by Ross Thomas
Durant at last unlocked his hands from behind his head and rose slowly. He stood an inch taller than Artie Wu but weighed at least sixty pounds less. At first glance most found him skinny until they realized their mistake and tried slim. When that didn’t quite work either they resorted to lean and left it at that because they couldn’t think of anything else.
In addition to his permanent tan Durant wore a pair of chino pants and a V-neck navy blue cotton sweater but no shirt. On his feet were a pair of expensive but sockless tasseled loafers that hadn’t been shined in a while—if ever. He walked over to the mirror and stared at Artie Wu’s reflection. “I don’t work with that Aussie git,” Durant said, using an offhand tone that Wu long ago had learned to interpret as adamant.
“Okay,” Wu said. “Forget it.”
There was a brief silence while they stared at each other in the mirror. Finally, Durant asked, “What’s Boy got?”
“I don’t know. He might be just the post office.”
“With a hell of a lot of postage due—as always.”
“So?”
“So we don’t have much choice, do we?”
“None at all,” said Artie Wu.
Emily Cariaga, reared by a great-grandmother in Manila who had insisted on speaking only Spanish to her great-granddaughter until the child was six, studied the ridged network of thirty-six pale scars that crisscrossed Durant’s back. He sat naked on the edge of the bed, smoking a breakfast cigarette. She reached over and ran a gentle forefinger along the longest scar. Durant shivered.
“What time is it?” she asked.
Durant looked at his stainless-steel watch on the bedside table and then slipped it onto his wrist. “Five past five.”
“At dinner last night Artie seemed so—well, I would say pensive, except I’m talking about Artie.”
“Artie’s broke,” Durant said. “When he’s broke, he thinks a lot.”
“You should’ve asked me about Ernie.”
“Probably.”
“I’ve known him all my life.”
Durant put his cigarette out in the ashtray. “And?”
“And Ernesto Arguello Bello Pineda was always a perfectly charming bastard. Utterly untrustworthy.”
Durant turned around to look at her as she lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, her small breasts bare, the rest of her covered by the sheet. “He checked out okay,” Durant said.
“With whom?” she said. “You and Artie talked to the wrong set. You talked to those who hoped to get a few crumbs from Ernie’s table. You should’ve talked to the ones who own the table.”
Durant smiled. “Your set.”
“My set.”
He shrugged. “It’s finished.”
“Whatever did you pay him all that money for?”
“To grease the skids; cross a few palms. The deal was a casualty reinsurance pool.”
“To insure insurers, right?”
“Right. Poor old Ernie claimed he knew people who’d cut us in for a twenty percent share of the pool. For their kindness, they’d be rewarded with two hundred thousand U.S., all cash. Ernie’d get one hundred thousand for all his hard work. Once we had it signed and sealed, Artie and I knew some money guys in London we could’ve laid our twenty percent off on. We were figuring on doubling our money or better.”
Emily Cariaga smiled. “Little lambs.” She ran a forefinger down the inside of Durant’s forearm. Again he shivered. “Didn’t anyone ever warn you against well-spoken strangers?”
“That’s what was really bothering Artie last night,” he said. “You see, until we bumped into Ernesto Pineda, Artie and I were always the well-spoken strangers.”
“Poor you.”
Durant nodded his agreement. “Poor is right.”
“You need money?”
He smiled, leaned over and kissed her. “That’s sweet of you. But no. Not yet anyway.”
“Let me know.”
Durant nodded and rose. “I’d better get dressed.”
She propped herself up on one elbow and stared at him. Spanish blood had bequeathed her a nicely boned chin and a straight thin nose that was large by Filipino standards. Above the well-shaped chin was a wide and perhaps overly generous mouth that grinned more often than it smiled. Best of all, Durant thought, were her eyes—enormous black ones that looked solemn until the grin came and they narrowed themselves into mischievous, faintly mocking arcs. With skin almost as dark as Durant’s dark tan, she stood five-three, except her posture was so perfect it seemed to add a couple of inches. With heels, she could pass for five-seven, even five-eight.
