Out on the Rim

by Ross Thomas

Artie Wu nodded sadly. “Yes, I suppose we would, wouldn’t we?” There was a silence and then Wu smiled, as if suddenly struck by an idea so wise and wonderful that it bordered on pure inspiration. “You could, of course—” Wu broke off. “Well, never mind.”

  “We could what?” Cray asked.

  “You could make your own deal with them.” Wu turned to Durant. “What d’you think, Quincy?”

  Durant appeared to give it some thought. “Sure. Why not?”

  “Georgia?” Wu asked.

  “It’d be better than your playing hostage up in the hills for a year or six months,” she said to Cray and Jordan. “Unless you’re both crazy about fishheads and rice.”

  Resignation spread across Cray’s face, erasing the last vestige of shock. Cynicism, in the form of a slight smile, moved in to replace resignation. “Isn’t this where I ask: I don’t suppose they take American Express?”

  Wu’s frown was one of deep concern. “Money does present a problem.”

  “But not an insurmountable one, right?” Cray said.

  Wu looked a question at Durant who nodded his answer. “Yes, well, I suppose Quincy and I could lend you the money and you could give us an IOU or something.”

  “A promissory note would be best,” Durant said.

  “You fucks,” said Weaver Jordan.

  Jack Cray again looked first at one ridge, then the other, turned to Wu and said, “Write it out.”

  Wu smiled at Georgia Blue. “Georgia.”

  She reached into her shoulder bag and removed an envelope. From the envelope she took a thrice-folded sheet of bond paper, which she unfolded and handed to Jack Cray.

  He looked at it. “Neatly typed, I see.”

  “What’s it say?” Weaver Jordan asked.

  “It’s headed ‘Promissory Note’ and then it says, ‘For value received we promise to pay to Arthur Case Wu and Quincy Durant on demand the sum of forty-eight thousand Filipino pesos or twenty-four hundred U.S. dollars with simple interest accruing at the rate of six percent per annum.’ And then there’re places to fill in the date and sign our names.

  “Who’s got a pen?” Weaver Jordan asked. “I’ll sign the fucker.”

  Georgia Blue silently handed him a ballpoint pen. Using Durant’s back as a desk, Jordan signed his name with a flourish and handed the promissory note to Cray who glared at Wu. “We’re signing under duress, of course.”

  Wu smiled politely. “We’ll let the lawyers argue about that, should it ever come up.”

  Cray signed, handed the note to Wu and said, “Okay. Let’s get it over with.”

  Durant turned toward the far ridge, took a white handkerchief from his pocket and waved it back and forth above his head.

  “What the fuck’re you doing?” Weaver Jordan said.

  “Surrendering, what else?” Durant said.

  Up on the far ridge, Vaughn Crouch grinned down at the handkerchief-waving Durant, turned to his temporary first sergeant and said, “Well, son, you know what to do.”

  “Right,” the first sergeant said.

  Barking out his orders, the first sergeant had lined up his twenty-three armed mercenaries in two neat rows near the bamboo bridge. Twelve men stood at near attention in the front row; eleven in the rear. Weaver Jordan and Jack Cray were the paymasters. Carrying the thick stack of Filipino fifty-peso notes, Cray counted out 2,000 pesos at a time. He handed each payment to Jordan who in turn handed it with his undamaged right arm to the next mercenary in line. The first sergeant approved each payment with a grunt and a nod.

  When Cray and Jordan were halfway down the front row, Georgia Blue took the 35mm Minolta from her shoulder bag and began snapping pictures of the payments. Jack Cray stopped, turned and started to say something, but changed his mind when the first sergeant clapped a large but gentle hand on his shoulder. Georgia Blue captured Cray with his mouth open and the first sergeant’s hand on his shoulder.

  After the last mercenary was paid, Cray and Jordan walked over to Wu and Durant, accompanied by the first sergeant.

  “Now what?” Cray said.

  “Well, we come now to the glory part,” Wu said. “You and Mr. Jordan will escort these brave ex-NPA freedom fighters back to Cebu City where they’ll meekly surrender to the proper authorities. Just how the CIA talked them down out of the hills we’ll leave to your imagination. But whatever you guys dream up, they’ll swear to. Right, Sergeant?”

