The Man With No Time

13

“Eleven million dollars,” Peter Lau said, “every two weeks.”

We'd followed him to a new restaurant, and the air, or something, had done him good. His eyes were steadier, his voice less susceptible to sudden spikes of nervous energy. The front of his shirt had dried out. He even smiled occasionally, like someone picking up radio jokes on his fillings. He was drinking lemonade without spilling it into his lap.

At my suggestion, Tran had taken up watch in the parking lot, conserving a Coke and eating ice cream and peering through Alice's dirty windows for a sight of the enemy. In his absence, Lau had grown more expansive.

“Eleven million dollars,” I said. It was a nice thing to say.

“That's just on this coast.” He narrowed his eyes, either in speculation or in defense against the light. “Another five, maybe, on the East. Let's make it sixteen million dollars every two weeks, so that's about four hundred and sixteen million dollars a year.” He put down the lemonade and clinked the rings together. “Tax free.”

“All under Charlie Wah?” Four hundred and sixteen million dollars didn't seem real.

“Charlie Wah runs the West Coast only. East Coast is Johnny King.”

“King?”

Lau smiled, for perhaps the third time. He'd wanted me to ask. “Koh, actually,” he said. “His first name, obviously, isn't really Johnny, either.” Now that he'd decided to talk, he was making a good story out of it, Chinese-style.

“Johnny King,” I said. “Charlie Wah. They sound like movie gangsters.”

“Very good,” Lau purred. “Hollywood has a lot to answer for.” He sniffed at his lemonade as though he hoped someone had slipped something alcoholic into it while he wasn't looking. “But make no mistake. These are appallingly dangerous men.”

“I've seen Charlie Wah in action,” I said.

Lau made a tight little P with his lips and blew air behind it. “Charlie Wah thinks he's the last of the old-time mobsters. He affects the whole gestalt: those bodyguards, that haircut, those awful suits.”

“Powder blue, the one I saw.”

“He dresses like sherbet. He's a pastel rainbow, a complete spectrum of bad taste. He has them made in London, nice piece of reverse snobbery there, by a very good tailor who must go reeling every time a bolt of fabric arrives. They're silk, of course, dyed in Thailand by the inmates of a home for unwed mothers.”

“Interesting labor pool.”

He looked a little disappointed at my lack of reaction. “It's a good holding pen. Bring a couple dozen Chinese girls through Bangkok, put them up in the home while their papers are cooking, then ship them out.”

“Why Bangkok?”

Lau sighed. He was feeling better, but it would be days before he was his old self again, if he still had an old self. “There are two main routes,” he said, industriously moving things around on the tabletop. He laid a knife between us. "One is over the Chinese border near Yunnan and then by air into Thailand." He pushed his index finger to the edge of the knife and then hopped over it and skidded onto an unwiped piece of food that apparently represented Bangkok. “In Thailand the CIAs-that's Chinese Illegal Aliens-become Taiwanese or Hong Kongese and fly either to Los Angeles or to New York, sometimes via Taiwan. That's the air route, the most expensive. Fifty thousand dollars each. A hundred arrive on each coast every couple of weeks, about twenty million dollars a month.”

The sums were troubling me. “Where does a mainland Chinese get fifty thousand dollars?”

A scowl informed me that I was breaking his flow. “Later. The second route"-he angled the knife about forty-five degrees away from me-"is by sea. Overland across China to Fujian Province, then by fishing boats into the Strait of Taiwan. They're picked up by a freighter and shipped, like computer parts or automobile bumpers, to San Pedro. Three or four miles offshore, they're loaded into small boats and brought the rest of the way in. As you can imagine, a long and uncomfortable trip. Also, no papers are involved. That's tourist class, thirty thousand apiece. A shipment of two hundred makes Charlie Wah six million dollars.”

“Who owns the freighters?”

“Dummy companies set up by the Snakes. There's legitimate cargo, too, of course. On a good-sized freighter, two hundred people don't take up very much room. Especially if they're Chinese. Chinese,” he said distastefully, “like crowds.”

