The Man With No Time Page 5

  “Where are we?” I demanded. “Albania?”

  “We're in China,” Eleanor said. “Right now, we're in China.”

  “This is Willis Street,” I said stubbornly.

  “No,” she said. “Three or four hours ago, this was Willis Street, Los Angeles. Now it's China. Something Chinese happened here. Whatever happens next will be Chinese, too.”

  I looked at her with longing. “You're as Chinese as I am.”

  “Three or four hours ago, that was true. Now it isn't.”

  I sat there, trying to control my giveaway Occidental face and waiting for all my immediate responses to line up in an orderly fashion. Then I eliminated all of them and said something else, something that might let me into the game.

  “Chinese or not Chinese, maybe I can help you without doing anything.”

  “Yeah?” Horace asked skeptically.

  “I know how to ask questions. I can ask you questions. Only you and Horace. And maybe those questions will help you get a better picture of whatever the hell is going on. I won't act on the answers, I promise. But maybe they'll help you when it's time for you to stop holding still and make decisions.”

  “Decisions,” Horace said vaguely.

  “What do you do when the phone rings?” I asked. “Let's say it's Uncle Lo, and he's got a deal. You've got to know as much as you can. I don't know anything, which makes me the perfect person to ask the questions. I promise, I swear on whatever you want, that I won't do anything with the answers. They're for you. They're to help you think of things you might not think of otherwise, because otherwise will be too late. And you know how Edmund Burke defined Hell? It's the truth, recognized too late.” Well, maybe it hadn't been Edmund Burke.

  They looked at each other again, brother and sister united against a world that included me. It was a new wrinkle in our relationships. I sat there feeling like a visitor from Internal Revenue. I wanted to hug them both and then knock their heads together.

  “Go,” Horace said when they'd finished their silent conference.

  I went, taking refuge in reason. “Hypothesis one: Uncle Lo came here from Hong Kong. Did you pick him up at the airport?”

  “No.” Horace looked surprised by the question.

  “Did anyone you know pick him up?”

  “No.” That was Eleanor.

  “Did he phone first?”

  “He knocked on the door,” she said.

  “When?”

  She glanced at Horace, who had gone very still. “About nine on Friday. Nine at night, I mean.” She looked at me, and faltered, then swallowed and went on. “I'm always here for dinner on Friday, you know.”

  I had a question ready, but her words choked it off. Friday was Eleanor's happiest night, the night Horace and Pansy shared the twins with her, and she'd arranged her working schedule to accommodate it, and also—I privately believed—to make it more difficult for them to cancel. Six days a week she wrote at home in Venice; on Fridays, she drove early in the morning to the big downtown library and did research there until it was time for her to drive to Willis Street for dinner. No one could call her to change the plan. Once, when we were both drunk, Horace had suggested that Eleanor loved the twins as much as she did because she and I had never had any. I'd pushed the idea away in self-defense.

  “So you were eating,” I finally suggested.

  “We'd just finished,” Eleanor said. “You know Pansy, she was in the kitchen slogging around in soapy water. Horace was introducing himself to his fourth beer, and Bravo and I were carrying the twins around on our backs.” Bravo, curled beneath the uprighted dining-room table, thumped his tail at the sound of his name.

  “Bravo and you?” I asked, seeing the picture.

  “He can't carry them both,” she said defensively. I ached to hold her.

  “So the doorbell rang.”

  “He knocked,” she said. She saw the look in my eyes and almost smiled. “He was at the back door.”

  “How'd he get the address?”

  “He had a letter Mom wrote him six or seven years ago. He showed it to me. There was an address, but we'd changed our phone number.”

  “Did you see his airline ticket?”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “But he told you he'd just landed from Hong Kong.”

  “That's what he said.” She was sounding impatient.

  “Did he go down to pay a taxi or anything?”

  “Um,” she said, looking at Horace again. “No. No, he didn't.”

  “So if he came in a cab, he paid the cab off, and he sent it away before he climbed the steps leading to a seven-year-old address.”

  Horace liberated another strand of hair and let it whiffle its way to the floor. We all watched it all the way down. Eleanor's hand was in her hair, a prelude to pulling.