  “Absolutely,” the first sergeant said.

  There was a silence that went on and on until Jordan looked at Jack Cray and said, “You know. It just might work.”

  After a moment, Cray nodded and looked at Durant. “What else?”

  “One last item,” Durant said. “If ever asked, you know nothing about anyone called Wu, Stallings, Overby, Blue or Durant. Nothing pertinent anyhow.”

  Cray turned the threat over in his mind. “If we know nothing about you,” he said slowly, “then you can’t know anything about us, can you? And you’d have no use for that promissory note or the photos.”

  “What a good boy,” said the beaming look that Artie Wu gave Jack Cray. Aloud, he said, “And thus we all arrive safely at the perfect stalemate.”

  “Otherwise known as mutual blackmail,” Durant said.

  “I like detente better,” Weaver Jordan said.

  Wu beamed again. “Then we’ll call it detente.”

  They came out of the tropical rain forest at 3:31 P.M., both limping a little, Otherguy Overby in the lead, Booth Stallings a dozen or so feet behind. They saw the bamboo bridge first and then, a little to the right of it, seated in the shade of some flourishing nipa palms, Wu, Durant and Georgia Blue.

  Durant was up first and trotted toward Overby who stopped and waited for him. “Where the hell is he?” Durant demanded.

  “Right behind me the last I looked,” Overby said and turned to find Booth Stallings moving slowly toward him. “Yeah. There he is.”

  Durant waited patiently until Stallings joined them. “I mean Espiritu.”

  “Oh,” Overby said. “Him. Well, he couldn’t make it.”

  “Espiritu’s dead,” said Stallings.

  “What happened?”

  Neither Overby nor Stallings apparently wanted to speak first. Finally, Stallings said, “We’d like to sit down in some shade, have a drink of water and maybe a sip of whiskey, if anybody’s got any, and then I’ll tell you what happened. And if Otherguy doesn’t like my version, he can tell his.”

  They sat in a row in the shade of the flourishing nipa palms, three big wide-eyed kids named Wu, Durant and Blue, listening transfixed to the tale told at storytime in the jungle kindergarten. At least, that’s how Otherguy Overby would later remember it.

  Stallings, the tale teller, began with the death of Alejandro Espiritu’s nephew, Orestes; continued with the death of Carmen Espiritu in the cave; reached his climax with the death of Espiritu himself (“Otherguy shot him twice in the back before old Al shot me. Afterward, Otherguy felt a little bad about it but I sure as hell didn’t”); and ended with the arrival of Minnie Espiritu and her five young guards.

  When Stallings was done with his story, he asked, “Anybody think to bring a bottle?”

  Georgia Blue reached into her apparently bottomless shoulder bag and produced a half-liter of Black and White Scotch, which she handed to Stallings. He twisted off the cap, had a long swallow and passed it to Overby who drank and offered it to Artie Wu who shook his head. So did Durant. Overby gave the bottle back to Georgia Blue and then crept into his private sealed-off place to wait and see who would get blamed for what.

  Wu looked at Overby and nodded sympathetically. “Is that about what happened, Otherguy?”

  “That’s it.”

  “So what d’you think went wrong?”

  “Overall?”

  Wu nodded.

  Overby thought before answering. “You came up with a real smart plan, Artie. One of your best. Maybe a little tricky here and there, and maybe a little too egg-c
rated, but what the hell, there was a big score involved and none of us, except you and Durant, have worked together for a while. So that was okay. And everybody was given a job to do and, as far as I can tell, everybody did their job—except one person.”

  “Who?” Durant asked.

  Although sweat still flowed down over Overby’s face, the smile he gave Durant was one of chilly disapproval. “Espiritu. You guys sort of forgot to give him the whole script. Especially the last act. If you had, well, maybe, things would’ve turned but better.”

  “Maybe,” Artie Wu said. “Maybe not.” He leaned toward Overby, his expression frankly curious. “What if you hadn’t shot him, Otherguy?”

  Overby sighed. “Well, Booth here’d be dead and I—well, I probably could’ve been five million bucks richer.” He paused. “Two and a half million anyway.”