“The money,” I prompted.

He paused and reached up to pat his pasted hair. “Chinese have very extended families. An entire family, thirty or forty people, will save for years for the down payment to send one young man to America. They're almost all men.”

“What about those girls? In the home for-”

“They're going to be prostitutes,” he said. “Not that they know it. Come to think of it, I'm not sure the Snakes do. It's just a sideline for Charlie. Charlie has a taste for prostitutes. They're useful in other ways, too.”

He looked around absently: one more bright coffee shop, devoid, for the moment, of people who wanted to kill him. A clean, well-lighted place where he could sit with his computer and fax machine and pretend that he was writing and that people were waiting to read what he was writing.

“The men who can't pay,” he said at last, “are the more interesting ones, if your interests run to slavery and degradation. They have no papers, no language except whatever Chinese dialects they speak, no money, obviously. They enter a period of indentured servitude, if we're being polite. One year of work, ten thousand dollars off their debt. Of course, there's interest, too. Most of them come tourist class, so that's roughly three years they owe to Charlie Wah and the Snakes.”

“Three years doing what?”

He grimaced. “Whatever their masters decree. Restaurants, farms, laundries, garment factories, assembly lines, import warehouses. The Snakes own some of the businesses, but for others they're just a source of cheap transient labor. Say the slave earns fifteen thousand a year, which is standard. That's ten for Charlie, two to send home, and three to live on. Three,” he said, watching me with an expression I couldn't read.

I was bone-weary and not paying attention as closely as I should have been. “Doesn't leave much for movies,” I said.

He slapped the table flat-handed. “It doesn't leave much for food,” he said. “These men own one shirt and one pair of trousers. They sleep six to eight in one-room apartments divided into plywood cribs. They buy fifty pounds of rice at a time and boil it in their apartments and flavor it with soy or make it into a gruel they can eat cold. They're afraid to go outside when they're not working, afraid someone from the INS will tap them on the shoulder-” He stopped himself and gazed over my shoulder, remembering something.

“So,” I said, calling him back to the present, “the INS.”

He grimaced. “This is how cute Charlie is. This is typical Charlie. Get some poor coolie into the country, soak him for three years' hard labor, and get Tiffle to hand him a phony green card. Then send a phony INS inspector, an English-speaking Chinese, to wherever he's working, got it?” He was speaking quietly, but he'd picked up a paper napkin and was methodically pulling its corners off.

“The INS guy tells the slave his card is no good. Says he'll be back tomorrow to check it out again, and to have money ready, hint, hint, elbow dig. The slave runs in a panic to Tiffle, who charges him seven hundred and fifty bucks to get the INS inspector pulled from the case and issue a new card. The next day the INS guy shows up anyway and says he's not on the case anymore, but he wants two-fifty not to pass the word to his successor. A thousand bucks,” he said, slapping his thigh hard enough with his left hand to spill the lemonade in his right. “One tenth of a year. Pull it three or four times on a few dozen guys, and you've got a nice little extra dividend. More time in the sweatshop for the coolie, less money to eat on, less money sent to mama and the kids in China, another loud suit for Charlie Wah to hang on his fat bloody shoulders.”

“Double play,” I said. “Charlie to Tiffle. Tell me about Tiffle.”

“Tiffle,” Lau snarled, tearing the napkin in half. “He's a fool. He likes Chinese girls, so he went into practice in C-town as a big liberal humanitarian, helping the poor little yellows with the bureaucratic machine. Business setups, immigration law, all that. Well, he shagged a few young ones now and then, but-what is it Shakespeare says about the appetite that feeds on itself?”

“Something terrific, I'm sure.”

Lau ripped the napkin into quarters. “So Charlie hears about him and thinks it might be nice to have a gwailo immigration lawyer, the police would never suspect that, and who has access to more Chinese girls than Charlie Wah? All those little unwed mothers. So he sent a few 'immigrants' to Claude Tiffle, and every one of them was a pretty girl, and every one of them had a problem that required Claude to do something just a little more illegal if he wanted to, ah, get paid.”

