Year of the Dragon

by Robert Daley

  Her eyes caromed too - from his face to his hands at his crotch. His fingers let go immediately, the job half done, and rose to straighten his tie. Lurtsema, embarrassed, was therefore irritated - an effect this woman had on him all too often. He longed for the good old days when journalism meant newspapers, and was a male profession. He thought grimly: a man can’t even piss privately anymore.

  “Willie,” she said. “Just the man I wanted to see.”

  The other on-camera people called him Will, or Mr. Lurtsema. He hated Willie. He was fifty-five years old. No one had called him Willie since college - and even then only his pals - until this woman. Who was not a pal.

  She said, “I need to see you and I run into you. What a coincidence.”

  It was no coincidence, he believed. More likely she had lurked in the hall outside the can waiting for him to come out, something no male reporter would have dared. Appointments were supposed to go through his secretary. Everybody went through his secretary. But not her. He was one of the most important producers in television, but to her he was just another man to be manipulated, he believed. Her method when dealing with men was to catch them off balance, with their fly open if possible, and then to keep them that way until she got what she wanted. It was an outrage. She was an outrage.

  He thought he could feel a draft, and he considered zipping himself shut right in front of her, blatantly, and screw women’s sensibilities. But he belonged to an older school - as a boy he had been taught, among other concepts, gallantry. A man was not allowed to zip up in front of a lady. The next best thing was to hike his pants higher on his hips as a means of pulling the open edges together and he did this. He also turned sideways so that whatever there was to see would not be staring her in the eye.

  “What do you want?”

  “Let’s go into your office.”

  In the office he would have to listen to another of her far-fetched ideas. The daily news conference was the place ideas were supposed to be tried out, give twenty other people a chance to shoot them down, but not her. In the news conferences she never opened her mouth. She much preferred waylaying him outside the can. One on one. A sexual confrontation of some kind.

  Lurtsema had been managing editor of the old Herald Tribune fifteen years earlier, before it folded. He had the same job here, different title. In the newspaper business the news came first, then the editors. The reporters, despite their bylines, were largely anonymous and did what they were told. But in television the reporters were referred to as talent, same as rock singers. They and their goddam Q factors had far more clout than editors - who were called producers - and got far more money. The Q factor was the recognition quotient of a reporter’s face as determined by secret polls of viewers. The networks paid heavily for the results of these Q polls. Carol Cone had an extremely high Q factor. She was a star. Lurtsema could not have fired her if he wanted to. On the other hand, she could probably get him fired, if she chose to make a stand on it.

  He peered off down the corridor, a long, airless tube. It was like staring the length of the inside of a submarine. At the far end, where the torpedo tubes would be, was the set for the Seven O’clock News, an airless place also, where each day’s grim events were collected and fired out into the world, destined, like a spread of torpedoes, to traumatize whatever they struck.

  “You can give me five minutes, Willie, can’t you?”

  She was, he saw, blinking her eyes at him. It was not a come-on to him personally, but rather part of a technique she used. He had seen her use it often enough - a technique that tapped the deep, sexual core of a man, any man. She –it - made men respond to her as father to daughter, as a man to his woman. She made men want to accord her any boon in their power. Her technique was as subtle as the perfume she wore, for perfume was also part of her arsenal. Or perhaps it was not subtle at all. Like perfume, she evoked responses over which men had little control. By pretending to an intimacy that did not exist, by seeming to make promises she had no intention of fulfilling, she made all males aware of her sexually - whether producers, sources, competing reporters, anyone. She made men want to step back and let her through the door first, and they did this and were always surprised when she never even turned around to say thank you. Her technique, to Lurtsema, was a lie, and she was a cheat.

  She was two other things Lurtsema did not comprehend: a so-called journalist who had never worked a day on a newspaper, and what had become known as a sexually aggressive woman. Formerly she would have been known as a bitch in heat, Lurtsema reflected. She had bedded a lot of guys. Or he supposed she had bedded them. She had as many dates as a college girl, different guys every few weeks, and a college girl she was not, so how else did all those dates end?

  You tell me, Lurtsema thought.

  “Willie, your office is that way.”

  He strode toward it. He was trying to keep ahead of her so he could finish unobserved with his fly. But she kept up, prattling non-stop. He increased speed. It didn’t help. He strode in past his secretary, practically running. He dropped into the chair behind his desk and bellied up tight into the kneehole and glared at her.

  “Here’s my idea,” said Carol. She sat down and got comfortable. “The Chinatown problem.”

  “What Chinatown problem?”

  Carol outlined it: “Gangs, gambling dens, tongs, the Golden Palace massacre-”

  “What happened to your other idea, police mismanagement?”

  “This one is better.”

  “It’s a local story. It has no national impact.”

  “Every Chinatown in the country is the same.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  He studied her. She must be forty, he thought, but made up she looked thirty, and she posed as twenty. Granted she looked terrific on TV, but mostly because the picture that went out over the air was not nearly as sharp as real life. The picture lied, though not to her, apparently. She looked at herself in the monitor every night and believed what she saw there. The old movie stars had believed what they saw too, he supposed. But they had seen themselves only once or twice a year. This woman saw herself every night. She believed what the screen told her, that she was still as delicious as a girl. To her, TV and real life were the same.

