The Man With No Time

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. At the moment I was filling its rooms with a jumble of places, times, personalities, cultures, dangers, possibilities, drawbacks, wild cards; and no matter how I arrayed them in the cramped rooms of my memory hovel, the rooms kept filling up with corpses. Some of them people I loved.

If the artifice failed to function, it wasn't for lack of furniture. Tran and Peter Lau, Everett and Mrs. Summerson, had given me more data than I could sort into categories and raised more possibilities than I could entertain. No matter how I tried to order them, I wound up piling everything I couldn't fit behind the couch and mentally jumping up and down on it. Well, that was pretty much the way I cleaned house, too.

Tran got up for yet more ice cream, and Horace lapsed into a pallid sulk. I decided the time was right for a heart-to-heart, took another look at his face, and decided I'd been wrong. Okay, discuss plans.

“This is what we want to do,” I said to Horace, who responded with a sullen stare. “Let's take our goals in increasing order of difficulty. One. We want to mess this deal of theirs up in a way that makes it harder for them to do it next time. Got that?”

He nodded without much interest.

“Damn it, we can't get Lo,” I said for the third time. “He's in China, remember?”

“I'm Chinese,” Horace said meaningfully, “but I speak English.”

I retreated. “So we want to screw up the deal. If Tran knows all he says he knows, I think I can do that.”

“Yeah?” Horace asked. He put his index fingers under his eyes and rotated them up and down, and I stopped feeling irritated. He was at least as tired as I was.

“Two. We want to put Claude B. Tiffle somewhere dark and small for a long time. If we can do the first, we can do the second.”

“Tiffle,” Tran spat, materializing with a strawberry ice-cream cone in his hand.

“Old Claude B.,” I said. “Three. We want to get Charlie Wah. We want to cross him up so he comes out of wherever he's hiding and runs the wrong way. Into us, preferably.” No one said anything. “And that's going to be tough.”

“And four,” I said, abandoning hope for the discussion, “we want to get out of this alive, in a way that won't endanger your family, Horace, when the assholes sort this out.”

I glanced at Horace, and got more reaction than I'd expected. He was staring past me and above me, looking like the crack of doom had just opened in the parking lot.

“Five,” Dexter said, dropping a hand onto my shoulder, “we want to free the slaves.”

“I was getting to that,” I said, and then I looked beyond him and into a face that would have stopped a grizzly in mid-charge. It belonged to a man the color of fresh asphalt who might have been six and a half feet tall and who might have weighed two hundred and ninety pounds, and who might have been the end of civilization as we know it. He wore a pink Bryn Mawr sweatshirt, baggy blue jeans, and a black watch cap rolled low over his eyebrows.

“This here Horton Doody,” Dexter said. “He my surprise.”

“Horton Doody?” I said involuntarily.

The obsidian marbles Horton Doody used for eyes rolled slowly toward me and fell into a slot that locked them on my face. “Somethin wrong with that?” he growled, bumping the bottom of the aural ocean.

“Horton a knife man,” Dexter offered tactfully.

“Wrong?” I said immediately. “What could be wrong? Fine old name, Doody. One of the Philadelphia Doodys?”

The left corner of Horton Doody's mouth twitched upward. He probably thought he was smiling.

“So, Mr. Doody,” I said, “you're joining our merry band?” Hope made a belated reentrance, wearing a tutu and gossamer wings.

“Dexter say money in it,” Horton Doody rumbled.

“Horton here fond of the green,” Dexter advised. “Take a lot of cash to sustain all that flash.”

“Whuff,” Horton Doody said. I think it was a laugh.

“He already been watchin Everett at a hundred an hour.”

“Big job,” Horton Doody said, sounding like an entire bowling alley.

“Of course, money ain't everything,” Dexter said. “Horton want to free the slaves, too, even if they Orientals.”

Something came to mind. “Who's watching Everett?”

“Horton's bigger brother.” Dexter said. “He in, too.”

“The Doody Brothers?” Horace asked, looking confused. His frame of reference, on rock and roll and practically everything else, had stopped expanding in 1979. “How many more are there?”

“Five,” Horton Doody thundered. “I the baby.”

“I take it all back,” Horace said to me. “You might have the help you need.”

“This little Oriental peewee name Tran,” Dexter said to Horton Doody. “Big bald Oriental name Horace.”

“Horace?” Horton Doody asked. His eyebrows did something complicated under the cap. “Whuff, whuff.”

“People who live in glass houses,” Horace said, passing a hand self-consciously over his remaining hair.

“And the faggot asked you about his merry band name Simeon. Think he got a big brain. He the one gone suicide us all.”

“Whuff,” Horton Doody said. He was having a great time.

Dexter looked at each of us in turn. “What a bunch,” he said. “Look like somethin in a bum's pockets.”

“Count Horace out,” I said. “He's going home.”

