artists’ colony and made off with a tin dish of dogfood the sheriff himself had set out on his back porch. It had to stop. Detlef Abercorn knew what was expected of him.
The thing was, he’d had no experience with anything like this. He’d spent his twelve years in L.A. raiding sweatshops in Eagle Rock and chasing skinny busboys around tofu-spattered kitchens in Chinatown. What did he know about swamps and hollows—what did he know about Georgia, for that matter? Sure, it was up to the local authorities to make the nab, but he was supposed to be the expert, he was supposed to cast the net, advise them—advise them, what a joke: he could barely make out a word they said down here. Even worse, he’d never had a problem, not that he could remember, with the Japanese. Tongans, yes. Ecuadorians, Tibetans and Liberians, Bantu, Pakistanis and Sea Dyak, everybody and anybody. But not Japanese. They never entered the country illegally. Didn’t want to. They figured they had it all and more over there, so why bother? Plenty of them came in to run factories and open banks and whatnot, but all that was done at the highest levels. And Detlef Abercorn didn’t work at the highest levels.
No matter. An illegal was an illegal, and it would be his ass if he didn’t catch him.
It was raining by the time he reached the parking lot. Of course, he thought, what else? The tires on his old battered turd-brown Datsun were bald as melons and the wipers were so frayed they might as well have been bottle brushes for all the good they did. It was going to be a rough trip.
Before it began, though, he had to swing by the apartment, cram his overnight bag with underwear, dental floss, SPF 30 maximum protection sunscreen, calamine lotion and a snakebite kit, dig his hip waders and rain slicker out of the trunk in the storage cage downstairs, and then find a Vietnamese grocery—
The shirt didn’t matter—it was sweat-soaked anyway—but still he wasn’t prepared for the typhoon that hit him as he dashed across the lot to the car. By the time he got the door open he was wet right on through to the elastic band of his BVDs. There was no sense in even starting the car—he couldn’t go anywhere till it eased up, not with these wipers—and he didn’t relish the idea of bolting back to the office, where he’d just look ridiculous in front of Ginger and the other girls, not to mention the button-down types who saw to the main business of the place. They’d always looked at him as if he were a freak anyway, a kind
In the end, he was over an hour late to pick up Turco, whom he’d never met and had only that morning spoken to for the first time on the phone. What complicated matters, after the rain had eased up and he’d gone home to pack his bag and dig out his waders, tape recorder, notebooks and the rest, was that he couldn’t find the place. He’d only been in Savannah six months and he’d always been lousy with maps. There were all these one-way streets and this endless succession of old squares that you had to drive all the way around, each one, one after another, and they all looked alike. He finally found De Lesseps, but he couldn’t locate the store, which, as it turned out, was stuck up in the ass end of an alley anyway. After he’d gone up and down the street twenty times he finally pulled up alongside a red-faced yokel at a stoplight and motioned for him to crank down his window. There was a strong, faintly astringent smell of freshly shucked oysters on the air, of sea sludge and fish scales and worse; the rain pattered down. “Tran Van Due’s Grocery,” he shouted, “you have any idea where it is?”
The red-faced man leaned toward him. He was wearing a suit and his wispy blond hair was parted in the middle. He was fat, Abercorn saw now, bulbous, an elephant seal heaved up out of the sea and wedged, as a joke, into the impossibly narrow confines of the cab of his mini-truck. He mumbled something in a heavy accent that sounded like “Roy’s hair” or “rye chair.”
“I’m sorry,” Abercorn said, trying his best to control his winning smile, the smile he wore like a necktie when he needed to, “but I didn’t—rye chair?”
The man looked away in exasperation. Mist rose from the pavement. “Rye chair,” the man repeated, turning back to Abercorn and pointing a thick finger to the towering, unmistakable, aniline red-on-yellow sign—TRAN VAN DUC—that hovered over the alley not fifteen paces from them. Then the light changed, and the man was gone.
