Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

He gave me a long glance. “Right at the beginning.” He looked a little uncomfortable. “The U.S. immigration laws were pretty raw then. Chinese men weren't allowed to bring their wives in with them. The idea being that they were supposed to come, build the railroad, light the fuses in the mines, do the laundry, and go home again.”

“The ones who got blown to pieces were allowed to stay?” I asked. “And how do you know this stuff?”

“Interracial sensitivity meetings,” he said. “Three hours a week, when I have the time to go, which isn't exactly often. Also, the Asian crime situation is so out of hand that everybody's trying to be an expert.” He settled back, forcing a tiny scream of pain from his chair, and tried to remember where he was. “So anyway, you had a Chinatown full of bachelors. Classic economics. Demand creates supply.”

“And the tongs,” I volunteered, recalling a detail that had caught my attention at the library, “brought in slave girls.”

“I hate to say it,” Hammond said, “but that's a phrase with real interest value. Slave girls.”

“But against the law,” I said virtuously.

“Well, the law,” Hammond said. “The law never works where sex is concerned, you know? Ask the guys in Vice.” He chewed on that for a second. “Slave girls. The tong leaders didn't see the crime in it. It was just business. Brothels in China were no big deal. Lots of the girls wound up as third or fourth wives.”

“Third or fourth wives?”

“God,” Hammond said acerbically. “Imagine four wives.” He was in the middle of a vehemently acrimonious divorce.

“So there are tongs in every American city now?” I asked. I already thought I knew the answer, but I needed verification.

"Yeah. Except they're all the same tongs. The tongs, most of them anyway, are national. Hell, they're international. They've got branches in Hong Kong and on the mainland, and especially in Taiwan. "

“Why 'especially'?”

“We don't have an extradition treaty with Taiwan,” Hammond said. “And I'm hungry.”

“I promised you a meal,” I said. “So why don't you guys bust the tongs? That's what the Asian Task Force is for, right?”

He shook his big, badly barbered head. Hammond's hair always looked like it had been cut with a can opener. “We can't get inside. Can't even tap a wire and listen in. You know how many dialects there are in China?”

“No.”

“So guess.”

I tried to remember anything Eleanor might have said and failed. “Fifty,” I ventured.

Hammond tried to grin, but the grin was nothing but a mechanical muscle-pull at the corners of his mouth. “A couple thousand.”

“Jesus.” His stomach growled again. “What do you want to eat, Al?”

He glanced around the big ugly room. “Something expensive and far from here.”

“Steak? The Pacific Dining Car?”

“Fine,” he said, underplaying it. Hammond would have chewed his way through a yard of concrete to eat a steak.

“Why are the kids Vietnamese?” The Vietnamese hadn't been mentioned in the books I'd read.

“The kids in the Vietnamese gangs are the enforcers. They're the ones who scare people shitless when they're late with their loan payments. They're the ones who pour Krazy Glue into the locks of the jewelry stores when the owner won't pay protection. They're the ones who break the elbows and slice the faces and pull the triggers. Hell, they've lost their country and their culture, and they're starting to forget their language. There are still lots of great Vietnamese kids, or so I hear. But, all in all, the bad ones are just about the meanest, scariest, deadliest little motherfuckers going.”

“Great,” I said. “That's absolutely great.” I had a big molten ball of lead in my gut.

“And behind the tongs,” Hammond said, watching me, “are the real bad guys. The triads. The triads are the real Chinese Mafia.”

“I don't want to hear about it,” I said, giving up. “It's just a paper.”

“Yeah,” Hammond said, laying it on thick. “It's just a paper.”

Two hours later Hammond and I stood on a downtown sidewalk while a couple of Asian parking attendants hiked toward Mexico to get our cars. He'd had three glasses of red wine to wash down two pounds of raw steak, and he was at the point where we were two buddies, not cop and non-cop.

“Is this about Eleanor?” he demanded. “And don't shit me.” In his present embittered state, Eleanor was at the top of a very short list of women whom Hammond was willing to tolerate.

“No,” I said, shivering. It had turned cold while we ate. “It's something a relative of hers might have gotten into.”

He gave me a couple of eyes that were smaller than raisins and he screwed up his mouth until he looked like Roy Rogers's mummy.

“Do you think Roy Rogers was mummified?” I asked him.

He didn't even look interested. “Might be. Any asshole who could stuff a horse. And look at Disney, he became a Creamsicle.”

“They made Lenin into a coffee table.”

“Which relative?” he asked, without a pause.

“Just some uncle. Listen, Al, about all this. I'd rather you didn't talk about it with anyone, okay?”

“I'd be embarrassed to,” Hammond said. He burped french-fried onions and waved it away, toward me. “I'm supposed to be a cop.”

“I'll call you if it gets any closer to home,” I said, but he was looking over my shoulder and chewing at the left corner of his mouth.

“Hey,” he said, and then he stopped. He put one hand in his pocket and took it out again, then put it back. “Hey, look, did I tell you I'm seeing someone?” He stared off at the horizon, avoiding my eyes, and a slow flush began at his jawline and climbed upward like the mercury or whatever it is in a thermometer.

“That's great.” His blush deepened. “I think.”

He shook his big blunt head. “She's on the job,” he said, and then stalled again.

“Really,” I said, just to keep the afternoon moving. “Does she rank you?”

“I may be stupid,” Hammond said, “but I ain't no masochist.”

“What's she like?”

“It's what she's not like. She's not like Hazel.” Hazel was Hammond's soon-to-be-ex. I'd never met Hazel; Hammond and I hung out mainly in male-bonding areas like bars and places where someone either just had been, or was immediately likely to be, killed.

Since I didn't know Hazel, the statement wasn't particularly informative.

“In what way,” I asked, “is she not like Hazel?”

He shifted his focus to a spot a foot above my head. “She's Hispanic,” he said.

“Oh-ho,” I said. I waited until the pressure in my chest subsided and I was absolutely certain I wasn't going to laugh, and then said, “Bit of a change in the routine.” Although he generally behaved himself, Hammond's feelings toward people of color were not likely to attract the official attention of the Vatican after he passed on. “Well, well,” I offered. Hammond was still waiting for the moon to rise. “I'd like to meet her, Al.”

“You will,” he said as one of the attendants pulled up in the car. “Maybe tomorrow night. Look whose car came first,” he said, tilting his chin discreetly toward the attendant, who immediately looked very interested. Chinese people point with their chins. “Looks like you pay for the parking.”

“You know, Al,” I said. “You should really attend more of those interracial sensitivity sessions.”

“Can't,” he said. “I'm giving all my time to the homosexual empathy hours.” He opened the door of the sedan and slid heavily in. The car sagged with a certain mechanical irony. “By the way,” he called, “Roy Rogers is alive.”

My first stop was Horace's, where I picked up Bravo. I'd called from UCLA and volunteered to get him out from underfoot, not saying what I really felt: that he was a living reminder of the twins. Eleanor, who'd answered the phone, hadn't said it either, but she'd been a little too bright about what a good idea it was.