Out on the Rim

Chapter Twelve

For the second time in his life Booth Stallings flew first-class. The first time had been nearly five years before when a Swedish small-arms manufacturer had flown him to a sales conference in London to deliver an ill-received paper Stallings perversely had entitled: “Terrorism: the Exciting Hot New Industry.”

Otherguy Overby had insisted on first-class to Manila as a matter of front and, by chance, Stallings had two seats to himself. Across the aisle were Overby and Georgia Blue who scarcely spoke to each other. After the 747 was 30 minutes out of Los Angeles, and after an overly solicitous flight attendant had pressed a second martini on him, Stallings rose, tapped Overby on the shoulder and said, “My turn.”

Georgia Blue watched as Stallings slipped into the vacated seat with his drink and said, “Tell me about the money.”

“The five million,” she said.

Stallings nodded.

“It’s real,” she said.

“Where is it?”

“It’ll be in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank — their new headquarters on Des Voeux Road.”

“That’s where it’ll be. Not where it is.”

“Right now it’s where it can be wire-transferred without bothering Washington.”

“Not in the States then, right?”

She smiled.

“When’ll Harry wire it?”

“When I tell him to.”

“By code?”

Again, she smiled.

“Like to share the code — since we’re partners and all?”

“Not just yet.”

“Whose money is it?”

“Who cares? Which means I don’t know.”

“Harry gave me some crap about it coming from a business consortium.”

“Crap’s a fairly apt description.”

“Think it’s Langley money?”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“They wouldn’t go through Harry. They’ve got their own proprietary false fronts.”

“Like to hear what I think?” Stallings said after ten seconds of silence.

“Of course.”

“I think the money’s coming from someone who won’t send after it when it disappears.”

“Harry’ll send after it,” she said. “And if we work it just right, he’ll send me.”

Stallings grinned. “Now there’s a pretty notion.”

“Yes, isn’t it though,” she said.

Stallings leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes and said, “Now tell me about you and Otherguy.”

Georgia Blue thought before replying, “He was a bad accident that happened in Guadalajara when I was twenty and he was thirty-one, or so he claimed, except you never can tell about Otherguy because he lies so much.”

“But he’s good at what he does,” Stallings said, opening his eyes.

She shrugged. “He’s in the top forty anyhow.”

Despite Stallings’ encouraging nod, Georgia Blue volunteered nothing else. After 15 seconds went by, he said, “So what did Treasury have you doing?”

“I guarded the bodies of the wives and mistresses of visiting prime ministers, premiers, presidents, potentates and what have you. Actually, I was the maid who carried the gun. So when a certain stark-naked madame told me to give her a massage, I told her to fuck off and got fired and Harry Crites hired me three weeks later.”

“To watch his back?”

She nodded.

“Just curious, but what does Harry really suffer from — enemies or paranoia?”

“They sometimes bunk in together, you know.”

“So I’ve heard,” Stallings said as he rose and returned to his seat across the aisle.

Booth Stallings had managed to sleep only three of the 15 hours it took to fly from Los Angeles to Manila. Overby somehow greased their way through customs and immigration and Stallings sleepwalked across the international airport terminal and out into the heat. The heat woke him up. That and the horde of Manila taxi drivers who were all yelling that they drove the coolest cabs and offered the lowest fares. Overby himself contributed to the clamor. He stood, coat off and tie loosened, bellowing, “Manila Hotel! Manila Hotel!”

The taxi drivers cheerfully took up the cry. Seconds later, an unusually small Filipino, wearing a white shirt, black tie, dark pants and a chauffeur’s cap, rushed up to Overby and began alternating apologies for his tardiness with assertions that he, in truth, was Romeo, the driver of the Manila Hotel limousine. The taxi drivers vouched for him with shouts of, “True! True!”

