Chinaman’s Chance

Chapter 1

The pretender to the Emperor’s throne was a fat thirty-seven-year-old Chinaman called Artie Wu who always jogged along Malibu Beach right after dawn even in summer, when dawn came round as early as 4:42. It was while jogging along the beach just east of the Paradise Cove pier that he tripped over a dead pelican, fell, and met the man with six greyhounds. It was the sixteenth of June, a Thursday.

Artie Wu and the man had often seen each other before. In fact, nearly every morning for the past two months, except on weekends, they had passed each other, Artie Wu in his blue sweat suit, the man in shirt and slacks, both of them barefoot. At first they had merely nodded, but later they spoke, although it never went much further than “Morning” or “Nice day.”

The greyhounds, all brindle colored, traveled in a tight, disciplined pack at the man’s heels. But sometimes, at the man’s silent hand signal, a kind of choppy, almost brutal gesture, they would leap forward and race one another to the pier, streaking along at sixty miles per hour, or however fast greyhounds run. After they reached the pier they would stop, turn, and trot back to the man, their mouths open, their long pink tongues licking their muzzles, as they seemed to laugh and josh each other about what fun the race had been.

After Artie Wu tripped over the dead pelican, he felt himself falling and said, “Shit” just before he hit the sand. The man with the six greyhounds wasn’t far off, not more than forty feet away, and when he saw Artie Wu fall he thought, There goes the fat Chinaman.

The man had always assumed that Artie Wu was a neighbor, or at least lived somewhere nearby, perhaps in one of the trailers in Paradise Cove. For a while he had tried thinking of Artie Wu as the fat Chinese, but for some reason that hadn’t rung true, so after about a month the man had gone back to “fat Chinaman,” although the description still made him just a bit uncomfortable.

When Artie Wu bothered to think about who he was, which was seldom, he usually thought of himself as a fat Chinaman. He had thought of himself as such ever since he was six years old and they had dumped him into that San Francisco orphanage where he had stayed until he ran away at fourteen. Sometimes, of course, when it suited his purpose, he also thought of himself as the pretender to the throne of the Emperor of China.

The man with six greyhounds hurried over to where Artie Wu lay half sprawled on the sand and asked, “Hurt yourself?” One of the dogs, as though to express his own concern, gave Wu’s face a wet lick.

“I don’t know yet,” Wu said as he sat up, bent forward, grasped his bare left ankle with both hands, and squeezed hard. The pain was there, all right, not blinding, but sharp, almost searing, and Artie Wu said, “Shit” again — but in a rather noncommittal way, so that the only other evidence of pain that he offered was the film of sweat that popped out on his forehead. One of the greyhounds gave the sweat a quick lick and then smacked his lips as though he liked the taste.

“Get away, Franchot,” the man said, and the greyhound promptly moved back, sat down on his haunches, and gazed out at the ocean as though he had discovered something wonderful and strange out there.

“Franchot?” Wu said.

“After Franchot Tone.”

“Cute,” Wu said, and then got into a kneeling position to find out whether he could rise using only his right leg. He was two and three-quarters inches over six feet tall and weighed 248 pounds, but only twenty of that was really lard, most of which had settled in around his gut, although enough had spread to his face to make him look fat and jolly and almost benevolent. Laughing Buddha was what a number of persons, mostly women, had told him that he looked like, and he had long ago grown sick of hearing it.

That which wasn’t fat was mostly big bone and hard muscle, and on any normal day Artie Wu could easily have raised himself to a standing position using only one leg. The pain, however, had done something to his balance, and he found that he had to put his left foot down for support. When he did, the pain shot through his lower left leg and ankle, even worse than before. So he said, “Shit” for the third time that morning and sank back down into a sitting position on the sand.

“Let me give you a hand,” the man said.

Artie Wu nodded and said, “Okay. Thanks.” The man helped him up and in doing so learned from Wu’s grip that there was far less flab to the fat Chinaman than he had thought.

“You live around here?” the man said.

“My partner does,” Artie Wu said. “The yellow house there.”

The sand that they were standing on was at the edge of the water and had been packed down hard by the surf. A few yards beyond this the beach rose sharply, not quite straight up, for three or four feet and then leveled off for sixty or seventy feet until it ran into a high bluff of tan earth that was partly covered with green succulents and gray weeds. The yellow house had been built at the base of the bluff and rested on creosoted piling that raised it about a dozen feet above the sand, which was probably high enough to keep it dry from anything except a tidal wave.

A flight of wooden steps ran up from the sand to the broad redwood deck that edged out from the house on three sides. Most of the front of the house was glass. The trim was a very pale yellow, and the roof was of dark green composition shingles. The house didn’t look very large to the man with six greyhounds. Two bedrooms, one bath, he thought. No more.

“Ever any good at hopscotch?” he asked Artie Wu.

“Not bad.”

“Ready?”

Artie Wu nodded. He had his right arm around the man’s neck and shoulders now, and with the man’s support he started hopping on his right foot toward the house. Going up the steep three- or four-foot sand incline was hard, but they managed it, and then when the beach leveled off it got easier until they reached the stairs. The greyhounds had followed along in their tight cluster, alert and interested and looking quite ready to offer advice if but asked.

The two men eyed the stairs for a moment and then, without speaking, shifted positions so that Artie Wu’s left arm, rather than his right, went around the man’s neck and shoulders. They started up the stairs then, Wu using his right hand on the banister to give a lift to his hops.

Once up on the deck they moved past the round redwood table with the Cinzano umbrella sticking up out of its center and over to a half-glass door that led into the kitchen-dining area.

“It’s not locked,” Artie Wu said. The man nodded, opened the door, and helped Wu hop inside.

The dining area blended into a living room whose far wall was covered, floor to ceiling, with books. Next to the wall of books was the wall of glass that looked out toward the sea. A man who wore nothing but a pair of faded blue jeans, their legs apparently sawed off at the thighs, stood in the corner that was formed by the walls of books and glass. He stood next to a newsprinter that was clacking away with the sharp, gossipy sound that all newsprinters have. The man was tall, taller even than Artie Wu, but lean — almost, indeed, skinny.

The man turned quickly from the newsprinter to stare at Artie Wu. He wore the deep tan of an old lifeguard, which made his white grin seem whiter than it was. “What the hell happened to you?” he said.

“I tripped over a dead pelican,” Artie Wu said.

“Let’s get him over here,” the man with the deep tan said, and moved quickly away from the newsprinter to help the other man ease Artie Wu down into a black leather Eames chair that was so worn and used that it almost looked old-fashioned.

The tall, lean man then knelt down before Artie Wu and gently felt and probed the injured ankle. Artie Wu said, “Shit.”

“Hurts, huh?” the man said.

“You damn right.”

“I don’t think it’s sprained.”

“It feels sprained,” Artie Wu said.

The lean man sat back on his heels and studied the ankle for a moment. His name was Quincy Durant, and he was fairly sure that he was thirty-seven years old, give or take a year. He and Artie Wu had been partners ever since they had run away from the John Wesley Memorial Methodist Orphanage in the Mission District of San Francisco when they were both fourteen years old — although in Durant’s case you had to give or take a year.

Durant rose and frowned down at the ankle. “I’ll go get something to put on it,” he said. “Maybe some Oriental impassivity.” He turned to the man with six greyhounds. “You like some coffee?”

“Sure,” the man said. “Thanks.”

“It’s on the stove,” Durant said, turned, and left through a door that led down a short hall. When he turned, the man with six greyhounds saw for the first time the network of long, crisscrossed white scars that spread over most of Durant’s back. They were ridged scars, frog-belly white against Durant’s tan, and had he had time to count them the man would have learned that there were an even three dozen.

“You want some coffee?” the man said to Artie Wu.

“Yeah, I would, thanks.”

The man moved into the small kitchen. On the gas stove was a large, old-fashioned coffeepot made out of blue-and-white-speckled enamel. It looked as if it would hold a gallon of coffee. At least a gallon, the man thought. He felt the pot and almost burned his hand. He found a pot holder and used it to lift up the lid and peer inside. The pot was almost full, and a small piece of eggshell floated on top.

The man opened a cabinet, found two cheerful yellow mugs, and filled them with coffee. It smelled just the way he liked it, strong and rich.

“How do you take yours?” he called to Artie Wu.

“With a shot of brandy this morning,” Wu said. “He keeps his booze in the cabinet above the refrigerator.”

The man reached up, opened the cabinet, and examined the bottles. The tall guy with the scars isn’t exactly a boozer, he decided. There were a bottle of fairly good bourbon, some halfway expensive Scotch, some so-so vodka, a bottle of Tanqueray gin that looked unopened (nobody drinks gin anymore, the man thought), and a fifth of Courvoisier.

The man took down the Courvoisier, poured a shot by guess into one of the cups, hesitated for a moment, shrugged slightly, and then poured another, smaller measure into the cup that he had chosen as his own.

He put the brandy back, thinking that the man with the scars must have been fairly well off at one time and perhaps not too long ago. The furniture in the living room indicated that. There was the Eames chair, for example, which was the genuine article, not just some Naugahyde imitation, and Eames chairs didn’t come cheap. Then there was the couch, upholstered in what seemed to be a rich, patterned velvet. Fifteen hundred bucks for the couch at least, the man thought, although he had noticed that it too looked a bit worn and beat up, as though it might have been stored often, moved frequently, and even slept on for many a night. And also there was that other chair, the man remembered, the one that looked as if it might be covered with pale suede. That hadn’t been bought at Levitz either.

The rug was the real clue, of course. The man thought of himself as something of a minor authority on fine Oriental rugs. He felt that the one in the living room should be displayed on a wall someplace instead of being spread out on the floor of a beach house, for God’s sake, where everybody would track sand into it. Well, if the guy with the scars ever goes broke he can always sell the rug. The man estimated that it would bring fifteen thousand easily. Maybe even twenty.

Carrying the two mugs of coffee the man moved back into the living room and handed one of the mugs to Artie Wu, who thanked him. The man nodded; took a sip of his coffee, which tasted even better than it smelled; and sent his gaze traveling around the room again. He gave his head a nod toward the newsprinter that was still clacking away in the corner.

“Reuters?” he said.

Artie Wu twisted around in the chair to look at the newsprinter. When he turned back he said, “Yeah, Reuters.”

“The commodity wire?”

Artie Wu shook his head. “The financial wire.”

The man nodded thoughtfully, took another sip of his coffee, and was trying to decide how to phrase his next question when Durant came back into the room carrying a shoe box with no top. The box contained a roll of gauze, some surgical cotton, adhesive tape, scissors, and a big, dark brown bottle with no label.

Durant knelt before Artie Wu again, uncapped the brown bottle, and started sloshing a dark purplish liquid onto the injured ankle. The liquid had a bitter, pungent odor that made Artie Wu wrinkle his nose.

“Jesus,” he said, “what’s that?”

“Horse liniment,” Durant said. “Best thing in the world for a twisted ankle.”

“Mine’s sprained.”

“No, it’s not. It’s just a mild twist, but when I get done you won’t even have that.”

He sloshed more of the dark liquid onto the ankle, rubbing it in carefully with his long, lean fingers. Then he made a neat pad of some of the gauze, soaked it with the liquid, and wound the pad around Artie Wu’s ankle, fastening it in place with two small strips of adhesive tape. After that he cut two long, wide strips of adhesive tape and wound them tightly around the ankle over the gauze, working carefully but with quick, seemingly practiced movements.

When done, Durant sat back on his heels. “Okay,” he said. “Put some weight on it.”

Artie Wu rose and gingerly put some weight on his left foot. He smiled broadly, and it was the first time that the man with six greyhounds had seen him smile. He noticed that Artie Wu had very large, extremely white teeth and automatically assumed that they were capped, although they weren’t.

“Jesus,” Artie Wu said, still grinning, “that’s not bad. Is that stuff really horse liniment?”

“Sure,” Durant said with a small, careful smile that made it hard to tell whether he was lying.

“You’ve done that before, haven’t you?” the man with six greyhounds said to Durant. The man was still standing in the middle of the room with his mug of coffee.

“You mean tape up a bum ankle?” Durant said, and then answered his own question. “Once or twice. Maybe more. Why don’t you sit down and finish your coffee?”

“Thanks,” the man said, and headed for the couch, but stopped. “By the way,” he said, “my name’s Randall Piers.” He watched carefully to see whether the name meant anything. It was a name that got into the papers often enough, and he was used to having people recognize it and even prided himself on the fact that he could usually tell when they did. But there was nothing in either Durant’s or Wu’s face. Not a glimmer or a glint.

Instead, Durant said, “I’m Quincy Durant, and this is my faithful Chinese houseboy, Artie Wu.”

Randall Piers grinned, but didn’t offer to shake hands because he somehow felt that they already knew each other too well for that. Instead he said, “You guys are partners, huh?” and then sat down on the couch.

“That’s right,” Durant said. “Partners.”

Durant was putting the scissors, tape, and gauze back into the shoe box. Wu was still on his feet, testing his taped ankle. He placed all of his weight on it; smiled again as if satisfied, or even delighted; and then sat back down in the Eames chair. Randall Piers nodded toward the newsprinter.

“You in the market?”

“In a small way,” Durant said.

“It can’t be too small with Reuters in your living room.”

“We’re keeping our eye on one particular little item.”

“Oh?” Piers said, refusing to push for the name, but curious.

“Something called Midwest Minerals,” Durant said.

Piers’s mouth went, down sharply at the corners — a petulant expression that somehow made his fifty-year-old face look younger. Or perhaps just childish. “Christ,” he said, “that’s dropped thirty-two in the last five weeks.”

Artie Wu got up again and moved over to the newsprinter, hardly even limping. He grinned happily and said, “Should be down thirty-three when it opens this morning.”

“You guys went short,” Piers said, making it an accusation, but an admiring one.

“Yeah,” Durant said, “we did.”

“Where’s bottom?”

“We think around twenty-seven, maybe twenty-eight,” Artie Wu said as he moved back to his chair.

Piers nodded thoughtfully. “Way too late for me, even with an uptick.”

“Probably,” Durant said.

“Is this all you do?” Piers said. “Sell short?”

Durant shrugged. “We sort of fiddle around with this and that now and again.”

“That’s not overly explicit.”

“No,” Durant said, “it’s not.”

Piers nodded as if he found that perfectly understandable. He shifted his gaze from Wu and Durant to the ocean and, still staring out at it, said, “Once in a while — not every day, of course, or even every month, but once in a while — just for kicks or maybe even a little excitement — I’ll go in on something that’s just a bit—” He stopped to choose his next word carefully, finally settling on “dicey.” He switched his gaze back to Wu and Durant. They returned it with no more expression than could be found in a saucer of milk.

Piers didn’t mind. “I’m a curious sort of guy,” he went on. “I mean I have a lot of curiosity, so I ask questions. Sometimes it pays off.”

After a long moment Artie Wu said, “Dicey, I think you said.”

Piers smiled. “Dicey.”

Keeping his face perfectly grave, Artie Wu leaned forward, tapped Piers on the knee, and in a low, confidential tone said, “Like to buy a map to the Lost Dutchman gold mine, mister — or is that too dicey for you?”

“Jesus,” Piers said, and smiled again.

“A bit rich, huh?” Durant said.

“A bit. Have you really got one?”

“We’ve got two,” Wu said. “Both very old, very worn, and nicely stained and tattered.”

“What else?” Piers said.

“You sound serious,” Durant said.

Piers shrugged. “Try me.”

Durant looked at Wu, who made his big shoulders go up and down in a small, indifferent shrug. Durant nodded and looked at Piers.

“How about buried treasure?” he said.

“Pieces of eight?” Piers said, and smiled, but not so that the smile would cancel out anything.

“Hundred-dollar bills,” Durant said. “Some fifties. A lot of them.”

“Whose?”

“Nobody’s now,” Durant said.

“How much?”

“A couple of million,” Artie Wu said.

“Where?”

“Saigon,” Durant said. “Or Ho Chi Minh City, if you prefer.”

“I don’t,” Piers said. “Where in Saigon?”

Artie Wu looked up at the ceiling and in an almost dreamy voice said, “When things got tight at the embassy toward the end, they found themselves with six million dollars in cash. They decided to burn it. Well, four million got burned and two million got buried, and for five thousand bucks we can buy a map of the embassy grounds with an X on it.”

“Well, now,” Piers said. “Who buried it?”

“The guy who wants to sell us the map,” Durant said.

“You check him out?”

Durant nodded. “We spent fifteen hundred bucks checking him out. There are, of course, a few obvious problems. That’s why we’ve decided that perhaps keener minds than ours should take over. We’ll sell you our contact for — say, two-fifty.”

“We might even part with him for two hundred,” Artie Wu said.

Piers rose, a grin on his face. He was a medium-tall man with a wedge-shaped head and gray, smooth, thick hair that lay flat on his head. He had some interesting lines in his face — perhaps too many lines for fifty, but he had both worried and laughed more than most people and perhaps the lines could be blamed on that. His eyes were gray and smart, his nose slightly hooked, his mouth wide and thin, and his chin firm without too much sag. All his life he had just escaped being handsome, for which he was mildly grateful, and now almost everyone thought of Randall Piers as being distinguished looking, which he was just vain enough not to mind.

Still grinning, Piers said, “I think you’ve got yourselves one hell of a deal.”

Durant looked at Wu and said, “I think he just said no.”

Wu shook his head sadly. “The chance of a lifetime.”

“If it works out for you,” Piers said, “I’d like to know. But then, if it works out for you, you won’t be letting anybody know, will you?”

“Not right away,” Durant said.

Piers grinned again. “Thanks for the coffee — and the offer,” he said. Piers started for the door, and then almost on impulse, but not quite, because he never did anything entirely on impulse, he stopped and said, “My wife’s having some people over for drinks this evening. Maybe you guys would like to come.”

“What time?” Artie Wu said.

“Around six.”

Wu looked at Durant, who after not quite a second of hesitation said, “Sure, I think we can make it. You live down the beach?”

Piers gave Durant a quick, careful look, but there was nothing in the lean man’s face other than the desire for an address.

“My house is the one where the white steps lead down to the beach from the top of the bluff,” he said. “You know it?”

Durant nodded. “Those steps. They’re real marble, aren’t they?”

“That’s right,” Piers said. “Real marble.”

Durant watched from the deck as the man with the six greyhounds made his way down the beach toward the glistening white steps. When Piers started up the steps, Durant turned and went back into the living room.

“Well?” Artie Wu said.

“I think,” Durant said, “that we just got our nibble.”

Wu nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “That’s what I think too.”

Chapter 2

The 182 steps that led to the top of the seventy-foot-high bluff where Randall Piers had built his house three years before were fashioned out of an Italian marble that came from a quarry in Carrara — the same quarry, Piers sometimes told people, that Michelangelo had liked to do business with. Piers wasn’t at all sure that this was true, but it made a good story.

The steps were eighteen inches deep and six feet wide, with gentle six-inch risers that made for easy ascent because of the way they zigzagged back and forth across the face of the bluff. The marble was a lustrous white with a faint pinkish tinge to it that sometimes, when the sunset was just right, made the steps look like a jagged, blood red scar running down the pale gold of the sandy bluff.

