The Man With No Time

23

At 4:55 a.m. Chinatown looked like a closed department store. The streets were dark and empty; even the Christmas lights had been given a rest. Two Chinese men in paramilitary uniforms strolled Hill Street. They were laughing.

“Foot patrol,” Horace the Expert said smugly from the driver's seat. “Neighborhood association. They do the whole circuit in forty-five minutes and then start over.”

“Do they go up Granger?”

“Nah. Only the main streets and the shopping alleys. The merchants pay them.”

“Our resident fount of wisdom,” I said.

“I had lots of time to figure it out.” He loved knowing more about anything, anything at all, than anyone else did.

“Speaking of time,” I said automatically.

“Almost five. We're right on top of it.”

He pulled over at Hill and Granger and I got out. The night had grown sharply colder and the sky was low with fog and pale with city light. Two homeless men sprawled in a patch of weeds, partly covered by yesterday's news.

The metal gate opened with a faint rusty protest. There was a streetlamp directly in front of the house, something I should have noticed before but hadn't, and I followed my lengthening shadow up the walk toward the dark bungalow, hoping that Tiffle wasn't shagging some silky immigrant on his desk. He was going to need his strength before the day was over.

I punched up 11–14 on the alarm keypad to the right of the door. Tiffle's birthday, Florence Lam had said, another piece of evidence that his brain worked on alternating current. Dexter's duplicate key turned without so much as a snag, and the light from the streetlamp illuminated Florence's desk, convincingly messy and busy looking. I pushed the door as far closed as I could without the latch clicking into place and switched on my flashlight. Moving quickly but deliberately, I searched the rooms, including the basement.

The basement was entirely satisfactory. It extended beneath the entire house, it had a rough wooden floor, and there were no windows. Metal filing cases stood against two of the four walls; the others were occupied by a massive old gravity furnace and the stairs I had come down. The door at the top of the stairs opened out, as I'd hoped it would. The skeleton key worked just fine.

Tiffle's desk was a steel hymn to paranoia. Not only did the three drawers lock, but an iron rod had been passed through their handles and locked to the desk frame at top and bottom. It might as well have had a neon sign on top of it saying search here. I was looking for the keys-not that I needed them, but as a way to pass the time-when I heard the first car door slam shut outside.

Five o'clock in the button, as Tran would say.

I had my hand in the inside pocket of Tiffle's suit jacket, which was hanging behind the door, and as I pulled it out my fingers snagged on something. “I'll be damned,” I said, pulling out a little keyring with four double-serrated keys dangling from it. “Thank you, Claude.” As I slipped one of the keys into the lock at the top of the iron rod, the first car pulled away and I heard footsteps on the front porch. The second car door slammed and the front door to the cottage opened almost simultaneously.

“Surprise,” Dexter said from the front room. “Where the balloons and whistles?”

“How many you got?” I called.

“Four. Rest with Tran and two Doodys.”

“They all inside?” The first lock turned easily.

“No, you dinkus, I left them on the step.”

“You know where they go.” The lower lock resisted, and I chose another key.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Shoes scuffled across the floor and then down the steps to the basement, and I heard the door close. A moment later the front door opened to a confusion of soft voices, one of them a deep Doody rumble.

“Here your jimmy,” Dexter said, coming into the office. He was toting a crowbar.

“Don't need it. The man thoughtfully left his keys.”

“Guy got to be in serious minus territory.” He leaned forward and studied the desk. “More locks than the mint, and he leaves the keys here.” The lower lock turned, and the metal rod slipped loose and clattered to the floor. “Good thing we ain't bein sneaky.”

“Dexter, why don't you go help Tran or something?” I flipped through the remaining keys.

“You the one needs help. Try the one with the nail polish on it.”

I did, and it fit smoothly into the top drawer and turned. “See?” Dexter said. “Good thing you got friends.”

“You're breathing on my neck.” I pulled the drawer open.

“I doin it free, too. Cap'n Snow would pay good cash for a little of that. What's in the box, you think?”

“Opening it,” I said patiently, “will be my very next act.”

“Lordy,” Dexter said. It was full of money: five stacks, apparently all hundreds, each three inches thick. “A little dividend,” Dexter said. “One each.”

I hesitated and then said, “Why not?” and scooped the money out of the box and handed it to him. “A sideline, maybe, something Charlie Wah didn't know about.”

“Or insurance,” Dexter said, stuffing money into his pockets. “Getaway stash.”

