The Man With No Time

“One or two guys from Taiwan. Charlie's always got backup, but not much.” The translator shook his head, making semaphores with the legs of Dexter's shorts. “Can you undo my hands?”

“No.” I looked at Tran and Dexter. “Only one or two?”

“That's it,” the translator said.

“Tell me how you get the pigeons off the ship, when the money changes hands, the whole thing.”

He sighed. “We bring them into the harbor. The immigrants get off-loaded into the little boats. While the ship gets checked for its registered cargo, the immigrants get driven to the safe houses in San Pedro. They pay the rest of their down payment, and then the businesses come by and pick them up.”

“The businesses,” Dexter said thickly.

“The people they're going to work for.” He sounded resigned.

“Slavemasters,” Dexter said.

“They want to get out of China,” the translator said. “Who wouldn't?”

“Back to the down payments,” I said.

“The down payment is ten K. Let's say they pay five K when they get on the ship. Let's say they pay nothing, or maybe one K for earnest money. Chinese don't like to pay in advance. Then they owe anywhere up to ten thousand when they're safe in America. They pay that in the vans on the way to San Pedro. When they're on American soil, but while they're moving at 35 miles per hour.”

“And they arrive with it intact,” I said. “You never grab it while they're still on the ship.”

“We'd have a mutiny. A hundred and seventy-five, two hundred men going crazy on a small ship. No, we wait until they're here, and they're happy to pay.”

“If they haven't got it?” Dexter asked.

“They've got it.”

“But if they don't?” I could barely hear him.

“They've got it.”

“Fork the asshole,” Dexter said.

“They get taken back.” The words came out very fast.

“Yeah,” Dexter said, “and you get them back into China with no papers.”

“Thrown overboard,” Tran suggested. “On the way back.”

“Somewhere in the middle,” Dexter said.

There was a long silence. “Not very often,” the translator finally said.

“Same as the slaves,” Dexter said, “when they got sick.”

“Think about the money,” I said to Dexter. “Twenty or twenty-five thousand times two hundred.”

“One hundred seventy-two,” the translator volunteered.

“I thinkin,” Dexter said. “I thinkin about a lot of things.”

“What's your name?” I asked the translator.

“Everett.”

“Okay, Everett. What's the name of the ship?”

“Please, mama,” Everett said. “I'm dead.”

“Bet your ass,” Dexter said, “less you straight with us.”

“Everett,” I said, “you haven't got a lot of choices.”

“Caroline B.,” Everett said. Dexter let a breath escape, a whiskey-flavored zephyr. Tran looked down at the fork in his hand and threw it across the room. Then he glanced down at Everett's leg and bolted to his feet, heading for the bathroom.

“Listen, Dexter,” I said as the door slammed. “You in?”

“I the guy.”

I wiped slick sweat from my face and wiped my hand on my shirt. “Okay. Great. Can you get us someone else?”

“Someone like who?” Tran was gagging in the John.

“Like you.”

He regarded me from a distance. “In what respect, like me?”

“Someone fierce and noble.”

“I the only noble man I know,” he said.

“Besides being noble, he should be dangerous and maybe just a little bit greedy.”

The toilet flushed, and Dexter put a long finger into his drink and stirred, waiting.

“Tell him we got a bad white guy, too,” I said.

Dexter leaned toward me, licking his finger. “Do tell.”

Ten minutes later Tran and I were in the car. Everett was tied hand and foot again, and stored in the trunk. Tran sat silent in the front seat, as far from me as possible, leaning against the passenger door. He'd fumbled with the door handle getting in.

“Tran,” I said, “I want to ask you a question.”

“One more?” he said listlessly. “Why not?”

“How many people have you killed?”

After a mile or so I turned to look at him. He was staring through the windshield, and his cheeks were wet. When he felt my eyes on him, he averted his face.

'One,' he said.

15

Slow Dance

We hadn't eaten in what seemed like weeks, so we went to a McDonald's and had the meal I'd been aiming for all those bruises ago. Tran dried his cheeks and ate two of everything I ordered, cramming it under his twenty- inch waistline, and I searched my mind for the positive aspects of getting old. One would have sufficed. After he'd gotten up for an ice cream and returned with two, he drove the point home by saying, “You eat like old fart, too.”

“You'll be an old fart someday,” I said.

“No,” he said, attacking the ice cream. If another kid had said it, I might have thought it meant something else.

“You really,” I asked, returning to an old theme, “don't think you should call your mother?”

His face went still, and he swallowed before he spoke. “No,” he said. “What I'm going to say to her?”

“You can say she's got one son alive.”

He went back to the ice cream. “No talking,” he said.

I pushed some food around and wondered why I'd wanted it in the first place. I'd finally summoned the will to pick up a french fry when he said, in an elaborately casual tone, “How many people you killed?”

I put the french fry back on the plate. “One.”

“How?” His ice cream had all his attention.

“Burned him.” It's not something I like to dwell on, although I still dream about it.

“Wah,' he said, giving it an entirely different intonation than he gave Charlie's last name. He was staring at me now. 'Very bad.”

My turn to change the subject. “Let's go say hi to Mr. Tiffle,” I said.

Tiffle's office was a little bungalow set back from Granger Street, which was one-way and wider than a cow path, but not much. Chain link fence surrounded it, keeping the world at a distance from Claude Tiffle's plentiful secrets. Whatever doubt I may have felt about the likelihood of anyone actually having such a name was battered into submission by a comfortingly old-fashioned sign hanging over the gate that said CLAUDE B. TIFFLE ASSOCIATES, ATTORNEYS AT LAW.

“Associates?”

“Oh, sure,” Tran said in a tone I was coming to recognize as derision. 'Should say 'sweeties.' '