Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

“Bingo,” he said. Then he smiled again. “English is an exhilarating language.”

“Glad you like it.”

“Shakespeare,” he said irrelevantly.

“Cao Xueqin,” I said.

He looked startled. “Red Chamber," he said. "You know it?”

“It's my favorite book.”

“You"-he paused for a moment-"you are pulling my leg.”

I couldn't help it. I laughed.

His face darkened, but then he smiled. “Who do you like,” he asked, “Bao-Chai or Dai-Yu?” It wasn't an idle question; it was a pop quiz.

“Bao-Chai,” I said. “Dai-Yu cries too much.”

Behind him, three beefy Chinese pulled the Vietnamese boys into the room. They'd been stripped to the waist. Two of the men carried long machetes.

“She cries always,” Charlie Wah said, relaxing slightly, “but such sentiment.”

“Coughs a lot, too,” I said, watching the two boys. The one with the Dumbo ears looked terrified.

“She was dying,” Charlie Wah said. “Don't you think that's sad?”

“Death is always sad.”

He saw me looking past him and turned to regard the boys. “But sometimes necessary.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said.

“Jesus?” Charlie Wah asked, swiveling back to me. “My least favorite god.”

“In the good days,” Charlie Wah was proclaiming from one end of the room, “we had respect. We had natural order.” He paused, and the mild-looking translator who'd gotten the laugh at Ying's expense turned it into Chinese. Charlie had one hand in the pocket of his blue, double-pleated suit trousers, jingling enough change to choke a parking meter. He liked making speeches.

The girl sagged drunkenly against her pillar. The cut on her cheek had scabbed into a rusty thread, border-straight. I'd decided to kill Ying if I got a chance.

The boys had been stood back to back in the center of the floor.

“The man who enjoyed respect was the oldest man,” Charlie Wah said comfortably. “As it should be. The wisest man, the grandfather, the one richest in experience. This was Chinese. This was proper and right. This was Confucian.”

One of the Vietnamese boys, the handsome one, snickered. The man nearest him slapped him in the face, not hard enough to hurt but hard enough to snap his head around. Hard enough to humiliate.

The boy looked straight forward, his cheek scarlet. Dumbo-Ears blinked rapidly, as though he'd been the one who'd been hit. He looked childishly small, childishly young.

“Now the man who gets respect is the man with the gun,” Charlie Wah continued, shaking his head sadly. Fluorescent light gleamed on his high forehead, and change clinked and jingled. "He can be a thug, he can be the most stupid man in the room, but if he has the gun he becomes the leader. Why is this?

“Is it because we are in America?” He paused rhetorically as his words of wisdom were translated. “Not really. We see the same thing these days in Hong Kong and Taiwan. America has no corner"-he turned toward me and smiled-” 'no corner'?"

I nodded.

“No corner on thugs,” he said proudly. Then he bypassed the translator and rendered the idiom into Chinese for the benefit of the thugs present before returning to English. “Now we have the two-week millionaires, the men who sell the heroin. Slime.” He turned to regard the two boys, his eyes flat and black. “And now we have the Vietnamese.”

The baby with the Dumbo ears took a quick look at Charlie Wah and clamped his eyes shut.

“We need the Vietnamese in America.” Charlie sounded regretful. “There are things no Chinese man should be asked to do. But the old values are being broken down, and in America the Vietnamese are the hard end of the battering ram.”

He paused and then smiled. “Just so no one makes a mistake, my sons,” he added jocularly, “I am the man with the gun at the moment.” On cue, the two Mr. Chinese Universe contestants displayed short, ugly automatics. Charlie Wah beamed at them paternally. “The Vietnamese,” he said, picking up the thread and stowing the smile belowdecks. “We use them when we have to, and we pay them well, but they are trash and they act like trash. We could kill them, of course, just as we could kill this gwailo, but would it be smart? No.” He seemed to like answering his own questions even more than he liked speechmaking. “We need the Vietnamese, and killing a gwailo brings the police.” He lifted a finger and said sententiously, “Killing a gwailo always brings the police. We do not need the police.”

This sentiment, translated by the mild-looking little guy, brought a murmur of consent. Only Ying seemed unhappy. His eyes flicked to mine and then looked away. I was sorry to see that he'd stopped bleeding.

“So we will send a message,” Charlie Wah said. “One of these boys will take it to the Vietnamese, and the gwailo will write it in his daybook.”

“Diary, I said.

“And he will not be back.” He looked at me inquiringly.

“Absolutely,” I said absolutely.

“It would be very easy to kill you,” he said, a man considering a purely technical challenge. “We could, for example, strip away the covering from the wires above your head and plug in a sewing machine and turn it on. The handcuffs would be a very good. . ” He looked up at the ceiling as though the word he sought was likely to be printed there, like a drunk actor's prompt.

“Conductor,” I said, just to move things along.

“Or we could simply shoot you,” Charlie Wah said impatiently. He'd had his English corrected enough for one evening. Ying brightened and made a clucking noise.

Charlie scowled at him. “But, as I say, it would bring the police. Still. .” He looked at me, and I decided it would be an extremely good idea to shut up.

One of the Mr. Chinese Universe finalists trained his gun on me.

In the darkness, as they used to say on the old Fugitive TV show, fate moved its heavy hand. Dumbo-Ears decided to go for the exit.

His boot came down on the instep of the Chinese man closest to him, and the man made a surprisingly musical sound, raised his foot, grabbed it with both hands, and demonstrated an energetic new variant on the hop, skip, and jump. He was still in the hop phase when Dumbo-Ears, five steps away, stopped cold and sucked in his bare midsection to keep the point of a machete from finding a way through it to his backbone. The other end of the machete was in the hands of the guy who'd introduced the side of my head to the barrel of his gun with such memorable results.

“Ssshhaaaaah,” Dumbo-Ears said, sinking to his knees. Then he burst into tears.

The mood in the room changed, as though atomized blood had been sprayed into the air vents. Men shuffled their feet and sniffed it.

“Swine,” Charlie Wah said meditatively. “And cowardly swine at that.”

“He's just a kid,” I said.

Charlie Wah let go of his change, reached up to his mouth, and took out his gold toothpick. Then he pointed the sharp end of the toothpick in the direction of his left eye and poked it. Message received.

“Kill them all,” Ying said, encouraged by Charlie's dumb show.

“You,” said Charlie, spacing the words for effect, “are too stupid to be Chinese.” It got translated, and a few of the men laughed. Ying's eyes got very small, and he aimed them straight at me. I was losing friends fast.

“Put him back,” Charlie Wah instructed the goon with the machete, and the goon hauled the kid with the unfortunate ears to his feet and dragged him across the room until he was standing behind his friend again. The handsome one put a hand back and grasped Dumbo-Ears' wrist, and the two of them held hands, standing back to back as Dumbo-Ears fought to control his sobs. The girl against the pillar did something with her breath that could have been a cough but probably wasn't.