We all mumbled pleasant preliminaries at each other, and Eleanor and I let go of each other's hands long enough to sit down. I immediately grabbed her hand back. The restaurant was Hammond's choice, one of those vestigial time capsules from the fifties where you sit in red leather booths and eat red meat, and women with red lipstick drink Manhattans with red cherries and blow smoke rings. A big Christmas tree blinked and shimmered in the foyer, dropping needles on dummy presents and scenting the air with pine. I felt like all I'd done in the past three days was eat meat. The sleepless nights were playing tricks with my sense of time, making the lunch with Hammond seem only hours ago. Lo was as two-dimensional as a figure in a frieze.
“Al says you should have been a cop,” Sonia de Anza said at once. Her voice was low and throaty, softer than her face had led me to expect.
“I did not,” Hammond said huffily. “I said he thought like a cop.”
“Gee, Al,” I said, “almost thanks for the compliment.”
“What does a cop think like?” Orlando asked. He made it sound like a trick question.
“Like a snowplow,” Hammond said, fearsomely avuncular. “We bull our way through the fluff until we hit something hard.”
“How disappointing.” Orlando offered kindly old Uncle Al the cold shoulder. “I'd hoped cops thought like Porfiry in Crime and Punishment.”
Hammond threw him a sour glance and then looked at Sonia. “Orlando's gifted.”
“He'll graduate from USC next year,” Sonia said, a little apologetically. “He'll only be seventeen.” She patted his hand. “But he's still being a little fart. He knows what cops think like. They think like me.” He opened his mouth, and she said hurriedly, “Like I.”
Eleanor nodded toward Orlando, and said to Sonia, “He's very beautiful,” and Orlando went redder than the leather in the booth.
“Well, you know what they say about appearances,” Sonia said, clearly pleased.
“Thinking like a cop,” Hammond offered, hoisting a menu bigger than The Little House on the Prairie, “how are your hypothetical Vietnamese kids?”
Eleanor withdrew her hand and very slowly turned to look at me.
“Real discreet, Al,” I said, my ears burning.
“Lookit, Sonia. Now they're both blushing.” Hammond made a show of fanning me with the menu. “Anyway, Sonia already knows about it. She's the only one I've told.”
“You don't get your kiss back,” I said to Eleanor. “I didn't get Mrs. S. from him.”
“Mrs. S.?” Hammond's ears went up the way Bravo's do when I mention food.
“Are you Chinese?” Orlando asked Eleanor, as though no one were talking.
“If I'm not,” Eleanor said, “my mother has gravely misled me.”
He leaned toward her. “How old are you?” Sonia looked alarmed.
“Far, far, too old, but thanks.”
“Have you got a sister?”
“Orlando!” his sister said. Hammond, looking at me, slowly crossed his eyes.
“No,” Eleanor said seriously. “But surely, you shouldn't have any trouble-”
“I'm too young for them,” Orlando said with surprising bitterness. “Girls at school are what, nineteen, twenty? I'm sixteen. I can't even drive.” For the first time he sounded like a teenager.
“I see,” Eleanor said. “That's a problem.”
"As long as we're talking hypothetically, Al. .” I began.
“Do you know anybody?” Orlando asked Eleanor.
“I'm thinking,” Eleanor said.
“Let's assume a hypothetical kidnapper,” I said. “Let's assume he steals a kid or two, or even just takes something precious-”
“She doesn't have to be Chinese,” Orlando said helpfully.
“That's enough, Orlando,” Sonia said, very much the older sister.
“But it would help if she could drive,” Orlando finished very quickly. Then he looked down at his plate and began to pick at the cuticle of his left thumb.
“What does he want, your kidnapper?” Sonia asked me.
“He doesn't say. Just demands that a house be left empty and unguarded for a certain number of hours and that everything of any value be sort of piled in the middle of the living room. And the person who owns the house comes home at the appointed time and the kid is right there, and nothing's missing.”
“Something must be missing,” Hammond said. “Did they check carefully?”
“Oh, yes,” Eleanor said, “this person would have checked very carefully.”
Hammond looked from her to me as the silence yawned around us. “You guys are sharing a hypothetical life, huh?”
“We have been for years,” Eleanor said.
“It was a card trick,” Sonia suggested. “He asked them to pile up everything valuable just to distract them and then, uh. .”
“Took something worth nothing?” Hammond challenged.
“This is thinking like a cop?” Orlando asked. He didn't sound awestruck.
“He risked a lot to take this kid or these kids or whatever it was,” I said. “If it was a kid, he even transported it over state lines.”
“Hey, hey,” Orlando said, snapping his fingers, “maybe he left something.”
We all looked at him.
“Sure,” he said. “Maybe the whole thing was for him to get inside when no one was there and have something. He never wanted to take anything at all. He just told them to put the stuff out because-”
“That's pretty good,” Hammond said grudgingly.
“Alternative,” Orlando said promptly. “What he took doesn't have any value at all except to him. It wasn't even with the stuff they put out. That's why he had them put the important stuff out, so they'd look there instead of anywhere else. Like Sonia said, a card trick. It's something so unimportant that it won't be missed, but it's important to him.”
“I may have a girl for you after all,” Eleanor said.
“That's the direction I've been leaning toward,” I said to Sonia. “Something that seems to be worthless.”
“Nothing is worthless to my mother,” Eleanor said, and then stopped. “Oh, good lord,” she said. She wrapped her right hand into a fist and pretended to try to force it into her mouth.
“Just some relative, huh?” Hammond said accusingly.
“Case closed, Al. All over, and at no cost to the taxpayers.”
“A kid was transported across state lines?” Sonia demanded.
“What do you think about Emily Liang?” Eleanor asked me.
“Nice little girl. Plays the piano, doesn't she? Wears a lot of pink?”
“I mean, for Orlando.”
Orlando pulled the center out of a piece of bread and rolled it up between his palms, the picture of adolescent nonchalance.
“Nah,” I said, “she's too nice for Orlando.” He gave me a startled glance.
“What do you mean, it's over?” Hammond's shoulders loomed toward me.
“The kids are home. Nothing valuable is missing. It was all a. . a-”
“A family misunderstanding,” Eleanor finished for me.
A big pill made out of bread hit me on the ear. “How could she be too nice for me?” Orlando said.
“What a question,” his sister scoffed. “Have you got a brother, uh, Eleanor?”
“Do I ever,” Eleanor said.
“And you seem so calm,” Sonia said.
“How many conversations we got here?” Hammond asked. “I feel like I've got jet lag.”
It reminded me of Uncle Lo, and it seemed like safe territory. “Just what exactly is jet lag?”
“It's a displacement of the circadian rhythms,” Orlando said, getting it out of the way so he could return to his main theme. “How could she be too-”
“Circadian,” I said. “Pretty word. Sounds like Shakespeare, the seacoast of Circadia.”
“What I really don't like,” Orlando announced to the world at large, “is when someone asks a question and doesn't listen to the answer.”