“Tutored them for what?”
“For college. For Princeton, in fact.”
“They’re Ivy Leaguers?”
“Well, Wu is, sort of, although he didn’t graduate. Durant was the real scholar, except that he didn’t go — not officially, anyhow, although he went.”
“It gets better and better.”
“The old man used his influence and that of some of his friends to get Wu in. One of the letters of recommendation came from Edmund Wilson, who was an old classmate of Dr. Belyeu’s.”
“Jesus.”
“The stipulation was that since Wu was the last of the Manchus, he had to be accompanied everywhere, even to class, by his faithful bodyguard-companion. Durant.”
“The Manchu thing” Piers said. “Who thought that up — Dr. Belyeu?”
“Right. He started digging into Wu’s background and somehow came up with what I told you.” Ebsworth made his voice go slightly prissy and somewhat Southern. “ ‘There are a couple of leaps of faith that one has to take, my dear Mr. Ebsworth, but although it all started out as a rather-elaborate hoax, I now feel that Arthur might very well be the last of the Manchus. And it is such a delicious story.’ He talks like that. Fascinating old guy.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, Dr. Belyeu paid their expenses for the first year.”
“And after that?”
“Poker.”
“Are they good?”
Ebsworth riffled through his cards. “In 1969 in a table-stakes game at the Leamington Hotel in Minneapolis they walked out with eighty-three thousand dollars.”
“But that was later,” Piers said. “What happened in between?”
“They dropped out of Princeton in 1960 and went to Mexico. They were messing around with pre-Columbian art, but somehow got into trouble and wound up in jail. The charges were dropped and the next thing you know they’re in the Peace Corps.”
“The Peace Corps?”
“Yeah, they got sent to Indonesia in late ’61 and about a year later they’re back in jail again. In Djakarta. For smuggling. But again the charges were dropped, although they did a couple of months. Well, after that they wandered around the Pacific for a while, doing God knows what, until they finally wound up in Papeete, population then about nineteen thousand.”
“This was when?”
“Early 1963.”
“Oh Tahiti, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“So what did they do in Papeete?”
“Well, they had a little money and they talked Air France into putting up a little more and they leased this old waterfront bar. Guess what they called it?”
“What?”
“Heyst’s.”
Piers chuckled. “My God, Conrad’s Axel Heyst. I haven’t thought of that name in years.”
“So let’s say you’re an ordinary tourist and you wind up in Papeete with nothing much to do and you’re looking for a little action. Well, some guy at that Air France outfit, UTA, tips you off to this place called Heyst’s down on the waterfront. You know the kind of place. No tourists — just beach-combers, remittance men, and stranded chorus girls.”
“I like it.”
“So you wander down to Heyst’s, and sure enough, there’s this fat Chinaman sitting at a table in his white linen suit and Panama hat, looking like a young Sidney Green-street, brushing the flies away with his ivory-handled fly whisk, and right away you know that he’s up to no good. And the other guy, the thin one, his partner, looks like a failed poet with an impossibly desperate past. And even better are all the good-looking broads who’re sitting around the place.”
“How’d it go over?” Piers said.
“Big. They ran the place for a little more than a year and then sold out to a syndicate from Sydney.”
“That brings them up to when?”
Ebsworth looked at his notes. “The middle of 1964. After that they moved around the Pacific a lot for a couple of years — all over — and then in 1967 they showed up in Bangkok and went into the import-export business. That lasted a couple of years.”
“And then?”
“In 1969 they were in Minneapolis for a while and then they turned up in Key West. They went in with a syndicate that was looking for sunken Spanish treasure. They found some — maybe even a lot — but there was a problem with the state, and so by 1970 they were back in Bangkok in the trucking business.”
“Trucking?”
Ebsworth looked at his notes. “That’s what I got. Well, they used to go in and out of Bangkok a lot. And one time Durant went out and he didn’t come back and then Wu went out, and when they both came back, Durant went into the hospital.”
“For what?”
“Exhaustion is what I got. But actually it was that time that he got the scars.”
You find out how?
Ebsworth shook his head. “No.”
“That was when, now?”
“The spring of ’72. When Durant got out of the hospital, they unloaded the trucking business and a month later turned up in Scotland.”
“Why Scotland?”
“Maybe because it was a long way from Thailand. They wound up in Aberdeen.”
“And what was in Aberdeen?”
“A lot of Texans and Oklahomans.”
“For the North Sea drilling?”
“Right. Well, the next thing you know Wu and Durant have opened up something called the Nacogdoches Chili Parlor featuring Texas Jailhouse Chili, the recipe — according to the menu — courtesy of Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson. Well, it was a smash, even with the Scots. I suppose if you can eat haggis, you can eat anything. Well, a month after they opened the place Wu got married.”
“This was, now?”
“The middle of ’72.”
“Who’d he marry?”
“An impoverished Scottish lass with a trace of royal blood who can trace her family back to before 1297. Agnes Garioch was her maiden name. Now she’s Aggie Wu. They had twin sons in ’74 and twin daughters in ’75. Artie Wu spent a little money with a genealogist in London, and they’ve figured out that with maybe three revolutions and about ten thousand or so providential deaths, the older of his twin sons, Angus, could be both Emperor of China and King of Scotland.”
Piers grinned. “That it?”
“Just about. They sold the chili parlor earlier this year at a big profit and then they all came back to the States. They were in San Francisco for a while and then came down here. Wu rented a house in Santa Monica. Durant has the one on the beach. He pays six hundred and fifty a month for it.”
Piers was silent for a moment, thinking, and then he said, “Good job. It must have taken a lot of digging.”
“I hired some help,” Ebsworth said. “I also used up a couple of big favors in Washington.”
“I don’t think I’ll ask what favors.”
“No,” Ebsworth said. “Don’t.”
There was another silence until Piers said, “Well?”
“I think they just might do,” Ebsworth said slowly. “But they’ll cost.”
Piers nodded.
“And,” Ebsworth said after a moment, “they’re probably going to take just one hell of a lot of convincing.”
Piers nodded again. “Well,” he said, “that’s what I do best.”
Chapter 7
It was the usual mixed bag that had been invited to Randall Piers’s for drinks that evening. In addition to a Nobel Laureate, who supposedly was the third-smartest man in the United States, there were a prominent criminal lawyer; a Democratic National Committeewoman; a former child actor turned union business agent; an ex-Governor; a producer who couldn’t quite stop reminding people that he had been to Yale; a onetime Rose Bowl queen; and a tall, pleasant man of about thirty-five, a TV producer, who told Artie Wu that he was Boris Karloff’s godson and wondered whether Wu would like to join him and his handsome wife in a run up to Oxnard for the world’s best burritos in a Mexican joint that they knew. Artie Wu declined with regret, but got the name of the restaurant because he was very fond of Mexican food.