by Lee Lamothe
She caught a glimpse of the Seine, of the bridges they’d crossed daily, their arms around the other’s waist, losing themselves in the romantic warrens of streets and alleyways, in the galleries and restaurants of the Left Bank.
She put her hand on Ray Tate’s leg. “I really like this place, Bongo. When we get out of prison, let’s come back.”
Prelude
It was perfect. It was cold. There was no moon. There were no lovers in parked cars rocking the shocks, no homeless camped along the river, no cops catching naps.
The rocks on the river’s edge were crusted with ice and pockets of snow. Football-sized chunks periodically broke away from the rocks and swirled away in the currents. There was a small beach of pebbles littered with tin cans, soda bottles, cigarette packages, and condoms.
America, on the other side, was close, maybe two hundred yards. The lights above a parking lot near a warehouse seemed to beckon.
It was wider, the river, at the pebble beach, but it was the preferred site because it was between two elbows of riverbank that blocked sightlines from the east and west. Upriver the span bridge was out of sight except for the very top of its suspension. Downriver, around the elbow, was a boats’ landing with a long jutting pier. Only the very tip of the pier was visible.
Between the bends of the river there were several currents of varying strengths and angles, foaming a little in laces of white where they clashed with each other and battled it out. One of the currents was a noticeably bright green, even without a moon; fluorescent effluent from the chemical mill up river on the American side.
The schizo wind was moody, stiff at times, placid at others.
You couldn’t do anything about the wind or currents or homeless folks or banging lovers but you could calculate the lack of moonlight and choose the hour.
The pig train huddled on the Canadian shoreline. It consisted of one older man who never spoke, two women of middle age, and a female child. The girl belonged to no one. She was on her way to meet an older brother who’d gone to America ten years earlier, crossing this river at this time of year. The girl had never seen her brother.
One of the women, who spoke with a harsh Fujianese accent, took care of the girl, making sure her cheap Canada Goose knockoff was zipped to her throat, that she kept her toque on and down over her ears. She had ensured that the girl got enough food on the boat trip from China to Vancouver and the truck trip from Vancouver to Toronto, and wasn’t molested by the transporters.
The pig train had been brought to the pebble beach in an unmarked, windowless van. They were accustomed to the lack of windows, of view, of context, of place. They’d been among hundreds in the ships’ holds for weeks, on one boat from eastern China to southern Thailand and another, the mothership, from southern Thailand across the open ocean to an island off Vancouver. Small fast boats met the mothership at sea and the migrants scrambled down webbing into the control of screaming boatmen who rode the heaving waves like deranged surfers. Speedboats took them to a rocky point where they were off-loaded, identified, counted, and divided into groups of fifteen. The telephone numbers of immigration lawyers were written indelibly on their forearms.
Each group was crammed into a cube truck and taken down on a long drive to Vancouver, where they were warehoused in a Chinatown hotel until several pig trains were merged and reorganized by destination, and then they were all loaded into transport trucks. Some trucks went south, crossing at Bellingham; others went east.
The pig train on the bank of the river had been driven non-stop across the country. They lived in the dark on donuts that constipated them and tea that made them urinate frequently.
They were nervous. Tales had been told of trucks being opened by the authorities and the occupants found dead, suffocated by neglect or indifference, their fingernails in the walls and doors. Tales of migrants mistaking their urine bottles for their water bottles. Tales of rape and murder.
But the lucky made it to this bank of this river at this time of night in this season. It took determination and hope. And hope alone won’t cook the rice.
Their jockey, the man who shepherded them from Toronto to the river, had silently held his palm up, Wait, and left them on the riverbank while he drove three athletic young men to the span bridge where they believed they could crawl across undetected on the struts under the roadway.
The pig train waited now for Mr. Presto.
The old man remained silent, grim, as if anticipating what was to come. He’d eaten from the bitter harvest all his life and why should now be different?
One of the middle-aged women muttered in a deranged fashion about devilish portents and vengeful gods and the bad weather of the soul. She repeatedly made intricate superstitious finger signs at the river, at the wind, at the invisible moon.
