The Man With No Time

10

“In the good days,” Charlie Wah was proclaiming from one end of the room, “we had respect. We had natural order.” He paused, and the mild-looking translator who'd gotten the laugh at Ying's expense turned it into Chinese. Charlie had one hand in the pocket of his blue, double-pleated suit trousers, jingling enough change to choke a parking meter. He liked making speeches.

The girl sagged drunkenly against her pillar. The cut on her cheek had scabbed into a rusty thread, border-straight. I'd decided to kill Ying if I got a chance.

The boys had been stood back to back in the center of the floor.

“The man who enjoyed respect was the oldest man,” Charlie Wah said comfortably. “As it should be. The wisest man, the grandfather, the one richest in experience. This was Chinese. This was proper and right. This was Confucian.”

One of the Vietnamese boys, the handsome one, snickered. The man nearest him slapped him in the face, not hard enough to hurt but hard enough to snap his head around. Hard enough to humiliate.

The boy looked straight forward, his cheek scarlet. Dumbo-Ears blinked rapidly, as though he'd been the one who'd been hit. He looked childishly small, childishly young.

“Now the man who gets respect is the man with the gun,” Charlie Wah continued, shaking his head sadly. Fluorescent light gleamed on his high forehead, and change clinked and jingled. "He can be a thug, he can be the most stupid man in the room, but if he has the gun he becomes the leader. Why is this?

“Is it because we are in America?” He paused rhetorically as his words of wisdom were translated. “Not really. We see the same thing these days in Hong Kong and Taiwan. America has no corner"-he turned toward me and smiled-” 'no corner'?"

I nodded.

“No corner on thugs,” he said proudly. Then he bypassed the translator and rendered the idiom into Chinese for the benefit of the thugs present before returning to English. “Now we have the two-week millionaires, the men who sell the heroin. Slime.” He turned to regard the two boys, his eyes flat and black. “And now we have the Vietnamese.”

The baby with the Dumbo ears took a quick look at Charlie Wah and clamped his eyes shut.

“We need the Vietnamese in America.” Charlie sounded regretful. “There are things no Chinese man should be asked to do. But the old values are being broken down, and in America the Vietnamese are the hard end of the battering ram.”

He paused and then smiled. “Just so no one makes a mistake, my sons,” he added jocularly, “I am the man with the gun at the moment.” On cue, the two Mr. Chinese Universe contestants displayed short, ugly automatics. Charlie Wah beamed at them paternally. “The Vietnamese,” he said, picking up the thread and stowing the smile belowdecks. “We use them when we have to, and we pay them well, but they are trash and they act like trash. We could kill them, of course, just as we could kill this gwailo, but would it be smart? No.” He seemed to like answering his own questions even more than he liked speechmaking. “We need the Vietnamese, and killing a gwailo brings the police.” He lifted a finger and said sententiously, “Killing a gwailo always brings the police. We do not need the police.”

This sentiment, translated by the mild-looking little guy, brought a murmur of consent. Only Ying seemed unhappy. His eyes flicked to mine and then looked away. I was sorry to see that he'd stopped bleeding.

“So we will send a message,” Charlie Wah said. “One of these boys will take it to the Vietnamese, and the gwailo will write it in his daybook.”

“Diary, I said.

“And he will not be back.” He looked at me inquiringly.

“Absolutely,” I said absolutely.

“It would be very easy to kill you,” he said, a man considering a purely technical challenge. “We could, for example, strip away the covering from the wires above your head and plug in a sewing machine and turn it on. The handcuffs would be a very good. . ” He looked up at the ceiling as though the word he sought was likely to be printed there, like a drunk actor's prompt.

“Conductor,” I said, just to move things along.

“Or we could simply shoot you,” Charlie Wah said impatiently. He'd had his English corrected enough for one evening. Ying brightened and made a clucking noise.

Charlie scowled at him. “But, as I say, it would bring the police. Still. .” He looked at me, and I decided it would be an extremely good idea to shut up.

One of the Mr. Chinese Universe finalists trained his gun on me.

In the darkness, as they used to say on the old Fugitive TV show, fate moved its heavy hand. Dumbo-Ears decided to go for the exit.

