Росс Томас - Voodoo, Ltd.

Miss Hazlitt cheerfully worked twelve-hour days when necessary or, with equal cheerfulness, did nothing at all for days or even weeks when Wu and Durant were away on business. She passed the idle hours by reading American novels and was particularly fond of those with steamy Deep South backgrounds. Whenever Wudu, Ltd., ran short of funds and couldn’t pay her salary, Miss Hazlitt stayed home, returning to work only after Wu or Durant proved that fresh funds had indeed been banked.

Satisfied that everything in the large office was as it should be, Miss Hazlitt softly closed the door, went to her desk, sat down and picked up a novel about a brokenhearted middle-aged lawyer in Savannah in the 1930s.

Behind each of the place cards were bottles of Evian water and Dortmunder beer with separate glasses for each. Teacups were provided for later, if needed, and ashtrays were placed to the right of each place card, except Durant’s because he no longer smoked. The oval table was covered with a rarely used green baize cloth, one of Miss Hazlitt’s first purchases. Two just-sharpened pencils rested on each of the four unlined notepads.

Jenny Arliss seemed more amused than surprised when she found her name on a place card. She looked up at Durant, smiled and said, “How long’ve you known I was with Help!? ”

“Since the day after you picked me up at the Tate. If you play mystery lady again, don’t use your real name.”

“I’ve always thought I lie rather well.”

“You do all right,” Durant said.

After half listening to Arliss and Durant, an obviously impatient Enno Glimm turned to Wu and said, “Can we for Christ sake sit down and get started?”

“Of course,” Wu said, pulled out his own chair and waited for the others to sit. After all were seated, Glimm was on Wu’s right, Jenny Arliss on his left. Wu smiled at Arliss, turned to Glimm and said, “Suppose you tell us your problem and we’ll tell you what, if anything, we can do about it.”

“I wouldn’t be here if you couldn’t do something.”

“Don’t overestimate us,” Durant said.

“Look,” Glimm said. “My business is never overestimating anybody. But before we get to me and my problem, I need to ask you guys something.”

“Please,” Artie Wu said.

“What d’you call yourselves? I mean, if somebody says, ‘I take from Voodoo, Limited, the whatchamacallit people,’ that’s not much of a description, especially if you two’re depending on word of mouth.”

“Not much,” Durant agreed.

Glimm frowned at Durant, then turned again to Wu. “And don’t get pissed off at the way I pronounce your company name. That’s what I started calling it and now it just pops out. But let’s get back to what you guys are. I know you’re not private enquiry agents. And your overhead’s too big to be con men. You might be into industrial espionage, but everybody tells me that’s kind of boring. So what do you think you are? High-priced gofers? Noncombatant mercenaries? I classify everybody I meet by occupation and not being able to pigeonhole you two’s giving me the jimjams.”

“The jimjams?” Durant said.

“They’re sort of like the willies.”

“Would you be offended,” Wu said, “if I were to ask where you learned your English?”

“In a minute. I want a job description first.”

“Wudu, Limited,” Wu said slowly, “is a closely held limited liability company that does for others what they cannot do for themselves.”

“For a price,” Glimm said.

“Certainly for a price.”

“Then if it wasn’t for the fucking price,” Glimm said, “you guys could call yourselves saints.”

“But since we do charge,” Wu said, beaming, “why not just think of us as professional altruists?”

“I’ll try,” Glimm said, paused, then asked, “So you wanta know where I learned my American? In Frankfurt, that’s where. Not far from a big PX and within spitting distance of the I. G. Farben building and its funny nonstop elevators that your Air Corps forgot to bomb for reasons there’s no need to go into because it’s all ancient history.”

“Very ancient,” Durant said.

Glimm poured himself a glass of beer, tasted it and said, “My mother was a maid after the war, a live-in Putzfrau for American army officers and later for army civilian personnel. I grew up surrounded by GIs and bilingual. My old man was either an American army captain, a lieutenant or maybe even a certain staff sergeant. Mom could never quite pin it down. I was born in late forty-six when she was twenty and after all my possible daddies had gone back to the States.”

“You ever try to locate him?” Wu asked.

“What for?”

“Curiosity.”

“I’m not that curious,” Glimm said. “Nineteen forty-six, in case you don’t know, was a tough year for us Krauts and Mom did whatever she had to do to keep us from starving. And if that ‘whatever’ hadn’t included a certain amount of fraternization with the Amis, we could’ve starved. She’s sixty-five now and lives in Hamburg but spends her winters in Spain or Florida. A couple of years ago she tried Hawaii and liked that okay, too. So that’s me, Enno Glimm, rich bastard.” He turned quickly to Wu again and said, “What’s all this crap I hear about you being a pretender to the Chinese Emperor’s throne?”

Before Wu could reply, Jenny Arliss said, “Mr. Wu does have a well-documented, if tenuous, claim to the Chinese throne.”

Glimm, still staring at Wu, said, “China’s never gonna have another Emperor.”

“One can but hope,” Wu said.

Durant leaned forward, elbows on the table, his eyes on Glimm. “Okay. Tell us what you want done and we’ll tell you if we can do it. If not, we’ll all have a goodbye drink.”

Glimm turned to Jenny Arliss and said, “You tell it.”

She thought for a moment or two, frowned, as if having trouble with her phrasing, then said, “We want you to find two British hypnotists who’ve gone missing in California.”

There was a brief silence. During it Wu and Durant refrained from looking at each other. Then Wu nodded, smiled and said, “I believe we can handle that nicely.”

Jenny Arliss said the two missing hypnotists, Hughes Goodison, 32, and his sister, Pauline, 27, had wandered into the hypnotist’s trade by accident.

“Their fascination with it began at a drinks party,” she said. “Hughes was twenty-five then, a bookkeeper, and Pauline was five years younger and a clerk-typist. They shared a flat in Hammersmith left to them by their parents who’d died the year before of food poisoning while on holiday in Malta.”

“Botulism,” Glimm said. “Somebody forgot to boil the milk.” Artie Wu made a careful note on his pad that read, “Cigars.”

“It was at this party,” Arliss said, “that an amateur hypnotist was putting people into trances and suggesting they do silly things such as barking like a dog, crowing like a rooster or meowing like a cat. Silly harmless nonsense.”

“That fascinated them?” Durant said.

“Of course not. What did fascinate them was that they themselves were such easy subjects. The amateur hypnotist told them he’d never worked with anyone more susceptible.”

“You can’t hypnotize anyone who doesn’t wanta be,” said Glimm, looking at Wu, as if expecting him to make another note. Wu obliged by writing another reminder, “Call Booth in Manila.”

Jenny Arliss said that brother and sister were so intrigued by their brush with hypnotism that Hughes Goodison bought a book on the subject. “It was one of those oversimplified popularizations, something like, ‘How to Hypnotize and Amaze Your Friends.’ They practiced on each other first, then on their chums, and discovered they were really quite good at it. They even laid on a study course and began reading books by recognized authorities such as, well, Estabrook was one, then there were Moodie and Gilla and Fromm and, let me think, Shor.”