Horace slapped the table. “Goddamn it, Simeon, stop speaking for me.”

“But you've got a fam-”

“I know what I've got. And we've got Horton Doody, here.”

“He only one man,” Tran said. Horton Doody gave him a glance that knocked him back a step.

“Yeah, but he a man we can all hide behind.” Dexter said. “And he got brothers.”

“Eleanor will kill both of us,” I said to Horace.

“Thass Simeon,” Dexter told Horton Doody. “Takes on the whole Chinese mafia but scared of his girlfriend.”

“Look,” I said, the soul of reason, “why don't we all sit down and sort this out? Pull up a couple of chairs, Mr. Doody.”

He took it literally. “Name Horton,” he said, distributing his weight.

“It's really swell to meet you,” I said. “Really, really swell. You have no idea. Tran? Have a seat. Horace?”

“I've got to go the bathroom,” Horace said. “I was in that car for hours.”

“I'll come with you,” Dexter said. “Just a couple of girls.”

“That Dexter,” Horton Doody said fondly when they were gone. People looked around to see who was moving furniture. “Ack like a African violet. You're cute,” he said to Tran, who was working on his ice-cream cone, looking perhaps eleven.

“I can shoot you,” Tran said mildly.

“Whuff, whuff,” Horton Doody chortled. “You wear high heels yet?”

Things were not going well. To my surprise, Tran smiled at Horton, looking very much like someone with a secret he intends to keep. "Funny, you" was all he said.

“Five of us?” Horton Doody asked me. “And my five bros make ten. That it?”

“That's it. Sixteen of them.”

He nodded, apparently thinking about something else. He put both hands on the table, balled them into fists, and gazed at them.

“Two,” Tran said helpfully.

The marbles rolled around until they were looking at Tran. Then Doody lifted a fist and moved it, very slowly, until it was almost touching Tran's ear. Tran sat very still, which was more than I could have done. He didn't even flinch when Doody took his ear between two thick fingers.

“Looky,” Horton Doody said, and pulled a silver dollar out of Tran's ear.

Tran's eyes went to the dollar and then to Doody's face, and then he broke into a grin that looked like one the Cheshire cat had left behind. “How?” he asked delightedly.

“Come here, honey,” Doody said. “Ears like those, you probably a rich man.”

Tran pulled his chair over to Horton Doody's, and when Dexter and Horace returned from the powder room, Tran was well into his first lesson in the fine old art of palming.

“Okay,” I said when they were seated. “Let's cut to the chase.”

Florence Lam's apartment was a few blocks north of Sunset, a regal old fourplex liberally decorated with angular graffiti. At seven-thirty the next morning, Dexter, Horton, and I were in place. We'd passed a memorable night in a motel about six blocks away, two thin walls away from a Chinese family of thirty or forty, most of whom seemed to be under two years of age and suffering from colic. When I finally went to sleep, I had a second installment of the dream about babies I'd begun at Eleanor's. In this chapter, a second chute opened at the far end of the room and the fattened babies slid down it to make room for the new arrivals. It seemed to me that there was a Chinese restaurant at the end of the chute. The idea woke me up.

I was as ready for action as anyone who's yawning can be when Florence Lam's door opened and she came out backward, fitting a key to the lock, and backed straight into Horton Doody.

“Excuse me,” she said automatically. Then she turned around, looked up at Horton, and screamed.

Dexter's hand cut off the scream. He'd slipped behind her and stuck his foot into the open door. Horton simply took a few steps forward, bulldozing both of them back into the apartment, and I followed, feeling like a rowboat behind an ice-breaker.

Up close, Florence Lam was smaller than I remembered, and older. Dark smudges beneath her downturned eyes sullied her fine skin, and her hair was dirty and slightly matted. Florence Lam was neglecting herself.

“Hush,” I said, although she'd already choked off the scream. “Nobody's going to hurt you.” I closed the door the rest of the way. The apartment was disheveled and grimy. Clothes were tossed onto the couch, and a couple of days' worth of dishes were growing crusts on the small table. She was either seriously sloppy or seriously depressed. “If he takes his hand away, are you going to be quiet?”

She nodded. Dexter experimentally removed his hand.

“I have no money,” she said.

“We don't want money. We don't want to hurt you. In fact, we're here to give you a break.”

Her eyes widened slightly; she'd recognized me. Then she glanced at Horton Doody, who was still only inches from her. “Can you ask him to move away, please?”

“He don't have to ask me,” Doody said, stepping back. He sounded hurt.

“Let's all sit down,” I said. “This is your lucky day.”

Florence Lam took a chair at the table. Dexter stood with his back to the door, one foot raised and resting against it. I sat on a chair opposite Florence, and Horton occupied the couch. All of it.

“Who are you?” She was using her index fingers to torment the cuticles on her thumbs, but she had her voice under control.

