by Robert Daley
Powers began tapping the revolver against his palm. It was a cupping motion, aggressive, like making a snow ball, packing it down hard, preparing a projectile with which to inflict damage.
“Let’s go wake up the district attorney,” he decided.
Luang was surprised. District attorneys were elected officials. They were men of genuinely august rank, far higher than police captains. This one, in addition, had held the job through four straight elections. You couldn’t just wake him up. But Powers went to the phone and did so.
The district attorney lived in a town house on Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson River - about fifteen minutes away at this time of night. They rode there in Luang’s Volkswagen, with Luang apologizing most of the way for the condition of his car.
The district attorney was waiting for them. As they climbed his front stoop he opened the door himself.
Another man in his bathrobe. Slippers with holes in them. Between slippers and bathrobe, red pajama legs. Luang was now totally confused. He was trying to relate the appearance of this man to the Chinese concepts of rank and face. A Chinese dignitary, even a minor functionary, would not have seen them at all at this hour. Or else he would have had them shown in by servants, would have made them wait, would have appeared only when decked out in all the finery of his office. Anything less was to lose face. The district attorney of New York County had not even bothered to comb his hair, which was rumpled from sleep. He showed them into his living room, and while Powers talked he padded about trying to stuff and ignite his pipe. He was neither friendly or unfriendly. He said nothing at all until Powers had concluded.
A full minute of silence ensued before he began to speak.
“You got enough to convict the kid on the homicide charge.” He said thoughtfully. “Maybe manslaughter, I don’t know. You got the murder weapon and you got a voluntary confession to a police officer. The kid was not under arrest, so the fact that there was no Miranda warning does not enter in. On Nikki Han, legally speaking, you’ve got nothing. Even if the kid testified against him, it’s the unsupported testimony of a co-conspirator. On Koy you’ve got even less. Your witness is the same co-conspirator, and he can’t even testify that Koy gave the orders in his presence.”
If this speech surprised Powers, it did not show. The district attorney puffed his pipe. He and Powers stared at each other through a cloud of smoke.
“A district attorney’s first job,” the DA told Luang in a kindly voice, “is to make the police bring in a legally sound case. I’m sorry to say that you don’t have one.”
“But we have enough for a wiretap order, don’t we?” asked Powers.
“On whom? The kid? You already got the kid cold.”
“On Koy. On his place of business, on his residence, and on the gambling den he runs.” Powers, as always when under stress, had begun to pace the room.
“You have no legal proof he runs the gambling den, and there are no phones in the gambling den proper, as I understand it. So that’s out.”
“On his residence and his place of business then,” said Powers stubbornly.
Luang saw that a negotiation was going on, and was surprised, though why? Everything else had to be negotiated every day. Why should law enforcement be different?
The district attorney said, “Legally it’s pretty shaky. Wiretap orders must be based on the continuing nature of the conspiracy, as you know, and the court might hold that these murders were isolated incidents in the past.”
“Come on, come on,” said Powers, “you can do better than that.”
“Also the law insists that, to be legally valid, a wiretap must be monitored, or you can’t keep it open. Do you have enough Chinese-speaking police officers to monitor this around the clock?”
Both men stared at Luang.
“No,” said Powers, “I guess I don’t.”
“Maybe,” Luang said resignedly, “I can find a Chinese restaurant to send me in food.” But he was not displeased. As a job, at least it sounded safe. It was better than tailing Koy through streets.
The district attorney said to Luang, “You understand that the law does not permit you to eavesdrop on general conversation. You have to keep switching the thing on and off.” He was giving Luang a kind of genial course of instruction, and explicit orders at the same time. “As soon as you’ve heard enough to indicate that a general conversation is taking place, you may no longer eavesdrop. You may eavesdrop only when discussion of criminal activity is taking place.” He turned back to Powers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t make the rules. But they’re getting stricter all the time. Make out your affidavit, Captain. Put down this police officer as the one who will monitor the wiretap. No one else may monitor it except for the person or persons specified in the affidavit. You know that of course.” He tapped his pipe bowl down into an ashtray, then sucked the pipe stem dry. It made a sound like a tea kettle whistling. “Will you inform the chief of detectives? Or shall I?”
Powers had stopped pacing. He looked pleased. He was going to get his wiretap order.
“Do we have to tell him?”
“We usually do.”
“May I ask you a favor?” said Powers. “Can we just not tell him for a few days?”
Luang’s glance went from face to face. This seemed an important point, but the significance eluded him.
“I don’t work for him,” said the district attorney.
“I don’t work for him either,” muttered Powers.
The district attorney gave a slight nod. “It makes no difference to me.”
“Thank you,” said Captain Powers.
A few minutes later Powers and Luang stood on the front stoop in the night. The door had slammed shut behind them. The light had gone out inside. The district attorney, presumably, had gone back to bed.
“We ought to pick the kid up before something happens to him,” said Luang. “Can I run you home, Captain?”
Powers was watching the traffic for a cruising taxi. “We can’t,” he said. “It would notify them that we know something. We have to leave him out there. Thanks for the offer, but it’s out of your way. You go home and get some rest. I’ll find a cab.
