“It’s the only way,” I said. “Unless you just want to give up without a fight-quit your job and go find another one.”
He took a swig of his beer. “What if Stan finds out?”
“The worst he can do is fire you.”
“You haven’t seen his temper. We had this Filipino maintenance guy at the Regent, and one day Stan was doing an inspection and he didn’t think the guy had done a good job cleaning. He knocked him out.”
“Wow. And nobody reported him?”
“Reported him? The Flip was probably illegal. He left and never came back.”
“All the more reason to take Stan down, Gunter.”
“Will you watch my back?”
“I’ll talk to my boss in the morning.”
He drained the rest of the beer. “I’m going home,” he said.
I raised an eyebrow. “Alone? Your bed will seem awfully empty.”
“I do sleep alone on occasion. When I find there’s nobody around who interests me.”
He stared at me for a moment and then swept regally toward the door, like Bette Davis in full flight. Unfortunately he stumbled over one of my rollerblades, which spoiled the effect.
I was just starting to enjoy having an empty apartment when my doorbell rang again. It was nearly nine o’clock, and I wondered who it could be. Fouad? Mike? Gunter?
Through the peephole, though, I saw Haoa and Tatiana. “I’m going to kill him,” my sister-in-law said, when I opened the door. “Either that or ship him back to Alaska.”
“Come on in.” I embraced them both. “Hey, brah,” I said to Haoa.
“She insisted we come right over,” he said. “After dinner we went to the office and she looked through the paperwork.”
“I cannot believe my brother is such a fuckup. The files are mess. And I left everything in perfect condition for him.”
“So you’re saying that he hasn’t been checking for working papers?”
“He’s been smart about it,” Haoa said. Tatiana glared at him, but he said, “It’s true. He’s messed up the files so much you can’t tell at first glance what’s going on. If Tatiana hadn’t known what was supposed to be there, it might have taken us a couple of days to figure out what he was hiding.”
“What do you want to do?” I asked Tatiana. “You want to talk to Sergei first? Send him back to Alaska?”
“I think the only thing that’s going to wake my brother up is a stint in jail.”
“Knowing Sergei, he’ll have some new racket set up inside,” Haoa said. Tatiana kicked him. “Hey, he’s your brother. Kick him, not me.”
“I’ll call my guy in Immigration tomorrow,” I said. “See what he says we should do.”
Haoa and Tatiana left a few minutes later, still squabbling, but I knew it would take more than a criminal brother to break them apart. I finally was able to lie down and read for a while, a thriller about an ATF agent who gets himself in trouble by his single-minded pursuit of the truth, by a Florida cop named James O. Born. I wished I could be so focused; it seemed that there were always detours pulling me away from what I was supposed to be doing.
MAHALO MANPOWER
The next morning, I called Juanita Lum as soon as I got in, but Lieutenant Kee was at a meeting at Honolulu Hale, our city hall, and wouldn’t be back till the afternoon. I hung up as Ray walked in, looking like he’d gotten too little sleep. “We were out pretty late with Treasure last night. That girl can drink.”
“She have anything to say?”
“She had lots to say. About her father and her sister and what a bitch Norma Ching was. Unfortunately, nothing that was useful. And the more she drank, the more useless the information was.” He massaged his temples.
“You okay?”
He shrugged. “I’m not accustomed to so much booze anymore. Got a little hangover. But I’ll survive.”
While Ray rounded up aspirin, I called Frank O’Connor at INS and made plans to meet at his office at eleven. Ray had a trial to go to for a case we’d closed a few months before, so he left to nurse his hangover at the courthouse. While I waited for the meeting, I did some more online research, this time on illegal immigration.
There were two different terms: smuggling and trafficking. A smuggled migrant is one who goes voluntarily, in exchange for payment. It might be as simple as hiring someone to drive you across a border. It might be more elaborate, as in the cases of men who brought in boatloads of Haitian refugees. In general, though, the relationship between the migrant and the smuggler ended upon arrival in the United States.
The smuggled migrants were often dumped somewhere-off the coast of Florida, for example, and left to make their way by swimming or wading through shallow water. In other cases, the migrants arrived with the names and phone numbers of relatives, and disappeared into the immigrant underworld.
A migrant who was trafficked was often lured by false promises or misled about immigration policies. They could also be driven by fear of violence, as from Haiti, or economic despair, as appeared to be endemic in Gansu Province.
These individuals were bound to their transporter in many ways-through fear, economics, or lack of knowledge. They were much like slaves, in that they had no way to leave their situations, and often all the money they earned went to pay back their transporters or reimburse their employers for living expenses.
It sounded like the Chinese workers at the acupuncture clinic had been trafficked. When I met up with Frank O’Connor, he agreed with that idea. “You have something new?” he asked. “I’m working on the information you gave me-but it was only yesterday, after all.”
“What would be the penalties for someone who hired illegals?” I asked. “Unknowingly. I’m talking about a company owner, and it’s a guy who works for him who hired the guys.”
He looked at me shrewdly. “Are we still talking about prostitution?”
“Nope. This is a guy I know, and I want to be honest with him about what might be involved.”
Frank punched a couple of keys on his desktop keyboard and glanced at the screen. “You say he had no direct knowledge that the workers were illegal?”
“Nope. This has only been going on for about a month, we think, and he trusted the guy who was processing the papers.”
“Is he willing to cooperate fully?”
“Of course.”
“He could probably get away with a plea and a fine, depending on the circumstances. When he’s ready to talk, bring him to me.”
On my way back to the station, I called Haoa and let him know what Frank had said. “Tatiana’s going back to the office tonight to make copies of everything,” he said. “I swear, when this is over…”
“When this is over, Sergei’s still going to be Tatiana’s brother,” I said. “You might as well accept that.”
“That doesn’t keep me from beating the crap out of him.”
“I have a feeling there’s going to be a line for that.”
When I got back to the station it was time for our meeting with Lieutenant Kee, but Ray still hadn’t returned from his trial so I went downstairs by myself.
“You’re the Lone Ranger today?” Juanita asked. “Where’s Tonto?”
“He go speak with big chief wearing robes,” I said. “The LT around?”
“In a meeting. But it shouldn’t last long. Have a seat.”
Juanita was multitasking again, carrying on a conversation with me while she filed documents and bantered with passing detectives. After about fifteen minutes, a couple of guys left Kee’s office and Juanita told him I was there.
“I might have a connection to that blackmail case I told you about the other day,” I said. I sat down across from him and told him about Gunter.