  “So, he could have come from Hong Kong or from Stockton,” I said. “No way to tell. Eleanor, lay off your hair, okay?”

  “Yikes,” she said, pulling her hand away and tucking it under her.

  “Okay. We don't know where he came from.” I cleared my throat. “Hypothesis two: It was Uncle Lo who took the twins, instead of someone else. What's gone that belongs to them?”

  Horace blinked. “Good question,” he said, getting to his feet and plodding toward the bedroom, like a man walking uphill.

  Eleanor waited until he was gone and put her hand in mine. “Don't try to understand,” she said.

  Her hand was warm and smooth and familiar in mine. I moved over to sit next to her, and she leaned against me and breathed on my neck. I knew she didn't mean anything by it; she was just breathing. She breathed a couple more times, and I bathed in her warmth.

  “Four sets of clothes,” Horace said, returning, “for each of them. And Julia's duck and Eadweard's clown ball.”

  Eleanor straightened. “Their favorites,” she said. She looked reassured at the news.

  “Did he see the twins play with them?” I wanted her back against me.

  “That's all they play with,” Eleanor said, blinking very fast.

  “Hypothesis three,” I said, raising my voice to distract her. “Uncle Lo wasn't really Uncle Lo.”

  Eleanor passed a hand over her eyes and stared at me. “Of course he was.”

  “What did he say when you opened the door?”

  "He said, 'Mei-Yu.' "

  I must have looked blank, because she said, “That's my name, remember?”

  “You recognized him?”

  “I was a little girl when I saw him last. It was more than twenty years ago. Of course I didn't recognize him.”

  “So he told you who he was. He said, ‘I’m Uncle Lo,' or something.”

  “Yes. And showed me the letter from Mom. He called Mom by her first name, too, Ah-Ling, and he asked about Horace, calling him Ah-Cho.” She recited the Chinese names like magic words, and they had been; they'd been the spoken charms that opened the door.

  The letter. “And you let him in.”

  “First I hugged him, then I started crying. Then I shouted for Ah—for Horace, I mean—and then I let him in.”

  “And then Bravo tried to eat him.”

  “I forgot,” she said. “Bravo barked before he knocked on the door. Yes, Bravo went for him. Uncle Lo looked like he was going to faint.”

  “Did you doubt at all that he was who he said he was?”

  “Not then,” Eleanor said. She sighed. “I still don't, to tell you the truth. He knew everything, how we got out, and what our names were. He talked about the escape for hours, it seemed like. We were all so happy, Simeon. And he had that letter from Mom.”

  The letter was the big problem. “Did you read it?”

  “No.” She wiped her nose.

  “Well, did it look like her handwriting?”

  “Simeon, it was in Chinese. All Chinese writing looks alike to me.”

  “When did you call your mother?”

  “Right away, but she wasn't home. I told her machine to call me instead
of Horace because I knew the kids would be asleep.”

  “So she never talked to him.”

  “He was so warm" she said suddenly. "I mean, we were all crying. He held me like a daddy and cried and laughed. He knew everything about us.”

  I took a breath. “Did he know about the twins?”

  “He even knew their names. He joked about Eadweard's.”

  “The twins are four,” I pointed out.

  A car passed us on the street below, stitching a seam of noise into the fabric of the night. Eleanor put both hands on Horace's forearm but kept her eyes fixed on me. “I see,” she said tonelessly.

  I wanted to put my arms around her and tell her everything would be fine, but I didn't believe that it would. “He used the return address on a seven-year-old letter.”

  “Maybe Mom wrote him more recently.” She was looking at me but talking to Horace.

  “Ask her,” I said.

  “Yes,” Eleanor said, not doing anything. “Right.” Then she let out a deep breath, stood, and left the room.

  “What did you think, Horace? Did you have any doubt?”

  “I'm not sure I do now,” he said. “If that wasn't Uncle Lo, it was Laurence Olivier.”

  As long as Eleanor was out of earshot, I decided to try a sneak play. “Why won't you let me do anything?”

