Росс Томас - Voodoo, Ltd.

“You still haven’t told me where Glimm got his idea for Help! ”

“While recruiting the straitlaced professionals, Glimm discovered quite a few others of a different sort — loners and malcontents mostly — who’d rather die than go on a packaged tour. A lot of these oddballs told Glimm they wouldn’t mind hiring out for several weeks or even a month or two or three in some exotic distant land, providing the money was right. And that’s when Glimm set up Help! ”

Wu stopped talking when he noticed his cigar had gone out. He relit it, blew smoke to his right and away from Durant, then said, “ Help! can, if but asked, supply Tibet with choreographers and Malaysia with lieder singers — all of them temps. Cousin Duncan says he’s been told that Glimm has the names of some fifteen thousand experts in his Rolodex and fat retainers from at least three dozen international firms.”

“If he has all those experts on tap, why come to us?” Durant asked.

“Maybe he heard we’re the best.”

“At finding lost hypnotists?”

Wu shrugged. “Did you get around to asking him why he wanted them found — or how they got lost?”

“He said we’d go into that at the two o’clock meeting.”

“He say anything else?”

“Not much,” Durant said. “Only that the twenty-five thousand quid is ours to keep whether we take the job or not.”

Durant liked to watch Artie Wu trying not to look surprised. The opportunities were few and Durant found himself grinning at Wu’s small judicious nods that were accompanied by a slight wise smile. Finally, Wu said, “What else should I know?”

“That Glimm’s thorough. It’s obvious that when he walked in yesterday, Jenny Arliss had been feeding him reports on you and me for at least a week or two. He himself’s been checking us out with people like Hermenegildo Cruz in Manila, who’s a captain now, and Overby in Amman. When I asked him what the hell Otherguy’s doing in Amman, Glimm said he and Booth Stallings were overhauling King Hussein’s personal security system.”

“Glimm also checked on us with the Count in Berlin,” Wu said.

“With von Lahusen?”

“How many counts do we know? That’s how Glimm got onto Otherguy.”

Durant raised an eyebrow, his left one, giving himself a dubious look, which perfectly matched his tone. “You talked to Otherguy?”

Artie Wu blew a faltering smoke ring off to the left. “I didn’t just talk to Otherguy. I hired him.”

Because they had been partners ever since they had run away together at 14 from a Methodist orphanage in San Francisco, Wu could easily read the signs that forecast Durant’s anger. First, Durant grew very still. Then his mouth flattened itself into an unforgiving line. By then his eyes had narrowed and, on close inspection, a slight pallor could be found beneath his wear-ever tan. But the true betrayal was Durant’s voice. It turned soft, gentle and almost coaxing, which is the way it sounded when he said, “Tell me why you’d do a stupid fucking thing like that, Artie?”

Wu sighed first, then said, “To ensure domestic tranquillity. Otherguy’d called Angus and Arthur and offered them summer jobs in Kuwait at three thousand a month each. Agnes was — well, she’d rather have them rob banks than come under Otherguy’s tutelage. I could’ve told them they couldn’t go, but if I had, they’d’ve been out the door and halfway to Amman by now.”

“I would’ve helped you lock them in the cellar.”

“I thought it best to lure Otherguy here. And to do that I had to offer something that’d make him drop whatever he had going in Kuwait and Jordan.”

Durant’s voice grew even more gentle when he said, “He had fuck-all going and you know it.”

“Perhaps,” Wu said. “But I told him we’d just taken on a fat new project and needed not only him but also Booth Stallings and — bear with me on this, Quincy — Georgia Blue.”

Durant knew when to give up. He leaned back in the zebra-striped chair, gazed at something just above Wu’s head and let indifference creep into his voice when he said, “If I know Otherguy and, by God, I should — right after he talked to the Count, he called the twins and offered them imaginary jobs because he damn well knew what Agnes’s reaction would be and exactly what you’d do. He cut himself in.”

“True,” Artie Wu said. “But I’m perfectly aware of how Otherguy’s mind works.”

“There’s that,” Durant admitted. “So what happens to Otherguy and Company if we don’t take the Glimm job?”

“We have to take it,” Wu said, paused, then added, “You do realize that?”

After a moment or two, Durant nodded and said, “Okay. I can work with Otherguy and watch him at the same time. And Booth always lends a bit of tone. But you have to sell me on Georgia.”

“I’m not sure I can,” Wu said. “I received a letter from her a few weeks ago. She’s being released from that women’s prison on Luzon.”

“The one in Mandaluyong,” Durant said, then asked, “When?”

Wu looked at the ceiling, as if trying to remember. “Either tomorrow or the day after. Her letter was apparently smuggled out and mailed from San Francisco. Georgia says she’s cut a deal with Aquino’s opposition. They’ve agreed to finagle her release, providing she gives them everything we did in eighty-six that can still embarrass Aquino and friends in the ninety-two elections.”

“Political ammunition,” Durant said.

Wu nodded. “I assume Georgia made up a lot of stuff — enough to secure her release anyway. Her letter asked about jobs, contacts — anything to help her get reestablished.” He paused. “I didn’t answer the letter.”

“You just hired her instead and sent Booth to Manila with the glad tidings.”

Wu studied his cigar and said, “Maybe I believe in redemption after all. Or want to.”

“Know how I remember Georgia?” Durant asked, his voice again soft and gentle and altogether sinister. “We’re back on that Hong Kong ferry. She’s in her Secret Service half-squat with her piece in that two-handed service grip and aimed right at me. In less than a second she’ll pull the trigger and blow me away. That’s how I remember her — when I remember her at all.”

Wu nodded and blew another smoke ring, but said nothing.

Durant’s voice was back to normal when he said, “Okay. She’s hired. But don’t ask me to count on her. Ever.”

After two more glum nods, Wu brightened. “What if we teamed her with Booth Stallings?”

“He still stuck on her?”

“I asked Otherguy that,” Wu said. “And just before I caught the train last night, he called back from Amman to give me a message from Booth. The message was, ‘Tell Artie it’s none of his fucking business.’ ”

“He’s still stuck on her,” Durant said.

Neither Wu nor Durant displayed any surprise when Enno Glimm arrived for the 2 P.M. meeting accompanied by Jenny Arliss.

Durant merely told Wu, “You’ve already met Jenny,” then introduced him to Glimm. They were all standing in what Glimm had called the pretty little reception room. After the introduction was made, Wu took over and ushered everyone into the office and over to the seven-foot-long oval walnut slab that served as both desk and occasional conference table.

Four small place cards, standing like tents, had been nicely hand-lettered by Miss Belle Hazlitt, Wudu’s office manager, receptionist, secretary, bookkeeper and chief of protocol. Miss Hazlitt, who had insisted on being called that when hired three years before, was neither pretty nor little, as Enno Glimm had guessed, but a handsome, smartly dressed 66 who had spent thirty-five years doing something either vague or secretive for the Foreign Office until retiring at 62. She soon grew bored, answered a blind ad in The Times of London for a “flexible perfectionist” — Artie Wu’s phrase — and was hired five minutes into her interview.