Out on the Rim

by Ross Thomas

  “I’ll tell him,” Overby said. “Billy likes stuff like that.”

  Cynthia Blondin nodded, backed the car around until it faced the drive, ground the gears twice and drove off. Just as the car reached the corner of the house, the man with the hurt wrist twisted around and used his unhurt hand to give Stallings and Overby the inevitable finger. Overby waved goodbye with the tire iron, turned to Stallings, indicated the revolver and said, “You want to keep it?”

  “What for?” Stallings said, handing it over.

  A relieved Overby said, “Now what?”

  “Now? Well, now we’ll go inside and talk about Wu and Durant.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Booth Stallings sat at the large round table in Billy Diron’s elaborate kitchen and watched Overby make two canned corned beef sandwiches. He made them with the quick economical moves usually learned in either a delicatessen or an institutional kitchen. Since he suspected Overby would starve before working in a delicatessen, Stallings decided not to ask for the name of the institution in which he had trained.

  Overby served the sandwiches on two plates, each containing exactly seven potato chips and three slices of dill pickle. Stallings had watched him count out both the potato chips and the pickles. To drink were two more bottles of San Miguel beer.

  After Overby sat down, Stallings took a bite of the sandwich. Between the slices of dark rye he found not only corned beef, but also several leaves of Boston lettuce, a thick slab of Bermuda onion, and a dressing of mayonnaise and two kinds of mustard that Overby had carefully measured out and blended together.

  After Stallings swallowed his first bite of sandwich, he said, “Tell me.”

  “What?” Overby said.

  “How old are they?”

  Overby tried to recall. “Well, Artie must be—”

  “That’s Wu, right?”

  Overby nodded. “Arthur Case Wu. He must be around forty-four now, but it’s kind of hard to tell about Durant on account of there was never any birth certificate. But Durant thinks he’s about the same as Artie. Forty-four. Around in there.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, they were both raised in this San Francisco Methodist orphanage, ran away when they were fourteen, wound up at Princeton for a while, and they’ve been partners ever since.”

  “They went to Princeton—to college?”

  “I never got that quite straight. Artie went on a scholarship and Quincy sort of went as Artie’s bodyguard.”

  “Dear God,” Stallings said. “Their specialty is what exactly?”

  “This and that. But most of the time they probably do pretty close to what you’d want ’em to do.”

  “I haven’t said.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “I’ll get to it,” Stallings said and ate some more of his sandwich, washing it down with the Filipino beer. “They married?” he asked.

  Overby produced one of his sly grins that displayed no teeth. “To each other, you mean?”

  “To anybody.”

  “Durant’s not married and fools around. But Wu’s married to this lady from Scotland, and by lady I mean she’s got some sort of thoroughbred bloodlines—eighteenth cousin to the Queen twice removed or something—which suits Artie just fine on account of he’s still pretender to the Emperor’s throne.”

  “Emperor?” Stallings said. “What emperor?”

  “The Emperor of China, who else?”

  “Sweet Jesus.”

  “He’s even got genealogical charts and everything. He also figures if there were about two revolutions, three wars and maybe ten thousand deaths of just the right people, his oldest twin boy could be both King of Scotland and Emperor of China.”

  “He has twin sons?”

  “Twin sons and twin daughters. Cute kids—or were the last time I saw ’em. The girls are younger than the boys.”

  Stallings slowly poured more beer into his glass and tasted it. “He’s not … obsessed with this emperor thing, is he?”

  Again, Overby smiled slyly. “Artie figures he’s the last of the Manchus.”

  “How about a straight answer?”

  Overby’s frown managed to make him look both grave and highly proper. Stallings thought it must be one of his most useful expressions. “Artie knows exactly who he is,” Overby said. “More’n anybody I ever met.”

  “And Durant?”

  “He doesn’t much give a shit who he is.”

  “When’d you meet them?”

  “The fourth of July in sixty-eight, Bangkok. At the Embassy reception.” He paused. “The Ambassador’d invited everybody who even looked American. Even us.”

