Watchers

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?”
    “I got him the loan that started this business. He owes me his good fortune.
    And it’s pretty much a clean loan, nothing that can be linked to me in any way, or to Don Tetragna, so Yuan remains an upstanding citizen who’s of no interest to the cops. All he does for me in return is let me keep the computer here.”
    Sitting in front of the terminal, Van Dyne began to use the keyboard. In two minutes he had Travis Cornell’s new name: Samuel Spencer Hyatt.
    “And here,” Van Dyne said as new data flickered up. “This is the woman who was with him. Her real name was Nora Louise Devon of Santa Barbara. Now, she’s Nora Jean Aimes.”
    “Okay,” Vince said. “Now wipe them off your records.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Erase them. Take them out of the computer. They’re not yours any more. They’re mine. Nobody else’s. Just mine.”
     
     
    A short while later, they were back at Hot Tips, which was a decadent place that revolted Vince.
    In the basement, Van Dyne gave the names Hyatt and Aimes to the bearded boy wonders who seemed to live down there around the clock, like a couple of trolls.
    First, the trolls broke into the Department of Motor Vehicle computers. They wanted to see whether, in the three months since acquiring