“Mrs. Summerson,” Eleanor began urgently.
“Because Christmas was the one day each year when you must believe in Christ.” She sat back triumphantly. “Isn't that wicked?”
“Tea, Simeon?” Eleanor asked between her teeth.
“You little pagan,” I said. “I'd be afraid to take tea from your hands.”
“But I'm forgetting my duties,” Mrs. Summerson said hastily. “Please. Let me pour.” Her hands trembled slightly as she lifted the pot. Aside from a plain gold wedding band she wore no jewelry. Eleanor's eyes followed the big hands with an expression I couldn't quite read.
“Someone was just talking to me about you,” she said, passing Eleanor a cup and saucer with a wedge of lemon. “Who was it?”
“Uncle Lo,” Eleanor said conversationally, as though we'd been talking about him for hours.
“Oh, of course. Poor man.” She shook her head gravely. “I suppose he came and saw you?”
“Last Friday.” Eleanor sipped her tea and waited.
“Dreadful thing. Mugged, right there on the streets of Chinatown. It's getting so no place is safe any more. I've been thinking of putting in new locks.”
“It's a good thing he wasn't really hurt,” Eleanor said neutrally.
“Well, his pride was hurt. And there was that eye, of course. Not very distinguished-looking, I must say. He's always been such a self-reliant man. I suppose he's getting older, too.”
“I wasn't aware that you'd kept in touch with him,” Eleanor said. “I knew you and he knew each other in China, of course.”
Mrs. Summerson moved things around on the tea cart in a way that, in a less godly person, might have suggested a stall for time. “He popped up about a year after your mother and brother came back from Sacramento,” she said to the dish of lemon slices. “You must have been eleven. Just knocked on the door one fine morning with some lovely ivory for me. That was when there were still elephants, of course. We simply went back to the same work,” Mrs. Summerson said, putting down her tea untouched. “Exactly as we did with you and your mother. Mr. Lo got them out of China and Dr. Summerson and I got them into America. They'd just eased up on the Chinese quotas, and it was easier than it had ever been to get visas and passports. I only wish Dr. Summerson could have lived to see it. It would have gratified his soul.”
“So Uncle Lo brought out people after us.” Eleanor was clearly surprised at the news, and not entirely pleased. She actually sounded jealous.
“A few.”
“From where?”
Mrs. Summerson pursed her lips. “Mostly Fujian,” she said. “It's on the coast, so it's a little easier. And then, too, the people are mostly fishermen, so there are lots of boats around.”
“Well, I'll be darned,” Eleanor said.
“How many times have you seen him since?” I asked.
“Two or three. He came every five or six years or so, so make it three. Three times in the last twenty years. Of course, the Chinese government put a stop to all that in the eighties, and I haven't heard from him now in, well, let's see, five years.”
“You never told us about this.” Eleanor managed not to make it an accusation, although her feelings were plainly hurt.
“It never came up, my dear.”
I put down my own cup. “What did he say about the mugging?”
“Oh, he was in a terrible state. Mad enough to spit. Said he'd been jumped right on the street.”
“What did they take?”
“Everything. His money, even his cigarettes. I gave him some money, of course, and let him stay here. I let him buy his own cigarettes.”
“What day did he arrive?”
“Well, he was here three nights and he left on shopping day, which is Friday, so it must have been Tuesday, mustn't it? Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday night, and gone on Friday morning.”
“Did he come back?”
She glanced up at me and then looked at the ceiling. Then she looked back down at the cup in her hand. Her back was rigid. “No,” she said, an Asian quarter-tone higher. She was a terrible liar.
I let it pass. “Who beat him up?”
“Thugs. One of those gangs. Everyone's in a gang these days, it seems.”
“Did he say what he was doing in America?”
She relaxed. “Just visiting,” Mrs. Summerson said. “More lemon?”
In the car, Eleanor wrapped her fingers around my upper arm and rested her head on my shoulder. “There was a time when I loved that lady more than my own mother,” she said. “She was everything I wanted to be.”
“Meaning?” We were most of the way back to the apartment, and it was still only three-thirty.