  Her Chinatown idea was worthless. It was like a statue she had constructed in her own image. He was demolishing it and he was pleased. He would take a hammer to it. It would lie in shards at her feet.

  “You have to admit that the Golden Palace massacre is national,” she said doggedly.

  “If the cops ever break the case, sure. So far they got nothing. They haven’t even found the getaway car, for chrissake. And apart from the massacre nobody gives a damn about Chinatown.”

  “It’s a big story,” persisted Carol.

  But her eyes had dropped to her hands, Lurtsema noted. She had a habit, when reading the news on camera, of dropping her eyes like that. Then she would raise them, reading directly into the lens, looking suddenly extremely vulnerable, like a woman who was about to exchange a confidence, about to confess something. It was an incredibly effective trick, or at least so the ratings seemed to prove. The public responded to her in a big way, according to the numbers. To Lurtsema her trick seemed transparent. That it produced results out of all proportion to its cunning infuriated him. The only other thing he would grant her was that she read the teleprompter well; she never flubbed words. He would not grant her that Chinatown was worth a story.

  “Well,” she said, “let’s get somebody in here from the police department to give us a Chinatown backgrounder. It’s worth that much at least. It’s worth a backgrounder.”

  “Get who in here?”

  “The guy who commands the Chinatown precinct, what’s his name-”

  “He’s not involved in the massacre investigation. Probably doesn’t even know what progress they’ve made, if any.

  Carol stood up. “Say you’ll think about it.”

  Lurtsema shrugged. “Sure.” He had no in
tention of thinking about it or her.

  Carol went out. Without batting her eyes at him, or wiggling her ass. Lurtsema considered this a victory, and he was chortling as he got up from his desk and began pacing the room.

  His secretary came in. “Yes, Margaret,” he said.

  Margaret, a twenty-two-year-old blonde, was about to speak when her gaze was caught by something that was not as it should be.

  “Mr. Lurtsema,” she said cryptically, and pointed with her eyes.

  “Goddamn it,” cried Lurtsema, furious with Carol Cone, furious with himself. Turning to the wall, he yanked the thing shut once and for all.

  Back in her own office, Carol stared out the window, and thought about Powers, a news source she wanted to see again. Potential news sources were regularly invited to Lurtsema’s office for cocktails after the News had been taped. The sources were then grilled by producers and reporters for background information. Would Lurtsema invite Powers to a backgrounder? Maybe not immediately, Carol decided. But she was confident that eventually she could make any man do almost anything she wished.

  PINNED TO the wall of Powers’ office, like a giant Chinese butterfly with wings outspread hung a map of the fifth precinct. As a wall decoration the butterfly failed, for it was dead and its tone was gray. It gave no hint of the color and vitality of the living organism that it represented, and that Powers would have to snare somehow and subdue.

  In front of the map stood Powers and seven other officers, most of them sergeants. Powers had a pointer, with which he repeatedly tapped one wing or the other.

  All eight men were in uniform. Like military commanders plotting a campaign, their first job was to study the terrain, and they were doing it. Next they should move up armament - tanks here, artillery there - and then troops, and they should attempt to achieve surprise. But their armament was useless - a handful of handguns which, in the normal course of events, they were not allowed even to draw or brandish, much less fire. As for surprise, the British redcoats of long ago were no more glaringly obvious, or alien to the community, than police blue.

  “We can’t do anything about the sweatshops,” said Powers.

  “We’re not allowed to crack down on the gambling halls. We can’t get at,” he hesitated, ”at the tongs.” He had almost called them what he believed them to be, crime syndicates. The leadership of the tongs and the Chinese Mafia were the same, he was convinced, but he was not even supposed to think this, much less say it aloud. “But we can suppress the youth gangs,” he continued. “We can save these restaurant owners and shopkeepers from being extorted.” He looked all around, and his subordinates stared back. He saw they did not believe him. They accorded him silence, not faith. “We can try, anyway,” he said, an admission of weakness he regretted as soon as the words came out, because the first adage of leadership was this: the leader must believe, or the led won’t.

  The officers before him had worked this precinct for years. The only newcomer was himself. The police department was not the army, and most lower ranks, once assigned to a station house, worked there the rest of their careers; only commanders were rotated. “As I understand it, most gang members are known to us by sight,” Powers told them. “I want you to order your men to harass them. Every time they go into a store or restaurant to make a collection, I want a cop to go right in behind them. Stand right beside them. The cop will not understand Chinese. Legally speaking he won’t have witnessed a thing. But I want the police presence felt. I want these victims to believe we are with them, that we will remove the fear they have lived under for so long. If we can convince them of that, maybe we can begin to get them to testify.”

  Again he looked from sergeant to sergeant. Again he listened to their silence. This was the best plan he had been able to think up, and he knew it wouldn’t work. He saw they knew it too. “I want to know exactly when and where collections take place. I want regular reports made and an intelligence file built up. If we can pinpoint the collections in advance, we can have a cop standing there every single time.” Every single time? There weren’t enough cops in the precinct for that, in the entire division. “If threats are observed, if force is used, I want an arrest made.”

