“Bravo and you?” I asked, seeing the picture.
“He can't carry them both,” she said defensively. I ached to hold her.
“So the doorbell rang.”
“He knocked,” she said. She saw the look in my eyes and almost smiled. “He was at the back door.”
“How'd he get the address?”
“He had a letter Mom wrote him six or seven years ago. He showed it to me. There was an address, but we'd changed our phone number.”
“Did you see his airline ticket?”
“Oh, come on.”
“But he told you he'd just landed from Hong Kong.”
“That's what he said.” She was sounding impatient.
“Did he go down to pay a taxi or anything?”
“Um,” she said, looking at Horace again. “No. No, he didn't.”
“So if he came in a cab, he paid the cab off, and he sent it away before he climbed the steps leading to a seven-year-old address.”
Horace liberated another strand of hair and let it whiffle its way to the floor. We all watched it all the way down. Eleanor's hand was in her hair, a prelude to pulling.
“So, he could have come from Hong Kong or from Stockton,” I said. “No way to tell. Eleanor, lay off your hair, okay?”
“Yikes,” she said, pulling her hand away and tucking it under her.
“Okay. We don't know where he came from.” I cleared my throat. “Hypothesis two: It was Uncle Lo who took the twins, instead of someone else. What's gone that belongs to them?”
Horace blinked. “Good question,” he said, getting to his feet and plodding toward the bedroom, like a man walking uphill.
Eleanor waited until he was gone and put her hand in mine. “Don't try to understand,” she said.
Her hand was warm and smooth and familiar in mine. I moved over to sit next to her, and she leaned against me and breathed on my neck. I knew she didn't mean anything by it; she was just breathing. She breathed a couple more times, and I bathed in her warmth.
“Four sets of clothes,” Horace said, returning, “for each of them. And Julia's duck and Eadweard's clown ball.”
Eleanor straightened. “Their favorites,” she said. She looked reassured at the news.
“Did he see the twins play with them?” I wanted her back against me.
“That's all they play with,” Eleanor said, blinking very fast.
“Hypothesis three,” I said, raising my voice to distract her. “Uncle Lo wasn't really Uncle Lo.”
Eleanor passed a hand over her eyes and stared at me. “Of course he was.”
“What did he say when you opened the door?”
"He said, 'Mei-Yu.' "
I must have looked blank, because she said, “That's my name, remember?”
“You recognized him?”
“I was a little girl when I saw him last. It was more than twenty years ago. Of course I didn't recognize him.”
“So he told you who he was. He said, ‘I’m Uncle Lo,' or something.”
“Yes. And showed me the letter from Mom. He called Mom by her first name, too, Ah-Ling, and he asked about Horace, calling him Ah-Cho.” She recited the Chinese names like magic words, and they had been; they'd been the spoken charms that opened the door.
The letter. “And you let him in.”
“First I hugged him, then I started crying. Then I shouted for Ah-for Horace, I mean-and then I let him in.”
“And then Bravo tried to eat him.”
“I forgot,” she said. “Bravo barked before he knocked on the door. Yes, Bravo went for him. Uncle Lo looked like he was going to faint.”
“Did you doubt at all that he was who he said he was?”
“Not then,” Eleanor said. She sighed. “I still don't, to tell you the truth. He knew everything, how we got out, and what our names were. He talked about the escape for hours, it seemed like. We were all so happy, Simeon. And he had that letter from Mom.”
The letter was the big problem. “Did you read it?”
“No.” She wiped her nose.
“Well, did it look like her handwriting?”
“Simeon, it was in Chinese. All Chinese writing looks alike to me.”
“When did you call your mother?”
“Right away, but she wasn't home. I told her machine to call me instead of Horace because I knew the kids would be asleep.”
“So she never talked to him.”
“He was so warm" she said suddenly. "I mean, we were all crying. He held me like a daddy and cried and laughed. He knew everything about us.”
I took a breath. “Did he know about the twins?”
“He even knew their names. He joked about Eadweard's.”
“The twins are four,” I pointed out.
A car passed us on the street below, stitching a seam of noise into the fabric of the night. Eleanor put both hands on Horace's forearm but kept her eyes fixed on me. “I see,” she said tonelessly.
I wanted to put my arms around her and tell her everything would be fine, but I didn't believe that it would. “He used the return address on a seven-year-old letter.”
“Maybe Mom wrote him more recently.” She was looking at me but talking to Horace.
“Ask her,” I said.
“Yes,” Eleanor said, not doing anything. “Right.” Then she let out a deep breath, stood, and left the room.
“What did you think, Horace? Did you have any doubt?”
“I'm not sure I do now,” he said. “If that wasn't Uncle Lo, it was Laurence Olivier.”
As long as Eleanor was out of earshot, I decided to try a sneak play. “Why won't you let me do anything?”
“Those kids with the guns,” he said. “They're not on their own.”
