The Man With No Time

24

“Looking bad, Charlie,” I said, and he was. His eyes were puffy and skittish, and his hair was pressed flat on one side as though he'd slept sitting up. The suit of the day, a stomach-curdling shade of lemon yellow, was wrinkled and bunched, and something sagged heavily in his pocket, dragging the jacket further out of shape. His necktie was at a lopsided half-mast, and he'd apparently missed his step coming up the driveway because one yellow knee was smeared with dirt. Still, the little gun in his hand was clean and bright and well maintained and absolutely steady.

“You live like a pig,” he said. He was standing beyond Mrs. Summerson, in front of the living room's one south-facing window.

“Well,” I said, “we can't all afford to dress like Life Savers. I guess you weren't on the boat.”

The gun came forward an inch or two, and my abdominal muscles went into involuntary aerobics. He saw it, and he smiled, but then he replayed what I'd said. “The boat?”

“The good ship Caroline B., your floating hotel. She's now the property of Uncle Sam.”

The smile congealed on his face, and his gaze suddenly went right through me, fixed on the distance as he started a whole new set of calculations. A sound from the bedroom drew his glance, and one of the steroid junkies, the one with the single eyebrow running across his head, came out, toting my spare gun. He pointed it at my midsection, and Charlie relaxed his, still distracted by all the shuffling realities in his head.

“Here's Bluto,” I said to Mrs. Summerson. “Have you met Pluto?” She didn't stir, just looked at the floor as though she were trying to see through it.

“What have you done to her?” I asked Charlie Wah.

“A little lesson in mortality,” Charlie said absently. Then he was back with us, giving me a glare that would have blistered paint. “The old have a low pain threshold. I wonder how high yours is.”

“It's subterranean.” I wasn't much liking the conversation's drift.

“That will simplify matters.” The gun came up again, and he said something to the bodybuilder. Bluto tucked the gun in the back of his pants and came toward me, gesturing for me to lift my arms. He patted me down quickly and thoroughly, relieving me of the automatic and the wad of money I'd counted out for myself at Dexter's. The gun went into his pants pocket and the money into Charlie's free hand.

How much?” he asked, hefting it.

“Fifty,” I said.

He wrinkled his nose. “Cab fare. Still, it's reassuring to know that you kept some. I suppose each of your associates has a similar amount?”

“Suppose anything you like.”

He said something, and Bluto punched me. I didn't even see it coming, just watched Bluto's face change suddenly and then my head exploded and I was lying on my back on the floor with my ears ringing and the room rippling in front of me like I was looking at it over a radiator.

“I suppose each of your associates has a similar amount?” Charlie Wah repeated, word for word.

“Yes,” I said, not trying to get up. I was damned if I was going to let him see me stagger.

“Two hundred fifty thousand dollars,” he said. “Add that to the two-eighty you left with Mrs. Jesus here, and we're over half a million. What in the world prompted you to leave half a million in Tiffle's office?”

“A love of symmetry,” I said. He'd heard the half million on the news, but he didn't know about the money for the pilgrims.

He shook his head. “Let's get things straight,” he said flatly. “You've cost me immeasurably. I've lost money, respect, and now a ship. There's nothing that I won't do to you.” He reached down and flicked his forefinger forcefully against my right eye, which I barely closed in time, and when I got it open again he was shape-shifting through my tears. “Anything you can think of that hurts, I can think of too. And, unlike you, I can do it.” He glanced at Mrs. Summerson, big and mute and absent on her chair. “I can even enjoy it.”

“Charlie,” I said, “you're getting personal.”

“I suppose I am,” he said, without much interest. “Certainly, if I cause you unnecessary pain, it will be for my own satisfaction. But there are business reasons, too. I need to recoup as much of my money as I can, and I have to annihilate the men who disrupted my transaction and cost me my ship. Anything less will not be understood by my associates.”

I watched him sweat.

“I was on the telephone most of the night,” he said in an aggrieved tone. “In Taiwan they actually took seriously the idea that some blacks were trying to move in on us. They were expecting some sort of proposition this morning: a partnership, perhaps. But then we got the news about Tiffle, and it all fell into place.”

Blacks. The henchmen we'd let go had apparently called Taiwan.

“Still, you might have gotten away with it if you hadn't handed so much to the police, just to inconvenience Tiffle. I don't understand how you could mount an operation so complicated, so elaborate, and then do something so revealing.”

He wanted me to talk. “My memory palace was full.”

