The Man With No Time Page 22

  “She got a eye for a man,” Dexter said, “she gone to spot me.”

  18 - The Underground Railroad

  Esther Summerson's eyes swam supernaturally large and blue through the dusty lenses above me. I was standing on the first step of the porch, looking at her through a fine mesh of nylon, trying to figure out how anything that was likely to happen in the next half hour or so could possibly do anyone any good.

  “Yes?” she said. She had the distracted air of someone who is listening to music in her head. The screen door was closed and, I imagined, latched against whatever slavering beast L. A. might decide to deal up. When she'd turned on the porch light from inside it had brought moths, and they swooped and fluttered against the glass, looking for whatever it is moths look for in a light.

  “Hello, Mrs. Summerson,” I said. I stepped up onto the porch and gave a little wave, hoping to attract some attention. “I'm Eleanor's friend, remember?”

  The magnified eyelids came down with an almost audible clank, and when she opened them again she was back in the present and she knew me. “But of course, and how nice,” she said, sounding like a missionary again. “It's Mr. Grist. How are the twins?”

  “Eating and sleeping,” I said, exhausting my fund of baby knowledge. “May I come in?”

  She hesitated as though she were translating the words. “Oh. Well, certainly you may. I'm sorry. This seems to be one of my foggy days.” She fiddled with the screen door and then held it open.

  “I've brought someone along,” I said, moving forward, and Tran stepped into view.

  Leaning slightly, she peered at him in the half light. She started a smile, but the smile turned into a rictus, and she turned her whole head, birdlike, to look at me, stepped back, and used both hands to slam the inner door. It hit my foot and bounced back against her, knocking her a step backward. I lunged and grabbed her shoulders before she went over backward. Tall as she was, she was even heavier and more solid than I'd expected, and my back creaked alarmingly again.

  Her eyes were clamped shut now, and she was shuddering violently. “Go away,” she said, mostly breath. She smelled of powder and lavender.

  “Where's Lo?”

  “You should be ashamed of yourself.” She fluttered ineffectually at my hands, gathering strength. “Pretending to be Eleanor's friend. Anyway, you can't get Lo now. None of you can. He's in China, where no one will find him.”

  “We're going to talk,” I said. “Come in, Tran. Close the door.”

  She made little shooing motions in his direction. “You can't. He can't. I'll call the police.”

  “You know you won't. How are you going to explain Tran?”

  “Please,” she said, “I need to sit down. My legs are shaking.”

  “You know where the living room is, Tran?”

  He nodded. “Where she give me cookies.”

  “Take her there. Let her sit. Keep her in one place.”

  He took her arm very gently, saying, “Come, please, Missus.” She tried to tug herself free and then allowed him to lead her slowly down the hall, talking to herself in Cantonese. I stood, inhaling the aromas of cooking oil and sachet, and waiting for something else, the smell of men: bodies, cigarettes, hair oil, anything that didn't fit into this last, exclusively female, missionary outpost of old China. Pulling my cold little nine-millimeter automatic from my jacket pocket, I searched the house.

  The first floor was crowded with heavy furniture and relics of a life of dour and earnest enterprise among the heathen. The walls bristled with photos of rigorously stiff men and women, white and Chinese, the Chinese eyes fixed politely to one side of the camera lens, so as not to stare at the viewer. More groups of solemn Chinese children, like the ones pictured in the living room, assembled portentously in front of the weathered schoolhouse—or another just like it—on the barren plain to have their portraits made. I counted ten of these, all framed and dated, and then stopped counting. Books were everywhere, in both Chinese and English: Bibles, commentaries on the Bible, commentaries on the commentaries, biographies and autobiographies of missionaries, Chinese dictionaries, histories of the Middle Kingdom.

  Front room, old-fashioned drawing room, half-bathroom, kitchen with its heavy wok and a mound of half-chopped vegetables, enough only for one, little maid's room with a desk occupying most of it, covered with correspondence in Chinese. A door under the stairwell, the one that should have led to the basement, was locked. The lock was heavy, bright new brass. I put it on hold and went up the stairs to the second floor as quietly as I could, knowing that anyone up there would have heard us come in. Tran and Mrs. Summerson were talking softly but urgently in the living room, all aspirates like wind through trees.

