I passed on Doreen for the moment. “Forty thousand dollars is a lot of money.”
“It is, isn't it? Tea?” I shook my head, and she poured for herself. “For the longest time I had no idea where to get it.”
“Where did you?” It sounded rude, but there wasn't much I could do about it.
“I was just going to tell you,” she said reprovingly, “when you interrupted me.”
“I'm sorry,” I said, wondering when the Dormouse would pop out of the teapot.
“I was, as they say these days, sitting on it all the time. Do you have any idea what's happened to California real estate values?”
“I've heard something.”
“I paid—we paid—fifteen thousand dollars for this house. And we paid most of it in cash, too. Dr. Summerson didn't believe in debt. Usury, you know, is prohibited in the Bible.” She ran her fingers through her short, thick hair in a gesture oddly reminiscent of Eleanor. I wondered whether Eleanor had gotten it from her.
“Well, seven or eight years ago people started writing me letters about the house, wanting to sell it for me. I threw the letters away at first—they were from people I didn't even know, and they wrote to me by name, and I thought it was presumptuous.” She sipped her tea and made a face. “Cold. But finally,” she continued, pouring her cup into the pot and then tilting the pot into her cup, “I began to wonder. If all these absolute strangers were sending me letters about the house, what in the world could it be worth? So I invited one of them here, and I told him that I truly wasn't thinking about selling, but could he make a guess at what I would get for it if I did, and he said four hundred thousand dollars.” Her eyebrows went up. “We ran whole schools in China for ten or twenty thousand dollars a year, including food. Well, it seemed like a sin to let such a vast amount of money just stagnate when there was so much good that could be done with it.” She leaned toward me confidingly, about to share a secret. “Have you ever heard of a home equity loan?”
“Remotely.”
“It's like magic. The house becomes a big checking account. Now, whenever I want to bring someone out, I simply write a check against the house for forty thousand dollars and deposit it in my checking account. It's as easy as that.” Her big eyes were brighter than I'd ever seen them.
As easy as that. She must have made many bankers very happy. “How many times have you done it?”
“Four,” she said promptly. “And this time makes five.” She put a hand to her mouth. “I'm afraid I fibbed about how many times I've seen Lo.”
“This time,” I said, remembering the name she'd mentioned. “You mean Doreen?”
All the good feeling left her face, and she looked old and confused. “That's a problem,” she said, “now that Lo is gone. I really don't know what to do about Doreen.”
“Doreen. Does she have a last name?”
“Doreen Wing. A lovely girl, tiny and so smart. She spoke French, too.”
“And the problem?”
“Lo's gone, and Lo's henchman, the one who sent Tran here all those times—”
“Right,” I said.
“Well, even if the henchman is still in place, this young man,” she fretted, glancing at Tran, “isn't. Whoever replaces him won't know where to find me, where to send this boy's replacement to get the money. If the second half of Doreen's payment isn't forthcoming, they'll put her in some dreadful place. Lord knows what they'll do to her.” She had one hand to her mouth, as if she'd just said something unspeakable.
“Probably nothing,” I said with an assurance I didn't feel. “Put her to work for a couple of years, unless she runs away and comes to you.”
“She has no idea where I am. Lo brought them to me after the payment was made.”
“You're right,” I said, not particularly interested. “It's a problem.”
“It's ghastly. That poor little girl, all alone here with no one to help her.” In Mrs. Summerson's mind, Doreen Wing was eleven years old and would be until she showed up, graying, on the doorstep. I was trying to integrate Doreen into the plan, such as it was, when she added, “Of course, none of them will have anyone to turn to.”
I waited, hoping she didn't mean what I thought she meant. She just gazed at me, perfectly at ease with the silence. “None of them,” I said neutrally.
“The other two hundred or so,” Mrs. Summerson said. “It is two hundred, isn't it?”
“One hundred seventy-two,” I said. Everett had been firm about that.
Tran began to laugh.
“You think this is funny?” I demanded.
“Has to be sad or funny. I choose funny.” He thought about it and laughed again.