“Was it?” he said dismissively. “Well, we're going to help you to clean it out.” He gestured to Bluto, who went into the bedroom and came back out carrying a coil of rope. Bluto surveyed the room briefly and then threw one end of the rope over one of the beams below the ceiling, the beam from which the hermit who built the shack had hanged himself some thirty years earlier, when he realized they were paving Old Topanga Canyon Boulevard a mile below. The man had prized his solitude.

Bluto took both ends of the rope in his hands and hoisted himself on it, bringing his legs up and parallel to the floor just to show off.

“He weighs more than you do,” Charlie Wah observed. “Too much muscle."

“It's a strong beam,” I said, my voice sounding thin and far away.

“Get up. Take off your shirt.”

“Take off your own shirt. It might help the suit.”

The gun tilted down to point at my midsection. “What's going to happen to you on the beam won't be pleasant, but it'll hurt less than being shot in the gut.”

I got up and took off my shirt. The buttons seemed to be smaller than I remembered.

“Over there,” Charlie Wah said, wiggling the gun toward Bluto. “Don't do anything you're not told to do, or I promise you really exquisite pain. Is that what they say? Exquisite pain?”

“For Christ's sake, Charlie,” I said. “Get a dictionary.” The shirt landed at my ankles. Feeling as naked as a shelled shrimp, I took the long walk to Bluto.

“Hands out,” Charlie Wah said. “Wrists together.” Bluto was an expert; it took him only a few seconds to wrap one end of the rope around my wrists. He knotted it off tightly enough to make the veins on the backs of my hands pop out, and then he backed off and began taking in the other end of the rope, hand over hand. He pulled effortlessly until I was dangling by my wrists, barely able to reach the floor on tiptoe. When I was stretched to capacity, he tied the rope's end to the leg of the wood-burning stove and stood back to admire his handiwork.

“This is a good trick,” Charlie Wah said. “We use it on first-time runaways, people who try to welsh on their contracts. There are very few second-time runaways.” He reached into the sagging pocket and pulled out a shiny little ballpeen hammer. “It also has the advantage of being consistent with the natural causes you are probably going to die from in a little while,” he said, advancing on me, “unless you are very, very cooperative.” We both listened to the lie, and he smiled apologetically. “A drunken fall from your sun deck.” He stopped in mock dismay. “Stupid me, I've forgotten something,” he said. He pointed behind him and snapped his fingers, and I saw a black medical bag at Mrs. Summerson's feet.

Bluto scurried to the bag and opened it. He withdrew a corked bottle of vodka and a hypodermic needle large enough to use on a horse. For a moment I thought I was going to vomit. Compared to the needle, the ballpeen hammer looked like the hand of friendship.

The cork popped as Bluto drew it out. “Not too much at first,” Charlie Wah said. “We want him coherent.”

The long needle probed the vodka, and I watched the level fall as Bluto drew back the plunger. It took about a quarter of the bottle. Looking beyond him, I saw Mrs. Summerson's magnified eyes fixed on the hypodermic. So someone was home, after all.

“Good,” Charlie Wah said. “Hurry up.”

Bluto came toward me with the needle in both hands, and I hoisted myself on the rope and swung my legs at him, trying to get the needle. He avoided me easily and swung wide to the right, going behind me. He moved very quietly. I lifted my feet again and swiveled on the rope to keep him in sight, and Charlie Wah threw an arm around my waist and pulled down with most of his weight. The beam groaned but held, and I lost sight of Bluto.

Something struck my right shoulder like a fist and immediately became the center of a circle of fire. Heat coursed up and down my arm and I resisted the compulsion to try to swing away, frozen by the image of the needle breaking off inside me. I felt a tugging sensation, and Bluto stepped away and into view, examining the empty hypodermic. Charlie said something sharp in Chinese, and Bluto handed him my spare gun. Charlie glanced at it and dropped it into his jacket pocket.

Then I was drunk.

It happened almost instantly: a brightening of the colors in the room and a high singing in my ears. Charlie Wah's wretched suit glowed like the world's last lemon drop. Bluto was back at the bottle, tilting it to get the rest of the liquid within reach of the needle.

“No,” I said automatically. My tongue was thick enough to choke on.

“I agree,” Charlie Wah said. Was he weaving or was I? “Not yet, anyway. We don't want it to act as an anesthetic.” He reached out and tapped my shoulder lightly with the hammer. “I want the names and addresses of the four people who helped you. We'll start with the black ones.”

“Martin Quimby and Klaus Fuchs,” I said, pulling names out of the air. And then I remembered Tran and added, “And George Smiley.”

Charlie tilted his head and regarded me. “Too easy,” he said. “Let's see if you stick to it.” Then he drew back his arm and swung the hammer directly at my chest.

