Читать книгу The Snakeheads - Mary Moylum - Страница 8

Walter Martin had been given a funeral befitting a well-respected peace officer. Hundreds of law enforcement officers attended, many on motorcycles. Traffic was snarled up for a good two hours in uptown Toronto. When it was over, Nick headed back to the office. The mood there was grim. He spent the rest of the morning on the phone, talking to his immigration and law enforcement counterparts around the world, seeking information.

When Officer Philip Wong appeared at his door, Nick, still on the phone, held up two fingers. Wong impatiently paced the hall until Nick hung up.

“What is it?” snapped Nick.

“I’ve got an informant who’ll talk about the snakeheads from the Martin operation. He owns a travel agency in Chinatown.”

“Which Chinatown?”

“Little Chinatown, Gerrard and Broadview. I made kind of an informal deal. He’s been charged with trying to bribe an immigration officer for the purposes of buying entry and exit visas. I told him if he talks we drop the charge.”

Shortly after one in the afternoon, Nick and Philip Wong were heading east through the city. Wong navigated the van through heavy traffic and crazy jaywalkers before turning down a side street and stopping in front of a travel agency with a sign reading Adventures to Go. They parked in front of a produce and fish shop; the odour that greeted them bluntly announced that fact.

Gerrard Street East attracted Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Chinese, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Caribbean immigrants. Nick didn’t belong to any ethnic minority group in this neighbourhood. “Philip, I’m counting on you to do most of the talking if English is a problem.”

The travel agency was empty except for a middleaged man who sat behind a pile of brochures. He rose from his chair and bowed when they entered.

“Hum Byng,” said Officer Wong, speaking Mandarin, “I want you to give my boss a full explanation, everything you told me. Remember, this is your chance to save yourself three years in the slammer.”

Hum Byng bowed again and nodded nervously. “We work on commission. As brokers or salesmen. In Mandarin, we’re called shetou, agent of snakehead …”

Wong translated for Nick. “He’s a genuine travel agent, but he makes a little money on the side moonlighting as a broker to a snakehead. He’s sure that his contact works for a huge smuggling syndicate. Nick, the way he describes it, it’s like an Amway pyramid scheme. He has no idea who the big players are. He only knows the name of his contact and what he looks like. Contact goes by the name of Tu.”

“Chinese?” asked Nick.

“No, Tu’s Vietnamese,” translated Philip.

“How did Hum find this Tu?”

Wong spoke to Hum Byng, then told Nick, “Tu found him. But he hasn’t seen Tu in almost a month. Tu’s the one who always initiates contact. No one knows where he lives. Tu is a big-time people smuggler. But this Tu is not the kingpin in the people smuggling pyramid.”

The travel agent spoke in rapid Mandarin to Philip, who translated to Nick. “He said this is Tu’s territory. When he’s in town, the smuggler hangs out at several of the noodle houses on this strip.”

Nick, watching the man nod and smile, said, “Tell him we won’t charge him with breaking any laws if he continues to cooperate. Tell him we want him to come down to our offices and look at the photos of snakeheads and smugglers we’ve accumulated. Maybe Tu’s in there.”

Wong translated, then turned to Nick. “He said he’ll come after work tomorrow. I gave him our address.”

Back in the van, Wong asked, “What do you think?”

Nick looked out the window as he spoke. “He really hasn’t told us anything new. Except now we know for sure that we’re dealing with a multimillion or even billion-dollar illegal empire that looks like a huge pyramid scheme. With a Vietnamese connection recruiting legitimate business people to work as brokers. It says a lot for human ingenuity. What we don’t know is whether we’re looking for one ringleader or several. It may be one huge operation, or a network of independent agents or cells. There’s still a lot of questions we don’t have answers to.”

Nick paused. Philip did nothing to fill the pause until they were midtown at Bloor and Bay. “I’m not holding out much optimism that we’ve got a mugshot of this Tu character.”

“You never know,” answered Nick, “sometimes you just get lucky.”

