The Man With No Time sg-5

by Timothy Hallinan

  The Man With No Time

  ( Simeon Grist - 5 )

  Timothy Hallinan

  Timothy Hallinan

  The Man With No Time

  The links among the Chinese make up a network that covers the globe.

  — Gontran De Poncins, From a Chinese City

  PART I

  THE DOG

  The dog is a creature that keeps watch and is skillful in its selection of men. On this account the ancients on all their festive occasions of eating and drinking employed it.

  — Khan Hsaing-Tao

  1

  Another Saturday Night

  Horace Chan had pointy little eyebrows like upside-down Vs. If they'd met over his nose, they would have formed a perfect M, and the M would have stood for Maybe. For years I'd been watching Horace make a bet and then hedge it, as reflexively as the rest of us inhale after we exhale, and now I was watching him hedge the biggest bet of his life: the one he'd made when he got married.

  This was serious, because Horace was almost my brother-in-law. And even worse: He was one of the very small group of people whom I love. So why was I watching him nuzzle some stranger dressed in a little something that could have been sewn from the cellophane torn from four packs of Marlboros?

  “She like you,” Horace's Uncle Lo observed sagely.

  Horace snickered. Horace had an unappealing snicker under the best circumstances, and these weren't they. I tried to kick him under the table.

  My kick missed and struck Uncle Lo on the shin.

  “Sorry,” I said. Uncle Lo was the guest of honor, the reason I was watching Horace punch holes in his marriage.

  Uncle Lo didn't seem surprised that I'd kicked him. He was maybe seventy years old, and looked like nothing had surprised him since his seventeenth birthday. His face, generously seamed by gravity and time, had probably been under absolute control since his whiskers sprouted. Control over facial expressions was something people apparently learned early in Mainland China.

  “You have hiccups?” he asked. For the tenth time that evening, I asked myself why I didn't like him. I was supposed to like him. After all, Uncle Lo was the Chan family hero. And the Chan family included Eleanor Chan, my longtime ex-girlfriend and the person I loved most in the world. I corrected my aim and tried to kick Horace-Eleanor's equivocal brother-again, and missed everyone.

  “Getting late, Horace,” I said, resorting to a less physical form of communication.

  “I love you,” the girl to my right said promptly, wrapping her arms around my neck. “No shit.”

  “That's very promising,” I slurred, perhaps denying the line the points it deserved for sheer novelty. How many beers had I drunk, anyway?

  “Promise her anything,” Uncle Lo said, leaning toward me as though we shared a confidence.

  No points for him, either, as far as I was concerned. There was a candle on the table, shielded in a rippled red glass, and it splashed his face from beneath with a malevolent light. To my intoxicated Anglo eyes-even after years of seeing my future in Eleanor's Chinese eyes-Uncle Lo, looming over the candle, still looked like a lot of racial stereotypes-mostly of a host of villains in black-and-white movies. The effect was heightened by a black eye that reminded me of the circle surrounding the eye of the mutt in the "Our Gang" comedies, except that there was nothing comic about it. Of course, the stereotypes might have been suggested by our surroundings, a mostly-Chinese hostess bar somewhere in the Asian colony known as Los Angeles. But bar or no bar, Uncle Lo didn't look like a hero. A pirate, maybe, but not a hero.

  The hero glanced at his watch for the eighth or ninth time. “Telephone?” he asked. The girl to my right said, “In the back,” and stuck her tongue into my ear.

  “Yeesh,” I said, swabbing it with my little finger.

  We all watched him go, thin and only slightly stooped, against the background of the bar, prematurely tinsel-festooned for Christmas. The other booths were jammed full of Chinese males in three-piece suits and young Asian women in outfits of varying degrees of transparency. A dead Christmas tree twinkled depressively in a corner.

  “He's only been here twenty-four hours,” I said to Horace. “Who could he know?” I looked at my little finger. It was wet. “And where'd he get the shiner?”

  “Somethin wrong with you ear?” asked the girl to my right.

  “It's the humidity,” I said, striving for pleasant. “Listen, Horace-”

  “Taste funny, too,” said the girl to my right. She'd told me her name was Ning when we sat down, and I saw no reason to doubt her. Whether she loved me was another question. I wiped my finger on my shirt.

