“Where did it stop you?”
He pondered. “Anywhere.”
“It couldn't be anywhere,” I said. “Charlie was going to a lot of trouble to avoid having Chinese stopped with the money. He would have pulled you over someplace near wherever he felt safe.”
“Charlie on the boat,” Tran said.
“Maybe.” I thought about the evening. “And maybe our friend Everett is a liar.”
Tran mentally ran through some of the trips. “Chinatown,” he said. “Always Chinatown.”
I was watching the lighted window. No one seemed to be looking at us, but I started Alice and turned on the headlights so as not to appear furtive. Around the corner, I pulled over again. “Did you ever pick up money from the restaurants, like the men we saw today?”
“Not thinking, you,” Tran said. “We don't know about that.”
“Probably not enough money anyway,” I said, attempting to recover a little face. “Not enough to get the cops suspicious if the mules got pulled over.”
“Charlie Wah not worried about cops,” Tran said. “Worried about other gangs.”
“Other gangs,” I said. “Jesus.” A door opened creakily in my mind, and a little light went on, not much of a light, but sometimes it doesn't take much.
“Sure. Other gang takes the money, kills the soldiers. This way they only kill Vietnamese.”
“Charlie doesn't care about the soldiers,” I argued.
“Soldiers,” Tran said patiently, even sympathetically, “don't know that.”
“Okay,” I said. “I'm stupid. Why the armed guard, then?”
He reached over and shook me gently, as though I were asleep. “So we don't take the money,” he said.
I thought about it. The more I thought about it, the better I liked it. “You know in English,” I asked, “ 'good, better, best'?”
“Sure.” Tran was openly humoring me now. “In school.”
“Say it, then.”
“Good, better, best,” he repeated, looking puzzled.
I punched him on the arm.
“Good team,” I said.
Tran hid a smile by looking at his lap.
“One more place,” I said, even though the new place wasn't anything I wanted to explore. “The Jesus lady you told me about.” I gunned the car. “Let's go see where she lives.”
She lived in Mrs. Summerson's house.
I had known she would, but hope springs eternal. The house sat there at the end of its extensive front yard, looking secluded and spacious, the perfect place to hide thirty or forty CIAs.
I sat at the wheel, trying to put Mrs. Summerson and Charlie Wah into the same room, and failing utterly. Why would Charlie need an ex-missionary? Why bring a gwailo into the distribution process? Tiffle I could see: He had his uses. But Mrs. Summerson had been Eleanor's savior; she'd taken care of her when Eleanor was a temporarily abandoned child with limited English. She'd been nervous, I recalled, when we'd asked her about Lo, but still, all those years ago, she'd given Eleanor affection and a home and brought her through the days of Ching-chong Chinaman. Of all the people in the world, outside of her immediate family, and maybe me on a good day, Eleanor loved Esther Summerson most.
And Lo, I thought, adding him to the list.
Eleanor was not going to be happy about this.
“How many times?” I asked.
“Two.”
“You delivered or picked up?”
“Picked up.”
“Great,” I said miserably. “That's marvelous.” Alice's clock, undergoing one of its temporary resurrections, ticked at us.
“Gave me cookies, her,” Tran said at last.
“I've no doubt.”
“We go in?”
“No. I need to think.”
“Not good, better, best?” he asked.
“Not nearly.” I tried one last time to be wrong. “Listen, Tran, an old lady, tall, thick glasses, white hair cut short, right?”
“In the button,” he said. I was going to write a dictionary of idioms someday.
“Well, fuck a duck,” I said. “We'll have to talk to her. And when the nice lady you tried to frighten-”
“Eleanor,” he said.
“Right, good for you, when Eleanor comes around tonight or tomorrow, you don't tell her about this, okay?”
In the end, I told Eleanor about Mrs. Summerson, after all.
When we got back to Topanga it was past ten, and I phoned her in Venice and asked if she could come take a look at Tran's arm. Then I called Dexter and added "black" to the list of qualifications for the knight in armor he was supposed to be recruiting. When he'd hung up, I dialed Peter Lau, first to make sure that he'd gotten home, and second, to check on what Everett had told me. Everett was trussed hand and foot in my bedroom with one end of Charlie's handy cuffs locked around a leg of the bed. I'd bandaged his thigh.
“Tell me about the timetable for Charlie Wah's shipments,” I said when Peter picked up the phone.
“ 'S'irregular,” he said, sounding as though he either were lying down or should be. “He keeps it that way on purposely. On purpose.”
“Then it's flexible?”
“You mean, can he improvise? My stars, no. The last thing he can do. He staggers the arrivals like any intelligent crinimal-scuse, crimmul-would, but the freighter has to talk to San Pedro all the way across the pond, talk, talk, and the arrival date is firm. Maybe they have to line up for a day or two offshore, jus' tote'n float. Better for Charlie. He can pick his day.”
“Do you think he's already moved them off the ship?”
“No way to know.”
I massaged my shredded ear. “Listen, Peter, have you heard anything about a missionary being involved? Here in Los Angeles, I mean.”
“Missionary? What kind of question is that?”
“One that I wish I weren't asking.”
“You mean a 'Merican missionary?”
“Have you heard anything?”
“No. Why'n earth would he-” I heard a familiar sound. He was clinking the rings together.
“Peter?”
“I'm thinking. There's something about missionaries. Are you a toll call?”
“Yes.”
“Then hold on.” He missed the table with the phone, and it took a couple of bounces on the way down. I was rubbing my ear again when the door opened and Eleanor came in, carrying a small shopping bag. She was wearing a nubby red sweater over black bicycle shorts, and she looked like the entree on a lecher's menu. Bravo, who was sitting with his head on Tran's lap, slapped the floor with his tail and whimpered welcome.
“Bactine,” she said, holding up the bag as though that would help me see through it, “and some nice red wine.”
“Gaaaahhh,” I said, wincing at the idea of wine.
“Kidding about the wine,” she whispered. “It's white. Are you talking to someone?”
“No,” I said, “I'm hooked up to the radio telescope on Mount Palomar.”
“I've got something to tell you after the supernova. There's my little patient.” She brightened at the sight of Tran.
“Hello, Eleanor,” Tran said, slowly and formally. “How are you today?” He sounded like he'd been practicing.
“Tell her,” I suggested, “where is the pen of your aunt.”
He looked startled. “Pardon?”
“He's just being Simeon,” Eleanor soothed. “He does it whenever he can't come up with something better.”
Tran stood and raised his hands to his chest, palms together. “Eleanor,” he said, “I am sorry.”
“For what?”
“For trying to kill you and frighten you.” He had been practicing.
“That little thing.” Eleanor pulled the Bactine from the bag. “Take off that fat man's shirt and sit down, and I'll make you sting.”
“Old fart shirt.” Tran began to unbutton.
“That's enough of that,” said the old fart.
“Of what?” Peter Lau asked.
“Talking to the dog,” I said.
“Oh. Had to get my files." He sounded like he'd gotten more than his files. “I knew there was something about missionaries. Back when Charlie Wah was an innocent, pink-cheeked lad, long before the suits and the haircut, he was taken in by missionaries.” He swallowed, a long and melodically liquid sound, and ice tinkled gaily. “This is in China, of course. He lived with them, mishnaries, and went to a mishnary school. Quite the little suck-up, too, our Charlie, until he decided that the kingdom of heaven was here on earth and helped a local gang break in and steal everything the school owned. I mean, down to the pencils. Five years later, he and the gang were on Taiwan.”