The Man With No Time (26 page)

“Yo,” Dexter whispered.

He was waiting for me at the top of the stairs, rubbing his arms against the cold and looking past me toward the crew's cabin. “Six guys in there,” he said. “They dancing to the music.”

“I have to look,” I said. "See if Charlie's there. Cargo's downstairs. "

“Wo, Everett. Look fast. I too old for this shit.”

There were indeed three male Chinese couples practicing 1970s disco moves to a Cantonese rendition of “Stayin' Alive.” A table was littered with bottles of cognac. None of the six dancers was Charlie, but I recognized one of them from the merry band who had barged into that alley in Chinatown only—what?—two nights before. Working my belt back into place, I ran to the grapple and climbed over, clutching the rope for dear life.

“Remember,” I said to Dexter. “Small splash.”

With gravity on my side, going down was easier. Hands grasped my pants and guided me on deck, and I turned to see Tran. “Push off,” he said. “Quick.”

I joined him and Captain Snow in shoving against the side of the tanker, and when we were an arm's length apart she picked up a long gaff, put its business end against the ship, and we all shoved on it. We drifted away, six, then eight, feet, and the rope hanging from the ship's side suddenly began to whip from side to side, and the grapple and Dexter hit the water at about the same time. I hauled in on the rope, scanning the water for Dexter. He surfaced a moment later, spitting water, and grabbed the end of the gaff we held out to him.

Thirty seconds later the engines had been cut in and Dexter was toweling himself dry on a sheet Tran had fetched from the cabin. Then, at a word from Dexter, he went back in and brought Everett.

“You lied to us,” I said to him. The freighter was well behind us now, and I didn't have to whisper. “You brought us out here hoping we'd get caught. You wasted our time. You got my friend here wet, and, what's worst of all, you forced him to reveal his taste in underwear.”

“They just kisses,” Dexter grumbled, buttoning his shirt.

“I thought Charlie was there,” Everett said. He couldn't keep his eyes on me; they kept shifting to Dexter.

“You're not taking us seriously,” I said. “That's a mistake.” I reached down and picked up the knife from its resting place in the coil of rope.

“Wait.” Everett ran the tip of his tongue over his lips. “I was wrong.”

“You were indeed.” I cut the grapple off the rope. “And you were wrong to be wrong. Get his shoulders, Dexter. Tran, hold on to his legs.”

The two of them moved into position, and I wound the rope around his waist, making three coils for safety's sake. I was fumbling with the knot when Captain Snow pushed my hands aside and said, “Allow me. You couldn't tie a granny around your granny.” She tugged the rope upward until it was beneath his arms, tied something large and complicated over his sternum, tugged it hard enough to make Everett gasp, and went back to the wheel.

“Not over the stern, over the side,” she said. "Avoid the propellers. "

Everett screamed something that sounded like the gull Tran had caught, and he kept screaming as Dexter and I hoisted him sideways and tossed him into the water. He bounced once, like a skipping stone, and then sank, and I ran to the rope and paid out a few yards' worth and watched him bob up, still screaming, three or four yards behind the boat. He trailed behind us like living chum, fighting to keep his head above water as he zigzagged from one of the churning trails of our wake to the other.

“Not too long,” the captain said, working the steel Zippo again. “Hypothermia. Guy's got no fat.”

We left him out there for five minutes, until we burst through the fogbank and the lights of shore blinked their welcome. He'd stopped screaming by then, although he hadn't stopped struggling for air.

Captain Snow cut the motors and we pulled Everett in, accompanied by a castanet orchestra that I identified as his teeth. When he was flat on his back on the deck, she punched the engines in, hard this time, and the front end of the boat lifted itself out of the water as we surged forward.

“No more bullshit,” I said, kneeling next to him.

He shook his head, trying to press his jaws together before he fractured his molars.

“Take him below,” I said to Tran. “Warm him up a little.” Tran cut the rope and got Everett to his feet, but he stumbled twice before he reached the doorway.

As we pulled into the dock at Marina Del Rey, Captain Snow lighted another cigarette and gave Dexter a grin. “Satisfied with the service?”

“You do bar mitzvahs?” He gave her the grin back with interest, the kind of interest I hadn't seen since Carter was president.

