The Man With No Time by Timothy Hallinan Page A

day. 'Dim sum time,' he said.”
    Sure. Dim sum time made sense. The rest of it didn't.
    “His things? Are you sure?” Eleanor had said he'd brought a canvas suitcase.
    She did the thing with the lip again, dropped the long eyelids briefly and then shook her head. “No,” she said. “The rest of his things.”
    “Do you think she was a Chinese lady?”
    She fished in her purse while she considered the question, and pulled out a ring of keys that would have slipped easily over her ankle. “Don't know. If she's Chinese, she didn't speak his dialect and she's married to an Anglo. He called her Mrs. Summerson.”
    A bubble of air forced its way through my lips, surprising both of us.
    “You know her?” Lek asked, looking startled at the sound.
    “I know her,” I said. And I did, and there was no way in the world I could talk to her without Eleanor's permission. If Lo was the Chan family's guardian angel, Esther Summerson was their household god.
    I even knew where she lived. I'd been there twice, most recently after the twins' hundred-day party. Mrs. Esther Summerson occupied a perfectly restored 1918 Craftsman's Bungalow, set back at least fifty feet from the sidewalk on an idyllic one-way lane called Jacaranda Street. The house was dark now, sleeping under ivy and dormant climbing roses, just visible beneath arbors that had dangled sweet, dusky clusters of grapes only two months before. By daylight, the whole thing looked like the scenes they'd painted on the labels of orange crates in the twenties.
    With Alice parked two streets to the west, I toted a large Styrofoam container of coffee up Jacaranda Street and found myself a dark little piece of curb between two parked cars almost directly across from Mrs. Summerson's. I couldn't talk to her, but nobody had said I couldn't look at her house.
    My watch said 3:20 when I sat down to look at Mrs. Summerson's house. The Styrofoam quart of coffee said Donut Deelite . I needed the coffee more than I needed the watch; I'd gone to bed for a couple of hours after the firemen finished putting out 1321 and then gotten up to go meet Lek, and every time I closed my eyes I saw little bitty fireworks.
    The coffee was so extraordinarily awful that it held my attention for almost an hour. Since nothing whatsoever was happening in front of me, I had ample time and attention to devote to analyzing the components of its taste. Foremost among them seemed to be wet dog hair, softened and modulated by a hint of aluminum and a reedy note of newsprint, the entire rich and complex bouquet culminating in a strong finish of industrial-strength benzine. In mitigation, it had enough caffeine to set an army of water buffalo doing the hokey-pokey.
    Lek , I thought. Thai. Lek and Ning and Lala, all of them thousands of miles from rice paddies and gilded temple spires and easy smiles. The Chans, Chinese. The tongs. The Vietnamese kids. All of them here now, part of a city that has more Koreans than anyplace outside Korea, more Cambodians and Thais than anyplace outside Cambodia and Thailand, more Japanese than anyplace outside Japan. Hell, we have more Canadians than Vancouver. A hundred languages, literally, are spoken in the public schools. All these people, Filipinos and Armenians, Turks and Guatemalans and Salvadorans, migrating over the lines and the empty blue spaces on the maps to create whole communities in a big ugly basin where the dominant gas is carbon monoxide and the dominant currency is disappointment. Mass movements, mass migrations, to get here.
    And what was here?
    Immigration, Im- migration. In my caffeine-saturated state, the word broke apart easily. I was composing an ode to immigration and my knees were taking turns jiggling up and down by the time the day was born rosy-fingered through the haze in the eastern sky, and a light went on upstairs in Mrs. Summerson's house.
    The light beckoned to me. I looked around. No one in the street. No one watching from the windows of the other