  “Want a Q-Tip?” Horace asked, producing one from a vest pocket. Horace made a practice of carrying one of everything, up to and including small articles of furniture, in his pockets. Another sign of irresolution. Why be prepared only for the library just because you've decided to go to the library? You might change your mind and wind up on a freighter bound for Kuala Lumpur. I could have traveled the world for a year on the contents of Horace's pockets.

  I didn't want a Q-Tip, but Ning had already grasped it and inserted it into my ear. I yanked back as though she'd poked me with a cattle prod, and the girl sitting next to Horace joined Ning in a hearty laugh. The laugh settled it: Both women were Thai. Nobody but a Thai can laugh that heartily without breaking a rib.

  Horace managed an economical Chinese chortle, and Ning put the dry end of the Q-Tip in her mouth and bounced it up and down. Horace, who didn't smoke, produced a lighter from somewhere and extended it, and Ning waggled it up and down between her teeth and said, “Peetah. Peetah, Peetah, Peetah.”

  “Bette Davis never said that,” I observed.

  Ning gave me what the Thais call “small eyes.” It's not a friendly expression. “You no fun,” she said. “Him,” she added, indicating Horace, “him fun.”

  “He's also married,” I said, looking at the girl sitting next to Horace. “In fact,” I said, stretching a point, “we're all married.”

  “You taste married,” Ning said, sliding away from me.

  The girl next to Horace responded to the bulletin by twining her arms around his neck and saying, “Married. Pah.”

  “Who married?” The lady whom the management had assigned to Uncle Lo slid into the booth. She was a few years older than Ning, and maybe a decade older than Horace's girl, and she was mistakenly trying to make up for added years by subtracting clothes. With less on than the average whelk, she succeeded only in looking like she'd somehow managed to reclaim her baby fat. Her name came to me out of the fumes: Lek, Thai for “little.”

  “Everyone in the world,” I said, a bit wildly, noticing that my glass was empty again. “Me, him, and the other him.” Ning picked up my empty glass and waved it in the direction of the bar.

  “More,” she called. Actually, “Mo-ah.”

  “No,” I said. The bartender sang out something cheerful and untranslatably Asian, then began to pour.

  “Married?” Lek shrugged. “If he not married, why he's here? Man who's not married don't need bar. Not married, got plenty girl.”

  I rubbed my face, which seemed to have gone numb with a wooden, absolute numbness that suggested the onset of some exotic neurological disease. So I wasn't drunk. I was only dying. “We don't need girls,” I said.

  All three girls responded with merry Thai laughter, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on nitrous oxide. As the hilarity crested, a beer was slapped down in front of me, and a young Chinese-looking woman seated herself at an electric piano and began an energetic phonetic rendition of “Jingle Bells.” People sang along in various languages.

  “We're leaving,” I said to Horace, trying and failing to stand up. �
�Pansy's waiting for you.” Pansy was Horace's wife and the mother of their twins, and as far as I was concerned an immediate candidate for sainthood.

  “Pansy,” Uncle Lo said dismissively, standing above us again. “Who cares?”

  He'd sounded a lot fonder of Pansy at Horace's house, and now his tone caught Horace's attention. Horace looked up at him, wide-eyed.

  “I do,” I said. This time I managed to get to my feet, and I was relieved to see Horace stand up, too.

  “Gotta hit the toilet,” Horace said, edging out of the booth.

  “Good luck,” Lek said cheerfully, and we all watched Horace weave his way toward the plumbing, as though he were part of the floor show.

  Uncle Lo sat down next to me, closer than I would have liked. He smelled like the old clothes at the bottom of the hamper.

  “The check,” I said, leaning away.

  Lek pouted politely and then floated in the direction of the bar. The electric piano gurgled out the opening chords of Elvis's “Blue Christmas.”

  “You detective boy,” Uncle Lo said, surprising me. When I'd been told the family hero was in town, I hadn't known he'd been told what I did for a living.

  “Yeah,” I said, worrying about Pansy and the twins. “Detective boy.”