  The upstairs was virginal and nostalgic, a doleful museum. The big bedroom contained a single bed heavily flounced in chintz and some very good Chinese rosewood furniture. On a small bamboo table next to the bed I found a pair of men's silver hairbrushes, perhaps a century old, and in my mind's eye I saw her packing and unpacking them for her husband each time the two of them were transferred or forced to flee. The rest of the house may have been dusty, but the brushes had been polished until the engraved initials R.D.S. were almost rubbed away.

  Directly above the table in an oval frame hung a hand-tinted photograph of a young woman with lustrous and adventurous pale eyes and a heavy coil of dark brown hair: the young Mrs. Summerson, decades and deaths and continents ago. It was a complicated face, bold and demure at the same time, the face of someone quietly waiting for something momentous to happen.

  A long connecting bathroom, unexpectedly cluttered and wet, led to the guest room. The bed sagged in the middle as though it had been folded lengthwise for decades. Everything was musty and coated with a fine fall of dust, weeks and weeks' worth of dust.

  When I went down the stairs I was on tiptoe. I found Tran sitting alone in the living room, looking up at the somber Chinese schoolchildren.

  I checked the corners of the room, just to make sure. “Where is she?”

  “Making tea,” he said. “She need tea.”

  “Why aren't you with her?”

  He avoided my gaze. “Want to cry, her.”

  “And I thought you were dangerous,” I said.

  Mrs. Summerson was defying popular wisdom by watching the kettle, but when she turned at the sound of my step she was alert and watchful and dry-eyed.

  “I need to go downstairs,” I said.

  Her eyes went to the gun in my hand, and I tucked it into my belt. “I can't open that door,” she said.

  “Bananas. We both know what's been happening here.”

  “Do you really think so?” She almost smiled at me. “Be that as it may, I don't have the key. It's lost.”

  “You're a really terrible liar.”

  She turned back to the kettle, which had started to hiss steam. “I know,” she said, using both hands to lift it to the sink. “I've never been any good at it. But I fooled you before.” She sounded proud, like a little girl who's tricked an adult.

  “Where's the key?”

  For what seemed like a long time, she busied herself with pouring the water into a ceramic teapot and spooning tea from a canister into a little metal infuser. Then she dropped the infuser in, capped the pot carefully, and said, “What's been happening here, then?” She had her back to me. “If you're so smart.”

  “I don't know all the details, but you—you and Lo, I mean—have been smuggling your old students out of China.”

  Her spine straightened, but all she did was put the teapot and three cups onto a heavily carved wooden tray. Her hands weren't shaking now. “Aren't you the clever boy,” she said. “That must be why they sent you to hunt for Lo.”

  “They didn't send me. I'll tell you about it in a minute. Where's the key to the basement?”

  “I told you, he's in China.” She still hadn't turned to face me.

  “And I believe you. He's long gone. I just want to see the setup.”

&nbs
p; “It's quite nice, really. The key is around my neck. Turn your back, please.”

  “You know I can't do that, Mrs. Summerson.”

  She rested a hand against the pot, testing its temperature. “What a pity you're such a reptile. Eleanor will be so disappointed to know.”

  “Call her. She knows what I'm doing.”

  “Don't be silly. Eleanor wouldn't have anything to do with one of them.”

  “I'm not. One of them, I mean.”

  “Then why are you with that boy?” She turned slowly to face me, and when I saw her in profile I was struck by how loosely the heavy clothes fit her. There was no fat left, nothing but bone and muscle and will.

  “They made him kill his brother and then they killed his cousin. His girl cousin. They cut her throat. He's on our side now.”

  The big eyes probed me. “How terrible,” she said conversationally. She'd seen worse. “But it's not as simple as sides. There are lives at stake.”

  “I know,” I said. “Horace's is one of them. Look, I can explain it all in a minute. Just give me the key, please, and then we can get down to business.”

