Читать книгу The Snakeheads - Mary Moylum - Страница 11

“… the death toll from last night’s drive-by shooting in Toronto has gone up. A third person has died in hospital. The incident is the fifth drive-by shooting in that city in the past three months. Crime in this city seems to be way up. And a good proportion of it is committed by foreign elements who’ve managed to elude your department for almost a decade. Would you care to comment on the situation?”

A television camera crew had caught Nick trying to flee through the back doors of the Immigration Building.

“What situation are you referring to? If it’s the drive-by shooting, the police and the RCMP Organized Crime Task Force have apprehended several gang members from a competing triad. Warrants have been issued to do search and seizure of their premises. Everything’s under control.”

“What are you going to do about criminals from other countries coming here illegally?”

“I’m glad you asked me that,” said Nick. He looked anything but glad.

Grace hadn’t seen or spoken to him in seven months, but from the televised image she could see that his face was bruised and bandaged up as if he’d been in a bar brawl. She felt her eyes tearing up. She couldn’t help it. The sight of him filled her with tenderness and yearning. Just about every case he worked on had left its mark on him, like a soldier in a nasty war.

“Unfortunately it takes an incident like this to get the public’s attention. I don’t want to alarm anybody, but sometimes people wilfully destroy their passports and claim asylum. When that happens we really don’t know who the hell they are. And once they leave the airport, there’s virtually no way we can police them. Unless of course they commit a crime and get caught. I’m sorry I can’t talk further. I’ve got to run to a meeting.”

There was a two-second shot of Nick diving into an unmarked police cruiser.

Grace turned off the television. Nick Slovak and his department were in deep trouble, and not just from a public relations angle. Suddenly, a case about a botched human smuggling operation had taken a 360-degree turn. One dead immigration officer and a drive-by shooting that had claimed the lives of innocent people. She wished she could help him out. But she couldn’t just call him up out of the blue.

She sighed. Once upon a time she had had two men in her life. Now she was dancing solo. She was a woman alone, without the benefit of husband or children. She had a nice house, but it was devoid of photographs of a handsome husband and laughing bambinos. All she had was her career, her ambition, and her mortgage. There were days when life looked pretty hollow.

The phone rang, startling her out of her thoughts. The call display on her kitchen phone showed her workplace number. Couldn’t they leave her alone even for one day? She wasn’t scheduled for any cases.

“This is scheduling. The deputy minister would like you to sit as second chair on a case, the one that’s in the news about that snakehead.”

“Which one would that be? There seem to be so many.”

“Gee Tung, the one implicated in the murder of an immigration officer. Maybe last night’s drive-by shooting, too. The deputy minister wants to expedite the case. Speedy deportation. Mark Crosby’s presiding and they want a second chair. Your name came up.”

“Can I think about it? I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Just talk it over with Crosby. We called him at the Vancouver office. He should be back on the eight o’clock flight tomorrow. All you’ve got to do is secure his consent.”

She mulled it over as she cleaned her kitchen. Cases like this didn’t come along every day. It had all the ingredients of a good movie plot: immoral alien smugglers, Asian triads fighting over gang turf, drive-by shootings, nightclubs where dancers doubled as prostitutes, raids on seedy rooming houses packed with young illegals. Not to mention a handsome immigration officer in charge of the investigation.

She narrowed her eyes in thought as she opened a tin of cat food. Face it, Grace. You want the case. It’s a reputation maker. Whoever hears the case will be queen of the heap.

And not only that, it was the perfect bridge to meeting Nick again.

She called Crosby at home and left a voice-mail message. After cleaning up the kitchen, she decided that it was to too nice a day to waste in front of a monitor and keyboard banging out legal reasons. She would bike down to Chinatown and pick up a few grocery items for dinner; she was out of sesame oil, soba noodles, and green tea.

A stroll through Chinatown was like a stroll down memory lane. The hanging barbecued ducks in the window and boxes of fish and dried goods displayed on racks on the sidewalk reminded her of her many childhood trips to Vancouver’s Chinatown with her mother. Stopping in front of a shop window full of spices and dried herbs, she stared momentarily at her reflection in the glass. While she had inherited her father’s thick wavy brown hair, her facial features were a composite of her parents, a blend of West and East.