“I’ve got to head out to Regional War Crimes in Etobicoke. Is it okay if I let you off here?” asked Philip.

“No problemo. I’m on home turf here. I’ll stroll through the university and grab a bite to eat.”

Lunch was a street-vendor hotdog dripping with mustard and relish. As he passed a storefront window, Nick checked his reflection. No obvious mustard and relish stains on his shirt or face. But there was the unmistakable shadow of stubble on his face. It had been over twenty-four hours since he shaved. That would be his excuse for his pathetic appearance these days. His faded black chinos and dark shirt with the bleach stain on the left cuff reminded him that he was also on the slippery slope of the dress code.

When he first joined Immigration and Citizenship he wore a suit and tie every day — until he learned, first-hand, that a tie could become a lethal weapon in the hands of an uncooperative deportee. Now he wore casual clothes to work. What was the use of throwing good money away on a suit only to have it damaged in a scuffle? His mother always said she’d never heard of a high-flying department head who dressed the way he did, but fortunately, his aging parents still lived in Rochester, New York, where Nick had grown up, so he didn’t have to pass his mother’s inspection often. Sure, he should probably dress in a manner befitting his position, but since the budget cutbacks in his department, which had been downsized to half its investigators, he had become a quick-change artist. He had one set of clothes for meetings and paperwork, and another set for confronting death in the field. It was standard department policy for all field investigators to wear body armour, but sometimes even a bullet-proof vest didn’t help. Like the time he went to deport a Somali warlord and found himself being clubbed with assorted kitchen utensils and household furniture by the warlord’s four wives and many children. Then they tried to push him out a twenty-first-storey window. Working in pairs was no guarantee of safety either. Only last month, he and another enforcement officer had gone to the home of an ex-cabinet minister from Haiti to hand the man arrest and deportation papers. His partner wrestled with the man’s dogs while Nick fought off a two-hundred-pound bodyguard who came at him with a dirty hypodermic and a mean set of teeth.

When he had joined the department a decade ago, inoculation against hepatitis had been standard procedure. Now standard procedure included — in addition to the body armour — face masks, flak jacket, side arms and a mobile phone to call for police backup. But you could take all the precautions you could think of, and sometimes that still wouldn’t be enough. Look at what had happened to Walter Martin.

Nick left the subway at the University Avenue station and dashed across four lanes of traffic. He was running late for his meeting with his friend RCMP Captain André Dubois. Their association had been long and fruitful, extending all the way back to Nick’s days as a prosecutor. Dubois had always been his first choice as an expert witness in cases involving organized crime, having spent his entire career investigating it. In the seventies Dubois had worked on major undercover operations to bring members of the Mafia and their crime bosses to justice. He had spent time in the eighties tracking down Italian and Latin American drug traffickers. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the nineties, he had been assigned to monitor the emergence of the new Russian criminal class. When the U.S. Congress had passed the Immigration Bill, Canada had joined with the Americans to form a joint task force to combat organized crime by non-citizens. As the president had said on television, it was a threat to our borders and national security. The day after Clinton’s speech, Dubois had been made the director of the RCMP Organized Crime Task Force.

Dubois was already sitting in the Mocha Java coffee house with a pot of caffeine and his favourite rag, the Toronto Star.

“Couldn’t you have picked a better place to meet?” asked Nick looking around him.

“You know how I need an afternoon shot of caffeine in my veins. Look at ya.” Dubois wagged a finger at his friend. “You could use a quick 100 cc of caffeine in your bloodstream, too.”

The coffee house, Nick pointed out, was packed full of hired guns coaching their clients one last time before they made their way into the courthouse around the corner.

“Are you kidding, Nick? I can’t think of a better place than this. When we’re in a place like this, we’re with the people.”

Nick rolled his eyes and grinned. It was the first time he’d smiled in days he realized. “Give me the homeless any day.”

“True. The defeated are much easier to handle than the self-righteous and the arrogant,” said Dubois.

“So, got anything interesting out of that botched illegal alien operation?” Nick ordered a pot of cream to go with his coffee.