Piers usually made the journey up and down the steps with the six greyhounds twice each day, just after dawn and just before dusk. He walked and ran the dogs along the beach for almost three-quarters of a mile in the direction of Point Dume and back. That was three miles a day, and he counted going up and down the steps as another two miles in effort, if not in distance, and that was all the exercise he got except for an occasional set of tennis on one of his two courts. For those who didn’t like to walk up and down the steps there was an electric boxlike affair, something like a ski lift, which had seats in it for those who were too weary to stand. Piers had ridden in it only once, just to make sure that it worked.

The land on which his house stood ran from the sea to the Pacific Coast Highway. It was approximately two acres wide and six acres deep, and when he had paid not quite a million dollars for it five years before, it was generally agreed that he was crazy. There had been a house on the land when Piers bought it, a sprawling fourteen-room California Mission-style affair that had been well built at low cost back in 1932. The house had been considered a showplace, if not quite a historic-cultural monument worthy of preservation, and almost everyone was properly horrified when Piers brought in the bulldozers, leveled it, and had the rubble carted off to a dump.

In its place Piers had build a thirty-two-room house that was usually referred to as a mansion for lack of a better description. It had been designed by a young Japanese architect in Tokyo who had worked on its plans full time for almost two years. The problem had been to comply with Piers’s insistence that every room must have a view of the sea. The architect had cleverly managed this by designing the house around a series of three staggered, open-ended, U-shaped courtyards. The architect had done his job so well that he had been written up in the Los Angeles Times as a genius, which made him happy because he was now getting a lot of work from the Arabs.

The house was built of Burmese teak and Pittsburgh glass and Italian marble and Mexican tile and Philippine mahogany, and exquisite was the word most often used to describe it. It had two swimming pools, one indoor and one outdoor; three Jacuzzis; two saunas; fifteen fireplaces; two kitchens; a six-car garage; nineteen bathrooms; and a dozen living suites, not counting rooms for the servants and kennels for the greyhounds.

The original estimated cost of the house had been $2.6 million, but because of inflation and what the architect and the contractor had come to call Piers’s “mizewells,” its final cost had topped out at $4.9 million. The mizewells were Piers’s unchecked proclivity to suggest, in the form of an order, that “we mizewell use marble here instead of tile, and while we’re at it, we mizewell put in another bathroom over there.”

When word got out about how much the house was costing, most Piers watchers were publicly shocked but secretly delighted. For a time, a lot of people went around calling the place “The Six-Million-Dollar Goof.” That lasted until late 1975, when a Beverly Hills real estate agent, representing what she chose to call “certain interested parties in Kuwait,” offered Piers a firm $10.6 million cash money for the place, which was almost exactly twice what it had cost.

It was a quarter till seven by the time Piers reached the top of the marble steps. He turned the greyhounds over to Fausto Garfias, the bowlegged thirty-nine-year-old Mexican gardener who was also the dogs’ schoolmaster. It was Garfias who had taught them the silent hand signals, which he later had taught Piers to use. Although the dogs pretty much had the run of Piers’s twelve acres, they usually roamed around all bunched up in their tight, disciplined pack. Piers had hired another Mexican, Angel Torres, nineteen, not only to help Garfias out with the gardening but also to pick up the dog shit.

The rest of Piers’s household staff consisted of a butler; a Korean who served as a combination chauffeur-bodyguard; an Austrian housekeeper from Vienna; two young Mexican maids who were in the country illegally; and a cook who claimed to be French, but was actually Swiss. The staff, with the exception of the butler and Fausto Garfias, kept hours that were scheduled around Piers’s wife, Lace Armitage, who seldom got up before eleven unless she was working in a picture, which she hadn’t done in seven months.

The butler, who liked getting up early because he was still enthralled by California sunrises and suffered from insomnia anyhow, was Styles Whitlock, a forty-four-year-old Englishman who had been born in Islington and, on a scholarship, had taken a degree in engineering from the University of Warwick. In 1960 he had emigrated to the States as part of what he still liked to think of as the brain drain. Whitlock had worked in the space program in Los Angeles until the cutbacks began in the early ’70s, when he had been one of the first to be fired because he was, at best, only a mediocre engineer.

After six months, Whitlock’s American wife had got sick of his hanging around the house all day staring at television. So she had hired herself an acerbic lawyer with an intimidating snarl, filed for divorce, and taken Whitlock for his last dime. After that he drove a Yellow Cab for a while and then in desperation placed an ad in the Hollywood Reporter that read: “Experienced English butler available for catered parties.” Because he was tall and dour and spoke with what most Americans thought of as a properly received accent, he soon had more work than he could handle.

When Randall Piers married Lace Armitage in 1973 they had moved into the new house in Malibu, and Styles Whitlock had been one of the bride’s wedding presents. Piers paid Whitlock almost as much as he would pay a halfway brilliant engineer, but after getting into several technical discussions with the Englishman, Piers was always relieved that he had hired him only as a butler.

Whitlock was waiting for Piers just outside the huge room which the architect had designed as a library, but which Piers used as an office, although the butler insisted on calling it “the master’s study.”

“Coffee is on your desk, sir.”

“Thanks,” Piers said. “Mr. Ebsworth here yet?”

“Just arrived, sir.”

Piers nodded, started into the room, but paused. “Get somebody to pick up a coffeepot,” he said. “I want the big old-fashioned kind that’ll hold a gallon and is made out of speckled enamel. Blue and white. They can probably find one at Sears.”

Whitlock gave Piers a grave nod of assent, which he had practiced for hours in front of a mirror after studying the nods of English butlers in old movies. The Public Television series Upstairs, Downstairs had proved to be a treasure trove of information on buttling, and Whitlock had watched each program at least three times and often took notes.

When Piers entered the library-office, he didn’t bother to say good morning to the twenty-nine-year-old lawyer with the streaked blond hair, cautious blue eyes, and thin, skeptical mouth that always looked to Piers as if it were about to issue a dire warning. The lawyer’s name was Hart Ebsworth, and he had been graduated second in his class at the University of Chicago. He had been Randall Piers’s executive assistant for nearly five years now and didn’t at all mind coming to work at seven in the morning because Piers paid him almost $76,000 a year.

Ebsworth had gone to work for Piers instead of joining his uncle’s Chicago law firm, which was the kind usually referred to as stuffy but prestigious, because when Piers offered him the job he had said, “If you come to work for me, you won’t starve, but you won’t make any money, not for the first three years. After that, if you work out, I’ll pay you exactly what the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court gets. If he gets a raise, so will you, because by then you’ll be worth it.”

Piers settled himself behind his carved oak desk, picked up his cup, and took a sip of the coffee. Ebsworth watched him, waiting, not saying anything. Piers decided that the coffee wasn’t nearly as good as that which he and the fat Chinaman had had that morning. He put the cup back down, looked at Ebsworth, and instead of saving good morning, said, “Midwest Minerals.”

“A dog,” Ebsworth said.

“We could have gone short.”

“We could have bought Avon at nineteen.”

“Two guys up the beach in that little yellow house. You know it?”

Ebsworth nodded.

“They’ve got Reuters, the commercial wire, in their fucking living room. How much does that cost?”

“About two hundred a month; maybe a little more with line charges.”

“They’re going to ride MidMin down to twenty-seven, which they claim is bottom.”

Ebsworth nodded again, thoughtfully this time. “Good luck,” he said.

“You don’t like it?”

Ebsworth shrugged. “They got inside somehow.”

Piers thought about it. “Probably.”

“You want me to find out how?” Ebsworth said.

Piers thought again for a few moments and then shook his head and said, “Don’t bother. Let me tell you how I met them instead.”

“Maybe you should,” Ebsworth said, and took a sip of his own coffee. Piers leaned back in his chair and stared out through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall that offered a view of the curving shoreline and, in the far distance, Santa Monica, which seemed to be trying to grow a fresh batch of morning smog.

“I’m going along the beach with the dogs like I do every morning,” Piers said, “and I see this guy who’s a jogger. He’s a fat Chinaman, a big guy, and I see him every day and sometimes we say hello or how are ya or some shit like that. Well, this morning he trips over a dead pelican and either twists or sprains his ankle. He didn’t ask me to, but I give him a hand up and it turns out that he’s not as fat as I thought. I mean there’s a lot of muscle there, too. So I help him up and into this little yellow house that turns out to be his partner’s. How much would a house like that go for?”

Ebsworth looked up at the ceiling. “If it’s the one I’m thinking of—”

“Yellow with a green roof.”

“About a hundred and fifty thousand.”

“Jesus, for two bedrooms and one bath?”

“It’s on the beach. In East L.A. It would bring thirty, maybe. When they built it twenty years ago it probably cost twelve, if that.”

“What would it rent for?” Piers said.

“Six, seven, maybe even eight hundred.”

Piers nodded his receipt of the information and went on with his tale, still staring through the window across nineteen miles of ocean to Santa Monica.

“Well, anyway, I get the fat Chinaman into the house and there’s his partner standing by the newsprinter, which is the first thing I notice. The partner’s a real tall guy too, sort of skinny with a hell of a tan and somewhere around thirty-six or thirty-seven. I think maybe they’re both around thirty-seven or so, although with the Chinaman you can’t be sure — and if I keep on calling him the Chinaman, I hope you and the ACLU will pardon me all to hell.”

“I’ll try to think of him as the Chinese gentleman,” Ebsworth said.

“Wonderful. Well, they offer me the best cup of coffee I’ve had in twenty years, and the tall, skinny guy bandages up the Chinaman’s ankle like he knows what he’s doing — I mean like maybe he’s had medical training somewhere. It was as good as any doctor could’ve done. Anyway, we get to talking and they tell me they’re going short on MidMin and that they sometimes fiddle around with this and that. We’re kind of kidding back and forth, but I’m pressing just a little because, hell, I’m curious, and so they come up with this real pisser.”

“What?”

“A couple of million that was supposed to be burned but got buried instead somewhere on the embassy grounds in Saigon.”

“And they have a map?” said Ebsworth.

“They know where to buy one — for five thousand.”

“And sell it to you for how much?”

“They didn’t try to sell it to me. That’s when I got interested. In fact, I got so interested that I invited them over for drinks this evening.”

Piers shifted his gaze from Santa Monica to Ebsworth, who stared back at him for a moment and then worked his face up into an expression that was even more dubious than usual. “The Chinese gentleman,” he said slowly. “Do you think he was really hurt?”

Piers gave it some thought. “He was hurt,” he said finally. “Either he was hurt or he’s the best goddamned actor in the world. Nobody could underplay it just like that and make the sweat pop out on his forehead and everything.”

“Did you get their names?”

“Artie Wu and Something Durant. Quincy Durant. Wu’s either W-u or W-o-o. He’s the Chinaman.”

“Really,” Ebsworth said, making a note on his pad and not bothering to keep the edge out of his tone. About the only thing Ebsworth could fault his employer on was Piers’s penchant for going into excruciating detail. Piers would sometimes justify it by explaining that experience had taught him that most people, present company excluded, of course, couldn’t pound sand down a rathole without printed instructions. Ebsworth had often wondered whether or not he agreed with this assessment and finally had decided that he did.

“So,” Ebsworth said, “did you pick up anything else I could use?”

“Scars,” Piers said. “The tall, skinny guy, Durant. He’s got scars on his back.”

“What kind of scars?”

Piers reached into a drawer, took out a sheet of thick, creamy paper, and using a ball-point pen, quickly drew the outline of a man’s nude back. The drawing was remarkable for its anatomical accuracy as well as for its economy of line. Piers thought a moment and then sketched in the scars as he remembered them. The only mistake he made was that he drew only thirty-two scars instead of three dozen. Finished, he handed the drawing to Ebsworth.

The lawyer looked at it and said, “Interesting.” Then he said, “I’ll try to find out how he got them. You want it all?”

“Everything you can get.”

“Five-thirty be okay?”

“Yeah,” Piers said. “Fine.”

Ebsworth rose. He looked at the drawing again and then at Piers. “Why these two?”

Piers locked his hands behind his head, leaned back in his chair, and resumed his thoughtful inspection of Santa Monica.

“Hunch, mostly,” he said. “Sometimes you can just tell about a guy — just like you can sometimes tell whether he’s ever had the clap or been in jail, you just know. These two — well, these two just might do.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

Piers shrugged. “If I’m wrong, we’ll keep on looking.”

Chapter 3

They broke McBride’s left thumb that morning at a quarter to eleven in the back booth of Sneaky Pete’s Bar & Grill, a place as shoddy as its name that was located three blocks from the beach in Venice, a failed paradise in Southern California.

They broke it casually, almost as an afterthought, the way a reasonably conscientious camper might break a match. McBride neither yelped nor yowled when they broke it, nor did he implore any particular deity’s intercession. All he said, very quietly, was “Motherfuckers.” If he felt any pain, which of course he did, he offered no evidence other than the single tear that formed in the inside corner of each eye and then trickled slowly down his check until he licked them away with a coated tongue.

The black man who sat next to McBride in the booth was the one who had pinned his wrist and arm to the table while the white man, sitting across from them, had reached over with only one hand, his right one; grasped McBride’s thumb; and bent it back quickly until the second joint went with a faint, moist popping sound. The black man was called Icky Norris, although his parents had named him Harold Ickes Norris when he had been born thirty-six years before on a farm near Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

Icky Norris smiled faintly without showing any teeth as he watched McBride lick away the two tears. “Go ahead and cry, man,” he said. “Shit, we doan blame you.”

McBride looked at him. In a soft voice that just escaped being gentle he said, “Get stuffed, Icky.” The black man smiled again, just as faintly as before, and then gave his head a couple of sorrowful shakes as though to demonstrate that he bore McBride neither grudge nor malice.

“Saturday,” Icky Norris said, although the way he said it made it sound something like “Saa’dy,” but not quite. “Saturday,” he said again; “noon.”

“Yeah,” McBride said, “noon.”

“You get behind like you got behind, Eddie,” the man across the table said, “and it gets hard to catch up. When you borrowed that five thou from Solly you said right up front that you maybe couldn’t pay it back for a couple of months on account of things being a little tight for you just then. Well, hell, Solly appreciated that. He really did. Some of these jerk-offs will come in and say, ‘Hey, Solly, lemme have five thou for a week, I got a real sweet deal goin’.’ Well, shit, they ain’t got no deal goin’ and they can’t pay no five thou back in no week, but Solly, because he’s a sweetheart, he really is, will say, ‘Okay, here’s five thou, but I gotta have it back in a week.’ Well, you know what happens.”

The man shook his head glumly, as though suddenly struck by the realization that all was perfidy. “What happens is that the jerk-off starts playing hide-and-seek and me and Icky here have to drop what we’re doing and go find him and try and convince him that if he can’t pay the nut, then he’s gotta pay the vigorish. And lemme tell you that some of these jerk-offs are so dumb that it takes just one hell of a lot of convincing.”

The man delivering the cautionary monologue was Antonio Egidio, sometimes called Tony Egg because of both his name and his shaved skull, which, along with his muscles, made him look very much like Mr. Clean. He often complained that if he hadn’t lost his hair ten years ago when he was twenty-three, he would have had a clear shot at the Mr. America title. Icky Norris, who wasn’t quite as tall as Tony Egg’s six-two, but whose bulging muscles were just as overly developed, claimed that the only reason he had never got to be Mr. America was because of what he darkly described as “politics.”

Both men spent most of their days working out at a gymnasium called Mr. Wonderful on Lincoln Boulevard not too far from Muscle Beach. The gymnasium was owned by Salvatore Gesini, an occasional lender of modest sums — never more than $5,000 — for which he charged 10 percent a week, or 520 percent in simple annual interest. Eddie McBride, into Gesini for the maximum $5,000, had fallen behind in his payments. The broken thumb was a Please Remit notice.

McBride now had the thumb down underneath the table pressed lightly between his thighs. It seemed to help the pain a little, but not much.

“I’ve gotta go find a doctor,” McBride said.

Icky Norris made no move to let him out of the booth. “Finish your drink, man. Hell, that’s good Scotch.”

McBride picked up the shot glass and drained the whiskey. They’re not through yet, he told himself. They haven’t got to the real horror stuff yet. That’s what they always leave you with, the horror stuff.

“Now, Eddie, we know you’re gonna be here Saturday noon just like you said,” Tony Egg said. “Hell, me and Icky here trust you, don’t we, Icky?”

“Sure, man.”

“But Saturday’s only a couple of days away and you gotta come up with at least a thousand bucks by then and we’re just sort of curious about how you’re gonna do it. I mean, we don’t want all the details or anything like that. We just want something that we can tell Solly, on account of you know how he worries.”

McBride started to speak, but stopped because he felt that if he spoke the words would come out high and scratchy. He cleared his throat. “A couple of guys out in Malibu,” he said. “We’ve got a deal going. I’m gonna go see ’em at two o’clock this afternoon.”

“Out in Malibu, huh?” Icky Norris said. “Well, that’s nice out there. Real nice.”

“Lot of money in Malibu,” Tony Egg said. “Lot of money.” He shifted in his seat, leaned forward across the table, and dropped his deep voice down into an even deeper tone, which gave his confidential whisper a rumbling sound something like distant artillery. Enemy artillery.

“Are these two guys you’re gonna go see thinking of buying something off of you maybe?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe like a map?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe like a map of where all you’ve gotta do is take a shovel and dig up maybe two million bucks?”

“It’s there,” McBride said.

Tony Egg leaned back in his booth, picked up his glass of Tab, and took a swallow. “Oh, hell, I don’t doubt it’s there, not for a minute. I mean, when you told me and Icky and then Solly about it, well, shit, you know, you convinced everybody, didn’t he, Icky?”

“Convinced me,” the black man said.

“There was only this one thing, and that was the thing Solly raised, which was really sort of a minor point, like they say, but hell, there it was, and what bothered Solly sort of was that he never could figure out how you’d get into Nam and then out now that the fucking Commies and all have kind of taken over. I mean, it’s just a minor point, but there it is.”

“One of these guys is Chinese,” McBride said.

Icky Norris turned his mouth down at the corners, stuck out his lower lip, and nodded comfortably as though to testify that that made sense. “Lot of Chinese folks in Nam,” he said. “Was when I was there, anyhow.”

“Well, hell, that’s different, then,” Tony Egg said. “All the Chinaman’s gotta do is get into Saigon somehow. Just how he’s gonna do that I haven’t got figured out yet, although maybe it’ll come to me in a minute. But anyway, once he’s in nobody’s gonna notice him, because all those slopes look alike, right? So all he’s gotta do then is buy himself a shovel and maybe a flashlight somewhere, wait till it gets dark, then sneak into the embassy grounds and dig it up. Two million bucks. Just like that. Right, McBride?”

“It could be done,” McBride said in a soft, stubborn voice.

Egidio stared at McBride for a moment, sighed heavily, and slumped back in the booth. He played with his glass of Tab, moving it around on the table. Still playing with it, he said, “You know what I hope, McBride?”

