5
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 early 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.”