The Snakeheads Read online

  “None,” said the RCO, who was obviously pleased at the discomfiture of the claimant’s lawyer, and was trying unsuccessfully to suppress a smirk tugging at the corners of his mouth.

  And so for the rest of the morning she continued to allow four grown men to bicker in a kind of intellectual ritual. Corvinelli was there as the immigration department’s police officer and witness. The RCO meant to be impartial but it was important that he uphold his place and retain the respect of his legal peer on the other side. Dalton and the other opposing counsel were vested with defending a man’s right to remain in the country. When a case went south, the claimant would be deported and denied the right to return to Canada. In many cases that meant breaking up a family. His wife and children would have the choice of remaining in Canada or going with him into exile in whatever country would accept them.

  Every day, Grace sat on the bench and listened to the terrible stories of the persecuted, and the elaborate lies of the ambitious. Secretly, she rooted for the genuine asylum seekers, hoping their lawyers would not be too incompetent, and delighted whenever their right to stay in the country could be proved. Every day, she was torn between emotions and intellect. On bad days she separated fathers from their children. Other days, she was merely interpreting and enforcing the law. So much depended on the merits of each case; when claimants were charged with crimes in Canada and abroad, she knew, though she tried to be fair, that their fate depended on how hard-hearted she was feeling on that particular day. Sometimes the press lambasted her for cruel, inhumane decisions. At other times she received death threats for her left-leaning sympathies and being too soft on crime.

  Grace had long given up trying to please everyone.

  chapter three

  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 49th 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.