  Durant glared at him. “You were going solo, weren’t you?”

  Overby returned the glare. “Was I?”

  Artie Wu smiled. “Let’s assume the thought crossed your mind—fleetingly, of course.”

  Overby only shrugged.

  Booth Stallings looked at Overby with a wry fond smile. “That was a hell of a choice you made, Otherguy.”

  Overby nodded. “Well, I made it,” he said. “And now I’ll just have to live with it.”

  CHAPTER 39

  When Booth Stallings came down to breakfast at 6:30 the next morning after three and a half hours’ sleep, the only other customer in the Magellan Hotel’s Zugbu restaurant was the retired Colonel, Vaughn Crouch. Stallings helped himself to rice, fruit and scrambled eggs from the breakfast buffet and sat down at Crouch’s table.

  “What time’d you get back?” Crouch asked, spearing the last piece of ham on his plate.

  “A little before three this morning.”

  “I got back yesterday afternoon—around four-thirty.”

  “You didn’t have to walk as far.”

  “The rest of your bunch sleeping in?”

  Stallings nodded and tried some of the eggs, which tasted like eggs had tasted when he was a child.

  “Then I guess they haven’t seen this yet,” Crouch said, handing Stallings a Cebu City morning newspaper. “My kids made the front page,” he announced proudly. “Had themselves a hell of a time.”

  Booth Stallings read the headline first, which claimed in 48-point Bodoni bold italics across three columns: ‘SURRENDER’ REPORT DISPUTED. He then read the story, or at least its first three paragraphs:

  CEBU CITY—Yesterday’s surrender of 24 rebels in Catmon Town, north of this city, was immediately branded as an “elaborate psy-war operation run by the CIA and the army’s Regional Unified Command to demoralize revolutionary forces.”

  The statement challenging the alleged surrender was issued by the Cebu Provincial Operational Command of the New People’s Army (POC-NPA) and signed by “Commander Min,” the nom de guerre (war name) of Miss Minerva Espiritu, sister of NPA legend, Alejandro Espiritu.

  The 24 alleged rebels who “defected” yesterday were accompanied by two men eyewitnesses described as “European males.” Catmon Town police refused to identify the two European males and later denied their existence.

  Stallings gave up on the story, handed the paper to Crouch and went back to his breakfast. After another forkful of eggs, he said, “Where were you?”

  The retired Colonel grinned. “Once I shadowed the kids and those two Langley shitbirds down from the hills, I kind of disappeared.” He indicated the newspaper. “Sure you don’t want to finish the story?” he said. “It gets better.”

  “Who cares?” Stallings said and pushed his breakfast plate away.

  Crouch slipped on his trifocals to give Stallings a closer inspection. “Something happened, didn’t it—up in the hills?”

  Stallings nodded. “Al got himself killed. I guess you could call that something—something you’d better not tell anyone.”

  “By God. Old Al,” Crouch said, leaned back in his chair, took off his glasses and stared off into blurred nothingness for almost a minute. “Well, I think he was just about due, don’t you?”

  “I don’t think Al thought so,” Booth Stallings said.

  At a few minutes after nine that morning, Otherguy Overby came out of the entrance to the Magellan Hotel, heading for the air-conditioned hotel van that would take him, Wu, Durant, Stallings and Georgia Blue to the Cebu airport and the eleven o’clock flight to Manila.

  Something blue, yellow and black caught his eye. It was the Rotary Club of Metro Cebu’s four-question billboard whose fourth question still wondered: “Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?”

  “All but one,” Overby replied, surprised that he had spoken aloud and even more surprised to find Artie Wu standing just behind him. Wu looked where Overby had been looking, read the Rotary Club billboard and smiled.

  “In Manila, Otherguy,” Wu said, “we’ll talk about it.”

  “What?” Overby said.

  “The correct answer to question four.”

  Booth Stallings was assigned a window seat on the port side of the Philippine Airlines plane. Next to him sat Quincy Durant. Across the aisle were Georgia Blue and Artie Wu. Otherguy Overby sat by himself in an aisle seat two rows forward.

  After the plane gained altitude, Stallings stared down at the long green skinny tropical island of Cebu until he could no longer see it. As he leaned back in his seat, Durant lowered his newspaper and said, “Did you find it?”