His boot came down on the instep of the Chinese man closest to him, and the man made a surprisingly musical sound, raised his foot, grabbed it with both hands, and demonstrated an energetic new variant on the hop, skip, and jump. He was still in the hop phase when Dumbo-Ears, five steps away, stopped cold and sucked in his bare midsection to keep the point of a machete from finding a way through it to his backbone. The other end of the machete was in the hands of the guy who'd introduced the side of my head to the barrel of his gun with such memorable results.

“Ssshhaaaaah,” Dumbo-Ears said, sinking to his knees. Then he burst into tears.

The mood in the room changed, as though atomized blood had been sprayed into the air vents. Men shuffled their feet and sniffed it.

“Swine,” Charlie Wah said meditatively. “And cowardly swine at that.”

“He's just a kid,” I said.

Charlie Wah let go of his change, reached up to his mouth, and took out his gold toothpick. Then he pointed the sharp end of the toothpick in the direction of his left eye and poked it. Message received.

“Kill them all,” Ying said, encouraged by Charlie's dumb show.

“You,” said Charlie, spacing the words for effect, “are too stupid to be Chinese.” It got translated, and a few of the men laughed. Ying's eyes got very small, and he aimed them straight at me. I was losing friends fast.

“Put him back,” Charlie Wah instructed the goon with the machete, and the goon hauled the kid with the unfortunate ears to his feet and dragged him across the room until he was standing behind his friend again. The handsome one put a hand back and grasped Dumbo-Ears' wrist, and the two of them held hands, standing back to back as Dumbo-Ears fought to control his sobs. The girl against the pillar did something with her breath that could have been a cough but probably wasn't.

“You brought this upon yourselves,” Charlie Wah said sententiously. “You were given an address and told to wait outside. All you had to do was fetch Lo if he came out, and come back and tell us if he did not. This you did not do. Instead, when only one of our men came out and Lo escaped into the neighborhood, you terrorized a Chinese family and then tried to kill a gwailo. You got personal, and there is nothing more stupid, nothing more Vietnamese, than getting personal.” Then he said something in Chinese, very fast indeed.

A lot happened.

Most of the men converged on the Vietnamese boys. One of the men carrying a machete, the one who'd clobbered me, forced the knife into the hand of the kid with the Dumbo ears. The machete's mate, identical from my perspective, was urged upon the handsome one. The others forced the two boys apart by six or eight paces and then turned them so they were facing each other. The boys stood there, machete points dragging the floor, like mechanical soldiers that hadn't been wound up.

“One of you will live through this," Charlie Wah said. He was having a great time. “The one who does will let his friends know what becomes of-what's the idiom?”

I wasn't having any of it. The girl against the pillar stared at Charlie Wah as though she hoped her eyes could burn holes through him.

“Bad little boys,” the handsome one said. “And screw you.”

“A brave one,” Charlie Wah said, sounding regretful. “Unusual in a Vietnamese. Still, you will do it. Because if you don't-” He raised a hand.

The room was full of guns. All of them were pointed at the Vietnamese boys.

“-you'll both die,” Charlie Wah said. “And we'll let little Miss Vietnam carry the message. Or, better still, we'll kill her first and then flip a coin to decide which one of you we should kill. Not as much fun, of course, and if we do it that way only one little fish sauce gets to go out and play. One instead of two. In fact,” he said, jingling the coins again, “maybe that's best.”

“Kill me,” the girl said, her face twisted. “You fat pig.”

Charlie Wah gave her an understanding gaze. “I'm not really very fat,” he said, “but you can be excused an inappropriate figure of speech, under the circumstances. This must be a stressful time for you.” He strolled over to her, change ringing like church bells, and touched her face, the side that hadn't been cut. “Maybe we can find a way to make it more interesting. Who would like to fuck her before she dies?”

“You first,” the girl said defiantly. “If you think you can.”

Charlie Wah put his finger on the tip of her small nose and dragged it upward, distending her nostrils and pushing deep wrinkles into the bridge. The girl bit at him ineffectually, and the cut on her face opened up again.

“Not so pretty this way, is she?” he asked. “Still, she'll do in this light. I'll have to decline your offer, my dear. No way to be sure exactly what a Vietnamese has.”

“We fight,” Dumbo-Ears said. “You leave her alone.”