I actually heard the rib break. A tide of hot red pain swept over me, starting at the broken rib and spreading through my body until it filled even my toes and fingers with a sticky, unholy heat. I gasped for breath, and the pain started again, a spark at first, then expanding outward like a ball of flame, pulsing ahead of the deeper pain that propelled it, and I was screaming. When the scream was exhausted, I grabbed air again and the seed of pain exploded once more, and this time I stifled the scream and hung there, trying to take in sips of air.

“You learn fast,” Charlie Wah said approvingly. “Some fools scream over and over again. We actually lost one to a heart attack. What are their names?”

I hung there, gaping at him like a fish. Their names, whatever they had been, had been washed from my mind. I closed my eyes, and the room began to spin wildly, and I forced them open again, trying to anchor the universe with the weight of Charlie Wah's yellow suit.

“We'll break one on the left side this time,” he said, raising the hammer.

“Dexter Smif. Horton Doody. Howard Doody,” I said. He'd never find them.

He gave the hammer a little heft and looked deeply into my eyes.

“Even you couldn't make up those names,” he said at last. He thought for a moment. “Smif?”

“That's the way he pronounces it. I don't know what it says in the phone book.”

“Addresses, please.”

“I don't know their addresses.” The hammer came up. “They're in my computer,” I said, the words tripping over each other in my eagerness to get them out before the hammer fell again.

Charlie Wah leaned toward me and gave the broken rib a little tap with the hammer, and I heard my voice scale upward again and snap like a dry wishbone, and then I was hanging there, coughing and sobbing.

“Is that all?” he said with exaggerated patience.

“Yes.”

“It wasn't,” Charlie Wah said, stepping back. “The little one who didn't really look very black was the Vietnamese we should have killed?”

“Tran,” I said. “I don't know where he is.”

“You do, you know, but we'll get to that later. Each of them has fifty thousand dollars?”

There were words there, floating right in front of me, and I grabbed them. “Unless they've spent it.”

Charlie Wah's face creased in merriment. “The Vietnamese will never spend it,” he said. “But who knows about black people?”

“Yeah,” I said, wishing I could double up.

“Which would you prefer,” he asked conversationally, “another broken rib or another shot?”

“What do you want from me now?”

He looked at Bluto. “Enjoyment.”

“You'd better hurry,” I said, using as little air as possible, “before Dexter and Horton spend your money.”

“A shot, I think,” Charlie Wah said. “Then we'll see about the rib.”

Bluto toddled toward us with the syringe. “Don't do anything active,” Charlie Wah cautioned me. “That rib is a very dirty break.”

The fire in the arm again, and then my head swam violently, as though some giant baby had picked up the dollhouse and given it a twirl, and then the pain screaming from the rib miraculously subsided to a roar. I closed my eyes in relief, and when I opened them I was looking at two Charlie Wahs, overlapping each other.

“. . too drunk,” I heard myself saying.

“Too drunk for what?” Charlie Wah asked politely.

“Computer,” I said. The last syllable was very difficult. I suddenly found I couldn't hold my head upright, and my chin bumped my chest.

“You have a point,” Charlie Wah said. He backed away from me and wiggled a finger for Bluto. “Cut him down.”

Bluto came toward me in a series of waves, and I had to close my eyes again to keep from vomiting. I felt his hands pass professionally over my ribs, and then the rope slackened, and I went down on my seat, the rib compressing another vast ball of pain into a seed and then exploding it, and my body jerked open again. When I opened my eyes I was flat on my back.

Bluto had a knife now and he was sawing at the rope around my wrists, not being overly careful about not cutting me, and Charlie Wah was standing in front of Mrs. Summerson with his gun loosely trained on Bluto and me. Then the ropes parted and I took my eyes off Charlie and off Mrs. Summerson and looked anywhere else in the world as she very slowly stood and picked up the heavy stool as though it were a Q-Tip and brought it down on Charlie Wah's head.

Bluto turned at the sound as Charlie crumpled and dropped his gun, and I grabbed the handle of the knife and turned it against the nerve-rich web of skin between Bluto's thumb and index finger. He jerked back to me, letting loose a scream and reflexively jerking his hand back, and I snatched the knife and drove it into the muscle of his calf, feeling it hit bone and slip aside, and he went down on top of me. Charlie was beginning to stir as I pushed Bluto off, the rib sending out concentric circles of pain, and I got to my feet at the same time Charlie's fingers touched the gun and launched myself at the light switch, flipped it off, and backed away.