  “Those kids with the guns,” he said. “They're not on their own.”

  “Who are they with?”

  He shook his head.

  “She didn't,” Eleanor said faintly from the doorway. She was leaning against the doorjamb. “In fact, she's not sure she remembers writing him seven years ago.”

  “Wah,” Horace said, abandoning hope.

  “But you know Mom,” Eleanor added unconvincingly.

  Horace knotted his hands behind his neck and rotated his head with a noise like someone stepping on a wineglass, and Eleanor pushed herself away from the wall and sat beside him and began to knead his shoulders.

  “And, of course, your mother never saw him.”

  “Of course not,” Eleanor said, concentrating on Horace's shoulders.

  “Pansy,” Horace blurted, pushing her hands aside.

  “What about Pan—oh, good Lord.” Eleanor got up and hurried back into the hallway.

  Two minutes later Mrs. Chan was seated on the couch, flipping through a thin stack of Polaroids. She looked longest at the fifth, then took it between thumb and forefinger and brought it up to her eyes. It was a close-up of a laughing man with a seamed face, a lot of gold teeth, and a puffy black eye.

  She held the picture up to Horace accusingly.

  “Lo,” she said.

  5 - Hypothetical Vietnamese

  The very next day, Monday, I broke my promise.

  “Vietnamese,” Hammond said smugly. “Those kids have to be Vietnamese.” I'd spent the night dreaming without sleeping, thrashing around on my bed like a gaffed fish, tangling myself in the sheets, and trying not to look at the pictures projected on the insides of my eyelids: Eleanor finding the house I now lived in, Eleanor making the curtains that still hung on the walls, Eleanor's face when she'd learned I was having an affair, Eleanor's straight, slim back going down the driveway on the day she'd moved out. Eleanor with the kids. Pansy, the trusting bride from Singapore, luminous with pride after the doctor had told her she was carrying twins. Horace, that same day, being transparently modest about the strength of his loins.

  Eleanor with the kids again, the three of them tumbling and laughing in an early-morning room splashed with sunlight and bright dust. Eleanor and the kids she hadn't had.

  At five I'd given up on sleep and taken an early shower. I was jogging the perimeter of the UCLA campus by seven, trying to run off a load of guilt that was way too heavy to carry, and by nine, after a second shower in the men's gym, I'd used my stacks privileges at the University's Powell Library to pull out everything I could find about Chinese crime, and especially about Chinese crime in America. Maybe I could work the guilt off.

  There was a whole lot more than I'd thought there would be.

  Nine cups of coffee and three hundred pages later, it was three in the afternoon, and I was jittering in a chair at Parker Center, laying a line of carefully worked out bullshit on Al Hammond.

  As always, Hammond was a lot bigger than he needed to be and, as always, he looked mean enough to eat kittens. In front of cats. He always intimidated me, in spite of the fact that most of the time, Hammond was my friend. I'd chosen him from a roomful of cops at a Hollywood cop bar called the Red Dog when I'd decided to be a detective, as opposed to a university professor. At the time I had put years into preparing to be a university professor and only weeks into being a detective, but those weeks were quality time, as people seem to like to say these days. A good friend of Eleanor's, a quiet Taiwanese girl named Jennie Chu, had been tossed onto the sidewalk from the roof of one of the UCLA dorms. Jennie had been dead on arrival, and Eleanor had been alive in my bed when someone had called to give her the news. Since the UCLA cops and the LAPD didn't seem all that interested, I'd helped Eleanor through her grieving process by finding the cocaine dealer who'd used Jennie to practice the vertical shot put. His mistake: He couldn't tell Asians apart. I'd happily broken both of his elbows, learning something sort of thrillingly unpleasant about myself in the process, and delivered him to the police. At that point I had more superfluous degrees than a Fahrenheit thermometer, the result of having stayed in college for what seemed like decades because I couldn't think of anything to do.

  After Jennie, I had something to do.

  “Why Vietnamese?” I asked. We were in a long room full of sickly fluorescent light and scarred wooden desks. Other detectives talked on phones or slogged on big heavy cop feet toward the coffee. I'd passed on the coffee.

