Year of the Dragon

by Robert Daley

  And she was gone, Cirillo, standing in his doorway watched her hurry out through his anteroom, out into the hall, without looking back.

  Carol, as she waited for the elevator, could hardly believe her luck. She was on to a big, big story, and she had avoided lunch with Cirillo - two triumphs in a single morning.

  Out on Centre Street she flagged down a taxi, and rode up to the Drug Enforcement offices on West Fifty-seventh Street, where she was received by the agency press officer, a man named Joyce. Joyce told her she ought to build her piece around the agency’s director, a great guy and a swell interview. A lot of reporters had failed to interview the director lately. She should go to Washington to meet him. He, Joyce, would be glad to set it up. Carol said she would surely do this before she was finished, but in the meantime she wanted to talk to someone familiar with Chinatown. So Joyce summoned Agent Wilcoxon to brief her.

  “Any special aspect of Chinatown?” Joyce asked, while they waited.

  Carol had to be careful. She did not want any one agency knowing too much about the direction in which her story was heading. Not because someone might stop her. If anyone tried, her network would scream freedom of the press, as if there were no other. No one could stop her. But possible sources could be made to dry up, and if parts of her story were leaked to other reporters, its impact could be diminished.

  During the next hour Wilcoxon described how Asian heroin was grown in the so called Golden Triangle where Burma, Thailand and Laos came together, three thousand feet up in the mountains, one of the few areas in the world where the combination of soil, climate and altitude permitted the opium poppy to be grown at all. This region was controlled by remnants of the army of Chiang Kai-shek. These men had retreated there in 1949 and, afterwards, as the sole available means of supporting themselves, had gone into the opium trade. Every regiment was a private army now, each one headed by formerly high-ranking officers who had become indistinguishable from the terrible Chinese warlords of the past. These men moved literally tons of heroin down through the jungle on mule back to Bangkok, eventually shipping most of it out of Thailand to Hong Kong. The new warlords of the Golden Triangle were not only Chinese, but principally Hakkas and Chouchows who dealt only with other Hakkas and Chouchows at every step along the route to the United States, where the principal port of entry was believed to be New York. In recent years about 80 percent of New York heroin had come from Southeast Asia, Wilcoxon said.

  “How do you know this?” Carol demanded.

  Because it was different heroin. The DEA labs tested all the purchased and confiscated heroin that the agents brought in, and were able in most cases to determine exactly where it had come from.

  “You really should go to Washington to see the director,” interjected Joyce. “I know he’d love to talk to you.”

  Carol ignored him. “Does this agency have a case going against Koy?” she asked Wilcoxon.

  Looking surprised, Wilcoxon shook his head. Koy was too cute, he said. No one had ever been able to nail him yet.

  Carol could pick up a great deal of information in Washington, Joyce said. From the director. An interview with the director could be set up on very little notice.

  Wilcoxon began to talk about Koy, repeating the same gossip Carol had already heard. She wondered how this gossip would compare with the facts, whatever they might be, and also she wondered how the gossip had originated.

  Carol thanked them, put her notebook in her purse, and left. Joyce walked her to the elevator. “When shall I tell the director he can expect you?”

  “Soon,” said Carol. “Very soon. Tell him I’m looking forward to it.” The elevator doors closed like scissors, snipping the forced smile off her face, excising Joyce and his director from her life.

  In the taxicab riding back to Broadcast Center she plunged eagerly into her notebook. She was terrifically pleased with herself. The pages flipped like playing cards, like the sound of sustained applause.

  She decided tomorrow she would make some telephone calls into Chinatown, try to set up an interview with this Jimmy Koy. It occurred to her that she should perhaps clear it with Powers first, for if he did have a case going against Koy, she might disturb it, might not only warn Koy, but even put one of Powers’ men in danger. But she decided not to do it. Powers was getting more and more nervous lately and she didn’t want to risk upsetting him any further.