“What?”

“I hope for your sake that these two guys you’re gonna go see this afternoon are just half as dumb as you are. Because if they are, maybe you got a half-ass chance of coming up with Solly’s thousand by Saturday.”

“Noon,” Icky Norris said. “Saturday noon.”

“We knew a guy one time who had a little trouble coming up with his money,” Egidio said, looking at Norris. “Remember old Toss Spiliotopoulos?”

“Shit, man, he was something else, wasn’t he?”

“He was a Greek,” Tony Egg said to McBride. “Toss Spiliotopoulos. Took me about a month to learn how to pronounce his name. Well, all Greeks have got what’s called an Achilles’ heel. They like to gamble. You know what an Achilles’ heel is, don’t you, McBride?”

“Yeah, I know,” McBride said, and knew it was coming now. The horror stuff.

“Well, there’s also something called an Achilles tendon. But anyway, to get back to old Toss, he got behind in his payments and took off for Vegas to try to double up and catch up, but that didn’t work out because it never does, and so he just got more and more behind. Well, the first thing you know old Toss the Greek has got himself a severed Achilles tendon. Now, if you ain’t ever seen a guy trying to walk around with a severed Achilles tendon, then you’ve missed one of the funniest fucking sights in the world.”

Icky Norris chuckled. “Old foot’s flippety-fioppin’ back and forth and up and down and ever which way.” Norris flopped his hand around to demonstrate. “He sure was some sight.”

“And the thing about it is that sometimes they can’t fix it, can they, Icky?”

“Couldn’t fix old Toss,” Norris said. “Last time I seen him he was scootin’ along the street on crutches, over on Wilshire in Santa Monica, his left foot just a wiggly-wagglin’, flippety-fioppin’ up and down and back and forth and ever which way. He sure was some sight.”

Tony Egg yawned and stretched. “Well, hell, McBride, we don’t wanta make you late for your appointment. How’s your thumb feelin’?”

“It hurts like hell” McBride said. “I’ve gotta go find a doctor.”

“Yeah, he can fix it up and maybe give you a pill or something.” Tony Egg slid out of the booth and stood up. As he moved, his huge muscles bunched and rolled and threatened to burst through his tight white T-shirt. McBride looked up at him and thought. He’s got a pea head. He grew all those muscles and they make his head look like a pea. He looks like a fucking freak, he decided, finding comfort in the thought.

Icky Norris was now up and standing beside Egidio. Norris also wore a T-shirt. He stretched and yawned, making his muscles ripple and roil. McBride watched as Norris sneaked a glance toward the bar to see whether any admirers were watching. None was, and McBride caught Norris’ flicker of disappointment. Another fucking freak, McBride decided.

Icky Norris turned and leaned down and across the table, supporting himself on his two huge, thick forearms. He leaned forward until his face was only a few inches from McBride’s. There was something on Norris’s breath, and McBride decided that it was cinammon. The black man made the muscles of his forearms jump and roll a couple of times for McBride’s benefit.

“Saturday, man,” Icky Norris said. “Saturday noon — unless you wanta try walkin’ wiggledy-waggledy.”

“Yeah, sure,” McBride said. “Saturday, noon.”

Chapter 4

Because she loved the touch and feel of fine things, but knew she would always be too poor to possess any, Ophelia Armitage had rather wistfully given her three daughters the names of some things that she admired most.

By early 1963 the Armitage sisters, Ivory, Lace, and Silk, were the hottest folk group in both the United States and England. But on Christmas Eve of that same year, Ophelia Armitage was found dead of a stroke, alone in her tiny house near the Black Mountain Folk School in the Arkansas Ozarks. Those who came looking for her discovered that one room of the house contained almost nothing but fine silk, costly lace, and rare ivory.

Also found tucked away out of sight underneath her bed in a slop jar was a Hills Brothers coffee can stuffed with $19,439 in cash. Thus, when she died Ophelia Armitage had been poor no longer, and nearly everyone agreed that the girls had been awfully good to their mama.

Ivory, the oldest sister, was dead now too, having died in 1970, alone like her mother and, again like her mother, dying on Christmas Eve, but in a Miami Beach hotel room — dead from an overdose of heroin that she had bought from a grinning Cuban bellhop.

By mid-1970 the group had already disbanded — nearly, but not quite, at the height of its popularity. A little less than six months later. Ivory was dead and Lace had just finished her first picture. It had been a small, nothing-much role, but there had been one particularly meaty scene that Lace had handled so superbly that she had been nominated for the Academy Award for best supporting actress.

She didn’t win the award, but her roles grew steadily larger and her popularity soared. By 1973, when she married Randall Piers, Lace Armitage was one of the two bankable actresses in the world. The other was an eleven-year-old girl with a foul mouth who could also wiggle her nose like a rabbit.

Lace, the second oldest, was usually considered to be the most beautiful of the three sisters, although it was hard to decide, really, because all three were stunning — even Silk, the youngest, who had been only sixteen when she had made her first million dollars in 1963.

But even at sixteen Silk had been the one best able to cope with all of that sudden fame and big money. That’s probably because she was the one most like Papa, Lace Armitage sometimes thought. Papa never gave a damn about money either. The only thing the self-ordained Reverend Jupiter Armitage had ever really given a damn about was the coming of the peaceful socialist revolution, which, he sometimes swore, was due next year or, at the latest, the year after that. The Reverend Mr. Armitage had gone to his grave in late November of 1960, poor as Job’s turkey, but convinced that Jack Kennedy would be sworn into office with a socialist blueprint in bis hip pocket.

“When we were growing up,” Lace had once told her husband, “I sometimes think politics was half of our diet along with cole slaw and black-eyed peas. And corn bread. We ate a lot of corn bread, too. But Ivory never did care about politics or about what she ate either, or even if she ate at all. Poor Ivory. Sometimes I think she must have lived where all the sad poets live, in that secret place where everything hurts all the time. Then she finally discovered dope, which must have been what she’d always been looking for, and she had enough money to buy as much as she wanted, so that’s what she did. I never tried to stop her. I don’t know, maybe I should’ve, but I didn’t.”

“But Silk,” Randall Piers had said. “Silk’s different, right?”

God, yes, Silk’s different, Lace Armitage had told him. “Silk was always just like Papa, all mouth and brains and both of them going wide open and full out from get up till go to bed. She was his favorite, and she was always with him from the time she was four going on five. You know what she did? She listened. You never saw a child listen so hard. And then, somewhere around 1958, when Silk was about — oh, hell — eleven, I reckon — she started talking; I mean talking just like a grown-up. And by golly, you know they all listened to her. They had to, because she was so smart and made such damn good sense.”

Piers had nodded understandingly. “Life at the bomb-throwing school,” he had said.

When Lace Armitage awoke that morning at eleven she awoke as she always did, quickly, almost abruptly, and Randall Piers was where he usually was, in the cream-colored chair near the window that looked south and west toward Little Point Dume. She smiled at him.

“Have you been there long?”

“Not long.” He rose, picked up a freshly poured cup of coffee from a table, and carried it over to her. She propped herself up in the bed against the pillows and accepted the cup gratefully.

“You shouldn’t bother,” she said, “but I’m glad you do.”

“I like to do it,” he said. “What time was it this morning?”

“When I got to sleep?”

Piers nodded.

“About five, I think. Maybe a bit later. It was just beginning to get light.”

“You should try those new ones he gave you.”

“No pills,” she said.

“He swears they’re not addictive.”

“No pills,” she said again. “When we get this thing with Silk straightened out I’ll start sleeping fine again.” She took a sip of her coffee and then looked at her husband again. “Today’s Thursday?”

Piers nodded. “The call came about nine. A man.”

“How much?”

“The same as always, a thousand.”

“What’d he use this time?”

“Calliope the calico. Was that okay?”

Lace smiled. “That was a kitten Silk once had. A calico kitten that became a cat. She called it Calliope because it sounded like one. Did Kun drop it off?” Kun was Kun Oh Lim, the Korean bodyguard-chauffeur.

Piers nodded.

“Where?”

“Somewhere over in Gardena.”

“She’s moving around.”

“Maybe not,” Piers said. “Maybe she’s just moving the drop around.”

Lace frowned and chewed on her lower Up. “What’s it been now, two months?”

“About”

“God damn it, I want to do something.”

“Silk made the rules.”

“If I could just talk to her.”

“She doesn’t want you involved.”

“I’m already involved. I’m her sister, damn it.”

“I had those private detectives, remember? They thought they were getting close and then she found out and made me call them off.”

“Those assholes. I don’t blame her. Look, I just want to see her and talk to her. Maybe we should go at it from a different angle, another approach.”

Piers sighed. “Two guys I’ve just met. They might do. As you said, a new approach.”

“Where’d you meet them?”

“On the beach.”

“Just like that?”

Piers sighed again and nodded. “Ebsworth’s checking them out. You can meet them this evening. They’re coming over for drinks.”

“What’re they like?”

“Well, one’s sort of tall and fat and Chinese, and the other one’s sort of tall and skinny with scars on his back.”

“Where’d he get the scars?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do they do?”

“Well, they play the market a little.”

“Oh, swell, marvelous. What else?”

“I don’t know, but somehow I’ve got the feeling that they go in for chancey stuff.”

“How chancey?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You didn’t say anything about Silk to them.”

“No.”

Lace frowned, took another swallow of her coffee, and then placed the cup and saucer on the bedside table. “Well, we’ve got to do something.”

“I know,” Piers said. “It’s interfering with my sex life.”

She grinned at him. It was the crooked, charming grin that was almost her trademark. “Nothing wrong with your sex life last night, old man.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the fucking,” he said. “Hell, I’m fucking Lace Armitage. That’s what fifty million guys out there dream about — as they damn well should. But afterwards I like a warm ass for my cold feet.”

“What do you want me to do, he there wide awake and stiff as a board all night so you can warm your feet?”

“You could take a pill.”

“A pill’s not going to cure what’s wrong with me,” Lace said, staring at Piers.

He shook his head. “I wasn’t talking about that.”

“You want to talk about it? If you want to talk about it some more, I will.”

Piers shook his head again, a small, pained expression on his face. “Talking about it never does much good, does it?”

She shrugged. “Not much. I just keep on making the same mistake over and over.”

For a while they were silent, both thinking about some of those past mistakes and the men they involved — men whose names filed through Piers’s mind in perfect chronological order.

Lace knew how to break the somberness of his mood. She threw back the covers and swung her feet to the floor. She was naked, and Piers experienced the same pleasant shock with which the sight of her still affected him, even three years after he had first seen her, as she liked to describe it, bare-assed and buck naked.

At thirty-two, Lace Armitage’s body was still almost perfect, at least in her husband’s opinion, although there were some who carped about the high breasts being a bit large and even argued that the long legs were a touch thin. But no one had ever faulted the smooth, perfect shoulders or the narrow waist that rounded out into the melonlike hips that she could make roll, when she was fooling around and talking Arkansas, “like two bull pups under a blanket.”

But if her body was nearly perfect, there was enough wrong with her face to make it haunting if not beautiful. People remembered that face. To begin with, there was all that thick auburn hair, which grew so that it was nearly always flopping down into those green eyes. The eyes were probably too green and too large and set too far apart, although they had to be that far apart to rest properly on those high cheekbones, which were so produced that they would have made her face seem hollow had it not been for her wide mouth with its sensual, almost too thick lips that seemed to promise all sorts of interesting oral sex. Except when she smiled. Randall Piers called it her “fuck tomorrow” smile, and it was what people remembered about her most and made them wish that they knew somebody who could smile like that.

She moved over to her husband, tousled his gray hair, leaned down, and kissed him on the crown. He put his arm around her, squeezed one of the cheeks of her buttocks, and kissed her on the stomach.

“I’ve got to go pee,” she said.

“You always make it sound like a news flash,” he said.

She started across the room toward the bath.

“Papa always told us that the body had certain natural functions that—” The closing of the bathroom door cut off the rest of her sentence.

Piers waited, knowing that when his wife came out she would finish the sentence as if there had been no interruption. It was the way her mind worked. Sometimes she would start a thought one week and finish it the next. If you didn’t pick up on it, she would look at you as though you were a fool. She had never once looked at Piers that way, because he was certainly no fool and had the kind of mind and memory that could connect up his wife’s thoughts even if their beginnings and ends were separated by as much as a month, which occasionally they were.

When Lace came out of the bathroom, she was wearing a white cotton voile robe with small buttercups woven into it. “—they shouldn’t be any more embarrassed about than a car’s backfire,” she continued. “People have to cough, hiccup, fart, sweat, cry, pee, and move their bowels, Papa always said, and if England hadn’t tried to pretend that none of these things existed, it would probably still be the greatest country in the world.”

“I don’t quite follow his last thought there,” Piers said.

“Well, I didn’t either, but Silk said she did. If they find her, they’ll kill her, won’t they?”

Piers’s mind worked quickly, the way it always did. “Her” was Silk, of course. “They” — well, he wasn’t absolutely sure who “they” were, although he had a fairly good idea.

“Your sister’s a very smart, competent woman,” he said. “She laid down the rules and we agreed to play by them.”

“That was two months ago.”

“They’re Silk’s rules and it’s her life.”

“I want to talk to her. I’ve just got to talk to her. You understand?”

“I understand.”

“These two guys, what makes you think they might be able to find her?”

Piers shrugged. “Mostly hunch, I guess.”

Lace stared at him and then smiled. “Is it one of those real gut ones that you get sometimes?”

He nodded.

“Down in here?” She bent over and poked him in the stomach.

“It’s not located any one place, dummy.”

“You know what I mean.”

“It’s a real strong feeling, but I could be wrong.”

“What’s it like?” she said. “I mean, why do you think they might be able to find her?”

“Well, it’s simply this feeling I have,” he said slowly, “that these two guys are the kind who just might know where to look.”

Chapter 5

It was three minutes until two when McBride turned his yellow 1965 Mustang convertible left off the Pacific Coast Highway and started down the narrow, winding asphalt lane that led to the Paradise Cove pier.

The top was down on the convertible, and if his thumb hadn’t throbbed so much, and if he hadn’t been brooding about the fact that he wasn’t still in the Corps and stationed at the embassy in either Paris or London or Bonn, which was where he could have been if only he’d kept his nose clean, McBride might have been able to admire or at least notice the tall green pines and the handsome eucalyptus trees that lined either side of the lane.

But preoccupied as he was with both fate and pain, McBride noticed nothing, not even the pothole. He hit it at twenty miles per hour. The resulting jolt made the front wheels start to shimmy. Without thinking, McBride grasped the steering wheel with both hands. When he did, the pain from his bandaged left thumb flared up, and the hot tears that filled his eves almost blinded him.

“Assholes!” McBride screamed. It was a broadside indictment, aimed at the world in general, but in particular at the U.S. Marine Corps; Tony Egg and Icky Norris; McBride’s landlord, who wanted to evict him; the young doctor at the free dope fiends’ clinic in Venice who had reset and taped up his thumb, but who had refused to give him anything for the pain, implying that McBride had probably broken the thumb just to get himself some free dope; and finally, the last asshole on the list, the management of Paradise Cove, whose clearly culpable negligence had created the pothole.

At one time, back in the ’20s, Paradise Cove had been a rumrunners’ haven. But now it was a trailer park that boasted a seafood restaurant, a pier where you could either launch your boat or rent one, and three-quarters of a mile of private beach that you could spend the day on if you could afford the price, which that year was $3 a car. McBride’s immediate objective was to talk his way past the guard at the gate without paying the $3.

At the end of the lane McBride braked his car and waited for the guard to come out of the small office.

“I’m going to see Mr. Durant,” McBride said.

The guard, a tall, skinny man with disappointed eyes, swallowed something, and McBride got to watch his Adam’s apple bob up and down. The guard shook his head. “Durant, huh?” He shook his head again. “Durant.” The name meant nothing to him.

“He lives in that small yellow house at the end of the parking lot,” McBride said.

“Oh, yeah, he’s the guy that the Chinaman comes to see all the time.”

McBride nodded. “That’s him.”

“Du-rant,” the guard said slowly, stretching the syllables out. “Durant. I guess I better try to remember that.”

“Work on it,” McBride said. He let in his clutch and pulled away, heading toward the beach. Directly in front of him, about a hundred yards away, was the pier. To his right was the parking lot that served the restaurant, which was a white, one-story structure built for some reason along faintly colonial lines, perhaps because it sold a lot of what its menu described as New England clam chowder. To the left of the pier was another large parking lot, about the size of a narrow city block, and at the end of that was the yellow house with the green roof.

McBride drove to the end of the parking lot, pulled into a space, switched off his engine, and listened to it as it kept on running for a few moments. The engine hadn’t done that before, and McBride automatically took it as a portent of awful things to come.

He pot out of the car, remembering not to open the door with his damaged left hand, and walked up the driveway that led from the parking lot to small garage that was attached to the yellow house. Guarding the driveway were some signs that read, KEEP OUT, PRIVATE PROPERTY and NO PARKING, VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED AWAY. Ignoring the signs was a large green Chrysler station wagon that McBride recognized as belonging to Artie Wu. He needs it for all those kids of his, McBride thought, and tried to remember whether the Wu clan numbered four or five.

When he reached the half-glass door, McBride knocked and waited until Artie Wu opened it. Wu nodded, and McBride went in. He followed the slightly limping Wu into the living room, where they turned and inspected each other’s damage.

“I tripped over a dead pelican,” Wu said. “What happened to you?”

McBride looked down at his taped-up thumb. “I owe a couple of guys a little money. This here’s the past-due notice.”

“They break it?”

“They broke it.”

“The bastards,” Wu said, and McBride was a little surprised at how much compassion went into the comment.

“Sit down some place while I go get Durant.” Wu turned to leave, but stopped. “You want a drink?”

“Got any beer?”

“In the fridge. Help yourself.”

Wu left, and McBride went over to the refrigerator, opened it, and took out a can of Schlitz. He popped it open, took a swallow, and then moved over to the newsprinter which was still clacking away in the corner. He glanced at what was coming off the printer, found it dull, drank some more beer, and inspected the titles of several of the books that lined the wall. They looked dull too. There were The Emperor Charles V by Brandi, George Antonius’s The Arab Awakening, The Age of the Reformation by Preserved Smith, and the U.S. Government Printing Office’s Investigation of Senator Thomas J. Dodd — Part I.

McBride decided that the books were there for decorative purposes. He was almost sure that nobody would ever read them, not unless they were forced to. On the other hand, Durant might have read every one of them. McBride found Durant hard to figure and had to remind himself constantly not to “sir” him when they spoke. That’s what eight years in the Corps’ll do to you, he told himself. Make you wanta say “sir” to any asshole who’s ever cracked a book.

He turned when Wu and Durant came into the living room. Durant was still barefoot and wearing his sawed-off jeans, but he had a shirt on now, a frayed blue oxford-cloth one with a button-down collar, although the buttons were long missing. He wore it with the tails out and the sleeves rolled halfway up to his elbows. Artie Wu, also barefoot, wore white duck shorts and a guady green-and-gold shirt that was big as a tent, but still not big enough to conceal his gut.