“Sorry, I couldn’t talk to you at the wake.”

“Hey, I was in no shape to talk to anybody,” replied Nick.

“Yeah, I noticed.”

Nick kept his feelings under wraps as he stirred his coffee with a stir stick.

“You know the dead smuggler your officers were tailing?”

“Shaupan Chau. I remember.”

“Well, I ran his fingerprints through CPIC. He also went by another name. Sam Tan. Under Tan, he had a criminal record as long as your arm.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“Well, this is gonna surprise you, Nick. VICAP had him listed as a tough and violent son of a bitch and a Flying Dragons gang member. But he made his money as a hired gun to the highest bidder whenever a gang needed to do something particularly vicious to a victim. His name’s been linked to at least a dozen homicides. He was out on parole when he was doing the smuggling job.”

“How come we didn’t pick up the Tan alias before we requisitioned the wiretap?” asked Nick.

“Because we’re short-staffed and overworked? Because the fucking feds axed our budgets and allocated our crime-fighting money to tax collection instead?”

“You said it. We’re embittered misfits. Let’s not go there right now,” said Nick.

“I hear ya.” Dubois bit into a muffin and spoke with his mouth full. “We raided Shaupan Chau’s house. Found a cache of AK-47s tucked into a hidden compartment in his bedroom.”

“He was out on parole and collecting AK-47s?” said Nick, more to himself than Captain Dubois. They both knew that the Russian firearm was the weapon of choice of Vietnamese gangs for a number of reasons. Many gang members had been trained on the AK by their Soviet masters. It rarely jammed and was easy to clean. “The smugglers are Vietnamese?” he asked Dubois.

“Yeah. It’s funny. I didn’t think the Chinks ever worked with the Vietnamese.”

“Hey, it’s one big global village now. They can’t speak each other’s language, but they all accept U.S. currency.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” replied Dubois, slurping his coffee. “The RCMP collected that snakehead from the Americans like you asked. Engle’s staff shipped him to us late last night. We ran his fingerprints. He goes by the name Gee Van Tung. Couldn’t find any other aliases. His crime sheet isn’t in the same league as Shaupan but he’s a Dragon triad member all right. Born in Vietnam.”

“Hmm,” said Nick rubbing his chin. “I just came from Gerrard East. Spoke to a travel agent who works as a commissioned salesman for a human smuggler called Tu. I wonder if Tung would know anything about that?”

“Don’t know, but we can ask,” said Dubois, scooping up donut crumbs with two fingers. “The other thing is, Tung has a reputation as something of a bungler.”

“A bungler? What kind of bungler?”

Dubois chortled into his coffee. “You’re gonna love this story. Coupla years ago he shot off the end of his dick with a .45 he had kept stuffed down the front of his pants. Walked into emerg with some story about being in a shootout. But gunpowder marks on the inside of his pants told a different story.”

“Jesus, no kidding!”

The two men laughed so hard that they spilled coffee on the table and themselves. Nick wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, and asked, “What about a search of Gee Tung’s house?”

“The OPP did the search. Turned up diddly-squat. Someone sanitized it before the cops got there. Another thing, we analyzed the blood from the side of the boat. Type O. Doesn’t match any of the smugglers or aliens, but we’d already assumed that. Also, no new hospital admissions of patients with bullet wounds on either side of the 49^th parallel with type O blood.”

“André,” said Nick. “I refuse to believe that Walter’s killer can just get away. He’s somewhere. Possibly hiding in Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver. Or even New York or San Francisco. Any city with a large Asian population would allow him to blend in. We’re going to have to call in the FBI and maybe Interpol on this one.”

Dubois picked up on the hard edge in Nick’s voice. “Because of Walter, you’re going for the jugular on this one?”

“Damn right I am,” replied Nick. “Let’s see if Interpol or the FBI has a file on this Gee Van Tung.”

“Well, I got something that could be of interest to you. We found a telephone number in Gee Van Tung’s pocket. We ran a trace. It’s a Toronto number. Belongs to the Mandarin Club. Could be something, could be nothing. Wanna run it from your end?”