In the sudden darkness, my legs hit the stool Mrs. Summerson had dropped and I went down on my side, the side away from the broken rib. I hooked an ankle under the stool and kicked it away from me, and when it landed a flame blossomed in the dark. Charlie had shot at it.

The boom from the gun ricocheted back and forth for what seemed like half an hour as I dragged myself toward the couch. The floor was heaving like a ship's deck beneath me and I was fighting down the greasy clams that were trying to climb back up my throat. I was drunker than I'd ever been in my life.

Then the darkness blistered in front of my eyes and pushed itself toward me, and I almost drowned in it. I gulped air to remain conscious, and someone moved, and Charlie fired two shots, and I heard one of them smack into flesh and there was a deep groan from Bluto as I turned my head and vomited and then vaulted for the couch, for where the couch had to be.

As I landed, Mrs. Summerson started to scream. Charlie snapped off something in Chinese and the screaming stopped, and then there was silence. A tardy bird sang outside, and my mind seized on the notes and turned them into a loop, a bird's drinking song, high-pitched and monotonous. The darkness started to blister and swell again, but I found the will to push it away and listen.

There should have been a moon. The fog had sealed it off so completely that it might have been circling another planet. Someone breathed: Charlie, I guessed. Near where I had last seen him, anyway. Someone else coughed, a deep ugly sound with fluid in it: Bluto, probably, still on the floor. I pressed the tip of my tongue against the top of my mouth, an old radio trick for eliminating breathing noises, and slowly drew air around it. The rib pinged brightly, and the pinging increased as I leaned over the back of the couch and put my right arm down behind it.

“I hear you,” Charlie announced. I froze, bending down over the broken rib, and the couch rippled and heaved beneath me. I had to put my other hand, the one bleeding from Bluto's knife, onto the couch to keep from losing my balance, and Charlie fired again at the noise, once this time, and the bullet slapped into the leather to my left. Dust tickled my nose.

“There's nowhere you can go,” he announced. “This is the only door out.”

Keep talking, I willed. I'd gotten both arms all the way down, and my fingers brushed the carpet. Just the carpet. I'd have to move down the couch.

It was a creaky couch.

“We can work this out,” Charlie said, sounding confident. “I've got the money. Hey, you can have the money. What's fifty thousand? Little change,” he continued, getting the idiom wrong. “Nothing to die for.”

A scuttling sound from the kitchen and then an enormously loud clatter in the living room, and Charlie fired again, and I scooted down the couch, trailing my fingers on the carpet and hit cold metal with both hands. My skin, wet with sweat, squealed against the leather, and Charlie pumped two blind shots into the couch. More dust, invisible clouds of it, billowed out, and I fought to breathe through my mouth again.

“FYI,” Charlie said gaily, “I've got your gun, too. Lots of bullets left.”

His shoes squeaked. Bluto moaned weakly on the floor. I wrapped my fingers around the metal and the effort pushed the breath out of me, and I inhaled dust through my nose. Another deafening clatter. Mrs. Summerson was throwing frying pans.

Charlie didn't fire this time. He didn't say anything, either. Over Bluto's labored breathing I heard something soft, like a knife through silk, and I realized Charlie was sliding over the carpet. There was only one place he could be going. I fought to locate it in the swirling dark.

Another clatter, Fibber McGee's whole closet this time, but by the time it ended both semiautomatics were in my hands and I'd lifted them free of the couch. Prickly dust crowded my nostrils and the night swam in slow, undulating waves all around me. Fumbling at the guns' safeties, I aimed at the spot Charlie had to be heading for, and-

— sneezed.

It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open, so I didn't actually see the light snap on, but I yanked back on both triggers and felt the guns jumping, jumping and roaring more times than I'd expected. I opened my eyes in time to see Charlie slowly sliding down the wall beneath the light switch as bloody holes appeared in his suit, awful red on awful yellow. He fired once at the ceiling and lay back, his head propped up against the wall. His eyes were wide and confused.

I sneezed and vomited simultaneously, a new and mind-altering experience, and the broken rib kicked in to make it truly memorable. When I was back in the room again, I saw Mrs. Summerson staring down at Bluto with my last frying pan in her hand. He was clearly dead.

“Murderer,” Mrs. Summerson said, and it took me a long, pain-slowed and alcohol-befuddled moment to realize that she meant Charlie, and not me. She slowly brought the blue eyes up to mine.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“No,” I said. My bleeding hand slipped off the back of the couch, and I tried unsuccessfully to shift my knees to take my weight. “Get the money out of Charlie's pocket and call this number, would you?” I said. I gave her Dexter's, twice. Then the room upended itself for the last time, and my face hit the floor.