Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

My head felt like leftover gristle, and my neck felt like it had been flayed. It was difficult to focus my eyes; things kept getting watery. Dried blood pasted my shirt to my neck and shoulder. Whoever my rescuers were, they'd been forceful about things. No one had been worried about diplomacy. On the other hand, I was alive.

I wasn't sure why, but then I wasn't sure about much of anything.

“He's awake.” One of the men said, giving me what he probably thought was a hard stare from the middle of the room. He was thin and round-shouldered, wearing a short-sleeved white shirt tucked into pleated, shiny-kneed slacks that he belted about six inches below his armpits. He came toward me, loafers flopping lazily on his feet, and one of the other men, the one who had clouted me with the gun, said something short and sharp in Cantonese. The natty dresser laughed, showing me a partial set of third-world teeth, and stopped about eight feet from me. Too far away to kick.

“Head hurt?” he asked, cocking his head to one side and giving me a diagnostic survey.

“No,” I lied.

“It will,” he said.

This got a big laugh from two of the men on the floor. There were six of them, counting the guy with his belt loops in his armpits and his pockets at his nipples. So a couple were missing, probably in the back room torturing puppies.

“Do a lot of sewing?” I asked him.

He looked absently around the room. “That's funny,” he said soberly. Then he stepped forward, lifted a leg, turned quickly, bent at the waist and swung a shoe into my ribs.

It took my feet right out from under me, and the cuffs took a bite out of my wrists as I dangled there, fighting back a sudden upsurge of vomit. As I tried to get my feet working again, he knotted his fingers together and swiped both hands, arms fully extended, across my face. The blow drove my head back and into a corner of the electrical box, and I saw a brief explosion of light and my legs went slack again.

“Now does it hurt?” he asked.

“Bruce Lee,” I said. I'd bitten my tongue hard, and my mouth tasted hot and salty. “Everybody thinks he's Bruce Lee these days.”

“Bruce Lee is dead,” he said informatively.

“That's the trouble with impressionists,” I said, finding my feet at last. “They never take it far enough.”

One of the other men, a mild, even scholarly-looking specimen several inches shorter than the one who'd hit me, laughed and loosed a volley of Chinese. I recognized “Bruce Lee,” and then the translator laughed again and the other men joined in.

It didn't sit well with Highpockets. His eyes narrowed, and his long upper lip raised to reveal those teeth. His hand went to an elevated pocket and came out with a knife. He flicked it downward and a very bright blade appeared, and he angled away to my right, out of reach of my feet.

The other men watched fascinated. Highpockets was behind me now, breathing shallowly and fast, and I could smell garlic and beer and the odor of my own fear. Something brushed past my hair, and the edge of the knife came to rest at the top of my injured right ear, at the spot where it joins my head. He began to press down.

“No,” the translator said. Then he said something in Chinese.

The knife was lifted, and Highpockets came around me, staying clear of my feet, and grinned at me. “Hero,” he said. “Mr. Hero.”

He turned his back on me and crossed the room to the girl. Her eyes were wide open now, watching him come. He stopped beside her, turned to give me a mocking look, and grasped her chin with his left hand. With his right he drew the knife down her smooth cheek.

She made a muffled, whimpering sound, and a line of red appeared. It began below her left eye and ended below the corner of her mouth. The blood coursed down her throat and dripped onto her jacket.

“What about it, Mr. Hero?” Highpockets asked. He released her chin and crossed behind the pillar to reappear on her right side. He grabbed her chin again, and now she began to cry. “Got anything funny to say?”

“Please,” I said.

“Pretty little fish sauce, isn't she?” he said, raising the knife again.

“Please,” I said again. “Please don't.” The girl sobbed hopelessly without moving, frozen into immobility by the point of the knife.

'Please,' he mimicked, forcing his voice into a soprano squeal. “Oh, please don't.”

“That's right,” someone said. “Don't.”

Highpockets jumped back as though the girl had given him a shock. The knife dangled impotently at his side.

The man who had come into the room was short, maybe five-six, but wide as a door frame. He wore a meticulously cut suit in an improbable shade of powder blue that didn't mask the huge muscles at the tops of his shoulders, muscles that seemed to crowd his ears. He was clean-shaven and blandly pleasant-looking, with thinning black hair combed straight back, a little too long at the back of his neck. Something gleamed at one corner of his wide, straight mouth. Two semifinalists from the Mr. Chinese Universe contest stood possessively behind him. They would have been identical except that one of them had two eyebrows and the other had one, a straight line of hair that joined over his nose like a furrow of corn.

“We will speak English,” the man in blue said in a mild voice. “To be polite.” Then he pointed at Highpockets and said, “Ying. Cut yourself.”

Highpockets looked at his friends on the floor, but no one moved. Most of them seemed to be fascinated by the unfinished garments in the cartons at their feet. One of them actually picked up a sleeve and gave it an experimental stretch.

Highpockets swallowed and then looked an appeal at the man in blue. The man in blue took whatever it was out of his mouth and lifted his eyebrows expectantly. Highpockets immediately put the blade against his own face and sliced downward. Blood flowed.

“Face the girl,” the man in the blue said. Highpockets did as told, bleeding face to bleeding face.

“You may spit on him,” the man in the blue suit said.

The girl spat on him.

“Ying,” the man in the blue suit said. “Take one of those pieces of cloth and clean her face.”

Highpockets-or Ying, I guessed-took a sleeve or something from a carton and mopped her face with it.

“Press it against the cut to stop the bleeding,” the man in the blue suit said.His eyes were calm, almost uninterested.

Ying did as told, very gently. Blood from his own cut stained his white shirt. The man in blue turned to face me.

“It's always wise,” he said, “to demonstrate control at the outset. People think it's easy to be the bad guy. They don't take into account the kind of help you have to hire. Does your head hurt?”

“Yes,” I said this time.

“Good,” he said, nodding. “There's no reason you should escape Scotch-free.”

“Scot-free,” I said without thinking.

His eyebrows went up and he smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “Idioms give me some trouble. So many of them make no sense. The first time someone said 'How do you do' to me, I asked him how I did what.” He paused.

“How about that?” I said, since he obviously expected me to say something.

“You are in the way,” he said, apparently fascinated by the sound of the words. “Is that what you say, 'in the way'?”

Was he kidding? “That's what we say.”

“I thought so. It's not your fault, exactly. Or, rather, it is, because you are a persistent soul. But it's not your fault that the Confucian ethic is breaking down.”

“Glad to hear it,” I said, not having the faintest idea what he was talking about.

“Everywhere you look,” he said, “old values are failing. Your country is certainly not immune.”