by Mary Moylum
Kim had always said Wa Sing was a strong individualist who played by his own rules, but his generosity to those less fortunate had been part of his character as long as she had known him. When his only son died in an automobile accident, he had reached out to the community for solace and they had rallied to his side. In gratitude, he established a foundation to assist Asian-Americans. His benevolence was legendary. Grace owed her political appointment to the bench to his intervention on her behalf. Quite a few politicians were said to have benefited by his influence and aid, although that, unlike the scholarships and relief funds, was not publicized, and no politician, to Grace’s knowledge, had ever admitted it in public. Over the years she had been curious about who, besides herself, he had helped. But there was no polite way to ask.
“Haven’t seen you in a while. Where’ve you been?” Grace asked. “Closing some mega deal somewhere in Asia?”
“No, I was in San Francisco. I was going to Guangzhou but had to reschedule. I can’t leave the country right now. Too much is happening.”
Grace nodded without asking him for details. She had heard the rumours in the Chinese community that he had a mistress tucked away in some remote place like Wuhan or Nanking.
The music cut their conversation short. After the band stopped playing, Wa Sing said, “I want to introduce you to someone.”
“Who?”
“A charming man.” Wa Sing took her hand and led her through the crowd. “You know how happy your mother would be if you were to settle down soon. Too much independence is not good for a woman. This is Sun Sui. Sun, Grace Wang-Weinstein.”
As Grace shook hands politely with the pervert who had been staring at her all evening, a young man in a tuxedo materialized at Wa Sing’s shoulder and said a few words to him in a low voice.
“Excuse me, Grace. Back in a minute.” Wa Sing moved away into the crowd and Grace was left alone with Sun Sui. He was a handsome Oriental, dressed expensively in a beige silk shirt and Armani suit. Not her type. Up close, his charm looked fake.
“Good to meet you,” she said coolly. “Are you from here or visiting?”
“I’m from Hong Kong. But I have businesses here in Canada, so I must be here. You can’t run businesses from a distance.” He exuded self-satisfaction. Obviously humility was foreign to him.
She gave him an artificial smile. “Others have said that.”
“You’re a judge on the immigration bench, I hear. Fascinating work. A lot of people must offer you money to swing your decisions in their favour.”
Did he really expect her to answer that? The man was a menace. What she really wanted was to get away from him, but rudeness to Sun Sui would show disrespect for Wa Sing, who had made a point of introducing them and would (she hoped) be back in a moment or two. So she simply changed the subject and told him about herself. How she had grown up in West Vancouver, and had downhill skied every March break at Whistler. How she had attended undergraduate studies at UBC before moving east to Toronto to pursue a doctorate. He sucked it all in, with that ingratiating smile of his, as if by paying close attention he was doing her a huge favour.
She was immensely relieved when Wa Sing returned and butted into their vacuous conversation about commerce in Asia. “How is your mother’s health?”
“Despite her arthritis, she’s doing pretty well.”
Wa Sing turned to Sun and said, “I knew Kim Wang, her mother, back in the old country, when we were fleeing the Communists. Now everyone wants to do business with them,” he cackled. “Western companies are salivating over those billions of consumers, because China is the biggest and last market left to crack. Yes, Grace’s mother was something in those days. Kim proved to everyone how courageous and strong she was when she escaped from behind the Bamboo Curtain. She swam all the way into Hong Kong harbour!”
Grace noticed how Wa Sing’s eyes became animated as he spoke about Kim. The old man was really fond of his long-time friend.
Turning to Grace, Sun asked, “Does your mother live with you?”
“No.” She refused to volunteer any more information to a stranger, but to her chagrin Wa Sing said, “No, her parents live in Vancouver. A beautiful house overlooking the ocean that they bought for a song when Grace was a baby.” Wa Sing gave her a playful pinch on the cheek.