“Artie told me about your thumb,” Durant said. “Does it still hurt?”

“Some,” McBride said.

“Want some painkiller?”

“You got any?”

Durant nodded. “I’ll give you a couple when you go. Just don’t take them before you drive and don’t mix them with booze.”

“I’ll take ’em tonight,” McBride said. “Things always hurt worse at night.”

“Sit down,” Durant said.

McBride sat down on the Eames chair, but didn’t lean back. He sat hunched forward, his arms resting on his knees, the can of beer in his right hand. He watched closely, trying to read something into the way Durant chose the couch and Wu the suede chair. Nothing to read, he decided. Just two guys sitting down, one of them fat and the other one skinny.

Artie Wu produced a long, slim cigar from a shirt pocket, cut off its end with a tiny knife, stuck it into the left side of his mouth, and lit it with a kitchen match that he struck with his right thumbnail. He looked at McBride as he blew some smoke out, and McBride noticed that he inhaled.

“No deal, Eddie,” Artie Wu said. “Sorry.”

“Shit,” McBride said.

Wu and Durant watched as McBride took a long draught of his beer. “Well, shit,” he said again.

“You were counting on it, I suppose,” Durant said.

“Yeah, I was counting on it.”

“We checked it out,” Durant said.

“If you checked it out, then you know it’s there.”

“That’s not the problem,” Wu said.

“You guys could do it,” McBride said.

“I’m thirty-seven,” Wu said. “That makes me too old to try because I’m too young to die.”

“You guys could do it,” McBride said stubbornly.

“We called somebody we know in Zurich,” Durant said. “He goes in and out of Saigon.”

“Jesus, you didn’t tell him about the whole thing, did you?”

“We told him just enough,” Wu said. “No more.”

Durant stared at McBride. “He wouldn’t touch it, not even for half.”

“You tell him how much half was?”

“We told him.”

McBride gave his lower lip a couple of bites. “Well, shit,” he said again. He looked at Durant and then at Wu. “Why don’t you look at it like this. Maybe you can’t get in this year — or maybe even next. But at the end of a couple of years they’re gonna have diplomatic relations with Nam again. Hell, you know it and I know it. They’re already talking about it. So why don’t you look at it as a long-term investment? For five thousand bucks you can have everything — my ten percent, the map, everything. Then when things calm down, hell, maybe even three years from now, you can find some asshole on the embassy staff and cut a deal with him. Even if you cut it fifty-fifty, you’d still be a million bucks ahead.”

Eddie McBride had been selling, something that he didn’t do very well and, worse, knew that he didn’t. The effort had made his armpits sweat, and they felt cold and damp and nasty. They can probably smell it, he thought. Even from where I’m sitting they can probably smell it.

Durant fished an unfiltered Pall Mall cigarette out of his shirt pocket. He looked at it for a moment with something like revulsion, then sighed, put it into his mouth, and lit it with a disposable lighter.

“You’re forgetting something, Eddie,” Durant said.

“What?”

“There were two of you, right?”

“Yeah, two of us.”

“Who was he?”

“Some spook. He’d been out in the boonies and he came in at the last moment and they assigned him the money.”

“And you were shotgun?” Wu said.

“That’s right.”

“Was it his idea?” Durant said.

McBride stared at them for a moment. “I was a Marine sergeant. He was a CIA heavy. Who the fuck’s idea do you think it was?”

Wu blew a smoke ring. “And you were to split it how — fifty-fifty?”

“Yeah.”

“When?” Durant said.

“He said we’d work it out.”

“How?” Wu said, and blew another smoke ring and stuck his right forefinger through it.

“He said he had some connections that he was leaving behind.”

“Did you believe him?” Durant said.

McBride took another swallow of beer. “No.”

“So how much did you take out with you?” Wu said.

“We both grabbed about twenty thousand.”

Durant nodded as if that were sensible. “Then what?”

“It was fucking panic after that. The slopes were coming over the goddamned walls. I was on the last chopper out.”

“And the spook?” Wu said.

McBride shook his head. “We were supposed to let everything simmer down and then meet here in L.A. Six months ago — January fifteenth. We were going to meet in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel. He didn’t show on the fifteenth — or the sixteenth, or the seventeenth. He just didn’t show. I spent a month in that lobby.”

“Did you try to find him?” Durant said.

It was a pained look that McBride gave Durant, who shrugged and said, “Maybe more to the point, did he ever try to find you?”

“I just told you that. No.”

Durant put his cigarette out. He did it carefully, and while he was doing it and without looking up he said, “What was his name?”

“Who?”

“The spook.”

“Why?”

Durant shrugged. “Maybe it might be worth something.”

“Who to?”

“To you,” Wu said, and blew another smoke ring, a fat one. It was time to be smart, McBride told himself. The trouble is that you’re just smart enough to know that, but not smart enough to do anything about it.

“How much?” he said.

“This jam you’re in,” Durant said. “How bad is it?”

“Bad.”

“You’re in how deep?”

“Five thousand.”

“And you’re what, a week behind?”

“Almost two. Two, Saturday. Noon.”

“Who’s the shylock?”

“Solly Gesini.”

“Jesus,” Wu said.

Durant looked at him. “You know him?”

“I’ve heard of him,” Wu said. “He’s the worst, the real basement.”

“Is he lined up with anybody?” Durant said.

McBride shrugged. “Solly drops a lot of names. He’s always talking about all the Wop gongos he knows in Chicago or Miami or Vegas or someplace.”

Durant studied McBride for several moments. He looks exactly like what the taxpayers pray that the Marine Corps looks like, he thought. Not too tall, not too heavy, and tough without being mean. Fairly competent, maybe even half clever, but certainly not brilliant. Presentable, almost handsome, but far from pretty. It’s Eddie McBride, the can-do kid, the perfect embodiment of the American ideal that lies somewhere between a shorter Gary Cooper and a taller Steve McQueen.

“You weren’t too smart, Eddie,” Durant said finally.

“Smart?” McBride said. “Smart’s got nothing to do with it. Nobody goes to a loan shark because it’s the smart thing to do. They go because they’re desperate. They go because they got no place else to go.”

He jerked his head at the newsprinter. “You guys,” he said. “You guys take a chance every now and then, don’t you?”

Durant nodded.

“Okay, and the bigger the risk the bigger the payoff, right? Sure. You can look it up. Well, you take a risk when you go to a loan shark, too. You know that something awful’s gonna happen to you if you don’t pay ’em back, but it’s not as awful as what’s gonna happen if you don’t get the money. You follow me?”

“So what’s going to happen to you, Eddie?” Wu said.

McBride bent over and pulled up his pants leg, peeled down his sock and pointed to his Achilles tendon. “They’re going to cut it,” he said, “right about there.”

Durant sighed. “How much would it cost to keep you from getting cut?”

“A thousand.”

“That would keep you out of trouble for how long?”

“A week, maybe two.”

“That’s not long.”

McBride snorted. “If you’ve been living the way I’ve been living, a week’s forever.”

He watched as some silent message passed between Wu and Durant. Wu shrugged slightly, reached into his pocket, and brought out a flat, thick, folded sheaf of bills that were pressed together by an oversized solid-silver paper clip. Wu counted out five one-hundred-dollar bills and then ten fifties, folded them lengthwise, and almost, but not quite, offered them to McBride.

“Who was the spook, Eddie?” Wu said.

McBride swallowed. Then he cleared his throat before speaking, because he was again afraid that what he was going to say would come out high or maybe even squeaky.

“He had a funny name.”

Wu waved the sheaf of bills, not much, just a little. “So.”

“Childester,” McBride said. “Luke Childester.”

Wu handed him the money without comment. Durant leaned back on the couch, clasped his hands behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling. He seemed thoughtful.

“I... I don’t know when I can pay you guys back,” McBride said.

“That’s for services rendered,” Durant said, still staring up at the ceiling. “We took up your time and time’s worth something, so we pay for it.”

McBride automatically tried to figure their angle. He knew that there had to be one, and he put all of his cunning to work in an attempt to determine what it was. And then it occurred to him that there just possibly might not be an angle. That made him experience the almost totally foreign emotion of gratitude, which he wasn’t at all sure that he liked because it made him swallow a lot.

“Look,” he said, and this time his voice did squeak a little. He forced it down into its normal register. “Look, if you guys ever need anything — I mean anything — well, shit, you know where to find me.”

“That’s right, Eddie,” Artie Wu said. “We know.”

Chapter 6

It was exactly 5:32 that evening when Hart Ebsworth, carrying a small stack of three-by-five cards, entered Randall Piers’s study and took his usual seat in one of the brown leather chairs that faced the carved oak desk. Piers watched as Ebsworth carefully rearranged the cards, getting them into the exact order that he wanted.

For a few moments Ebsworth said nothing as he concentrated on the cards, shuffling and rearranging them, frowning a bit as he worked. The cards were filled with the lawyer’s cramped scribblings that were virtually indecipherable to anyone but him. Ebsworth liked to work from cards because he found them neat, concise, and logical.

Finally, Piers grew tired of waiting and said, “Well?”

Ebsworth looked up. “A couple of real hot-doggers,” he said. “Hardball players. They’ve done it all. Or almost all.”

“Oh?” Piers sounded pleased. “What haven’t they done?”

“Well, they’ve apparently never killed anybody and they’ve never been caught stealing and they’ve only been in jail twice, once in Mexico and once in Djakarta. And the Chinese gentleman, if you’re still with me, is the pretender to the throne of China. The last of the Manchus. Or so he says.”

Piers nodded and grinned. He looked pleased. “Tell me,” he said.

“About Artie Wu?”

“Yeah. Pretender to the throne of China. Damn, I like that. By God, I do.”

“Well. According to Wu — and he has some pretty fancy documentation to back him up, although I guess it could be faked — he’s the illegitimate son of the illegitimate daughter of the Boy Emperor who was called P’u Yi. by most Westerners. You want more?”

“Absolutely.”

“The Boy Emperor — and he was the last one they ever had — ascended to the throne in 1908 when he was not quite three, I think. In 1912 he was forced to abdicate by Sun Yat-sen, but they let him hang around the palace in Peking until about 1924. Well, in 1922, just before he got married, there was this fourteen-year-old girl in the palace who had an illegitimate daughter. P’u Yi, it seems, had knocked her up. The fourteen-year-old, I mean, not the one he married. So all the high pooh-bahs in the court wanted to get rid of the baby — strangle her or throw her out with the garbage or whatever. But P’u Yi — you’ll like this next part — got one of his faithful eunuchs—”

“You’re making it up,” Piers said happily.

“I’m not.”

“A faithful eunuch, by God!”

“Well, the faithful eunuch smuggled the kid out of the palace and turned her over to Mr. And Mrs. C. Howard Hempstead, a couple of Methodist missionaries who were both about forty and childless.”

“And they took the kid in.”

“Right. They adopted her and took her to San Francisco with them when they went back in 1926.”

“Whatever happened to the Boy Emperor?”

“He got married and finally they chased him out of Peking and he wound up in Tientsin and then, about 1931, after the Japanese took over Manchuria, they made him emperor of that, which really wasn’t much of a job, but he stayed with it until the Russians dragged him off the throne in 1945. Then when Mao came along in 1949 or ’50, P’u Yi got thrown into jail — actually, it was a labor reform camp — but finally they let him out and he wound up as a tourist guide in Peking — at the Heavenly Palace, in fact. He died in ’66.”

“And the girl?”

“She grew up in San Francisco with the Hempsteads. Then in early 1939 this old friend from China visited them on some kind of a fundraising trip. He was a Chinese Methodist bishop, and if I’ve got it right, his name was Bertrand Sooming Liu. It seems that the bishop had an eye for the ladies.”

“The girl was how old by then?”

“In ’39? Seventeen, I guess. Sixteen, maybe.”

“And the bishop snuck into her bedroom, huh?”

“Somebody did. Anyway, she got pregnant and died giving birth to Artie Wu. By then the Hempsteads were in their late fifties, but being good Christians they adopted the new baby and gave him the name Arthur Case Wu — which was his mother’s surname. I don’t know where they got the Arthur Case.”

“Then what?”

“Well, on August 9, 1945, the Hempsteads got killed in a car wreck in Oakland. They had no relatives, close or otherwise, so Artie Wu was dumped into the John Wesley Memorial Methodist Orphanage in San Francisco. Guess what six-year-old was there to show him the ropes?”

“Durant,” Piers said.

“Right. Quincy Durant — and that’s all anybody knows about him. He got left on the orphanage steps in the usual bassinet or basket when he was about six weeks old. He had a tag around his neck that read Quincy. Nobody knew whether Quincy was his first name or his last, but the guy who ran the orphanage had once had a Durant car — was there a Durant car?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Piers said.

“So he named him after this car that he’d once had.”

“Jesus,” Piers said. “Then what?”

“Well, they stuck it out at the orphanage until they were both fourteen, which would be around 1953. August of ’53, in fact. And then they simply took off and never went back. They’ve been partners ever since.”

“And afterwards?” Piers said. “I mean after the orphanage.”

“There’s a blank between 1953 and 1956, but by late ’56 they’re down in New Orleans shucking oysters in some place just off Canal Street. So one night they’re going home. It’s late, maybe two in the morning. They re going up Chartres, and they decide to cross Jackson Square because they live in a flophouse on Decatur — 1021 Decatur.”

Ebsworth looked down at his notes to make sure of the address. Piers tried to remember whether Ebsworth had looked at them before and decided that he had, but only once.

Ebsworth glanced up from his notes and frowned — a small, disapproving frown. “Now it gets a bit like Dickens or maybe Horatio Alger.” From his tone it was apparent that he didn’t think much of either one.

“More,” Piers said.

“Comes now Henderson Hodd Belyeu, doctor of philosophy — Princeton ’16 it seems — Southern scion, minor poet, onetime associate professor of Greek at the University of Mississippi, and elderly fag. He was sixty-five then and the first time Durant and Wu saw him he was getting himself beaten up by a couple of deepwater sailors that he’d tried to cruise.”

Piers grinned, clasped his hands behind his head, and leaned back in his chair. “Well, now.”

“So Durant and Wu waded in and took out the two sailors. They got Dr. Belyeu back up on his feet and brushed him off, and he was so grateful that he invited them up to his apartment. He lives in one of those big old red brick buildings that are on either side of Jackson Square.”

“Lives?”

“Lives. I talked to him this afternoon. He’s eighty-four and a militant activist in the Vieux Carré chapter of the New Orleans Gay Liberation movement. But it apparently wasn’t like that between him and our two heroes, although I suppose he tried. He didn’t say. What he did say was that the first thing he noticed about both Wu and Durant was that they were bright — very, very bright. Well, they talked almost the entire night — the old man’s fascinating, by the way, he really is — and finally he asked them if they wanted to be oyster shuckers for the rest of their lives. They said no, and he offered to tutor them. Which he did.”

“Tutored them for what?”

“For college. For Princeton, in fact.”

“They’re Ivy Leaguers?”

“Well, Wu is, sort of, although he didn’t graduate. Durant was the real scholar, except that he didn’t go — not officially, anyhow, although he went.”

“It gets better and better.”

“The old man used his influence and that of some of his friends to get Wu in. One of the letters of recommendation came from Edmund Wilson, who was an old classmate of Dr. Belyeu’s.”

“Jesus.”

“The stipulation was that since Wu was the last of the Manchus, he had to be accompanied everywhere, even to class, by his faithful bodyguard-companion. Durant.”

“The Manchu thing” Piers said. “Who thought that up — Dr. Belyeu?”

“Right. He started digging into Wu’s background and somehow came up with what I told you.” Ebsworth made his voice go slightly prissy and somewhat Southern. “ ‘There are a couple of leaps of faith that one has to take, my dear Mr. Ebsworth, but although it all started out as a rather-elaborate hoax, I now feel that Arthur might very well be the last of the Manchus. And it is such a delicious story.’ He talks like that. Fascinating old guy.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, Dr. Belyeu paid their expenses for the first year.”

“And after that?”

“Poker.”

“Are they good?”

Ebsworth riffled through his cards. “In 1969 in a table-stakes game at the Leamington Hotel in Minneapolis they walked out with eighty-three thousand dollars.”

“But that was later,” Piers said. “What happened in between?”

“They dropped out of Princeton in 1960 and went to Mexico. They were messing around with pre-Columbian art, but somehow got into trouble and wound up in jail. The charges were dropped and the next thing you know they’re in the Peace Corps.”

“The Peace Corps?”

“Yeah, they got sent to Indonesia in late ’61 and about a year later they’re back in jail again. In Djakarta. For smuggling. But again the charges were dropped, although they did a couple of months. Well, after that they wandered around the Pacific for a while, doing God knows what, until they finally wound up in Papeete, population then about nineteen thousand.”

“This was when?”

“Early 1963.”

“Oh Tahiti, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“So what did they do in Papeete?”

“Well, they had a little money and they talked Air France into putting up a little more and they leased this old waterfront bar. Guess what they called it?”

“What?”

“Heyst’s.”

Piers chuckled. “My God, Conrad’s Axel Heyst. I haven’t thought of that name in years.”

“So let’s say you’re an ordinary tourist and you wind up in Papeete with nothing much to do and you’re looking for a little action. Well, some guy at that Air France outfit, UTA, tips you off to this place called Heyst’s down on the waterfront. You know the kind of place. No tourists — just beach-combers, remittance men, and stranded chorus girls.”

“I like it.”

“So you wander down to Heyst’s, and sure enough, there’s this fat Chinaman sitting at a table in his white linen suit and Panama hat, looking like a young Sidney Green-street, brushing the flies away with his ivory-handled fly whisk, and right away you know that he’s up to no good. And the other guy, the thin one, his partner, looks like a failed poet with an impossibly desperate past. And even better are all the good-looking broads who’re sitting around the place.”

“How’d it go over?” Piers said.

“Big. They ran the place for a little more than a year and then sold out to a syndicate from Sydney.”

“That brings them up to when?”

Ebsworth looked at his notes. “The middle of 1964. After that they moved around the Pacific a lot for a couple of years — all over — and then in 1967 they showed up in Bangkok and went into the import-export business. That lasted a couple of years.”

“And then?”

“In 1969 they were in Minneapolis for a while and then they turned up in Key West. They went in with a syndicate that was looking for sunken Spanish treasure. They found some — maybe even a lot — but there was a problem with the state, and so by 1970 they were back in Bangkok in the trucking business.”

“Trucking?”

Ebsworth looked at his notes. “That’s what I got. Well, they used to go in and out of Bangkok a lot. And one time Durant went out and he didn’t come back and then Wu went out, and when they both came back, Durant went into the hospital.”

“For what?”

“Exhaustion is what I got. But actually it was that time that he got the scars.”

You find out how?

Ebsworth shook his head. “No.”

“That was when, now?”

“The spring of ’72. When Durant got out of the hospital, they unloaded the trucking business and a month later turned up in Scotland.”