“Generous, good-hearted, self-sufficient, and white. All the white kids in school were calling me names then. Ching-chong. Wang-wang. And I'd go home, and she'd be white, too, even if she did speak better Cantonese than I did. Horace and Mommy were in Sacramento, and I felt like the only Oriental in the world.”
“Poor prickly little Ching-chong.” I was thinking about Mrs. Summerson's lie. Lek had heard Lo say, “Dim sum time.”
“I outgrew it,” she said. She rubbed her forehead against my shoulder. “I'm sleepy.”
Her forehead felt good. “Me, too.”
“You've been great through all this. Very steadying.”
“It's not over yet.” Mr. Manly speaking.
“It's going to be all right. I'm not going to ask you how you found out about Mrs. Summerson. You made a promise, and I know you didn't break it.”
“Of course not,” I said with the quick indignation of the guilty.
“I may have to kiss you on the neck.”
“The ear,” I said.
“What have you got to bargain with?”
“I didn't have to go anywhere near Chinatown to find out about Mrs. Summerson.”
“What a man,” she said. “The ear it is.”
As she reached her face up to me I hit the bump at the bottom of Horace and Pansy's driveway. Alice took a good bounce, and I leaned down and got her on the lips.
She settled back, looking satisfied. “That's cheating,” she said.
“Bugger cheating, as the British would say.” I coasted Alice to a stop and looked up at the apartment. “Bet you a big one they're all asleep,” I said.
“What happens if you lose?”
“Then you have to give me a big one.”
“I am completely indifferent,” she said, “to the outcome of this bet.”
We closed the car doors softly and went quietly up the stairs. I eased the door open and let Eleanor in. The apartment was silent. At the end of the hallway, Eleanor stopped and said, “Oh.”
Over her shoulder, I saw Horace and Pansy lying on the couch, their arms and legs in a knot. Pansy was facing us, and her eyes flew open at the sound of Eleanor's voice, and Horace jerked around spasmodically and then fell off the couch. Both of them were blushing furiously, but Horace just rolled all the way over and came up on his knees facing us with his hands outstretched, looking like Al Jolson.
“Eadweard's at Mom's,” he said. Pansy sat up, her face crimson, smiling like a fool.
“Already?” Eleanor looked at her watch. “But it's—”
“You know Mom. She drove by every fifteen minutes. He was only in there an hour. The third time she went by, his car was gone. She went in and found Eadweard sitting on the living-room floor.”
Eleanor ran to him and kissed him and then kissed Pansy. Pansy let out a kind of strangled giggle, and Eleanor backed off. “She's bringing him down?”
“No,” Pansy said firmly and happily, putting one hand to her forehead as though she had a fever. “We take a plane, six o'clock.”
Eleanor surveyed the two of them. Horace's shirt was held closed by only one button, and his hair was sticking up again. “I think we old folks ought to leave these two kids alone,” she said, turning to me. Her delight made her look ten years old.
“I'll take you on a double date.”<
br />
“That sounds half as good as a single.”
“It's already set,” I said. “Want to come?”
“Sure,” she said. “We've got celebrating to do. Let me change my clothes. What are we doing, anyway?”
“Dinner.”
“That's very informative. Dressy or not?”
“Not.”
“What else is new?” Eleanor said.
“Horace,” I asked, “what did he take?”
Horace looked at Eleanor and then at me, and then he tucked his shirt in. “That's the funny part,” he said. “He didn't take anything.”
8 - Card Tricks
The double date turned out to be a fivesome.
“This is Sonia de Anza,” Hammond said proudly across the table. Then he forced a smile that looked like it weighed ten pounds and added, “And this is her brother, Orlando.”
