The Snakeheads Page 4

  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.

  chapter four

  It was a hazy morning, promising a bright, hot day. Grace took a cab to work. Her fourteen-year-old Volvo had broken down yet again, which meant two days in the shop and another six-hundred-dollar bill. What she needed was a new car. A Toyota Camry or the latest BMW would be nice, except for one small problem. In her family, the Wang-Weinsteins, Japanese and German-made cars were still referred to as “enemy” cars. Her parents had been mere infants when the atrocities in their former homelands occurred, but the history of it all still lingered in their minds. In any case, with her luck she’d drop forty thousand dollars on a BMW and within a week it would be on a container ship to the Middle East, Hong Kong, or Russia. That’s why a rusting Volvo, supplemented by taxi cabs whenever it was in the shop, was still much cheaper and less complicated.

  “This block will do. Drop me off here.”

  Three years had programmed her for the walk, which took her across O’Connor and up Bank Street. From there, she turned down Slater towards an uninspiring thirty-seven-storey concrete building. A silver and black sign proclaimed “Immigration and Refugee Commission”.

  The IRC sat four blocks south of Parliament Hill, a mere ten-minute walk away from the political machinations it had been set up to bypass. Back in 1989, the commission had been created with noble intentions, as an arm’s-length agency, to determine who was or was not a refugee under the 1951 Geneva Convention. The year she had been appointed was the same year the commission had earned the distinction of being just about the most vilified government agency in the country. Knowing that, she had still accepted a political appointment to the bench. Why? Ambition — and naiveté. She had wanted to grant asylum to every deserving, downtrodden soul from every wretched country in the world. And besides, what else could you do with a law degree and a doctorate in anthropology?

  It was easy to tell when an immigration or humansmuggling story had hit the front page. The lobby became a circus of newshounds. She did her best to look unimportant and anonymous as she threaded her way through them towards the bank of elevators. At the security desk, she discreetly flashed her ID badge to the men guarding the agency from subversives, and from the public it was supposed to serve.

  On the nineteenth floor, she slipped past cubicles of overworked civil servants who laboured in silence, bent over desks covered in paper and case files. There were days when she still thought that the taxpayers were getting their money’s worth from all these young prosecutors, stern moralists bent on carving out careers, weeding out bogus asylum seekers from the genuine article.

  “Grace!”

  She turned around and came face to face with Mark Crosby, one of her least favourite colleagues. Crosby was a womanizer and plotter; when not on the bench, he spent his time scrounging around for cheap feels and political gossip.

  “What?” she barked.

  “I hear you’re assigned the Vladimir case?” he asked, leaning against the door outside her office.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Need a second-chair? I could be of help to you. Given that last year, I was in Russia for three months with Immigration.” He glanced at the banker’s boxes of documents stacked outside her office waiting to be returned to records.

  “Well, thanks, but no thanks.”

  Not put off by the lack of friendliness, he continued, “I’m heading out to Vancouver this afternoon to try a boatload of Filipino sailors. My second-chair is down with the flu. Wanna run away with me?” he winked. “I checked. You got nothing on the docket.”

  “No. I’m busy,” she snapped, giving him the onceover. Black horn rimmed glasses, double chin, and an evergrowing paunch. Why on earth should she be interested in him? She found his sexual interest in her almost insulting.

  She pushed past him as she walked into her office, a nine-by-nine foot place of chaos, crammed with bulging files and more banker’s boxes of documents. It wasn’t luxurious by any stretch of the public’s imagination. However, this was the cubby-hole where she had produced her best work, the legal decisions that had held up at the Federal Court.

  “Grace, you really could use my help on the Vladimir case and I can use yours on the Filipino sailors’ case. I don’t see why you’re not keen to work together.”

  “The fact is, I’m not into office romance. I’ve said it once. I’ll say it again.”

  “Come on, Grace. What’s a gorgeous girl like you doing all by yourself? You know how it could be between us.”

  She glared at him. “I don’t want to hear how you feel about me. Let’s not go there. We’ve got a nice working relationship, so let’s keep it at that.”

  “What about the hotel room I’ve already booked for you?”

  “What? What?” She was royally pissed. “Cancel it! Cancel it right away! I don’t need that kind of cheap gossip hanging around me.” She wagged her finger menacingly at him. “Do something like that again and it’s groun
ds for a harassment charge. Send me an e-mail when you’ve cancelled the hotel room. Jesus!”

  Without another word she buried her head in the file sitting in the middle of the desk, hoping he would go away. Mark Crosby had a sharp mind for spinning clever legal arguments, but she found him irritating. Unfortunately for her, he was somewhat infatuated with her. At the same time she could see the loneliness in his face. She wondered if he could see the loneliness in her as well. They were both workaholics, partly because they both had little going on in their private lives. He probably interpreted that as common ground. The fact of the matter was, he just didn’t appeal to her.

  As she reached for the second package of exhibit items, the phone rang.

  “Ms. Wang-Weinstein? This is Cindy Black from the law offices of Richard and Richard. We’re seeking a postponement of Thursday’s case.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “We need time to line up the witnesses. Immigration refuses to accept the authenticity of the passport and birth certificate. The lawyers want to explore identity through witness testimony.”

  I don’t know how witness statements can vindicate your client when it’s clear from the documents that he’s a liar, Grace wanted to say. Instead she answered, “I suggest you call scheduling and ask for a hearing date next month. I’m not willing to postpone it further than that. And I want to see those witness statements at least a week prior to the hearing.”

  “You’ll get them. I appreciate this, Ms. WangWeinstein.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She knew that refugee claimants were often quite prepared to violate the Immigration Act by producing forged or stolen identity and immigration documents. It was predictable, yet dispiriting. Four years on the bench had made her weary of photocopies presented as “original documents,” or identity papers that were torn or had incomplete stamps and seals or faded lettering. That was the problem with the job. After a while, compassion fatigue set in, closely followed by cynicism. Nothing surprised her. She had seen it all before. Prosecutors and judges who spent too many years in the business became masters of the same worn-out, exasperated expression.