  “Oh, my. I suppose if I don't give it to you, you'll just take it anyway.”

  “No,” I said, suddenly feeling the lack of sleep. “I won't.”

  She nodded slowly and lifted a hand to pat at her hair. “Then I’ll give it to you.” She reached around behind her neck and her long fingers located something. She pulled a long, thin gold chain out of her dress and handed it to me. Dangling from its end was a double-serrated brass key. “The light's on the left at the top of the stairs.”

  “Thanks.” I was already moving.

  I heard the lid of the teapot being lifted. “Lemon?”

  “That would be lovely.” The key fit easily into the lock and turned with no resistance at all. The light switch was right where she'd said it would be.

  The stairs descended steeply and doglegged to the right. When the room came into view, I stopped and looked at it for a long time. Then I laughed.

  It was perfect. Wall-to-wall carpet on both floor and ceiling to absorb sound, a plump couch, and a double bed. Bookshelves sagged beneath a spy's library, crammed with magazines about American life and books and pamphlets in Chinese. A television set and a VCR, equipped with earphones. A treadmill and some dumbbells to keep the muscles functioning. The bathroom had both a step-in shower and an old claw-footed tub. It was, in all, a lot nicer than my house. Anyone could have lived there indefinitely, deprived only of the sight of sun and sky. And Uncle Lo, I was willing to bet, had been down there with his feet up, watching kung-fu movies on the VCR while Eleanor and I were cunningly cross-examining Mrs. Summerson.

  Some papers on the bed caught my eye: Photocopies of old but official-looking documents in Chinese. One of them featured the picture of a young Chinese man who strongly resembled Horace Chan. I scooped them up and went back up the stairs, still laughing.

  “Of course he was there,” Mrs. Summerson said several minutes later. “He was right down there, waiting for his papers.” She was balancing a saucer on her knee and blowing in a genteel fashion at a cup of steaming tea.

  “Papers to get him to China?”

  She shook her head. “No, but good enough to get him to Canada. The really good papers come from Canada. And then, it's easier to get to China from Canada.”

  “And these,” I said, indicating the photocopies, “belonged to Eleanor's father. He took them from her mother's house.” Peter Lau's phrase came back to me. “He was ghost-processing himself, wasn't he? He terrorized Eleanor's family so he could be someone who was dead.”

  Her eyes widened behind the cloudy lenses, and she hesitated. Tran leaned forward and put a soothing palm on her arm. She smiled gratefully at him. “He needed them desperately,” she said. “To get back in, I mean. He would never have taken the children otherwise. He knew he had no time left. There were only so many places he could go, and they had all his papers—I mean everything. It's always safest to have papers with a real Chinese person's name on them. He and Eleanor's father are about the same age, and there's no record of Mr. Chan's death.”

  My surprise must have showed.

  “Lo,” she said with some pride, “is a very smart man. He was an official in those days, but he knew everything had gone wrong with China and he had an eye on the future even then. When men of his age passed away in his district, he burned their death papers. Then he bought the birth and school papers from the family. He created unimpeachable biographies for the dead men and sent the papers off to Beijing with his own photograph. He was probably paying someone to process them. By the time things opened up again, he had any number of valid passports hidden away. Unfortunately, he didn't have them with him when things went wrong this time.”

  I had a lot of questions, but I settled on one close to home. “Why didn't he buy Mr. Chan's papers?”

  “He got too involved with—” She hesitated and blew on her tea again. “With the family,” she said at last.

  “Oh, good lord,” I said, feeling myself blush.

  “Eleanor doesn't know,” Mrs. Summerson said quickly. “I really think Mrs. Chan was the love of Lo's life. Not that anything is simple with Lo.”

  Chalk up another one for Mrs. Chan. Tran was standing in front of the picture of the Chinese children, staring at it as though he were about to step into it. He'd withdrawn from the conversation, except to thank Mrs. Summerson for the tea.