She blatantly looked at her watch. “Wa Sing, I’ll see you later, at dinner. If you gentlemen will excuse me, the auction is about to start and I don’t want to miss it. I’m going to bid on the Chinese screen.”
Sun Sui pressed his business card into the palm of her hand. “If you’re not successful in getting the screen, I can get you an exact copy. I would be pleased to have lunch with you.”
Fat chance, she thought, as she made her escape.
Nick got back to his office to find Rocco Corvinelli standing outside his door.
“First thing I want to say is, you did great handling the press.”
“Thanks,” said Rocco, beaming from ear to ear. “That Singh fellow isn’t so bad. We broke the ice by swapping ethnic jokes. He thought it was a hoot that the name Corvinelli is as ethnic as Singh. He said I looked like a swarthy Sicilian.”
“Glad you two got on. A connection to the press is useful. Particularly him.”
“Yeah, a few Mafia jokes, and we were best buddies.”
“Better you than me,” Nick replied, giving him the once-over. Yep, Rocco could easily pass for a Mafia enforcer. He was a muscular bull of a man, the kind of guy you would not want to meet in a dark alley. In the business of enforcement, that was a plus.
Rocco dropped onto the beat-up sofa that Nick had managed to confiscate when they were redoing the first-floor lobby, and waited as Nick picked up his voice-mail messages.
There was an angry message from Dubois, his RCMP counterpart. “You were right about the little shit. Gee Tung was released on $200,000 bail today and he and his lawyer have already talked to reporters about us using police brutality on him. And get this. He’s suing us on the grounds that we violated his constitutional rights, and not only that, he’s also pulling the multicultural angle, the race card shit! I’m holding a press conference of my own to give the facts to those left-wing reporters. In the meantime, process those deportation papers, and let’s put the creep on the next plane back to Nam. We don’t need shit like that in this country. Call you again later.”
So much for key witness evidence from Gee Tung. A week had passed since Walter Martin’s death and the trail was getting colder. Hanging up the phone, Nick fixed his gaze on Rocco. “What about the rest of those foreign work authorizations I asked you to check out?”
“I went through the last batch. Twenty-seven of the entertainers applied for asylum when their permits weren’t renewed. All twenty-seven were turned down. Five of them appealed at the federal court and lost their appeal. We sent them removal notices.”
“Did we deport all of them?”
“Not one of them showed up to get on the plane. We ordered warrants for their arrest, but …”
“Rocco, what’re you telling me? That we never executed those arrest warrants because we couldn’t keep track of their whereabouts?”
“Yeah. Worse, I was talking to one of the police detectives in New York’s Fifth Precinct. He tells me that several of the girls are plying their trade on Forsyth Street in New York’s Chinatown.”
Nick rubbed his temples as he stared out the window. “If we add up the numbers, we have over five thousand failed asylum seekers facing deportation that we can’t find?”
Rocco nodded his head with a grim look.
“At least half of them have already sneaked across the border to New York,” wailed Nick. “Let’s keep this under wraps. The last thing I need is a diplomatic kafuffle with Washington over illegals using Canada as a back door to get into the States. In the meantime, have the clerk run a complete search on the numbers, do the paperwork with Metro Precinct to have the Mandarin Club girls picked up. We’re going to shut down the Mandarin Club te
mporarily.”
“Boss, are you serious?”
“We’ve only got a few options open to us to prevent them from going underground. That would be a public relations disaster for us and the government. Having them in lockup buys us time to find evidence that Sun’s abusing foreign work permits as a people-smuggling tactic to get them into North America. We need that evidence to build a case against Sun Sui as a smuggling kingpin. Then from that evidence, we take what we need to charge him with Walter Martin’s death. Unfortunately, we’ll have to deport the girls back to their country of origin.”
“On what charges do we pick them up?”
“Whatever sticks. Expired working papers. Underage prostitution. Lap dancing. Possession of drugs.”
“Shit, Nick. We’re squeezing a bunch of girls so we can go after one guy? We’re going to have every damn feminist in this country down our throat.”