The store was tiny, a central aisle of loosely stacked cans and two low wall-length freezers, and it smelled worse than the fish-stinking pavement outside. Abercorn pulled the door shut behind him and took in the entire place at a glance: a pair of shrunken ageless Asian faces staring up at him in horror, the cans of pickled this and salted that, the strange little fishes in frozen plastic envelopes, the dried spices and chilies and sauces no one would ever buy. He’d raided a hundred places just like it in Arcadia and Pacoima and San Pedro, and he knew that the two behind the counter had residence permits but the twenty in the basement didn’t and he knew too that they had to be bringing in more than fish sauce to survive, but that was somebody else’s problem. “I’m looking for Lewis Turco,” he said.
Nothing. No reaction. He might just as well have been talking to himself, humming, singing, gargling, he might as well have been a dog or a monkey. The couple behind the counter—a man and a woman, he saw now— didn’t flinch. They were holding their breath, controlling their heartbeat—their eyes didn’t even blink. “Lewis Turco,” he repeated, lingering over the syllables, “I-look-for-Lew-is-Tur-co.”
“Yo,” said a voice behind him, and a man in fatigues stepped out from behind the bead curtain at the back of the store. He was short—five-five or so, Abercorn guessed—and he wore a noncommital expression. His shoulders were too wide for his height and he had a weight lifter’s build, strong in the chest and upper arms. He wore a beard and his long flat greasy blond hair was tied back with a leather thong. “Abercorn, right?” he said.
Detlef Abercorn was six-five, he wore his hair short, and at thirty-four he preserved the same lanky narrow- hipped build he’d grown into as the pitching ace of his high-school baseball team in Thousand Oaks, California. “Yes,” he said, smiling, “and you’re Lewis Turco.”
Turco wasn’t smiling. He sauntered up the aisle like a cowboy, each stride too long, too wide, sauntered as if he were sprinting up the side of a hill in slow motion, and then he halted abruptly at the counter, wheeled on the wooden couple and said something in a burst of what Abercorn took to be Vietnamese. They came to sudden life, as if they were wired, and the man ducked behind the counter to produce a tightly bound and visibly swollen Army- issue backpack, from the frame of which dangled an entrenching tool, a baton, a pair of handcuffs and several esoteric-looking devices Abercorn didn’t recognize, while the woman handed over a cellophane package that appeared to contain some sort of foodstuff—dried meat or roots or something.
Just to hear himself, Abercorn said, “It’s a bitch, huh?”—meaning the rain, Georgia, the INS and the rat- crazy, house-burning, Japanese son of a bitch holed up with the slugs and centipedes on funky, dripping, hopeless Tupelo Island.
Turco didn’t respond. He’d shouldered the pack and taken the parcel of food from the woman, and now he was studying Abercorn with a cagey look. “Jesus,” he said finally, “what happened to you, man—napalm, car wreck or what? Don’t tell me you were born with that?”
Abercorn stiffened. He’d heard it all his life and all his life he’d been touchy about it—who wouldn’t be? He was a good-looking guy, good bone structure, strong nose and chin, hair as thick as a teenager’s. But he knew what Turco meant, knew what he’d had the bad grace to bring up—most people, anybody with any sensitivity, anyway, would have left it alone. What Turco was referring to were the white patches on his face and hands—a lot of people thought it was scar tissue or eczema or something, but it wasn’t. There was nothing wrong with him, nothing at all, just that he had less pigment than normal, less melanin in his skin and hair. He’d been born an albino. Or part albino. His coloring was fair to begin with, but the albinism—or vitiligo, as the doctors called it—manifested itself in dead-white patches that mottled his entire body—even his hair. He’d been able to dye his hair, of course, but there was nothing he could do about his skin. And even that wouldn’t have been so bad, but for his face. He’d got used to it now, but as a kid it used to drive him crazy—he looked as if he’d been splashed with paint. A rough oval, two inches across, framed his right eye and six paper-white blotches dribbled across his jaw, bleached the bridge of his