  “What were you doing in Bangkok?”

  “Looking around. I’d bumped into Wu and Durant and they needed a crimp for a little something they’d decided to play off against the chief of station.”

  “The CIA chief of station?”

  “Who else.”

  “So what happened?”

  Overby looked puzzled. “What d’you mean what happened? We ran it and walked away with about sixty-three thousand. That was major money back then, in sixty-eight.”

  “And what did he do about it?”

  “The chief of station? He ate it. What else could he do? He sure didn’t go around bragging about the bad case of greed he’d come down with.”

  “Were either Wu or Durant ever hooked up to Langley?”

  Overby’s answering shrug was a bit too elaborate to satisfy Stallings. “Is that a maybe yes or a maybe no?”

  “Artie says that a couple of times they were maybe unwitting assets. But Durant always says they were half-witted assets and no maybe about it. They moved around a lot and sometimes they just took whatever turned up.”

  “When’s the last time you worked with them?”

  “Seven or eight years ago. We went in on a deal together and we all got well.”

  “Where?”

  “Here. In California.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “That’s none of your fucking business, is it?”

  They stared at each other for long moments, each searching for the other’s weakness, only to find there was none. Stallings finally replied to Overby’s question. “No,” he said, “I don’t guess it is. Any of my fucking business.”

  Overby drank some of his beer and said, “Tell me about your deal.”

  “All right.” Stallings was silent for perhaps ten seconds as he edited what he planned to say. “Somebody,” he said, “and I don’t know exactly who, wants to pay me half a million dollars to bribe a Filipino freedom fighter and/or terrorist to come down from the hills and light out for Hong Kong where five million dollars U.S. will be waiting for him. Or so they say.”

  Although Overby’s face and eyes remained calm and even impassive, his nose betrayed him with a long, long sniff as if he suddenly smelled sweet profit. After the sniff came the white, wide and utterly ruthless grin, which Stallings found curiously merry.

  “You need help,” Overby said.

  “I know.”

  “You need Wu and Durant.”

  “So it would seem.”

  “You also need me.”

  Stallings raised his eyebrows to register surprise. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Overby’s ruthless, merry grin returned. “Like hell.”

  “It’s an interesting notion.”

  “Where’s this freedom fighter and/or terrorist of yours holed up—central Luzon?”

  Stallings shook his head. “Cebu. Know it?”

  Overby’s grin grew even wider. “Lapu-Lapu land. Yeah, I know Cebu. Like my name. Not to get too commercial and all, but what kind of split are we talking about?”

  “You’re negotiating for Wu and Durant now, right?”

  Overby nodded. “For both them and me.”

  “I was thinking in the neighborhood of fifty-fifty.”

  Overby’s feigned disappointment took the form of a sorrowful frown. “I think we’d need ju
st a little more taste than that.”

  “It’s take it or leave it, Otherguy.”

  The frown went away and the grin came back. “Well, hell, half of five hundred thousand split three ways, less expenses, is about eighty thousand each, which isn’t bad. Not good, you understand, but not bad.”

  “I guess I didn’t make myself clear,” Stallings said. “I intend to split the entire five million—not just the five hundred thousand.”

  Overby didn’t try to disguise anything. The big white smile was back, never more ruthless, never more merry. “You’re talking interesting fucking money now.”

  Stallings didn’t return the smile. Instead his eyes took on the look of someone who has dipped into the future and is dismayed by what he’s seen.

  “It’s poisoned money,” Stallings said.

  “Money’s money.”

  “Not this time.”

  Guided only by his almost infallible con man’s instinct, Otherguy Overby came up with exactly the right measure of reassurance.

  “In that case, friend,” he said, “you sure as hell got off on the right floor.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The pretender to the Emperor’s throne stood in the innermost sanctum of the deposed ruler’s palace and listened, beaming with pride, as the younger of his ten-year-old twin daughters finished reading the framed poem aloud. The poem had been left behind on the wall when the deposed ruler fled into the night.

