obtained from the back-issue files of the Santa Barbara newspaper. “Yeah, I
remember him. He’s not one you forget. Not a foreigner looking to become an
instant American like half my customers. And not the usual sad-assed loser who
needs to change his name and hide his face. He’s not a big guy, and he doesn’t
come on tough or anything, but you get the feeling he could mop up the floor
with anyone who crossed him. Very self-contained. Very watchful. I couldn’t
forget him.”
“What you couldn’t forget,” said one of the two bearded boy wonders at the
computers, “is that gorgeous quiff he was with.”
“For her, even a dead man could get it up,” the other one said.
The first said, “Yeah, even a dead man. Cake and pie.”
Vince was both offended and confused by their contributions to the conversation,
so he ignored them. To Van Dyne, he said, “Is there any chance you’d remember
the new names you gave them?”
“Sure. We got it on file,” Van Dyne said.
Vince could not believe what he had heard. “I thought people in your line
of work didn’t keep records? Safer for you and essential for your clients.”
Van Dyne shrugged. “Fuck the clients. Maybe one day the feds or the locals hit
us, put us out of business. Maybe I find myself needing a steady flow of cash
for lawyers’ fees. What better than to have a list of a couple of thousand bozos
living under phony names, bozos who’d be willing to be squeezed a little rather
than have to start all over again with new lives.”
“Blackmail,” Vince said.
“An ugly word,” Van Dyne said. “But apt, I’m afraid. Anyway, all we care about
is that we are safe, that there aren’t any records here to incriminate us. We
don’t keep the data in this dump. Soon as we provide someone with a new ID, we
transmit the record of it over a safe phone line from the computer here to a
computer we keep elsewhere. The way that computer is programmed, the data can’t
be pulled out of it from here; it’s a one-way road; so if we are busted, the
police hackers can’t reach our records from these machines. Hell, they won’t
even know the records exist.”
This new high-tech criminal world made Vince woozy. Even the don, a man of
infinite criminal cleverness, had thought these people kept no records and had
not realized how computers had made it safe to do so. Vince thought about what
Van Dyne had told him, getting it all sorted out in his mind. He said, “So can
you take me to this other computer and look up Cornell’s new
ID?”
“For a friend of Don Tetragna’s,” Van Dyne said, “I’ll do just about anything
but slit my own throat. Come with me.”
Van Dyne drove Vince to a busy Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. The place must
have seated a hundred and fifty, and every table was occupied, mostly by Anglos
rather than Asians. Although the joint was enormous and was decorated with paper
lanterns, dragon murals, imitation rosewood screens, and strings of brass wind
chimes in the shapes of Chinese ideograms, it reminded Vince of the kitschy
Italian trattoria in which he had murdered the cockroach Pantangela and the two
federal marshals last August. All ethnic art and decor—from Chinese to Italian
to Polish to Irish—were, when boiled down to their essence, perfectly alike.
The owner was a Chinese man in his thirties, who was introduced to Vince simply
as Yuan. With bottles of Tsingtao provided by Yuan, Van Dyne and Vince went into
the owner’s basement office, where two computers stood on two desks, one out in
the main work area and the other shoved into a corner. The one in the corner was
switched on, though nobody was working at it.
“This is my computer,” Van Dyne said. “No one here ever works with it. They
never even touch it, except to open the phone line to put the modem in operation
every morning and to close it at night. My computers at Hot Tips are linked to
this one.”
“You trust Yuan?”