“American.”
“Her?” the woman said, indicating Emily Cariaga.
“Filipina,” Wu said.
“And him?” she said, giving Durant a nod.
“American,” Wu said.
“Passports and ID, please.”
“Right,” Wu said and reached slowly into his inside breast pocket for his passport. The woman brought up her pistol and aimed it at him. Wu noticed it was of Colt manufacture; that it looked too large for her hand, and that the one safety he could see had been switched to off. He handed her his passport, collected Durant’s, an ID card from Emily Cariaga and passed them over. The woman backed up two steps. One of the men with a sawed-off shotgun took her place.
The woman stuck the semiautomatic pistol down in the leather belt that ran through the loops of her jeans. She was not very tall, no more than five-two or three. Her straight black hair had been cut off into a kind of Dutch boy bob. Wu couldn’t see her eyes behind the dark glasses, but he thought what he could see of her face was attractive, even pretty.
The woman studied the ID card and the two passports carefully. She then took out a small notebook and used a ballpoint pen to copy down some particulars. After she put the notebook and pen away, she looked at her watch, nodded in a satisfied way, took the pistol from her belt and walked slowly back to Wu’s window.
“What is your occupation, your work?” she said. “You and the one in the rear. American passports don’t reveal it.”
“Businessmen.”
One of the men with the shotguns said something to her in Tagalog. “He wants to know how much your company would pay for you,” she said.
“We don’t have a company,” Wu said. “We’re private investors.”
“If you have money to invest, you must be rich. You wear a fine white suit and drive an expensive car.”
“Alas,” said Artie Wu. “The suit is old, the car is rented, and our last investment turned out badly.”
The woman smiled. She had extraordinarily white teeth. “Did you really let Ernie Pineda take you for three hundred thousand U.S.?”
Artie Wu didn’t try to hide his astonishment. He swallowed as much of it as he could and said, “I don’t know what—”
Durant leaned forward, interrupting. “It was around in there. Three hundred thousand.”
The woman nodded and tapped the two passports and the ID card on the car windowsill. “What happened to Ernie could happen to you. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Not exactly,” Durant said, still leaning forward.
“This is a corrupt country with a new government that promises to end corruption. Although we don’t believe those promises, we do believe the new government needs to be reminded of what can happen unless those promises are kept. Poor talkative Ernie was such a reminder. I’m still trying to decide if three additional reminders would be useful or counterproductive.”
The woman again tapped the passports and the ID on the windowsill several times and suddenly thrust them at Artie Wu who accepted them with a grateful nod.
She backed away as one of the men with an M-16 climbed into the old Jeepney and began grinding its starter. The battery was low and the grinding grew weaker and weaker. Just when it seemed that the battery was doomed, the engine caught and spat out a black cloud of diesel smoke from its exhaust. The man with the M-16 raced the engine several times and then backed and filled until there was enough room for the Mercedes to get by.
Wu put the Mercedes into drive and crept slowly forward. Durant stared out through the rear side window at the woman with the semiautomatic pistol. She reached up with her left hand and removed her dark aviator glasses. She had shining brown eyes that stared at Durant. After a moment, she nodded at him. He thought the nod could have meant goodbye, or we’ll meet again, or remember what I said, or even nothing at all. He nodded an equally equivocal reply. Wu fed the engine more gasoline and the Mercedes shot past the Jeepney.
When they were safely around the next curve, Wu broke the silence with, “What the hell was all that about?”
“It was about just what she said it was about,” Emily Cariaga said.
Wu wrinkled his forehead into an unbeliever’s frown. “Maybe,” he said.
“Tell me something, Artie,” Durant said. “Did you really say ‘alas’ back there?”
Wu sighed. “Alas. I really did.”
At seven that evening Wu and Durant were up in Wu’s suite in the Manila Peninsula, debating whether to go to dinner at a new German restaurant that had been touted to them by the Graf von Lahusen, or wait for Boy Howdy to return their call. Waiting for the call meant dining on room service fare, which appealed to neither of them. They had almost agreed to give the German restaurant a try when the phone rang. Durant answered it.
Boy Howdy’s harsh Australian accent crackled over the line. “That you, Artie — or that fucking Durant?”
“That fucking Durant.”
“Listen, Durant, I’ve really got a ripe one for you lads this time.”
“Tell it to Artie,” Durant said. Wu rose from the couch and took the phone.
“How are you, Boy?” Wu said and began to listen. He listened for nearly two minutes without making a sound except for two noncommittal grunts. When he finally spoke, his tone was cool and indifferent.
“Tell him we’re interested, that’s all,” Wu said, listened some more and then said in a new hard tone, “No, you sure as hell do not tell him it’s on, Boy. You tell him exactly what I told you: that we’re interested.”
Wu went back to listening and when he spoke again there was nothing but deal-breaking finality to his tone. “Absolutely not,” he said. “Your cut comes out of his end, not ours.” There was some more listening until Wu broke in with an indifferent, “Okay, Boy. As you say, the fuck’s off.”
Wu hung up the phone, smiled pleasantly at Durant, and waited. Twenty seconds later the phone rang. Wu picked it up, said hello and again listened. Finally, he nodded, as if with satisfaction, and said, “Right. I think we finally understand each other now, Boy.”
After he hung up this time, Wu turned to Durant, smiled again, took a cigar from a shirt pocket, eased himself down into a club chair and squirmed around in it until he was comfortable. He lit the cigar and carefully blew three perfect smoke rings up into the air. Durant watched it all with an amused smile.
“Tell me,” Artie Wu said. “Do you still believe in the good fairy?”
“Has the good fairy got a name?”
Wu blew another perfect smoke ring. “Otherguy Overby,” he said.
Durant’s smile widened and he began to clap slowly and softly. “I believe,” he said and, still smiling and clapping, said it once again.
Chapter Eleven
Otherguy Overby explained that the very early breakfast meeting in the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge was simply a matter of edge.
“This guy Harry Crites — the poet I’ve been reading up on — well, he flies in from Washington late last night and he’s still on East Coast time, right? So this morning we’re getting him up at say, six, six-thirty, and this’ll throw his biorhythms all out of whack and that gives us the edge. Not much, but some.”
“His biorhythms,” Booth Stallings said.
“Yeah.”
Stallings glanced at Overby who was behind the wheel of the yellow Porsche 911 cabriolet they had borrowed from the stable of the still incarcerated Billy Diron. They were rolling down the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, approaching the Getty Museum. It was 7:04 A.M., a Saturday, and the third day of spring in the year 1986.
“So you think his out-of-whack biorhythms are somehow going to help us pilfer the five million?”
“Pilfer? You don’t pilfer five million bucks. You... liberate it.”