“What does he mean?” Mrs Summerson didn't actually sound very confused this time, and I wondered whether I was being manipulated by a seventy-some-year-old missionary. Still, I'd wondered about the hundred and seventy-two, too. Over and over. It was the reason we hadn't simply called the INS about the ship: that and the fact Charlie hadn't been aboard. I'd been poking at the thought of the hundred and seventy-two like a sun blister I was afraid might be malignant, afraid to go any deeper.
“If we can do anything,” I said hopelessly, “we will.”
She looked from me to Tran and back again. For a moment I thought she was going to smile. “What do you mean, if you can do anything?”
“We, um, we plan to put a little crimp in their operation.”
“Good. Then you can rescue them,” Mrs. Summerson said, sipping her tea at last.
“We're not set up,” I protested, “to rescue the entire adult population of China.”
“Well, surely that's figurative,” she said.
“Where could I put them?” I asked, just to slow her down.
“A church,” she said. “I have one you could use.”
“Swell,” I said. “A church.”
“Simply deliver them to me. 'Deliver the little children unto me,' as Jesus says in one translation.”
“I don't know. I mean, I do know. We can't do it. I mean, what are we going to deliver them in?”
“The vans,” Tran immediately volunteered. “They go to San Pedro in—”
“Shut up,” I snapped. He gave me a Vietnamese snicker. It sounded a lot like an American snicker.
“That's rude,” Mrs. Summerson said to me. “I can have the church ready in twenty-four hours.”
My resistance gave out. “We'll do what we can.”
“Good. And if there's anything I can do . . .” she said, sounding doubtful.
“Not really,” I said cheerlessly. “Not unless you know when they're coming.”
“Well, that's easy,” she said promptly. “I have to know, so I can get the money. They're coming tomorrow night.”
Chez Tiffle was dark. The cottage was the same vintage as Mrs. Summerson's, and I was reasonably certain that it also had a nice, big, more or less soundproof basement.
Tran and I had cruised the block twice, trolling for our furtive friend, and on the third pass, Tran said: “Here, him.”
I was cramped down in the passenger seat, and as much as I dreaded the encounter, the idea of straightening up had a lot of appeal. “You know the drill.”
“Salowly,” Tran said, sounding like his brother. He turned left and then left again. One more left brought us onto Hill, a block from the place where Dexter was waiting in the truncated little stretch of Granger. Tran dimmed the lights once as we approached, and when Dexter pulled out into traffic he was behind the white Hyundai.
“Three blind mice,” Tran said, eyeing the rearview mirror.
Traffic was a little lighter than I would have like it to be. “Watch the stoplights. You want to get a yellow one.” The light directly in front of us turned from red to green, and Tran slowed the car by a few miles an hour and looked elaborately around, overacting a man searching for something. We were in the right lane, and cars passed us impatiently on the left. One fat clown shoehorned into a tiny Honda Civic honked at us with a sound like a Vel
cro sneeze.
“They're both through,” I said, looking back nervously. “Slow down a little, would you?”
“Who's driving?” Tran asked, braking anyway. He caught the Sunset light, a good long one, on the yellow, and slowed to a stop. Behind us, Dexter pulled his big tubby Lincoln up so that it almost touched the rear bumper of the white Hyundai.
“Here goes,” I said, forming the words around my heart, which had decided to move north and take up residence in my mouth. We'd already disconnected the interior light, so I got out of the car on the passenger side without sending up any skyrockets. Hunched over and feeling like Lon Chaney, I worked my way back past three cars until I was to the left of the Hyundai, and then I pulled out the automatic and stood up, approaching the passenger door.
When I yanked it open and shoved the gun inside, the Chinese man in the driver's seat yelped and whipped his head toward me. Then the yelp turned into a sigh, and he narrowed his eyes and pushed the gun aside.
I stood there, listening to my heart booming in my ears. “Where the hell have you been?” I asked Horace Chan.
PART IV
TIME-BINDING
Our tidy notions of time and space quickly break down in the realm of the very small. For example, at the subatomic level it is possible to measure both the velocity of a particle and its position, but it is impossible to measure them simultaneously.
