The Man With No Time (21 page)

“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.”

14 - Ralph and Grace

“W
o,” Dexter Smif said, efficiently blocking the doorway. “You in the wrong 'hood.” Then he glanced past me at Tran, and said, “United Nations still in New York.” He pushed the door wider, craned his neck forward to give Tran a good look, and nodded. “I be drivin a cab now. Driver got to know where the U.N. is.”

“I don't mean to seem unfashionably nervous in a largely minority neighborhood,” I said, “but do you think we could come in?”

“Be nervous,” he said. “This a good place to get your ass chewed.” Dexter was impossibly tall and thinner than soap film. He favored uniforms with his name embroidered on the pocket. The one he was wearing was bright orange and said RALPH.

“Ralph,” I said forcefully, “we'd like to come inside. Now.” The translator had been wrapped in battery cables and stored in the trunk.

He looked down at the name on his pocket. “Fifty cents a letter,” he said. “Saves me half a buck. Always thought I looked like a Ralph.”

“This is Tran,” I said, switching tactics. “He'd like to come in, too.”

“T-R-A-N?”

Tran nodded, craning up at Dexter.

“Lucky dude. You a two-buck-shirt man.”

“Tell it to
Consumer Reports"
I said, "and get out of the way, would you?”

“No manners at all,” Dexter said, stepping aside. Tran and I filed past him into a room that looked like a bordello for dentists.

“Why a cab?” I asked, looking around. The living room was furnished entirely in cut-rate Ikea stuff, leather, black steel, and glass. Literally everything emitted clinical glints of light. “Jesus, I'd hate to think what you do in here.”

“All the leather,” he said, “make it easy to mop up after. Yeah, new career path. Man can only chore for the city, pick up dead animals for so long. Hey, your cat still dead?”

The first time I'd met Dexter, the city had sent him to pick up an extravagantly deceased cat at the foot of my driveway. “She's been reincarnated,” I said, “as a dog.”

“All the same to me, by the time I got them, 'cept dog a little heavier to lift. Talk about hard to lift, got a couple of cows, about a week apart, just before I hung up the ole shovel. Cow a week, it was lookin' like.”

“Tran's Vietnamese,” I said, including him in the chat. “He doesn't know from cows.”

Dexter gave Tran the eye again. “I know he some kind of sushi. You shave yet?”

“I'll never shave,” Tran said, sounding defensive.

“Wo. Two bucks a shirt, no razors. Man can live cheap. You sit on the floor?”

“No,” Tran said shortly.

“Shame. Do without furniture, too, you on the way to rich.”

“Same you?” Tran asked, taking in Dexter's furniture.

Dexter stopped in mid-flow and made his eyes glimmer at Tran, who took a step back, up against a low table that might have been the educated child of two pieces of scrap iron. Then Dexter laughed. “You should drive a cab,” he said fondly to Tran, ignoring me. “Got the right attitude. Fare tries to shovel it at you, you shovel it right back. Hey, a free lesson. Fare say, 'You takin me out of the way,' when you just drivin from Beverly Hills to Santa Monica by way of San Diego. You say, 'Hey, garbageface, get out the fuckin cab.' Less you want to say something bad. You drinking?”

“No,” I said, shuddering.

“Does the Pope—” Tran began cheerfully.

“He's drinking,” I said.

“Does the Pope what?” Dexter asked, fascinated.

“You don't want to know,” I said.

“Pope sounds like a good career path,” Dexter said, turning to a perfectly ordinary black cabinet and leaning over to unfold a bewildering number of surfaces, like someone taking apart origami furniture. “Not too many dead cows on the Pope's beat. Somebody hand the Pope a dead cow, he just probably make the sign over it, say somethin in Polish.” Open at last, the cabinet gleamed with bottles and glasses.

“The cow,” I pointed out, “would still be dead.”

“But on the
way,
” Dexter said, gesturing skyward with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. “On the way to Elsie Heaven with clover everywhere, milkin done on cue by angels in silk gloves. One bull for every cow, just standin around stupid, waitin for the word.”

“What word?” I asked.

“Moo,” Dexter said pityingly. “What word you think?” He poured two glasses of Johnnie Walker and handed one to Tran. “Want one?” he asked me.

“No.”

“Tea? I could make it real weak.”

“It'll make my heart race,” I said. “You know how I get when my heart races.”

“Grace here,” Dexter said, nodding toward me, “only get wrecked on beer. And, hey, thanks for all the cards and letters.”

“I didn't have your address.”

Dexter started to say something and then laughed again, showing Tran the biggest teeth he'd probably ever seen. “Drink up, little Tran,” he said, “and then let's figure out what Grace here wants.”

“Wait,” I said. “We've brought a friend.”

“How many?” Dexter asked two glasses later. Tran was sitting, happy and red-faced from the alcohol, on the couch. The translator was lying on his side on the floor, trussed in jumper cables and belts. He'd still been unconscious when Dexter and I toted him in, and we'd improvised a hood, an old interrogation technique, from a pair of Dexter's boxer shorts. The legs waved over his head like cotton antennae.

I prodded him with a toe.

“Sixteen,” he said. Tran had poked him with a two-pronged barbecue fork a minute ago.

“Sixteen Chinese guys,” Dexter said, clarifying things.

“Sixteen Chinese guys with guns,” I corrected him, “and God knows how many innocent Chinese along for the ride.”

“But they Chinese, too,” Dexter said. This was what had worried me.

“Chinese shit,” Tran said, returning to his main theme.

“You know,” Dexter said, rubbing his face with long fingers, “some black folks aren't crazy about Orientals.”

I looked at my two allies and went for the hole card. “There's a lot of money here.”

“I made out okay last time,” Dexter said, although money had had nothing to do with why he'd come in with me. Dexter had a low boredom threshold. He'd been an unwilling soldier in two small but stupid American wars, and while he wouldn't have claimed to be richer for having spent time in Grenada and Panama, he'd retained the skills he picked up in the University of Legal Murder. He demonstrated one of them by popping seven hundred knuckles. “How'm I sposed to tell them apart? I can't tell a boy from a girl as it is.”