The Man With No Time

“Not home. Eating. Dexter always eating.”

My blood pressure rose. “Who the hell's watching Everett?”

“Friend, he say.”

“Great. A friend. Well, nothing we can do about it now. Where's he eating?”

“House of Breakfast. Olympic Boulevard. Dexter only eat breakfast, but he eat it four times a day.”

I checked behind us again. “Let's go interrupt him.”

We cruised Tiffle's four times: Tran driving, me sitting on my lungs in the passenger seat so I couldn't be seen through the window. By then Dexter was stationed in his maroon Lincoln on the little dead-end section of Granger Street across Hill. If the tail made a move, he'd have to get across Hill somehow, but I figured he'd manage.

On the fourth pass, Tran said, “Nothing.”

I turned to wave Dexter to join us, and we met a block away. “Who's with Everett, anyway?” I demanded.

“Somebody make Everett wish he never learned English. You gone to meet him.”

“I can't wait. I need you to follow Florence Lam home.”

Dexter made an elaborate show of scratching his head. “Florence Lam.”

“Weepy,” I clarified.

“I like Snowbell.”

“Me, too,” Tran said.

“Florence Lam,” I said. “And don't let her see you yet.”

“You didn't have to say that,” Dexter said. “Hurt a man's feelings.”

“We'll meet back here at ten and cruise old Granger Street again.”

“She got a eye for a man,” Dexter said, “she gone to spot me.”

18

The Underground Railroad

Esther Summerson's eyes swam supernaturally large and blue through the dusty lenses above me. I was standing on the first step of the porch, looking at her through a fine mesh of nylon, trying to figure out how anything that was likely to happen in the next half hour or so could possibly do anyone any good.

“Yes?” she said. She had the distracted air of someone who is listening to music in her head. The screen door was closed and, I imagined, latched against whatever slavering beast L. A. might decide to deal up. When she'd turned on the porch light from inside it had brought moths, and they swooped and fluttered against the glass, looking for whatever it is moths look for in a light.

“Hello, Mrs. Summerson,” I said. I stepped up onto the porch and gave a little wave, hoping to attract some attention. “I'm Eleanor's friend, remember?”

The magnified eyelids came down with an almost audible clank, and when she opened them again she was back in the present and she knew me. “But of course, and how nice,” she said, sounding like a missionary again. “It's Mr. Grist. How are the twins?”

“Eating and sleeping,” I said, exhausting my fund of baby knowledge. “May I come in?”

She hesitated as though she were translating the words. “Oh. Well, certainly you may. I'm sorry. This seems to be one of my foggy days.” She fiddled with the screen door and then held it open.

“I've brought someone along,” I said, moving forward, and Tran stepped into view.

Leaning slightly, she peered at him in the half light. She started a smile, but the smile turned into a rictus, and she turned her whole head, birdlike, to look at me, stepped back, and used both hands to slam the inner door. It hit my foot and bounced back against her, knocking her a step backward. I lunged and grabbed her shoulders before she went over backward. Tall as she was, she was even heavier and more solid than I'd expected, and my back creaked alarmingly again.

Her eyes were clamped shut now, and she was shuddering violently. “Go away,” she said, mostly breath. She smelled of powder and lavender.

“Where's Lo?”

“You should be ashamed of yourself.” She fluttered ineffectually at my hands, gathering strength. “Pretending to be Eleanor's friend. Anyway, you can't get Lo now. None of you can. He's in China, where no one will find him.”

“We're going to talk,” I said. “Come in, Tran. Close the door.”

She made little shooing motions in his direction. “You can't. He can't. I'll call the police.”

“You know you won't. How are you going to explain Tran?”

“Please,” she said, “I need to sit down. My legs are shaking.”

“You know where the living room is, Tran?”

He nodded. “Where she give me cookies.”

“Take her there. Let her sit. Keep her in one place.”

He took her arm very gently, saying, “Come, please, Missus.” She tried to tug herself free and then allowed him to lead her slowly down the hall, talking to herself in Cantonese. I stood, inhaling the aromas of cooking oil and sachet, and waiting for something else, the smell of men: bodies, cigarettes, hair oil, anything that didn't fit into this last, exclusively female, missionary outpost of old China. Pulling my cold little nine-millimeter automatic from my jacket pocket, I searched the house.

The first floor was crowded with heavy furniture and relics of a life of dour and earnest enterprise among the heathen. The walls bristled with photos of rigorously stiff men and women, white and Chinese, the Chinese eyes fixed politely to one side of the camera lens, so as not to stare at the viewer. More groups of solemn Chinese children, like the ones pictured in the living room, assembled portentously in front of the weathered schoolhouse-or another just like it-on the barren plain to have their portraits made. I counted ten of these, all framed and dated, and then stopped counting. Books were everywhere, in both Chinese and English: Bibles, commentaries on the Bible, commentaries on the commentaries, biographies and autobiographies of missionaries, Chinese dictionaries, histories of the Middle Kingdom.

Front room, old-fashioned drawing room, half-bathroom, kitchen with its heavy wok and a mound of half- chopped vegetables, enough only for one, little maid's room with a desk occupying most of it, covered with correspondence in Chinese. A door under the stairwell, the one that should have led to the basement, was locked. The lock was heavy, bright new brass. I put it on hold and went up the stairs to the second floor as quietly as I could, knowing that anyone up there would have heard us come in. Tran and Mrs. Summerson were talking softly but urgently in the living room, all aspirates like wind through trees.

The upstairs was virginal and nostalgic, a doleful museum. The big bedroom contained a single bed heavily flounced in chintz and some very good Chinese rosewood furniture. On a small bamboo table next to the bed I found a pair of men's silver hairbrushes, perhaps a century old, and in my mind's eye I saw her packing and unpacking them for her husband each time the two of them were transferred or forced to flee. The rest of the house may have been dusty, but the brushes had been polished until the engraved initials R.D.S. were almost rubbed away.

Directly above the table in an oval frame hung a hand-tinted photograph of a young woman with lustrous and adventurous pale eyes and a heavy coil of dark brown hair: the young Mrs. Summerson, decades and deaths and continents ago. It was a complicated face, bold and demure at the same time, the face of someone quietly waiting for something momentous to happen.

A long connecting bathroom, unexpectedly cluttered and wet, led to the guest room. The bed sagged in the middle as though it had been folded lengthwise for decades. Everything was musty and coated with a fine fall of dust, weeks and weeks' worth of dust.

When I went down the stairs I was on tiptoe. I found Tran sitting alone in the living room, looking up at the somber Chinese schoolchildren.

I checked the corners of the room, just to make sure. “Where is she?”