Because Luang had seen Powers two straight nights in bathrobe and slippers, he decided that a kind of tacit intimacy now existed between them, a tacit permission to question his commander’s decision. “If you ask me,” he said, “that’s taking terrible risks with that kid’s life. If they find out he’s talked to me, they’ll whack him out so quick.”
Powers shook his head. His attention was divided. He was still watching for a taxi. “The answer is no.”
Here came one, roof lights on, coming up the service road toward him. “Good night, Luang,” he said. He stepped out into the street, flagged it down, got in and was gone.
POWERS SPENT the next morning with an assistant district attorney named O’Hara, twenty-four years old, brand new in the law-enforcement business, writing out the copious affidavits that went with a wiretap application. Late in the afternoon O’Hara took all this paperwork before a friendly judge, one of only a handful considered friendly enough by the prosecutors to be approached for this purpose, the rest being self-styled civil libertarians. This judge signed the wiretap order, and O’Hara so notified Powers, who had returned to his precinct, by phone.
O’Hara also notified Telephone Company Security, whose men installed the wiretaps, running the intercepts, as requested by Powers, well outside of Chinatown into an office on the second floor of the Sixth Precinct station house in Greenwich Village. In this office Luang took up station at 9 A.M. the following morning. Powers waited with him until the first intercept was made, a call by Koy to a supplier of coffins. Both parties spoke in English and the call sounded, both to Luang and to Powers, entirely legitimate. It continued to sound legitimate as Luang cut back into it from time to time to make sure. The subject matter did not change, and after two minutes and thirty-three seconds the call ended.
As Powers left the
station house many police eyes watched him go. The entire station house was already aware of Luang, Powers saw. Aware of the wiretaps too, and therefore brimming with questions for which there were as yet no answers available. Presently, Powers knew, some cop would manage to identify Luang and the situation would become clear to the entire complement of cops. There were no secrets in station houses. After that it was only a matter of time, perhaps days, perhaps hours, before news of Luang and of his wiretap - and of Powers behind it - leaked back to the chief of detectives. That is, Powers thought, I am already feeling the pressure of time. The wiretap order was for thirty days, but he had far less time than that, and he knew it.
Koy’s wife made five phone calls from home that morning, one of them lasting forty-two minutes. She spoke each time in English, always to women. She had not been identified in the wiretap application as part of the continuing criminal conspiracy. Luang had no right to eavesdrop on her conversations at all, and did not do so, except to cut in from time to time to make certain that the phone had not been taken by Koy. In addition, as he noted in his log, there were seven incoming and six outgoing calls from the funeral parlor. He could put a name to Chang’s voice. The embalmer spoke only Cantonese, and sounded like a moron. Since he was not listed in the affidavit either, Luang cut into his calls only briefly, making sure that the voice on the line stayed the same. Two other calls were made by one of the assistant funeral directors, and the rest were by Koy, who mostly spoke Cantonese. All of the local calls sounded innocent. But there were also two calls to Hong Kong, to different numbers each time, and these seemed more promising, principally because Koy had at once commenced speaking in a language Luang was able to identify, but could not understand: Hakka.
Luang spoke Cantonese and Shanghainese. He did not speak Hakka, one of the most difficult of the major Chinese dialects. Neither did any of the other six Chinese police officers, he knew. Not one of them even spoke Mandarin. New York, up till now, had been a Cantonese town, as far as Chinese-Americans were concerned. Mandarin was the official language of Red China, and also of Taiwan, and one heard more and more of it in the streets of Chinatown today. But Hakka was another story. The Hakkas had been the original indigenous people of China. They were forced out of their own country by invaders from the north about a thousand years ago, and moved to the south where they became known as the guest people. For the most part they hadn’t mixed with local residents then, and still didn’t. They had a reputation for trusting nobody but each other.
Traditionally they had been the adventurers, the seamen, the pirates, the criminals of China.
Luang realized that Koy was probably a Hakka.
In the afternoon Koy made more calls - the log showed six of them, two more to Hong Kong, two to Canada, one to London, one to Amsterdam, all in Hakka. The first came at 3 P.M. and the last at 4:30, at which time Luang phoned the Fifth Precinct. Powers rushed right over.
“Hakka?” he demanded. He had closed the door, closing the two of them into the small office. He had hung his uniform jacket over the back of a chair, and he was pacing. “Hakka?” he said again.
“The language of Chinese banditry for a thousand years,” said Luang. “As far as Koy is concerned, it fits in, doesn’t it?”
“That’s not the point, Luang,” said Powers. He looked and sounded extremely agitated. “That’s not the point.”
“I know,” said Luang. “Since I don’t speak Hakka, I can’t monitor him. The minute he starts talking Hakka, I have to shut the tape recorder off.”
“Don’t you understand Hakka at all?” Powers was almost pleading with him. “Don’t you understand it even a little?”
“Not a word, Captain.”
“This is crazy.”
“China is a big country. We have eight major languages. So what? Europe has about twenty.”
Powers was pacing hard, head down. “We’ve got to find somebody who speaks Hakka.”
“That’s not going to be easy, Captain.”
