The check will be deposited in approximately six minutes and you’ll again be solvent.”
“And what exactly is required of us?”
“We have to find a pair of hypnotists, a brother-and-sister act, who’ve gone missing.”
“Where?”
“Who cares?”
“A most sensible attitude,” Wu said. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”
“We meet Glimm here at two.”
“I’ll be there,” Wu said, turned and handed back the telephone.
“Good news?” Ramsay asked.
“So-so,” said Wu as he took a checkbook from a suit pocket, placed it on the desk, absently patted his other pockets for something, then smiled at Perkin Ramsay and said, “Do you have a pen?”
In Carriages Bar of the Caledonian Hotel in Princes Street in Edinburgh, the sons of Artie Wu sat in a booth across from their father and watched him sign his name to a check for the second time that day. Arthur and Angus had half-pints of lager in front of them. In front of their father was a large and yet-to-be tasted whisky.
Wu tore out the check and handed it to Arthur, the older son by nine minutes. He glanced at the amount, raised an eyebrow and passed the check to his brother.
Angus studied it and said, “Four hundred quid,” letting a dubious inflection raise the specter of insufficient funds.
“It won’t bounce,” Wu said. “And it should get you through to the end of next month when I’ll send more. Now all you guys have to do is finish the term, bum around the Continent this summer and head for Princeton in August.”
Angus gave the check back to his brother and carefully examined his father before asking, “Have you really thought about what it’ll cost to send us through four years at Princeton?”
Wu sipped his whisky and ran some figures through his mind.
“About a hundred and sixty grand,” he said. “That’s for four years without frills. If you want frills, try poker.”
“Like you and Durant did?” Angus said.
“We played a few hands.”
“Durant says you two averaged six hundred a month from stud and draw,” Arthur said. “And that was back when the dollar was worth three or four times what it is now.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —18
“We got by,” Wu said.
“He also claims there were a lot of rich fish around Princeton then who were more than willing to sit down to an evening of cards with the pretender to the Chinese Emperor’s throne and his silent, ever-present bodyguard.”
Wu smiled and nodded, as if remembering. He was instead studying his sons and discovering yet again, with almost embarrassing satisfaction, that they looked as much like him as they did their mother.
They had his height but their mother’s rangy build. His slow smile and her lithe walk. His black hair and her gray eyes, which, along with Wu’s epicanthic folds, gave the twins what they called their all-Amerasian preppy look.
“Did you like it—Princeton?” Arthur asked.
Wu stared suspiciously at Arthur—then Angus. “Whenever you two want something, you always take me by the hand and try to lead me back down Reminiscent Row. So let’s hear it. What’s up?”
The twins traded quick looks and Angus won the invisible coin toss.
“We know where we can make a lot of money this summer.”
Wu stuck a fresh cigar in his mouth and, just before lighting it, asked, “Doing what?”
“It’s sort of a summer intern program,” Arthur said.
Once the cigar was lit, Wu said, “Summer intern jobs never pay a lot of money.”
“These will,” Angus said.
“Where is it and what is it?” Wu said. “Be specific.”
“Kuwait,” Angus said. “Or it will be when the war’s over next week, next month—whenever. There’ll be a ton of money floating around during reconstruction and this consulting firm we heard from already has a lock on a lot of it. But the firm needs bodies, American bodies, and it’s willing to pay for them.”
“What’s the firm?” Wu asked.
“Overby, Stallings Associates.”
Artie Wu’s eyes narrowed and his face grew still. Nothing moved.
Then his lips moved just enough to say, “Overby as in Maurice Overby?”
Arthur grinned. “As in Uncle Otherguy, Pop.”
Agnes Wu sat before the dressing table in the Caledonian Hotel room, brushing her hair and listening to her husband’s word-for-word account of his telephone call from Quincy Durant.
Wu packed while he talked. He packed automatically, almost without thinking, folding whatever needed to be folded and wadding up whatever needed to be washed. It all went into an abused leather Voodoo, Ltd. —19
satchel with brass fittings that she called the Gladstone and he called the bag.
The hair that Agnes Wu brushed was still the palest of pale gold, which she kept that way with only minimal assistance from her hairdresser. She now gave it what she hoped was its one-hundredth brush stroke, turned from the mirror, looked at Wu with her large clever gray eyes and said, “That was a hell of a coincidence—Quincy calling at that precise moment.”
After removing his partially smoked cigar from an ashtray, Wu said,
“Coincidences are seldom more than good or bad minor accidents that happen all the time. Quincy’s call was neither. He got the check from Glimm, knew we were broke and picked up the phone.”
Agnes Wu rose from the dressing table’s padded bench, went to a window, stared down at Princes Street with its handful of half-frozen pedestrians and asked, “Can we really afford it—Princeton?”
“That’s an August-September problem. This is February. But you can’t very well send two kids to Princeton at the same time unless you’re in the top two or three percent income bracket—which I trust we’ll have reentered by September.”
“Then you’re counting on Herr Glimm?”
“Somewhat.”
“Perhaps you’d best find out whether you should.”
Wu blew a fat smoke ring. “You can do it faster.”
Agnes Wu turned with an answering grin that transformed her face.
The cool, even remote look changed into something reckless, merry and even a trifle sly. “Cousin Duncan?” she said.
“Money knows money,” Wu said. “If Glimm has it, Duncan will know.”
“I really should see him now that I’m up here,” she said. “I could brag about the kids, slip Duncan some London gossip and find out whether he’s still cross with you and Quincy for not letting him invest in Wudu.”
“Since we kept him from investing in a damn near bankrupt outfit, he’s got nothing to be cross about.”
The first cousin with nothing to be cross about was Sir Duncan Goriach, the 62-year-old titular chief of the Goriach clan, who had been knighted in 1984 for services to the Crown—services that consisted largely of making enormous profits for himself and a few carefully selected others during the North Sea oil boom.
Agnes Wu said, “Duncan wouldn’t’ve cared about the money. He thinks you and Quincy lead spicy, eventful lives and merely wanted to buy himself a vicarious slice. So I’ll call him and invite myself up to Aberdeen for a long weekend.”
“There’s something we need to talk about first.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —20
Agnes left the window to sit on the edge of the bed next to the leather satchel. She clasped her hands in her lap and settled a carefully neutral look on her face. It was the look she assumed when anticipating terrible news. She had worn the same look during her marriage more times than she thought really necessary.