—Frances Steig
The Space-Time Intersection
19 - The Mild Bunch
One-thirty a.m. In the waxy light of yet another McDonald's, my crew looked pasty and ill-matched. I'd been fantasizing the James Gang and gotten the Musicians of Bremen.
I felt like my battery life had been cut to minutes. Horace and Tran were still bickering. The missing Musketeer, Dexter, had disappeared after we worked the snare that had netted us Horace, saying he'd return with a surprise. I wasn't sure I had energy in reserve for a surprise, but it was always hard to say no to Dexter.
Despite fifteen minutes of concentrated explanation, Horace eyed Tran as though he expected him to sprout fangs and dive for the throat. Tran was, after all, half of the reason he'd abandoned the comforts of home and hearth to stalk the mean and lonely streets of vengeance, or whatever the hell he thought he'd been doing. I let them growl at each other while I listened to my internal clock running down and tried to figure out where we were.
In the sixteenth century, a Jesuit priest named Matteo Ricci showed the Chinese how to create a memory palace. The memory palace, a prototypically Renaissance conceit, was an elaborate imaginary edifice intended to help its owner defeat the erosion of time by providing an organizational principle for the storage of a lifetime of mental baggage. The floor plan of the palace guided its owner from idea to idea, detail to detail, simple to complex: the anteroom might be a museum of first things; branching corridors led to ramifications and possibilities; the inner rooms could be furnished with outcomes. The various stories suited perfectly the Renaissance preoccupation with ordering things from highest to lowest. The memory palace wasn't a new concept in Europe even in the sixteenth century, but it was a dazzler for the Chinese, and Ricci was a persuasive salesman, renowned throughout China for his ability to look once at a list of one hundred Chinese ideograms and recite them, in order, weeks later.
My own memory palace, to the extent that I had one, was a replica of the tumbledown shack I called home. At the moment I was filling its rooms with a jumble of places, times, personalities, cultures, dangers, possibilities, drawbacks, wild cards; and no matter how I arrayed them in the cramped rooms of my memory hovel, the rooms kept filling up with corpses. Some of them people I loved.
If the artifice failed to function, it wasn't for lack of furniture. Tran and Peter Lau, Everett and Mrs. Summerson, had given me more data than I could sort into categories and raised more possibilities than I could entertain. No matter how I tried to order them, I wound up piling everything I couldn't fit behind the couch and mentally jumping up and down on it. Well, that was pretty much the way I cleaned house, too.
Tran got up for yet more ice cream, and Horace lapsed into a pallid sulk. I decided the time was right for a heart-to-heart, took another look at his face, and decided I'd been wrong. Okay, discuss plans.
“This is what we want to do,” I said to Horace, who responded with a sullen stare. “Let's take our goals in increasing order of difficulty. One. We want to mess this deal of theirs up in a way that makes it harder for them to do it next time. Got that?”
He nodded without much interest.
“Damn it, we can't get Lo,” I said for the third time. “He's in China, remember?”
“I'm Chinese,” Horace said meaningfully, “but I speak English.”
I retreated. “So we want to screw up the deal. If Tran knows all he says he knows, I think I can do that.”
“Yeah?” Horace asked. He put his index fingers under his eyes and rotated them up and down, and I stopped feeling irritated. He was at least as tired as I was.
“Two. We want to put Claude B. Tiffle somewhere dark and small for a long time. If we can do the first, we can do the second.”
“Tiffle,” Tran spat, materializing with a strawberry ice-cream cone in his hand.
“Old Claude B.,” I said. “Three. We want to get Charlie Wah. We want to cross him up so he comes out of wherever he's hiding and runs the wrong way. Into us, preferably.” No one said anything. “And that's going to be tough.”
“And four,” I said, abandoning hope for the discussion, “we want to get out of this alive, in a way that won't endanger your family, Horace, when the assholes sort this out.”
