“Artie’ll never tell his kids not to do something he’d’ve done at their age. But he also has to keep Agnes happy. So what he’ll do is move the pieces around till they form a new pattern.”
“You being one of the pieces?”
Overby nodded. “And you, too. Artie’ll decide to hire me and that’s when I’ll tell him you’re part of the deal. He’ll agree and I’ll call the twins and tell them the Kuwait jobs fell through but maybe we can aim for something next summer. That way the kids don’t get their feelings hurt, Agnes is happy and Artie gets himself a couple of guys he can trust on the Glimm deal, whatever it is.”
Booth Stallings rose slowly and stared down at Overby with awe. He was still standing and still staring when he said, “Minds like yours really do exist, don’t they?”
After giving it some thought, Overby said, “Yeah, I guess there still must be a few around.”
At 1:08 A.M. The next day, Booth Stallings was awakened by the pounding on his hotel room door. After he opened it, Overby strolled in, exuding even more confidence than usual.
Voodoo, Ltd. —24
“I just talked to Artie,” he said as he crossed to the room’s desk and poured himself a measure of Stalling’s whisky.
“And?”
“I go to London day after tomorrow and you, well, you’ve gotta be on the next flight to Manila.”
Something exploded in Stalling’s chest. He knew it wasn’t a heart attack because there wasn’t any pain. And he knew it wasn’t fear or its evil twin, terror, because he had known both and neither felt like this. But the unfamiliar sensation, whatever it was, made his heart rate jump to around 130 beats a minute and produced a strange coppery taste, which, while not unpleasant, couldn’t be swallowed away. Then suddenly he knew what it was and gave it the only name it deserved—wild anticipation.
After realizing that Overby was staring at him curiously, Stallings breathed in deeply through his nose and coughed to make sure his voice wouldn’t crack when he spoke. “What’s in Manila?”
“A coming-out party.”
“Whose?”
Overby again produced his smile of benign calculation. “Georgia Blue’s. She’s getting herself sprung and Artie says he and Durant can use me, you and her.”
“All right,” Stallings said, not trusting himself to say more.
“Artie was wondering if you’re still kind of stuck on Georgia,”
Overby said. “Not that it’d make any difference, but he was just curious. I told him I’d ask.”
Overby waited. When Stallings made no reply, he said, “So what do I tell him?”
“Tell Artie it’s none of his fucking business,” Booth Stallings said.
Voodoo, Ltd. —25
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.
Voodoo, Ltd. —26
“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.