“Of course we'll leave her alone.” Charlie Wah let go of the girl's nose so suddenly that her head snapped forward. “This isn't personal. The idea is to discourage the rest of you from showing initiative when it isn't called for. Initiative is a fine thing in its place, but it's always touchy trying to figure out what its place is. Clear away, sons. Give them room.”

The sons backed off, looking disappointed. Now it was the handsome one who seemed adrift, the machete weighing his arm down. The boys stood in the center of a wide, flat concrete circle. Here and there on the floor threads sparkled, remnants shorn from minimum-wage garments.

Dumbo-Ears raised his machete. One of the men cheered derisively, earning a place on my must-kill list.

Dumbo-Ears struck a slow, sweeping blow that the handsome kid parried easily. Sparks flew off the knives. The handsome kid backed off, shaking his head, and Dumbo-Ears aimed a quick swipe at it, a swipe that would have cleaved a stone. The force of the missed blow swung him all the way around, and for a split second he stood with his back completely turned to his opponent.

Laughter.

The handsome kid backed away, saying something in Vietnamese.

When Dumbo-Ears turned around, he was weeping again. With his eyes closed he advanced and sliced the air with his machete. Its tip made a red line across Handsome's brown chest.

Dumbo-Ears had decided to live.

Now he was off balance, the weight of the machete dragging him down, and Handsome was backing away, staring down at his own sudden blood. Their feet scraped on the concrete, and their breath rasped like fingernails on silk. Dumbo-Ears recovered his balance, still sobbing, and swung the knife again, and this time it split the air above Handsome's skull, and Handsome raised his knife to stop it and then brought the knife down reflexively and cut Dumbo-Ears shallowly from sternum to navel, a diagonal slash that broke the fine brown skin, parted it, and let the red blood escape into the air. It splattered among the remnants, bright red berries in a drab Christmas wreath. Handsome looked startled.

The girl screamed a confusion of words.

“They're only playing,” Charlie Wah complained in English.

But one of them wasn't.

Dumbo-Ears took his knife in both hands and swung it horizontally waist high with a grunt of effort, and Handsome jumped back and just avoided being cut in half at the navel. He stumbled into one of the goons, and the goon grabbed his shoulders and threw him back, into the point of the other boy's upraised knife, which passed through the skin over his right deltoid muscle. Handsome emitted a shrill sound and dropped to his knees, the knife slipping out again, and blood pulsed out of the wound and drenched his chest and stomach.

But the other boy was coming after him now, slicing downward at his head, and Handsome got the machete up in time to parry the blow and then scrambled back between the thugs' legs and out of reach. The men laughed and backed away, and Charlie Wah, laughing too, said, “Give them room.”

The men backed up, widening the circle, and then one of them yelled something sharp and surprised, and Handsome burst into the circle from a new direction, behind Dumbo-Ears, and the machete split the air coming down and cut a flap of red meat from Dumbo-Ears's left arm.

The men applauded.

Dumbo-Ears backed away, staring in disbelief at his arm, and Handsome brought the knife up this time, sharp edge pointed toward the ceiling, in a swipe that missed everything but the point of Dumbo-Ears's chin and the tip of his nose. There was, as Charlie Wah had surmised there would be, a lot of blood.

Now both boys were screaming, not words, just raw red noise, and Dumbo-Ears was running forward at Handsome in a move so devoid of grace and lethal meaning, so obviously planless, that the men laughed again. Handsome retreated quickly, knife pointing up at a forty-five degree angle, at the ready, methodically seeking an opening, and it was obvious to me that Dumbo-Ears would be dead the moment he found it.

And then the harmless-looking little man who'd translated my joke stepped out of the group and stuck out a foot, and Handsome went down on his back, and Dumbo-Ears lunged forward and down and pierced him through the chest, falling over him in his eagerness to drive the knife all the way through and into the floor. His momentum carried him forward and he somersaulted over his friend, losing his grasp on the knife, but the knife wasn't going anywhere. Its handle pointed at the ceiling, the blade held in place by the bone of the other boy's sternum.

Handsome put both hands against the blade of the knife and pulled, either ignoring or not feeling the sharpened edge cutting into his palms. He tugged once and then again, more slowly this time, and then he gargled his own blood and his left hand fell away and landed on the concrete with a slap like a dead fish. He gazed at the ceiling, looking like Charlie Wah seeking an idiom.

