Out on the Rim

by Ross Thomas

  “I saw her, Booth. Up close. And she was all set to shoot—not just hijack you down to Cebu. The signs were all there—stance, breathing, everything.”

  “That your professional Secret Service opinion, Georgia?” Stallings asked.

  “It’s what they trained and paid me to spot.”

  “I’m not so sure,” he said. “A terrorist’s first job is to terrify. Well, she sure scared hell out of me. Another minute and I’d’ve been on my way down to Cebu alone and I don’t much care who knows it. But we also threw a pretty good scare into her. Who terrifies most, controls. Right now I’d call it a draw.”

  “Carmen’s still out front,” Durant said. “Ahead on points anyway. About three hundred thousand points.”

  Otherguy Overby found the man he went looking for in a morning coffee club that was on a side street just off Taft Avenue. It was the third such club Overby had visited and all three seemed to be doing a brisk business of dispensing coffee, rolls, alcohol and sex. The club’s customers—off on their morning breaks that might last until one or two in the afternoon—were, for the most part, businessmen, executives, merchants, politicians, lawyers, journalists and a number of well-dressed men who sold things that fell off trucks.

  The man Overby went looking for was now in his mid-sixties and had got his start during the Japanese occupation as a young buy-and-sell man in the Manila black market. His name was Abelardo Umali and Overby found him sitting at a table near the crowded bar with two young women and a bottle of something that looked like champagne. Only the two young women drank it; Umali drank coffee.

  Overby was dressed in a blue cord jacket, gray pants that looked like flannel but weren’t, and a dark blue polo shirt. The only reason he had worn the jacket in the Manila heat was for its inside pocket where the money envelope was. He crossed the room to Umali’s table, approaching from the old man’s left. When he reached the table, Overby said, “Hello, Abe.”

  Abelardo Umali turned slowly and looked up. He had a dark brown wrinkled face with a turtle mouth and tiny wet black eyes that looked as if they wept easily. He wore a starched, immaculately ironed white short-sleeved shirt, gray tie and black pants. Overby could not remember him ever wearing anything else. The turtle mouth smiled.

  “Otherguy,” Umali said. “Somebody claimed you were dead.” He frowned, as if trying to remember what he had really heard. “Or maybe it was just that you ought to be. Either way, you’ve got my condolences. Sit. Join us. Please.”

  “It’s a private matter, Abe,” Overby said.

  “Private? What kind of secrets have we got?”

  “The money I owe you.”

  The old man’s wet eyes widened and the smile returned. “Ah. That money. A real secret.” He turned to the young women. “My hearts—could you—would you—please—just for a few minutes?”

  The two young women giggled, eyed Overby, giggled again, rose and hurried away. “Sit, Otherguy. Have something cool.”

  Overby sat down and said he would have a beer. Umali ordered it. When it came, he poured it carefully into a glass and served it to his guest. As Overby took his first swallow, Umali said, “I hear you saw Boy Howdy last night.”

  Overby nodded.

  “I hear it was a warm talk you had. Very warm.”

  “You ever talk to Boy without raising your voice?”

  Umali shrugged. “You paid him good money—or so I hear.”

  “I paid him to find me Wu and Durant.”

  Umali’s eyebrows went up and down twice in what Overby always thought of as the Cebu salute. The rapid movement of the eyebrows could signal approval, commiseration, agreement, doubt, disappointment or even, Tell me more. “They’re at the Peninsula,” Umali said. “Have been for a month.” He paused. “I would’ve told you for nothing.”

  “I want you to tell me something for something, Abe.”

  “Is there a figure?”

  “Two thousand.”

  “Pesos?”

  “Dollars,” Overby said. “U.S.”

  The old man’s eyebrows rose and fell again, indicating what Overby interpreted to be interest.

  “I hear very little these days,” Umali said, obviously lying. “I’m an old man now and I have to pay young women to listen to me. I like to talk to them about the past—about the old days in Cebu. You remember them, Otherguy?”

  “They’re not so far back,” Overby said. “Ten, twelve, fifteen years ago.”

  “I mean forty, forty-five years ago.”

