Chinaman’s Chance
- Автор: Томас Росс
- Серия: Arthur Case Wu #1
- Год: 1978
- Язык: английский
- Год: Simon & Schuster
- ISBN: 978-0-671-24070-7
- Жанр: Политические детективы
Электронная книга - «Chinaman’s Chance». Краткое содержание книги:
The report was delivered almost in relays, Wu and Durant spelling each other off with some kind of silent system that seemed to James almost prearranged. They skipped nothing and they embellished nothing, and James’s only interjections were an occasional “I see” and “Of course” and “Indeed.” When Durant came to the deaths of Icky Norris and Tony Egidio a brief frown wrinkled itself across James’s forehead, but it lasted only a second. Perhaps less.
After Wu and Durant were done, James looked at his watch and said, “There should be fresh coffee here within the next few minutes.”
They waited in silence then. James toyed with a spoon. Durant sat quietly, slumped back in his chair, his lean hands locked behind his head.
Artie Wu’s cigar, forgotten while he talked, had died from neglect in an ashtray. Wu picked it up, looked at it fondly, and stuck it into the left side of his mouth. As he chewed on his cold cigar, Wu examined James for evidence of the reaction that would soon be due. A patrician, Wu thought, if there is such a thing. He could be coming to a boil, but you’d never know it.
If there were any clues to James’s thinking, Wu felt that they would be found in the eyes and the mouth. But the eyes had all the expression and color of ice cubes forgotten in the refrigerator since last summer. And the mouth, underneath the slightly beakish nose, was stretched into a tight, reproving line that could mean either stifled rage or trouble with the kippers.
Wu was about to break the silence and say, “Well?” when somebody knocked at the door. James rose and admitted the same room waiter as before. The waiter put the fresh pot of coffee down, and James complimented him on his promptness and tipped him a dollar. When the waiter asked if they would like the table removed, James shook his head no.
When the waiter had gone, James served the coffee in fresh cups. He almost made it into a ceremony, and when it was over he leaned back in his chair and looked first at Wu and then Durant.
“Well, it’s better than I expected,” he said.
Durant, his hands still locked behind his head, stretched and looked at the ceiling. Wu simply chewed on his cold cigar some more.
“He knows you’re here,” James said. “That might be good.”
“Simms?” Durant said.
“Yes. Reginald Simms.” James said the name as though he were biting into it for the first time and were not at all sure that he would like what he found.
“We assume that he knows,” Durant said.
“Well, yes, he probably does. I would say that it’s a safe assumption. Alter all, someone wanted your names from McBride, didn’t they? We can assume, then, that it was Simms. Or one of his henchmen.”
“Henchmen,” Wu said. “My God, I don’t think I’ve heard that used in twenty years. Not since Princeton.”
“It almost goes back that far, doesn’t it? You and Simms, I mean.”
“Almost,” Durant said.
“It all began in Mexico, didn’t it — in ’61 or thereabouts.”
“In ’61,” Durant said, still staring at the ceiling.
“And exactly what were you doing in Mexico then?”
“Exactly?” Wu said.
“Yes.”
“We were in jail.”
“Yes, I remember, but I don’t recall the details.”
“You mean why?” Wu said.
“Yes. Why.”
“We were involved in pre-Columbian art,” Durant said, shifting his gaze from the ceiling to James and smiling a little.
“Counterfeiting it, you mean.”
Durant shrugged. “Some of the pieces we sold are still in museums. Old Carrasco was a real artist. A genius, probably.”
“You were how old then?”
Wu did some mental subtracting. “Twenty-two.”
“And Simms showed up,” James said. “And he recruited you.”
Wu shook his head. “He didn’t recruit us. He gave us a choice. We could either stay in a Mexican jail or join the Peace Corps and go to Indonesia for him.”
James smiled, and for the first time a small amount of mirth crept into it. “I can think of no two less likely candidates for the Peace Corps, I mean. What did he see in you — did he say?”
“Our youth,” Durant said with a grin.
“Yes, of course. For two so young you hadn’t led an exactly sheltered existence.”
“Not quite,” Wu said.
“And so you went to Indonesia for ‘the Peace Corps.’ ” James carefully put the name in quotes. “Java, wasn’t it?”
Wu nodded. “About seventy miles out of Djakarta.”
“Who was your contact?”
“A Dutchman called Jonckheer. Simon Jonckheer.”
James sipped his coffee. It had grown cold, but he seemed neither to notice nor to care. “Yes, Jonckheer. The Chinese doubled him, didn’t they?”
“That wasn’t until later,” Wu said. “In late ’62.”
“How long did it take for him to burn you?”
Durant shrugged. “He let us run awhile.”
“Why?”
“We were cutting him in.”
James nodded. “Cigarette smuggling, wasn’t it?”
“Partly,” Wu said.
“What else were you feeding him?”
“Jonckheer?”
“Yes.”
Durant smiled again. “We made things up. If we caught a rumor, we’d fancy it up and pass it along to him. He liked us.”
“And the Peace Corps?”
“They were happy as hell with us” Wu said. “We increased the per capita income of the village we’d been assigned to by five hundred percent in the first six months. Of course, we had almost the entire village on our payroll by then.”
“How was the jail?” James said.
“You mean the one in Djakarta?”
James nodded.
Durant shrugged. “It was Dutch built. Solid. Lousy, of course, but we got to meet Sukarno.”
“Did he come just to look?” James said.
Artie Wu thought about it for a moment. “He talked to us a little. About Hollywood. He was a film nut.”
“But nothing else?” James said.
Wu shook his head. “They had us cold. On the smuggling, anyway. They would have had us on the other except Jonckheer was found dead with a bullet in his back, and after that they couldn’t prove anything.”
“That was just about the time that our Mr. Simms appeared on the scene again.”
“Right,” Durant said.
There was another long silence. James’s face had acquired a dark, almost brooding look as he stared down at the tablecloth. Finally, he looked up and said, “Simms killed him, of course — Jonckheer, I mean — and then worked a deal with Sukarno to let you go. An expensive deal, I might add.”
“Money?” Wu said.
“No, not money.”
There was another silence, and then James said, “And after Indonesia came Tahiti, didn’t it, and Simms pulled the strings with the French for your licensing and so forth. That was your payoff, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right,” Durant said.
“Or you would have gone public?”
There was nothing pleasant in the smile that Wu formed around his dead cigar. “We mentioned it to him in passing, I think. Once or twice.”
“Would you have?”
Wu shrugged. “Maybe. But probably not.”
“But he still had you on his string?”
Durant shifted in his chair. He leaned his elbows on the table and stared at James. “Let’s get one thing straight. We were never on anybody’s string. We were never anything but pea pickers — casual labor, seasonal help. We got into it because we were blackjacked into it, and afterward we played along because sometimes it was useful, but not very. And finally there toward the last, we did what we did for money and for nothing else. But as for being spies, if that’s what we ever were, Artie and I were pretty much of a bust.”