  NIKKI HAN, GO LOW and two other Chinese youths entered the school yard at about three o’clock the following afternoon. They were looking for Quong, and spotted him.

  The boy was seated halfway up the bleachers, wearing his Chinese cap, his English grammar open on his lap. He was poring over it, struggling to decipher information he needed to know, but the words were impenetrable to him, as dense as bamboo around a pond. He was also waiting for Luang, and kept glancing up, hoping to see him, his attention divided between the grammar book and thoughts of his guidance counselor. He felt slow-witted, happy, heavy with expectation.

  As Nikki Han approached the bleachers, Quong, though uneasy, came down onto the pavement to greet him. The other boys, till then unnoticed, sidled up to him from three different directions, isolating him from other children in that part of the yard. He became even more isolated when they began to move him toward an empty corner hidden by the bleachers from the school building. However, the attitude of the four Flying Dragons was effusive and friendly, with much backslapping, and Quong was no longer as afraid of them, as he had been initially. He even became relaxed, joking back with them, though at the same time keeping an eye open for Luang. He was concerned that the guidance counselor, if he entered the school yard now, might go away without being able to find him.

  Upon reaching the empty corner behind the bleachers, the attitude of Han and the others changed abruptly.

  Han said, “That Chinese guy we saw you with, who was he?”

  Quong immediately became tense. “Where?”

  “You were on the bleachers with him.”

  “My guidance counselor.” Quong again used the words “supervising teacher.”

  “There’s no Chinese guidance counselor in this school. Where’s the gun we gave you?”

  The boys began patting him down, looking for it. They seemed to know they would not find it. Quong became terrified. “I lost it.”

  “Hey, guys,” said Nikki Han, with pretended amusement, “he lost it.” It was the last amusement Quong was ever going to see.

  Go Low said, “That’s what happened, he lost it.”

  A third boy said, “He just lost it.” The four Flying Dragons, having surrounded Quong, began batting him back and forth with their bodies.

  “He lost it.”

  “Well, what do you know about that?”

  Nikki Han had him by the ear, twisting his head sideways. “Do you know what we do to informants?”

  Surrounding Quong, they marched him out of the school yard. Although no force was used, it was clear to Quong that he was in custody. He glanced in all directions for Luang, but Luang was not coming that day at all. He was sitting with the nuns on the wiretap in the Greenwich Village station house, and had as yet found no way to notify the boy that he would be out of circulation for a few days. In an hour this detail would make no difference to anyone. Quong, meanwhile, was looking for him desperately, for Mr. Goldfarb - anyone. But there was no adult in the school yard, only other kids who, if they glanced his way at all, saw nothing amiss. Predators had singled him out to make a meal. The rest of the herd went on grazing. Quong was marched through the school yard and out the Hester Street gate. He was too scared to cry out. It was as if his vocal cords had been cut. He was so scared he could not even speak.

  POWERS AND his wife sat at dinner at a table under a chandelier in Ting’s restaurant.

  “This is my precinct,” Powers said. “Which means I have to be seen here more or less around the clock. It’s called showing concern.”

  “More tea?” Eleanor poured it into both cups. “I’
m a little gun-shy about eating in this place, though. After what happened to you here the last time, I mean.”

  Powers’ own memories of that night were focused at this moment on Carol Cone. The machine gunning was over. His affair with Carol was not.

  He said, “Besides, I want Ting to think I’m keeping an eye on him.”

  “He hasn’t so much as glanced this way since we sat down. Somehow I don’t think he’s as afraid of you as you might like.”

  “It’s not funny, Eleanor.”

  “You don’t have to snap at me.”

  Powers looked across at Ting, who stood armed with menus at the door. “I could have sworn he was straight,” he said, “a victim, like nearly everyone else in Chinatown. Until he went with Koy to meet that Mafia guy.”

  “You can’t really be sure who Ting met, or what was said,” Eleanor told him. “Maybe you’re leaping to conclusions.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The police mind is always so certain when it thinks it has discovered evil.”