  “About the time I was born. Maybe you and I can even talk about that a little.”

  “For money?”

  Overby nodded. Umali’s eyebrows went up and down, up and down. Overby took the unsealed Peninsula Hotel envelope from his inside pocket and placed it on the table in front of Umali.

  “May I?” he said. Overby again nodded. Umali opened the envelope, peeked inside and sent his eyebrows into motion again. “You can ask,” he said. “Maybe I can answer. Maybe not.”

  “Tell me about Boy Howdy,” Overby said. “Tell me why he sort of turned over on his back last night, stuck his paws up in the air, and begged me to scratch his stomach.”

  Umali looked left, as if in that direction lay orderly thoughts. “You, Durant and Wu, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Interesting,” Umali said. “Well, first, you have to understand that Boy’s in a state of shock since our leader ran away.”

  “Boy’s afraid Aquino’s not going to let the good times roll much longer?”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  Overby waited. Finally, the old man said, “Boy believes in the second coming.”

  Overby’s hard, merry grin came and went. “Faith is a wonderful thing.”

  “Boy’s willing to back his faith with—what’s the saying?—his fortune and his sacred honor, such as it is. His honor, I mean.”

  “He really wants Marcos back?”

  “Many do. But Boy is betting everything he’s got on it.”

  “What’re the odds, Abe?”

  “For a Marcos return?” He shook his head. “For somebody else?” The eyebrows rose and fell twice.

  “Who?”

  Again, Umali’s eyebrows made a “who knows?” reply.

  “Has Boy got a favorite?”

  “You’ll have to ask him.”

  “Okay,” Overby said. “That was my first question.”

  “How many more d’you plan to ask?”

  “One more.”

  The eyebrows said one more would be allowed.

  “You know Cebu,” Overby said. “You were born there.”

  Umali shrugged.

  “Tell me what you know about Alejandro Espiritu.”

  The old man’s thin mouth stretched itself into a wide tight reproachful line. His eyes grew even wetter. He sniffed, either to hold back tears or because he smelled something unpleasant. Then he said, “Go away, Otherguy. Take your money with you.”

  Overby hitched his chair forward, leaned across the table and tapped the money envelope with his right forefinger. “Two thousand U.S., Abe. Just for a sentence or two.”

  The old man sighed. “You, Wu and Durant mixed up with Espiritu. Well, you all deserve each other. But I don’t want to know about it, Otherguy. For the first time in my life I don’t want to be the first to know.”

  “Espiritu bothers you, huh?”

  The eyebrows shot up and down again. “When he was a kid, he only frightened me. Now that he’s an old man, he terrifies me. You won’t beat him because he’s smarter than you, Otherguy. Smarter than Durant. Smarter even than Artie and that’s smart-smart. No matter what, you won’t win. So I don’t care how fat the deal is, drop it. Go run the Mexican General or the Omaha Banker on somebody in Hong Kong or Bangkok. Or even Singapore, for God’s sake.”

  Overby smiled. “He’s bad, huh?”

  “He’s death.”

  “Pick up your money, Abe.”

  Umali shook his head. />
  “I want you to get a message to him.”

  Apprehension battled with curiosity across the old man’s face. Curiosity won. “From you?”

  “You can get a message to him without either of us getting mixed up in it. You’re good at that, right?”

  The old man’s hand crept across the table and rested on the money envelope. “What’s the message?”

  “Out of the five, Overby’s it.”

  The old man stared at him. His turtle mouth went back into a thin line of disapproval. His left eye brimmed over and a single tear ran down his cheek. He didn’t bother to wipe it away.

  “You’re going to stiff Wu and Durant, aren’t you?”

  Overby made no reply. The old man picked up the money envelope and tucked it against his stomach beneath his belt buckle.

  “I’m talking to a dead man,” Umali said. “If Espiritu doesn’t fix you, Durant will.”

  Overby rose. “See to it, Abe.”

  “I don’t like talking to dead people,” the old man called, but by then Overby was already walking toward the door.

  CHAPTER 17

  The first thing Booth Stallings said after Durant introduced him to Artie Wu was, “How’d you get to be the pretender, Mr. Wu?”

