Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

“I want to ask you about the old man.”

“Lo,” she said.

I nodded, faintly surprised that she remembered him.

“Funny old guy. Still likes the girls, maybe too much. Like a dog sniffing, but funny about it. Some old guys never seem to run out, you know?”

“Lucky him,” I said. “Some of us run out almost immediately. You were with him when he made his phone call.”

“No.” She raked damp hair back from her forehead with her right hand, and her eyes suddenly seemed even larger. “I was in the toilet, trying to look younger.”

“Could you hear him?”

I got the sidelong gaze again. “I liked him,” she said.

I spread my hands in what I hoped was an international gesture of reason. “I don't want to do him any harm. I just want to know who he called.”

“Why?” It was thick with skepticism.

“I can't tell you.”

“Go away.” She started to back around the Toyota, mace still pointed at my face. “Go to the end of the parking lot and stay there until I've driven away.”

“Wait,” I said. “Um, wait, look here, I'll put my driver's license and my business card and whatever else you want right here on the hood, and then I'll back off and you come and check it out. Would I do that if I was going to hurt him?” I slipped my wallet out of my shirt pocket and started to pull pieces out of it. “Oh, hell, look at the whole thing.”

The wallet landed with a hollow thump on the Toyota's hood as I backed away, my hands in plain view again. Lek waited until I was a good ten feet off before she came and flipped through it one-handed.

“Okay,” she said at last. She'd read everything in it and compared my face under the lamplight with the photo on my driver's license twice. “I'd take your check.”

“Anything happens to Lo, the cops talk to you and you can send them straight to me.”

“I said I liked him. I said I thought he was a funny old man. I didn't say I thought he was a good old man.”

“No,” I said, “he's not a good old man.”

She pushed her lower lip out and then drew it back in again. Then she lowered the mace and dropped it into her purse. “In fact, I think he's probably a pretty terrible old man. I don't think he told the truth once all evening. And he was jumpy, always looking at his watch like he heard it ticking all the time.”

“Did he speak English or Chinese on the phone?”

“I still don't know why you're asking.”

“He did something to someone I love.”

She weighed it. “A girl?”

“The people I love are mostly girls.”

Her teeth caught the light again, and she chuckled. “I didn't think you were a lady-boy.”

“As you said, he's a pretty terrible old man.”

“Fun, though.” Lek sighed at the injustice of it all, and then made up her mind or, more likely, her heart. “Spoke mostly English, a little Cantonese when he ran out of words. Only talked a few seconds. He called a lady, said he'd come for his things the next day. 'Dim sum time,' he said.”

Sure. Dim sum time made sense. The rest of it didn't.

“His things? Are you sure?” Eleanor had said he'd brought a canvas suitcase.

She did the thing with the lip again, dropped the long eyelids briefly and then shook her head. “No,” she said. “The rest of his things.”

“Do you think she was a Chinese lady?”

She fished in her purse while she considered the question, and pulled out a ring of keys that would have slipped easily over her ankle. “Don't know. If she's Chinese, she didn't speak his dialect and she's married to an Anglo. He called her Mrs. Summerson.”

A bubble of air forced its way through my lips, surprising both of us.

“You know her?” Lek asked, looking startled at the sound.

“I know her,” I said. And I did, and there was no way in the world I could talk to her without Eleanor's permission. If Lo was the Chan family's guardian angel, Esther Summerson was their household god.

I even knew where she lived. I'd been there twice, most recently after the twins' hundred-day party. Mrs. Esther Summerson occupied a perfectly restored 1918 Craftsman's Bungalow, set back at least fifty feet from the sidewalk on an idyllic one-way lane called Jacaranda Street. The house was dark now, sleeping under ivy and dormant climbing roses, just visible beneath arbors that had dangled sweet, dusky clusters of grapes only two months before. By daylight, the whole thing looked like the scenes they'd painted on the labels of orange crates in the twenties.

With Alice parked two streets to the west, I toted a large Styrofoam container of coffee up Jacaranda Street and found myself a dark little piece of curb between two parked cars almost directly across from Mrs. Summerson's. I couldn't talk to her, but nobody had said I couldn't look at her house.

My watch said 3:20 when I sat down to look at Mrs. Summerson's house. The Styrofoam quart of coffee said Donut Deelite . I needed the coffee more than I needed the watch; I'd gone to bed for a couple of hours after the firemen finished putting out 1321 and then gotten up to go meet Lek, and every time I closed my eyes I saw little bitty fireworks.

The coffee was so extraordinarily awful that it held my attention for almost an hour. Since nothing whatsoever was happening in front of me, I had ample time and attention to devote to analyzing the components of its taste. Foremost among them seemed to be wet dog hair, softened and modulated by a hint of aluminum and a reedy note of newsprint, the entire rich and complex bouquet culminating in a strong finish of industrial-strength benzine. In mitigation, it had enough caffeine to set an army of water buffalo doing the hokey-pokey.

Lek , I thought. Thai. Lek and Ning and Lala, all of them thousands of miles from rice paddies and gilded temple spires and easy smiles. The Chans, Chinese. The tongs. The Vietnamese kids. All of them here now, part of a city that has more Koreans than anyplace outside Korea, more Cambodians and Thais than anyplace outside Cambodia and Thailand, more Japanese than anyplace outside Japan. Hell, we have more Canadians than Vancouver. A hundred languages, literally, are spoken in the public schools. All these people, Filipinos and Armenians, Turks and Guatemalans and Salvadorans, migrating over the lines and the empty blue spaces on the maps to create whole communities in a big ugly basin where the dominant gas is carbon monoxide and the dominant currency is disappointment. Mass movements, mass migrations, to get here.

And what was here?

Immigration, Im- migration. In my caffeine-saturated state, the word broke apart easily. I was composing an ode to immigration and my knees were taking turns jiggling up and down by the time the day was born rosy-fingered through the haze in the eastern sky, and a light went on upstairs in Mrs. Summerson's house.

The light beckoned to me. I looked around. No one in the street. No one watching from the windows of the other houses, or at least no one I could see. I got up and stretched and ambled across the street, just your average wired guy out strolling at the crack of dawn, and then I ducked under the arbors and ran, half bent over, to the wall of the house that faced the street, positioning myself against a section of clapboard between two large windows.

I heard singing, and the window to my left lit up. Growing in front of it was some sort of bush that someone who knew something about bushes could probably have identified. With the low arbors behind me I felt secure from the street, so I sidled like a good moth toward the light and waited behind the bush, peering through the gossamer or crinoline or whatever it was for all to be revealed.

What was revealed, eventually, was a woman in her late seventies having tea with her breakfast. I learned a new way to break and eat a soft-boiled egg, and I learned that Mrs. Summerson used linen napkins even when she ate alone and that she refolded them neatly to present a clean surface each time she touched one to her lips, which was often, and in general I learned that my standards of gentility were precariously low. Abandoning the light, I left her to her protein and checked every window I could see through and found the rooms on the other side empty. No lamps came on anywhere else in the house. If Mrs. Summerson was secretly playing host to Uncle Lo or to several thousand tong members, they were apparently breakfasting in the rooms upstairs. In the dark.