Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

“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.