The Man With No Time (6 page)

That made me sit back. “Who's 'we'?”

“Uncle Lo will take care of them,” Eleanor said.

“I really
seriously
don't understand,” I said.

“He's our benefactor,” Horace said automatically. “Even if he did take Julia and Eadweard, he took them because he needs something. He took them to make sure he'd get it. That's all.” It was the longest speech he'd made since we got home.

“He's in danger, obviously,” Eleanor said. “He's running away from something. Maybe he thinks that having Julia and Eadweard will protect him.”

“From what?”

“We don't know,” Eleanor said, after waiting for Horace to respond.

“Our little buggers,” I said, “would shoot right through the kids to get dear old Uncle Lo.”

“They won't,” Eleanor said, sounding a touch shaky about it. “They promised.”

I looked at her as I listened again to what she'd said. I thought I knew her,
had
thought I knew her for years, but now she was like a face on an exotic stamp, small and far away and foreign. “They
promised?”
I finally asked.

“In Cantonese,” she said, “as they left. They said if we'd tell them when we found Uncle Lo, they'd make sure the kids got home.”

It sounded like a wan hope at best, but it wasn't one I was going to contradict. “And how are we going to find Uncle Lo?”

“We're not,” Horace said. “He's going to come to us.”

There were a million possible questions, and all of them seemed wrong; all of them seemed like they'd rip Horace apart. I chose the least harmful. “What does he want?”

“God knows,” Horace said.

“Does your mother?”

Horace tore his eyes from the television, and he and Eleanor exchanged glances. “Perhaps,” she said.

“Let's ask her.”

“No,” brother and sister said in unison.

“Well, for Christ's sake,” I said, suddenly angry, “why not?”

“We'll ask her,” Eleanor said quietly. “Not you, we. You want to do something, Simeon, and we're grateful to you for it.” Horace reached over and patted my knee, awkwardly but feelingly. “But we can't let you. Those guys who were here? The one you tickled already wants to kill you. You cost him a lot of face. You should have just gone ahead and kicked him.”

“You know me,” I said, deciding not to remind her that she'd been horrified at the idea. “Could I kick someone in the head?”

“He'd hate you less if you had. But he's not going to go after you unless you do something. And they'll kill all four of us, and then come after you, the minute they learn you're trying to do something. Anything. And they would learn. You just have to believe that.”

“If all I did was talk to the cops, how would they know?”

“They'd know if the cops did anything in the Chinese community after you talked to them. Anything at all.”

“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

T
he 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.