There was no Chinese-American cop they could use, and if they picked some Chinese-American off the street, he would most likely feel more loyalty toward a fellow Chinese than toward the police, and also more fear - Koy was, after all the Cho Kun. An individual off the street would be more likely to go straight to Koy with the news than to help make a case against him.
This deplorable tendency had been amply proven during past gambling cases. The department’s public morals division had often employed informants who would enter the gambling dens, make their observations, and afterwards testify against those individuals they were able to identify as employees. Not once had any informant ever identified a single big shot in the gambling hierarchy. Nothing but low-level arrests were ever made - this was still another reason why crackdowns on the Chinese gambling dens had been curtailed. To the police commanders involved, it had seemed clear that the owners and operators of gambling dens were men of respect in Chinatown; they were also dangerous. To finger one of them would subject the informant to swift, vicious reprisals.
It was useless to imagine that an ordinary Chinatown citizen, no matter who he was, could be trusted to monitor the wiretap on Koy.
“Wait a minute,” cried Powers. “I’ve got an idea.” He was suddenly beaming. “I think I know where some Hakka-speaking people can be found.”
A crazy idea, as yet insubstantial, he tossed it this way and that. But possible, an idea that might work.
“Stay on post. I’ll be back.”
From an office down the hall Powers made a number of phone calls. He could scarcely believe his luck. Gathering up the notes he had made, he ran down to his car and drove to the district attorney’s office at 5 Leonard Street. By then it was supper time and the district attorney, waiting for him, looked annoyed. He listened impassively as Powers outlined the situation. Trustworthy Hakka-speaking people were needed to monitor the wiretap, and he had found them. He had their names right here.
He pushed the new names across the desk. But the district attorney, who sat with his lips pursed, his fingers steepled, was shaking his head negatively. “All we have to do is add these names to the existing wiretap order,” Powers said.
“Wiretaps must be monitored by law enforcement personnel,” the DA declared. “These names you have given me, they’re women, and they certainly would not be mistaken for law enforcement personnel. I don’t know if a judge will sign this.” But he was already beginning to change his mind, Powers saw. A half-smile was creeping onto his face. Powers’ plan amused him. He looked willing to try it.
“They are not law enforcement personnel,” Powers persisted. “They’re retired missionary nuns who speak Hakka. Their integrity is beyond question. There have to be exceptions to these rules from time to time. The law can’t be that strict. Now would you please sign this thing and let’s get it to a judge.”
And an hour later Powers led the two old women into the station house. He knew heads would turn and stare. He watched it happen - the cop on security duty at the door, the desk sergeant. Powers wanted to laugh. He was like a practical joker observing the results of his joke - his joke on this station house, on the police department, on law enforcement, on the world.
“Right this way, Sisters,” chortled Powers, and the two aged nuns, dressed in the flowing black habits and starched cowls of many years ago, followed him looking neither right nor left, great frail blackbirds with sharp white beaks.
In all that large room, as Powers and the two women crossed it, no one else moved. About ten officers and detectives stared. Their shoes seemed screwed to the floor.
What were these women doing here?
Station houses, every cop knew, were not cathedrals. They attracted neither worshippers nor tourists. They were as forbidding as cemeteries, as repugnant as garbage dumps. They were monuments to human degradation. One avoided them out of an almost superstitious dread. Even neighborhood people sometimes crossed the street to walk by, they crossed their breasts, as if the building itself
had unknown power, gave off some vague occult emanation. No one strolled in off the street out of idle curiosity. No one strolled in at all except cops whose gear creaked, rough men, hearty, ribald. Most visitors were dragged in, hands manacled, cursing and screaming, or else stunned and bloody. They were sometimes accompanied by their victims, who were likely to be stunned and bloody also. Women visitors could be either one category or the other, prisoner or victim. If prisoners, they were principally shoplifters or whores. They could be axe murderesses too, but this was rare. If victims, they had suffered usually at the hands of their husbands, either legal or, more often, common law. The more impermanent a relationship, the more violent. These were the categories of women cops were used to in station houses, and so now they froze and gawked, eyes like radar disks.
Nuns in station houses were totally outside every cop’s experience. The two old women now parading past them could not have aroused more shock, created more questions, started more talk if they had been stark naked. Chiefs Duncan and Cirillo, Powers knew, would hear about this in an hour. There would be no keeping of secrets now.
Upstairs he threw open the door on Luang. The phones were still at the moment, and the Chinese police officer, wearing jeans and a sweater, sat with his feet on the desk reading a book. But he jumped quickly to his feet, and his gaze switched from Powers to the nuns. Unlike the men downstairs, he showed no surprise at all, so that Powers wondered: is it because he is Chinese? Have the Chinese seen so much more than we that nothing surprises them anymore?
In this room Powers’ joke had fallen flat, and he did not know why.
“Sisters,” he said, “this is Police Officer Luang. Luang, this is Sister Mary Bartholomew and Sister Mary Jeanne. They’re retired nuns. They were missionaries in China for many years, and they speak Hakka. Show them what to do.”
Sister Jeanne said, “Oh, Captain, this is so-”
She must be eighty, Powers thought, and she’s as excited as a girl.
