Tran began to laugh.
“You think this is funny?” I demanded.
“Has to be sad or funny. I choose funny.” He thought about it and laughed again.
“What does he mean?” Mrs Summerson didn't actually sound very confused this time, and I wondered whether I was being manipulated by a seventy-some-year-old missionary. Still, I'd wondered about the hundred and seventy-two, too. Over and over. It was the reason we hadn't simply called the INS about the ship: that and the fact Charlie hadn't been aboard. I'd been poking at the thought of the hundred and seventy-two like a sun blister I was afraid might be malignant, afraid to go any deeper.
“If we can do anything,” I said hopelessly, “we will.”
She looked from me to Tran and back again. For a moment I thought she was going to smile. “What do you mean, if you can do anything?”
“We, um, we plan to put a little crimp in their operation.”
“Good. Then you can rescue them,” Mrs. Summerson said, sipping her tea at last.
“We're not set up,” I protested, “to rescue the entire adult population of China.”
“Well, surely that's figurative,” she said.
“Where could I put them?” I asked, just to slow her down.
“A church,” she said. “I have one you could use.”
“Swell,” I said. “A church.”
“Simply deliver them to me. 'Deliver the little children unto me,' as Jesus says in one translation.”
“I don't know. I mean, I do know. We can't do it. I mean, what are we going to deliver them
“The vans,” Tran immediately volunteered. “They go to San Pedro in-”
“Shut up,” I snapped. He gave me a Vietnamese snicker. It sounded a lot like an American snicker.
“That's rude,” Mrs. Summerson said to me. “I can have the church ready in twenty-four hours.”
My resistance gave out. “We'll do what we can.”
“Good. And if there's anything I can do. .” she said, sounding doubtful.
“Not really,” I said cheerlessly. “Not unless you know when they're coming.”
“Well, that's easy,” she said promptly. “I have to know, so I can get the money. They're coming tomorrow night.”
Tran and I had cruised the block twice, trolling for our furtive friend, and on the third pass, Tran said: “Here, him.”
I was cramped down in the passenger seat, and as much as I dreaded the encounter, the idea of straightening up had a lot of appeal. “You know the drill.”
“Salowly,” Tran said, sounding like his brother. He turned left and then left again. One more left brought us onto Hill, a block from the place where Dexter was waiting in the truncated little stretch of Granger. Tran dimmed the lights once as we approached, and when Dexter pulled out into traffic he was behind the white Hyundai.
“Three blind mice,” Tran said, eyeing the rearview mirror.
Traffic was a little lighter than I would have like it to be. “Watch the stoplights. You want to get a yellow one.” The light directly in front of us turned from red to green, and Tran slowed the car by a few miles an hour and looked elaborately around, overacting a man searching for something. We were in the right lane, and cars passed us impatiently on the left. One fat clown shoehorned into a tiny Honda Civic honked at us with a sound like a Velcro sneeze.
“They're both through,” I said, looking back nervously. “Slow down a little, would you?”
“Who's driving?” Tran asked, braking anyway. He caught the Sunset light, a good long one, on the yellow, and slowed to a stop. Behind us, Dexter pulled his big tubby Lincoln up so that it almost touched the rear bumper of the white Hyundai.
“Here goes,” I said, forming the words around my heart, which had decided to move north and take up residence in my mouth. We'd already disconnected the interior light, so I got out of the car on the passenger side without sending up any skyrockets. Hunched over and feeling like Lon Chaney, I worked my way back past three cars until I was to the left of the Hyundai, and then I pulled out the automatic and stood up, approaching the passenger door.
When I yanked it open and shoved the gun inside, the Chinese man in the driver's seat yelped and whipped his head toward me. Then the yelp turned into a sigh, and he narrowed his eyes and pushed the gun aside.
I stood there, listening to my heart booming in my ears. “Where the hell have you been?” I asked Horace Chan.
PART IV
Our tidy notions of time and space quickly break down in the realm of the very small. For example, at the subatomic level it is possible to measure both the velocity of a particle and its position, but it is impossible to measure them simultaneously.
19
One-thirty a.m. In the waxy light of yet another McDonald's, my crew looked pasty and ill-matched. I'd been fantasizing the James Gang and gotten the Musicians of Bremen.
I felt like my battery life had been cut to minutes. Horace and Tran were still bickering. The missing Musketeer, Dexter, had disappeared after we worked the snare that had netted us Horace, saying he'd return with a surprise. I wasn't sure I had energy in reserve for a surprise, but it was always hard to say no to Dexter.
Despite fifteen minutes of concentrated explanation, Horace eyed Tran as though he expected him to sprout fangs and dive for the throat. Tran was, after all, half of the reason he'd abandoned the comforts of home and hearth to stalk the mean and lonely streets of vengeance, or whatever the hell he thought he'd been doing. I let them growl at each other while I listened to my internal clock running down and tried to figure out where we were.
In the sixteenth century, a Jesuit priest named Matteo Ricci showed the Chinese how to create a memory palace. The memory palace, a prototypically Renaissance conceit, was an elaborate imaginary edifice intended to help its owner defeat the erosion of time by providing an organizational principle for the storage of a lifetime of mental baggage. The floor plan of the palace guided its owner from idea to idea, detail to detail, simple to complex: the anteroom might be a museum of first things; branching corridors led to ramifications and possibilities; the inner rooms could be furnished with outcomes. The various stories suited perfectly the Renaissance preoccupation with ordering things from highest to lowest. The memory palace wasn't a new concept in Europe even in the sixteenth century, but it was a dazzler for the Chinese, and Ricci was a persuasive salesman, renowned throughout China for his ability to look once at a list of one hundred Chinese ideograms and recite them, in order, weeks later.
My own memory palace, to the extent that I had one, was a replica of the tumbledown shack I called home.
