Charlie tilted his head and regarded me. “Too easy,” he said. “Let's see if you stick to it.” Then he drew back his arm and swung the hammer directly at my chest.
I actually heard the rib break. A tide of hot red pain swept over me, starting at the broken rib and spreading through my body until it filled even my toes and fingers with a sticky, unholy heat. I gasped for breath, and the pain started again, a spark at first, then expanding outward like a ball of flame, pulsing ahead of the deeper pain that propelled it, and I was screaming. When the scream was exhausted, I grabbed air again and the seed of pain exploded once more, and this time I stifled the scream and hung there, trying to take in sips of air.
“You learn fast,” Charlie Wah said approvingly. “Some fools scream over and over again. We actually lost one to a heart attack. What are their names?”
I hung there, gaping at him like a fish. Their names, whatever they had been, had been washed from my mind. I closed my eyes, and the room began to spin wildly, and I forced them open again, trying to anchor the universe with the weight of Charlie Wah's yellow suit.
“We'll break one on the left side this time,” he said, raising the hammer.
“Dexter Smif. Horton Doody. Howard Doody,” I said. He'd never find them.
He gave the hammer a little heft and looked deeply into my eyes.
“Even you couldn't make up those names,” he said at last. He thought for a moment. “Smif?”
“That's the way he pronounces it. I don't know what it says in the phone book.”
“Addresses, please.”
“I don't know their addresses.” The hammer came up. “They're in my computer,” I said, the words tripping over each other in my eagerness to get them out before the hammer fell again.
Charlie Wah leaned toward me and gave the broken rib a little tap with the hammer, and I heard my voice scale upward again and snap like a dry wishbone, and then I was hanging there, coughing and sobbing.
“Is that all?” he said with exaggerated patience.
“Yes.”
“It wasn't,” Charlie Wah said, stepping back. “The little one who didn't really look very black was the Vietnamese we should have killed?”
“Tran,” I said. “I don't know where he is.”
“You do, you know, but we'll get to that later. Each of them has fifty thousand dollars?”
There were words there, floating right in front of me, and I grabbed them. “Unless they've spent it.”
Charlie Wah's face creased in merriment. “The Vietnamese will never spend it,” he said. “But who knows about black people?”
“Yeah,” I said, wishing I could double up.
“Which would you prefer,” he asked conversationally, “another broken rib or another shot?”
“What do you want from me now?”
He looked at Bluto. “Enjoyment.”
“You'd better hurry,” I said, using as little air as possible, “before Dexter and Horton spend your money.”
“A shot, I think,” Charlie Wah said. “Then we'll see about the rib.”
Bluto toddled toward us with the syringe. “Don't do anything active,” Charlie Wah cautioned me. “That rib is a very dirty break.”
The fire in the arm again, and then my head swam violently, as though some giant baby had picked up the dollhouse and given it a twirl, and then the pain screaming from the rib miraculously subsided to a roar. I closed my eyes in relief, and when I opened them I was looking at two Charlie Wahs, overlapping each other.
“. . too drunk,” I heard myself saying.
“Too drunk for what?” Charlie Wah asked politely.
“Computer,” I said. The last syllable was very difficult. I suddenly found I couldn't hold my head upright, and my chin bumped my chest.
“You have a point,” Charlie Wah said. He backed away from me and wiggled a finger for Bluto. “Cut him down.”
Bluto came toward me in a series of waves, and I had to close my eyes again to keep from vomiting. I felt his hands pass professionally over my ribs, and then the rope slackened, and I went down on my seat, the rib compressing another vast ball of pain into a seed and then exploding it, and my body jerked open again. When I opened my eyes I was flat on my back.
Bluto had a knife now and he was sawing at the rope around my wrists, not being overly careful about not cutting me, and Charlie Wah was standing in front of Mrs. Summerson with his gun loosely trained on Bluto and me. Then the ropes parted and I took my eyes off Charlie and off Mrs. Summerson and looked anywhere else in the world as she very slowly stood and picked up the heavy stool as though it were a Q-Tip and brought it down on Charlie Wah's head.