The coffee shop was emptying now, people paying their checks and heading back to work. The noise level had dropped, and our voices were carrying. I'd liked it better full.

Peter Lau put the pieces of napkin on the table in front of him and aligned their edges. “Of course, he was also a prime candidate for disbarment. Charlie set up two or three really dirty deals in a row and then paid the counselor a visit.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I'm a good reporter,” he said mildly. “I found a girl who had quit Tiffle's office-Chinese, of course-and moved to Virginia. I wrote a story using just tiny pieces of what she gave me. That's when the editor of my paper learned that he might have a fire problem.”

“Okay,” I said.

“But the point is that Claude liked it. He liked being dirty, and he liked the money that Charlie kept dropping onto his desk, and, of course, he liked the girls.”

“How does Charlie deliver the girls?” I was seeing all sorts of possibilities.

“They used to deliver them every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Maybe they still do.”

“What else does Tiffle do, exactly? When he's not practicing the two-person bellyflop.”

“Phony IDs, real IDs, green cards.” Lau glanced around the restaurant. “Ghost processing, when an illegal immigrant gets the papers of a real immigrant who's either died or gone back to China through one of the unofficial doors. That's a boom market, dead men's papers. A little money laundering, Chinese into American currency, nothing serious, just enough to get him into even worse trouble if Charlie ever decides to open the trap door.”

“That's great,” I said. “Rampant jerkism.”

“Don't think about going up against Claude. He's a fool, but he's almost as mean as Charlie Wah.”

I nodded, thinking of ways to go up against old Claude.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I jumped six inches. When I looked up I saw Tran.

“Toilet,” he said.

“So go ahead,” I said. “You don't need to ask.”

“Toilet,” he said more urgently. “Everybody.”

“Oh, my God,” Peter Lau said, going pale.

“Come on,” I said. He hadn't unpacked his office, so I grabbed two of the cases and Lau's elbow. Tran took the other case and headed for the men's room.

“No,” Lau said, standing shakily. “This way.” And he led us, in a crouching Groucho Marx run, for the kitchen. Through the windows I could see four Chinese men approaching the coffee shop. They wore the Hollywood mode du jour, sport coats and jeans. One of them was talking and the other three laughing. The one who was talking was Ying.

The kitchen was large and steamy and densely overpopulated. At least fifteen men occupied the room: slicing, dicing, washing, drying, frying, boiling, sitting idly and smoking. They gazed at us incuriously, ghosts from another dimension, as we hurried through the room, down a short, dingy corridor, and out the back door.

“Oh, no,” Peter Lau said, stopping short and going so loose in defeat that I put out an arm to prop him up. “I parked in front.”

“Relax,” I said. “This has got to be a coincidence.” It didn't sound very plausible to me, either.

“No coincidence,” Lau snapped. “They came to collect. They have people working here.”

“Well, if you'll excuse my saying so, this is a pretty stupid place to hide, then.”

“I'm not hiding. I want them to know that I'm around, not doing anything. If they go too long without seeing me-”

“Coming into the kitchen, them,” Tran said, emerging. I hadn't seen him go back in.

“I always park in front,” Peter Lau moaned. “Why do I drink!”

“If they're in the kitchen, we can make it to the car. It's got to take them a few minutes.”

“They'll leave two in front,” Lau said hopelessly. “They always do. And they'll bring the headman out here for a talk. Who's not working, who might want to run away.”

“Two?” Tran said. He grinned at me.

“Not on your life,” I said. “It's broad daylight.”

“Anyway, we look,” Tran said insistently.

Well, hell. “Do they know your car?”

“I don't know.” Lau was green again. “Usually, they sent this one.” He turned his head toward Tran.

“Okay. Go around to the other side of the building.”