“Who are they with?”
He shook his head.
“She didn't,” Eleanor said faintly from the doorway. She was leaning against the doorjamb. “In fact, she's not sure she remembers writing him seven years ago.”
“Wah,” Horace said, abandoning hope.
“But you know Mom,” Eleanor added unconvincingly.
Horace knotted his hands behind his neck and rotated his head with a noise like someone stepping on a wineglass, and Eleanor pushed herself away from the wall and sat beside him and began to knead his shoulders.
“And, of course, your mother never saw him.”
“Of course not,” Eleanor said, concentrating on Horace's shoulders.
“Pansy,” Horace blurted, pushing her hands aside.
“What about Pan-oh, good Lord.” Eleanor got up and hurried back into the hallway.
Two minutes later Mrs. Chan was seated on the couch, flipping through a thin stack of Polaroids. She looked longest at the fifth, then took it between thumb and forefinger and brought it up to her eyes. It was a close-up of a laughing man with a seamed face, a lot of gold teeth, and a puffy black eye.
She held the picture up to Horace accusingly.
“Lo,” she said.
5
Hypothetical Vietnamese
The very next day, Monday, I broke my promise.
“Vietnamese,” Hammond said smugly. “Those kids have to be Vietnamese.” I'd spent the night dreaming without sleeping, thrashing around on my bed like a gaffed fish, tangling myself in the sheets, and trying not to look at the pictures projected on the insides of my eyelids: Eleanor finding the house I now lived in, Eleanor making the curtains that still hung on the walls, Eleanor's face when she'd learned I was having an affair, Eleanor's straight, slim back going down the driveway on the day she'd moved out. Eleanor with the kids. Pansy, the trusting bride from Singapore, luminous with pride after the doctor had told her she was carrying twins. Horace, that same day, being transparently modest about the strength of his loins.
Eleanor with the kids again, the three of them tumbling and laughing in an early-morning room splashed with sunlight and bright dust. Eleanor and the kids she hadn't had.
At five I'd given up on sleep and taken an earl
y shower. I was jogging the perimeter of the UCLA campus by seven, trying to run off a load of guilt that was way too heavy to carry, and by nine, after a second shower in the men's gym, I'd used my stacks privileges at the University's Powell Library to pull out everything I could find about Chinese crime, and especially about Chinese crime in America. Maybe I could work the guilt off.
There was a whole lot more than I'd thought there would be.
Nine cups of coffee and three hundred pages later, it was three in the afternoon, and I was jittering in a chair at Parker Center, laying a line of carefully worked out bullshit on Al Hammond.
As always, Hammond was a lot bigger than he needed to be and, as always, he looked mean enough to eat kittens. In front of cats. He always intimidated me, in spite of the fact that most of the time, Hammond was my friend. I'd chosen him from a roomful of cops at a Hollywood cop bar called the Red Dog when I'd decided to be a detective, as opposed to a university professor. At the time I had put years into preparing to be a university professor and only weeks into being a detective, but those weeks were quality time, as people seem to like to say these days. A good friend of Eleanor's, a quiet Taiwanese girl named Jennie Chu, had been tossed onto the sidewalk from the roof of one of the UCLA dorms. Jennie had been dead on arrival, and Eleanor had been alive in my bed when someone had called to give her the news. Since the UCLA cops and the LAPD didn't seem all that interested, I'd helped Eleanor through her grieving process by finding the cocaine dealer who'd used Jennie to practice the vertical shot put. His mistake: He couldn't tell Asians apart. I'd happily broken both of his elbows, learning something sort of thrillingly unpleasant about myself in the process, and delivered him to the police. At that point I had more superfluous degrees than a Fahrenheit thermometer, the result of having stayed in college for what seemed like decades because I couldn't think of anything to do.
After Jennie, I had something to do.
“Why Vietnamese?” I asked. We were in a long room full of sickly fluorescent light and scarred wooden desks. Other detectives talked on phones or slogged on big heavy cop feet toward the coffee. I'd passed on the coffee.
“Why are you here?” Hammond countered. He was a cop to his bitten fingernails.
“This is purely hypothetical, Al,” I said, retreating toward the bullshit.
“And it has nothing to do with Eleanor,” Al said with ponderous irony.
“Eleanor who?” I asked, crossing my arms to emphasize the scholarly patches on my jacket. The lapels spread to reveal the aging Megadeth T-shirt beneath, and I tugged them closed. Hammond, like most cops, thought heavy metal was the musical equivalent of assault and battery. “I've decided to finish an old sociology thesis on urban crime. Asians are tops in their high school classes, tops in the graduation lists of lots of universities. Where are they in urban crime?”
“Tops,” Hammond said promptly. “They're fucking with the Mafia like no one ever has. Ninety percent of the 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 real bad guys. The triads. The triads are the real Chinese Mafia.”
“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.
The Man With No Time sg-5 Page 5