The other woman spoke chidingly but with affection to the child because she’d left her mittens behind in the Chinatown hotel in Toronto. The caring woman took off her plastic boots, removed one of her pairs of socks, and rolled them up the child’s hands and wrists to keep her warm.
The girl, with a bright yellow knapsack like a hunch on her back, sat with her socked hands under her armpits, her knees up so she could lean her chin on them, and she stared intently at the lights of the parking lot of America.
A van bumped over the hill from the bridge end of the river, curving down the unlit road, its headlights wonky and cross-eyed. Once the driver had the shape of the road ahead and had spotted the huddled migrants he turned off the headlights and continued down, stopping a dozen yards away.
A stocky young Asian man energetically disembarked from the driver’s seat, rounded the van, and opened the rear double doors. The passenger, a slim white man with swept-back blond hair and a goatee and moustache, joined him. Both wore dark blue parkas, construction boots, and toques. The Asian man dragged a black and dark blue uninflated inflatable dinghy from the van. The price tag was still dangling from a handle: fifty-nine-ninety-nine, SALE. The goateed man paused to vomit in the weeds, then set up a compressor and attached a long hose to the nozzle on the raft. There was a loud insect sound and the raft inflated as if inhaling.
While the goateed man tested the pressure of the dinghy, the Asian man crossed to the migrants. In halting Mandarin with a strong Vietnamese accent, he greeted them. “Your journey is nearly finished,” he said, talking softly to calm them. He pointed across the river to the lights of the parking lot. “Two vehicles will be there. Taxis. You know taxis? Yellow and black, with checkerboards on the doors. You, two and two, in each taxi, and then you go. The drivers will not stop until you reach the city. If you require personal maintenance, use those bushes now. Remember, the drivers will not stop.”
The migrants nodded but none of them went to the bushes.
The goateed man dragged the dinghy to the shoreline. He went to the van and took two paddles from the back. He brought the paddles to the dinghy and looked at the pig train, then he went back to the van, opened the passenger-side door, and rummaged through a bag in the footwell. He returned with four whistles on string and four Oh Henry! chocolate bars. With a friendly smile, he distributed the whistles and chocolate bars, one each to each.
The Asian man said, “The Oh Henry is a very America delicacy. Welcome, welcome. The whistles, you put like this.” He crouched and wrapped the string tightly around the right wrist of the man. They all looked from the whistles to the Asian man’s face and back again. He smiled, and affixed a whistle to each wrist. “If you feel danger, or you fall out, blow mighty the whistle. We will come and find you.” He glanced up at the goateed white man sadly, and then turned back to the migrants and lied: “We have another boat nearby, so don’t worry. Just blow mighty the whistle.”
The goateed man stared at his feet. He swayed.
“I will position you in the boat, two strongest at back, the weightiest.” He pointed to the silent man and the superstitious woman. “You two. The child and the other woman in front.” He straightened. “
The difficult part is done. If you weren’t to see the Gold Mountain, you would have perished before now, you see?”
The goateed white man undid the neck of his parka and took off his scarf. Careful not to breathe into her face, he wrapped it around the girl’s neck, tucked it, and rezipped her coat. Her cheeks were greasy with spray from the river. He checked the straps of her yellow knapsack and smiled at the socks on her hands.
He positioned the forward third of the dinghy in the river and the migrants, clutching their chocolate bars, boarded as told. He passed the paddles to the two in the rear.
The Asian man tried to explain the currents, “When the water comes from this …” he pointed to the right, “… only one will do this …” and he mimed digging in on the left. “From this …” he pointed to the left, “… then only one will do this.” He dug in on the right. “Watch the lights. You must land as close to the lights as you can. Push the craft into the water behind.”
The young Asian man and the blond man bent and pushed the dinghy further into the water, careful of the sharp stones on the pebble beach.
When the dinghy was fully on the river and five yards out, the goateed man called, “Zai jian.” Again see, but also, Goodbye.