“You don't really want to know,” I said. “I need your attention. Are you with me?”

“What choice do I have?”

“Right,” I said. “I'm going to operate on two assumptions for the next minute or so. The first is that you share my opinion that your boss is a pustule. The second is that you know what's really going on in that office.”

“Like what?” Her eyes were watchful.

“Like many, many broken federal laws. Like ties to organized crime. Like exploitation and extortion, all against Chinese. Like a little prostitution.”

She glanced at Doody, who was staring at her like something you might bump into at forty fathoms, and then quickly looked away. “You're not Immigration.”

“We're much worse than INS. They have to play by the rules.”

She took it in and nodded. Then her lower lip tightened and started to quiver.

“Lady gone to cry,” Dexter said lazily.

Florence Lam straightened in her chair. “That's how much you know.”

“I'm going to give you some good advice,” I said. “But I need a couple of things first. Give me your keys.”

Whatever she'd expected, that wasn't it. “My keys?”

“To the office. They're on that ring with the blue F on it.”

She took that in with a blink. “Why do you need them?”

“That's something else you don't want to know. May I?” I reached out a hand.

“I need them to open the office.”

“You'll have them back in ten minutes.”

She looked around the room as though she were saying good-bye to it. “I suppose I have to.”

“You have to.”

She picked up the key ring, all business now, and sorted out a large brass-colored key. “Front door,” she said. “Back door is this one.”

I crossed my fingers. “And the basement?”

She looked surprised again. “It's not locked,” she said.

“But it does lock, doesn't it?”

“Sure it does. Tiffle loves locks. He's got a lock on everything.” She pursed her lips. “Except his fly.” Her fingers sorted though the keys and came up with an old-fashioned skeleton key. “This one,” she said.

“Got it?” I asked Dexter.

“Oh, please,” Dexter said, taking the key ring from her. “Back in a flash.” He closed the door very quietly behind him.

“And now?” Florence Lam asked, a little steadier.

“And now the advice. Take a big purse with you to work today. When the others are at lunch, go to the personnel and payroll files and grab everything that's got your name on it. Everything.” She hesitated and then nodded, waiting. “Clean out your desk, but don't make it obvious. Leave junk on top of it. Don't go to work tomorrow. Have you got somewhere you can go?”

“For how long?” She was surprisingly calm. Either she'd seen something like this coming, or she intended to go straight to work and tell Tiffle everything.

“For keeps.”

“Oh,” she said. She swallowed. Her eyes went around the apartment again and her hands went to the purse, and Horton stirred on the couch.

“Uh-uh,” he said.

“A cigarette,” she said a little sharply. “Do you mind?”

Horton shrugged, and the couch squealed. “Bad for you,” he said.

“I'll risk it.” She pulled a package of Virginia Slims from the purse and lit up with a silver lighter. When she tilted her head back to exhale she looked younger and prettier. She took another hit and looked around the table for an ashtray, then flicked the ash into a bowl that still had a couple of corn flakes floating in it. “Okay,” she said. “I can go-”

“Don't tell us. Don't tell anybody. Just get the hell out of here. You've got skills, you can get a job. You can do something straight, start over.”

She passed her fingers over her brow. “Sure,” she said. “Start over.” Then she coughed, and the cough turned into a sob. She leaned forward, the hand with the cigarette in it pressed against the back of her head, singeing her hair. I took it from between her fingers and let her cry, the sobs breaking apart like soap bubbles in the early light. There's something especially terrible about a woman weeping in the morning.

“There, there, lady,” Horton Doody said helplessly. He shifted his weight as though he intended to get up and comfort her. “You be okay.”

“What's he got on you?” I asked her when the sobs had slowed.

“I've signed things,” she said, fighting for breath. “We all have. He made us. Federal forms, forged papers, I don't know what.”

“Take them with you.”

Her head came up, and she wiped at her cheeks with a napkin. “They're locked in his desk. He'd never let me get at them. He's got us all.”

“All four of you.” Four was just too many.

“Do you think we'd be there if he didn't? Do you know what he does to us?”

“I can imagine. Listen, Florence, you can't tell the others. We'll try to get the stuff in his desk, but we can't have ail four of you acting crazy. He's stupid, but nobody's that stupid.”

“I could call them tonight,” she said. It was a question. “That way they won't come back.”

I looked at Horton. Horton spread his hands to reveal a soft center.

“You can call them at six in the morning.”

“And I can take their papers?”

“Oh, shit,” I said. “Just don't get caught.”

She reached across the table and took my hand in both of hers and pressed it to her wet cheek. “Thank you,” she said.

I sat there feeling fraudulent and uncomfortable as the door opened and Dexter came in. He started to toss me the keys and saw that my hands were occupied.

“Gettin along better, I see,” he said. He gave me a knowing smile. “Good thing I ain't Eleanor.”