Bluto turned at the sound as Charlie crumpled and dropped his gun, and I grabbed the handle of the knife and turned it against the nerve-rich web of skin between Bluto's thumb and index finger. He jerked back to me, letting loose a scream and reflexively jerking his hand back, and I snatched the knife and drove it into the muscle of his calf, feeling it hit bone and slip aside, and he went down on top of me. Charlie was beginning to stir as I pushed Bluto off, the rib sending out concentric circles of pain, and I got to my feet at the same time Charlie's fingers touched the gun and launched myself at the light switch, flipped it off, and backed away.
In the sudden darkness, my legs hit the stool Mrs. Summerson had dropped and I went down on my side, the side away from the broken rib. I hooked an ankle under the stool and kicked it away from me, and when it landed a flame blossomed in the dark. Charlie had shot at it.
The boom from the gun ricocheted back and forth for what seemed like half an hour as I dragged myself toward the couch. The floor was heaving like a ship's deck beneath me and I was fighting down the greasy clams that were trying to climb back up my throat. I was drunker than I'd ever been in my life.
Then the darkness blistered in front of my eyes and pushed itself toward me, and I almost drowned in it. I gulped air to remain conscious, and someone moved, and Charlie fired two shots, and I heard one of them smack into flesh and there was a deep groan from Bluto as I turned my head and vomited and then vaulted for the couch, for where the couch had to be.
As I landed, Mrs. Summerson started to scream. Charlie snapped off something in Chinese and the screaming stopped, and then there was silence. A tardy bird sang outside, and my mind seized on the notes and turned them into a loop, a bird's drinking song, high-pitched and monotonous. The darkness started to blister and swell again, but I found the will to push it away and listen.
There should have been a moon. The fog had sealed it off so completely that it might have been circling another planet. Someone breathed: Charlie, I guessed. Near where I had last seen him, anyway. Someone else coughed, a deep ugly sound with fluid in it: Bluto, probably, still on the floor. I pressed the tip of my tongue against the top of my mouth, an old radio trick for eliminating breathing noises, and slowly drew air around it. The rib pinged brightly, and the pinging increased as I leaned over the back of the couch and put my right arm down behind it.
“I hear you,” Charlie announced. I froze, bending down over the broken rib, and the couch rippled and heaved beneath me. I had to put my other hand, the one bleeding from Bluto's knife, onto the couch to keep from losing my balance, and Charlie fired again at the noise, once this time, and the bullet slapped into the leather to my left. Dust tickled my nose.
“There's nowhere you can go,” he announced. “This is the only door out.”
Keep talking, I willed. I'd gotten both arms all the way down, and my fingers brushed the carpet. Just the carpet. I'd have to move down the couch.
It was a creaky couch.
“We can work this out,” Charlie said, sounding confident. “I've got the money. Hey, you can have the money. What's fifty thousand? Little change,” he continued, getting the idiom wrong. “Nothing to die for.”
A scuttling sound from the kitchen and then an enormously loud clatter in the living room, and Charlie fired again, and I scooted down the couch,
trailing my fingers on the carpet and hit cold metal with both hands. My skin, wet with sweat, squealed against the leather, and Charlie pumped two blind shots into the couch. More dust, invisible clouds of it, billowed out, and I fought to breathe through my mouth again.
“FYI,” Charlie said gaily, “I've got your gun, too. Lots of bullets left.”
His shoes squeaked. Bluto moaned weakly on the floor. I wrapped my fingers around the metal and the effort pushed the breath out of me, and I inhaled dust through my nose. Another deafening clatter. Mrs. Summerson was throwing frying pans.
Charlie didn't fire this time. He didn't say anything, either. Over Bluto's labored breathing I heard something soft, like a knife through silk, and I realized Charlie was sliding over the carpet. There was only one place he could be going. I fought to locate it in the swirling dark.
Another clatter, Fibber McGee's whole closet this time, but by the time it ended both semiautomatics were in my hands and I'd lifted them free of the couch. Prickly dust crowded my nostrils and the night swam in slow, undulating waves all around me. Fumbling at the guns' safeties, I aimed at the spot Charlie had to be heading for, and-
— sneezed.
