After Wu remained silent for a number of seconds, his wife said,
“Well?”
He blew another smoke ring, this time at the ceiling. “The boys’ve been offered summer jobs.”
“Where?”
“Kuwait.”
“By whom?”
“Otherguy Overby.”
Agnes Wu’s neutral look vanished. Her eyes lost their cool remoteness and seemed to turn a hot smoky gray. Her voice dropped into a lower register, which transformed it into an urgent warning when she said, “Don’t tell them no. If you do, they’ll be off like a shot.”
“They’ll go no matter what I say. To them, Otherguy’s the crown prince of fun.”
There was another brief silence as Agnes Wu considered what must be done. After reaching her decision, she issued a command—
although it sounded as if she were merely asking her husband to please pass the salt. But Wu knew better and it gave him a small erotic thrill when she said, “Stop him, Artie.”
Artie Wu blew a final smoke ring at the ceiling and smiled up at it.
“I’m not going to stop Otherguy,” he said. “I’m going to hire him.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —21
Five
The only coats and ties in the bar of the Inter-Continental Hotel in Amman were worn by two men who sat at a table drinking Scotch and water. Most of the other drinkers were European and American correspondents who were either bunched up together at one end of the long bar or scattered about at tables in reclusive twos and threes.
Nearly all of them wore quasimilitary desert gear, much of it obviously ordered by mail from either Banana Republic or Eddie Bauer. Safari jackets, or their first cousins, seemed to be the universal favorite.
Along with his coat and tie, the older of the two men also wore a thick cap of short-cropped pewter-gray hair and a well-seamed face that easily could have belonged to the board chairman of some small hungry international firm that dealt in esoteric and even suspect services. The younger coat and tie had dark brown hair shot with gray; bleak eyes; a guarded expression, and might well have been the older man’s chief executive officer, who hired, fired and looked after the bribes.
The older man swallowed the last of his drink, rattled his ice cubes, looked at the younger man and said, “Tell me about the rabbits again.”
The man who wanted to hear about the rabbits was Booth Stallings, expert on terrorism, doctor of philosophy, author of Anatomy of Terror, onetime White House consultant and recognized adept at grantsmanship, who, five years before at age 60, had abandoned it all to go adventuring.
“What rabbits?” asked Maurice Overby, also known to a number of law enforcement agencies as Otherguy Overby. Over the years, Overby had protested—with notable success—that it was never he, but some other guy, who had done all that stuff the cops wanted to question him about. Usually involved in a variety of enterprises, some of them legitimate, Overby was by trade a journeyman confidence man and much admired by his peers.
After Overby denied any knowledge of the rabbits, Stallings shook his head sadly and said, “If you don’t know about Steinbeck’s rabbits, then tell me again about those wonderful job offers from Artie Wu that’ll materialize any second now.”
“Why d’you want to hear it again?”
“Reassurance.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —22
Adopting a weary tone, Overby said, “Okay. Remember when we bumped into Count von Lahusen here in the bar last week?”
“An evening with the Graf von Lahusen is not easily forgotten.”
“So he’d had a few. What if you’d just spent two months in the GDR, or what used to be the GDR, trying to reclaim your ancestral estates only to be told, ‘Go fuck yourself, Count’?”
“At the sad tale’s third telling, I took to my bed.”
“And missed the best part,” Overby said. “Look. Me and the Count and Artie and Durant’ve known each other for years and even went in on some things together a time or two, know what I mean?”
“Where?”
Overby nodded in the general direction of the South China Sea.
“Mostly out there,” he said. “On the rim. Where else? Anyway, the Count tells me he’s in Berlin about a week or ten days ago, staying at the Am Zoo, when he gets a call from some guy called Enno Glimm.”
“German?”
“What else would he be with a name like that?”
“Austrian. Possibly Swiss.”
Overby ignored the suggestions. “What Glimm wants from the Count is a rundown on Voodoo, Limited. At first, the Count thinks he knows jack shit about Voodoo, Limited, until it hits him that what Glimm means is Wudu, Limited, the outfit Artie and Durant set up in London just before they took their big bath in the eighty-seven market.”
“They should’ve invested their funds more prudently—as did you and I.”
“Don’t start,” Overby said. “It took you less’n twenty days to make that million you flew out of Hong Kong with and about eighteen months to lose it. Or most of it. For a while there, on paper, you were worth two, almost three million.”
“Cold comfort, Otherguy,” Stallings said. “Very cold. How much did Wu and Durant lose?”
“I hear half a million apiece.”
“I feel better. Now you can continue with what the Count told Herr Glimm.”
“Well, von Lahusen’s not about to bad-mouth Artie or that fucking Durant either so he gives them a big buildup. But Glimm’s not satisfied and wants to know who else he can check with. The Count tells him to call me here at the hotel and that’s what he did.”
“Then what?”
“Glimm asks me about Artie and Durant and I ask him why he wants to know. He’s not about to tell me, of course, but I can guess it’s something pretty fat. So I tell him that Wu and Durant are top of the line—although Durant can be a mean bastard. Glimm says that’s exactly what he’s looking for, thanks me and hangs up. So I think for a Voodoo, Ltd. —23
couple of minutes, then call Artie’s twin boys, Arthur and Angus, at their school just outside Edinburgh. That’s in Scotland.”
“Thank you,” Stallings said. “And now you’re going to tell me why you called them, aren’t you?”
“To offer them summer jobs in Kuwait City after the war’s over—
jobs that’ll pay them three thousand U.S. a month each.”
“Sweet Jesus,” said Stallings.
The smile that Overby gave Stallings should have been, by rights, hard, calculating and even cruel. Instead it was benign, almost gentle, and strangely contented. Stallings had seen it before and always thought of it as The Smile of the Christian About to Devour the Lion.
Much of it was still in place when Overby said, “I offered them jobs on the condition that they’d check it out with their folks, especially their mother, Agnes, and that’s why Artie’ll be calling any minute now with the job offer.”
Stallings shook his head slowly. “For once, Otherguy, I fail to follow.”
“It’s simple. The twins are seventeen or eighteen. They’ll tell their folks about Kuwait and Agnes’ll go ape and tell Artie, very quiet-like, the way she does, that her sons will not, by God, spend a summer in the clutches of Otherguy Overby.” He paused, as if to check his logic, nodded comfortably and continued. “Of course, none of this’d play if I didn’t know how Artie’s mind works.”
“And how is that?” Stallings asked, resigned to his role of interlocutor.