“Why Scotland?”

“Maybe because it was a long way from Thailand. They wound up in Aberdeen.”

“And what was in Aberdeen?”

“A lot of Texans and Oklahomans.”

“For the North Sea drilling?”

“Right. Well, the next thing you know Wu and Durant have opened up something called the Nacogdoches Chili Parlor featuring Texas Jailhouse Chili, the recipe — according to the menu — courtesy of Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson. Well, it was a smash, even with the Scots. I suppose if you can eat haggis, you can eat anything. Well, a month after they opened the place Wu got married.”

“This was, now?”

“The middle of ’72.”

“Who’d he marry?”

“An impoverished Scottish lass with a trace of royal blood who can trace her family back to before 1297. Agnes Garioch was her maiden name. Now she’s Aggie Wu. They had twin sons in ’74 and twin daughters in ’75. Artie Wu spent a little money with a genealogist in London, and they’ve figured out that with maybe three revolutions and about ten thousand or so providential deaths, the older of his twin sons, Angus, could be both Emperor of China and King of Scotland.”

Piers grinned. “That it?”

“Just about. They sold the chili parlor earlier this year at a big profit and then they all came back to the States. They were in San Francisco for a while and then came down here. Wu rented a house in Santa Monica. Durant has the one on the beach. He pays six hundred and fifty a month for it.”

Piers was silent for a moment, thinking, and then he said, “Good job. It must have taken a lot of digging.”

“I hired some help,” Ebsworth said. “I also used up a couple of big favors in Washington.”

“I don’t think I’ll ask what favors.”

“No,” Ebsworth said. “Don’t.”

There was another silence until Piers said, “Well?”

“I think they just might do,” Ebsworth said slowly. “But they’ll cost.”

Piers nodded.

“And,” Ebsworth said after a moment, “they’re probably going to take just one hell of a lot of convincing.”

Piers nodded again. “Well,” he said, “that’s what I do best.”

Chapter 7

It was the usual mixed bag that had been invited to Randall Piers’s for drinks that evening. In addition to a Nobel Laureate, who supposedly was the third-smartest man in the United States, there were a prominent criminal lawyer; a Democratic National Committeewoman; a former child actor turned union business agent; an ex-Governor; a producer who couldn’t quite stop reminding people that he had been to Yale; a onetime Rose Bowl queen; and a tall, pleasant man of about thirty-five, a TV producer, who told Artie Wu that he was Boris Karloff’s godson and wondered whether Wu would like to join him and his handsome wife in a run up to Oxnard for the world’s best burritos in a Mexican joint that they knew. Artie Wu declined with regret, but got the name of the restaurant because he was very fond of Mexican food.

As the party wound down and the guests began to leave, Lace Armitage came up to Durant, put a tentative hand on his arm, and said, “You’ll stay for a while longer, won’t you, Mr. Durant — you and Mr. Wu? My husband and I really haven’t had a chance to talk with you.”

Durant looked at her and she gave him her best smile, one that contained an amazing amount of what seemed to be genuine warmth. Durant said, “All right, I’ll go talk to Artie.”

She smiled at him again, touched his arm gratefully, and moved off to say good-bye to the rest of her guests. Durant went over to Artie Wu, who stood by the pool, drink in hand, staring at the house.

“How do you like the way the rich folks live?” Durant said.

“I like it. Damned if I don’t.”

“They want us to stay.”

Wu nodded. “Piers mentioned it to me.”

“Maybe they’re just being neighborly.”

Wu shook his head. “If you had a hundred and sixty million, would you invite us over?”

“No,” Durant said, “now that you mention it, I wouldn’t.”

Randall Piers took a sip of his drink, looked at Wu and then at Durant, and said, “How much do you know about me?”

They were in Piers’s office-study. Lace Armitage was behind her husband’s big desk, playing with a silver letter opener. Piers was on a couch, and Wu and Durant were in two of the brown leather chairs. Hart Ebsworth, the lawyer, was in another chair beneath a very good oil portrait of Lace Armitage.

Durant answered Piers’s question. “Not much,” he said.

“How much?”

“You went through MIT on the GI bill, got your doctorate in ’51, started teaching at Cal Tech, got fascinated by electronics and symbolic logic, eventually set up a company called International Data Systems, and nine years later sold out to IBM for roughly one billion dollars. You had almost fifteen percent of the stock, so your cut was about a hundred and fifty million. After that you sort of dabbled in things — politics, a couple of films, a record company, and that magazine you founded, The Pacific, which always looks to me like an uneasy cross between the National Enquirer and Arizona Highways.”

“You’ve been busy,” Piers said.

Durant shook his head. “Not really. Artie took a run over to the Malibu library this afternoon.”

“We ran a check on you two,” Piers said.

Artie Wu frowned. “What does that mean?”

“You’ve been around.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Wu said.

“It means I was interested in your bona fides because I’m going to make you a proposition.”

“What my husband is saying is that we’d like you to help us,” Lace Armitage said.

“To do what?” Durant said.

Piers looked out through the huge window at Santa Monica, whose lights were just beginning to come on. “I have a sister-in-law whom you’ve probably heard of, Silk Armitage.”

Wu looked at Lace Armitage. “She was the Silk in Ivory, Lace, and Silk right?”

Lace nodded.

“And she’s in trouble,” Piers said.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Durant said, “but I can’t see what it has to do with us. We’re not exactly in the trouble business. In fact, we try to avoid it.”

“Not always,” Ebsworth said.

Durant looked at Ebsworth and then at Piers. “What does he do?”

“As I said, he’s my lawyer.”

“You need a lawyer for this?”

“Maybe.”

Durant shook his head. “Then I don’t think I’m going to like it.”

Lace Armitage tossed the silver letter opener on to the desk with a clatter. “This is becoming a waste of time.”

“Probably,” Artie Wu said.

“Maybe we’re going a little fast for you,” Piers said to Durant.

“Maybe. We meet a guy in the morning. We have a cup of coffee together and a few laughs, and being neighborly, he invites us over for drinks that evening. By the time we get here he’s run a check on us. Whatever it is he finds out about our pasts — something unsavory, probably — convinces him that we’re the kind who can get his sister-in-law out of some jam she’s in. As you say, it’s a little swift for me, a little sudden.”

“Mention money,” Ebsworth said to Piers.

Piers shook his head. “Not yet. We’ll get to that later.”

“How much money are we going to get to later?” Artie Wu said.

Piers looked at him. “Enough.”

Wu shrugged and grinned. “I’ll listen.”

“What about you?” Piers said to Durant.

Durant sighed and rattled the ice in his glass. “I think I could use another drink first.”

Ebsworth rose and took Durant’s glass. “Scotch?”

“Anything.”

“You care for one?” Ebsworth said to Artie Wu.

Wu shook his head. He produced one of his long cigars. “I’ll just smoke this if nobody minds.”

Nobody did, and Wu used his tiny knife to slice off the end, stuck the ear into his mouth, and lit it with a kitchen match.

Piers waited until Durant had his drink. Then he said, “What do you know about Pelican Bay?”

“Not much. It’s a city down the coast on the other side of Venice. About a hundred and fifty thousand in population. Sort of ugly. And I hear it’s a little like Philadelphia used to be, corrupt and contented.”

“Pelican Bay,” Piers said, “was part of the district of a Congressman who died a couple of months ago. Congressman Floyd Ranshaw. Know anything about him?”

“I know how he died,” Wu said. “He died messy. His wife shot him and then shot herself.”

“So they say.”

“Who’s they?” Durant said.

“The Pelican Bay cops. The Ranshaws had been separated for a year. His wife checked into a motel room with a bottle. She’d been having trouble with the booze. The Congressman was back in town from Washington. She called him. He went over, probably to see if he could get her into a drying-out place. She pulled a gun and shot him and then shot herself. Suicide-murder. Case closed.”

Piers waited for the question he knew would come.

“What’s this got to do with your sister-in-law?” Durant said.

“Silk was living with Ranshaw,” Lace Armitage said. “She had been for not quite a year.”

“In fact, she was waiting outside the motel in her car when he was killed,” Piers said. “And that’s the last time anyone’s seen her.”

“But you’ve heard from her?” Durant said.

“Just once.”

“What’d she say?”

“She talked to me,” Lace Armitage said. “It was two days after it happened. My sister is usually a very relaxed person, calm as clams. But this time she was nervous, all tensed up, and very, very scared. I could tell. She said it didn’t happen the way the cops said it did. She wouldn’t say how she knew that, but she did say she was in just one hell of a lot of danger so much so that she was going to have to disappear.

“She said she knew some people who would help her and that she would need money, but not too much because too much might draw attention to her. She said she would have somebody call us every week. It would be in a kind of code. Whoever called would mention something that only she and I would know about, something from when we were kids. Then whoever called would tell us where to drop the money off. The same amount every week, one thousand dollars. And that’s the last time I ever talked to her.”

Wu nodded and inhaled some of his cigar. “And this was when, two months ago?”

“Just about,” Piers said.

“You’d better tell them about the other thing she told you,” Ebsworth said to Lace.

She nodded. “Silk said that we should look into how the Congressman’s wife felt about guns.”

“Did you?” Durant said.

“I hired some private detectives,” Piers said. “They learned that back in 1947 when the Congressman’s wife had been six. years old, she found her father’s service pistol. A forty-five automatic. He tried to take it away from her. It went off and blew his brains all over the bedroom wall. Ever since then she was frightened of guns. She was more than frightened. They terrified her.”

“You told the Pelican Bay cops about this?” Wu said.

“Ebsworth did,” Piers said.

“I took a copy of the report,” Ebsworth said, “and drove down to Pelican Bay and personally handed it over to the chief of police, a guy called Oscar Ploughman. I sat there and watched him read it. When he was through he made me a nice little speech about how much he always liked to meet a public-spirited citizen. Then he very politely told me that he would take the report under advisement and that perhaps it might be better if I went back to L.A. and waited until I heard from him. I’m still waiting.”

Durant took a Pall Mall out of his shirt pocket, looked at it regretfully, and lit it.

“You trying to quit?” Piers said.

“Not really” Durant said. “I just go through a bit of self-loathing every time I light one.” He purled some more smoke down into his lungs, blew it and said: “So what you’re saying is that both the Congressman and his wife were probably murdered; your sister-in-law may or may not know who did it, but thinks she’s in trouble; and the Pelican Bay cops may or may not be sitting on their hands. Is that it?”

“Roughly,” Piers said.

“What do you want us to do about it?”

“Find her.”

“Why don’t you use private detectives? We’re not in the people-finding business.”

“I know. That’s why I want you to do it. I tried private detectives. They got close, she found out, and she made me call them off.”

Artie Wu blew a smoke ring. “If we find her, what then?”

“You’d ask her to set up a meeting between her and Lace. Anyplace Silk says, anytime.”

“And if she won’t?” Wu said, and blew another ring.

Piers looked at his wife. Lace Armitage sighed and picked up the letter opener again. “If she won’t, she won’t. But I’ll give you a letter — which will be part begging, part personal entreaty from one sister to another. Family stuff. I think I can make it strong enough so that she’ll agree to see me.” Lace paused. “I hope I can, anyway.”

Piers looked at Wu and then at Durant. “Now I’ll mention money, all right?”

“All right,” Durant said.

“One month of your time, twenty-five thousand dollars. If you find her, another twenty-five. If she agrees to the meeting a total of seventy-five thousand.”

Durant stared at him and then smiled slightly. “You can afford it, can’t you?”

“That’s right,” Piers said. “I can afford it. But I don’t throw money away. Finding Silk is awfully important to both me and my wife.”

Durant looked at Wu. “Well?”

Wu grinned. “I’m a miner, I’ll go down.”

“What does that mean?” Piers said.

“Probably yes,” Durant said.

“You don’t want to talk it over?”

Durant shook his head, another slight smile on his face. “We have a rule never to talk it over when somebody offers us twenty-five thousand dollars for a month of our time.”

“By the way,” Wu said, “will it be cash or check?”

Piers nodded at Ebsworth, who rose, moved over to Durant, and took a check from the breast pocket of his jacket. He looked at the check as though to make sure that the amount was correct and handed it to Durant, who glanced at it, nodded appreciatively, and then looked at Piers.

“You’re taking just one hell of a chance,” he said.

Piers nodded. “As I told you this morning, I sometimes go into things that are just a bit dicey.”

Durant shook his head, not bothering to hide his disbelief. He shifted his gaze to Wu. “Have you got any ideas about how to find a strayed sister-in-law?”

Wu thought about it for a moment. “Maybe we’d better start in Pelican Bay.”

“We know anybody useful there?”

Wu thought some more, reached into his hip pocket, and brought out a small black address book. He leafed through it for a moment, then stopped, smiled happily, and looked up at Durant. “Otherguy Overby.”

“Well, now,” Durant said.

“Is that someone we should know about?” Piers said.

“I’m not sure,” Durant said. “We first met Otherguy where — in Manila?”

“Yeah, Manila,” Wu said.

“He was always just a couple of jumps ahead of the law, but when the cops sometimes caught up with him, he always managed to blame it on some other guy. The San Francisco cops hung the name on him, and now he hardly answers to anything else.” Durant looked at Wu. “What’s his real name — Maurice?”

“Uh-huh,” Wu said. “Maurice.”

“Is he a thief or what?” Ebsworth said.

“I suppose he’s stolen a few things in his life,” Wu said. “But mostly he’s a hustler who tries to work a medium-size con. He’s also a dedicated gossip. That’s what we’ve sometimes used him for. Information.”

“Do you think he might know where Silk is?” Lace Armitage said. Durant put his drink down and rose. “No, but he might head us in the right direction. You said something about a letter.”

Lace nodded. “I’m going to write it tonight. I’ll get it to you tomorrow. Will ten be all right?”

“Ten’s fine,” Durant said.

Wu rose, went to the huge window, and stared out at the distant glitter of Santa Monica. He turned to look at Piers, who was also up now. “We’re a long shot, you know.”

Piers thought about it. “Ten to one, at least.”

“Probably more.”

“Probably.”

“When the banks open tomorrow, I’ll be there with your check.”

Piers studied Wu for a moment. Then he smiled. “If you weren’t,” he said, “I’d start worrying about my judgment.”

Chapter 8

Salvatore Gesini, the moneylender, didn’t like to drive. Despite having lived for the past thirty years in California, where driving is a minor dogma laid down in the public schools, Gesini drove the way that they still drive in his native Manhattan — nervously, irascibly, grimly.

Usually, Gesini had one of his older catamites chauffeur him around, but none was in attendance at Mr. Wonderful’s when the call came that Friday morning, so Gesini had climbed into his Oldsmobile 98 and driven off, grumbling to himself about how the fuckers were never around when you needed them.

A short, squatty man of fifty-five, Gesini was almost remarkably ugly, with a bald head and a squeezed-together face in which nothing seemed to fit. The bulging brown eyes were too near the huge, waxy triangle of a nose that hovered over the sweet little rosebud mouth. And the mouth was so round that it always seemed in danger of rolling off the ledge-like chin which, even freshly shaved, was invariably blue with beard.

Although he was the sole owner of Mr. Wonderful’s, the Venice gymnasium whose motto was We Build the World’s Best Bodies, Gesini had let his own body go to hell. He was fat, grossly so, with gray skin almost the color and nearly the texture of wet plaster. And although he didn’t smoke, he sometimes wheezed and gasped and fought for breath, especially when servicing one of his string of muscular young men — a sexual inclination he had picked up in San Quentin, where, fifteen years before, he had served sixteen months for second-degree manslaughter. The father of four, Solly Gesini no longer bothered much with women, particularly his wife, because he didn’t like the way women looked at him when he took off his clothes.

Gesini was thinking about the call that had come that morning. He thought about it as he drove south on the San Diego Freeway, keeping stubbornly in the fast lane at a dogged forty-five, oblivious to all traffic except the car directly ahead of him.

The call had come at 8:30 from Mr. Simms — or rather, from someone who had said that he was Mr. Simms’s executive assistant. Gesini had been slightly irritated by the voice and its tone, because it had been one of those snotty Hollywood voices, all la-di-da, the kind that says “terrific” a lot and calls you by your first fucking name even if they’re thirty years younger than you. Solly liked to be called Mr. Gesini, by God, at least for the first two minutes.

Nobody that Gesini knew ever called Mr. Simms anything but just that — Mr. Simms — although his first name was Reginald. Gesini wondered what kind of name Reginald Simms was and decided, after some thought, that it was a lucky name because it obviously was neither Jewish nor Italian. Gesini had little ethnic identity and often wished that his own name were something different. Years ago he had settled on Lawrence Parnell because he thought it sounded kind of classy, and sometimes he even covered sheets of paper with it just to see how it looked as a signature.

Gesini knew very little about Reginald Simms other than his name. He knew that Simms had been brought in from back East a little more than a year ago to smooth things over in Pelican Bay. Gesini wasn’t quite sure what smoothing things over actually entailed, but he had a fairly good idea, although he hadn’t pursued it because what went on in Pelican Bay was really none of his business.

Gesini was curious, however, about why Mr. Simms would want to see him. Gesini had no illusions about his own ranking in the scheme of things. On a scale of one to a hundred, Gesini felt that he himself was very small change — four bits probably, sixty cents at best. Gesini always ranked everyone like that. A real success was, to him, a ninety-nine-center. A failure was a nickel-dime guy.

At the sign that read PELICAN BAY — NEXT 3 EXITS Gesini decided to switch lanes. He did it without either signaling or looking into his rearview mirror, and as usual, he was a little surprised by all the frantic horn blowing. The fuckers oughta look where they’re going, Gesini told himself as he swung down the curving ramp that led to Park Avenue.

When it had been founded a little more than ninety years ago, Pelican Bay had been laid out on a stern grid. It was a narrow, oblong coastal city almost totally surrounded on three sides by Los Angeles, which it poked up into like a long, exploring finger. More of its streets ran north and south than east and west, and the city’s founding fathers, not noted for imagination, had numbered all the east-west streets.

The north-south streets, however, had presented something of a problem because they had to be given names. The founders had solved the problem by giving them the names of states. As the town grew it eventually ran out of states and started borrowing the names of other famous thoroughfares. Now there were a Park Avenue; a Peachtree Street; a Downing Street; a Bourbon Street; a Broadway, of course; and for a time even a Kurfürstendam, although in 1917 that name had been changed to Champs-Élysées, which nobody could ever pronounce, and the street was now called Champ Street.

There was no park adorning Park Avenue, which could boast nothing more than a long line of dusty-looking bungalows. Most of the bungalows seemed to have campers parked in their driveways, as though to advertise that their owners liked to get out of Pelican Bay and go somewhere else as often as possible.

Gesini drove along Park Avenue until he came to Fifth Street, which was one of the city’s main thoroughfares. He turned right on Fifth Street and headed toward the ocean. Gesini prided himself on his ability to read a street and determine its level of prosperity. Fifth Street, he decided, was on an economic bummer.