It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open, so I didn't actually see the light snap on, but I yanked back on both triggers and felt the guns jumping, jumping and roaring more times than I'd expected. I opened my eyes in time to see Charlie slowly sliding down the wall beneath the light switch as bloody holes appeared in his suit, awful red on awful yellow. He fired once at the ceiling and lay back, his head propped up against the wall. His eyes were wide and confused.
I sneezed and vomited simultaneously, a new and mind-altering experience, and the broken rib kicked in to make it truly memorable. When I was back in the room again, I saw Mrs. Summerson staring down at Bluto with my last frying pan in her hand. He was clearly dead.
“Murderer,” Mrs. Summerson said, and it took me a long, pain-slowed and alcohol-befuddled moment to realize that she meant Charlie, and not me. She slowly brought the blue eyes up to mine.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“No,” I said. My bleeding hand slipped off the back of the couch, and I tried unsuccessfully to shift my knees to take my weight. “Get the money out of Charlie's pocket and call this number, would you?” I said. I gave her Dexter's, twice. Then the room upended itself for the last time, and my face hit the floor.
25
Dimmer Sum
The Empress Pavilion was jammed as always, but we'd come early enough to get a table.
Mrs. Summerson sat possessively next to Doreen, who had inadvertently brought Charlie to me. She and Mrs. Summerson had gotten the pilgrims settled in at the church and gone back to Mrs. Summerson's house for a long catch-up chat. They'd been there, undoubtedly sipping tea, when Charlie and his boys dropped in, using the address Lo's henchman had volunteered. Dexter had found Doreen bound and gagged in my bedroom when he'd come to pick up Charlie and Bluto.
By now, the other pilgrims had already been dispatched to Las Vegas.
Eleanor had claimed the chair to my right, between me and Mrs. Summerson. Across the table, Horace was spooning out something mysterious for Pansy, who passed it on to the twins. The twins were being good enough to convince me, momentarily at least, that they'd been worth all the fuss. Tran, looking brown and healthy, sat next to Pansy.
The three wild cards were seated opposite Eleanor and me: Hammond, Sonia, and Orlando. We'd been halfway out the door when Hammond had called and asked if I was free for lunch, and some perverse instinct had prompted me to invite them to join us.
“Nice place,” Hammond said, every inch the good sport. He loathed Chinese food as much as I loathed television evangelists.
“Ooooh, dim sum, Sonia said, eying the waiters and their carts. "Keep an eye on me, Al, or I'm likely to outweigh you.”
Hammond patted her hand, lowered his head at me, and charged. “Been a lot going on lately with the Chinese.”
“Boy, hasn't there been?” I asked brightly. “It's all you hear about.” The story had been everywhere, and Stillman's show-with me furnishing background, off-camera through a voice filter-had actually broken news off the TV pages. The cops had located dozens of Charlie's earlier slaves in Los Angeles, although surprisingly few of them seemed to be women destined for sordid lives of sexual servitude.
Hammond had no way of knowing about the four bodies Dexter, Captain Snow, and some Doodys had dropped into the sea, heavily weighted, about six miles offshore. Nor did he know about Everett, whom the Doodys had placed aboard an eastbound train after pounding his parents' phone number and address out of him and threatening their lives if Everett ever came back to L. A.
“Nothing to do with your little hypothetical problem,” Hammond said.
“That was just uncles,” Eleanor said, the picture of innocence. In justice, she didn't know about the bodies, either. I was going to tell her eventually, probably the next time we made love. Like maybe in an hour.
On the other hand, maybe we'd just make love.
“I spent decades doing the Lord's work among the Chinese,” Mrs. Summerson volunteered, “as a missionary. Misery among those fine people is an everyday commonplace. It doesn't even make the news.”
Hammond registered the fact that she was a missionary with a heavy blink.
“Same Vietnamese,” Tran said, serene and secure in the knowledge that he'd given thirty thousand dollars to his mother and had already bought a ticket to New Orleans, where he planned to buy a shrimp boat. “Always trouble.”
