East is East

Jesus, was he setting fire to houses now? This was bad news. Worse than bad. The guy must be a psychopath, he thought, a terrorist, a Japanese Manson. And it got worse: he’d been at large a week and already the list of sightings filled the screen. He was everywhere, from Peagler Sound to Hog Hammock and Tupelo Shores Estates and back again, popping up out of the bushes like a jack-in-the-box, terrifying old ladies and stirring up the war veterans and coon hunters till gunfire crackled across the island in an unholy storm from morning till night. He’d cursed a bunch of people at the local grocery, filched three pairs of ladies’ undergarments from a clothesline at the artists’ colony and made off with a tin dish of dogfood the sheriff himself had set out on his back porch. It had to stop. Detlef Abercorn knew what was expected of him.

The thing was, he’d had no experience with anything like this. He’d spent his twelve years in L.A. raiding sweatshops in Eagle Rock and chasing skinny busboys around tofu-spattered kitchens in Chinatown. What did he know about swamps and hollows—what did he know about Georgia, for that matter? Sure, it was up to the local authorities to make the nab, but he was supposed to be the expert, he was supposed to cast the net, advise them—advise them, what a joke: he could barely make out a word they said down here. Even worse, he’d never had a problem, not that he could remember, with the Japanese. Tongans, yes. Ecuadorians, Tibetans and Liberians, Bantu, Pakistanis and Sea Dyak, everybody and anybody. But not Japanese. They never entered the country illegally. Didn’t want to. They figured they had it all and more over there, so why bother? Plenty of them came in to run factories and open banks and whatnot, but all that was done at the highest levels. And Detlef Abercorn didn’t work at the highest levels.

No matter. An illegal was an illegal, and it would be his ass if he didn’t catch him.

It was raining by the time he reached the parking lot. Of course, he thought, what else? The tires on his old battered turd-brown Datsun were bald as melons and the wipers were so frayed they might as well have been bottle brushes for all the good they did. It was going to be a rough trip.

Before it began, though, he had to swing by the apartment, cram his overnight bag with underwear, dental floss, SPF 30 maximum protection sunscreen, calamine lotion and a snakebite kit, dig his hip waders and rain slicker out of the trunk in the storage cage downstairs, and then find a Vietnamese grocery—the Vietnamese grocery, probably the only Vietnamese grocery in the whole slow-talking, tobacco-spitting, godforsaken state—on De Lesseps off Skidaway. He was going to rendezvous there with Lewis Turco, an ex-LURP and part-time special agent who’d lived in Borneo, Okinawa and the Pribilof Islands, and he was going to take Turco with him to help sniff out the amok Nip on Tupelo Island. Or rather, he would let Turco do the sniffing while he sequestered himself in the local motel with a couple six packs, John le Carré and the prospect of the upcoming four-game series between the Dodgers and the Braves.

The shirt didn’t matter—it was sweat-soaked anyway—but still he wasn’t prepared for the typhoon that hit him as he dashed across the lot to the car. By the time he got the door open he was wet right on through to the elastic band of his BVDs. There was no sense in even starting the car—he couldn’t go anywhere till it eased up, not with these wipers—and he didn’t relish the idea of bolting back to the office, where he’d just look ridiculous in front of Ginger and the other girls, not to mention the button-down types who saw to the main business of the place. They’d always looked at him as if he were a freak anyway, a kind of subspecies not much higher on the social scale than the odd refugee applying for a green card. So he just sat there, not daring even to turn on the radio for fear of running down the battery, fuming over this crazed, inconsiderate, raging pain in the ass of a Japanese Nip—he hated the son of a bitch already, hoped they tarred and feathered him and sent him home to Nagasaki or wherever in a box—and listening to the thousand tiny frustrated fists of the rain as they beat at the roof of the car.