“For a price,” Glimm said.
“Certainly for a price.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —33
“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.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —34
Eight
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.”
“Some memory, huh?” Glimm asked.
“Remarkable,” Durant said.
It was just after the Goodisons began their course of study, Arliss said, that Hughes began looking into ways he and his sister could become certified hypnotists and discovered the requirements were surprisingly lax. He also learned of schools of hypnotism where the course lasted only forty hours—followed by sixteen hours of supervised practice. He and his sister could even attend classes at Voodoo, Ltd. —35
night and, once all courses were completed, hang out their shingle as certified hypnotists.
“And that’s exactly what they did,” Arliss said.
“Tell ‘em about their gimmick,” Glimm said.
She nodded. “Right. Their gimmick, as Mr. Glimm calls it, was to open a lose-weight, stop-smoking clinic—except they didn’t call it a clinic. They called it a workshop and their success rate was about what it is for most such places—anywhere from fifteen to twenty percent, if that. But one boasts about successes, not failures, and Hughes and Pauline were quite good at self-promotion. They worked up a fairly witty lecture-cum-demonstration, wisely keeping it to fifteen minutes, and offered it free to civic and professional groups that met weekly or monthly. They sprinkled their act—I suppose I should call it that—with generous dollops of psychobabble and lots of audience participation. Pauline was especially clever at choosing those in the audience who were most easily hypnotized.”
“Real operators, huh?” Glimm said.
“But so far very small-time,” Durant said.
“Just wait.”
“Opportunity knocked or banged on their door,” Arliss said, “when a woman detective, who happened to be a heavy smoker, attended one of the professional women’s meetings, although I don’t remember which one.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Glimm said.
“The detective signed up for the Goodison’s stop-smoking program and even joked that if they didn’t make her stop smoking, she’d arrest them for fraud. But after only two sessions she did stop smoking, apparently forever.”
“Why apparently?” Wu asked.
“Because I haven’t seen her in several months. The detective was working on a rape case when she met the Goodisons. The victim was a seven-year-old girl who suffered traumatic memory loss and couldn’t or wouldn’t say who’d attacked her, although the detective had begun to suspect Uncle Ned.”
Arliss poured herself some Evian water, sipped it and said, “The detective and the Goodisons were chums by then and she asked them if they’d done much work with children. They said children were often the most receptive subjects—which obviously didn’t answer the question. The detective then asked if they’d be willing to hypnotize a seven-year-old rape victim suffering from traumatic memory loss. This time Pauline admitted they’d never done anything quite like that but very much wanted to cooperate with the police in any way they could.”