“That wasn't fair,” Charlie Wah said mildly. “Someone check the rule book.”

The one who'd tripped the boy translated, and it got a big laugh.

Dumbo-Ears pulled himself to his elbows and turned to look at his friend. Then an anguished wail burst from him, a bright, burnished bubble of sound, and he crawled over and wrapped his arms around Handsome's head.

“Hit him,” Charlie Wah said. “Not too hard.”

The translator leaned over and struck the boy sharply at the base of the skull, and Dumbo-Ears looked up, puzzled by the impact, and then slumped across Handsome's chest. Handsome didn't move.

“How long?” Charlie Wah said impatiently.

“Maybe a couple of hours,” the translator said. He was slender and balding, and cooler than old coffee. “He'll be out of here long before the morning crew arrives.”

Charlie Wah nodded in satisfaction. “Don't bother cleaning up,” he said. “They have to be found somewhere.” He turned to me. “Just so you know we're not kidding,” he said. Then he snapped his fingers twice. “Ying. Kill her.”

Ying approached the girl, knife in hand. He waved it in front of her face once, just trying for a little fun, a little reaction, and he got it. She spat at him again.

“Quickly,” Charlie Wah said, and Ying raised the knife and grinned and cut the girl's throat. Her feet kicked out, mimicking a folk dance, and Ying stepped back to avoid the blood.

Charlie Wah came over to me. “Open your mouth,” he said calmly. I did as I was told, and he put something small and cold into it. “The key to your cuffs,” he continued. “You should be able to work your hands around and spit the key into your right hand so you can use it to set yourself free. This should pose no problem to a resourceful man like you. Once you are free, leave. The stairs will lead you to Hill Street. Go home. Get a new girlfriend. Stop thinking about Chinese matters. Do you understand?”

I nodded. I couldn't have spoken if my life depended on it.

“I like to think I have a certain flair for these things,” Charlie Wah said. “I will exert it to the fullest if I have to kill you. But I won't have to kill you, will I?”

I lowered my gaze. Blood roared in my ears.

He smiled. “I didn't think so,” he said. Then he patted me on the arm and said, “it's been nice discussing English with you.” The translator got another laugh.

On his way out, Ying gave me a mean little jellyfish sting of a glance and snapped out the lights.

I waited at least half an hour, partly to regain my strength and partly to make sure they'd really left. I was fully appreciative of Charlie Wah's flair.

As he'd predicted, it was relatively easy to get the cuffs undone. I simply followed the scenario he'd outlined, found the keyhole, and listened to the snap. It was a musical sound.

I would have left there and then if my legs had worked, but luckily for me they didn't. I had to sit on the floor in the dark and flex them for a few minutes before I could trust them to bear my weight, and by then I knew that I had to take something with me.

First I felt my way to the light switch and snapped it on, waiting as the fluorescents flickered into a chalky glow. Then I checked the girl and Handsome and found both of them cooling rapidly. I touched my pants pockets and discovered my car keys right where they should have been.

Charlie Wah knew his man. I'd been properly cowed. I was a sensible man, no threat. It was a perfectly reasonable scenario: I'd unlock my cuffs like a scared puppy chewing through his leash and drive home with my tail between my legs, and Dumbo-Ears would wake up around five in the company of a couple of dead friends and head for a hole to nurse his wounds before the police came and gave him a new set of problems. And he'd carry the news to the members of his gang, and there wouldn't be any unwanted displays of initiative for a while. Why take us anywhere? The soldiers might be spotted as they dropped the living and the dead into alleys and ashcans. Let the dead be discovered where they died, the living having sensibly scattered.

But I wasn't feeling reasonable.

It's so easy to exercise the power of life and death. It doesn't take courage, it doesn't take skill, it doesn't take Confucian virtue. It does, however, take something very special to promise someone she'll live and then break the promise, and what it takes is something that should be eliminated on sight.

So I climbed the stairs and made sure the door could be opened and then went back down again and onto the killing floor, where I ransacked the boxes of garments until I found a jacket with sleeves that would cover a torn arm, and I got Dumbo-Ears to his feet by wrapping the good arm around my shoulders and dragged him up the stairs and took him home. To Topanga.