East is East

There were no two ways about it: he was going to have to go down there. Not that he wanted to. Anything but. The thought of driving to Tupelo Island in this heat—and with a broken-down air conditioner no less—so he could stand around in the haze interrogating a bunch of snuff-dipping inbred cracker morons who could barely wheeze “uh-huh” or “naw” without growing roots and bark, was enough to make him wish he was back in L. A. Or almost.

Detlef Abercorn stood at the window gazing out at the flat dead sky that hung over Savannah like an old dishrag. It was a gray humid high-summer morning, sunless but stifling. He hadn’t read the paper yet, had barely blown the steam off his first cup of coffee, and already his shirt was wet through. Ten minutes earlier he’d breezed into the office, blown a kiss to Ginger, the new receptionist with the freckled cleavage and congenitally parted lips, switched on his monitor, taken a perfectly innocent sip of coffee—and watched an IAADA alert claw its way across the screen.

An IAADA—Illegal Alien, Armed, Dangerous and Amok—was the highest priority designation in the INS electronic mail file. In Los Angeles, the innermost circle of INS hell, IAADAs went out routinely, what with Guatemalans shooting at Salvadorans, Hmong tribesmen microwaving dogs, Turks and Iranians setting fire to carpet stores and the like—but here, in the mossy old somnolent backwater of Savannah, they were unheard of. The place wasn’t exactly a hotbed of international intrigue or even a semi-major port. Nothing ever happened here. Ever. That’s why he’d transferred.

It was the Nip, of course—he corrected himself: the Japanese—who’d jumped ship the week before. He’d been monitoring the situation from the beginning—he’d interviewed the ship’s captain over the phone and obtained and filed a copy of the Coast Guard report—but it was no big deal. They’d classified the AWOL sailor as IA—Illegal Alien—and left it at that. If he made it to shore, the yokels would have him in the county jail before he could shit twice, and if he gave them any trouble they’d string him up and skin him like a rabbit. But then the report came in that he had made it to shore—there were eyewitnesses, a couple from the artists’ colony he’d attacked in Peagler Sound—and Abercorn had dug deeper. From the Chief Engineer of the Japanese ship—a desiccated old fart about a hundred and twelve years old who looked as if he’d been hatched from an egg—he learned that the man at large was armed with a knife and had attacked half the ship’s crew before throwing himself over the rail, and so he’d had the regional head upgrade the designation to IAAD, Armed and Dangerous. Still, it was no big deal. A Nip in Georgia? These people ate weasel, picked their teeth with their feet, grew right up out of the ground like weeds, like kudzu; the poor dumb Nip—Japanese—wouldn’t last a day, six hours even. Abercorn was sure of it. And then the weekend had intervened and he made the rounds of the discos, drank too much, got lucky, learned most of everything about a girl named Brenda who used blusher on her breasts, and forgot all about the AWOL Nip on Tupelo Island.

But now things had gotten out of hand. An IAADA. He sighed. He’d been looking forward to a long quiet morning with the new le Carré and a pot of fresh-dripped Folgers, with nothing, absolutely nothing to do, except listen to the girls in the main office type up the odd student visa and whisper about the scandalous sex lives of people they barely knew. Yes. And now this. He turned wearily to his desk, lit a cigarette and typed in a request for more information. The screen immediately began to fill:

TANAKA HIRO. JAPANESE NATIONAL. BORN KYOTO 6/12/70. MOTHER TANAKA SAKURAKO DECEASED 12/24/70. FATHER UNKNOWN. LAST KNOWN RESIDENCE GRANDMOTHER TANAKA WAKAKO 74 YAMAZATO-CHO NAKA-KU YOKOHAMA. ARMED AND DANGEROUS AND AMOK TUPELO ISLAND MID-GEORGIA COAST ADVISE EXTREME CAUTION. ESCAPED BRIG AND ASSAULTED OFFICERS TOKACHI-MARU FREIGHTER JAPANESE REGISTRATION 1300 HOURS 20 JULY. UNPROVOKED ATTACKS ON EYEWITNESSES LIGHTS SAXBY DERSHOWITZ RUTH WHITE OLMSTEAD FIRST DEGREE BURNS ARSON HOUSE FIRE TOTAL LOSS.