Stallings hadn’t been to Manila in more than 40 years. He had arrived then to find it virtually destroyed by some of the fiercest and most senseless house-to-house fighting of the war. Seated now in the front seat of the black Mercedes on his way to the Manila Hotel, he saw they had rebuilt almost everything, that everything looked pretty godawful, and that he recognized almost nothing except the slums. The slums were just as he remembered them.

In late August of 1945, Booth Stallings and Alejandro Espiritu had been flown in an Army C-47 from Cebu to Manila where it was rumored that MacArthur himself would present the medals during what a PRO handout predicted would be “a brief but stirring ceremony.”

The chief purpose of the ceremony was to give the dead T/5 Hovey Profette of Mena, Arkansas, a posthumous Distinguished Service Cross for his exceptional gallantry in action. Bronze Stars were to be pinned on Espiritu and Stallings for their lesser valor. The trip to Manila was the first time either had flown in an airplane.

MacArthur didn’t show, of course, and the task of handing out the medals to a dead medic, a live second john and a raggedy-ass guerrilla with suspect politics fell to MacArthur’s amanuensis, Major General Charles A. Willoughby, who later in life would become a close and valued associate of yet another singular American, H. L. Hunt.

Espiritu was given his medal last. As the General pinned it on, he murmured congratulations in English. Espiritu smiled and murmured back in Tagalog or Cebuano — nobody was quite sure which. Years later Willoughby was to claim that Espiritu had said: The real struggle is yet to come, General.

The brief and not very stirring ceremony had been held in one of the few untouched rooms in the nearly bombed-out Manila Hotel, the same hotel Booth Stallings would return to more than 40 years later. When the lowliest public relations officer had gone and none was left save the second lieutenant of infantry and the guerrilla, Booth Stallings looked down at the medal on his chest, took it off and stuck it down in his hip pocket. Espiritu did the same with his and asked Stallings, “Where do you go now?”

“Looks like Japan,” Stallings said. “The occupation.”

“I mean this afternoon.”

“I’d kind of planned on getting kind of drunk.”

“May I accompany you?”

“You don’t drink, Al.”

“I can find you cheap gin, bargain with the whores, keep the binny boys away and otherwise entertain myself.”

“Okay,” Stallings said. “Let’s go.”

The drunk lasted two days and three nights. When they finally said goodbye on August 28, 1945, Stallings was sure he would never see Alejandro Espiritu again.

They knew Otherguy Overby at the Manila Hotel and his welcome was warm and effusive. As he crossed the huge rare wood and fine marble lobby, Overby handed out crisp new five-dollar bills to bellhops and porters and door-openers, greeting some of them by name. Stallings estimated Overby had parted with close to sixty dollars by the time he reached the assistant manager and another elaborate welcome.

But when Overby turned to run a practiced eye over the lobby, the well-dressed assistant manager’s expression changed from one of welcome to the fatalistic look of someone who knows he’s about to be sandbagged.

Overby turned from his inspection with a sympathetic smile. “What’s the occupancy rate running, Ramon?” he asked. “About forty, forty-five percent now all the excitement’s over?”

The assistant manager shook his head. “It’s better than that, Otherguy. Much better.”

“I sure hope so.” Overby turned, gave the lobby another skeptical look and turned back. “Tell you what we need. We need a suite for Doctor Stallings and two big rooms for Miss Blue and me. We want ’em all on the same smoking floor because even though Doctor Stallings doesn’t smoke, he’ll have guests who do.”

The assistant manager nodded. “We’ll be happy to do that.”

“The only other thing we need is a twenty-five percent discount for a week’s guarantee in advance, all cash, all U.S. dollars. But if you can’t handle that, Ramon, just say so and we’ll take a cab over to Makati and try the Inter-Continental or the Peninsula.”

The assistant manager shook his head regretfully. “I can’t give you twenty-five off, Otherguy. This is still a government hotel.”

Overby shrugged and turned to Stallings and Georgia Blue. “Let’s go.”

“But I can give you twenty off,” the assistant manager said. “Providing it’s in dollars.”