I grabbed a breath to interrupt him and winced. Beneath my turtleneck, I was taped from navel to gullet like a mummy who got the curse wrong and aimed it at himself.
“You're Vietnamese?” Hammond asked, looking not at Tran but at me.
“He's sweet,” Sonia said, beaming at Tran. “Look at his adorable little face.”
“Look this,” Tran said. He glanced down, pulled a quarter out of his salad fork, and spun it across his fingertips.
“Magic,” Orlando said impatiently, “is just a trick against time.” He was apparently peeved that we hadn't shown up with a seventeen-year-old girl in tow. Sonia hit him with an elbow.
“Say again,” Tran said, lifting his eyebrows.
“We've all been sitting here at the table,” Orlando said, “so we know you didn't slide that quarter under your salad fork. We've all had experience with salad forks, so we know they don't have quarters inside them, because no salad fork in the past has ever had a quarter in it. You contradict time when you pull the quarter out of the salad fork, which is why it's entertaining.”
Eleanor leaned in and rested her chin on her hand. “Do you still think time travels in one direction only?” she asked Orlando.
He shrugged impatiently. “Maybe it's all here at the same time: past, present, future. We can all look at the past. You do it every time you look at a star. The light you see started traveling toward us years ago, maybe millions of years ago. There isn't even any way to know whether the star is still there. It might have exploded when dinosaurs hatched eggs in Montana. It might flicker out tomorrow night, as far as we're concerned, but its death actually happened, in earth time, while some Tyrannosaurus rex was eating a little mammal. Back when mammals were nothing to worry about.”
“Bringing it closer to home,” I offered, “there isn't any way to be certain that a person you think you know is still there, either.”
“Your time, his time,” Orlando mumbled. “They're not the same.”
“I've been thinking,” Eleanor told him, “about time. Since the last time I saw you, I mean. I've decided I'm no fan.”
“I'm sure that time is bereft,” Orlando said crankily.
“It changes us in ways it shouldn't,” she continued. “It separates us, it makes us strangers to the people we're supposed to love. It buries the past and obscures the future. It dulls and yellows the world around us. Eventually, it kills us, but it doesn't even
let us off that easily. First it turns us into something we don't want to be: frail, ailing, dishonest with ourselves and mistrusting of others. And then, when we're hurting, it slows down to give us leisure to wish for what we were.”
“Oh, please.” Orlando sounded disdainful. “If you want to think about it in personal terms.”
Eleanor slipped something into my hand, something with sharp edges. “I think about everything in personal terms,” she said. “I'm a person. I think time is a cheat. It encourages us to make bets we can't win and then snickers nastily when we try to go back and bet again. What it doesn't tell us, what we can't know when we're young, is that all bets are for keeps.”
The thing in my hand was a postcard, a brightly colored picture of some rosy-cheeked Asian people standing around with some animals that might have been yaks. “But still,” Eleanor continued, “what strikes me is that most of the ways we measure time are beautiful. Old pocket watches. Medieval water clocks, dividing the day and night into so many splashes of water. Sundials. Aztec calendars carved into wheels of stone. Time counted in music, three or four beats to the measure. Stonehenge. Did you know that the ancient Chinese used incense clocks? They took a metal plate and cut a design into it, a single complicated groove, and they filled the groove with different kinds of incense, one for each two-hour period. Then they lit one end. People could wake up and know what time it was by the perfume they smelled.”
“Dr. Summerson gave me an incense clock,” Mrs. Summerson said wistfully. “Sung Dynasty.”
I turned the postcard over and stared down at it.
It was postmarked China.
“We never know what time it is,” Orlando insisted. “My time and your time-”
“Hush,” Sonia said. And, miraculously, he did.
It was a normal, junky, third-world postcard, printed on cheap, fiber-flecked paper that had been soiled by many hands. Hello children, it said, in rigidly rectangular English script, a script with years of missionary-school practice behind it. I ask your forgiveness.
The Man With No Time sg-5 Page 29
