Voodoo Ltd qd-3 Page 4

  Something exploded in Stalling’s chest. He knew it wasn’t a heart attack because there wasn’t any pain. And he knew it wasn’t fear or its evil twin, terror, because he had known both and neither felt like this. But the unfamiliar sensation, whatever it was, made his heart rate jump to around 130 beats a minute and produced a strange coppery taste, which, while not unpleasant, couldn’t be swallowed away. Then suddenly he knew what it was and gave it the only name it deserved—wild anticipation.

  After realizing that Overby was staring at him curiously, Stallings breathed in deeply through his nose and coughed to make sure his voice wouldn’t crack when he spoke. “What’s in Manila?”

  “A coming-out party.”

  “Whose?”

  Overby again produced his smile of benign calculation. “Georgia Blue’s. She’s getting herself sprung and Artie says he and Durant can use me, you and her.”

  “All right,” Stallings said, not trusting himself to say more.

  “Artie was wondering if you’re still kind of stuck on Georgia,”

  Overby said. “Not that it’d make any difference, but he was just curious. I told him I’d ask.”

  Overby waited. When Stallings made no reply, he said, “So what do I tell him?”

  “Tell Artie it’s none of his fucking business,” Booth Stallings said.

  Voodoo, Ltd. —25

  Six

  After British Rail made its run from Edinburgh to London in seven hours rather than its much touted five, Artie Wu came out of Victoria Station at 7:04 A.M., carrying his leather satchel. But instead of going home to the rented house in St. John’s Wood or to the Wudu, Ltd., office in Mayfair, he took a taxi to Durant’s small flat in Maida Vale.

  In the mid-seventies a cautious speculator had bought and gutted a large aging two-story house in Ashworth Road, dividing it into what he called four luxury flats—two up and two down. The upstairs flats shared a common interior staircase but the downstairs flats had separate entrances. Durant’s was the one on the left.

  He had lived there for nearly three years, but knew little about the other tenants and had yet to say much more than “Good morning” or

  “Nice day” to the cats-and-small-dogs-only veterinarian, a 42-year-old bachelor, who lived in the other ground-floor flat. The fiftyish married couple who lived just above Durant were so anonymous that he recognized them on the street only because the wife was six inches taller than her diminutive husband. A pretty blond woman lived alone, most of the time, in the flat above the veterinarian, but all Durant knew about her was that she left each weekday morning at 8:25 sharp and hurried down the street and around the corner toward the Maida Vale underground station in Elgin Avenue.

  Artie Wu, satchel in hand, paid off the taxi, went through the small decorative iron gate and up the short flagstone walk to Durant’s door.

  He rang the bell twice and counted to 41 before the door was opened by a woman in her thirties who wore one of Durant’s blue oxford cloth shirts and little else. She gave Wu a long cool stare and said, “You’re a bit large to be out so early.”

  “I’m ‘ere for what’s owed me, miss,” Wu growled in his best East End accent.

  “I suspect you’re the Wu in Wudu,” she said. “So do come in before we both freeze.”

  “Who is it?” Durant called in a voice muffled by walls and distance.

  “A Chinese gent,” she called back, leading Wu from the small entranceway into the sitting room. “Wants to do your kneecaps.”

  “Give him a cup of tea,” Durant said from the bedroom.

  The woman stood, fists on hips and feet apart, challenging Wu with her still-cool stare. He now noticed that she wore not only Durant’s shirt but also his thick white athletic socks.

  Voodoo, Ltd. —26

  “I’m Jenny Arliss, overnight guest,” she said. “Tea?”

  “Artie Wu. Milk, please. No sugar.”

  “Put your bag and coat anywhere,” she said, disappearing through a swinging door into the kitchen.

  Because Durant had lived much of his life in hotels, Wu always felt that the Ashworth Road flat should have resembled a comfortably furnished small suite on the ninth floor of some elderly hotel that had sprung for a new Pullman kitchen. Instead, the flat resembled a contemporary museum’s near-miss exhibit of “How We Lived in the Thirties and Forties.”

  Ninety percent of the sitting room’s contents had been created or manufactured before Durant was born. One hundred percent of them had been chosen by his landlord, the cautious speculator, who swore the old stuff’s value doubled every three or four years and even claimed to know “certain chaps who’d kill for a nice fresh bit of nineteen fifty-four lino.”