“Sure. What is it? Gang hangout?” asked Nick as he flipped open his notebook and jotted down a few entries.

“Some of my officers think it’s a den of illegals working under the table.”

“I’ll check it out myself.”

“I’m flying back to Ottawa on the four o’clock. Gonna interrogate Gee Tung. The RCMP’s already moved him to the West Detention Centre. Wanna sit in?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“My flight from the island airport leaves in less than two hours.”

“That gives me just enough time to check something on our database,” replied Nick.

“How about we hook up at the airport? I’ve got a few things to wrap up, too.”

Back in his office, Nick logged into the Citizenship and Immigration Database, which held the records of hundreds of thousands of resident aliens. The system supplied, at a glance, information on how, when, where and under what class a person had entered the country, and his or her current immigration status. This morning the network was slow. It meant that there were too many officers across the country logged into the system running background checks.

Patience had never been one of his virtues but in this case Nick endured the lengthy transmission delays. If Gee Tung could lead him to the identity of Walter Martin’s killer, then justice would be served, and from a department standpoint, a blow would be struck against the global trade in human trafficking. He thought about how much things had changed since his first year in enforcement. His predecessor had been reamed, by the minister of immigration himself, when Canada was caught off guard and 158 South Asians waded ashore in Newfoundland to claim refugee status. A hundred and fifty-eight was nothing these days. Last year, over five thousand people claimed refugee status at Canadian airports.

A couple more clicks of the mouse and he was finally in the system.

Gee Van Tung had entered Canada when he was ten years old under the Family Reunification Program in 1979 at Mirabel Airport. A few more keystrokes and he learned that the entire family had landed immigrant status, but there was no record of citizenship. That meant Gee Tung could be deported. Next, he opened a deportation file to execute the removal of Gee Tung from the country. But in this case, Nick was prepared to trade information for asylum — if Gee Tung came across with the information he wanted. Granting asylum wasn’t within his jurisdiction, but he’d cross that bridge when he got to it.

Detention centres had never ranked high on Nick’s list of favourite places. They were worlds unto themselves. Sterile buildings that housed deportees prior to their removal from the country. Drug dealers, serial killers, kidnappers, war criminals. Once you had been inside a detention centre, the rose-coloured glasses were off forever. The Ottawa West Detention Centre was situated on what had once been prime farmland. Swell, thought Nick. Displace crops for crooks. He wondered if the politicians had ever offered that choice to the voters.

The armed security guards, electric fences, high tech security codes, and magnetic identity cards were for others. Nick was waved through without the usual checks.

Corridors were heavily monitored by overhead television cameras. A female guard escorted them past several sets of airlock doors and into Gee Tung’s cell.

“Look at that. The perp’s got private accommodation at our expense,” said Dubois, breaking the silence for the first time since they walked into the detention centre.

The prisoner lay on a bunk bed, hooked up to an IV bag. One leg was bandaged up to his thigh and elevated at an angle. At the sight of Nick and Dubois, the passive look on his face changed to one of alarm.

Dubois had never been a fan of prisoners’ rights.

“I’m with the RCMP and he’s with Immigration,” said Dubois, and waited, lighting up a cigarette. In the lengthy silence that followed, Dubois took a few drags and then pulled up a chair across from the prisoner. The staring match had begun. Nick preferred to stand. He leaned his back against the wall with an air of detachment as he sized up the prisoner. Gee Tung was about thirty years old, thin, and had a scar that ran the length of his face from his left eyebrow down past his ear.

Dubois observed the prisoner through a cloud of cigarette smoke. He was a master of the art of silence as a weapon of intimidation, knowing that imagined threats could be worse than reality.

Halfway through the cigarette, Dubois finally opened his mouth. “Let’s understand each other, Gee Tung, so no mistakes are made. And don’t give me any crap about you not speaking English. Okay? You pull that cheap trick on me and I’m going to knock your front teeth out. We know you’ve been in Canada since you were a kid. We know a lot about you but we need to know more about your friends. My associate here is gonna vouch that I’ve been known to use a little touchy-feely to get the job done.”

