The Man With No Time

“Not then,” Eleanor said. She sighed. “I still don't, to tell you the truth. He knew everything, how we got out, and what our names were. He talked about the escape for hours, it seemed like. We were all so happy, Simeon. And he had that letter from Mom.”

The letter was the big problem. “Did you read it?”

“No.” She wiped her nose.

“Well, did it look like her handwriting?”

“Simeon, it was in Chinese. All Chinese writing looks alike to me.”

“When did you call your mother?”

“Right away, but she wasn't home. I told her machine to call me instead of Horace because I knew the kids would be asleep.”

“So she never talked to him.”

“He was so warm' she said suddenly. 'I mean, we were all crying. He held me like a daddy and cried and laughed. He knew everything about us.”

I took a breath. “Did he know about the twins?”

“He even knew their names. He joked about Eadweard's.”

“The twins are four,” I pointed out.

A car passed us on the street below, stitching a seam of noise into the fabric of the night. Eleanor put both hands on Horace's forearm but kept her eyes fixed on me. “I see,” she said tonelessly.

I wanted to put my arms around her and tell her everything would be fine, but I didn't believe that it would. “He used the return address on a seven-year-old letter.”

“Maybe Mom wrote him more recently.” She was looking at me but talking to Horace.

“Ask her,” I said.

“Yes,” Eleanor said, not doing anything. “Right.” Then she let out a deep breath, stood, and left the room.

“What did you think, Horace? Did you have any doubt?”

“I'm not sure I do now,” he said. “If that wasn't Uncle Lo, it was Laurence Olivier.”

As long as Eleanor was out of earshot, I decided to try a sneak play. “Why won't you let me do anything?”

“Those kids with the guns,” he said. “They're not on their own.”

“Who are they with?”

He shook his head.

“She didn't,” Eleanor said faintly from the doorway. She was leaning against the doorjamb. “In fact, she's not sure she remembers writing him seven years ago.”

“Wah,” Horace said, abandoning hope.

“But you know Mom,” Eleanor added unconvincingly.

Horace knotted his hands behind his neck and rotated his head with a noise like someone stepping on a wineglass, and Eleanor pushed herself away from the wall and sat beside him and began to knead his shoulders.

“And, of course, your mother never saw him.”

“Of course not,” Eleanor said, concentrating on Horace's shoulders.

“Pansy,” Horace blurted, pushing her hands aside.

“What about Pan-oh, good Lord.” Eleanor got up and hurried back into the hallway.

Two minutes later Mrs. Chan was seated on the couch, flipping through a thin stack of Polaroids. She looked longest at the fifth, then took it between thumb and forefinger and brought it up to her eyes. It was a close-up of a laughing man with a seamed face, a lot of gold teeth, and a puffy black eye.

She held the picture up to Horace accusingly.

“Lo,” she said.

5

Hypothetical Vietnamese

The very next day, Monday, I broke my promise.

“Vietnamese,” Hammond said smugly. “Those kids have to be Vietnamese.” I'd spent the night dreaming without sleeping, thrashing around on my bed like a gaffed fish, tangling myself in the sheets, and trying not to look at the pictures projected on the insides of my eyelids: Eleanor finding the house I now lived in, Eleanor making the curtains that still hung on the walls, Eleanor's face when she'd learned I was having an affair, Eleanor's straight, slim back going down the driveway on the day she'd moved out. Eleanor with the kids. Pansy, the trusting bride from Singapore, luminous with pride after the doctor had told her she was carrying twins. Horace, that same day, being transparently modest about the strength of his loins.

Eleanor with the kids again, the three of them tumbling and laughing in an early-morning room splashed with sunlight and bright dust. Eleanor and the kids she hadn't had.

At five I'd given up on sleep and taken an early shower. I was jogging the perimeter of the UCLA campus by seven, trying to run off a load of guilt that was way too heavy to carry, and by nine, after a second shower in the men's gym, I'd used my stacks privileges at the University's Powell Library to pull out everything I could find about Chinese crime, and especially about Chinese crime in America. Maybe I could work the guilt off.

There was a whole lot more than I'd thought there would be.

Nine cups of coffee and three hundred pages later, it was three in the afternoon, and I was jittering in a chair at Parker Center, laying a line of carefully worked out bullshit on Al Hammond.

As always, Hammond was a lot bigger than he needed to be and, as always, he looked mean enough to eat kittens. In front of cats. He always intimidated me, in spite of the fact that most of the time, Hammond was my friend. I'd chosen him from a roomful of cops at a Hollywood cop bar called the Red Dog when I'd decided to be a detective, as opposed to a university professor. At the time I had put years into preparing to be a university professor and only weeks into being a detective, but those weeks were quality time, as people seem to like to say these days. A good friend of Eleanor's, a quiet Taiwanese girl named Jennie Chu, had been tossed onto the sidewalk from the roof of one of the UCLA dorms. Jennie had been dead on arrival, and Eleanor had been alive in my bed when someone had called to give her the news. Since the UCLA cops and the LAPD didn't seem all that interested, I'd helped Eleanor through her grieving process by finding the cocaine dealer who'd used Jennie to practice the vertical shot put. His mistake: He couldn't tell Asians apart. I'd happily broken both of his elbows, learning something sort of thrillingly unpleasant about myself in the process, and delivered him to the police. At that point I had more superfluous degrees than a Fahrenheit thermometer, the result of having stayed in college for what seemed like decades because I couldn't think of anything to do.

After Jennie, I had something to do.

“Why Vietnamese?” I asked. We were in a long room full of sickly fluorescent light and scarred wooden desks. Other detectives talked on phones or slogged on big heavy cop feet toward the coffee. I'd passed on the coffee.

“Why are you here?” Hammond countered. He was a cop to his bitten fingernails.

“This is purely hypothetical, Al,” I said, retreating toward the bullshit.

“And it has nothing to do with Eleanor,” Al said with ponderous irony.

“Eleanor who?” I asked, crossing my arms to emphasize the scholarly patches on my jacket. The lapels spread to reveal the aging Megadeth T-shirt beneath, and I tugged them closed. Hammond, like most cops, thought heavy metal was the musical equivalent of assault and battery. “I've decided to finish an old sociology thesis on urban crime. Asians are tops in their high school classes, tops in the graduation lists of lots of universities. Where are they in urban crime?”

“Tops,” Hammond said promptly. “They're fucking with the Mafia like no one ever has. Ninety percent of the