The Snakeheads Read online

  After she hung up, she reached into her briefcase for the morning’s Globe and Mail. Immigration and refugee stories were now a sign of the times. Populations were on the move, displaced by war, natural disasters, famine — who could have guessed that her Ph.D. dissertation on mass movements and resettlement of displaced peoples would position her in a growth industry? Wanting to make a difference in the world, she had accepted a contract with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to study mass migration in Europe. That was the year when Europe had to deal with an influx of millions of people leaving the former Soviet Union. In the course of her two years with UNHCR, which spanned seventy thousand interviews with asylum seekers, she had learned two facts. One, people migrated. For whatever reason, they wanted a chance to live in another country that offered them better economic opportunities. Two, when too many people migrated, prosperous countries responded by shutting their gates through tougher immigration laws. But people were desperate, and willing to do anything. They would use fraudulent documents, pose as other people, become indentured slaves as nannies or sweatshop workers or prostitutes, run drugs, run guns — anything to earn hard currency to pay for passports and air tickets.

  In Geneva, one of her tasks had been to deal with the press, who tended to be unsympathetic to the plight of refugees. Often, she would link them up with various field officers: people who worked on certain cases or remembered a story that stayed with them. Grace thought about the case that still resonated through her life after all those years, like the incoming tide that washed driftwood onto a beach. She would never be able to forget the face of that young woman. The case had played itself out at customs in Sweden. A young Iranian woman and her baby had been smuggled out of Iran by agent smugglers. They had stuffed her and her baby into a cargo trunk. When customs officials pried open the top, they found the woman buried underneath a bundle of rags. During the trip, the baby had suffocated. Mouth to mouth resuscitation could not save her infant. The young mother had seized her one chance to escape from Khomeini’s henchmen, who had executed every member of her family, only to find herself being charged with criminally negligent homicide by the Swedish authorities, and sent to jail.

  Grace despised agent smugglers. To her they were no more than criminals living off the desperation of others. But she knew that those desperate people in Third World countries often saw them as saviours. And sometimes, she grudgingly had to admit, they were.

  She grabbed a second cup of coffee from the lunchroom and scanned the papers. This was the third immigration story splashed all over the front page this month. More often than not, she read the feature stories not for the news, but to see if the reporters got the details right. The lead story this week was about a people-smuggling ring that was jointly smashed by U.S. and Canadian immigration officers. A migrant vessel had been intercepted around Akwasasne. Nick Slovak’s colleague, Walter Martin, had been killed in the shootout between INS agents and the snakeheads. Even the papers were calling them snakeheads now. She preferred the term alien smugglers. The dead smuggler, Shaupan Chau, had been granted refugee status by the IRC in Montreal, back in the mid-1990s. Thank goodness she hadn’t been the judge who heard his case. Blank passports and Canadian visas were found on the boat. It must have been an inside job in some embassy somewhere. How else would they have gotten their hands on blank passports and visas?

  There was an adjoining article about Nick. It described how he had spent the last couple of years running undercover operations against agent smugglers. There was a picture of him at the bottom of the page. She soaked up his image; looking for subtle changes since they had last seen each other. The photo didn’t do him justice. In the flesh, he exuded energy and intelligence. She remembered the first time she had laid eyes on him. He was her idea of handsome: deep-set, piercing greygreen eyes, a serious, sensitive face, mop of brown hair falling over a high forehead, the way his clothes hung on his five-foot-eleven frame. He moved with an easy grace; she knew that he either played or had once played a lot of sports. He turned her on. Taking him to bed was easy, but a real extramarital romance wasn’t something she had planned. A brief encounter had morphed into something deeper. In the beginning, on impulse, she had lied to Nick about not being married, and then she had to go on lying. What a fool she had been. At first it was easy to do, living in two different cities. He always called her on her pager. But then one day he had called her office and her secretary had inadvertently provided him with her home number. David, her husband, had answered the phone. Nick had ended their romance. He told her he wasn’t interested in a three-way relationship. Not long after that, David, too, left her and filed for divorce.

  After the break-up with Nick, she rationalized that there was no way their relationship could ever have worked. In the world of immigration, there were two opposing sides. Those like Nick who stopped the barbarians at the gate. And adjudicators like her who granted them asylum and let them in. In their nine months of sleeping together they had both been crossing into enemy territory.

  A few months later she had presided on a case in which Nick had represented the minister’s office. He had spent months building a deportation case against a female member of the Iranian mujahedin. However, in Grace’s opinion the middle-aged woman didn’t fit the profile of a terrorist. In her legal decision, she had written that living in a mujahedin neighbourhood wasn’t the same thing as actually being a bomb-throwing member of an underground army. Forced to choose between love and the exercise of her own judgement, she really had no choice at all. She could not convict a woman she believed was innocent because she was in love with the prosecutor. Nick was outraged, and his office treated her as persona non grata. He hadn’t returned any of her calls. To make matters worse, the left-wing ideologues had been triumphant, using her legal decision as a moral victory in their propaganda war with the right-wing ideologues over the issue of refugees.