The superstitious woman twisted around and looked at him in alarm at the language from the white devil, her mouth open. This must be a portent, a yellow-haired devil speaking the language. Surely a trap; she was being sent into the maw.
She dropped her paddle over the side and tried to scramble to get out of the dinghy, back to land. She got one leg into the water, overbalanced, fell in, and was gone. And then the river had the dinghy and the rest of them, spinning, the girl and the kind woman screaming, the silent man silent, his portent confirmed.
Only the yellow knapsack in the dark was visible from the Canadian side when the whistles began blowing.
The goateed man went for the river’s edge. He ran in the water to his knees before the Asian man grabbed him from behind. “Bobby, no.”
Downriver yellow knapsack hung in sight for a moment, then it was gone.
Bobby Preston struggled and went again for the river and dragged the Asian man further into the water before he was overpowered by a chokehold and muscled back, onto the bank. They lay collapsed side by side. Preston, the fabled Mr. Presto, wept inside a stranglehold.
“Bobby, it is as it is.”
The whistles stopped their mighty blowing and there was only the indifferent sound of the river running, doing what rivers do, making its own finality of silence.
PART ONE
Chapter 1
It was perfect. It was hot. The sun bore down on the access to the span bridge. Traffic into Canada was heavy, people with cottages or friends on the other side, people heading to Canadian casinos.
At noon a mint-condition, black 1984 Cadillac Seville headed out of the city toward the span bridge. The fat driver kept the seat racked fully back and drove with his short arms almost straight and his tiny hands at ten-and-two as he mounted the access to the bridge, the tires of the Caddy thrumming over the iron grating. On the river below sailboats hung in the irons; there was no breeze but they rocked severely as power boats pulling foam ran up into the lake.
The man in the Seville, Abner Hussey, thought about the river a lot. There was a summer-end regatta coming up and he thought about that too. Hundreds of boats, all kinds of boats, on the water, running from the Canadian side over to the city and back. One more boat in there wouldn’t be noticed. It could be carrying anything, and a lot of it.
He could see the cluster of flags, the Canadian red leaf and the stars-and-bars, an eighth of a mile ahead at the border crossing. He slowed as he tried to figure which groove of cones to enter. Once in he was committed, he was in federal territory where the jail time was crushing.
The sun was glaring and he squinted, but he left his sunglasses on the dash. He believed he had innocent blue eyes and that sunglasses might make him look sinister.
In his mind he grabbed up his nuts and decided to go for it, the far right aisle.
Just short of committing himself, his rear-view mirror lit up with strobing lights. There was a shot of siren, roof music the cops called it. He pulled to the right and waited for it to pass. But it stopped behind him. It was a black Chrysler with a crash bar on the front bumper. A rotating red-and-blue light was mounted on the dash and smaller ones winked through the grill and on the side-view mirrors.
In the rear-view Hussey could see a bearded white man in sunglasses behind the wheel and a black woman with spiked hair on the passenger side. He knew what they were, and he began to sweat.
He felt very unhappy. Aloud, he said, “Ah fuck, ah fuck, ah fuck.”
In the black Chrysler the detectives sat in the air conditioning for a few minutes.
“Let him wait,” Ray Tate said. In spite of the heat he wore a short hacked-out brown leather jacket over a bright untucked Hawaiian shirt of avian motif that covered his handcuffs. His gun was in his right ankle boot under his jeans’ cuff. A bead chain hung around his neck, dragged to the left side where his city badge was in his shirt pocket. He had a short satanic grey-shot beard; the tip of his left ear was gone. “He must be one soaking unit by now, old Abbie.”
“But we’ve got to make him ours before he hits federal land,” Djuna Brown said, running her hands through her spiked hair. “He gets up there and he’s a federale prize. We don’t get dick, dig it?” She wore a red T-shirt from the Pompidou in Paris and khaki hiking shorts. Her legs were slim and brown. Her gun, a little silver automatic, was in plain view in an open holster on her right hip; her handcuffs were at her spine; the outline of her State Police sergeant’s badge, hanging on a necklace, was visible between her breasts under the shirt. On her feet were bright red slippers, threaded with little silver spangles and bangles. “Let’s do this guy quick and have the rest of the day to ourselves.” She made sloe eyes at him and started humming an upbeat Edith Piaf “La Vie en Rose.”
