Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

Esther Summerson's eyes swam supernaturally large and blue through the dusty lenses above me. I was standing on the first step of the porch, looking at her through a fine mesh of nylon, trying to figure out how anything that was likely to happen in the next half hour or so could possibly do anyone any good.

“Yes?” she said. She had the distracted air of someone who is listening to music in her head. The screen door was closed and, I imagined, latched against whatever slavering beast L. A. might decide to deal up. When she'd turned on the porch light from inside it had brought moths, and they swooped and fluttered against the glass, looking for whatever it is moths look for in a light.

“Hello, Mrs. Summerson,” I said. I stepped up onto the porch and gave a little wave, hoping to attract some attention. “I'm Eleanor's friend, remember?”

The magnified eyelids came down with an almost audible clank, and when she opened them again she was back in the present and she knew me. “But of course, and how nice,” she said, sounding like a missionary again. “It's Mr. Grist. How are the twins?”

“Eating and sleeping,” I said, exhausting my fund of baby knowledge. “May I come in?”

She hesitated as though she were translating the words. “Oh. Well, certainly you may. I'm sorry. This seems to be one of my foggy days.” She fiddled with the screen door and then held it open.

“I've brought someone along,” I said, moving forward, and Tran stepped into view.

Leaning slightly, she peered at him in the half light. She started a smile, but the smile turned into a rictus, and she turned her whole head, birdlike, to look at me, stepped back, and used both hands to slam the inner door. It hit my foot and bounced back against her, knocking her a step backward. I lunged and grabbed her shoulders before she went over backward. Tall as she was, she was even heavier and more solid than I'd expected, and my back creaked alarmingly again.

Her eyes were clamped shut now, and she was shuddering violently. “Go away,” she said, mostly breath. She smelled of powder and lavender.

“Where's Lo?”

“You should be ashamed of yourself.” She fluttered ineffectually at my hands, gathering strength. “Pretending to be Eleanor's friend. Anyway, you can't get Lo now. None of you can. He's in China, where no one will find him.”

“We're going to talk,” I said. “Come in, Tran. Close the door.”

She made little shooing motions in his direction. “You can't. He can't. I'll call the police.”

“You know you won't. How are you going to explain Tran?”

“Please,” she said, “I need to sit down. My legs are shaking.”

“You know where the living room is, Tran?”

He nodded. “Where she give me cookies.”

“Take her there. Let her sit. Keep her in one place.”

He took her arm very gently, saying, “Come, please, Missus.” She tried to tug herself free and then allowed him to lead her slowly down the hall, talking to herself in Cantonese. I stood, inhaling the aromas of cooking oil and sachet, and waiting for something else, the smell of men: bodies, cigarettes, hair oil, anything that didn't fit into this last, exclusively female, missionary outpost of old China. Pulling my cold little nine-millimeter automatic from my jacket pocket, I searched the house.

The first floor was crowded with heavy furniture and relics of a life of dour and earnest enterprise among the heathen. The walls bristled with photos of rigorously stiff men and women, white and Chinese, the Chinese eyes fixed politely to one side of the camera lens, so as not to stare at the viewer. More groups of solemn Chinese children, like the ones pictured in the living room, assembled portentously in front of the weathered schoolhouse-or another just like it-on the barren plain to have their portraits made. I counted ten of these, all framed and dated, and then stopped counting. Books were everywhere, in both Chinese and English: Bibles, commentaries on the Bible, commentaries on the commentaries, biographies and autobiographies of missionaries, Chinese dictionaries, histories of the Middle Kingdom.

Front room, old-fashioned drawing room, half-bathroom, kitchen with its heavy wok and a mound of half-chopped vegetables, enough only for one, little maid's room with a desk occupying most of it, covered with correspondence in Chinese. A door under the stairwell, the one that should have led to the basement, was locked. The lock was heavy, bright new brass. I put it on hold and went up the stairs to the second floor as quietly as I could, knowing that anyone up there would have heard us come in. Tran and Mrs. Summerson were talking softly but urgently in the living room, all aspirates like wind through trees.

The upstairs was virginal and nostalgic, a doleful museum. The big bedroom contained a single bed heavily flounced in chintz and some very good Chinese rosewood furniture. On a small bamboo table next to the bed I found a pair of men's silver hairbrushes, perhaps a century old, and in my mind's eye I saw her packing and unpacking them for her husband each time the two of them were transferred or forced to flee. The rest of the house may have been dusty, but the brushes had been polished until the engraved initials R.D.S. were almost rubbed away.

Directly above the table in an oval frame hung a hand-tinted photograph of a young woman with lustrous and adventurous pale eyes and a heavy coil of dark brown hair: the young Mrs. Summerson, decades and deaths and continents ago. It was a complicated face, bold and demure at the same time, the face of someone quietly waiting for something momentous to happen.

A long connecting bathroom, unexpectedly cluttered and wet, led to the guest room. The bed sagged in the middle as though it had been folded lengthwise for decades. Everything was musty and coated with a fine fall of dust, weeks and weeks' worth of dust.

When I went down the stairs I was on tiptoe. I found Tran sitting alone in the living room, looking up at the somber Chinese schoolchildren.

I checked the corners of the room, just to make sure. “Where is she?”

“Making tea,” he said. “She need tea.”

“Why aren't you with her?”

He avoided my gaze. “Want to cry, her.”

“And I thought you were dangerous,” I said.

Mrs. Summerson was defying popular wisdom by watching the kettle, but when she turned at the sound of my step she was alert and watchful and dry-eyed.

“I need to go downstairs,” I said.

Her eyes went to the gun in my hand, and I tucked it into my belt. “I can't open that door,” she said.

“Bananas. We both know what's been happening here.”

“Do you really think so?” She almost smiled at me. “Be that as it may, I don't have the key. It's lost.”

“You're a really terrible liar.”

She turned back to the kettle, which had started to hiss steam. “I know,” she said, using both hands to lift it to the sink. “I've never been any good at it. But I fooled you before.” She sounded proud, like a little girl who's tricked an adult.

“Where's the key?”

For what seemed like a long time, she busied herself with pouring the water into a ceramic teapot and spooning tea from a canister into a little metal infuser. Then she dropped the infuser in, capped the pot carefully, and said, “What's been happening here, then?” She had her back to me. “If you're so smart.”

“I don't know all the details, but you-you and Lo, I mean-have been smuggling your old students out of China.”

Her spine straightened, but all she did was put the teapot and three cups onto a heavily carved wooden tray. Her hands weren't shaking now. “Aren't you the clever boy,” she said. “That must be why they sent you to hunt for Lo.”