Something said, “Burra-burra-burra.”
I cranked one eyelid open and looked at the cracked leather covering my couch. If I'd achieved paradise, I'd apparently taken my couch with me. I'd imagined paradise before, full of willing, lissome houris, but I hadn't imagined them on my couch. Paradise seemed a lot cheaper with my couch in it.
Someone said, “Wheeee.” Not something, but someone.
“Left wing up,” the voice said, and I recognized words I had spoken myself while I was still alive.
“Throttle back,” croaked a rusty hinge that I recognized as me. “Not so fast.”
“Quiet,” the other voice commanded. “Working it out.”
“Fine,” I said to the back of the couch. “I'm dead anyway.”
“Landing, me,” the other voice said unsympathetically. “Die later.”
“Then get the goddamn left wing up and throttle back.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the other voice said. I closed my eyes. Then it said, “Shit.”
“You crashed,” I said, disappointed that the exit from life wasn't more clearly marked. What if there was a fire?
“I totally eat it.” The tone was apologetic.
“Do you think,” I asked, trying not to plead, “that you can find the Excedrin?”
“Already took three,” Tran said. “Water?”
“Good idea,” I said, reconciling myself to the thin and tepid gruel of life. “You can walk okay?”
“You took them off, remember?” Tran said over the splash of running water. “I got no place to walk, that's the problem.”
“That's your problem,” I said primly.
“You should learn to throw up,” he said, sounding closer. "Me, I throw up." A tentacle touched my arm, and I rolled blindly toward it and opened my eyes to see a hand that looked larger than Australia, with a couple of pills in it.
“Five,” I suggested.
“Salowly,” he said. “Two first.” He extended a glass of water in the other hand.
I gulped them down, closed my eyes again, and slid down a long greased chute into queasiness. I had no indication that we were no longer alone until I heard Eleanor's voice saying, “What's wrong with this picture?”
“We're alternating,” I said. “Tomorrow I take care of him.”
“Well, who should I look at first?”
“Him,” I said, without turning over to face her. “There's nothing that can be done for me.”
Something clinked. “All three bottles,” she said accusingly. “Did you get this boy drunk?”
Tran laughed, a light, merry, truly merciless little laugh.
The bottles hit the paper bag in the kitchen that serves as a garbage can. “Sit down,” Eleanor said. She sounded sympathetic.
“I haven't got that much energy,” I said.
“Not you, you sot. You.” The chair in front of my computer-the computer on which Tran had just totaled an electronic airplane-creaked. Saran Wrap rustled. “Well, well,” Eleanor said approvingly, “this is much better.”
“He's seventeen,” I said bitterly.
Tran said, “Ouch.” It momentarily cheered me.
“Shhh. Have you had coffee?” she asked.
“Yes,” Tran said.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“You know where it is,” Eleanor said.
“I know exactly where it is,” I told the back of the couch, “and I know I can't possibly get there.”
“Sit tight, sweetie,” Eleanor said to the little murderer. “Let me get the old sot some coffee.”
“I finish it,” Tran said, without a tinge of guilt.
“That's all right. He needs some special coffee. We make it with uranium.” Extremely familiar puttering sounds came from the kitchen. If I'd died, I found myself thinking, I would never have heard those sounds again. A little butterfly, or, more likely, a cabbage moth, spread its wings in my soul.
Two and a half hours later, I was sitting in a blindingly bright coffee shop in Monterey Park, watching the most nervous man I'd ever seen in my life. Peter Lau was definitely not enjoying his middle forties. He was tall, almost six feet, and unhealthily thin, with the jaundice-yellow face of a drinker whose liver is moments away from retirement. Wary eyes swept the restaurant from above dark circles that looked like they'd been planted with a punch press. He'd checked me out twice, but he hadn't seen Tran, who'd retreated strategically into the men's room.
Across an expanse of scalp that began three inches above his eyes, Lau had meticulously pasted twenty six foot-long hairs, left to right, to form a clever little hair hat. The vanity behind this hopeless pretense was echoed in his clothing, which was stylish in a way that had nothing to do with style, like someone who'd once heard a description of the well-dressed man on the radio but had never actually seen one: color-coordinated tie and handkerchief, both in a large check; striped shirt; blazer nipped too sharply at the waist; wide gray slacks; white shoes. The gold rings on his index fingers, like the rings under his eyes, were a matching set.
We'd visited five coffee shops before we found one with a window table that had a reserved sign on it. Tran had led me to a table and we'd had more coffee, not as bracing as Eleanor's, but strong enough to keep the floor level. After a few minutes, one of the Chinese waitresses had started to set the reserved table: a carafe of coffee, a couple of pieces of toast.