Abner Hussey wasn’t in the files as violent, but he was rolling dirty and had a lot to lose. Ray Tate pushed his sunglasses up into his long straggly hair, flipped his badge from his shirt pocket, and slid his gun from his ankle holster. He checked traffic and got out of the driver’s seat, holding the gun down his leg. Djuna Brown stepped out in her little slippers and didn’t pull her gun, just kept her hand on it.
“Misssss-tah Hussey,” Ray Tate said, as he eased up to the door of the Seville, staying just on the edge of Abner Hussey’s eye line. He remembered a TV advertisement for hominy grits and created an accent. “I will need yew to shut off the vee-hick-ull. Good man. Now I will need yew to toss the keys on the passenger seat of the vee-hick-ull. Good. Now I will need yew to disembark the vee-hick-ull, but for your safety and that of passing motorists, Misssss-tah Hussey, I need yew first to put both your hands out the win-der. You don’t want to move sudden, suh. My partner there, behind you, she’s got the deadeye on.”
He used his left hand to secure Abner Hussey’s left wrist and tugged a little. “Okay, Djun’, mine.”
Djuna Brown opened the passenger door and leaned in to pick up the keys. She drew her gun and held it down her leg. “Okay, Ray, mine.”
Ray Tate put his gun into his boot holster and secured Hussey’s wrists with handcuffs.
“Fuck’s this?”
“Abner, Abner, Abner. Don’t give us a hard time, okay, mon ami? Just relax and enjoy it.”
Ray Tate let go the chain and stepped back out of Hussey’s periphery. “Pull your hands back in, Ab’.” He opened the door and eased Hussey out by the arm, tugging just enough to keep him off balance. He remembered a late-night Jimmy Cagney movie. “You heeled, pal? You packin’ a roscoe?”
“Me? A gun?” Hussey sounded insulted. “Fuck, no.”
“Okay, we’re going back to our car.” He gave Hussey a quick pat-down, then looked at the gleaming Seville. “Wow, this is a boss ride. You had it original, Ab’?”
“Yeah.” Hu
ssey cracked a reluctant proud smile. “Dealership serviced, GM all the way. Indoors, all winter.” He stared with pride and his smile became sad. “I got this car new the day I got married, took it on my honeymoon. All the way to New Orleans. It’s cherry.”
“Well, maybe. Right now it’s proceeds of crime,” Djuna Brown said. “You want to say goodbye to it?”
Hussey was short and his body was huge, inflated, but he had noticeably small skull with a fringe of dyed red hair, grey sideburns, and a skinny neck and tiny feet. He wore a lightweight Haspel suit that had seen better days, and an open-collared white shirt showing a fringe of grey chest hair. His feet were miniature in slip-on loafers. Taking him by his elbow, Ray Tate led him to the Chrysler and ushered him into the back seat. Unlocking one handcuff, he secured it to a long chrome bar across the back of the front seat and fastened Hussey’s seatbelt.
Djuna Brown got into the passenger seat, took the freddy from its rack, and said, “Project office, Asset Four with our target in custody at span bridge.”
“Ten-four, Four.”
“Individual is known mutt Abner Hussey, white male, approximately fifty years, five-five, brown and balding dyed red, seven hundred pounds.” She paused. “Pinhead.”
Ray Tate laughed.
“Seven hundred pound ginger pinhead,” the radio operator said. “That’s a ten-four, Four. You need backup?”
“Negatories. Can we get a departmental wrecker to hook up a 1984 Cadillac Seville, black in colour, to the span bridge, just before the cones about an eighth mile from the booths? Impound relocate to the office.”
“Ten-four on the tow truck, Four.”
She put the freddy in the rack and spoke over the backseat to Hussey. “Talk to us, Abbie. You know we’re not like all the others.”