Overby reached into a pocket and came up with a roll of $100 bills. As he started counting them onto the mahogany counter, the impressed assistant manager picked up a pen and offered it to Georgia Blue along with a registration card. “Welcome to the Manila, Miss Blue.”

They met three hours later in the sitting room of Booth Stallings’ fifth-floor suite. Stallings, wearing a pair of chinos and a dark blue short-sleeve shirt from Lew Ritter’s, still felt groggy from the flight. But Overby seemed rested and wide awake in his well-worn jeans, gaudy Hawaiian shirt and scuffed running shoes that he wore without socks. Stallings wondered why Overby wanted to look like a budget-bound tourist but decided not to ask.

Georgia Blue also appeared rested and alert in her white skirt, tan cotton blouse and brown and white spectator pumps, which Stallings assumed were back in style — or would be shortly. He and Overby drank San Miguel beer out of cans. Georgia Blue sipped a vodka and tonic. The drinks had come from the room’s mini-refrigerator. On the low coffee table was a huge untouched basket of tropical fruit with a “Compliments of the Management” card.

Stallings glanced around the big sitting room whose windows offered a view of Manila Bay and asked, “How much?”

“Regular price is two-eighty a day, U.S.,” Overby said. “But you’re just paying two thirty-four and you can charge it off to front.”

“Only two thirty-four,” Stallings said. “Imagine.”

“Since we’re on money we might as well stick to it for a minute,” Overby said. “Okay?”

“Fine,” Stallings said.

“Georgia and I have to go see a guy who’ll try and hold me up for ten thousand, but who I’m going to beat back down to five. I need the five.”

“This your contact?”

Overby nodded.

“What’s his name?” Georgia Blue asked.

“Boy Howdy.”

“Sounds American.”

“Australian,” Overby said. “Except he may be Filipino now. He married one about ten or twelve years ago.”

“What is he?” she asked.

“A first-class asshole who owns a snakepit over in Ermita. Runs whores, beggar kids, a protection racket, does a little strikebreaking, stuff like that. He also takes messages and that’s what I use him for. Messages.”

“Five thousand,” she said. “Must be some message.”

“I believe it concerns the whereabouts of our other two partners,” Stallings said.

She looked first at Stallings, then at Overby, her disbelief apparent. “You guys don’t even know where they are?”

Overby shrugged. “They move around.”

Something happened to Georgia Blue’s face then. It lost all animation and expression. Stallings decided it was her Secret Service look. When she spoke her lips scarcely moved.

“Have they got names?” she said.

Overby’s eyes wandered the room for a moment or two until they landed on Georgia Blue. “Wu and Durant,” he said.

Stallings watched as the surprise that was almost shock struck Georgia Blue. Her eyes widened and her face paled. Her mouth opened to suck in a lungful of air. For a moment, Stallings thought she might hyperventilate. But then an angry crimson erased her sudden paleness and she used her breath to swear at Overby.

“Goddamn you, Otherguy!”

“What’s up?” Stallings asked.

Overby turned an unpleasant smile on Stallings. “All four of us worked a few deals together in Mexico a long time ago. Her, me, Durant and Wu. When Georgia and I sort of broke up, Durant caught her on the bounce for a while and I guess she’s not over him yet. Right, Georgia?”

“You shit.”

“You can’t work with them?” Stallings said.

“For a million I can work with anybody,” she said. “Even Overby.”

“And Durant?”

“Him too.”

“A rather nice coincidence, isn’t it?” Stallings asked. “Your knowing Otherguy and also Wu and Durant.”

Georgia Blue stared at Overby but spoke to Stallings. “Who sold you the package, Booth?”

“A man named Howard Mott in Washington. Know him?”

She ran the name through her memory. “Lawyer?”

Stallings nodded.

“I’ve heard of him but I don’t know him. Should I?”

“He’s my son-in-law.”

The look Georgia Blue gave Stallings was one of pure malice. “Yes, well, I can see you must be relieved that I don’t know him. Your son-in-law.”

“Very relieved,” Stallings said. “Extremely so.”