  Staring at the photo of Nick, she was filled with regret and desire. It was too late now to pick up the phone. Too much time had passed and events had driven them too far apart. The connection between them was broken.

  chapter five

  Nick was on a first-name basis with agents of the FBI, CIA, Interpol, MI5, MI6, Mossad and half a dozen other police forces around the world, but one of his most frequent working partners was his old friend, Detective Steve Kappolis of the OPP. Kappolis commanded the fugitive squad, which investigated and tracked down criminals from other countries who had chosen Canada as a hiding place. The last case they’d worked together had involved a phony document ring that was doing brisk business in the reproduction of passports, propiskas, health insurance cards and other documents for illegals who were living under false identities. Nick knew he could count on Kappolis. The detective was not one to play the information-sharing, power-playing jurisdictional games that provincial and federal enforcement agencies often indulged in.

  Nick figured if the killer of Walter Martin had not been a criminal before he entered the country, he was a criminal now. And within twenty-four hours Kappolis had gotten a police search warrant for the Mandarin Club.

  The world of clubs held no allure for Nick. The only one he had ever belonged to was Hart House, the alumni association at his university, and he guessed the Mandarin Club wouldn’t be much like Hart House. According to the current month’s issue of Entertainment and the scribes of the city’s gossip columns, the Mandarin was an expensive and glamorous new place where Asian hip-hop and celebrity types hung out. The membership fees alone spoke of a closed world of privilege, where those with money and leisure could afford to pass the time exchanging gossip over mai tais and margaritas.

  Detective Steve Kappolis parked his unmarked cruiser at the end of the block right under a tow-away sign.

  Apart from its prime location, there was no mistaking the aura of exclusivity which extended right down to the sidewalk: the building was sixty thousand square feet of marble opulence, with a raised roof and nine-metre cathedral window
s. A flashing sign underneath one of the windows promised karaoke five nights a week.

  “Tacky,” said Kappolis. “Big red canopy. Flashing neon. Looks like a bordello, if you ask me.”

  “This is how the yuppies fool themselves that they’re not going into the red light district.” Nick patted his hip pocket to make sure he had his wallet.

  “Let’s not mention the warrant right away. I want to get a feel for the place before everyone makes a run for it or destroys evidence.”

  “I’m with you,” Nick answered.

  “We’re the run-of-the-mill customers who want to check out the girls and the booze before buying memberships. The only problem is, it’s four hundred bucks just to get in,” said Kappolis.

  “Four hundred bucks! No club is worth that.”

  “Nick, this ain’t the time to be cheap, my friend. And don’t count on me, because this is an immigration matter. The requisition originated from your office. Remember?”

  “I’m sure glad I made that trip to the bank machine,” grumbled Nick.

  They extended their wrists and receipts to the doorman who wordlessly unhooked the rope. Nick tried to make out the Chinese characters stamped on the back of his hand as they climbed the wide circular staircase to the first floor.

  “Let’s keep tax evasion in mind if nothing else pans out,” remarked Kappolis as he eyed a couple of Hollywood actors with their dates, tall, slender birds of paradise in five-inch stilettos, impossibly uncomfortable clothing, and blue eyeshadow.

  “White collar crime isn’t at the top of my agenda here,” replied Nick dryly. “I’m here for a certain matter of justice.”

  Kappolis cast a brief look at Nick’s set face and wondered if “revenge” might not be more a more accurate term.

  Clouds of opium smoke and other illegal substances assaulted their nostrils. Not even in the old days, before he became respectable, had Nick ever frequented places like this, but in fact, the club was giving him a feeling of déjá vu. It took him back to his posting in Thailand in the eighties, when he was a young intellectual-property lawyer working for a Boston firm. One of his clients had been a big-name New York fashion house that wanted to put a stop to the Asian knock-offs that were costing them millions in lost revenues. His investigation had led him to the bars and whorehouses in the red light district of Bangkok where he saw the knock-offs being worn as a uniform by every bar girl. Those years of working and travelling through Asia came wafting back to him, bringing a sharp nostalgia for that Eastern culture, with its mix of tranquillity and cruelty, devoutness and grasping ambition, beauty and squalor.

  Kappolis gave him a reality check by poking him sharply in the ribs. “You wondering where the money came from for all this? I just found out from that guy over there that this place has three separate nightclubs. I could get used to a place like this.”

  “Well, don’t even think about it. It’s not: in your budget.”

  “Speaking of budget, bet they uncork a lot of pricey champagne here. And none of this cheap Baby Duck stuff.”

  “Come on.”

  A frosted-glass door led into a cavernous disco lit by flashing coloured lights and a gigantic overhead glitter ball. The walls were tastefully plastered in nineteenth-century Chinese art. A slim, tuxedoed young woman croupier presiding over the blackjack and roulette tables tried to entice them over to play. They ignored her to admire the singer in the daring sequined number who was belting out a Chinese torch song.

  “My Cantonese isn’t as good as yours. It’s hard to get worked up about a song if you don’t understand the words,” said Kappolis.

  “Never mind my Cantonese. Don’t look now, but over there … notice anything funny?”

  “Yeah. I thought the courts had banned lap dancing. Obviously those with moolah think they’re above the law.” Kappolis pointed at the stage. “Look at the mirrored floors. Now look at the videocameras. Holy shit! Girls with no knickers! Real kinky.”