The street was lined largely with small stores which occasionally were interrupted by five- and six-story office buildings all wearing SPACE AVAILABLE signs. Here and there a brassy fast-food chain had set up shop. But mostly the small stores seemed to be marginal businesses: tired junk shops with cute names; a couple of used-paperback bookstores with no customers; four palm readers in one block, which to Gesini meant Gypsies; a hopeless-looking VD clinic flanked by two massage parlors; and bars. Far too many bars.

They oughta at least wash their fucking windows, Gesini thought. Mr. Wonderful’s was located on Lincoln Boulevard in Venice, an unlovely street in an unlovely town. But Gesini kept his place spruced up and freshly painted — not out of civic pride, but because it was good for business. When it came to Venice, Gesini had no civic pride. Besides, he lived in Brentwood.

Pelican Bay seemed to grow a little more prosperous as Gesini neared the ocean. But he still didn’t like the looks of the pedestrians. Too many spics and too many spades, he thought as he pulled into a parking lot and snapped at the black attendant to “Watch the fucking fenders.” He waited until the car was safely parked. Sometimes, when he suspected that an attendant was drunk or doped, or possibly both, Gesini would rent two spaces, park the Oldsmobile himself in the center of them, and take the keys. Gesini trusted few people. Perhaps none.

The building where he was to meet Mr. Simms was called the Ransom Tower, and Gesini remembered that it had been named after one of Pelican Bay’s dead city councilmen. He also remembered that there had been some scandal attached to the construction of the building, but other than a vague impression of civic graft, he could recall no details.

The Ransom Tower was a little more than two years old and exactly fifteen stories high. Built out of steel beams and tinted glass, it suggested, in design, a box of cereal. It was located two blocks from the ocean, and the occupants of its west side could look at that if they wished. Those on the east side had nothing much to look at but the streets of Pelican Bay or, if that palled, Los Angeles.

Gesini found the number of Reginald Simms, Inc., Consultants, on the building directory and took the elevator up to the fifteenth floor, which was actually the fourteenth floor. There was no thirteenth floor. And the top floor, the sixteenth, which was really the fifteenth, was occupied by what Gesini had heard was an exclusive private club, which in Pelican Bay, he decided, meant that they didn’t let any Jews in. Or Italians either, probably. Gesini could understand that.

The first thing Gesini saw when he got off the elevator was a redheaded receptionist, who smiled at him and asked whom it was that he would like to see. When he told her who that was and who he was, she smiled again, Picked up her phone, and said, “Mr. Gesini is here.”

A few moments later, to Gesini’s right, a voice said, “Hel-lo, Solly.”

Gesini turned. He saw a tallish man of about thirty-two with the sleek looks of a male model. The man had a fat mass of carefully styled brown hair, and he wore a three-piece grayish-blue suit with a cream-colored shirt. The shirt was open and tieless, and the man had spread its collar out over the lapels of his jacket. Gesini thought it looked silly.

The man bore down on him, his hand outstretched. Gesini gave it a limp shake.

“I’m Chuck West,” the man said, and automatically Gesini didn’t like him because he didn’t like anyone who had a nice name like Charles and then went and fucked it over into something like Chuck. Gesini hated it when people called him Solly, although he never made any fuss about it because he didn’t much care for Salvatore either.

Gesini was steered toward the ocean end of the hall by Chuck West, who chattered smoothly about how busy we know you are and how grateful everybody is that you could make it on such short notice. Gesini grunted “Uh-huh” and “Sure” in reply and kept on wondering what it was all about.

At the end of the hall they reached a doorway. West took out a plastic card, something like a credit card, and inserted it into a slot. The door, which looked like wood, slid open, and Gesini assumed that the door was some kind of metal, probably steel.

Gesini’s impression of the room that they entered was one of deep carpet, paneled walls, and a blond secretary at an antique desk who looked up from her typing, smiled slightly, and then went back to her machine. West used the card again to open yet another sliding door. West was talking about the weather now, something to do with rain or the lack of it.

The first thing Gesini noticed when he entered the big room was the gray stone fireplace. On his left were the tinted windows which looked out over the Pacific and on the right was the fireplace with four-foot logs in it that crackled and blazed. Gesini wondered who brought the logs up and how the chimney worked and whether they used a gas jet to light the logs and keep them going.

The second thing Gesini noticed was the man who rose from behind the big spindly-legged desk and advanced to meet them: handsome as an actor, tall, somewhere in his mid or late forties, tanned, and at least in Gesini’s estimation, dressed fit to kill.

The man had his head cocked slightly to one side and a warm but strangely shy smile on his face. “Mr. Gesini,” he said. “I’m Reginald Simms. How splendid of you to come.” They shook hands, and Gesini gave him a little more grasp than he had given Chuck West. Simms seemed to notice West then, nodded at him politely, smiled again, and said, “Thank you, Charles”

“Yes, sir,” West said, and left.

Gesini examined Simms carefully and liked everything that he saw. He liked the dark gray almost black suit with its pearl gray vest. He liked the starched white shirt and the carefully knotted, richly patterned tie and the plain black shoes with their gleaming toes. He liked Simms’s face, too, with its heavy dark brows, gray eyes, bold nose, firm mouth and chin, and just enough lines here and there to make it all look thoughtful and intelligent.

“Do you like a fire, Mr. Gesini?” Simms said, gesturing Gesini into one of the big, comfortable-looking leather chairs that were drawn up to the fireplace. “I suppose it’s rather ridiculous to have a fire in Southern California in June, but I somehow find one rather comforting, don’t you?”

“Fires are okay,” Gesini said, settling himself into the chair. They were barely seated when the door opened and a black man in a white jacket entered, carrying a tray that held cups and a silver coffee service. He served the two men silently, Gesini first. Gesini didn’t much like coffee. He usually drank Tab for breakfast. But he could stand coffee if he put enough cream and sugar into it. He helped himself liberally to both and then noticed that Simms took his black. He also noticed how Simms dismissed the black servant with a small, but very polite, nod. The fucker’s got class, Gesini thought. You gotta admit that.

Simms took a sip of his coffee, gave Gesini another of his warmly shy smiles, and said, “It seems, Mr. Gesini, that we have some mutual friends who speak most highly of you.”

“Oh, yeah? Who?”

“Vince Imperlino has some very kind things to say about you.”

Gesini nodded carefully. “Yeah, I know him.” He had met Imperlino just twice, the second time at a big, fairly secret meeting at La Costa. Gesini had felt both lucky and surprised to have been invited to the meeting, because a lot of the ninety-nine-centers had been there.

“And then Mr. Minuto down in Palm Springs also has some awfully nice things to say about you.”

Gesini knew that Simms was lying then, but he didn’t care. There are lies and lies. Gesini had shaken hands with Ulderico Minuto just once, and that had been nearly thirty years before, when Gesini had just arrived on the Coast from New York and the newspapers were still calling Minuto Richie Minute. Now Minuto was a retired aging myth that was baking itself to death in the desert sun down in Palm Springs. Shit, Gesini thought, he must be eighty now.

“Well, I met Mr. Minuto a long time ago.”

“He still keeps abreast of things,” Simms said. “A most amazing old gentleman. He’s almost eighty-three now, of course.”

“I figured he was up there somewhere like that.”

“As you probably know, what we do here in our little shop is try to serve as liaison between certain business groups and the city government. I suppose what we really are is an intelligence-gathering organization. We collect the odd bits and pieces of information, feed them into the computer, and from that we can make our projections.”

“Sounds interesting,” Gesini said because Simms was looking at him as though he expected some kind of response.

“It is, actually. Sometimes a comment here and a snippet of gossip there will be just what we need to head us in the right direction.” Simms put his coffee cup down on a small, highly waxed table, reached into his pocket, and brought out a silver cigarette case. He opened it and offered it to Gesini.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Good for you. Do you mind terribly if I do?”

“Go right ahead.”

Simms lit his oval cigarette with a lighter that Gesini assumed was real gold. He blew the smoke out, fanned it away with his left hand, and gave Gesini another almost shy smile. “Let’s see, where were we? Oh, yes. Snippets of information. Well, yesterday — or was it the day before? No matter. What is important is that from all the bits and pieces that were fed into the computer some names cropped up. Among them were yours; two of your associates, a Mr. Egidio and Mr. Norris, I believe; and a Mr. McBride. Edward McBride, I think. Do you know him?”

“Eddie McBride,” Gesini said. “Yeah, I know him.”

“You’ve lent him a small sum to tide him over, I understand.”

“Five thousand bucks.”

“That much? Is he a suitable risk?”

“He’ll pay.”

“I’m sure he will. However, what really caught our eye was this marvelous story about a buried two million dollars that Mr. McBride seems to bruiting about. Are you familiar with it?”

“Yeah, he came to me with it. I thought it was a lot of cock.”

“I don’t blame you, Mr. Gesini. I don’t blame you at all. That was exactly my reaction. Exactly. Still, one must poke about in all the dross. So we did some extremely discreet checking up on your young Mr. McBride, and to our surprise there seems to be a measure of truth in his remarkable tale.”

“Ho shit,” Gesini said.

“Again, my reaction exactly.”

Suddenly, Gesini smelled money. Not a lot, of course, because if this smooth fucker is in on it, although he seems like just one hell of a nice guy, well, there’s not gonna be much left over for yours sincerely. Occasionally, Gesini got his cliches mixed up. But there’d be a payoff of some kind, he knew. A tiny slice; a few crumbs; peanuts, probably — but what the hell, it all added up.

“That’s kinda interesting,” he said.

“Mmm. Isn’t it? Profitable, too, although perhaps not in the immediate future. More of a long-term investment, I should think, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Gesini said cautiously, “I guess so.”

“However, there does seem to be a tiny problem. Your two associates, Mr. Egidio and Mr. Norris, are such talkative chaps. I’m not sure that you shouldn’t caution them. Of course, if they weren’t so garrulous, we would never have heard of Mr. McBride, now, would we?”

It was said with a charming smile, but it was still a rebuke, and Gesini immediately went on the defensive. “Well, when you’re in the kinda business I’m in, you hear all sorts of crazy stories and all of them are gonna make you a million at least.”

“It must be a trial,” Simms said. “However, I was wondering if you would be interested in a proposal?”

“I’ll listen.”

“Good. My proposal is that you get all the information that Mr. McBride has. I must stress all. It seems, according to your talkative two colleagues, that Mr. McBride, after you rejected his overtures, decided to take his proposition to two other gentlemen.”

“Yeah, I think Icky and Tony told me that.”

“And one of these two gentlemen was Chinese, I believe.”

“I think I remember that they said one of ’em was a Chinaman. I wasn’t listening too close.”

“Did they mention where they live?”

Gesini thought about it. “One of ’em lives in Malibu, I think. I don’t know which one.”

“I would think that the names of these two gentlemen along with their addresses should be included in the information that you get from Mr McBride. They are a couple of loose ends and I don’t like to leave such things dangling. Of course, after Mr. McBride has been debriefed he would become surplus, wouldn’t he?”

“What do you mean, surplus?”

“I would think he could be disposed of, don’t you? Nowadays, we do live in such a throwaway world. Could you handle all this — with your usual discretion, of course?”

“Yeah,” Gesini said, “I can handle it.”

“And now to compensation. I do hate to haggle, so I’m going to be what I hope is generous. Say, twenty thousand?”

“Yeah, that’s all right. That’s fine.”

“Good.”

“What about the other two guys, the Chinaman and the other one?”

Simms seemed to think about it for a moment and then gave Gesini another of his shy, pleasant smiles. “I do think, Mr. Gesini, that I might have to look after them myself. You do understand, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Gesini lied, “I understand.”

Chapter 9

Artie Wu was at the Crocker Bank in Santa Monica that Friday morning at two minutes until ten, which was when the bank opened. At five minutes past ten, just after he had cashed Randall Piers’s check for $25,000, he used a pay telephone in the bank’s lobby to call Durant.

Durant was in the bedroom of the rented beach house making his bed. He picked up the phone on its first ring and said hello. As he did, he heard the knock at the front door.

“It’s me,” Artie Wu said after Durant said hello.

“Hold on a second. Someone’s at the door.”

Durant put the phone down and went into the living room. Through the door’s glass he could see Lace Armitage — at least, her upper half. She was bearing a white blouse that he couldn’t quite see through, with four of its top buttons undone and no brassiere. Durant opened the door to discover that the six greyhounds were with her. They had gathered around her in a tight bunch and seemed to be waiting for an invitation to bound inside.

“Well,” Durant said. “Good morning.”

“Morning,” she said. “Am I early?”

“Not at all. Come in.”

“¡Siéntense!” she said to the dogs with a passable Spanish accent, and they promptly lowered their haunches to the deck and prepared to await the morning’s next development.

Inside, Durant gestured toward the stove. “Help yourself to some coffee,” he said. “I’m on the phone, but I’ll be through in a second.”

“No hurry,” she said.

Durant was wearing only his sawed-off blue jeans. When he turned to go back into the bedroom she saw the thirty-six scars on his back, although she didn’t count them. In the bedroom Durant picked up the phone again and said, “Okay.”

“Who was it?” Wu said.

“Piers’s wife.”

“With the letter?”

“Probably.”

“I’m at the bank.”

“And?”

“We’re in business — although I’m not sure what kind.”

“Profitable, I’d say. So far.”

“What do you want to do next, take a run down to Pelican Bay and look up Otherguy?”

“We might as well.”

“Lunch?”

“Who’s cooking today?”

“I am.”

“Then I’ll be there,” Durant said, and hung up the phone. When Durant came back into the living room he was wearing an old gray sweat shirt with DENVER ATHLETIC CLUB stenciled across its front in faded letters. Lace Armitage was seated in the suede chair, a yellow mug of coffee in her hands.

“My husband was right,” she said. “You do make a damn good cup of coffee.”

“Thanks.”

She nodded at the burled-walnut coffee table, where another mug of coffee rested on the current issue of Foreign Affairs. “I poured you some too.”

“Good,” Durant said, and sat down on the couch.

“My husband sent someone out yesterday to get a coffeepot like yours, but when they tried it this morning it turned out awful. What’s your recipe?”

“Let me think,” he said. “I have to think about it because I always make automatically and half asleep.” He thought a moment and then said, “Well, first you fill up the pot and bring it to a boil. Then you throw in a couple of handfuls of coffee, crack an egg, and toss in the shells. Then you boil it till it’s done. If you don’t know what to do with the egg, you can drink it. I always do.”

“Raw?” She made a face.

“It’s not bad with a little Worcestershire and a dash of Tabasco. Some salt and pepper.”

“How do you know when it’s done?”

“The coffee?”

“Yes.”

Durant shrugged. “You just know.”

Lace shook her head in a kind of mock despair, reached down beside the chair, and picked up her large leather drawstring purse. She opened it and took out a thick buff envelope, which she handed to Durant. He noticed that the envelope was unsealed. On its front was written the one name Silk in a firm, rather pretty hand.

“This the letter you mentioned?” he said.

“Yes. You can read it if you like.”

Durant thought about it. “Would it help us to find her?”

“No.”

“Then I won’t read it. If I do find her, she might not like having had the postman read her mail. And that’s about really all I am, isn’t it — a postman?”

He licked the flap of the envelope, sealed it, and placed it on the coffee table.

Lace looked at him for a moment and then smiled. It was her best smile. “That was a damn decent thing to do.”

“What?”

“Not reading it. Most people would’ve.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

Durant grinned. “Then we share an opinion of most people.” He picked up his coffee and sipped it. “Tell me about her,” he said as he put the mug down.

“Silk?”

“About her and the Congressman.”

“Silk,” she said and bent down to fish into her leather bag again. She came up with a red box of Sherman cigarettes, the long brown kind; took one for herself; and then offered the box to Durant. He took one, nodded his thanks, and lit both of them with a disposable lighter. Lace blew some smoke out and said, “Silk” again. “Well, Silk and I have always been very close. That’s not to say that she and Ivory weren’t close, but both of them felt closer to me than they did to each other. Does that make sense?”

“Sure.”

“You have any brothers or sisters?”

“I thought your husband checked me out.”

Lace shook her head slightly in a kind of small apology. “I almost forgot. You grew up in an orphanage, didn’t you?”

Durant nodded.

“You and Mr. Wu?”

“Yes.”

“What’s it like, growing up without knowing who your folks are?”

“You usually get used to it.”

“And if you don’t?”

“Then you invent something.”

“Like Mr. Wu?”

“He didn’t invent anything.”

“You mean he’s really the pretender to the Emperor’s throne?”

Durant nodded slowly. “When he needs to be, he is.”

There was a silence for a moment as Lace examined Durant’s answer. “I think I understand what you’re saying,” she said after a moment.

Durant smiled. “Maybe you do.”

“But Silk,” she said. “To understand Silk I reckon you’d have to understand how we grew up.” She started putting out her barely smoked cigarette in an ashtray. She did it carefully, turning it into a painstaking task as she thought about what she was going to say. “We grew up poor on eighty acres in the Arkansas Ozarks that my papa called the Black Mountain Folk School. My husband always calls it the bomb-throwing school.”

“Was it?”

Lace smiled. “No. My papa was a socialist and a preacher, but looking back on it now, I reckon that what he was most of all was a teacher. He thought there had to be some place in the United States that taught all the things that were dying out. You know, folklore and crafts. Things like how to make a chair out of white oak splits. How to cure the itch with just sulfur and lard. How to cure a bee sting with mashed ragweed. How to build a log cabin, even. How to cook possum. You ever eat possum?”

“Never.”

“It’s good — if you cook it right. The head’s the best part. When we were little, Ivory, Silk, and I’d fight over who got the head. You eat everything but the eyes. Well, anyway, during the Depression when Papa was still single he traveled all over the South preaching wherever he could, but mostly back in the mountains, and he learned all this stuff and wrote a lot of it down. And songs, too. He collected songs. He could play almost any instrument there was, and of course, he never had a lesson in his life. And sing! He had one of those big old fine country church baritones that you could hear damn near over in Joplin. ‘Loud, girls,’ is what he used to tell us. ‘Folks don’t care much what you sing as long as you sing it good and loud.’ ” She stopped and smiled at Durant. “Maybe you remember how we used to sing.”

Durant smiled back. “Good,” he said, “and loud.”

“Well, anyway, Papa wound up in Arkansas in 1940 when he was about thirty-two or — three, I reckon. He had this idea for a folk school even then, so when he met Mama he set to courting her, not just because she was the prettiest girl in three counties, but also because she just happened to own an eighty-acre farm that her folks had died and left her. Well, they got married and Papa founded the school.”

“Who came to it?” Durant said.

“That’s the funny part. Mostly city people came. Papa had the idea that it’d be mostly country folks, but not many of them seemed too interested. Then word sort of got around and people started coming from the cities — New York especially, Chicago, Boston, Saint Louis, all over. After a while, even some college professors. Of course, almost nobody ever had enough noney to pay the whole tuition, although, God knows, it wasn’t much. But that didn’t bother Papa as long as they could pay just some, or if they couldn’t even do that, well, he’d let them help out around the school. Those who did come then were talkers, and sometimes I think Silk must have listened to every word.”