She made a mental note to call her parents on the weekend, when they were back in the country. Now that they were retired they spent their summers travelling, and for the past month they had been visiting her mother’s ancestral village of aging aunts, uncles and cousins. It was no holiday of pleasure. It was more a pilgrimage of guilt and obligation to those left behind the Bamboo Curtain.

Last year they had spent a month in Israel. It had been William Wine’s second trip to the Red Sea in his sixty-nine years. His father, Grace’s paternal grandfather, had been born Aaron Weinstein, but changed the family name when they emigrated to Canada. Aaron Weinstein had opposed Hitler at a public rally, and was jailed as a political enemy of the Nazis. In 1941, he, his wife and their children escaped from Germany with the Gestapo on their heels. Only after they had arrived safely in England did they learn that Hitler was deporting Jews to the death camps. Their entire families were gassed at Auschwitz. After the war they sailed for Vancouver. But it was not a happy tale of survival and immigration. They were never able to cope with the fact that they had left parents, brothers, sisters, and cousins behind in Germany to perish.

In very British Vancouver, with their German accents, they tried to pass themselves off as the English Mr. and Mrs. Wine. But their son William, Grace’s father, knew the act was wearing thin. When he married Kim Wang, he abandoned his adopted English name, assumed her family name and converted to Buddhism. He tried hard to erase his past, because he was ashamed to be Jewish; it humiliated him that he came from a race of people that were despised and hunted down. Completing school forms for Grace and her sister distressed him; he could not bear even to write the word “Jew”. When Grace turned sixteen, he had confessed to his daughters that they were half Jewish. He explained that he had renounced his Jewishness to protect them. The story of how he and his two brothers, sister and parents had left Germany tumbled from his lips. For the first time, he talked about the remorse and shame he still felt because he had been unable to save the lives of his cousins, his grandparents, and his aunts and uncles.

It was ironic, really, Grace reflected, as she surveyed the traditional medicines displayed on the shelves of a Chinese drugstore. Her father was a physician, who had practised medicine as a family doctor for over thirty years. He had helped others, but was unable to help himself. He never got over his nightmares or his distrust of people.

When she was seventeen, without asking her father’s permission, Grace took the original name of her paternal grandfather as her own, hyphenating it with her Chinese name. She was who she was; she was proud of her Jewish ancestry. Her father told her he admired her courage, but he himself would never acknowledge his background. Fifty-eight years after fleeing Germany, he had never gone back.

But he and Kim had been to China several times. Kim Wang’s family was less dysfunctional, but they too had a history of political persecution. Grace’s grandfather, Rei, had served the last emperor in the Forbidden City, and in 1925 the warlords who were controlling Beijing had put him under house arrest. Then during the Japanese invasion Rei’s past with his emperor employer brought him under the scrutiny of the Japanese, and he was imprisoned. His daughter, Kim, spent her childhood in various labour camps until she escaped in a bold act of defiance. She was sixteen, and had been sent to a farm commune between Canton and Hong Kong. One day when the Revolutionary Guards were absent from their post, she decided to make a break for freedom.

The way Kim remembered it, she had walked until she found herself in a village with a train station. When the train pulled in, she sneaked aboard and rode it to the end of the line. From there she walked in the dark to avoid the checkpoints and the border control guards and their dogs. It was a starless night when she finally reached the ocean with the bright lights of Hong Kong beckoning to her. There was no one with a boat to take her across, and so, being young, strong and fearless, she decided to swim. She was in the water for many exhausting, despairing hours before reaching the city, but in the end she made it to shore.

She found work in the sweatshops and managed to learn English on the side. It was in the textile factory that she met and married her first husband, a Shanghanese. After their marriage, they emigrated to Canada where he was sent to manage a China-sponsored retail operation in Vancouver. The marriage was difficult, and Kim enrolled in a nursing program to learn a trade, in order to support herself. After her graduation she and her first husband separated amicably, and a year later she met William Wine at the Vancouver General. They married, and two years later Grace was born.