“Your friend here knows how to reach me.” She took off the cap and fluffed out the frizzy dark hair, and Tran came out of the cabin propelling a soaking Everett in front of him. “If you want to, I mean. There's a phone on the boat.”

“My,” Dexter said, making two sweet syllables out of it. “All the comforts.”

“Do you mind?” I asked. “We've got to get Everett home before he flatlines.”

“On the way,” Dexter said. He touched an index finger to the bridge of Captain Snow's vulnerable looking nose and said, “Permission to go ashore?”

“What if I say no?” Captain Snow said.

Halfway up the dock, in between kicking at Everett's sodden heels to help him along, Dexter turned to me and allowed himself a smirk. “It's the shorts,” he said. “Gets 'em every time.”

17 - Cave Fishing

I
'd overstated the case when I described Claude B. Tiffle to Dexter as a white man. Claude Tiffle had virtually no color at all. He looked like something that had evolved underground: eyes as pale and soiled as mushrooms, hair like alfalfa sprouts, a sparse mustache that looked like a scraggle of centipede's legs. Fat, wet, white lips it was easy to imagine him licking, a dirty dimple in his chin that you could have sharpened a pencil in, and a belly so beery I expected to hear it slosh when he got up.

Four weary-looking young Chinese women, whom Dexter had nicknamed Weepy, Bleary, Mopey, and Snowbell, had reluctantly passed me, like the baton in a relay no one wants to win, toward the sanctum of Tiffle's office in the back room of the cottage, the one Tran and I had seen lighted first.

My watch said four p.m. Everett was reclining in Dexter's bathtub, wrapped in an honest-to-god straitjacket Dexter had proudly pulled from his closet, thereby justifying all my suspicions about what went on in that glittering, clinical decor. Tran and Dexter and I had been watching in turns for most of the day, timing the arrivals and exits of the staff and getting to know them by sight, with the odd man out racing to Dexter's apartment to relieve the one keeping Everett company. Although the four women worked from eight-thirty or nine to six, Tiffle himself didn't make his morning appearance until eleven or so, probably enervated by his exertions with Charlie Wah's slave girl of the previous evening.

Tiffle's tardiness, I thought, could be a problem.

Nevertheless, I'd have watched for another full day, making sure that the timetable was right, except that a clock I didn't know how to reset was ticking its way toward the moment when the little boats would take the pilgrims on their last short sail into slavery.

The pilgrims had been on my mind a lot.

“They're peasants,” Everett had said defensively the evening before, speaking from the porcelain pocket of Dexter's bathtub. “They've worked like slaves their whole lives.”

“They had a choice then,” I said. How many of them had served my food, broken their backs in the fields that grew the vegetables I bought, laundered my shirts, inhaled the carcinogenic fumes of the dry-cleaning fluids that allowed me, on rare occasions, to look dapper? How much had I profited from Charlie's game?

“Made they own money then, too,” Dexter said, bending low over Everett like he wanted to test his teeth on Everett's throat.

“They wanted to come here,” Everett said, kicking his feet, which were about all he could move. “They knew.”

“They didn't know they'd get cheated,” I said. “They didn't know about the dirty little fake-INS tricks. They didn't know their papers would be shit.”

“They
have
to be,” Everett squealed, thrashing to get away from Dexter. “Otherwise they'll escape.”

“Wrong audience, Jack,” Dexter said.

“Chinese are very sneaky,” Everett said, as though he were describing a race someone had once told him about. “It costs money to get them here. Ships are expensive, you know.”

“What the profit margin?” Dexter asked, straightening.

“Well . . .” Everett began.

Dexter brought his teeth together with a snap. “In dollars. How many? Right now.”

Everett looked at me imploringly.

“He's with me, remember?” I said.

“They pay thirty,” Everett said. He pursed his lips. “We make ten.”

“How
much?” Dexter demanded.

“Twenty.”

“Your eyes,” Dexter said meaningfully.

“Twenty-five,” Everett said. “Twenty-five.”

“So you the big humanitarian, bringing them here and putting them to work for—how many years you say?” he asked me.

“Three,” I said, “for starters.”

“Your brothers,” Dexter said forcefully. “Shit, man, I was you, I'd be ashamed to look Chinese. Three years. You know, they ain't gonna get those years
back,
those years
gone,
asshole.”

