“When’d you meet them?”
“The fourth of July in sixty-eight, Bangkok. At the Embassy reception.” He paused. “The Ambassador’d invited everybody who even looked American. Even us.”
“What were you doing in Bangkok?”
“Looking around. I’d bumped into Wu and Durant and they needed a crimp for a little something they’d decided to play off against the chief of station.”
“The CIA chief of station?”
“Who else.”
“So what happened?”
Overby looked puzzled. “What d’you mean what happened? We ran it and walked away with about sixty-three thousand. That was major money back then, in sixty-eight.”
“And what did he do about it?”
“The chief of station? He ate it. What else could he do? He sure didn’t go around bragging about the bad case of greed he’d come down with.”
“Were either Wu or Durant ever hooked up to Langley?”
Overby’s answering shrug was a bit too elaborate to satisfy Stallings. “Is that a maybe yes or a maybe no?”
“Artie says that a couple of times they were maybe unwitting assets. But Durant always says they were half-witted assets and no maybe about it. They moved around a lot and sometimes they just took whatever turned up.”
“When’s the last time you worked with them?”
“Seven or eight years ago. We went in on a deal together and we all got well.”
“Where?”
“Here. In California.”
“What kind of deal?”
“That’s none of your fucking business, is it?”
They stared at each other for long moments, each searching for the other’s weakness, only to find there was none. Stallings finally replied to Overby’s question. “No,” he said, “I don’t guess it is. Any of my fucking business.”
Overby drank some of his beer and said, “Tell me about your deal.”
“All right.” Stallings was silent for perhaps ten seconds as he edited what he planned to say. “Somebody,” he said, “and I don’t know exactly who, wants to pay me half a million dollars to bribe a Filipino freedom fighter and/or terrorist to come down from the hills and light out for Hong Kong where five million dollars U.S. will be waiting for him. Or so they say.”
Although Overby’s face and eyes remained calm and even impassive, his nose betrayed him with a long, long sniff as if he suddenly smelled sweet profit. After the sniff came the white, wide and utterly ruthless grin, which Stallings found curiously merry.
“You need help,” Overby said.
“I know.”
“You need Wu and Durant.”
“So it would seem.”
“You also need me.”
Stallings raised his eyebrows to register surprise. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Overby’s ruthless, merry grin returned. “Like hell.”
“It’s an interesting notion.”
“Where’s this freedom fighter and/or terrorist of yours holed up — central Luzon?”
Stallings shook his head. “Cebu. Know it?”
Overby’s grin grew even wider. “Lapu-Lapu land. Yeah, I know Cebu. Like my name. Not to get too commercial and all, but what kind of split are we talking about?”
“You’re negotiating for Wu and Durant now, right?”
Overby nodded. “For both them and me.”
“I was thinking in the neighborhood of fifty-fifty.”
Overby’s feigned disappointment took the form of a sorrowful frown. “I think we’d need just a little more taste than that.”
“It’s take it or leave it, Otherguy.”
The frown went away and the grin came back. “Well, hell, half of five hundred thousand split three ways, less expenses, is about eighty thousand each, which isn’t bad. Not good, you understand, but not bad.”
“I guess I didn’t make myself clear,” Stallings said. “I intend to split the entire five million — not just the five hundred thousand.”
Overby didn’t try to disguise anything. The big white smile was back, never more ruthless, never more merry. “You’re talking interesting fucking money now.”
Stallings didn’t return the smile. Instead his eyes took on the look of someone who has dipped into the future and is dismayed by what he’s seen.
“It’s poisoned money,” Stallings said.
“Money’s money.”
“Not this time.”
Guided only by his almost infallible con man’s instinct, Otherguy Overby came up with exactly the right measure of reassurance.
“In that case, friend,” he said, “you sure as hell got off on the right floor.”
Chapter Eight
The pretender to the Emperor’s throne stood in the innermost sanctum of the deposed ruler’s palace and listened, beaming with pride, as the younger of his ten-year-old twin daughters finished reading the framed poem aloud. The poem had been left behind on the wall when the deposed ruler fled into the night.
“‘Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it,’” she read, “‘And — which is more — you’ll be a man, my son.’”
The ten-year-old girl had read Kipling’s “If” with what at one time was called expression. The Filipinos in the line behind her applauded enthusiastically. She turned, curtsied prettily — despite the jeans she wore — then looked up at the big Chinaman (as she and her sister always thought of him) who was not only her father, but also pretender to the throne of the Emperor of China.
“Very, very nice,” said Artie Wu who stood six foot two and three-quarters inches and weighed 249 pounds, only six percent of it pure blubber.
His younger daughter made a face at the poem on the wall. “God, that’s dumb.”
“Mr. Kipling had an unhappy childhood,” Agnes Wu explained. “To make up for it he sometimes became a trifle optimistic and overly sentimental.”
Her daughter nodded wisely. “Mush, huh?”
“Mush,” agreed Agnes Wu whose Rs were tinged with a slight Scot’s burr. Everything else she said sounded like the English spoken by those who have gone to proper schools that place a high premium on received pronunciation. But none of the schools were able to do anything about the burr of Agnes Wu who had been born Agnes Goriach.
The older of the twin daughters (older by 21 minutes) turned on her sister. “It wasn’t half as dumb as ‘Invictus’ that you got out of and Mrs. Crane made me memorize last year. You want mush? ‘Out-of-the-night-that-covers-me-black-as-the-pit-from-pole-to-pole-I-thank-whatever-gods-may-be-for-my-unconquerable-soul.’ That’s mush.”
“You’re holding up the line, ladies,” said Artie Wu as sternly as he ever said anything to his daughters. Totally incapable of assuming the heavy father role, Wu continued to be surprised at his daughters’ reluctance to take advantage of his faltering will. His twin 13-year-old sons were something else. His sons would flimflam a saint.
The Wu family moved out of Ferdinand Marcos’ small private study whose shelves still contained scores of pop histories, biographies and steaming political exposes, written — for the most part — by American authors. The study was a windowless room tucked away in the Malacanang Palace on the banks of the Pasig River in Manila. The Wus had already toured the discothèque, the throne room, and were heading for Imelda Marcos’ bedroom when Agnes Wu turned back to the trailing Peninsula Hotel limousine driver who was also visiting the palace for the first time.
“How much time do we have, Roddy?” she asked.
Rodolfo Caday glanced at his watch. “Plenty, ma’am. The flight’s not till four and I fix it with A and A to meet us here outside.”
A and A were the twin 13-year-old Wu sons, Arthur and Angus, who already had toured the palace twice on their own. “Then we don’t have to go back to the hotel for them?” Agnes Wu said.