Kim Wang had travelled a long way from her days in the gulag, and she had reinvented herself more than once. At the age of fifty-five she had assumed the role of matriarch of the Vancouver Benevolent Society. Grace had always admired her mother, who was in every sense her own person. Long ago, Kim had freed herself from the restrictions that prevented her from living the kind of life she wanted. She had escaped from a prison camp and travelled to a new country. She had chosen the man she wanted. And all in the days before women’s lib.

Grace could not say the same about her own life. Shame on you, she chastised herself. As a beneficiary of the women’s movement, she had had it easy, compared to her mother. And what did she have to show for it? House, mortgage, career, cat … but no husband. No Nick.

She sighed. She’d better get over to the office, do some serious work this afternoon. Work late. Get her mind off romance.

Crossing the park, Grace remembered that Mark Crosby lived a short walk from the office. Now that she’d decided she wanted to work on the case — wanted to see Nick again, truth be told — it occurred to her that she should drop in on him tomorrow. His plane got in at eight, and by nine he’d be home. Then she could tell him she was taking him up on his offer to work on a case together as long as he didn’t think she was taking him up on his other offer. She was eager, now, to speak to Crosby and make sure he didn’t give the second chair to anybody else.

The drive-by shooting made headlines in all the papers. The public was outraged and the immigration department’s toll-free number was ringing off the hook. Television, print, and radio reporters were calling the investigative and enforcement unit for interviews and updates. One of the support staffers wheeled the television from the conference room straight into Nick’s office. Nick flicked it on with the remote.

The mayor was quick off the mark, holding a press conference about last night’s shooting. “Our system of deporting undesirables is obviously not working. There are too many people abusing the system. Criminals from all over the globe know Canada has an open door policy….”

Nick knew exactly where the mayor was going. His remarks about cleaning up crime in the metropolis were very familiar. City elections were two years away, but he was already working on his re-election strategy. Now the mayor was joined by another elected official and the police commissioner himself. They took turns offering sound bites to the press.

Nick called Rocco Corvinelli into his office.

Rocco looked sharp in his suit and tie. Nick had hired him fresh out of grad school with a psychology degree, of all things. But then he had always hired people with diverse backgrounds as immigration officers. Creative thinking scored high in his book, and he also looked for tenacity. Given that immigration and customs officers were among the few enforcement officials with the right to search anyone or anything without a warrant, he expected his staff to hold up as witnesses under gruelling cross-examination by a defendant’s lawyer. Rocco was smart, and he was also something of a bulldog — another positive trait, in Nick’s book. In his first few months on the front lines at Terminal 2, Rocco had scored a cold hit that resulted in one of the largest airport drug busts ever.

“How many calls have we logged?”

“Over five hundred so far on our toll-free line. Frothing at the mouth, most of them. Want to deport every coloured face out of the country. Scary, actually,” said Rocco, leaning against the door.

Nick nodded. “Racism flares up when stuff like this happens. This is what we’re gonna do. The press will want to bypass Public Information for the inside scoop. That will be you.”

For the next half hour, Nick briefed Rocco on what to give to the press on the investigation Immigration was conducting into the drive-by shooting.

“We pick two reporters. Print and television. The Globe and CTV. I want you to leak to them that we’re running our own checks on the Flying Dragons triad members. We think the shooting wasn’t really about alien smuggling, it was about gang warfare and fighting for turf. That way we toss the ball back into the police commissioner’s lap.”

“Why are we leaking it to those two reporters?”

“First of all, we need to buy time. And secondly, we want to put a reporter or two in our debt. That will make the other reporters jealous, and they’ll chase the story that much harder.”

“I don’t quite follow.”

“We want the reporters to push the investigation. Any information they find will help us. One of them will be sharp enough to track down the owner of the Mandarin Club. And hopefully we get who we want in the spotlight.”