The prisoner lay on the bed, mute and passive. He gave no indication that he understood.

Dubois continued, “We have two options in dealing with you. We can charge you with conspiracy to kill an immigration officer. You’ll probably get life for that. Or you can cooperate with us and we’ll give you a deal.”

“I didn’t kill anybody.” His voice was faint.

“We know that. We know killing and attempting to kill are two different things. Now that night on the boat, there were three of you. You, Shaupan and the snakehead who got away. The one who got away, what’s his name?” demanded Dubois. He grabbed the prisoner and pinched his cheeks painfully together. “I want the name of the third snakehead. Ballistics tells us the slug that killed the immigration officer wasn’t from your gun or from Shaupan’s. That means the third guy was the killer. What’s his name?”

“I want to see my lawyer. After I see my lawyer, we talk.”

Dubois’s eyes were pinpricks of anger now. He turned to Nick and said, “What did I tell you about these bad-ass foreigners? They got their rights and privileges down pat. Don’t care diddly-squat about their responsibilities to the country that welcomed them with open arms.” He turned and casually delivered a sharp hand to the prisoner’s mouth.

“Excuse me, you little fucker. This ain’t no legal aid clinic here, so don’t you pull that line on me again. Understand that? No calls to any scumbag lawyer until I get some answers.” Then he was in Gee Tung’s face again. “We found that telephone number in your pocket and traced it to a place called the Mandarin Club. We know from police records that you’re a member of the Flying Dragons, and that you’ve moved up a coupla notches from being a foot soldier. So gimme the dope. What’s the Flying Dragons’ connection to the Mandarin Club?”

“I want to see my lawyer.”

Hand raised ready to strike, Dubois said through clenched teeth, “What did I just tell ya, you sorry piece of shit?”

“They’ll kill me if I talk.”

Dubois pushed Gee Tung’s head into the concrete wall.

“And if you don’t talk they’ll kill you anyway, just to be on the safe side. If I don’t kill you first. Either way, you’re a dead man if you don’t cooperate with us. Look at it this way. Cooperate and we’ll save you from life imprisonment and possibly extradition. We’ll cut a deal for you and give you protection.” Dubois paused. “Otherwise, first you go to prison, then we kick you out of the country.” He smacked the prisoner hard across the side of his head with the back of his hand.

Nick didn’t move or speak. He could see that the prisoner was frightened. Ordinarily he would have intervened at this point, before any real damage was done. He wondered how far he was prepared to let Dubois go. Would he let him beat the prisoner half to death to get the information they wanted? He thought he might, if it would help them find Walter’s killer.

“Okay. Okay, I’ll talk. The Mandarin Club is under Dragon roof.”

“Speak English. What’s this Dragon roof stuff?”

“The Flying Dragons give protection to the Mandarin Club from other gangs.”

“Now, why the fuck would the Dragons want to do a thing like that?”

“That’s the deal they have.”

“Who inked that kinda deal?”

Nick winced at the sight of Dubois raising his hand to strike the prisoner again. Unable to shift his position lying on the bed, Gee Tung raised his hand feebly to block the blow.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. All I know is the Dragons give protection to the club, and they use one of the karaoke rooms for meetings.”

“You’re telling me that the Mandarin Club is the official hangout for the Flying Dragons?”

“We go to the club. We go to sing karaoke and to play mah-jong.”

“No, stupid!” snapped Dubois, whacking the prisoner across the side of his head. “Did ya use the club for gang business? Like did ya plan the illegal alien smuggling operation there?”

“Gang members never do business in their homes. They want to protect their families from reprisals later on.”

“Then how often did you and the other Flying Dragons members meet at the club?”

“Sometimes once a week or twice a month to sing karaoke.”

“I don’t want to hear about stupid karaoke singing! I want to know if protection money also exchanged hands at the club? Christ almighty!” Dubois swore at the prisoner and then turned to Nick. “I can’t believe someone this stupid could plan a smuggling operation worth half a million.”