Seated, Sonia de Anza was as tall as Hammond and a lot better-looking. She was dark-haired, straight-nosed, square-jawed, and striking, with oddly yellowish eyes, the longest real lashes I'd ever seen, and delicately flaring nostrils that made me think of perfume. Orlando was Sonia as a boy of seventeen, with the same features metamorphosed, as though seen through water: The square jaw added definition to her face while the fringe of lashes softened his. Even a member of another species could have seen at once that they were brother and sister. Hammond and Sonia were dressed casually, Hammond in a red muscleman's polo shirt and Sonia in a pale lavender blouse that made her skin look darkly creamy, but Orlando was decked out in an IBM-issue white shirt with a badly ironed collar and a narrow black patent-leather tie. He glanced once at my aging Megadeth T-shirt and then looked politely away.
We all mumbled pleasant preliminaries at each other, and Eleanor and I let go of each other's hands long enough to sit down. I immediately grabbed her hand back. The restaurant was Hammond's choice, one of those vestigial time capsules from the fifties where you sit in red leather booths and eat red meat, and women with red lipstick drink Manhattans with red cherries and blow smoke rings. A big Christmas tree blinked and shimmered in the foyer, dropping needles on dummy presents and scenting the air with pine. I felt like all I'd done in the past three days was eat meat. The sleepless nights were playing tricks with my sense of time, making the lunch with Hammond seem only hours ago. Lo was as two-dimensional as a figure in a frieze.
“Al says you should have been a cop,” Sonia de Anza said at once. Her voice was low and throaty, softer than her face had led me to expect.
“I did not,” Hammond said huffily. “I said he thought like a cop.”
“Gee, Al,” I said, “almost thanks for the compliment.”
“What does a cop think like?” Orlando asked. He made it sound like a trick question.
“Like a snowplow,” Hammond said, fearsomely avuncular. “We bull our way through the fluff until we hit something hard.”
“How disappointing.” Orlando offered kindly old Uncle Al the cold shoulder. “I'd hoped cops thought like Porfiry in Crime and Punishment.”
Hammond threw him a sour glance and then looked at Sonia. “Orlando's gifted.”
“He'll graduate from USC next year,” Sonia said, a little apologetically. “He'll only be seventeen.” She patted his hand. “But he's still being a little fart. He knows what cops think like. They think like me.” He opened his mouth, and she said hurriedly, “Like I.”
Eleanor nodded toward Orlando, and said to Sonia, “He's very beautiful,” and Orlando went redder than the leather in the booth.
“Well, you know what they say about appearances,” Sonia said, clearly pleased.
“Thinking like a cop,” Hammond offered, hoisting a menu bigger than The Little House on the Prairie, “how are your hypothetical Vietnamese kids?”
Eleanor withdrew her hand and very slowly turned to look at me.
“Real discreet, Al,” I said, my ears burning.
“Lookit, Sonia. Now they're both blushing.” Hammond made a show of fanning me with the menu. “Anyway, Sonia already knows about it. She's the only one I've told.”
“You don't get your kiss back,” I said to Eleanor. “I didn't get Mrs. S. from him.”
“Mrs. S.?” Hammond's ears went up the way Bravo's do when I mention food.
“Are you Chinese?” Orlando asked Eleanor, as though no one were talking.
“If I'm not,” Eleanor said, “my mother has gravely misled me.”
He leaned toward her. “How old are you?” Sonia looked alarmed.
“Far, far, too old, but thanks.”
“Have you got a sister?”
“Orlando!” his sister said. Hammond, looking at me, slowly crossed his eyes.
“No,” Eleanor said seriously. “But surely, you shouldn't have any trouble—”
“I'm too young for them,” Orlando said with surprising bitterness. “Girls at school are what, nineteen, twenty? I'm sixteen. I can't even drive.” For the first time he sounded like a teenager.
“I see,” Eleanor said. “That's a problem.”
"As long as we're talking hypothetically, Al . . .” I began.
“Do you know anybody?” Orlando asked Eleanor.
“I'm thinking,” Eleanor said.
“Let's assume a hypothetical kidnapper,” I said. “Let's assume he steals a kid or two, or even just takes something precious—”
“She doesn't have to be Chinese,” Orlando said helpfully.
“That's enough, Orlando,” Sonia said, very much the older sister.
“But it would help if she could drive,” Orlando finished very quickly. Then he looked down at his plate and began to pick at the cuticle of his left thumb.