  “What?”

  “Whatever you were looking for.”

  “I was looking for a nineteen-year-old second john who went in on an I and R patrol armed with a carbine, six grenades and the collected poems of Rupert Brooke.”

  “And?”

  “I found him.”

  “How was he?”

  Stallings turned to look at Durant. “Older. That’s all. Just older.”

  “And wiser?”

  “Not so you’d notice.”

  At 12:06 P.M. that day, Quincy Durant walked into the Manila International Airport’s main entrance concourse. Ahead of him were Artie Wu and Otherguy Overby. Just behind him were Booth Stallings and Georgia Blue. At 12:07 P.M., he was arrested by the Manila homicide detective who had two of the smartest brown eyes Durant had ever seen.

  As another detective snapped the handcuffs on, Durant said, “May I ask why?”

  “No,” said Lt. Hermenegildo Cruz.

  “May I call a lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “What about my rights, such as they are?”

  Lt. Cruz smiled, as if enjoying the exchange. “What rights?” Artie Wu had now turned back and was striding toward Durant when a third detective stepped in front of him, blocking the way. Wu stopped and glared down at the five-foot-seven detective with such menace that a fourth detective hurried over to form a two-man barrier.

  Lt. Cruz led Durant over to where Wu stood, still blocked by the two detectives. “You wanted to say something?” Lt. Cruz asked.

  With as much bombast as he could manage, Wu said, “You can’t do that—he’s an American citizen.”

  “Dear God, I had no idea,” Lt. Cruz said as he led Durant away.

  Two of the plainclothes detectives put the still handcuffed Durant into the front seat of a black Nissan Maxima and waited until Lt. Cruz slipped behind the wheel. The detectives then melted away into a small crowd of airport gawkers who had gathered to see whether something awful would happen to Durant.

  Lt. Cruz backed the Maxima out of a parking space whose stenciled sign claimed it was reserved for the assistant airport manager. Neither man spoke until they were well past the airport and turning into EDSA.

  It was then that Lt. Cruz said, “I think I’ll charge you with the murder of your lady friend, Emily Cariaga.”

  “I notice this isn’t the way to police headquarters,” Durant said.

  “I could build a very tight case against you—opportunity, motive, all that.”

  “A crime of pas
sion, right?”

  “What else?”

  “You can take the cuffs off now.”

  “Later,” Cruz said and drove on in silence except for the sound of his horn, which he honked every four seconds regardless of need. “I know who killed her,” Lt. Cruz said after four blocks of verbal silence.

  “So do I.”

  Lt. Cruz flicked a glance at Durant and then looked back at the traffic, which he decided could use another toot from his horn. “How long’ve you known?”

  “Days.”

  “And you didn’t come forward.”

  “I was busy.”

  “Down in Cebu.”

  “Yes.”

  “A pleasure trip, wasn’t it?”

  “Strictly business.”

  There was another silence, four blocks long this time, until Lt. Cruz said, “I know who killed her but I can’t prove it.”

  “I probably can,” Durant said, “but it’ll have to be done my way.”

  “That would pose some rather delicate problems.”

  “Not as delicate as the one you’ve already got.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Lt. Cruz said.

  “You’ve got until eight tomorrow morning.”

  “What happens then?”

  “I fly to Hong Kong.”

  Lt. Cruz said nothing. Instead, he turned off EDSA and onto Ayala Avenue, which led into the heart of Manila’s financial district. It was down Ayala Avenue that Mrs. Aquino’s white-collar and middle-class supporters had liked to parade.

  Lt. Cruz drove past the Ritz Tower on the right and the Rustan’s department store on the left. After he drove past Fonda Street and the Rizal Theatre and crossed Makati Avenue, Durant said, “My hotel’s back there, the Peninsula.”

  “I know,” Lt. Cruz said but didn’t slow the car until he reached the Associated Bank Building and pulled over to a stop. A man of about thirty, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, silently opened Cruz’s door. The shirt covered but didn’t conceal the gun lump on the man’s right hip. After Lt. Cruz climbed out of the car the man slipped behind the wheel.