heroin brought into America today-” He stopped and lifted a hand half the size of Moby Dick. “You're actually sitting there and looking right at me and telling me this is for a paper?”
“The professor is named Mamie Liu,” I improvised, stalling. So far I'd met Chinese-Americans named Eleanor, Horace, Pansy, Eadweard, and Julia (as well as Homer, Ruby, and Maxine), and I'd worked up considerable curiosity about the American names Chinese parents chose. “What do you think, Al?” I asked. “Why do Chinese choose names like Mamie?”
“You want to ask someone on the Asian Task Force?”
“No,” I said, too quickly.
His grin turned wolfish. “Yeah? Why not?”
“Because it's only hypothetical. I don't want to waste their time. Is that straight about the heroin?”
“You bet.” He shifted his weight in his chair, settling in to be the expert. “The old French Connection through Marseilles, which the Mafia ran, was shut down years ago. Now the stuff moves from Burma through Bangkok and Hong Kong, and the Chinese run it.”
“All Chinese?”
“One hundred percent. Ethnic Chinese in Burma, Thailand, and Laos.”
Hammond's stomach rumbled. It sounded like an automobile accident.
“Who runs it here?” I asked.
Hammond looked hungry. “Like I said-”
“No, I mean who specifically? Who among the Chinese? The tongs?”
Hammond sat up. “You know about the tongs?”
“A little.” I'd also read about triads, village associations, and name societies.
“Like what?”
“The tongs started in San Francisco in the middle of the last century as protective associations,” I said, dredging my caffeinated memory. “The Chinese were very unpopular in those days. They made the mistake of working cheap. Occasionally they were shot for sport. The cops didn't care what went on in Chinatown as long as no white people got hurt, so the tongs stepped in and kept order. Also helped people in trouble, arbitrated disputes, paid for funerals if somebody died broke.”
“So far, okay,” Hammond said grudgingly.
“Chinese try not to die broke,” I said. “They come from a culture where starvation is the common denominator. Still, it's hard to make it into a visible tax bracket when you're working for half the minimum wage. But the Chinese work at it anyway. There are people working in Chinatown at three dollars an hour who save sixty, seventy percent of their salaries. And the tongs, today's tongs, I mean, help them keep their heads far enough above ground so that they can still open their mouths to eat.”
“You've been doing research,” Hammond said accusingly.
“For the paper. But there are lots of things I don't know. Like when the tongs got crooked.”
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
“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.
