The Man With No Time

“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.”

“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.