“Do you really want to find out what happened to Ernie and your money?” Emily Cariaga asked.
Durant didn’t reply for several seconds. “I really don’t give much of a damn about Ernie, but I was rather fond of the money.”
“Then I’ll ride down to Manila with you and Artie. Talk to a few people. It shouldn’t take me long to learn something.”
Durant nodded. “Okay. Fine.”
“When’s Artie coming by?”
“Six.”
“And it’s what now?”
Durant looked at his watch. “Five-fifteen.”
She patted the bed. “Then we just have time, don’t we?”
“Yes, I think we do,” Durant said as he slipped back into bed.
Durant said he’d already seen the great stone head of Ferdinand Marcos more times than he really needed to, so Artie Wu took the traditional Kennon Road back down through the mountains to the highway that ran south to Manila. The narrow two-lane Kennon Road twisted, curved and turned back upon itself. Traffic was light that early in the morning and Wu drove expertly, if too fast, making prodigal use of his horn on the curves.
Because riding in the back seat made her carsick, Emily Cariaga sat in front with Wu. Durant sat braced in the back. Whenever a curve came up he closed his eyes. Artie Wu’s driving was one of the few things that absolutely terrified Durant.
The old Jeepney formed the roadblock. Positioned across the narrow road, the Jeepney’s red and yellow paint was faded and peeling, but it still boasted two small chromed rearing horses on its hood. The hood and its radiator were all that still resembled the surplus Army jeeps after which it had been named.
They had parked it exactly right. When Wu came speeding around the curve he had just time enough to slam on the brakes. The Mercedes skidded to a stop a foot away from the Jeepney. In the rear seat Durant said, “Shit.”
They came out from behind the Jeepney then. There were five of them—four men and a woman, all in their twenties. Durant thought most of them were under twenty-five—at most, a year or two older. The woman seemed to be in charge.
The five wore what Durant had come to think of as standard international guerrilla gear: jeans, the inevitable jogging shoes, some kind of fatigue jacket with camouflage markings or, lacking the jacket, a dark T-shirt. Two of the men also wore Timex gimme caps.
The two with the caps and the M-16s took the right side of the Mercedes. The other two men, armed with sawed-off repeating shotguns, took the left side. The woman wore dark aviator glasses and carried a .38 semiautomatic down at her side. She walked slowly up to the driver’s door and stared through the dark glasses at Artie Wu who, after a moment’s hesitation, rolled down the window.
“Hi, there,” Artie Wu said with his friendliest smile.
“American?” she said.
“American.”
“Her?” the woman said, indicating Emily Cariaga.
“Filipina,” Wu said.
“And him?” she said, giving Durant a nod.
“American,” Wu said.
“Passports and ID, please.”
“Right,” Wu said and reached slowly into his inside breast pocket for his passport. The woman brought up her pistol and aimed it at him. Wu noticed it was of Colt manufacture; that it looked too large for her hand, and that the one safety he could see had been switched to off. He handed her his passport,
collected Durant’s, an ID card from Emily Cariaga and passed them over. The woman backed up two steps. One of the men with a sawed-off shotgun took her place.
The woman stuck the semiautomatic pistol down in the leather belt that ran through the loops of her jeans. She was not very tall, no more than five-two or three. Her straight black hair had been cut off into a kind of Dutch boy bob. Wu couldn’t see her eyes behind the dark glasses, but he thought what he could see of her face was attractive, even pretty.
The woman studied the ID card and the two passports carefully. She then took out a small notebook and used a ballpoint pen to copy down some particulars. After she put the notebook and pen away, she looked at her watch, nodded in a satisfied way, took the pistol from her belt and walked slowly back to Wu’s window.
“What is your occupation, your work?” she said. “You and the one in the rear. American passports don’t reveal it.”
“Businessmen.”
One of the men with the shotguns said something to her in Tagalog. “He wants to know how much your company would pay for you,” she said.
“We don’t have a company,” Wu said. “We’re private investors.”
