“I'm going to reach into my pocket and bring out a card,” I said. “Don't be alarmed.” His eyes followed my hand as though it were the first one he'd ever seen, and stayed on it even after I'd dropped the card, right in the middle of the coffee he'd spilled.
“Sorry,” I said. “I'm in worse shape than you are.”
“I severely doubt that,” Lau said, picking up the card and wiping it with a napkin. He had to read it twice, closing his eyes between passes. “So what?” he said at last. “Anybody can print a card. You should see some of mine.”
“Tran,” I said, “would you please ask the waitress to bring us some coffee?”
“Oh, sure,” Tran said. “Make me very happy, be of service.” He was gone, and Lau never took his eyes off him.
“The other one is really dead?” he asked when Tran was out of earshot.
“I saw it,” I said.
“I won't ask how,” he said, sitting back slightly.
“But I need to ask
“How do I know,” he asked, his voice notching up half an octave, “that Tipple didn't send you to see if I'd talk to you? Hmmm?”
“You don't. Look, Mr. Lau, I'm a private detective. I'm in the phone book. I have a terrible red-wine hangover.”
His eyes narrowed sympathetically. “Did you mix it?”
“No, but I drank enough so that it doesn't matter. Do you want,” I asked, “to go on living like this?”
“It's a perfectly good method,” he said. “I bought dozens of these things.” He pointed to the reserved card. “I just call the restaurant I want to be in, and they set up for me.”
“It's a little public,” I said.
He almost smiled. “That's the point.”
“And I have to say that it wasn't very hard to find you.”
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “there is that. But you didn't kill me.”
“I don't
“So you say.” His eyes went back to Tran.
“If you like, I'll ask him to wait in the car.”
“That would be peachy,” he said. “In fact, why don't you ask him to drive the car to New York?”
“Coffee, boss,” Tran said, setting the cups down. Then he turned to Peter Lau and folded his hands together over his chest, looking penitent. “Mr. Lau,” he said. “Sorry. Please forgive me, you.” He bowed very low. Every eye in the restaurant followed him.
“Bloody little-” Lau began. Then he pulled himself up short and blinked twice. “I have to absorb this,” he said. “Come back tomorrow.”
“Not possible. I want to hot-wire the Snakes, and I haven't got the time.”
“Ho-ho,” Peter Lau said politely. “You're going to undo the Snake Triad?” He clinked together the rings on his index fingers, waiting for something persuasive.
“Mr. Lau,” I said. “This is the situation. I want to help someone I love. With your help, I might be able to be a genuine pain in the ass to the Snakes. Without your help, they'll probably catch me. And if they do, Mr. Lau, if they catch me because you didn't help me, I'm going to tell them you told me everything you know.”
“Oh,” Peter Lau said, blinking again. “You mean you'll lie about it.”
“That's what I mean.” Tran was looking at me admiringly.
“Love is a terrible motive for doing something vile,” Lau said after a moment's reflection.
“And I'm sorry about it. I'm sure you're a nice man and a good journalist and all that. But you're just not as important to me as they are.”
“That's bald,” he said. “And you're only one man.”
Tran waved at him, palm downward, fingers curling in. “Remember me?” he said. He sat beside me.
“You're murderous,” Lau said, “but I don't know that you're smart.” Tran took it in silence.
“What'll it be?” I asked.
Lau sighed. “What do you know?”
I told him about the kidnapping and about Charlie Wah. When I mentioned Wah's name, Lau looked very much like a man who desperately needs the bathroom. “So Wah's the Taiwanese boss, right?”
Lau nodded and wiped his upper lip with a finger.
“And Tiffle?”
“Tiffle's a lawyer.” He closed his eyes, like someone about to go over Niagara Falls in a teacup. “He's the Anglo front, when they need one. Legal chores. He launders a little money.” He fiddled with his cup, clinking it against the saucer, and the waitress Tran had been flirting with hurried over to half-fill it. He waited until she was out of earshot before he said, “Tiffle's
“Money from what?” I asked. “And why, specifically, a lawyer?”
Lau measured me with his eyes. “I thought you said you knew something.”
“I didn't say I knew everything.”
“You don't know anything at all.”
“But you're going to tell me.” He sat absolutely still, looking out the window as if he hoped the U.S. Cavalry was about to gallop into the parking lot. “Is it drugs?” I prompted. “Prostitution? Gambling? Extortion?”
“No,” he said. “It's bigger than that.”
“Bigger than drugs?”
He reached up and passed both hands over his scalp, knocking his heavily sprayed hair turban askew, and then reached back and laced his fingers together behind his neck. With a sigh that seemed to have its roots in centuries of finely honed malaise, he arched his neck back against his hands. Vertebrae popped.
“You have to understand the Chinese,” he said, turning his head slowly from side to side. “They're always ready to go somewhere, to follow something that might lead them to a lifetime of regular eating. They followed the Red Eyebrows in the first century, the Boxers in this one, Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, then Mao on the Long March. Millions of Chinese,
“They're following Charlie,” I said, realizing that the back of my neck was beginning to tingle, although I didn't fully know why. “Charlie's got the light now?”
“Charlie's part of the Snake organization is specialized,” Lau said as carefully as if he'd learned the words phonetically. “They, ah, they effect migrations.”
“Migrations,” I said, my hangover suddenly over. Orlando's migrating starlings swarmed into view, diving and swooping hungrily through a confusion of light-seeking moths.
Peter Lau turned away from the parking lot, bathed in sweat. No help was at hand. He started to say something and then stopped.
“The Snakes,” I said, sitting there surrounded by immigrants who had all gotten here somehow, and wondering why it had taken me so long to figure it out. “The Snakes deal in people.”
“The Snakes,” Peter Lau said, “deal in slaves.”
PART III
