legend, had been buried, booby-trapped and abandoned by General Yamashita Tomoyuki, the Tiger of Malaya, as his Japanese army retreated from Manila in the early months of 1945.
Stallings, who considered himself something of an authority on the Philippines, argued that Yamashita’s Gold, as it was called, hadn’t been buried by Yamashita at all, but by Iwabuchi Sanji, the tough and ruthless Japanese rear admiral who reoccupied Manila after Yamashita fled.
It was the admiral who had waged the bitter house-to-house battle for Manila, destroying the city in the process. And it was this last utterly senseless battle that had given Admiral Iwabuchi the time he needed to bury the gold bullion.
Otherguy Overby had listened patiently to Stallings’s lengthy recitation. When it was over, he asked, “You really believe the gold’s there, don’t you?”
“You don’t?”
Voodoo, Ltd. —53
“I believe other people believe it’s there,” Overby said, “just like I believe other people believe in immaculate conception. And that’s what we’re buying into, Booth—pure blind faith.”
After three gold bars with Japanese stampings were discovered a month later at the site of the digging just north of Manila, the syndicate shares soared and Overby and Stallings promptly dumped theirs, realizing an 800 percent profit even after taking into account the cost of the three gold bars Overby had bought, doctored and with which he had salted the digging.
The young woman in the front seat who, Stallings guessed, couldn’t have been more than 20 or 21, finally turned around and asked, “How do you like our deterioration?”
“Seems to be coming along nicely.”
“You have been to Manila before?”
Stallings said he had been there in 1945, 1986 and 1988.
She turned back to the driver and said, “He was here with MacArthur!” The driver shrugged, muttered something that sounded like “Who cares?” and honked at an errant motor scooter.
The aimless tour ended at a large one-story house on the very edge of a vast dismal slum. Built of concrete blocks, the house boasted a sharply pitched roof of corrugated iron that was half-covered by a magnificent bougainvillea. A crude stake-and-chickenwire fence surrounded the hard-packed dirt in front of the house and served as a pen for two goats, three ducks, six hens and a rooster.
After the Toyota came to a stop, the young woman again turned to say, “She’s waiting for you.”
Stallings said, “Thanks for the ride,” left the car, finally figured out how to open the gate, went through it, carefully fastened it behind him, walked to the open front door and knocked.
A muscular Filipino of 35 or so, wearing a faded Batman T-shirt, appeared and greeted Stallings with a scowl and a long hard stare that was finally ended by an abrupt nod, which Stallings interpreted to mean, “Well, now that you’re here, come on in.”
Inside, the man vanished through another door and Stallings found himself in a square room with two dozen folding metal chairs arranged in three rows in front of an old flattop wooden desk. In the center of the desk was a telephone. Around the four edges of the desktop were scores of closely spaced cigarette burns. Against a wall to the left of the desk stood a padlocked steel cabinet, the kind that holds office supplies, and just to its left was an aging Toshiba copier.
A round-faced woman in her mid-forties with graying hair sat behind the desk. She wore a large, loose-fitting cotton dress patterned with giant sunflowers. Despite the tentlike dress, Stallings decided she Voodoo, Ltd. —54
wasn’t nearly as heavy as she was when he had last seen her in Hong Kong five years ago.
“How are you, Minnie?”
Minnie Espiritu leaned back in her chair, studied him gravely, then smiled and said, “Sit down, Booth.”
Stallings chose one of the folding chairs in the front row. “You’ve taken some weight off,” he said. “Looks good.”
“The cancer took it off and I look like hell.”
“Sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Why would you? They went in and cut and claim they got it all, but . . .” She shrugged.
“Anything I can—”
“Nothing,” she said, not allowing him to finish.
There was a short silence until Stallings said, “Those t
wo kids gave me a tour. Everything’s falling apart, isn’t it?”
She sighed first, then nodded and said, “They traded Marcos-style graft for the Aquino brand and now everybody’s shocked that there’s not a damn bit of difference. Our economy’s a basket case but all we do is squabble with Washington over those lousy military bases. You know something, Booth? We slid from a third world country into a fourth world catastrophe, right down there with Bangladesh, and nobody’s noticed and nobody’s cared.”
“How goes the revolution, Minnie?”
“The Berlin Wall almost squashed it. But we’re still struggling.
Somebody has to—although I sometimes think if it was really up to me, I’d sell it all to the Japanese and let ‘em turn it into golf courses and whorehouses.”
She sighed again and lit a cigarette after first offering the pack to Stallings, who declined with a headshake. When the cigarette was lit, she blew smoke at the ceiling and said, “What d’you want, Booth?”
“A passport.”
“What kind?”
“U.S.”
“Who for?”
Stallings reached into the side pocket of his tan poplin jacket, brought out a passport-size color photograph, rose and placed it on the desk. “Remember her?” he asked as he sat back down.
Minnie Espiritu leaned forward to peer at the photograph of Georgia Blue. “Sure. Miss Hardcase of 1986. The ex-Secret Service lady. She crossed you guys and did five years here in Welfareville. Then she cut herself a deal with Cory’s opposition and they got her sentence commuted.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —55
Minnie Espiritu looked up at Stallings, gave him a smile that was almost a grin and asked, “Is this business, romance or a little of both?”
“I’m of an extremely forgiving nature.”
“You’re also a damned old fool,” she said, glared at her cigarette, dropped it on the concrete floor and ground it out with a shoe. She was still grinding at it when she said, “It’ll cost you five thousand U.S.”