  “You want a beer or a drink?” Wu said.

  “A beer’d be good.”

  Durant went to the sitting room’s refrigerator and took out three beers. He passed the cans around without opening them. Wu popped his open, took a long draught, sighed with pleasure and said, “I’m the illegitimate son of the illegitimate daughter of the last Emperor of China.”

  “The Boy Emperor?” Stallings said without surprise, popping his own beer can. “Old P’u Yi?”

  “The same,” Artie Wu said, pleased that Stallings would know, and even more pleased that not much explanation would be necessary.

  “Mao threw him in jail for a while, didn’t he? And then made him a tourist guide in Peking—or whatever they’re calling it now. Died back in the sixties, I think. Sixty-four, sixty-five—around in there.”

  “Sixty-six,” Wu said.

  Stallings raised his beer can in a toast of sorts. “Well, here’s to Grandpa.”

  Wu smiled at the toast and said, “You may as well know the rest. My real father was an oversexed Methodist Chinese bishop who either sneaked or snuck into my mother’s bedroom. She’d been adopted by a Methodist missionary couple in China who brought her back to San Francisco. She was seventeen when the bishop had his way with her and she died having me. My adoptive grandparents were killed in a car wreck a few years later and I wound up in the John Wesley Memorial Orphanage in San Francisco.”

  “Where he met me,” Durant said.

  “And you two’ve been partners ever since, right?”

  Durant nodded.

  “Must be a comfort,” Stallings said.

  Wu’s eyebrows moved up into a quizzical look. “Being partners?”

  “Knowing where you spring from. Most people don’t even know who Grandpa’s pa was. I know I don’t. A few years back I thought maybe I should, but then I asked myself what the hell difference would it make and got over it. But I can still see how it could be a comfort.”

  “You have children?” Durant asked.

  “Two daughters but no grandchildren.”

  Wu took out one of his large cigars and went through the ritual of lighting it, talking all the while. “I’ve always felt that a marketable skill provides far more emotional security than a well-diagrammed family tree. When the rent’s due and you’re broke, it’s not much help to know you’re the shirttail relative of some guy who signed the Declaration of Independence, or rode up Cemetery Hill with Pickett, or lent King John a pen.”

  He looked up and blew one of his fat smoke rings at the ceiling. “On the other hand, when you reach down into your pocket and nothing jingles, and you have to get out and scratch something up, it’s nice to know you’ve got a skill to sell, whether you’re a cooper, a parson, a wheelwright, a miller or even a terrorism expert.”

  Stallings winked at Wu. “I sure like the way you slid into that.”

  Wu leaned forward, big elbows on broad knees, an interested look on his face. “So how’d you get to be a terrorism expert, Booth?”

  Stallings drank some of his beer, thought for a moment and said, “I learned by doing because that’s what I did from about the time I turned nineteen until I was almost nineteen and a half.”

  “Here?” Durant said. “I mean, here in the Philippines?”

  “Negros and Cebu. Mostly Cebu.” Stallings paused. “You want the rest?”

  “Of course,” Wu said.

  Stallings finished his beer before continuing. “I was a just-commissioned second lieutenant. A replacement. One Hundred and Eighty-second Infantry. The Cebu invasion was set for March twenty-sixth.”

  “Forty-five?” Durant said.

  “Forty-five. There was a pretty fair guerrilla outfit on Cebu that division needed to make contact with. So they decided to send in an eight-man I and R patrol three weeks early—mostly fuckups and new guys like me. Besides me, there were four riflemen, a buck sergeant, a radioman, a T/5 medic and a guerrilla liaison.”

  “Alejandro Espiritu,” Wu said.

  “Right. Old Al. Well, they caught us on the beach. Japanese infantry. Four of us never even made it out of the rafts. The sergeant and three riflemen died first. The fourth rifleman bought it the second he made the beach. Then the radioman. That left Al, the medic and me. We ran like hell, lost everything in the surf and finally made it to where we were supposed to hook up with the guerrillas, but they were all dead—all nineteen of ’em. We salvaged an M-1 with no rear sight and about a hundred rounds the Japs’d missed.” He paused. “We called them Japs then.”