I put the box on the desk and rifled though the rest of the drawer's contents. A manila envelope contained thirty or forty green cards, genuine to my unpracticed eye, and four Canadian passports. The spaces for the photos were blank.

“Hot shit,” Dexter said over my shoulder. “Hello, Uncle Sam.”

“Downstairs, them,” Tran said, coming into the room. “Talk too much.”

“Let's hope they keep it up,” I said, fishing out a cardboard stationery box that had been shoved to the back of the drawer. “Oh, well, Claude, you wicked dog.” The box was packed with Polaroids of naked Chinese girls, taken right there in the office. They were all young and all unsmiling, but other than that they ran the gamut from plain to beautiful, fat to thin. They had been posed obscenely, and breasts pushed themselves at the camera like swollen bruises, sex organs gaped like wounds.

“Cops gone love that,” Dexter said.

“Bleary,” Tran said, picking one out with thin fingers. “Here Mopey.”

“Find Weepy and Snowbell,” I said, handing him the box. “Keep them.”

“I'll keep Snowbell,” Dexter offered. “Just kidding,” he said, his free hand upraised, when I turned to look at him.

An economy-sized box of twenty-four Trojan condoms rounded out Claude's private museum. Tran passed me the box of Polaroids, keeping four, and I closed the first drawer and went to work on the second.

“They all untaped?” I asked as I worked.

“Cept they hands and they eyes,” Dexter said.

“Good,” I said. “Where are the cases?”

“Hall,” Tran said. “You want?”

“Not yet.” The second drawer was full of papers: deeds, quit claims, contracts, business partnerships, immigration forms. I flipped through them, looking for signatures and finding Florence Lam neatly written at the bottom of seven. Folding them lengthwise, I put them on the floor. Then I thought again and pulled out all the papers with women's signatures.

“What time is it?”

“Five-forty-two,” Dexter said. “Gone be light soon.”

“Get the Doodys to untape their wrists and eyes, and then nail the door shut.”

“Yes, Massa,” Dexter said. He straightened up and threw an arm around Tran's shoulders. “Come on, peewee, the Doodys got work to do.”

“Ho, ho,” I said to the third drawer. It was empty except for a small stack of photographs bound by a rubber band. Charlie Wah's face gazed paternally up at me from the first one.

He hadn't known he was being photographed. He'd been caught coming up the walk, with Granger Street fuzzy and indistinct behind him. He figured prominently in five others: one talking to Ying, two walking down Hill Street with his bodybuilders, one at the wheel of a car, and one, barely recognizable, in a restaurant somewhere. Each of the pictures bore a little electronic date in the lower right corner. Tiffle had been busier than Charlie knew.

Just for the hell of it, I got up and went into the front room, listening to the blur of voices from the basement. Rolling a piece of CLAUDE B. TIFFLE ASSOCIATES letterhead into Florence Lam's typewriter, I typed Charlie Wah, and then Snake Triad, Taiwan. I looked at it for a moment and then realized what I'd forgotten to ask Everett. I couldn't ask him now, so I pulled my little phone book out of my pocket and dialed.

“Whassit?” Peter Lau asked blearily.

“Peter. Simeon. Sorry to wake you.”

“Jesus,” Lau said. “My head.”

“Listen, I need Charlie Wah's real name.”

Bedsprings creaked. “Why?”

“I want to send him a letter.”

“No, you don't.”

“Just give me the name, Peter.”

“Wah Yung-Fat. Spelled like it sounds, but no 'o' in 'Yung.' " WAH YUNG, I typed. "Hyphen between Yung and Fat?”

“Yes. What time is it?” — FAT, I typed. “Time for Charlie Wah to start worrying,” I said. “Keep your radio on the news stations.”

I hung up and carried the paper into the office, where I folded it tightly and slipped it under the rubber band around the photos. Then I closed the drawer, got up again, and trudged into the hallway to get the cases.

I put five or six thousand into Tiffle's little box and closed it, then spread the rest of it, more than half a million dollars, over the surface of his desk. It looked impressive. By now nails were being driven into the door at the head of the basement stairs, and then the banging stopped and Dexter ambled in, the hammer still in his hand.

“Wo,” he said, glimmering at the money. “Enough salt for Colonel Sanders.”

“It'll make a nice picture, don't you think?” I locked the desk and tossed Tiffle's keys on top of the money.

“Less the cops snatch it.”