  “Asian nightclubs tend to be like this. I remember when I lived in Japan. In the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, Roran Shabu Shabu was an exclusive all men’s dining club. None of the waitresses wore underwear. You paid $36,000 a year for the privilege of titillating yourself.”

  “Nick, you telling me that this is real tame by comparison? I want to go upstairs. Maybe it gets kinkier up there.”

  They ignored the singer in the skin-tight micro mini who was pouring her heart into a microphone for the second floor club, done in Italian wrought iron.

  “Crowd’s different. A lot of Armani suits,” Nick observed.

  “For some, there’s never a recession,” replied Kappolis.

  “Probably not their money. They’re on expense accounts.”

  The waitresses were dressed as schoolgirls in white shirts and micro kilts with baggy white socks.

  “This is paedophile heaven. I should send Vice over now,” commented Kappolis.

  “Before we do that, let’s check out the top floor.”

  The third floor, billed as “Ecstasy Club,” was a cokehead’s paradise. They walked through a set of red doors to find people in an array of positions and states of undress shooting stuff into their veins and inhaling substances up their noses. In another opium-filled room were several couples making out on floor mats.

  Kappolis pointed to a man lying prostrate on the floor with his shirt opened. “I know that guy,” he whispered to Nick. “He’s a city councillor. He was on television just days ago talking about family values. Can you believe it?”

  They stood by the door, taking it all in. A voluptuous bottle blonde in a latex body suit and a leather whip was dragging a middle-aged man around the room by his dog collar.

  Nick whispered, “I read somewhere that dominatrixes make good coin whipping and brutalizing their clients.”

  Off in one corner was a bearded man stretched out on the floor smoking an opium pipe. In an alcove, a young woman in little more than stilettos and a pair of surgically assisted breasts was entertaining a halfdressed drunk.

  “That’s it for me. I’ve seen enough,” said Kappolis.

  “I agree. Casino gambling on the first floor. Half-naked politicians. Women with no underwear. If we don’t shut this place down right now, our asses could be hauled before a public inquiry questioning our behaviour in coming here.”

  “Right. Our pensions are at stake here.” Taking out his cellphone, Kappolis made the call for uniformed officers, and plenty of them.

  Nick led the way back down to the first floor. It took less than three minutes for two squad cars to pull up at the curb. At the sight of uniformed cops, Nick pulled out his ID and asked the nearest bartender, “Who’s in charge of this place?”

  “That would be the general manager, Andy Loong.”

  Nick remembered what the snakehead Gee Tung had said about the general manager being the conduit.

  “We want to see him. Now!”

  Andy Loong turned out to be a hip young Asian dressed in pink and lime green, sporting coloured hair and a pair of earrings.

  He stared at the search warrant and protested at being shut down. “We have a bona fide licence to operate the club. Our clientele is very respectable.”

  “Yeah? Is that so?” Kappolis’s tone was cocky.

  “Our guests are all very legitimate people. District attorneys, supreme court judges, business owners and movie moguls. This a very legitimate establishment. See those photos on the wall?” he pointed to a row of black-and-white photographs of prominent people.

  “We don’t care about your who’s-who list,” said Nick. “What I want to know is, what kind of joint you’re running?”

  “This is a private club for people of high class.”

  “Class thing, is it?”

  Kappolis’s sarcasm was lost on Andy Loong. He continued in an earnest tone. “Entry is for members only. Our initiation fees are five thousand with annual membership at three thousand. Right now we have a waiting list for membership.”

  “I�
��m sure you do,” answered Nick. “Who owns the place?”

  “Mr. Sun Sui.”

  “Where is he? Where did he get his money?”

  “Mr. Sui is at home this evening.”

  “Pick up the phone and call him. Tell him to get his butt over here right now,” demanded Nick.

  “He doesn’t like to be disturbed at home.”

  “Tough shit,” said Kappolis in a menacing tone.

  Loong quietly complied, punching in a set of numbers on Kappolis’s cellphone. Nick took the phone out of Loong’s hand, and listened for a few seconds. “His bloody voicemail. The guy’s not home. I don’t feel like leaving a message when the element of surprise works a hell of a lot better,” he said to Kappolis.

  “Getting back to this membership business,” said Kappolis to Loong, “how about letting us have a look at that membership list of yours?”

  “I can’t do that. That’s private information. I would have to ask the members first.”

  “We got a search warrant, Mr. Loong. I hope your immigration status is regularized. Or you better start praying.”

  The general manager sighed. “I’ll give you a computer printout. You want it right now?”

  “Yeah, after we’re done with the questions. I see you’re peddling sex and drugs on the third floor.”

  “Those are massage rooms. We have permits for that. And I can’t say exactly what goes on behind closed doors.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Heard that excuse before.”

  “The girls are dancers and entertainers. If they want to sell sexual services, it’s up to them. It’s got nothing to do with the club management or policy.”

  “Is that so? Well, this is an immigration investigation. And I want to see their working papers. Or else I’m gonna shut the place down for the evening. And maybe permanently.”