  “‘Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it,’” she read, “‘And—which is more—you’ll be a man, my son.’”

  The ten-year-old girl had read Kipling’s “If” with what at one time was called expression. The Filipinos in the line behind her applauded enthusiastically. She turned, curtsied prettily—despite the jeans she wore—then looked up at the big Chinaman (as she and her sister always thought of him) who was not only her father, but also pretender to the throne of the Emperor of China.

  “Very, very nice,” said Artie Wu who stood six foot two and three-quarters inches and weighed 249 pounds, only six percent of it pure blubber.

  His younger daughter made a face at the poem on the wall. “God, that’s dumb.”

  “Mr. Kipling had an unhappy childhood,” Agnes Wu explained. “To make up for it he sometimes became a trifle optimistic and overly sentimental.”

  Her daughter nodded wisely. “Mush, huh?”

  “Mush,” agreed Agnes Wu whose Rs were tinged with a slight Scot’s burr. Everything else she said sounded like the English spoken by those who have gone to proper schools that place a high premium on received pronunciation. But none of the schools were able to do anything about the burr of Agnes Wu who had been born Agnes Goriach.

  The older of the twin daughters (older by twenty-one minutes) turned on her sister. “It wasn’t half as dumb as ‘Invictus’ that you got out of and Mrs. Crane made me memorize last year. You want mush? ‘Out - of- the - night - that - covers - me - black - as - the - pit - from- pole-to - pole - I - thank-whatever- gods- may - be - for - my- unconquerable-soul.’ That’s mush.”

  “You’re holding up the line, ladies,” said Artie Wu as sternly as he ever said anything to his daughters. Totally incapable of assuming the heavy father role, Wu continued to be surprised at his daughters’ reluctance to take advantage of his faltering will. His twin thirteen-year-old sons were something else. His sons would flimflam a saint.

  The Wu family moved out of Ferdinand Marcos’ small private study whose shelves still contained scores of pop histories, biographies and steaming political exposes, written—for the most part—by American authors. The study was a windowless room tucked away in the Malacanang Palace on the banks of the Pasig River in Manila. The Wus had already toured the discothèque, the throne room, and were heading for Imelda Marcos’ bedroom when Agnes Wu turned back to the trailing Peninsula Hotel limousine driver who was also visiting the palace for the first time.

  “How much time do we have, Roddy?” she asked.

  Rodolfo Caday glanced at his watch. “Plenty, ma’am. The flight’s not till four and I fix it with A and A to meet us here outside.”

  A and A were the twin thirteen-year-old Wu sons, Arthur and Angus, who already had toured the palace twice on their own. “Then we don’t have to go back to the hotel for them?” Agnes Wu said.

  “No, ma’am.”

  With a small gesture that took in the palace, Agnes Wu said, “Well?”

  Rodolfo Caday frowned, then shrugged. “Much foolishness.”

  In the bedroom of Imelda Marcos one of the volunteer Filipina docents was commenting in a not quite bored voice on several of the room’s more interesting items, particularly the huge red satin bed. Some ten thousand Filipinos were trooping through the palace each day and the handful now in the bedroom made no effort to disguise their voyeurism. Some of the men nudged each other. Some of the women giggled. Others kept handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths as if to strain out any of the remaining bad-luck germs that had infected Imelda Marcos.

  Artie Wu’s younger daughter looked up at him. “How come they bought so much—well, muchness?”

  “It may have been a way to keep score.”

  “You mean the lady with the most shoes wins?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  “Maybe that’s the point,” Artie Wu said.

  Standing in the center of the bedlam that was the Manila International Airport, Wu peeled off fifty-peso notes and handed them to sons and daughters, porters and self-proclaimed expediters, and to the driver, Rodolfo Caday, dispatching them all on real and imagined errands that would give Wu a few minutes alone with his wife.