  A deeper remark, Powers reflected, than perhaps Eleanor knew. With his chopsticks, he pushed unknown ingredients around on his plate, for he was not hungry. Instead he watched Eleanor eat, and brooded about the nature of evil, a popular topic these days, especially among liberal intellectuals, of whom this city was so full. Such persons talked about evil in abstract terms, which cops never did. To cops evil was not abstract. It was physical, and usually extremely bloody. Often it was repulsive, often it stunk - you had to hold your nose to get into the room with it. To cops it was also commonplace. They came upon it every day, and thought about it more than they wanted to, and struggled with insights about its nature - insights denied to those moral philosophers and political philosophers who only talked so much about it, without ever having had to clean up after it. It was cops who carried the corpses out. That was the principal difference in outlook between cops and thinkers. It was also the reason cops took evil so much more seriously, so much more personally, than thinkers did. And yet the most evil-prone among us, Powers reflected, devoted only a minuscule percentage of his time to committing evil, probably less than one percent a day. However, the tendency in him to commit evil was most likely constant, and therefore so terribly dangerous to other people that it had to be extirpated, and the only way the person’s deplorable tendency could be extirpated was by extirpating the person himself - which was what cops did. That was the line of work they were in. So yes, to cops and to Powers evil was not abstract, not intellectual, but physical and personal. To a cop evil always came down to himself against one evildoer at a time. A cop could not war against all the evil in the world, only against those few individuals who, in the course of his career, would cross his path. Those he could fight. Those he could extirpate, and if he was a good cop he would keep trying to do so with all the energy and passion at his command until the last minute of the last day. For me at this time, Powers thought, the person to extirpate is Koy. Ting too, if I can get him.

  The check was presented. Standing, Powers began pulling money out of his pants pocket. “It’s not only important that I be seen in Chinatown at odd hours,” he said to his wife. “But also that I pay all my dinner checks with extreme conspicuousness.”

  Ting came over and shook hands with both of them. “It was a lovely dinner, Mr. Ting,” said Eleanor. She gave him a warm smile.

  Powers both noted the smile and resented it.

  Powers realized that he was impatient with his wife. They were frequently impatient with each other these days.

  Together they went down the broad staircase and out into the streets of Chinatown, where Powers glanced at his watch.

  “I know it’s late,” he told Eleanor. “But I want to stop in at my wiretap on the way home. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Mind?” Eleanor shook her head. “How long do you think I’ve been a policeman’s wife?”

  Sister Mary Bartholomew, Powers noted, as they came through the door, had cheeks like crepe paper. Looking at her face protruding out of her starched cowl was like looking at age squeezed out of a tube. The headphones were clamped over her habit over her ears, and the clamp looked as if it hurt, as if the headphones had flattened and elongated her head to match her cowl-squeezed cheeks. Powers was reminded of an accident victim he had seen once, lying on the pavement, head like a crushed suitcase. As she listened, the old woman made notes in the log book with one hand while with the other she worked the console, cutting in and out of the conversation. She seemed amazingly efficient, which surprised Powers, though he wondered why - the nuns of his youth had exuded efficiency as much as piety, maybe more; had instilled both values, as if they were inseparable, into little boys like himself: God loved you for praying and doing your chores. It was as if all the rest of life had no moral value whatsoever. If one prayed efficiently and performed chores piously, then God’s love was assured, and Powers wondered if these two nuns had proclaimed this same message during their years in China. If so, had the Chinese swallowed it as wholeheartedly as he had? And all the other little boys too, as he remembered.

  The call she now monitored had begun just as Powers and his wife entered the office. The second nun, Sister Mary Jeanne, had glanced up from her breviary and, like the classroom nuns of long ago, had imposed silence by giving them a stern look and pressing her forefinger to crimped lips. She had then resumed reading her breviary, and was reading it still, which reminded Powers of another message received from nuns. God preferred prayer to idleness any day. God was against wasted time.