“I’m not happy with the decision either but we’re just doing our jobs, Rocco.”
After Rocco left, Nick stayed in his office working until it was past eight, making good progress on some of the files sitting on his desk. After he’d done enough paperwork for one day he dialled the number for the embassy in Hong Kong.
“Jon Keiler around?” he asked.
“He’s on summer holidays,” replied the secretary for the immigration unit at the embassy.
“How can I reach him?”
“Mr. Slovak, my boss doesn’t file his holiday plans with staff.”
“When’s he back?”
“In a week.”
“Tell him to call me ASAP.”
His anxiety over the Mandarin Club file was giving him a headache right between the eyes. This case and Walter’s death gave him the feeling that he was a warrior going into a losing battle, and more than anything, Nick hated to lose. If he hadn’t gone to law school he would have been a cop, maybe a wrestler, anything that allowed him to fight the good fight. That’s why he had always loved the job. He went through his notes again, his jaw tightening as he read. After closing the file, he made up his mind. He was going to send a message to smugglers and illegal migrants and all those who abuse the immigration system that there were serious consequences for doing so. He was going to make an example out of Sun Sui.
His phone rang. He glanced at the call display. Dubois. He picked up the receiver.
“Nick, I’m buried in paperwork. If I could take early retirement tomorrow, I would.” His friend’s voice was raspy with fatigue.
“Dubois, I’m buried in a file myself. Get to the point.”
“My counterpart at the American embassy in Hong Kong told me that Sun Sui used to date the daughter of the Flying Dragons crime boss there. The Dragons are into drug trafficking, people smuggling, prostitution. Nothing good. Our boy’s got no crime sheet, but he’s sure got connections.”
“That would explain the wads of cash in his bank accounts,” said Nick, getting up to stretch his legs. He stared at the rush-hour traffic snaking up University Avenue. There were benefits to working late after all.
“I’m going to follow up on this conversation when Keiler returns from his holidays.”
“One more thing. Kappolis told me he got orders from you to lay 209 criminal charges against the owner of the Mandarin Club and his so-called entertainers. The club’s membership list is full of movers and shakers. Tread carefully there, boy.”
“Just doing my job, Dubois.”
The RCMP officer chortled at the other end. “A lot of good civil servants have been downsized for doing their jobs, Nick. Because their job didn’t jibe with some politician’s game plan.”
The thought had occurred to Nick. He knew politicians bent the rules when it suited them. In his own modest way he tried to make the immigration system fair and transparent. The problem was the applicants with money and political connections who got to bypass the system.
“Hey, I ran into your ex-girlfriend.”
“Grace?”
“I don’t want to get into your personal life, but … were you serious about her?”
“Why do you ask?” He shrugged to his reflection as he stared out the window. “I thought I was. But she was just slumming. Looking for fun on the side.” When Dubois didn’t speak, Nick said again, “Why do you ask?”
“She went to a colleague’s house, found him dead, made the 911 call. Autopsy report indicates here that he’d been killed minutes before she showed up. Body was pretty warm. If she’d been at the victim’s house any sooner, she might not have got out alive herself.”
“Is she okay?” His heart seemed to stop beating, then started up again in a rush. He could feel his legs giving way under him. He pulled his chair over to the window and sat down.
“As okay as anybody can be after walking into a dead body.”
“Suicide?”
“That would be simple. Nah, he was murdered. Victim’s name was Crosby. Shot once through the heart. Lab running ballistic tests as we speak.”
“Any suspects?”
The RCMP officer snorted. “Nothing. It’s shaping up to be another cold case. No fingerprints, hairs, hair follicles, pubic lice, nothing to take for DNA testing. Nada!”
“What the hell was Grace doing at the victim’s house?”
Dubois was silent for a long moment.
“Surely she’s not a suspect!”
“Well, the officers found her a little evasive. Like she was hiding something,” Dubois replied.