  “Why are you here?” Hammond countered. He was a cop to his bitten fingernails.

  “This is purely hypothetical, Al,” I said, retreating toward the bullshit.

  “And it has nothing to do with Eleanor,” Al said with ponderous irony.

  “Eleanor who?” I asked, crossing my arms to emphasize the scholarly patches on my jacket. The lapels spread to reveal the aging Megadeth T-shirt beneath, and I tugged them closed. Hammond, like most cops, thought heavy metal was the musical equivalent of assault and battery. “I've decided to finish an old sociology thesis on urban crime. Asians are tops in their high school classes, tops in the graduation lists of lots of universities. Where are they in urban crime?”

  “Tops,” Hammond said promptly. “They're fucking with the Mafia like no one ever has. Ninety percent of the heroin brought into America today—” He stopped and lifted a hand half the size of Moby Dick. “You're actually sitting there and looking right at me and telling me this is for a paper?”

  “The professor is named Mamie Liu,” I improvised, stalling. So far I'd met Chinese-Americans named Eleanor, Horace, Pansy, Eadweard, and Julia (as well as Homer, Ruby, and Maxine), and I'd worked up considerable curiosity about the American names Chinese parents chose. “What do you think, Al?” I asked. “Why do Chinese choose names like Mamie?”

  “You want to ask someone on the Asian Task Force?”

  “No,” I said, too quickly.

  His grin turned wolfish. “Yeah? Why not?”

  “Because it's only hypothetical. I don't want to waste their time. Is that straight about the heroin?”

  “You bet.” He shifted his weight in his chair, settling in to be the expert. “The old French Connection through Marseilles, which the Mafia ran, was shut down years ago. Now the stuff moves from Burma through Bangkok and Hong Kong, and the Chinese run it.”

  “All Chinese?”

  “One hundred percent. Ethnic Chinese in Burma, Thailand, and Laos.”

  Hammond's stomach rumbled. It sounded like an automobile accident.

  “Who runs it here?” I asked.

  Hammond looked hungry. “Like I said—”

  “No, I mean who specifically? Who am
ong the Chinese? The tongs?”

  Hammond sat up. “You know about the tongs?”

  “A little.” I'd also read about triads, village associations, and name societies.

  “Like what?”

  “The tongs started in San Francisco in the middle of the last century as protective associations,” I said, dredging my caffeinated memory. “The Chinese were very unpopular in those days. They made the mistake of working cheap. Occasionally they were shot for sport. The cops didn't care what went on in Chinatown as long as no white people got hurt, so the tongs stepped in and kept order. Also helped people in trouble, arbitrated disputes, paid for funerals if somebody died broke.”

  “So far, okay,” Hammond said grudgingly.

  “Chinese try not to die broke,” I said. “They come from a culture where starvation is the common denominator. Still, it's hard to make it into a visible tax bracket when you're working for half the minimum wage. But the Chinese work at it anyway. There are people working in Chinatown at three dollars an hour who save sixty, seventy percent of their salaries. And the tongs, today's tongs, I mean, help them keep their heads far enough above ground so that they can still open their mouths to eat.”

  “You've been doing research,” Hammond said accusingly.

  “For the paper. But there are lots of things I don't know. Like when the tongs got crooked.”

  He gave me a long glance. “Right at the beginning.” He looked a little uncomfortable. “The U.S. immigration laws were pretty raw then. Chinese men weren't allowed to bring their wives in with them. The idea being that they were supposed to come, build the railroad, light the fuses in the mines, do the laundry, and go home again.”

  “The ones who got blown to pieces were allowed to stay?” I asked. “And how do you know this stuff?”

  “Interracial sensitivity meetings,” he said. “Three hours a week, when I have the time to go, which isn't exactly often. Also, the Asian crime situation is so out of hand that everybody's trying to be an expert.” He settled back, forcing a tiny scream of pain from his chair, and tried to remember where he was. “So anyway, you had a Chinatown full of bachelors. Classic economics. Demand creates supply.”

  “And the tongs,” I volunteered, recalling a detail that had caught my attention at the library, “brought in slave girls.”