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 international 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.”