  “Hah,” Uncle Lo said, as though I'd admitted personally eating most of the members of the Donner Party. “Some Chinese not like detective.”

  “And some detectives don't like some Chinese,” I said, draining my newly full glass without thinking about it.

  Uncle Lo put his hand on my arm and squeezed. I lowered my head-which seemed to take a lot of time-to check it out. His index finger was scraped raw, its nail split vertically to the quick. It must have hurt him to squeeze my arm, but nothing showed in his face. “What you think about me?”

  “I think you've got a terrific black eye. And I think Horace should be home with his wife.”

  Uncle Lo sank his fingers more deeply into my arm, and I watched the skin beneath the nail go white, except for the livid line of red beneath the split. It had to hurt like hell Then he smiled a cheese-yellow crescent that defied the pain and stood. He didn't wobble this time. “We go home then.”

  “Swell,” Horace said, materializing next to the table. He'd splashed his pants, leaving a pattern that suggested an archipelago of uninhabited islands adrift in a khaki sea. “The urinal moved,” he said.

  The girls laughed again, dutifully this time, and Horace settled the tab, added a big tip, and led us out through the door in an imprecise conga line. Horace and I had lost the ability to identify either of our feet as right or left, but Uncle Lo walked with the kind of precision that would have qualified him to lead the Long March. Once we were squeezed into the front seat of Horace's little Honda-the backseat was taken up with the twins' stuff-Uncle Lo leaned against my shoulder and went promptly to sleep.

  “I gather the dog tried to bite you,” I said conversationally, but he'd departed the conversation zone.

  Horace was far too drunk for L.A. on a Saturday night, but the luck that had deserted him in the men's room rejoined us in the car. He swerved away from oncoming headlights once or twice and said "Wheeee" too often to reassure the faint of heart, but eventually we pulled up behind the apartment house that he and Pansy and the twins rented from his and Eleanor's mother. Pansy stood silhouetted in the light from the door as Uncle Lo revived against my shoulder and gave the world a survivor's squint.

  “So,” I said as Uncle Lo and I climbed carefully out of the car beneath Pansy's sober gaze. “Who'd you call in the bar?”

  “Always detective,” Lo said. He held up the wrist bearing the watch he'd kept checking. “I look my watch, and all wrong. So I call Time.”

  I started toward my car before the question struck me: “Why didn't you ask one of us what time it was?”

  “Detective boy,” he said dismissively, “Good night.”

  I thought about it all the way home.

  2

  Dim Sum and Then Some

  As much as I loved Eleanor Chan, my hangover was making it difficult to like her.

  “He saved my life,” Eleanor said, grabbing my arm with surprisingly strong fingers.

  “This seems to be a family trait,” I said, pushing her hand aside. Then I hung onto her wrist. The room had developed an alarming tilt.

  We hadn't been seated yet. Horace, Pansy, the two kids, and Uncle Lo were late meeting us, and the competition for tables at the Empress Pavilion was too fierce to allow us to do anything but mill around hopelessly, clutching our paper numbers and praying that the rest of the group showed up before our number was called. The entire Chinese population of Los Angeles proper, which is to say all but the more recent Mandarin-speaking arrivals who had laid claim to Monterey Park, showed up at the Empress Pavilion for dim sum on Sundays. Every single one of them was talking. For all the myth of the inscrutable Orient, the Chinese are the most demonstrative people on earth.

  “Well, he did" Eleanor said, raising her voice over the din. Like many Chinese, she seemed perfectly at ease packed shoulder to thigh with strangers. "He carried me, literally carried me, more than two hundred miles across China on his shoulders with my pregnant mother following behind dressed as a peasant. When we hit the water he tied my hands around his neck and swam toward Hong Kong with my mother paddling along behind.”

  We hadn't actually talked about this in detail before. “Lo did that?”

  She turned away, scanning the crowd for latecomers. “The harbor was full of police boats. He bought them off, somehow. Three or four times we saw the spotlights skipping over the water. Once a light stopped just above our heads and someone yelled something in Cantonese. I thought we were dead.”

  “What did he yell?” I just can't help asking questions.