“Even as a child?” Durant said.

“Even then. She drank it in. And then in early 1960, well, she and] Vorv and I sang at that fair in Fort Smith and Don Pennington heard us signed us up with Papa’s blessing and we became Ivory, Lace, and Silk and that fall, just before Papa died, we went on the Sullivan show and after that you know what happened. We got rich and famous.”

“You were very good,” Durant said. “Some of those songs were tremendous.”

“That was Ivory. She wrote all of our really good ones. She was actually a poet, I suppose, and terribly shy. Silk had the brains and the voice, and I... well, I always sang loud and wanted to be someone else, which is how I wound up in films, I reckon. I don’t know, but sometimes I think that if it hadn’t been for Vietnam, we’d all still be back in Arkansas.”

“But you were doing well in the early ’60s, before anyone really gave a damn about Vietnam.”

“We were singing pure folk then. All those old songs that Papa had collected over the years. Then in ’63 Ivory wrote that song about Kennedy after he got killed, and after that we really took off. Funny when you think about it — how we made all that money off of assassination and war. I think that’s what really got to Ivory finally. She just couldn’t do it anymore. So we broke it up, and Silk went on as a single and really got into the antiwar movement, and Ivory — well, you know what happened to Ivory.”

“Yes,” Durant said. “I’m sorry. Would you like some more coffee?”

“I sure would,” she said.

Durant rose, picked up the cups, and started for the kitchen, but paused. “How’d your sister meet the Congressman?” he said, and went on into the kitchen.

Lace Armitage raised her voice a little. “He used to be a cop, you know.”

“So I recall,” Durant said, pouring two more cups of coffee. He came back into the living room and handed her one of the mugs. “I don’t think I got them mixed up.” He sat back down on the couch. “Floyd Ranshaw, the singing cop — wasn’t that what they called him?”

“He wasn’t bad, either,” she said. “Not good, but not bad. He sang his way through college, club dates, weddings, what have you, and then joined the cops in Pelican Bay and became the youngest lieutenant in its history — the padrón of the East Side. It’s almost pure ghetto over there, you know. Part black, part Chicano, part poor white. And he knew them all. Or a lot of them, anyhow, and they liked him because he was honest and fair, and on Saturday night he had this radio program where he’d sing, play the music they liked, and take calls from anybody who wanted to bitch about something. City Hall didn’t bother him because he didn’t interfere with their graft, and besides, he was helping keep the East Side quiet. Well, in 1968 the Congressman from that district up and died, and Ranshaw decided to run. He didn’t have any money, and there were fifteen in the race. But he came in second, and so they had to have a runoff. The man who came in first was the pet of City Hall. Well, just ten days before the runoff election Ranshaw came up with a briefcase full of solid evidence that could’ve put his opponent away for twenty years. Or so they say. Well, there was a quiet meeting and the opponent withdrew four days before the election for reasons of ill health and Ranshaw found himself elected.”

“Where’d your sister meet him?”

“At an antiwar rally in Washington in ’72. Somebody came up with the cute idea of having Silk and the Congressman sing a protest song together. Well, you know how those things go. They started seeing each other, and then the Congressman left his wife, and he and Silk set up light housekeeping about a year ago, sometimes in Washington, sometimes out here. She was mostly working Vegas and New York at the time. Then something happened in Pelican Bay and the Congressman started spending more and more time out here.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. Something to do with politics. All Silk ever said was that he was in trouble.”

“She didn’t say what kind?”

“No.”

“Then he died.”

“Two months ago.”

“How active was your sister in the antiwar movement?”

“She worked at it. She really did.”

“She didn’t have anything to do with the really far-left nuts, did she?”

“Like the Weather Underground?”

Durant nodded.

“You mean you think that some of them might be helping her to keep out of sight.”

“They know a lot about it.”

She shook her head. “Silk is a pretty devout anti-Communist. Most old-line socialists are. Papa was.”

“They have reason to be.”

“You a socialist?”

Durant smiled. “No, I’m a registered skeptic.”

“But you keep up, don’t you?” She nodded toward the wall of books. “All those books and Foreign Affairs on the coffee table. Or is that just for show?”

“I’m just curious about what they did then and what they’ll do next. Politicians, I mean.”

Lace dug the box of Shermans out of her purse again and lit one, after first offering the box to Durant, who shook his head no. “You’re not married, are you?”

“No.”

“You like women?”

“Why?”

“Well, I’ve been sitting here for half an hour and nothing’s happened — not a look, not a leer. So I just got curious.”

Durant stared at her a moment, then smiled slightly and said, “There’re clean sheets in the bedroom, Mrs. Piers, if you’d like to fuck.”

The pink flush started in her smooth neck and rose rapidly to her face. Some kind of reply sprang to her lips — something bitter, Durant decided — but she bit it back, actually clamping down on her lower lip. “None of that was necessary,” she said.

Durant shrugged. “It cleared the air.”

“Your private life is none of my damn business.”

“That’s right,” he said. “It isn’t. All I am is a hired hand who might or might not find your sister.”

“Do you think you can?”

“I have no idea.”

“When will you start?”

Durant let his eyes roam up and down her body. His gaze unbuttoned her blouse and took it off and then removed her pants. She crossed her legs.

“When will you start?” She said again.

He smiled. “To look for your sister?”

“Yes.”

He kept the smile on his face. “I’ve already started.”

Chapter 10

Artie Wu lived in a four-bedroom Spanish Mission-style bungalow on Ninth Street in Santa Monica, a sunbaked, somnolent city so quiet and devoid of commerce that it could offer free indoor parking to the occasional shopper who happened to stray within its limits.

The house on Ninth Street had a red-tiled roof, white stucco walls, arched windows, and a neat green lawn that was kept in shape by the heavy tribute Wu paid to the twelve-year-old buccaneer who lived next door. The backyard, which was the real reason Wu had rented the house, had a high fence, a sandbox, a nice grove of six tall eucalyptus trees, and some bare patches in the lawn that, after a rain, were useful for making mud pies. It was in the backyard that the two sets of Wu twins spent a lot of their time, watched over by nineteen-year-old Lucia Reyes, an illegal emigrée from down Sonora way who was teaching them Spanish, which the older twins had already begun to speak with a slight Scottish accent.

Durant parked his car in the driveway behind Wu’s Chrysler station wagon. The car was a five-year-old 280 SL Mercedes two-seater that was beginning to show its age. Durant had paid too much for it secondhand because he had liked its lines, and since then it had given him nothing but trouble. When he got out he slammed the door hard, hoping it would fall off so that he would have an excuse for trading it in on something sensible like a Volvo. Durant had never owned an American car. He wasn’t quite sure why.

The front door to the Wu house wasn’t locked, so Durant went in and called out, “Hi, honey. I’m home.”

“In here,” a female voice said from the living room.

Durant moved from the short reception hall into the living room, where he found Agnes Wu seated in a chair, an open book in her lap. She was a tall woman in her late twenties, nearly five-ten, with a cap of short, curling blond hair that framed a strong, handsome, full-lipped face softened by large gray eyes that looked innocent, but weren’t. She wore jeans and a yellow T-shirt. When Durant came in she closed her book, using her thumb to mark her place.

She looked up at Durant and smiled. “Ah, the misanthrope of Malibu.”

“Aggie,” Durant said, and twisted his head around, trying to read the title of her book.

She held it up for him. “Trollope’s Barchester Towers.” There was a soft burr to her R’s, but so slight that unless it was listened for it might be missed.

“That’s pretty racy stuff.”

“That’s all I’m reading — the dirty parts. We’re having a drink, aren’t we?”

“Sure. Where’s Artie?”

“Back in the kitchen preparing something Oriental and exotic called Reuben sandwiches, I believe.”

“Artie,” Durant called.

“Yeah,” came the answering call from the kitchen.

“You want a drink?”

“Sure.”

Durant moved over to a table that held a tray of bottles, an ice bucket, and some glasses. He put ice cubes into a glass pitcher, poured in some gin, added a dollop of vermouth, thought about it, added a drop or two more, and started stirring the mixture with a glass rod.

“How’re the bairns?” he said.

“Growing up straight and tall in true California style.” Agnes Wu loathed California. “They’ll all probably reach seven feet. Did I ever tell you I had an uncle who was seven feet tall? My uncle Jacob.”

“Old Jake Garioch,” Durant said. “Used to play for the Lakers, didn’t he?”

“The only thing Uncle Jacob ever played was cards, which he did incessantly and very badly and died broke, like all Gariochs.”

Durant poured the martinis into three glasses. “Have you got an olives?”

“No olives.”

Durant shrugged, picked up two of the drinks, moved over to Agnes handed her one, and then sat down on the red-and-white-striped couch. Artie Wu had rented the house furnished just after its owners, in a seizure of patriotism, had redecorated it in red, white, and blue. The couch was red and white, the rug was blue, a couple of easy chairs wore slipcovers of red-and-white and blue-and-white stripes, and the draperies, until Agnes had rebelled, had been red, white, and blue. Now they were a soft off-white.

Agnes Wu held up her glass and said, “To the California life-style.”

Durant grinned. “The next wet, cold, rainy day we have you ought to bring the kids out to the beach.”

“There’s never going to be another wet, cold, rainy day,” she said. “Forever and ever it’s going to be nothing but sunshine with tanned, smiling faces all insisting that I have a nice day whether I want one or not.”

“You didn’t like San Francisco either.”

She took a sip of her drink. “San Francisco. You know what San Francisco is?”

“What?”

“It’s Glasgow with hills.” She took a cigarette from a box of Parliaments, lit it, and looked at Durant. “What was she like, Quincy?”

“Who?”

“You know who, Lace Armitage.”

“Didn’t Artie tell you?”

“Artie didn’t have her over for coffee this morning. What was she wearing?”

“How’d you like a gift subscription to Modern Screen Romances?”

“I’ve got one. What was she wearing?”

“Well, she was wearing blue-and-white-checked pants and a white shirt that was unbuttoned down to here and no brassiere, and she seemed to think that since I wasn’t married or anything I might be a little gay.”

“You went into your macho act then, I bet.”

“Yeah, I did a little, I’m afraid.”

“Get anywhere?”

“You mean into her panties?”

“Now, this is my kind of conversation,” Artie Wu said as he came in from the dining room carrying a tray of sandwiches. He put the tray down on a glass-and-chrome coffee table. “Whose panties are we getting into?”

“Lace Armitage’s,” his wife said.

“Remember what they used to say at Princeton back in the ’50s when we’d come in from a date?” Wu said.

Durant nodded. “ ‘Get any tit?’ ”

“I don’t believe that,” Agnes said.

“Quincy and I never said it, of course, but the cruder types did.” Wu looked around. “Where’s my drink?”

“Over there,” Durant said.

Wu picked up a plate that held one of the sandwiches, handed it to his wife, and moved over to the drinks tray. He took a sip of his martini and looked at Durant, who was just biting into his sandwich. “I got a call,” Wu said.

Durant chewed and then swallowed. “Who from?”

“McBride.”

“And?”

“He’s had an offer for his map.”

“How much?”

“Five thousand.”

“Well, now,” Durant said. “Who’s buying?”

“The moneylender.”

“Solly Gesini?”

Wu nodded and took another sip of his drink. “There’s just one stipulation to the offer.”

“What?”

“Gesini wants our names.”

Durant smiled without either showing his teeth or putting any humor into it. “Things seem to be moving right along, don’t they?”

“They do indeed,” Artie Wu said.

It was two o’clock by the time Durant and Wu arrived at the address on Alabama Avenue in Pelican Bay. Located three blocks from the beach, Alabama avenue was lined with blighted palms and aging apartment buildings. Number 256 was a seven-story, thirty-nine-year-old, weary-looking structure that called itself the Catalina Towers.

They drove by in Durant’s Mercedes, turned right at the end of the block, and found a place to park on Fifth Street. They got out of the car locked it, and started walking back toward the Catalina Towers.

Wu examined the apartment buildings, most of which seemed to be losing their battle to hang on to a few shreds of respectability, although several of them had tried to camouflage their decline with coats of pastel paint and cheaply remodeled entrances. But nothing could be done to disguise the tenants. A lot of them were oldsters in their sixties and seventies who, primly dressed, sat outside in the sun and watched with reproving eyes and pursed lips as their neighbors hurried into and out of large, shiny cars. The hurrying neighbors seemed mostly to be young, pretty women who wore too much eye shadow.

Wu looked around again as they approached the Catalina Towers. “Faded splendor,” he said. “Otherguy’s kind of neighborhood.”

“He never was much for high overhead.”

“Who shall we be?” Wu said as they turned into the walk that led to the apartment’s entrance.

“I think we’re probably from the finance company,” Durant said.

“Here for the car?”

“Why not?”

Inside the small lobby, Durant and Wu approached the counter that enclosed the switchboard. Behind the counter sat a canny-looking old gentleman with glittery blue eyes and pure white hair so long that he wore it in a ponytail bound by a red rubber band.

Wu and Durant leaned on the counter for a moment, looking around the lobby. It was empty.

The old man cleared his throat. “Help you gents?”

Artie Wu turned and smiled. “Like to make an easy twenty bucks?” The old man thought about it. “Who do I have to mug?”

The old man turned his mouth down at the corners and nodded knowingly. “Repo, huh?”

“That’s right,” Durant said.

The old man examined them with the shrewd eyes that seemed never to have needed glasses. “Well, you guys are big enough,” he said. “Who’s the victim?”

Artie Wu took a folded letter-size sheet of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, glanced at it quickly, and then looked at the old man, “Maurice Overby.”

The old man snorted. “Him.”

“He giving you any trouble?” Durant said.

“Nah, he’s just an all-around prick. Car?”

“Car,” Wu said. “How’d you know?”

“Well, it’s always either the car or the TV. Although sometimes you guys come for the stereo, too. You start fucking around with that stereo stuff, adding all those woofers and tweeters and what have you, and before you know it you’re in over your head. Speaking of which, you said something about twenty bucks.”

Wu slid a twenty-dollar bill across the counter to him. The old man picked it up, folded it lengthwise, folded it again and yet again, and then tucked it into his watch pocket. “Maybe the old lady won’t find it there before I get it spent on something nice. Maybe a blow job. Got a twenty-year-old hooker living here who’s sorta sweet on me. Gives me cut rates when she’s feeling good.”

“Sounds cozy,” Durant said.

“Yeah,” he said dreamily. “Twenty years old. Well, hell, I guess you guys wanta go on up. Apartment 522. Try not to start a ruckus, but if you have to bust him a couple, I sure as shit ain’t gonna say nothing.”

“Thanks for your help,” Artie Wu said, giving the counter a farewell slap.

He snorted again. “For twenty bucks I’ll do almost anything. Make it fifty and I’ll do even that.”

Durant gave the old man a small salute and a good-bye grin, and the two men moved down the hall, got into the waiting elevator, and rode it up to the fifth floor. When they reached Apartment 522, Wu knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” a man’s voice called.

Wu made his voice go down an octave. “It’s the FBI, Mr. Overby. Open up.”

There was a silence followed by some scurrying noises and then the faint sounds of a woman’s voice that seemed to be protesting something. After that the door opened slowly until it was stopped by its security chain. A man peered out cautiously. Artie Wu jammed his foot in the space.

“Ah, shit,” said the man who had opened the door.

“Hello, Otherguy,” Wu said cheerfully.

“I’m busy,” Overby said. “Come back tomorrow. Maybe next week.”

“You don’t want to lose the chain, do you?” Durant said. “Artie’s picked up a few pounds since you last saw him. All he has to do is lean on it and bang, you’re out a new chain.”

“Well, shit,” Overby said. “Get your goddamned foot out of the door Artie, so I can close it and get the chain off.”

Wu withdrew his foot. The door closed and then reopened. Wu and Durant went in. Overby, a medium-tall man of about forty with a sour look on his hard, seamed face, stood barefoot in the middle of the apartment’s living room dressed in what obviously was a hastily donned white shirt and a pair of expensive fawn slacks. The shirt was unbuttoned, and its tails hung down over the slacks, whose fly was unzipped.

“We didn’t interrupt anything, did we, Otherguy?” Durant said, looking around the room, which had an indisputably furnished look to it. There were a couch covered with some kind of green, shiny fabric; a couple of overstuffed chairs that failed to match either the couch or each other; some scarred occasional tables; another table in the dining area with four chairs around it, only three of which matched; a few ugly lamps; and on the white walls a couple of prints, one of a China Clipper under full sail and the other of some snow-covered mountain peaks that looked, to Durant, like Colorado. On the floor was a brownish wall-to-wall carpet that bore the scars of spilled drinks and careless cigarettes.

“I like your place,” Wu said.

“This going to take a while?” Overby said.

“It could,” Durant said. “You might as well zip up your pants and get rid of her.”

Overby looked down to see whether his fly was really open, zipped it up. Turned toward a closed door, and not quite yelled for Brenda to come out.

The door opened and a young woman of about twenty-three or — four came out of the bedroom. She wore only a wispy pair of bikini panties. Pale green. She had a face that would have been almost pretty except for its wised-up expression. Her hair was long and black, her breasts were nice, and her feet were dirty, especially around the ankles.

She examined Wu and Durant carefully and then turned to Overby. “Well?”

“Come back later,” he said.

She again looked Wu and Durant over with her antique eyes. “I’ll fuck all three of you for fifty bucks.”

“Later,Brenda,” Overby said.

She shrugged, turned, went into the bedroom, and came out carrying a pair of sandals, a blouse, and a pair of shorts. Wordlessly, she went to the hall door, opened it, and left.

“That was Brenda, huh?” Wu said.

“Yeah.”

“She always walk around like that?”

Overby sighed. “She lives across the hall.”

“Well,” Durant said, “it’s been a while.”

“Not long enough,” Overby said. “How’d you know I was in town? My phone’s not listed.”

“We were up in San Francisco — when was it, Quincy, a couple of months ago?”

“About that,” Durant said.

“Well, we were sitting in the Fairmont lobby waiting for my wife — you didn’t know I was married, did you?”

“I heard.”

“Well, we were sitting there and who should walk in but Run Run Keng. You remember Run Run?”

“Yeah,” Overby said, “I remember.”

“I thought you would,” Wu said. “Well, Run Run’s just in from Singapore and we started talking about mutual acquaintances and what they were up to and Run Run mentioned you and how if he had time, which he didn’t, he’d like to look you up for both auld lang syne and that five thousand bucks you owe him.”

“Four thousand,” Overby said.

“Whatever. So we told him we had a somewhat similar interest in paying you a call and he was good enough to give us your address.”

“How much did you finally get for the pearls, Otherguy?” Durant said.

“Let me explain about that. You guys want a beer?”

“Sure,” Durant said. “You can tell us about the pearls over a beer.”

Overby walked into the small alcove that held the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and took out three cans of Pabst. “I was supposed to fly down from Manila and meet you guys in Cebu, right?” he said, closing the refrigerator door with his knee.

“Right,” Wu said.

