smoky gray. Her voice dropped into a lower register, which transformed it into an urgent warning when she said, “Don’t tell them no. If you do, they’ll be off like a shot.”
“They’ll go no matter what I say. To them, Otherguy’s the crown prince of fun.”
There was another brief silence as Agnes Wu considered what must be done. After reaching her decision, she issued a command—
although it sounded as if she were merely asking her husband to please pass the salt. But Wu knew better and it gave him a small erotic thrill when she said, “Stop him, Artie.”
Artie Wu blew a final smoke ring at the ceiling and smiled up at it.
“I’m not going to stop Otherguy,” he said. “I’m going to hire him.”
Five
The only coats and ties in the bar of the Inter-Continental Hotel in Amman were worn by two men who sat at a table drinking Scotch and water. Most of the other drinkers were European and American correspondents who were either bunched up together at one end of the long bar or scattered about at tables in reclusive twos and threes.
Nearly all of them wore quasimilitary desert gear, much of it obviously ordered by mail from either Banana Republic or Eddie Bauer. Safari jackets, or their first cousins, seemed to be the universal favorite.
Along with his coat and tie, the older of the two men also wore a thick cap of short-cropped pewter-gray hair and a well-seamed face that easily could have belonged to the board chairman of some small hungry international firm that dealt in esoteric and even suspect services. The younger coat and tie had dark brown hair shot with gray; bleak eyes; a guarded expression, and might well have been the older man’s chief executive officer, who hired, fired and looked after the bribes.
The older man swallowed the last of his drink, rattled his ice cubes, looked at the younger man and said, “Tell me about the rabbits again.”
The man who wanted to hear about the rabbits was Booth Stallings, expert on terrorism, doctor of philosophy, author of Anatomy of Terror, onetime White House consultant and recognized adept at grantsmanship, who, five years before at age 60, had abandoned it all to go adventuring.
“What rabbits?” asked Maurice Overby, also known to a number of law enforcement agencies as Otherguy Overby. Over the years, Overby had protested—with notable success—that it was never he, but some other guy, who had done all that stuff the cops wanted to question him about. Usually involved in a variety of enterprises, some of them legitimate, Overby was by trade a journeyman confidence man and much admired by his peers.
After Overby denied any knowledge of the rabbits, Stallings shook his head sadly and said, “If you don’t know about Steinbeck’s rabbits, then tell me again about those wonderful job offers from Artie Wu that’ll materialize any second now.”
“Why d’you want to hear it again?”
“Reassurance.”
Adopting a weary tone, Overby said, “Okay. Remember when we bumped into Count von Lahusen here in the bar last week?”
“An evening with the Graf von Lahusen is not easily forgotten.”
“So he’d had a few. What if you’d just spent two months in the GDR, or what used to be the GDR, trying to reclaim your ancestral estates only to be told, ‘Go fuck yourself, Count’?”
“At the sad tale’s third telling, I took to my bed.”
“And missed the best part,” Overby said. “Look. Me and the Count and Artie and Durant’ve known each other for years and even went in on some things together a time or two, know what I mean?”
“Where?”
Overby nodded in the general direction of the South China Sea.
“Mostly out there,” he said. “On the rim. Where else? Anyway, the Count tells me he’s in Berlin about a week or ten days ago, staying at the Am Zoo, when he gets a call from some guy called Enno Glimm.”
“German?”
“What else would he be with a name like that?”
“Austrian. Possibly Swiss.”
Overby ignored the suggestions. “What Glimm wants from the Count is a rundown on Voodoo, Limited. At first, the Count thinks he knows jack shit about Voodoo, Limited, until it hits him that what Glimm means is Wudu, Limited, the outfit Artie and Durant set up in London just before they took their big bath in the eighty-seven market.”
“They should’ve invested their funds more prudently—as did you and I.”
“Don’t start,” Overby said. “It took you less’n twenty days to make that million you flew out of Hong Kong with and about eighteen months to lose it. Or most of it. For a while there, on paper, you were worth two, almost three million.”
“Cold comfort, Otherguy,” Stallings said. “Very cold. How much did Wu and Durant lose?”
“I hear half a million apiece.”
“I feel better. Now you can continue with what the Count told Herr Glimm.”
“Well, von Lahusen’s not about to bad-mouth Artie or that fucking Durant either so he gives them a big buildup. But Glimm’s not satisfied and wants to know who else he can check with. The Count tells him to call me here at the hotel and that’s what he did.”