“Here goes,” Tran said, and did his fade. Thirty seconds later, Peter Lau jittered in with three briefcases, looking like something that had been run over by the Doodah Parade. He'd sat down as though he were afraid his knees would snap, and gone immediately to work on the latches of the first briefcase. After nine or ten false starts he worried the snaps into submission and pulled out a laptop computer, which he opened and put dead center in front of him. The next case yielded, after a prolonged struggle, a cellular telephone and a miniaturized fax machine. Case number three, which probably contained his secretary, he placed on the seat next to him.
Only then, floating office in place, did he take any sustenance: He lit a cigarette, cupping his shaking hands around a cheap plastic lighter as though he were in a full-force gale. Smoke streaming from his nostrils, he carefully poured coffee onto the table near his cup and then gave up and handed the trembling carafe to the waitress, who doled out something less than half a cup. When he lifted it, I could see why; his hand was so unsteady that I would have taken equal odds on his dropping it, spilling the coffee on his shirt, or knocking out a tooth with the rim of the cup.
It was the tooth. I was standing over him by the time the cup reached his mouth, and when he saw me the crack of porcelain on enamel was enough to bring my own coffee halfway back up into the light.
“Whawhawha?” Peter Lau said, looking around wildly. He seemed to have forgotten already where the exit was.
“Relax,” I said, sitting opposite him and trying to look reassuring and urbane, rather than green and sticky and reeking of Bordeaux. “I just want to talk to you.”
“This table. .” he said, “this table, ah. .” Words failed him, and he snatched up the reserved sign and brandished it in my face.
“I only need a few minutes,” I said, looking at him more closely. He was wringing wet.
“No talking,” he said jerkily. He started to put the reserved sign into his shirt pocket, found it wouldn't fit, and tucked it under the lapel of his jacket. “I don't talk. I never talk. Ask anybody.”
I leaned in and took an inconspicuous sniff. Alcohol fumes roiled off him. If I had the mother of all hangovers. Peter Lau had all four of its grandparents.
“I need some help,” I said, reaching over to extricate the sign and put it back on the table.
“I don't help.” He started the catechism. “I never help. Ask-”
He broke off and stared past me, looking like one of those little rubber dolls whose eyes pop out of their head when you squeeze them.
“He's with me,” I said, feeling very sorry for Peter Lau.
&nb
sp; “Hey, Peter,” Tran said, dropping a hand onto my shoulder.
“Mr. Lau,” I corrected him.
“How you doing, Mr. Lau?” Tran amended.
Lau wrenched his gaze from Tran to me, and his brain might as well have been a blackboard: The kid is back, but this time they've sent someone with him and he can't be bought off. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and the points on his collar had begun to curl up. “You're from Tiffle,” he finally said. It was more a gasp than a question.
“That's the name,” Tran said happily, slipping into the booth beside me. “White guy. Tiffle.” He was swimming in one of my shirts, looking very small and brown.
I knocked my leg into Tran's. “Why would Tiffle send me?” I asked.
“I don't know,” Lau said jerkily. “I'm not writing-”
“They threatened you,” I said.
“This little monster,” Peter Lau said, peering around for help. Literally everyone in the place looked away, finding the answers to long-held questions on the walls or in the middle of their plates. “This little beast and his-his-”
“Mr. Lau.” He jumped slightly. “Mr. Lau, I'm on your side.”
“I don't have a side,” he said quickly, “and if you're on it, why's he here?”
“Tiffle and the Snakes,” I said, and this time Lau positively leaped. His fingers, frantic for something to do, scrabbled lightly over the keys of his laptop. “They killed his brother and cousin. They kidnapped,” I added, stretching the truth some, “the children of some friends of mine.”
“My stars,” he said, and I realized he had a faint British accent. Hong Kong.
“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 you some things.”
“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 want to kill you.”
“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 very unpleasant.”
“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, hundreds of millions of Chinese, have literally nothing to lose. They accept the first emperors, they overthrow the emperors, they set up a republic, they overthrow the republic and accept communism, they embrace capitalism. They follow the light someone holds up, a light suspended over a full bowl of rice. When the light goes out and they lose their direction, they starve for a while in the dark. When someone shines a new light in their eyes, they follow it again. They've followed the greatest assortment of scoundrels ever produced by a single country in all of history.” He sighed once more, even more heavily. “Of course, part
of the problem is that we've had more history than everyone else put together.”
“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
THE SUN IN A MIRROR
A very few migrating creatures seem to guide themselves by following the lines of the earth's magnetic field, perhaps sensitized to its alignment by magnetized particles they have swallowed. Since the planet's magnetic field has reversed itself several times in the past, the theorist can only wonder whether these purely physical events have caused wholesale biological exterminations as entire species lost their way over the surface of the earth.
— Martin Fielding, Natural Navigation
13
Sojourners
“Eleven million dollars,” Peter Lau said, “every two weeks.”
We'd followed him to a new restaurant, and the air, or something, had done him good. His eyes were steadier, his voice less susceptible to sudden spikes of nervous energy. The front of his shirt had dried out. He even smiled occasionally, like someone picking up radio jokes on his fillings. He was drinking lemonade without spilling it into his lap.
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