  Wu nodded. “I still do when the TV conks out.”

  “After that,” Stallings said, “well, we turned into terrorists, at least Al and I did.”

  “What about the medic—Profette?” Durant asked. “The guy with his name up in gold letters.”

  “He went apeshit. Hovey was a Quaker and a C.O. who’d misplaced his faith. We were up on a ridge in the Guadalupes, the three of us, when Hovey spotted two scouts from a Japanese company-strength patrol. They turned out to be Imperial Marines. Big fuckers. Well, Hovey wanted to take out the two scouts with that one rifle we had. The one with no rear sight. Al and I didn’t think that was such a hot idea. But then Hovey grabbed the rifle.”

  There was a silence that threatened to go on and on until Durant broke it with a one-word question. “And?”

  “And Al took Hovey out with a bolo.”

  “Can’t say I blame him,” Durant said.

  Wu nodded slowly several times before he asked the next question. “Then what?”

  “Then Al and I hooked up with some other guerrillas, ate fish and rice when we could get it, dog and worse when we couldn’t, and turned into pretty fair terrorists.”

  “When you got back to your own outfit,” Wu said, “did they ask about the medic?”

  “They asked. I recommended Hovey for a DSC. He got it, too.”

  “And before you got back …” Durant didn’t quite make it a question.

  The smile that Stallings gave Durant was thin and cold and bleak. His February smile, Durant thought. “Who’d we terrorize is what you want to know, right? Who’d we kill?”

  Durant nodded.

  “The Japanese were our primary target. We killed a lot of them. Filipino collaborators were our secondary target. We killed a bunch of them, too.”

  “How’d you know they were collaborators?” Wu said.

  “We had a list.”

  “Whose list?”

  “Espiritu’s.”

  “Good list?”

  “Good as any.” Stallings paused. “Wartime lists, I discovered later, a lot later, often include the names of the enemies of those who draw up the lists. I imagine old Al sprinkled a few of his in.”

  “You have anyth
ing … personal against him?” Wu said.

  “Espiritu?”

  Wu nodded.

  “He’s a guy I soldiered with a long time ago. That’s all. I don’t like him or dislike him. But when it comes to trusting him I’m not quite so ambivalent. I don’t trust him at all.”

  “Then neither will we,” Artie Wu said. He looked at Durant. “Let’s order up some lunch and get Georgia and Otherguy in here. We might as well start.”

  “I thought we already had,” Durant said as he picked up the phone.

  Georgia Blue and Overby arrived together shortly before a pair of Peninsula Hotel room waiters wheeled in the lunches Durant had ordered. Durant had asked for three fish and two chicken lunches, which worked out well because Wu, Georgia Blue and Stallings asked for fish. Overby and Durant were content with chicken.

  During lunch the talk was desultory. By now, everyone knew about the morning episode at the war memorial. There were several long stretches of silence and occasionally Durant would catch Wu staring off into the distance with a curiously blank expression. It was a look that Durant always thought of as Wu’s perfectly rotten plan expression.

  After the lunches were eaten—or half eaten—Wu and Durant stacked the dishes, lowered the wheeled table’s sides, and rolled the table out into the hall. Stallings watched them work, almost with the efficiency of room waiters, and wondered how many meals they had eaten in how many hotels. Thousands of meals, he guessed. Hundreds of hotels.

  Wu went back to his seat on the end of the couch, took out a cigar, and held it up to see whether anyone would object. No one did. Georgia Blue chose the other end of the couch. Stallings returned to his club chair. Otherguy Overby picked out a straight-back chair and sat, feet firmly planted, knees together, arms folded across his chest. Durant leaned against a wall and lit one of his increasingly rare cigarettes.

  Booth Stallings noticed how all eyes, including his, were on Artie Wu. Three fat smoke rings headed for the ceiling. Wu watched as they twisted, swirled and finally disintegrated. He then looked at Stallings.

  “I’ve been thinking about our problem,” Artie Wu said, “and I may have come up with a solution.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Stallings said.