I handed Lau the two cases, and Tran piled on the third. “Stay there for ten minutes. If we haven't come to get you, wait another fifteen minutes and then cross the street, nice and slow. Don't look back. Go into a store over there and just watch through the window until you're sure you can get to your car.” He was protesting, but I had to leave him to follow Tran.

The restaurant was a one-story cinder-block oblong dropped into the center of a large asphalt parking lot, built before the new Chinese immigrants drove Monterey Park land values up toward the Beverly Hills stratosphere. The back and sides of the building were pink and featureless except for the door we'd come through; ten feet away were the equally featureless sides of the neighboring buildings. The front, which looked onto Garvey Boulevard, was mostly glass and shrubbery, scrubby deep green juniper. The door was off center, closer to the corner Tran and I were about to round.

“Belt,” Tran said, pointing at his.

“This is ridiculous,” I protested, taking off my belt and hoping Ying was one of the men outside.

“In bushes,” he said. “Wait.”

I squeezed into the junipers at the corner of the building, and Tran waved at me and then sauntered around the corner. I was wrapping the ends of my belt around my hands when I heard a shout of surprise, and then the sound of running feet.

Tran hurtled around the corner, followed closely by two men, both almost as small as he was. I waited until the one closest to Tran had passed and then stepped out directly behind the second one. In two quick steps I was behind him and looping the belt up over his head and around his neck. I crossed my hands, bringing the belt tight, and dug my feet in, and the man's weight stopped him and snatched at the belt so hard that I would have lost it if I hadn't wrapped it first. He said, “Yuunnng,” and his hands went up to the belt, and I saw Tran stop dead and kick out behind him, putting one foot into the mid-section of the man behind him.

The man dropped to his knees, and Tran twirled and lifted a boot and punted his victim's head into some imaginary end zone, probably in Hawaii. As the man flopped to the pavement with a wet sigh I could hear ten feet away, the one with my belt around his neck gurgled and went limp, and I aided his forward movement with a shove that bounced his forehead on the blacktop. I kicked him in the ear for good measure, and he lay still.

“Go start the car,” I said, retrieving my belt. “Wait for me.”

Tran jumped nimbly into the air and landed with both knees on the kidneys of the one he'd kicked, tearing the man's sport coat up the back seam, and then sprinted for the car. I went to his victim and took a look: Ying. Tran's cousin's face swam into the air in front of me, and I grabbed a handful of Ying's hair and lifted his head and then scrubbed his face back and forth against the asphalt, pushing down with all my strength. He bled rewardingly from forehead, chin, and nose, and the seam down his left cheek opened up very nicely. I realized I was growling as I took a little leap of my own, nothing as graceful as Tran's, and landed on his kidneys with the heels of my Reeboks, hoping he'd be pissing blood for weeks.

The whole thing hadn't taken fifteen seconds. With my heart beating three-quarter time in my ears, I went to the one I'd choked and rolled him over to make sure he was alive. His face was swollen and almost purple, but he was breathing, and I recognized the mild-looking little translator. I took a moment to check his pockets out of habit, found nothing, and, just for the hell of it, I lifted my right foot and dropped on my left knee into his gut. As his breath escaped him with a whoof, Alice came around the corner with Tran at the wheel.

He was laughing and pounding the dash, but when he saw the man at my feet, his face darkened.

“Take him,” he said through the driver's window.

“Ying's over there,” I said. “We can't handle both of them.”

“Him,” Tran said. “Or drive off, me, and leave you here.”

“Him it is,” I said, grabbing the translator by the back of his pants and hauling him toward the car. Tran leaned over and opened the passenger door, and I tossed the translator into the backseat.

“Around the building,” I gasped, as Tran navigated around Ying. “Get Peter.”

But Peter wasn't there. While I fought to regain my breath and kept an eye on the little translator, motionless on the backseat, Tran drove sedately across the lot and into the street. Half a block later, he turned to me, grinning fiercely, and raised a fist.

“Turn left,” I said. My mind was whirling with possibilities. “Get to the freeway heading south.”

“Where we going?”

“We're going to deal ourselves a wild card.”