“There'll be too many of them. They'll be watching each other. You got the list?”

“LAPD, INS, U.S. Marshals,” he recited. “Chinatown Association, Chinese Legal Aid Society, ACLU, Times, the radio and TV guys. Start dialin at seven. Give 'em the salt, the slicks downstairs, and the ol' Caroline B.”

“Don't forget the safe houses,” I said. “We haven't got any real slaves for them, but we've got four houses full of stuff.”

Dexter snapped his fingers. “The dresses,” he said, his face lighting up.

“You're a deeply intelligent man, Dexter.” I scooped up the documents Florence Lam and the others had signed and put them into one of the briefcases.

“I the bee's knees,” Dexter said. “Toss that.” I flipped the case at him, and he caught it one-handed. “You throw like a white girl,” he said. “A very young white girl.”

“See you later.”

“You gone sit here, huh? They can't get out.”

“Just in case. No point in taking a short cut now.”

“We had more like you,” Dexter said in mock admiration, “we wouldn't be sniffin around after the Japanese.”

Tran came in behind Dexter. “Getting light,” he said.

I tossed him the second case. “Beat it.”

“You forgot to say we sposed to put a egg in our shoe,” Dexter said.

“If an egg in your shoe,” Tran said to him, “you eat it.”

“Hey,” Dexter said, brightening, “time for breakfast.”

I sat there as the room gradually filled with light, bringing the green of the money out of the gloom like the colors of an underwater reef, and thought about the pilgrims and their long passage and the years of labor they would pass in dingy workplaces and crowded rooms, all to live in a country that didn't want them, that would send them home if it got a chance, but that they thought of as a rich mine, the Gold Mountain where they could trade their hours and days and years and skills for the money they folded meticulously each week into envelopes and sent home to the land of empty stomachs and waiting women. And I thought about Tiffle and his greedy acrobatics with phony green cards and false INS inspectors and the girls he'd invaded on his couch, and wished he were going to take a harder fall.

At seven-ten, while Dexter was making his anonymous phone calls about a cellarful of illegal immigrants, half a million dollars in cash, and a waiting ship, I went out into the dull day and relocked the door behind me. Horace was parked on the short cul-de-sac of Granger on the other side of Hill, and I slid into the car next to him and watched the police and the federals arrive around seven-thirty, followed by men and women with cameras and microphones, and Horace leaned over and punched me on the shoulder when, at eight on the dot, Tiffle sleepwalked right into them.

We drove aimlessly for an hour, listening, and at nine we made the news: a thirty-second story about a Chinatown lawyer, some Chinese prisoners in the basement, and half a million bucks. At nine-thirty I reclaimed Alice from her parking spot, followed Horace while he returned the rental, and dropped him at home, where he could start being nicer to Pansy.

By ten-fifteen, Dexter and I were sitting in Captain Snow's little boat, bobbing up and down in the fog and keeping an eye on the Caroline B. Or, rather, I was keeping an eye on the Caroline B. Dexter had a fishing pole in one arm and Captain Pat Snow in the other, and both of them were looking down at the water.

Some people are said to have postcoital tristesse. Astronauts talk about postorbital letdown. I'd managed to pull off most of something that, two days earlier, I'd privately given no chance of working, and I felt like cold fried eggs. The discontent was so strong as to be physical, a queasy, hollow core in the center of my abdomen that wasn't caused by the rocking of the boat. The only thing that could relieve it, I realized, would be the sight of Charlie Wah coming across the water, on his way to the wrong place.

After forty-five minutes I was sure he wouldn't come. After an hour, I knew he wouldn't come. At eleven-thirty, Dexter caught a fish, and Captain Snow cooed appreciatively and helped him take it off the hook.

At eleven-forty-eight, a big black-and-white cruiser emerged from the fog. There were lots of men in uniform on its deck, and there wasn't much question where they were going. Still, we waited until they went aboard, and then Captain Snow made the engines hum and we headed for Marina Del Rey. I left Dexter on the boat and took a long walk up the dock to my car.

On the way home, I realized I wasn't going there. The Pacific lay gray and cold to my left as I passed the Topanga turnoff and headed toward Alaska. There was a longer news story on the radio around twelve-thirty, and by now they'd gotten around to the houses, which the announcer dubbed “rest stops on the slave highway.” Apparently someone had seen a little capital in it, because a couple of politicians served up outraged, overwritten sound bites about exploitation and human misery. One of them, an Orange County admirer of Louis the Fourteenth, yapped shrilly about the need to control immigration more effectively and protect American jobs, just like there were millions of Americans eager to work sixty-hour weeks for three thousand a year, net.