  Eleanor had taken the chair in the corner. Powers waited with arms folded for the call to end.

  Removing the headphones, Sister Bartholomew turned around smiling. At the same time Sister Jeanne’s breviary closed over the holy picture which served her as a place mark.

  “We sent Officer Luang out to dinner,” Sister Bartholomew explained. “The poor man was starving. This is the log of calls that have come in, Captain.”

  Powers, as he studied the log book over her shoulder, was brooding again about evil, for nuns like this had taught him that moral values never changed, and he had found them instead as unstable as most of the rest of life, no more constant than football - the rules of both changed slightly every year, until, after a number of years, it became a very different game. He had known dozens of nuns like this in childhood. They were revered as the most saintly of human creatures. They - and the Catholic Church itself - had propounded the notion that virginity was the highest station to which man and, especially, woman could aspire. Today virginity was becoming scarce even among high school girls, and above a certain age was considered almost dishonorable. Nuns had become anachronisms, faintly ridiculous. He wondered what these two old ladies felt when they considered the subject, if they considered the subject. Did they ever talk about it to each other, ever suppose that perhaps they had wasted their bodies, if not their lives?

  “They seem to be mostly routine business conversations,” said Sister Bartholomew, studying the log beside him. “That’s what Officer Luang thought, too.”

  One of their number had once told Powers that it was evil to say the word damn, heavy baggage for a nine-year-old who wanted to sound tough, and for four or five years he had believed this. He wondered what that nun, or either of these nuns here, would think to hear the language that issued routinely from the mouths of some women today, from the mouth of Carol Cone, for instance.

  Sister Jeanne said, “The perpetrator did call his wife in Hong Kong.”

  Perpetrator. It made Powers smile to hear the police word spoken by an elderly nun.

  “You ladies must be tired,” said Eleanor. “This isn’t exactly God’s work, is it?”

  “Oh, it is, it is,” said Sister Bartholomew. “If this Mr. Koy is as bad a man as your husband says he is.”

  “His wife doesn’t live in Hong Kong,” said Powers. “His wife lives on Diplomats’ Row on the Upper East Side.”

  Sister Jeanne, shook her
head. “He called her wife in Hakka.”

  “And she talked back to him as if she was his wife, too,” said Sister Bartholomew. She pointed to the log book. “Anyway, there’s her number in Hong Kong.”

  Sister Jeanne said, “He’s going to go there as soon as he clears up some unfinished business here in New York.”

  Powers looked questioningly from one nun to the other, but neither had any further information to give him.

  Sister Jeanne said, “And it’s lovely to hear Hakka spoken again. It’s been so many years since we were there, so many years.”

  Powers puzzled over the notion that Koy was on his way to Hong Kong. But all he said was: “Let’s close up for tonight, Sisters.” Last night he had driven them home himself. Today there’d been time to make other arrangements. “There’s a radio car downstairs to take you back to the convent. And a radio car will pick you up in the morning, also.”

  But Sister Jeanne had become busy at the tape recorder. “I’m turning the machine off,” she said. “It wouldn’t be legal if it recorded a conversation with nobody monitoring it.

  “Fine, Sister,” he said. “Good night.”

  As soon as he had showed them out the door, Powers rushed to plug the machine back in.

  “You heard Sister,” said Eleanor. “That’s illegal.”

  Powers grinned at her. “Who’s going to turn me in?” he asked. “You?” He took her in his arms because he realized he could trust her with his career, with his life, with anything. As she put her head on his shoulder, he thought of Carol, whom he loved, but still didn’t trust much at all. He still had not trusted her even with his unlisted home telephone number.

  “If any more conversations come in tonight,” he murmured into his wife’s ear, “they’ll be on there. It’s Sister Jeanne’s fault. Sister Jeanne just forgot to turn the machine off.”