  “Who knows? I was just a little kid. But whatever it was, and whatever Uncle Lo called back, the boat turned around without picking us up and moved away from us, and Uncle Lo told us to follow the boat, and half an hour later another boat picked us up and we were in Hong Kong.”

  “He must be very resourceful,” I said.

  She gave me Full Glare. “You make it sound like an accusation. If he hadn't been resourceful, I'd still be in China.”

  “I'm grateful,” I said, meaning it. My headache approached tumor magnitude. “But there's still something wrong with him. Whose brother is he? Your mother's or your father's?”

  “Neither,” she said. She looked at my big doleful white man's face, mistook my grimace of pain for a pang of conscience, and lifted herself up to kiss my cheek. She'd always been forgiving, and I'd often taken advantage of it. “Uncle is a term of respect. For years, I thanked Uncle Lo in my prayers every night for what he did for my family. If he hadn't, there wouldn't have been any family.”

  Now we were on familiar ground. Eleanor's family had been landowners, a fatal mistake when the Chinese government made one of its Great Leaps forward. Her father, a university professor, had spent eighteen hours kneeling on broken glass and reciting his sins to illiterate Red Guards. Then he'd been sent to prison in Manchuria, and when the prison officials realized he was going to die, they released him so they wouldn't have to bother with the body. Somehow he got himself home and impregnated his wife with Horace as a final gesture toward life. That finished, he'd turned his face to the wall and let life go. That was in 1959. Eleanor was two.

  Like many men of his class, he'd been an intellectual, which made him doubly guilty. He'd written a long scholarly treatise about Cao Xueqin's The Dream of the Red Chamber, the novel that Eleanor and I loved best in the world. It had brought us together at UCLA, me in Literature, she on loan from Oriental Studies. Both of us had been transfixed by the tale that set forth the problems of Bao-Yu, the pampered and neurotically sensitive rich boy, and his two beautiful female cousins, the ethereal Dai-Yu and the earthy Bao-Chai-a vanishing Gone with the Wind way of life painted unexpectedly on a Chinese canvas like the frilly blue tragedy of the Willow Pat
tern.

  “So, Uncle Whoever,” I said as the room listed in the other direction. “Uncle Duplicitous who doesn't like Pansy.”

  Eleanor's eyes narrowed, never a good sign. “Simeon.” Then she heard what I'd said. “What do you mean, he doesn't-”

  A hand landed heavily enough on my shoulder to make my teeth crack together, and I turned to see Horace grinning lividly at me. He was an especially drab shade of olive and perspiring freely, and there were flushed blotches under his eyes. Over his shoulder, Pansy gazed cheerfully at me through her square spectacles. Compassion surged over me. “Nice imitation of military camouflage, Horace,” I said, throwing an arm gently over his shoulders. “How are you, Pansy?”

  “We are fine,” Pansy said as she always did, meaning the family. Pansy's ego could have floated in a fairy's tear. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that said OHIO U, and her inevitable high heels. Something was missing.

  “Four-ninety-one,” said the woman at the cash register.

  “Here,” Eleanor called urgently, waving a slender arm. She grabbed my sleeve and yanked at me, and Horace came along in my wake, grunting unhealthily as he bumped against me. Pansy, who couldn't see his face, put a possessive hand against the small of his back and beamed affectionately at his neck. “Horace isn't hungry,” she said to me.

  “I'll bet he isn't,” I said as Eleanor pulled us along. Horace burped discreetly, and the burp reminded me of what was missing. “Where are Julia and Eadweard?” I asked. I hadn't seen Pansy without the twins since the day they were born.

  “Home,” Pansy said. In the absence of the twins three cameras hung around her neck, vestigial organs from an earlier life in which she'd wanted to be a photographer. Marriage and the twins had recast her, in the Chinese tradition, as wife, mommy, and daughter-in-law to Eleanor and Horace's remarkably difficult mother. Until that moment in the Empress Pavilion, the only mementos of her earlier calling had been the twins' names, which were bestowed in honor of Julia Cameron and Eadweard-pronounced "Edward"-Muybridge, two of the seminal figures in photography, and the abandoned cameras hanging high on the walls of the apartment where the children couldn't reach them.