Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

“They didn't send me. I'll tell you about it in a minute. Where's the key to the basement?”

“I told you, he's in China.” She still hadn't turned to face me.

“And I believe you. He's long gone. I just want to see the setup.”

“It's quite nice, really. The key is around my neck. Turn your back, please.”

“You know I can't do that, Mrs. Summerson.”

She rested a hand against the pot, testing its temperature. “What a pity you're such a reptile. Eleanor will be so disappointed to know.”

“Call her. She knows what I'm doing.”

“Don't be silly. Eleanor wouldn't have anything to do with one of them.”

“I'm not. One of them, I mean.”

“Then why are you with that boy?” She turned slowly to face me, and when I saw her in profile I was struck by how loosely the heavy clothes fit her. There was no fat left, nothing but bone and muscle and will.

“They made him kill his brother and then they killed his cousin. His girl cousin. They cut her throat. He's on our side now.”

The big eyes probed me. “How terrible,” she said conversationally. She'd seen worse. “But it's not as simple as sides. There are lives at stake.”

“I know,” I said. “Horace's is one of them. Look, I can explain it all in a minute. Just give me the key, please, and then we can get down to business.”

“Oh, my. I suppose if I don't give it to you, you'll just take it anyway.”

“No,” I said, suddenly feeling the lack of sleep. “I won't.”

She nodded slowly and lifted a hand to pat at her hair. “Then I’ll give it to you.” She reached around behind her neck and her long fingers located something. She pulled a long, thin gold chain out of her dress and handed it to me. Dangling from its end was a double-serrated brass key. “The light's on the left at the top of the stairs.”

“Thanks.” I was already moving.

I heard the lid of the teapot being lifted. “Lemon?”

“That would be lovely.” The key fit easily into the lock and turned with no resistance at all. The light switch was right where she'd said it would be.

The stairs descended steeply and doglegged to the right. When the room came into view, I stopped and looked at it for a long time. Then I laughed.

It was perfect. Wall-to-wall carpet on both floor and ceiling to absorb sound, a plump couch, and a double bed. Bookshelves sagged beneath a spy's library, crammed with magazines about American life and books and pamphlets in Chinese. A television set and a VCR, equipped with earphones. A treadmill and some dumbbells to keep the muscles functioning. The bathroom had both a step-in shower and an old claw-footed tub. It was, in all, a lot nicer than my house. Anyone could have lived there indefinitely, deprived only of the sight of sun and sky. And Uncle Lo, I was willing to bet, had been down there with his feet up, watching kung-fu movies on the VCR while Eleanor and I were cunningly cross-examining Mrs. Summerson.

Some papers on the bed caught my eye: Photocopies of old but official-looking documents in Chinese. One of them featured the picture of a young Chinese man who strongly resembled Horace Chan. I scooped them up and went back up the stairs, still laughing.

“Of course he was there,” Mrs. Summerson said several minutes later. “He was right down there, waiting for his papers.” She was balancing a saucer on her knee and blowing in a genteel fashion at a cup of steaming tea.

“Papers to get him to China?”

She shook her head. “No, but good enough to get him to Canada. The really good papers come from Canada. And then, it's easier to get to China from Canada.”

“And these,” I said, indicating the photocopies, “belonged to Eleanor's father. He took them from her mother's house.” Peter Lau's phrase came back to me. “He was ghost-processing himself, wasn't he? He terrorized Eleanor's family so he could be someone who was dead.”

Her eyes widened behind the cloudy lenses, and she hesitated. Tran leaned forward and put a soothing palm on her arm. She smiled gratefully at him. “He needed them desperately,” she said. “To get back in, I mean. He would never have taken the children otherwise. He knew he had no time left. There were only so many places he could go, and they had all his papers-I mean everything. It's always safest to have papers with a real Chinese person's name on them. He and Eleanor's father are about the same age, and there's no record of Mr. Chan's death.”

My surprise must have showed.

“Lo,” she said with some pride, “is a very smart man. He was an official in those days, but he knew everything had gone wrong with China and he had an eye on the future even then. When men of his age passed away in his district, he burned their death papers. Then he bought the birth and school papers from the family. He created unimpeachable biographies for the dead men and sent the papers off to Beijing with his own photograph. He was probably paying someone to process them. By the time things opened up again, he had any number of valid passports hidden away. Unfortunately, he didn't have them with him when things went wrong this time.”

I had a lot of questions, but I settled on one close to home. “Why didn't he buy Mr. Chan's papers?”

“He got too involved with-” She hesitated and blew on her tea again. “With the family,” she said at last.

“Oh, good lord,” I said, feeling myself blush.

“Eleanor doesn't know,” Mrs. Summerson said quickly. “I really think Mrs. Chan was the love of Lo's life. Not that anything is simple with Lo.”

Chalk up another one for Mrs. Chan. Tran was standing in front of the picture of the Chinese children, staring at it as though he were about to step into it. He'd withdrawn from the conversation, except to thank Mrs. Summerson for the tea.

“Why didn't he just ask them for the papers?” I said. “They would have given them to him. Why take the twins and make everybody crazy like that?” Nothing was simple with Lo, she'd said, but I wasn't so sure. For the Chans, and maybe for Mrs. Summerson, Lo was a snapshot taken thirty years before. In the thirty years they'd been gazing at the snapshot, a different picture had been developing over decades, hidden from their view. How does anyone know who an old friend will become over time?

“He couldn't ask them. He didn't want them to know what he needed. Suppose those men had traced him to the Chans through his notebooks, as he was sure they would, and suppose the Chans had told them about the papers. They can buy Chinese Immigration, you know. If they couldn't, they couldn't stay in business. There might have been men on the lookout for Eleanor's father at every checkpoint in China.”

It was so simple, even if Lo was so complicated. “I'll be damned,” I said, without thinking. “Sorry.”

“I've heard worse in my life,” Mrs. Summerson said, “and in many languages. I wish I had some cookies for Tran.”

“I okay,” Tran said to the picture.

“You should go to New Orleans,” Mrs. Summerson said maternally. “You could fish for shrimp.”

I went back to basics. “How did Lo usually get back to China?”

“The way he came, on the ship. That's why he wasn't carrying extra papers.”

“Okay.” I closed my eyes and ran it past. “He came in, he got betrayed, he had to get out, he stole the kids to get to Mr. Chan's papers.” She nodded. “I'll be damned,” I said again.

“I hope not,” Mrs. Summerson said.

“Me, too. Okay, so how your dodge worked, at least most of the time,” I suggested, “was that you'd give Lo the name of an old student-”

“No,” she said promptly. “The other way around. Lo would find them and talk to them, and if they wanted to come out, he'd write me a letter. We had a code,” she confided, sounding very pleased with herself. “He didn't want to use names in case the letters were read, so we made small copies of the class pictures, and he'd work numbers into the letter that told me what year, what row in the picture, and what position in the row, counting from the right. Chinese read from right to left, you know.” She laughed unexpectedly. “The first time we did it, I wasn't thinking, and I counted from the left. I was expecting a lovely girl named, oh, what was her name? Daisy Wang, that was it, and when the day came I had a great hulking man named Warren Lu. And that was before I'd fixed the basement, so he had to sleep upstairs in the guest room and use my bathroom and everything. Oh, it was a mess.” The big guileless eyes came back to mine. “You're sure Eleanor knows about this?”