“What does he want, your kidnapper?” Sonia asked me.
“He doesn't say. Just demands that a house be left empty and unguarded for a certain number of hours and that everything of any value be sort of piled in the middle of the living room. And the person who owns the house comes home at the appointed time and the kid is right there, and nothing's missing.”
“Something must be missing,” Hammond said. “Did they check carefully?”
“Oh, yes,” Eleanor said, “this person would have checked very carefully.”
Hammond looked from her to me as the silence yawned around us. “You guys are sharing a hypothetical life, huh?”
“We have been for years,” Eleanor said.
“It was a card trick,” Sonia suggested. “He asked them to pile up everything valuable just to distract them and then, uh . . .”
“Took something worth nothing?” Hammond challenged.
“This is thinking like a cop?” Orlando asked. He didn't sound awestruck.
“He risked a lot to take this kid or these kids or whatever it was,” I said. “If it was a kid, he even transported it over state lines.”
“Hey, hey,” Orlando said, snapping his fingers, “maybe he left something.”
We all looked at him.
“Sure,” he said. “Maybe the whole thing was for him to get inside when no one was there and have something. He never wanted to take anything at all. He just told them to put the stuff out because—”
“That's pretty good,” Hammond said grudgingly.
“Alternative,” Orlando said promptly. “What he took doesn't have any value at all except to him. It wasn't even with the stuff they put out. That's why he had them put the important stuff out, so they'd look there instead of anywhere else. Like Sonia said, a card trick. It's something so unimportant that it won't be missed, but it's important to him.”
“I may have a girl for you after all,” Eleanor said.
“That's the direction I've been leaning toward,” I said to Sonia. “Something that seems to be worthless.”
“Nothing is worthless to my mother,” Eleanor said, and then stopped. “Oh, good lord,” she said. She wrapped her right hand into a fist and pretended to try to force it into her mouth.
“Just some relative, huh?” Hammond said accusingly.
&nb
sp; “Case closed, Al. All over, and at no cost to the taxpayers.”
“A kid was transported across state lines?” Sonia demanded.
“What do you think about Emily Liang?” Eleanor asked me.
“Nice little girl. Plays the piano, doesn't she? Wears a lot of pink?”
“I mean, for Orlando.”
Orlando pulled the center out of a piece of bread and rolled it up between his palms, the picture of adolescent nonchalance.
“Nah,” I said, “she's too nice for Orlando.” He gave me a startled glance.
“What do you mean, it's over?” Hammond's shoulders loomed toward me.
“The kids are home. Nothing valuable is missing. It was all a . . . a—”
“A family misunderstanding,” Eleanor finished for me.
A big pill made out of bread hit me on the ear. “How could she be too nice for me?” Orlando said.
“What a question,” his sister scoffed. “Have you got a brother, uh, Eleanor?”
“Do I ever,” Eleanor said.
“And you seem so calm,” Sonia said.
“How many conversations we got here?” Hammond asked. “I feel like I've got jet lag.”
It reminded me of Uncle Lo, and it seemed like safe territory. “Just what exactly is jet lag?”
“It's a displacement of the circadian rhythms,” Orlando said, getting it out of the way so he could return to his main theme. “How could she be too—”
“Circadian,” I said. “Pretty word. Sounds like Shakespeare, the seacoast of Circadia.”
“What I really don't like,” Orlando announced to the world at large, “is when someone asks a question and doesn't listen to the answer.”
“Circadian,” Eleanor interposed, “circa dies, literally 'about a day.' A rhythm that repeats approximately every twenty-four hours.”
“An internal rhythm,” Orlando said sulkily.
“Like sleeping?” Hammond asked.
“You have hundreds of them,” Eleanor said. “Your digestive system, your basal metabolism, body temperature, endocrine glands, brain waves. All cyclic, all set to a period of about twenty-four hours. When you change time zones—” she glanced at me, realizing what I was thinking—"you, um, you have to readjust all those little clocks to local time."
The Man With No Time (Simeon Grist #5) (Simeon Grist Mysteries) Page 9