I glanced at Horace, and got more reaction than I'd expected. He was staring past me and above me, looking like the crack of doom had just opened in the parking lot.
“Five,” Dexter said, dropping a hand onto my shoulder, “we want to free the slaves.”
“I was getting to that,” I said, and then I looked beyond him and into a face that would have stopped a grizzly in mid-charge. It belonged to a man the color of fresh asphalt who might have been six and a half feet tall and who might have weighed two hundred and ninety pounds, and who might have been the end of civilization as we know it. He wore a pink Bryn Mawr sweatshirt, baggy blue jeans, and a black watch cap rolled low over his eyebrows.
“This here Horton Doody,” Dexter said. “He my surprise.”
“Horton Doody?” I said involuntarily.
The obsidian marbles Horton Doody used for eyes rolled slowly toward me and fell into a slot that locked them on my face. “Somethin wrong with that?” he growled, bumping the bottom of the aural ocean.
“Horton a knife man,” Dexter offered tactfully.
“Wrong?” I said immediately. “What could be wrong? Fine old name, Doody. One of the Philadelphia Doodys?”
The left corner of Horton Doody's mouth twitched upward. He probably thought he was smiling.
“So, Mr. Doody,” I said, “you're joining our merry band?” Hope made a belated reentrance, wearing a tutu and gossamer wings.
“Dexter say money in it,” Horton Doody rumbled.
“Horton here fond of the green,” Dexter advised. “Take a lot of cash to sustain all that flash.”
“Whuff,” Horton Doody said. I think it was a laugh.
“He already been watchin Everett at a hundred an hour.”
“Big job,” Horton Doody said, sounding like an entire bowling alley.
“Of course, money ain't everything,” Dexter said. “Horton want to free the slaves, too, even if they Orientals.”
Something came to mind. “Who's watching Everett?”
“Horton's bigger brother.” Dexter said. “He in, too.”
“The Doody Brothers?” Horace asked, looking confused. His frame of reference, on rock and roll and practically everything else, had stopped expanding in 1979. “How many more are there?”
“Five,” Horton Doody thundered. “I the baby.”
“I take it a
ll back,” Horace said to me. “You might have the help you need.”
“This little Oriental peewee name Tran,” Dexter said to Horton Doody. “Big bald Oriental name Horace.”
“Horace?” Horton Doody asked. His eyebrows did something complicated under the cap. “Whuff, whuff.”
“People who live in glass houses,” Horace said, passing a hand self-consciously over his remaining hair.
“And the faggot asked you about his merry band name Simeon. Think he got a big brain. He the one gone suicide us all.”
“Whuff,” Horton Doody said. He was having a great time.
Dexter looked at each of us in turn. “What a bunch,” he said. “Look like somethin in a bum's pockets.”
“Count Horace out,” I said. “He's going home.”
Horace slapped the table. “Goddamn it, Simeon, stop speaking for me.”
“But you've got a fam—”
“I know what I've got. And we've got Horton Doody, here.”
“He only one man,” Tran said. Horton Doody gave him a glance that knocked him back a step.
“Yeah, but he a man we can all hide behind.” Dexter said. “And he got brothers.”
“Eleanor will kill both of us,” I said to Horace.
“Thass Simeon,” Dexter told Horton Doody. “Takes on the whole Chinese mafia but scared of his girlfriend.”
“Look,” I said, the soul of reason, “why don't we all sit down and sort this out? Pull up a couple of chairs, Mr. Doody.”
He took it literally. “Name Horton,” he said, distributing his weight.
“It's really swell to meet you,” I said. “Really, really swell. You have no idea. Tran? Have a seat. Horace?”
“I've got to go the bathroom,” Horace said. “I was in that car for hours.”
“I'll come with you,” Dexter said. “Just a couple of girls.”
“That Dexter,” Horton Doody said fondly when they were gone. People looked around to see who was moving furniture. “Ack like a African violet. You're cute,” he said to Tran, who was working on his ice-cream cone, looking perhaps eleven.
The Man With No Time (Simeon Grist #5) (Simeon Grist Mysteries) Page 23
