The Man With No Time

“The INS guy tells the slave his card is no good. Says he'll be back tomorrow to check it out again, and to have money ready, hint, hint, elbow dig. The slave runs in a panic to Tiffle, who charges him seven hundred and fifty bucks to get the INS inspector pulled from the case and issue a new card. The next day the INS guy shows up anyway and says he's not on the case anymore, but he wants two-fifty not to pass the word to his successor. A thousand bucks,” he said, slapping his thigh hard enough with his left hand to spill the lemonade in his right. “One tenth of a year. Pull it three or four times on a few dozen guys, and you've got a nice little extra dividend. More time in the sweatshop for the coolie, less money to eat on, less money sent to mama and the kids in China, another loud suit for Charlie Wah to hang on his fat bloody shoulders.”

“Double play,” I said. “Charlie to Tiffle. Tell me about Tiffle.”

“Tiffle,” Lau snarled, tearing the napkin in half. “He's a fool. He likes Chinese girls, so he went into practice in C-town as a big liberal humanitarian, helping the poor little yellows with the bureaucratic machine. Business setups, immigration law, all that. Well, he shagged a few young ones now and then, but-what is it Shakespeare says about the appetite that feeds on itself?”

“Something terrific, I'm sure.”

Lau ripped the napkin into quarters. “So Charlie hears about him and thinks it might be nice to have a gwailo immigration lawyer, the police would never suspect that, and who has access to more Chinese girls than Charlie Wah? All those little unwed mothers. So he sent a few 'immigrants' to Claude Tiffle, and every one of them was a pretty girl, and every one of them had a problem that required Claude to do something just a little more illegal if he wanted to, ah, get paid.”

The coffee shop was emptying now, people paying their checks and heading back to work. The noise level had dropped, and our voices were carrying. I'd liked it better full.

Peter Lau put the pieces of napkin on the table in front of him and aligned their edges. “Of course, he was also a prime candidate for disbarment. Charlie set up two or three really dirty deals in a row and then paid the counselor a visit.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I'm a good reporter,” he said mildly. “I found a girl who had quit Tiffle's office-Chinese, of course-and moved to Virginia. I wrote a story using just tiny pieces of what she gave me. That's when the editor of my paper learned that he might have a fire problem.”

“Okay,” I said.

“But the point is that Claude liked it. He liked being dirty, and he liked the money that Charlie kept dropping onto his desk, and, of course, he liked the girls.”

“How does Charlie deliver the girls?” I was seeing all sorts of possibilities.

“They used to deliver them every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Maybe they still do.”

“What else does Tiffle do, exactly? When he's not practicing the two-person bellyflop.”

“Phony IDs, real IDs, green cards.” Lau glanced around the restaurant. “Ghost processing, when an illegal immigrant gets the papers of a real immigrant who's either died or gone back to China through one of the unofficial doors. That's a boom market, dead men's papers. A little money laundering, Chinese into American currency, nothing serious, just enough to get him into even worse trouble if Charlie ever decides to open the trap door.”

“That's great,” I said. “Rampant jerkism.”

“Don't think about going up against Claude. He's a fool, but he's almost as mean as Charlie Wah.”

I nodded, thinking of ways to go up against old Claude.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I jumped six inches. When I looked up I saw Tran.

“Toilet,” he said.

“So go ahead,” I said. “You don't need to ask.”

“Toilet,” he said more urgently. “Everybody.”

“Oh, my God,” Peter Lau said, going pale.

“Come on,” I said. He hadn't unpacked his office, so I grabbed two of the cases and Lau's elbow. Tran took the other case and headed for the men's room.

“No,” Lau said, standing shakily. “This way.” And he led us, in a crouching Groucho Marx run, for the kitchen. Through the windows I could see four Chinese men approaching the coffee shop. They wore the Hollywood mode du jour, sport coats and jeans. One of them was talking and the other three laughing. The one who was talking was Ying.

The kitchen was large and steamy and densely overpopulated. At least fifteen men occupied the room: slicing, dicing, washing, drying, frying, boiling, sitting idly and smoking. They gazed at us incuriously, ghosts from another dimension, as we hurried through the room, down a short, dingy corridor, and out the back door.

“Oh, no,” Peter Lau said, stopping short and going so loose in defeat that I put out an arm to prop him up. “I parked in front.”

“Relax,” I said. “This has got to be a coincidence.” It didn't sound very plausible to me, either.

“No coincidence,” Lau snapped. “They came to collect. They have people working here.”

“Well, if you'll excuse my saying so, this is a pretty stupid place to hide, then.”

“I'm not hiding. I want them to know that I'm around, not doing anything. If they go too long without seeing me-”

“Coming into the kitchen, them,” Tran said, emerging. I hadn't seen him go back in.

“I always park in front,” Peter Lau moaned. “Why do I drink!”

“If they're in the kitchen, we can make it to the car. It's got to take them a few minutes.”

“They'll leave two in front,” Lau said hopelessly. “They always do. And they'll bring the headman out here for a talk. Who's not working, who might want to run away.”

“Two?” Tran said. He grinned at me.

“Not on your life,” I said. “It's broad daylight.”

“Anyway, we look,” Tran said insistently.

Well, hell. “Do they know your car?”

“I don't know.” Lau was green again. “Usually, they sent this one.” He turned his head toward Tran.

“Okay. Go around to the other side of the building.”

I handed Lau the two cases, and Tran piled on the third. “Stay there for ten minutes. If we haven't come to get you, wait another fifteen minutes and then cross the street, nice and slow. Don't look back. Go into a store over there and just watch through the window until you're sure you can get to your car.” He was protesting, but I had to leave him to follow Tran.

The restaurant was a one-story cinder-block oblong dropped into the center of a large asphalt parking lot, built before the new Chinese immigrants drove Monterey Park land values up toward the Beverly Hills stratosphere. The back and sides of the building were pink and featureless except for the door we'd come through; ten feet away were the equally featureless sides of the neighboring buildings. The front, which looked onto Garvey Boulevard, was mostly glass and shrubbery, scrubby deep green juniper. The door was off center, closer to the corner Tran and I were about to round.

“Belt,” Tran said, pointing at his.

“This is ridiculous,” I protested, taking off my belt and hoping Ying was one of the men outside.

“In bushes,” he said. “Wait.”

I squeezed into the junipers at the corner of the building, and Tran waved at me and then sauntered around the corner. I was wrapping the ends of my belt around my hands when I heard a shout of surprise, and then the sound of running feet.

Tran hurtled around the corner, followed closely by two men, both almost as small as he was. I waited until the one closest to Tran had passed and then stepped out directly behind the second one. In two quick steps I was behind him and looping the belt up over his head and around his neck. I crossed my hands, bringing the belt tight, and dug my feet in, and the man's weight stopped him and snatched at the belt so hard that I would have lost it if I hadn't wrapped it first. He said, “Yuunnng,” and his hands went up to the belt, and I saw Tran stop dead and kick out behind him, putting one foot into the mid-section of the man behind him.

The man dropped to his knees, and Tran twirled and lifted a boot and punted his victim's head into some imaginary end zone, probably in Hawaii. As the man flopped to the pavement with a wet sigh I could hear ten feet away, the one with my belt around his neck gurgled and went limp, and I aided his forward movement with a shove