  This is crazy, he thought. Chinatown is in the grip of an octopus and I’m asking them to help me lop off the ends of a few tentacles. There are too many tentacles and each one can be replaced. What we ought to be doing is going after the creature’s head. Kill the head and the tentacles will die by themselves. We’re dealing with an organized criminal conspiracy and I’m not allowed even to say so, much less try to fight it. He thought of the PC and Duncan: arrest rate up, crime rate down. Okay, he thought.

  “I want lots of arrests,” he said. “I don’t care whether they stand up in court or not.”

  Their faces remained resolutely blank. What Powers was ordering was the same type of arrests that occurred whenever the mayor ordered a crackdown on prostitutes. The prisoners, whether prostitutes or Chinese gang youths, would be swept into court in front of a bored judge who was probably sixty, and an assistant district attorney, who was probably twenty-five. Both had much more political clout than any police captain. The judge - almost any judge - could be depended on to start screaming about “bullshit arrests that are stinking up my courtroom.” As for the young ADA, his only interest was to make a name for himself, to advance his career as fast as possible. He did not want his time taken up with arrests that would wash out, and he would denounce any police captain who caused this to happen. Neither the judge nor the ADA was likely to denounce the PC or the chief of patrol.

  So the orders Powers had just given were risky in the way that climbing a mountain was risky. He was clinging to the mountain by a succession of small handholds, and the more he kept on, the more dangerous it became. Safety was down there, not up here, and the height got dizzying. Before long, one could no longer see the summit, or the ground either.

  “I also want new foot posts,” he said. “I want a foot patrolman at every gambling hall twenty-four hours a day. I want the bosses to feel weight too. I want to see if we can’t hurt business enough to force the bosses to cooperate against the gangs. Any questions?”

  No one answered. But Powers was a cop too, and believed he could read their thoughts. The principal police emotion was not love or hate, not boredom or fear. It was cynicism. Almost all these men, when they came into the department, had been idealistic young cops. They had soon changed. Much about people’s lives, they learned, could not be explained, and almost nothing could be improved. It was hardly worth trying. Their own superiors had long since given up trying and were content to issue dumb orders. The real world was already set. It was as smooth and hard as a globe plastered in concrete. One could not get a grip on it. The world they had hoped to change did not exist, no world comparable to it existed either, and as a result young cops were left with nothing to believe in at all. Loss of idealism was like having a tooth extracted. It was painful, it left a hole, and nothing would ever grow there again. By the time they became old cops, thirty-five years old or so, they were as sour as men of sixty.

  Powers’ executive officer, a captain named Harris, said, “You want the gang members harassed. On what grounds?”

  “Any grounds. Loitering, disturbing the peace, anything that comes to mind.”

  “What about their civil rights?”

  “Screw their civil rights,” snapped Powers. “Any other questions?” None were likely to be put to a captain in this mood. “No? Then that’s all. Move out.”

  As stolid as men in pain they filed from this office. Cynicism was pain - the toothache kept recurring. In addition he had challenged them and challenge was pain too. They would obey his orders, and that was all. They had been wounded in action and were in no condition to do more. Was he in any better shape himself?

  Powers took Lom’s list, and began working his way through it at the rate of one Chinese dignitary a day. Most of the meetings took place at 3:00 in the afternoon. He intr
oduced himself and usually was offered tea. The meetings were formal, always polite, and afterwards his host invariably bowed him out the door. Usually he managed to leave his home phone number behind, saying that in the event of problems he should be phoned directly. But no one promised special cooperation, and no one ever called him at home. He learned very little. He was making himself known, not coming to know them.

  Most of the rest of each day he walked the streets, looking into shops, shaking hands with owners, smiling a good deal.

  In a cellar-level laundry one day he again encountered Nikki Han. He had come down the stairs from the sidewalk, and had introduced himself. He had launched into his pitch: the police were there to help.

  The owner and his wife, bowing and smiling, appeared nervous, and they kept turning to glance at the clock above their heads. For Chinese, their behavior was almost rude, and they wore smiles that were much too brilliant. Powers realized they wanted him to finish his speech and be gone and, since there were no customers in the place, he did not know why. Then footsteps came down the staircase behind him - a customer, he supposed, without turning around. But the laundryman’s wife had recognized this “customer” at a glance. It was as if a mask had been ripped off her face. Underneath was terror. Her new expression was as ugly as a smear of blood. The transformation was as shocking as anything Powers had seen in Chinatown.

  Spinning, the precinct commander stared at the figures in the doorway: Nikki Han and two others. The Chinese gang leader was wearing a tan polyester suit with bell-bottom trousers, clothes several years out of style. His confederates were similarly dressed. Italian gangsters, Powers thought irrelevantly, were far more mod, far more stylish. It seemed obvious that he had interrupted a scheduled extortion payment, and he glanced from the gang leader to the laundry-man, who was almost imperceptibly trembling. The laundryman had been caught talking to a cop. He would be accused of squealing to the cops, that much seemed clear, and the gang would wreak who knew what reprisals as a result.