Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

“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.”