Rocco’s eyes opened in amazement. So that was how spin worked. Manipulate the press to get them investigating a few leaks Nick fed them. Massage the message, give them a bagful of half truths, and stand back. With luck, they’d get a lot of new information.

“We’re buying time until we finish our investigation. Remember, we never lie. We just withhold some information until the time is right. We need time to organize our investigation.”

“Okay. I follow.”

“Good. Handle the media scrum this afternoon. Don’t let the reporters trip you. Watch yourself with that reporter from the Times. Jamie Singh. He likes to ask the same question ten, twelve different ways. Then when you give a wrong response he’ll correct you. And you trip yourself by talking too much. Giving out more information than you meant to.”

Rocco nodded.

“Jamie’s one of the sharpest reporters around. English is his first language — don’t let that Sikh turban of his fool you. Remember, be very careful with him.”

After Rocco left, Nick tried to close a few files. But he couldn’t work. He needed to clear his head and think. He needed oxygen. Everything was racing too fast for his brain. Instead of hiding in his office, he dodged out the back of the building and took a walk. Why had Andy Loong been gunned down last night? Who knew about the raid at the Mandarin Club? Just himself, Kappolis and the squad cars waiting in the side street. He didn’t think it was an inside leak. Was he being followed? He looked behind him as he walked along King Street towards Spadina Avenue. Or had someone inside the club made a quick exit when the raid began? That seemed more likely. The police had tried to seal off all the exits, but they didn’t know the precise layout of the building. Supposing this someone knew what was going down, quickly got out, and alerted the head honcho, who ordered the drive-by hit on Loong. Why? To silence him. Whatever Loong knew had died with him. What the hell did he know that was worth his life?

He power-walked up Spadina. As he crossed the first set of lights, he played back what he knew because too many theories were spinning around his head. The Mandarin Club’s membership list had not turned up Li Mann’s name or anything close to it. Unfortunately, he had no idea if Li Mann was a real name or a nickname. Some cultures, like the Somalis, used nicknames in the place of real names. To Nick, they were all aliases designed to confuse law enforcement officials, nothing else.

Chinatown was a sea of life, sounds, smells and people. Nick grabbed a bite to eat at a street vendor’s stall. He could remember when Spadina had been the heart of the Jewish community, defined by delis and garment factories. After the Jews had moved up and out, the Chinese had moved in. The Yiddish theatre had been replaced by a movie theatre featuring kung fu movies. The old Jewish synagogue had been converted into the Chinese Community Centre. But in the last few years, immigration had altered the four-kilometre stretch again. Now the Chinese were following the Jews and the Italians in their migration to the suburbs, and the Vietnamese were taking over the area, giving it yet another identity as Little Saigon.

He detoured around large trucks unloading and delivering boxes of fresh produce and cases of frozen fish to the crowded shops and street markets. Before the crosswalk, he elbowed his way through a throng of shoppers who were busy checking out T-shirts, fake Rolexes, and other knock-off merchandise. Waiting patiently for the streetlights to change, he curiously eyed a pair of young Asian girls on the other side, hair bleached reddish-blonde. One of them sported a nose ring, while her companion had a ring through her belly button.

Crossing the street and walking past the synagogue, Nick noticed that it had been transformed again; this time into a pool hall. He didn’t know why it bothered him but it did. A lot of things were beginning to bother him. Particularly about the case. Officer Philip Wong had left a voice-mail message that he had some evidence that the shooting might have been done by a rival gang, the Vietnamese Lo Chien.

Maybe. But Nick was far from convinced that Loong’s murder was really about gangs rubbing out the ethnic competition. If so, what about the timing of the hit? Coincidence, or what? Maybe the Lo Chien gang had been hired to take Loong out to keep him from talking to the police. That seemed plausible. But then, who bought the contract hit? He went over and over the facts, trying put them together in a way that made sense.

All he could do was keep pushing. Stay in touch with Dubois. Maybe Kappolis would have some ideas about where to go next.

In the back of his mind one persistent, maddening thought never went away: that Walter Martin’s killer was still out there somewhere. So far, the son of a bitch had gotten away with it.