Abruptly, Nick sat forward. “I see.”
“This is gonna hurt, Nick, but the detective that interviewed her, and myself included, thought she was having an office affair with this Crosby.”
He had to work to hold down his emotions. The thought of Grace sleeping with another man was painful. So much for the passage of time.
“Sleeping around like that in those circles impairs judicial impartiality or something like that.”
“Could be just a random act of dropping in to see a colleague,” said Nick, coming to Grace’s defence.
“The detective nosed around her workplace. People who knew them both said she and Crosby weren’t exactly pals. This is what I can’t figure out. Maybe that was just an act they put on in the workplace to hide their affair. You know, everything in this world is timing. I’d like to know what was so important about meeting Crosby that she had to get to his place right after his plane touched down. She even had his exact flight number.”
“Hmmm. Interesting.”
“Let’s just hope whoever pulled the trigger didn’t see her. Because the last thing we want is to have him, or them, come back and finish the job.”
Nick hung up the phone in a state of disbelief. First Walter was killed, and now Grace chanced upon a dead body. He dialled her home number, but there was no answer. And he didn’t feel like confronting her in a voicemail message. After all, who the hell was he? Nobody in particular — just a civil servant confronting a judge.
In a state of emotional vertigo, he walked out of his office. A colleague called out to him, but he didn’t stop. No banter, no flirting with the clerks in the bullpen. He took the elevator down.
Theirs had been a complicated relationship, and she was a complex creature. At times too complex for him to figure out. They had met during national training week at Immigration. It was the one week in the year when the Commission judges and immigration officers could mingle without repercussions from the Bar Association, which frowned on its members fraternizing with immigration officers, whose outlook could taint the thinking of the Commission members. The five days of grudgingly permitted social contact was allowed under the guise of professional development.
Nick had been one of the speakers at the interrogation techniques workshop. He could hardly have helped noticing her because she barraged him with questions — good questions. He had always found a woman with a razor-sharp mind sexy. He couldn’t guess her age. He thought she must be in her mid-thirties — she had lost the bloom of youth, but she was extremely a
ttractive.
Over coffee, they discovered how much they had in common. They were both children of refugees. His parents had fled Czechoslovakia, ending up in Rochester, New York. Her father’s family had escaped out of Hitler’s Germany, and her mother’s people had fled the Communists too late. They had both missed out on communicating with their grandparents, because the older generation didn’t speak English, and as children, they had refused to speak their mother tongue, and now regretted their childish stubbornness. They compared notes and found that a similar mix of idealism and circumstance had drawn each of them to their respective vocations.
On their first date at a Japanese restaurant they had laughed themselves silly trying to play ethnic oneupmanship at the sushi bar; each trying to gross out the other. She had won when she bravely popped the raw octopus tentacles into her mouth. He drew the line at eating squishy fish eyeballs.
It was true that he hadn’t had a relationship in close to four years before their fateful meeting. He’d applied a simple test to any woman he found at all interesting: would she date a man without a car? He couldn’t believe how many of them failed. Living within walking distance of work in the heart of downtown, he didn’t see the point of dropping thirty thousand to own a car when he could rent the latest model whenever he wanted, and without the hassle of car repairs. And he figured any woman who cared more about him pulling up in front of her house in a set of wheels than she did about him, himself, wasn’t worth the trouble.
Grace didn’t mind taking the subway or a taxi. She said it made her feel young and footloose again. Besides, she made him blissfully happy in so many other ways. The truth was, he hadn’t felt such happiness in a long time. Kappolis had said that his happiness was directly proportional to the emotional deprivation he’d been feeling when they met, but Kappolis was the original hardboiled anti-romantic. Anyway, maybe they’d both been emotionally deprived. She had stayed on an extra week in Toronto. And when that wasn’t enough, they had impulsively walked into a travel office and bought air tickets for Malta. While it lasted, it had been pure happiness. And then it all came crashing down to earth.