“I don’t know about protection money being paid.”

“Bullshit! Who’s your contact at the club?”

“The general manager. We call him when we want to book the karaoke room.”

“Is that how you guys do business? You book a karaoke room?”

The prisoner nodded.

“What about your pal who pulled the trigger on an immigration officer and got away?”

A terrified look came over the prisoner’s face.

Dubois spoke softly now, but his voice was full of menace. “You’re gonna be a dead man. We’re your only hope. Cooperate and we’ll give you immunity from extradition to the States.”

Nick touched his friend lightly on the shoulder to subtly remind Dubois that extradition was not in the cards. Even if the U.S. wanted to extradite a permanent resident of Canada, the police did not have control or influence over the parole board or jurisdictional issues like extradition.

“I’m afraid. They’ll kill me.”

Nick spoke for the first time. “I’ll kill you myself. What’s the name of your friend who killed the immigration officer? Give us that and a good description of him and I’ll make sure you get a good plea bargain arrangement. You may even get to stay in Canada.”

“Li Mann. His name is Li Mann Vu.”

“Good,” announced Dubois. “I’m glad we’ve reached an understanding ’cause you see, I ain’t into this police brutality stuff. I only use it when I have to. Get my drift?”

“One more thing,” said Nick, “ever hear of a smuggler called Tu?”

“No. Never.”

For the next two hours, the three men worked with a police artist via a video conference call to make a composite drawing of Li Mann. After the video equipment was disconnected, Dubois answered the call on his pager.

Driving back into the city in Dubois’s RCMP cruiser, they rehashed the interrogation.

“That guy’s no mastermind,” said Nick. “For sure he’s not the ringleader. I wonder if there’s any connection between Tu and the snakeheads in this operation?”

“The question is, who is the mastermind? It’s either this Li Mann guy or someone else behind the scenes.”

“From other cases that we’ve cracked, it’s usually someone who doesn’t like to get his hands soiled,” said Nick.

“And he’s got the money and the contacts to make a good living out of it. I’d profile the guy as someone living on a net income of several million bucks a year, in five-star hotels, while he puts up his clientele eleven or twenty to a room,” returned Dubois. His foot was heavy on the gas and the speedometer needle was touching a hundred and fifty. “I’ll cross-reference our police networks and see what I can come up with. When I get back to the office, I’ll run Li Mann Vu and this Tu through CPIC and every enforcement database and see what happens.”

“Those could be aliases. I’m not banking on that turning up much.”

Dubois turned sideways to look at his friend. “It’s gonna take some digging. It’s one thing I learned as a Catholic. These guys all get their comeuppance in the end. You trust me on that, Nick.”

Nick said nothing. Memories of Walter Martin weighed heavily on his mind. He was a man in mourning, who only wished he could mourn openly. For Walter, and all the others who had died in the line of duty. It weighed on him now like unwanted baggage.

“Where to, my friend?”

“Drop me off at the Chateau Laurier. I’ll catch a cab to the airport from there.”

For the next hour he wandered through the capital like a man lost in a trance. He moved where his feet took him, revisiting familiar places. What he really wanted was to pick up the phone and call Grace. But so much water had flowed under the bridge since they broke up. It was painful to realize that he was travelling through the world all alone. He felt as if he had ten men’s loneliness trapped inside him.

Back in his hotel room, he changed into his running gear. He ran for the high of it. To feel the pounding of his heart against his chest. On a deeper level, he ran to forget the bullshit and craziness of the workday. And to try to blow her out of his system. Usually it worked, but not today. He was in her town.

He stared at the phone one last time before heading out to the airport. No, he wouldn’t call her. What the hell was he going to say? That he was in town, and how about a drink?

Instead he closed the door behind him and hit the button for the elevator. Get it through your head, pal. It’s over. Long past the point of blaming her. He could only blame himself for not being wiser. For not knowing, until it was too late, that her ambition on the bench far outweighed any love she had ever had for him.