Overby came back into the living room and handed Wu and Durant each an unopened can of beer. He popped open his own can and tossed the top at an ashtray on the coffee table. He missed.

“Well, everything was all set. I was at the airport. I had my ticket, the money, and everything. And then I came down with this attack of malaria”

“Jesus, Otherguy, we’re sorry to hear that,” Durant said, opening his beer. He walked over to the coffee table, put his top in the ashtray, and picked up Overby’s and dropped it in.

“Still the fusspot, isn’t he?” Overby said to Wu.

“Neat as a pin.”

“So what happened after you came down with the malaria attack?” Durant said.

“Well, hell, they threw me in the hospital, what do you think? Ten fucking days. Then when I got out I tried to find you guys, I really did, but you’d disappeared. I looked everywhere.”

“Of course you did,” Wu said. “So how much did you get for our pearls?”

“Ten thousand,” Overby said promptly.

Wu sighed. “Otherguy.”

“What?”

“After you had your — uh — ‘malaria attack,’ we flew up to Manila looking for you.”

“I was probably in Hong Kong by then, looking for you. We probably just missed each other.”

“Uh-huh. And when we got to Hong Kong you were in Singapore, and when we got to Singapore you’d just left for Kobe. But in Manila guess who we talked to?”

“Who?”

“Sonny Lagdameo.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, Sonny,” Wu said. “Well, Sonny said he paid you twenty thousand for the pearls because you were in a hurry, but if you’d dickered with him, he’d’ve gone twenty-three, maybe even twenty-five.”

“Which means,” Durant said, “that deducting your commission, an overly generous fifteen percent, as I recall, you owe us exactly seventeen thousand dollars.”

Overby took a swallow of beer. A defiant, stubborn expression spread over his face. “I ain’t got it.”

Durant sighed. “Then we’re going to have to work something out, aren’t we?”

“What?”

“Not what, but how,” Wu said.

The defiant expression slid off Overby’s face. In its stead came the hungry look of the born gossipmonger, the quidnunc who would almost rather die than be the last to know.

“You guys,” he said, “you’ve got one going, haven’t you?”

“Maybe,” Durant said.

“And you’re gonna cut me in.”

Wu swallowed some beer. “We’re thinking about it.”

“For how much?”

“For just what you owe us, Otherguy,” Durant said. “Seventeen thousand.”

Overby’s face fell, but then it brightened as he glimpsed the angle. “Plus expenses,” he said.

Durant sighed again. “Okay, plus expenses.”

Chapter 11

Durant, beer in hand, stood by one of the windows in Overby’s apartment, staring out at the view, which consisted largely of the rooftops of some grimy two- and three-story buildings. The stripped frame of a bicycle, probably stolen, had been abandoned on one of them. Two blocks beyond the buildings a pair of coupled, nearly empty gondolas inched their way up toward the summit of the highest hump in the old roller coaster at the Bayside Amusement Park. The gondolas reached the top of the hump, paused to catch their breath, then plunged down out of sight. Beyond the amusement park, glittering in the afternoon sun, more gray than blue, was the Pacific.

Durant turned. “You never stray too far from the ocean, do you, Qtherguy?”

Overby sniffed. “It’s good for my sinuses. Keeps ’em open.”

Overby was seated on the couch and Wu in one of the chairs. Wu took out one of his long cigars and, after snipping off an end, lit it with his usual kitchen match. When he had it going he critically examined its burning end and said, “Tell us about it, Otherguy.”

“About what?”

“Pelican Bay and how you happened to light here.”

Overby finished his beer. “It’s ripe.”

“Oh?” Durant said.

“Yeah. Very ripe.”

“Tell us,” Durant said.

Overby rose and started for the kitchen before he stopped, remembering his manners. “You guys want another beer?”

Both Wu and Durant shook their heads no.

“Well, when the war ended in Nam things went dead as a doornail out there,” he said, opening the refrigerator and taking out another beer. “Out there” to Overby was the Far East — everywhere from Seoul to Sydney. He popped open his beer and tossed the top at the sink. Again, he missed.

“Where were you when it ended?” Wu asked as Overby came back into the living room and sat down on the couch again.

“Me? I was in Saigon. I mean, I wasn’t there when it ended, not when they were knocking the slopes off the planes and all, but I was there two or three weeks just before the end. Hell, you could smell it ending, and in a situation like that you never know what might turn up.”

“You did all right, huh?” Durant said.

Overby shook his head. “I did a little business. Some diamonds, some gold, but shit, the competition was something awful. You know who was in town then?”

“Who?”

“Well, Pancho Clarke was there; and Jane Arden, she came in all the way from Seoul, fat as ever; and old Tiger Madrid was there from Cebu—”

“I thought the Tiger was dead,” Wu said.

“Nah, he ain’t dead. Well, he was there, and Run Run was there — that’s how come I happened to owe him that four thousand bucks that he went and lied to you and said was five thousand — and the Pommie Bastard was there. Old as he is, he flew in all the way from Adelaide, and everybody said he cleaned up. Well, he was there, and lemme think who else; oh, yeah, the Niggerlick Kid was there — you knew him in Papeete; and Gyp Lucas, he was there too; and a whole bunch of others that I can’t remember right off.”

“And everybody got rich, huh?” Wu said.

“Well, they say that some of ’em did, and I know for a fact that Gyp Lucas got out of there with at least two hundred grand in emeralds that he traded fifteen first-class seats to Paris for. But all I managed to score was a little walking-around money. Well, after all that I went to Singapore for a while, but that’s been turned into a fucking YMCA, so I left there and tried Hong Kong, but you gotta be a goddamn millionaire to live there now, so I went back to Manila, which ain’t much better, but at least it’s where I belong, and that’s where I heard about Pelican Bay.”

“Who’d you hear it from?” Wu said.

“Billy Prospect.”

Durant grinned. “What’s Billy got going, his pirate-picture scam?”

“Yeah. I figured it’s the same fucking deal he pulled off in Ceylon two years ago, although this time he was trying to get Manila to put up the development money. Anyway, Billy showed up carrying this script around and it looked to me like it had the same old coffee rings on it. Of course Ceylon’s still looking for Billy and that two hundred and fifty thousand they advanced him, but he figures that maybe Manila hasn’t heard about that. So anyway, we were sitting in Boy Howdy’s place out on Mapa Boulevard, and Billy, who’s just in from L.A., starts telling me about Pelican Bay. He tells me money’s lying around in the streets.”

“What kind of money?” Durant said.

“Billy’s kind.”

Wu examined his cigar again. “What do you have to do to get it?”

“You have to do what you always have to do,” Overby said. “You have to see the man.”

“Did Billy say who the man was?”

Overby nodded. “Reginald Simms, and nobody ever calls him Reggie. Not even Billy. Well, Billy paints me this picture and it sounds so good that I flew in here a couple of months ago.”

Durant looked around the shabby apartment. Overby caught the look. “That’s right,” he said. “I ain’t quite got rich.”

“What happened?”

Overby thought about it for a moment. “Well, you know how I am. I’m not bragging, but usually I can fly into a town at nine in the morning and by noon I can tell you what the Mayor’s taking for his piles. You guys know that.”

Wu knocked half an inch of ash from his cigar. “We know how wonderful you are, Otherguy. Just tell us what happened.”

“Well, I got here and I nosed around a little, but I didn’t turn up anything interesting, so I decided to go see this guy Simms and tell him that I’m ready to help him pick up some of the loose change that’s supposed to be lying around in the streets. Well, Simms has got the whole fifteenth floor of the Ransom Tower here. But I don’t get in to see him. All I get to see is Simms’s assistant, a real smooth number called Chuck West. So this guy West goes through a whole rigamarole which is sort of the fine print, if you know what I mean. Then we get to the bottom line, which is if I wanta talk to Simms about doing a little business it’s gonna cost me ten thousand bucks just to talk. Well, I tell Chuck baby that although I’m sure it’s just one hell of a fine offer, I’d like to think it over. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since — thinking it over.”

“That’s all?” Durant said.

“Well, I’ve been nosing around here and there.”

“And you’ve turned up what?”

“That they had an election here last November.”

“They had one all over the country.”

“Not like they had here. They dumped a majority of the old city council here, and the first thing the new one did was fire the city manager and the police chief and bring in Simms as sort of an industrial-civic consultant. At least, that’s what the newspaper here calls him when it mentions him at all, which it don’t hardly ever do.”

“Where’s Simms from?” Durant said.

“Back East, although nobody seems to know for sure. At least, he’s supposed to have a lot of connections back there.”

Wu blew a smoke ring. “After Simms got here — what happened?”

“Well, the first thing he did was find ’em a new city manager. He found ’em this guy who’d been fired off his last job, some place in Idaho — Boise, I think — for being a lush. And he ain’t no reformed lush, either. Then Simms brought in the new police chief, a guy named Ploughman who’s from Jersey. Well, I don’t have anything better going so I do a little checking on Ploughman, and it turns out he’s had a touch of trouble with a grand jury back in Jersey, if you know what I mean.”

“Well,” Durant said.

“You getting the picture?”

Wu smiled. “As you said, Otherguy, it sounds ripe.”

“It gets better.”

“How?”

“Well, the first thing I always do when I hit a cold town is try to get in right with a reporter. I try to find the kind who covers either the police or politics. I especially try to find one who’s maybe fifty years old and making two-fifty, three hundred a week and who’s just woke up to the fact that he ain’t never gonna win any Pulitzer Prize like everybody said he was when he was editing the college paper back in ’49. Well, you find a guy like that and buy him a good steak and all he can drink and you can learn a lot. So I found one. A guy called Herb Conroy. And one night he’s had his thirteen dollar steak and his twenty-two-dollar bottle of wine and is working on his fifth or sixth drink and I bring up Simms and the police chief and the city manager and ask him how come I haven’t read anything nasty about ’em in the Times-Bulletin, which is the rag he works for. Then I go on to tell him that if he doesn’t know anything real juicy about ’em I’d be glad to drop a couple of hints in his lap, at least about the police chief and the city manager, which I dug up all by myself with just two or three long-distance calls.”

“So what did he say?” Durant asked.

Overby shook his head in a kind of wonder. “Well, he started crying. So, shit, you know how you feel when you have to sit there and watch a fifty-year-old man start bawling in public. You sorta squirm around and see if anybody’s noticing, and of course, everybody is, and, Christ, well, it makes you embarrassed.”

“Why was he crying?” Durant said.

“That’s what I asked him. I sorta patted him on the arm and gave him my handkerchief, and he went and blew his nose in it and then started apologizing all over the place. And then, in between sniffs, he tells me how he’s been a reporter on the Times-Bulletin for twenty-five years; in fact, it’s the only job he’s ever had, although if it hadn’t been for his mother-in-law, who lives with him and his wife and who won’t leave California, he could’ve been working for The New York Times or The Washington Post, or UPI anyway. Well, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that story. All these fucking reporters claim that the only reason they’re not all dressed up in trench coats and reporting from Paris or some place on the six-thirty news is because they’ve always refused to kiss ass. Anyway, I buy him another drink, which he sure as shit don’t need, and he starts telling me that he don’t need me to tell him about what’s going on in his town.” Overby thought about what he had just said. “You follow me?”

“Sure,” Wu said.

“So I say what do you mean, and he says he knows all I’ve told him about the police chief and the city manager and more besides. And that if I don’t understand why I’m not reading it in the paper, then maybe I’d better do a little more checking and see who really owns the fucking paper. Well, by now he’s mad. You know how drunks get. He’s mad at me, and he’s mad at himself for not living in Georgetown and having Kissinger over for dinner every week, and he’s mad at his mother-in-law and his wife and God knows who-all. Himself mostly, I guess. Well, I figure if I get another drink or two in him he’ll really turn confidential, you understand what I mean?”

Overby seemed to be expecting some sort of comment, so Durant nodded and said, “Perfectly.”

“So I order us both a couple of double shots of the best fucking cognac they’ve got, which set me back twelve bucks, and he tosses his down like it’s diet cola or something. Well, the cognac hits him pretty good and in a few minutes he leans forward and asks me if I know when Reginald Simms really showed up in Pelican Bay. So, I tell him sure, it was right after the election, when they brought him in as a consultant. He shakes his head and goes on shaking it, and I’m starting to worry that maybe it’ll fall off when he says, no, it was before that. Then he tells me that Simms was the guy who brokered the sale of the Times-Bulletin four months before the election that they had last November. The paper’d been in the same family for years and a lot of chains had tried to buy it, but the family always said no. But Simms arrives in town, makes ’em an offer, and a week later it’s sold. And no sooner’s it sold than it starts coming out against the city council and the Congressman and everybody else who’s in office. Well, like I already told you, the city council got rolled. But the Congressman got back in because Pelican Bay is only about half of his district. But he didn’t last long — the Congressman, I mean — because his wife shot him a couple of months ago, but you probably heard about that.”

Wu nodded. “We heard. So who bought the paper, Otherguy?”

“That’s what I asked him. But by now he’s drunk himself about half sober and he’s mad again, so he shakes his finger under my nose and tells me that since I’m so fucking smart I can find out for myself. Then he gets up, stumbles, grabs to keep from falling, gets hold of the tablecloth, and goes down flat on his ass — drinks, dishes, glasses, and everything all over the floor.” Overby shook his head. “It was a mess. The goddamn bill for the two of us — guess how much?”

Durant sighed. “How much?”

“Eighty-three fucking dollars plus a twenty-five-percent tip, which I had to give ’em on account of the mess he made. Can you imagine, eighty three dollars for two people — for dinner?”

“Who owns it, Otherguy?” Wu said.

“What?”

This time Wu sighed. “The Times-Bulletin?”

“Oh, yeah, that. You know, sometimes I think if I’d gone to college, I’d’ve made just one hell of a good librarian. They got men librarians, don’t they?”

“Lots of them,” Wu said.

“Well, there’s nothing I like better than to get back some place where they keep old records. You get back there with maybe just one fact to go on and that leads you to another one, and before you know it it’s turned into kind of a chase and you really get all excited, you know what I mean?”

“Sure,” Wu said.

“Anyway, I started checking out this outfit called Oceanic Publishing, Inc., which bought the Times-Bulletin. Well, it seems Oceanic Publishing is owned by something called the Glassman Products Company, which is a do-nothing corporation that’s owned by the Golden Bear Manufacturing Company, which is owned by Nightshade Records. Well, hell, everybody’s heard of Nightshade Records on account of all that publicity it got when it was set up back in the late ’60s by that scientist guy who made a billion dollars or whatever it was out of that electronic doodad he invented. You remember him; he even married what’s-her-name, the one who used to be a singer, Lace Armitage. His name starts with a P. Uh—”

“Piers,” Durant said.

“Yeah, Randall Piers. Well, he sold Nightshade Records about five years ago for a ton of money. And everybody knows who put up the cash for that deal, although his name sure don’t show up on the records anywhere.”

“Otherguy,” Wu said.

“What?”

“Durant and I, we don’t know his name.”

“Yeah, that’s right. You guys’ve been out of the country.”

“So have you,” Wu said.

“But I keep in touch.” Overby managed to make it a mild accusation.

“Well, we all have our failings,” Wu said, “but even so, maybe you’ll the us the name.”

The cunning expression that appeared on Overby’s face was that of a man who knew he was about to serve up his choicest morsel. He savored the moment and then said, “Vince Imperlino.”

If Overby expected his announcement to produce a reaction, he was disappointed. Wu and Durant stared at him impassively, their expressions polite and interested as if they were quite willing, but not terribly anxious, for him to go on with his story.

Overby’s expression became one of exasperation. “Christ, you guys at least know who Vince Imperlino is, don’t you?”

Durant nodded. “Something to do with organized crime, I think.”

“Or perhaps better yet, ‘prominent mob figure,’ ” Wu said, giving his voice a quoting tone.

Overby started nodding his head up and down quickly, as a man might when he suspects that he may be the butt of a joke. “Okay, you guys, go ahead. Have fun. You know all about Vince Imperlino. For all I know, you’re asshole buddies.”

Durant rose and moved over to Overby and looked down at him. He stared at the seated man for several moments and then said softly, “What’s he going to do with it, Otherguy?”

“What?”

“He bought himself a newspaper and now he almost owns himself a town. So what’s he going to do with it?”

Overby stared up at Durant. “What the fuck you think he’s going to do with it? He’s going to make himself some money.”

“How?”

Overby shrugged. “I could think of a million ways.”

“And not one of them legitimate,” Wu said.

Overby smiled — a wise, tight, cruel smile. “Funny thing about Vince — and I’m gonna call him Vince, although if I ever met him, I’d sure as shit call him Mr. Imperlino. But like I was saying, it’s a funny thing about him. He runs things west of Denver, except for Vegas. I mean, none of ’em makes a move unless they check with Vince first. But Vince don’t get his name in the paper hardly at all. And the L.A. cops, they don’t even seem to know he’s alive. Even the Feds leave him alone. You’d almost think old Vince had the fix in all the way to Washington.”

“One might think that,” Durant said, “but it still doesn’t tell us what plans Imperlino has for our fair city.”

Overby looked at both men suspiciously. “What do you guys really care?”

Wu smiled, showing most of his big, broad white teeth. “We might want in. Quietly, of course.”

“Then again, we might not,” Durant said. “So why don’t you front for us, Otherguy. Why don’t you see the man?”

Overby looked at them again, his gaze more suspicious than before “It’ll cost.”

“We know,” Durant said. “Ten thousand, wasn’t it?”

“That’s just to talk.”

Durant nodded. “We know. Pay him, Artie.”

Wu took a thick manila envelope out of his breast pocket and counted a stack of one-hundred-dollar bills on to a table. “Ten thousand.”

Overby rose, moved over to the table, counted the bills, then looked at Durant. “Expenses,” he said. “You guys mentioned something a while back about expenses.”

Wu counted some more bills on to the table. “Two thousand. Expenses.”

Overby looked around the room and frowned. “Maybe I oughta move into a better place. Maybe like all of a sudden I came into some big money. It’d look good.”

Wu glanced at Durant. Durant’s expression didn’t change, but Wu started counting out some more bills. “That makes four thousand in expenses.”

“You want a receipt?”

“Well, no, I don’t think so, Otherguy.” Durant smiled. “But we’d certainly like you to stay in touch.”

Wu took a notebook from his pocket and wrote two phone numbers on it. “You can usually reach us at one of these.”

Overby nodded and pocketed the numbers. He took the sheaf of bills, shaped them into a roll, found a rubber band in an empty ashtray, and snapped it into place. He tossed the roll up into the air a couple of times, but not far, and then tucked it away in his pants pocket. “Okay, I see Simms, keep you out of it, find out what I can, and then get back to you, right?”

“Right,” Wu said. “But there’s one more thing you can do for us.”

“What?”

“This Congressman who got killed.”

“What about him?”

“Find out about it.”

“His wife shot him. Everybody knows that.”

Wu shook his head patiently. “Find out about it.”

Overby stared at him and then licked his lips. “Why?”

Wu smiled, but not very pleasantly. “Because we told you to.”