  Almost everyone liked to stare at Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Case Wu. They especially liked to gape at the tall woman with the pale yellow hair, the big smart gray eyes, and the not quite perfect features that seemed almost regal until she grinned. When she grinned she looked just a bit wacky.

  The gapers also liked to dart quick and, they hoped, undetected glances at the big Chinese in his white silk suit and Panama hat who carried an ebony cane—a walking stick, really—that they all knew concealed a sword, although it didn’t. Agnes Wu always referred to the white silk suit as the “get out of here and get me some money suit” because Wu almost never put it on unless they were broke or nearly so.

  Agnes Wu ran a hand down the suit’s immaculate lapel, smoothing out an imaginary wrinkle. “So riddle me this,” she said. “When you get up to Baguio, what if you and Durant still can’t find the Cousin?”

  “We’ll find him,” Artie Wu said.

  “You’re going to have to face it sooner or later, Artie. The Cousin took you and Durant.”

  Wu nodded. “That’s why we have to find him. After all, Quincy and I have our reputations to think of.” Then he smiled—the great white Wu smile behind which laughter bubbled, threatening to erupt. The smile told Agnes Wu she could disregard everything her husband had just said.

  She grinned back at him, again making herself look just a few charming bubbles off level. “So when you don’t find the Cousin and your reputations are in shreds, then what?”

  “Then we come back down here and take the next plane to London and the fast train up to Edinburgh. Durant likes trains.”

  “Bring money, Artie.”

  “Don’t I always?”

  “Bring bagsful this time.”

  “Bagsful,” he promised.

  “Take care of yourself.”

  He nodded.

  “And look after Durant.”

  “Or vice versa,” Artie Wu said.

  The Peninsula Hotel in the Makati section of Manila was owned and operated by the same organization that operated the Hong Kong Peninsula. About the only difference Artie Wu could detect was that the Hong Kong Peninsula sent a Rolls-Royce to pick you up at the airport whereas the Manila Peninsula made do with a Mercedes.

  As Wu entered the many-sided lobby he saw that most of its tables were filled as usual by well-dressed Man
ileños who had gathered to gossip and drink coffee or maybe something with ice in it. And, as usual, many of them stared at him when, swinging his cane, he strode across the lobby toward the concierge. Wu looked left once and right once, checking to see if there were any faces out of his past.

  The only familiar one belonged to the Graf von Lahusen whose ancestral estates lay unfortunately on the wrong side of the Elbe. The thirty-seven-year-old count had dropped out of the Sorbonne at nineteen to take the hippie trail to Southeast Asia where he soon discovered that his title, looks and four languages could earn him a decent if questionable living.

  Wu was remembering the time the count and Otherguy Overby had run the ancient Omaha Banker wheeze, Overby playing the role of the remorse-stricken banker to perfection, when the Graf von Lahusen looked up, saw Wu, rose and bowed gravely. Artie Wu stopped and bowed gravely back. The count’s mark, a middle-aged Japanese, twisted around in his chair to see who was doing all the bowing and scraping. He seemed visibly impressed by the Chinese gentleman in the splendid white silk suit and Panama hat who carried what obviously was a sword cane.

  Wu continued to the concierge’s desk, pleased to see that Mr. Welcome-Welcome was on duty. The assistant concierge’s name was really Bernard Naldo but Wu always thought of him as Mr. Welcome-Welcome because that’s what he always said to Wu, even when they had seen each other only minutes before.

  “Welcome, welcome, Mr. Wu,” the assistant concierge said as Wu reached the counter and leaned on it, noting that Naldo still looked like a genial brown frog, all dressed up in a black coat, white shirt and striped pants, who would turn back into a prince once he had answered the millionth tourist’s millionth dumb question.

  “Got my bill ready, Bernie?” Wu said.

  Naldo reached beneath the counter and came up with a thick sheaf of computer-printed billings. “As requested,” he said. “The total is, let’s see, sixty thousand two hundred and nineteen pesos.”

  “Settle for three thousand U.S., cash money?”