Nothing about the Caroline B. yet, and nothing about Charlie.

Maybe the parts of it I'd pulled off hadn't been the right parts. Maybe I should have let the INS get the pilgrims and concentrated on Charlie, taking the long view: There'd be fewer slaves for a while. On the other hand, as Everett had said, they want to come. So maybe there weren't any easy answers.

I hate it when there aren't any easy answers.

By the time I hit Rincon, we'd made the one o'clock news, the national news out of New York. The dresses had been announced to the media, and the report was rife with implications that there were forty or fifty female slaves, presumably naked, rattling around the streets of Los Angeles. Never underestimate the power of cash and sex and the media fascination with the word “slave.” I grinned for a moment at the image of Norman Stillman trying frantically to reach me, and then hoped that the phone lines between Taiwan and Charlie Wah's left ear, wherever it might be, were about to catch fire.

Charlie. Just his name was enough to bring me back down to earth. I watched a bunch of freezing surfers pretend to have fun as I ate a couple of greasy fried clams on a pier somewhere near Santa Barbara. The thought of Charlie and his pastel suits and his prostitutes finished off whatever remnant of my appetite the grease on the clams hadn't already quelled. I hurled the rest of them, one at a time, at the heads of the surfers, and gulls swooped down and picked them out of the air.

Charlie was going to skate. He might have a few bad hours with the Snake overlords, and his trip back to Taiwan probably wouldn't be a pleasure cruise on the Love Boat, but he'd still be able to afford his terrible clothes. He'd still be able to play with other people's lives, making and breaking promises and watching the thick blood flow whenever he got bored. Nobody was going to practice the Death of a Thousand Cuts on him in retribution for the two Vietnamese kids in the sweatshop.

Since the clams were all gone I balled up the paper sack they'd come in and pitched it into the gray air. A fat gull caught it and dropped it and squawked at me indignantly. I squawked back and headed toward Alice.

Fog had ghosted its way in from the sea. It pressed itself against the slopes of the mountains and thickened maliciously as I drove south, cutting visibility to a hundred feet or so, and I saw one, then two, accidents, all crumpled metal and flashing lights, and I slowed to a crawl, fixing my eyes on the taillights of a truck in front of me and letting it run interference. I figured it would mash anything in front of us flat, so that I could just ride over it. Smart.

Mr. Smart Guy. Charlie, free as a seagull with millions in the bank. Eleanor's family, never able to be sure that they wouldn't get tied to this somehow and waiting for the knock on the door. Two men dead. Millions of Mainland Chinese lining up to put their money into Charlie's sticky hand and head for what they thought would be freedom, poorer by ten thousand dollars and one last hope.

The truck driver gave up around four and turned into a seaside motel that announced itself in a smear of pink light as The Last Wave. Deprived of my scout, I slowed even more and watched the world grow dark. Above the glow of Alice's instrument lights, Uncle Lo smiled at me from wherever he was, safe on a dead man's papers. I switched off the news and found some rock and roll, loud and mindlessly busy, and daydreamed about the next time I'd meet Lo. Like the truck driver, he'd guided me into the fog and then disappeared. I couldn't seem to remember a time when it wasn't foggy.

I punched up the news again at six-thirty as I turned into Topanga Canyon, and got a story about the Feds busting a ship in San Pedro, the Caroline B., operating on a warrant based on an anonymous tip. Nine people, all Taiwanese nationals, taken into custody, no names. Part of an international ring smuggling Mainland Chinese into the country. The word "slaves" was used four times. In a related story, the good folks living next to the safe houses had suddenly realized there'd been something strange going on and stepped forward eagerly to tell lurid tales of broken-spirited young women being herded in and out. It made me feel good enough to stop at the Fernwood Market and grab a six-pack.

It was close to seven and already completely dark, the night black and fog-muffled, when I climbed out of Alice and scaled the driveway. I whistled for Bravo, but he was probably off disrupting the agendas of the local coyotes. Ready for a shower and sixteen hours' sleep, I felt my way to the door and opened it and then stepped inside and switched on the light.

The first thing I saw, sitting on the stool in front of my computer, was Mrs. Summerson, looking dazed and large and empty and frail. The second thing I saw was Charlie Wah.