“Tell Artie it’s none of his fucking business,” Booth Stallings said.
Six
After British Rail made its run from Edinburgh to London in seven hours rather than its much touted five, Artie Wu came out of Victoria Station at 7:04 A.M., carrying his leather satchel. But instead of going home to the rented house in St. John’s Wood or to the Wudu, Ltd., office in Mayfair, he took a taxi to Durant’s small flat in Maida Vale.
In the mid-seventies a cautious speculator had bought and gutted a large aging two-story house in Ashworth Road, dividing it into what he called four luxury flats — two up and two down. The upstairs flats shared a common interior staircase but the downstairs flats had separate entrances. Durant’s was the one on the left.
He had lived there for nearly three years, but knew little about the other tenants and had yet to say much more than “Good morning” or “Nice day” to the cats-and-small-dogs-only veterinarian, a 42-year-old bachelor, who lived in the other ground-floor flat. The fiftyish married couple who lived just above Durant were so anonymous that he recognized them on the street only because the wife was six inches taller than her diminutive husband. A pretty blond woman lived alone, most of the time, in the flat above the veterinarian, but all Durant knew about her was that she left each weekday morning at 8:25 sharp and hurried down the street and around the corner toward the Maida Vale underground station in Elgin Avenue.
Artie Wu, satchel in hand, paid off the taxi, went through the small decorative iron gate and up the short flagstone walk to Durant’s door. He rang the bell twice and counted to 41 before the door was opened by a woman in her thirties who wore one of Durant’s blue oxford cloth shirts and little else. She gave Wu a long cool stare and said, “You’re a bit large to be out so early.”
“I’m ’ere for what’s owed me, miss,” Wu growled in his best East End accent.
“I suspect you’re the Wu in Wudu,” she said. “So do come in before we both freeze.”
“Who is it?” Durant called in a voice muffled by walls and distance.
“A Chinese gent,” she called back, leading Wu from the small entranceway into the sitting room. “Wants to do your kneecaps.”
“Give him a cup of tea,” Durant said from the bedroom.
The woman stood, fists on hips and feet apart, challenging Wu with her still-cool stare. He now noticed that she wore not only Durant’s shirt but also his thick white athletic socks.
“I’m Jenny Arliss, overnight guest,” she said. “Tea?”
“Artie Wu. Milk, please. No sugar.”
“Put your bag and coat anywhere,” she said, disappearing through a swinging door into the kitchen.
Because Durant had lived much of his life in hotels, Wu always felt that the Ashworth Road flat should have resembled a comfortably furnished small suite on the ninth floor of some elderly hotel that had sprung for a new Pullman kitchen. Instead, the flat resembled a contemporary museum’s near-miss exhibit of “How We Lived in the Thirties and Forties.”
Ninety percent of the sitting room’s contents had been created or manufactured before Durant was born. One hundred percent of them had been chosen by his landlord, the cautious speculator, who swore the old stuff’s value doubled every three or four years and even claimed to know “certain chaps who’d kill for a nice fresh bit of nineteen fifty-four lino.”
The grate in the sitting room was filled with plastic lumps of coal that glowed bright red at the flick of a switch. Placed nearby was a matching pair of boxlike easy chairs upholstered in zebra hide — or something supposed to resemble it. Within easy reach of the chairs was a sleek chrome, glass and ebony liquor cabinet that, when opened, played the first few bars of Duke-Gershwin’s “I Can’t Get Started With You.”
On the walls were poster-size black-and-white art photographs of Paris, New York, London and Rome in the 1920s and ’30s. The wallpaper offered gray vertical stripes of varying widths and shades. Close to a long, long pink couch was a 1938 radio that a wartime family could gather round to learn how the campaign against Rommel was going in the Western Desert.
Wu found the sitting room faintly depressing, like twice-told knock-knock jokes. Durant said he no longer noticed it.
The two now sat facing each other in the matching easy chairs and waiting for the unseen Jenny Arliss to leave through the flat’s front door. After they heard the door’s soft click and slam, Artie Wu asked, “Where’d you find her?”
Durant looked at the grate’s false glow, as if the exact time and place lay there. “Two Sundays ago at the Tate in front of a Turner,” he said, now looking at Wu. “Although I’m not sure which Turner.”
Wu finished his tea, put the cup down, clasped his hands across his belly and smiled, which made him look even more benign than usual. Like Buddha on the perfect day, Durant thought.
“It was nasty out two Sundays ago,” Wu said. “Rain followed by sleet, as I recall.”
“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?”
“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.”