  The grate in the sitting room was filled with plastic lumps of coal that glowed bright red at the flick of a switch. Placed nearby was a matching pair of boxlike easy chairs upholstered in zebra hide—or something supposed to resemble it. Within easy reach of the chairs was a sleek chrome, glass and ebony liquor cabinet that, when opened, played the first few bars of Duke-Gershwin’s “I Can’t Get Started With You.”

  On the walls were poster-size black-and-white art photographs of Paris, New York, London and Rome in the 1920s and ‘30s. The wallpaper offered gray vertical stripes of varying widths and shades.

  Close to a long, long pink couch was a 1938 radio that a wartime family could gather round to learn how the campaign against Rommel was going in the Western Desert.

  Wu found the sitting room faintly depressing, like twice-told knock-knock jokes. Durant said he no longer noticed it.

  The two now sat facing each other in the matching easy chairs and waiting for the unseen Jenny Arliss to leave through the flat’s front door. After they heard the door’s soft click and slam, Artie Wu asked,

  “Where’d you find her?”

  Durant looked at the grate’s false glow, as if the exact time and place lay there. “Two Sundays ago at the Tate in front of a Turner,” he said, now looking at Wu. “Although I’m not sure which Turner.”

  Wu finished his tea, put the cup down, clasped his hands across his belly and smiled, which made him look even more benign than usual.

  Like Buddha on the perfect day, Durant thought.

  “It was nasty out two Sundays ago,” Wu said. “Rain followed by sleet, as I recall.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —27

  “I go to galleries when the weather’s nasty because they’re less crowded,” Durant said. “And because the women there on such days are more approachable.”

  “Lonely, you mean.”

  “Do I?”

  “What’s Jenny Arliss do?”

  “She says she’s a researcher for BBC,” Durant said. “But the BBC’s never heard of her. A dozen calls later, I found out she’s with Help!—

  that’s h-e-l-p followed by an exclamation point, mark, whichever. Its specialty is supplying highly qualified experts on extremely short notice to fill technical but temporary jobs all over the world. Very high pay and hard work for a month or two—often less. You call Help! if you need a microbiologist in Madagascar, an artist in Anarctica or other alliterative examples.”

  “A urologist in Uruguay,” Wu said.

  “Exactly. This is no small outfit either. It’s Help! In English, but Hilfe! In German, Au Secours! In French and ¡ Socorro! In Spanish—

  except in Spanish it has two exclamation points, the first one upside down.”

  “I assume it’s also in the States,” Wu said.

  Durant nodded. “And in Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Australia.”

  “What does our Jenny do at Help!?” Wu asked.

  “She’s managing director.”

  “For London?”

  “For Britain.”

  “Well,” Wu said.

  “Exactly my reaction,” said Durant.

  Wu removed a cigar from an inside pocket, held it up for close inspection, then gave Durant a long sly look and said, “I was told only yesterday that Help!’s intern
ational headquarters is in Frankfurt and that its president, chairman and principal stockholder, all rolled into one, is none other than our new best friend, Enno Glimm, who only yesterday rescued us from ruin.”

  Durant smiled appreciatively. “You’ve been talking to Sir Duncan, right?”

  “Agnes has.”

  “What’s Duncan say?”

  “That Glimm’s big money,” Wu said. “Maybe even great big money.

  Duncan says Glimm founded Help! After he’d founded another equally profitable company called Camaraderie!—which also has an exclamation mark tacked on at the end. Camaraderie!, in fact, gave Glimm the idea for Help!”

  “Camaraderie! Is what?”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —28

  “A packaged tour business catering to xenophobes. Glimm’s premise was—and is—that nearly everybody’d rather go on a foreign holiday with either family or friends or, failing that, with people as much like themselves as possible. In nineteen seventy-four Glimm leased a 727, or maybe it was a 707, filled it with happy chemical workers from Hoechst just outside Frankfurt and flew them to the Costa del Sol for a two-week vacation that cost half of what it would’ve cost on the Italian Adriatic. And it was there on the beaches of Franco’s Spain that Camaraderie! was born.”

  “Then what?” Durant said.

  “Then Camaraderie! went upscale. While not forgetting its working-stiff customers, it also began catering to professionals who might enjoy three weeks in, say, Borneo, providing they were accompanied by their own kind and given all the comforts of home plus a possible tax write-off. So Glimm segregated them by profession into groups of chartered accountants, doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, engineers and what have you.”

  “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?”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —29

  “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 perfecdy 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.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —30

  “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.

  Voodoo, Ltd. —31

  Seven

  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 tbirty-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.

  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.