“If you have money to invest, you must be rich. You wear a fine white suit and drive an expensive car.”
“Alas,” said Artie Wu. “The suit is old, the car is rented, and our last investment turned out badly.”
The woman smiled. She had extraordinarily white teeth. “Did you really let Ernie Pineda take you for three hundred thousand U.S.?”
Artie Wu didn’t try to hide his astonishment. He swallowed as much of it as he could and said, “I don’t know what—”
Durant leaned forward, interrupting. “It was around in there. Three hundred thousand.”
The woman nodded and tapped the two passports and the ID card on the car windowsill. “What happened to Ernie could happen to you. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Not exactly,” Durant said, still leaning forward.
“This is a corrupt country with a new government that promises to end corruption. Although we don’t believe those promises, we do believe the new government needs to be reminded of what can happen unless those promises are kept. Poor talkative Ernie was such a reminder. I’m still trying to decide if three additional reminders would be useful or counterproductive.”
The woman again tapped the passports and the ID on the windowsill several times and suddenly thrust them at Artie Wu who accepted them with a grateful nod.
She backed away as one of the men with an M-16 climbed into the old Jeepney and began grinding its starter. The battery was low and the grinding grew weaker and weaker. Just when it seemed that the battery was doomed, the engine caught and spat out a black cloud of diesel smoke from its exhaust. The man with the M-16 raced the engine several times and then backed and filled until there was enough room for the Mercedes to get by.
Wu put the Mercedes into drive and crept slowly forward. Durant stared out through the rear side window at the woman with the semiautomatic pistol. She reached up with her left hand and removed her dark aviator glasses. She had shining brown eyes that stared at Durant. After a moment, she nodded at him. He thought the nod could have meant goodbye, or we’ll meet again, or remember what I said, or even nothing at all. He nodded an equally equivocal reply. Wu fed the engine more gasoline and the Mercedes shot past the Jeepney.
When they were safely around the next curve, Wu broke the silence with, “What the hell was all that about?”
“It was about just what she said it was about,” Emily Cariaga said.
Wu wrinkled his forehead into an unbeliever’s frown. “Maybe,” he said.
“Tell me something, Artie,” Durant said. “Did you really say ‘alas’ back there?”
Wu sighed. “Alas. I really did.”
At seven that evening Wu and Durant were up in Wu’s suite in the Manila Peninsula, debating whether to go to dinner at a new German restaurant that had been touted to them by the Graf von Lahusen, or wait for Boy Howdy to return their call. Waiting for the call meant dining on room service fare, which appealed to neither of them. They had almost agreed to give the German restaurant a try when the phone rang. Durant answered it.
Boy Howdy’s harsh Australian accent crackled over the line. “That you, Artie—or that fucking Durant?”
“That fucking Durant.”
“Listen, Durant, I’ve really got a ripe one for you lads this time.”
“Tell it to Artie,” Durant said. Wu rose from the couch and took the phone.
“How are you, Boy?” Wu said and began to listen. He listened for nearly two minutes without making a sound except for two noncommittal grunts. When he finally spoke, his tone was cool and indifferent.
“Tell him we’re interested, that’s all,” Wu said, listened some more and then said in a new hard tone, “No, you sure as hell do not tell him it’s on, Boy. You tell him exactly what I told you: that we’re interested.”
Wu went back to listening and when he spoke again there was nothing but deal-breaking finality to his tone. “Absolutely not,” he said. “Your cut comes out of his end, not ours.” There was some more listening until Wu broke in with an indifferent, “Okay, Boy. As you say, the fuck’s off.”
Wu hung up the phone, smiled pleasantly at Durant, and waited. Twenty seconds later the phone rang. Wu picked it up, said hello and again listened. Finally, he nodded, as if with satisfaction, and said, “Right. I think we finally understand each other now, Boy.”
After he hung up this time, Wu turned to Durant, smiled again, took a cigar from a shirt pocket, eased himself down into a club chair and squirmed around in it until he was comfortable. He lit the cigar and carefully blew three perfect smoke rings up into the air. Durant watched it all with an amused smile.
