“Good guess,” Eleanor said.
“You have a phone call.”
“Where are we,” Hammond asked heaven, “the Polo Lounge?”
“I left the number on my answering machine.” Eleanor smoothed a hand over my shoulder, but not before I'd asked her to give my regards to Burt. She grabbed a lock of my hair and yanked it as she followed the maitre d’.
“Burt, huh?” Hammond grunted, shoveling a bale of romaine lettuce into his mouth. “Talk about permanent objects.”
“The reptilian brain, on the other hand,” Orlando continued as though no one had interrupted, “can't really time-bind. Its prey has to be the right shape, the right size, and moving. Surround a frog with dead flies, and it'll starve to death.”
“And that's enough,” Sonia commanded. “No more flies, no more dung. We've been very patient.”
Orlando started to say something, then closed his mouth so sharply I could hear his teeth crack together. He prodded at his salad with a forefinger, the picture of a man looking for dead flies.
“Do you really think,” Sonia asked, softening, “that Eleanor might introduce him to someone?”
On cue, Eleanor beckoned to me from across the room. Even at that distance I could see that something was wrong.
“I'll ask her,” I said, getting up.
“Collar the waiter while you're up,” Hammond said. “No Russian dressing?”
“Getting smaller now,” I said as I left the table. Orlando fixed me with a poisonous look.
The Christmas tree twinkled hyperactively at me, silhouetting Eleanor in its prism of light. She grabbed my wrist and led me toward the phone, out of sight of the table. The receiver dangled by its coiled cord, and she picked it up and gave it a shake, as though there were someone unpleasant inside it.
“I don't know whether to laugh or cry,” she said, hanging it up. “I wish I'd been born an orphan.”
“What is it?”
“It's Horace,” she said. “The jerk. He's left Pansy and the kids in Vegas and gone after Uncle Lo.”
9
My room in the TraveLodge on Hill Street was mercifully lacking in Christmas cheer. No dying tree, no cards lining the mantel. For that matter, no mantel. I'd checked the window for a glimpse of festivity and found myself looking at a concrete wall two feet away. After my first night on the street, I'd found the dour little room a relief from the faux-Oriental facades of Chinatown, sparkling with lights and ringing with scratchily amplified carols, as though a missionary had seized control of a small Asian country and decreed a cure for his homesickness.
Tossed over the sagging princess-sized bed a stained lemon-yellow spread struggled for chromatic dominance with a carpet the color of decayed teeth, an irregularly mottled brown over which you could have changed the oil in a car without leaving a noticeable stain. I'd dropped my keys on it the second evening I was there and spent ten minutes on my hands and knees trying to find them by touch. They didn't move or jingle, so I didn't get a chance to practice my time-binding.
This was my fourth evening, which made it Sunday night. One week since I'd stared at Lo over the red candle.
One wall framed a door and a mirror, below which were a narrow Formica counter and a curved plastic chair. The chair and counter had seceded from the color wars and assumed a sort of spit-gray neutrality. The decor was completed by a simulated wood dresser shoved up against the wall with the pictureless window in it. Above the dresser a bent nail supported an impossibly vivid laser-generated photo of two kittens in a basket. That was it, except for two more doors, one leading to the tiny closet and the other to a bathroom where the grouting was in serious need of attention.
Sitting becalmed on the lemony pouf of the bed, I tried to convince myself that I knew what I was doing. I knew I was putting on my Reeboks because my feet would hurt later if I didn't, but long-term goals were conspicuous by their absence. I didn't really think I would turn a corner and bump into Horace, or that my two murderous Vietnamese kids would wave cheerfully at me from across a room. But the kids had come from Chinatown and Uncle Lo had been assaulted in Chinatown-or so he'd told Mrs. Summerson. Or so Mrs. Summerson had said he'd told her. Still, Eleanor had been sure that Horace was in Chinatown, and more than anything in the world right then, I needed to find Horace. I needed to find him for Eleanor and Pansy, and I needed to find him for me. So I'd sentenced myself to wandering aimlessly around Chinatown morning and night, working my way through Horace's known haunts, and enduring the TraveLodge so I could get an early start.
After three nights of merciless Cantonese meals-lop sop, Eleanor called it, dismal imitation Chinese food the restaurant help would never eat themselves-and after wearing down the tread on my Reeboks tracking kids who, on closer inspection, looked like visitors from the Valley, I'd come to one firm conclusion. I'd concluded that I'd eat at McDonald's.
Only in a city as horizontal as Los Angeles would Hill Street be called Hill Street. Most of it is as level as a billiard table, four lanes of flat black asphalt distinguished from a million other L. A. streets only by the two-story, Chinese-cheesy architecture that crowds it on either side, replacements for the original buildings, slapped together in 1938 by the ephemeral architects of Paramount Pictures as a gift to the Anglo city's fantasy life. The development had been so romantically and persuasively inauthentic that scenes from The Good Earth had been shot there before the whole mishegas burned to the ground. The canned-Cantonese frippery that replaced it was no less unauthentic but much less glamorous, sets for a movie starring Victor Mature, with someone like Veronica Lake playing the Chinese girl he loves, all shorthand Asian Mystery and inscrutable proverbs, pidgin English, horsehair wigs, and rubber eyelids. The wigs were in plentiful evidence, re-Orienting the Western mannequins modeling Chinese robes in the shop windows. The eyelids, the ones on the street, that is, seemed to be real.
Of course, not all of them these days belonged to Chinese. Hill Street, its two parallel streets, and the web of cross streets, alleys, and walkways that connected them were relics of what had at least been a real Chinese neighborhood all those years ago. Now the Asian presence in Los Angeles was more complex, a confused stew of people with nothing in common but tonal languages. The Chinese and Japanese had been joined by the refugees from wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Add the ambitious economic opportunists from Korea and Indonesia and Thailand to the mix, and you had the diverse population that the Anglo newspapers lumped together as “the Asian community.”
Grumbling loudly enough to draw stares, I angled across Hill and into a little pedestrian walkway between shops, on the way to my car and a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. I didn't make it.
My car, Alice, was in view, gleaming horsefly-blue under a street-lamp thirty yards away, when the girl screamed. She was tiny and Asian, and she burst from an alley twenty feet ahead of me and to the right, and then an arm snaked out and grabbed her down jacket at the neck and jerked her back in. I heard the squeeee as her rubber-soled tennis shoes left the pavement, and then another scream, higher and more urgent than the first.
Well, so it wasn't a time for reflection. I wrapped my fist around my car keys so that the points protruded between my knuckles, and sprinted after her. Fist-first, keys raking the air, I rounded the corner and dove headfirst into sucker heaven.
Something hard and heavy landed on the back of my neck, coming from the left, and the whisper it made as it parted the air gave me just enough warning to launch myself off the balls of my feet, subtracting my forward velocity from its momentum, and it struck my neck and folded my left ear forward and pasted it to my head like the flap on a glued envelope, pushing me forward and off my feet. I felt hot blood pour down my neck as I landed on my stomach, and the girl giggled.