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
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.