“Tell me,” Artie Wu said. “Do you still believe in the good fairy?”
“Has the good fairy got a name?”
Wu blew another perfect smoke ring. “Otherguy Overby,” he said.
Durant’s smile widened and he began to clap slowly and softly. “I believe,” he said and, still smiling and clapping, said it once again.
CHAPTER 11
Otherguy Overby explained that the very early breakfast meeting in the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge was simply a matter of edge.
“This guy Harry Crites—the poet I’ve been reading up on—well, he flies in from Washington late last night and he’s still on East Coast time, right? So this morning we’re getting him up at say, six, six-thirty, and this’ll throw his biorhythms all out of whack and that gives us the edge. Not much, but some.”
“His biorhythms,” Booth Stallings said.
“Yeah.”
Stallings glanced at Overby who was behind the wheel of the yellow Porsche 911 cabriolet they had borrowed from the stable of the still incarcerated Billy Diron. They were rolling down the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, approaching the Getty Museum. It was 7:04 A.M., a Saturday, and the third day of spring in the year 1986.
“So you think his out-of-whack biorhythms are somehow going to help us pilfer the five million?”
“Pilfer? You don’t pilfer five million bucks. You … liberate it.”
Stallings chuckled. “Maybe I should recite the names of two or three dozen countries that’ve been sacked and plundered under liberation’s bright banner.”
Overby gave him a quick frowning glance. “Look,” he said. “Let me ask you something you don’t have to answer. But have you got funny politics? Not that I give a shit, but I’d kind of like to know.”
“Funny?”
“Red. Rouge. Pink.” He paused. “Moscow, Peking, maybe Havana?”
“No,” Stallings said with a smile. “In that sense I have no politics at all.” He chuckled again. “What’re yours—if I may be so bold?”
Overby seemed to give the question serious thought. “Well, you’d have to say I’m kind of a Republican, except I don’t bother to vote much anymore.”
/> “Don’t—or can’t because of a past felony rap or two?”
Overby sealed himself away in that remote and frozen place where Stallings had seen him go before. It’s his fuck-off retreat, he thought.
“I don’t see how that’s any of your goddamn business,” Overby said with his always surprising dignity.
“You’re right,” Stallings said. “It’s not.”
The parking attendant gave the yellow Porsche a look of recognition when Overby brought it to a stop in the Beverly Hills Hotel drive. The attendant opened Overby’s door and said, “When’s Billy getting sprung, Otherguy?”
“Tomorrow or maybe the next day and watch the fucking paint,” Overby said, getting out of the car.
As they went up the hotel steps, Overby turned to give Stallings a quick up-and-down inspection. “Let’s stop in the john,” he said.
“I’ll wait for you.”
Overby let a little exasperation flicker across his face. “Look. When I say something like that, it’s not just because I need company.”
The corners of Stallings’ mouth went down in a facial shrug. He gestured for Overby to lead on and followed him down the corridor and into the men’s room.
On that third day of spring, Stallings was wearing a new tan poplin suit and a blue tab-collar shirt with a gold bar pin and the striped brown and gold tie of some disbanded regiment. The suit, shirt, tie, pin and a pair of lace-up cordovans were part of a wardrobe Otherguy Overby had picked out for Stallings two days before at Lew Ritter’s haberdashery on Wilshire Boulevard, paying a premium for next-day alterations and delivery.
Overby had then driven Stallings to a hairstylist on Melrose and contracted for $85 worth of haircut, facial and manicure. On their way to the barber, an amused Stallings had listened as Overby revealed his tactics.
“I don’t know how long it’s been since you were out on the Rim,” Overby had said with a wave that included the world west of Catalina and east of China. “But when you’re working it like we’ll be working it, you’ve gotta look like you can buy the mark and have change left over. Out there, marks don’t fork over to shabby because shabby doesn’t inspire confidence and that’s all we’ve got to sell. What does inspire confidence is front—not flash, but front. You know the difference?”