“That's the way it works,” Everett said, looking genuinely puzzled. “I don't make the rules. I just follow orders.”

“Shame we ain't got no Jews here,” Dexter said. “You could offend everybody.”

“When are they going to come off the ship?” I asked.

Everett visibly abandoned hope. He started to make a word, but the breath behind it escaped without shape or meaning. He shook his head.

“I think you still cold,” Dexter said. “How about some hot water?”

“I don't know,” Everett said immediately.

Dexter put a hand on the tap.

“No, really, honestly, I don't know. Only Charlie knows.” He sounded on the verge of tears. “Charlie sets it up with the businesses for the pickup and lets us know about an hour before it's time to move them. Honest.”

“And where's Charlie?”

“Nobody ever knows where Charlie is.”

“Real
hot water,” Dexter reminded him, a hand on the tap again.

“But
think
about it,” Everett shrilled. “Charlie's the boss. If anything goes wrong, it's Charlie's head. He's not going to tell us anything. Chinese are
sneaky.”

“Charlie's head,” I said, “sounds good to me.”

“One more time,” Dexter said. “When they gonna get moved?” Everett just squeezed his eyes closed and shook his head, waiting for the hot water.

So at five till four the following day, feeling jumpy, guilty, and seriously sleep-deprived, I left Tran in the driver's seat and rang the bell to Tiffle's little realm.

Once inside, I found that the staff member we'd dubbed Weepy sat at the front desk behind a nameplate that said Florence Lam. Bleary, Mopey, and Snowbell seemed to have no fixed places of abode: they passed listlessly back and forth with papers in their hands, guiding me toward Tiffle's lair each time I took a wrong turn, which was as often as possible: I didn't know exactly what my agenda for the conversation was, other than to galvanize Tiffle's greed glands to the point where they'd bounce him out of bed for an early morning meet, but I knew I wanted a look at the inside of the cottage. Snowbell was a knockout, pale and slender beneath a tapered shag of hair that would have prompted Eleanor to stop her in the street and ask who cut it.

“Mr. Skinker,” Tiffle said in a fat, damp voice as he rose from his desk and put a hand on his belly, presumably to keep it from flopping down and overturning his desk, “what can I do you for?” He followed his
mot
with a chuckle, one wit to another.

“Actually,” I said, shaking hands with a wad of well-chewed gum, “it's
Dr.
Skinker.” I was wearing my hair parted on the left, which made it stand up here and there, a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, patched over the nose with adhesive, that I'd found long ago in a parking lot, and a sober, submissive dark suit. Tran had talked me out of the false mustache.

“The good doctor,” Tiffle wheezed merrily. “Sawbones or phud?”

I made a prim
moue.
“Neither. Doctor of Divinity.”

“Never enough divinity in the world, wurf, wurf." He held out a Chinese lacquer box and whisked the top off it. “Smoke? No, I guess not. Not in your line, is it? Mind if I do?” He lit one without waiting for an answer, the fat lips hugging it like a living pudding. It didn't take imagination to see why he hadn't gone into criminal law. A shoplifter facing a jury with Tiffle for the defense would have probably gotten the gas chamber. “So anyhoo,” he said, spreading the arms of his chair and squeezing himself between them in a cloud of smoke, "what's on your mind?”

“I want to set up a church,” I said. “In this community.”

He extracted the cigarette from his mouth and regarded it. It was soaking. “Don't you need a bishop or something? Not really a job for a lawyer.”

“A church is a business like any other.”

His interest was fading. “News to me.”

A car backfired in the street, and I turned my nervous jump into a perspicacious chin-scratch. “You may not be aware of the strides our brethren have been making in the Korean community.”

“Don't know much about Koreans. Pretty women. Not, I mean, that you—”

I let him flounder until he ran down and then permitted myself a thin ecclesiastical smile. “Very pretty,” I said.

“Taller than Chinese,” said the connoisseur, lipping the cigarette again and focusing on the adult video loop he probably called his imagination.

“Some of them are exquisite.”

“Still,” he said, blinking his way back into the room, “a church.”

“People come into a community,” I said, resisting the impulse to rub my hands together, “seeking brotherhood. They are strangers among strangers.”

“Nicely put,” Tiffle said dutifully. “Strangers among strangers.”