  “Why didn't he just ask them for the papers?” I said. “They would have given them to him. Why take the twins and make everybody crazy like that?” Nothing was simple with Lo, she'd said, but I wasn't so sure. For the Chans, and maybe for Mrs. Summerson, Lo was a snapshot taken thirty years before. In the thirty years they'd been gazing at the snapshot, a different picture had been developing over decades, hidden from their view. How does anyone know who an old friend will become over time?

  “He couldn't ask them. He didn't want them to know what he needed. Suppose those men had traced him to the Chans through his notebooks, as he was sure they would, and suppose the Chans had told them about the papers. They can buy Chinese Immigration, you know. If they couldn't, they couldn't stay in business. There might have been men on the lookout for Eleanor's father at every checkpoint in China.”

  It was so simple, even if Lo was so complicated. “I'll be damned,” I said, without thinking. “Sorry.”

  “I've heard worse in my life,” Mrs. Summerson said, “and in many languages. I wish I had some cookies for Tran.”

  “I okay,” Tran said to the picture.

  “You should go to New Orleans,” Mrs. Summerson said maternally. “You could fish for shrimp.”

  I went back to basics. “How did Lo usually get back to China?”

  “The way he came, on the ship. That's why he wasn't carrying extra papers.”

  “Okay.” I closed my eyes and ran it past. “He came in, he got betrayed, he had to get out, he stole the kids to get to Mr. Chan's papers.” She nodded. “I'll be damned,” I said again.

  “I hope not,” Mrs. Summerson said.

  “Me, too. Okay, so how your dodge worked, at least most of the time,” I suggested, “was that you'd give Lo the name of an old student—”

  “No,” she said promptly. “The other way around. Lo would find them and talk to them, and if they wanted to come out, he'd write me a letter. We had a code,” she confided, sounding very pleased with herself. “He didn't want to use names in case the letters were read, so we made small copies of the class pictures, and he'd work numbers into the letter that told me what year, what row in the picture, and what position in the row, counting from the right. Chinese read from right to left, you know.” She laughed unexpectedly. “The first time we did it, I wasn't thinking, and I counted from the left. I was expecting a lovely girl named, oh, what was her name? Daisy Wang, that was it, and when the day came I had a great hulking man named Warren Lu. And that was before I'd fixed the basement, so he had t
o sleep upstairs in the guest room and use my bathroom and everything. Oh, it was a mess.” The big guileless eyes came back to mine. “You're sure Eleanor knows about this?”

  “As I said, call her.”

  “That's all right. You said you wouldn't take the key by force, and that was good enough for me.” She turned and beamed at Tran. “And this boy looks—well, different, lighter in spirit. He let me go off for a little cry when I needed one. A soul saved, even if it was at terrible cost.” Tran went scarlet and turned to the little ceramic Christ figure Eleanor had picked up, giving it all his attention.

  Mrs. Summerson sipped her tea, the cup looking like a demitasse in her big hands. “Where was I?”

  “Mechanics,” I said. “Lo let you know who was coming, and then he'd pay the first fifteen thousand—”

  “Twenty,” she said, “and twenty upon their arrival. I paid him back when he arrived, of course.”

  “Forty,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral.

  “You needn't look like that,” Mrs. Summerson said, laughing again. “Lo wasn't cheating me. Ten thousand went to his henchman. Is that the term? Henchman?”

  “Henchman,” Tran said experimentally, trying it on for size.

  “You know, the man who told you to come here to pick up the, um, swag.” She settled back, looking very pleased with herself. “The one who turned Lo in.”

  “I don't know anything about that.”

  Her fingers went to a button on the front of her dress and twisted it. “He's the one who told on Lo. They caught him with much more money than he should have had, and he told them all about our little sideline. They were so angry at Lo. It seems the man who runs it all has something against missionaries. Well, in mitigation, some of them are real sticks. Still, his grudge seems disproportionate. They beat Lo quite severely. He was lucky to escape with his life. And now, I don't know what's going to happen to Doreen.”

  I passed on Doreen for the moment. “Forty thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

  “It is, isn't it? Tea?” I shook my head, and she poured for herself. “For the longest time I had no idea where to get it.”