Year of the Dragon

by Robert Daley

  “She probably did it on purpose,” said Eleanor. “She struck me as a woman with no respect for the law. Unlike some people I could name.”

  “True,” said Powers. “She should be prosecuted.”

  “I don’t think anybody is going to prosecute a seventy-five-year-old nun, though. A forty-six-year-old police captain, now. That would be another story.”

  “You’re right,” said her husband, and he kissed her on the nose. “Come on, let’s go home.”

  He switched the light out, and locked the door. They went downstairs and as they walked out through the muster room Luang was just coming in.

  “We’ve closed down for the night,” Powers told him. They stood out on the stoop. “In the morning have the Sisters review today’s tape. Maybe they missed something.”

  In front of the station house the two nuns were climbing into the back of the police car. Powers, Eleanor and Luang watched it drive away with them.

  “Go home and get some rest,” Powers told Luang. He was amazed at how fond of Luang he had become. He liked him more every day. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  When Luang had gone off he and his wife got into the Mustang and started home, driving out of Greenwich Village and into the seedier neighborhood close to the waterfront. At West Street, Powers turned north under the old elevated highway, now closed and condemned. There were gaps in the pavement overhead where he could glance up and see sky. Weeds and bushes had taken root in the decaying concrete up there. Vines dangled over the edge like hair. Beside the ear the steel supporting stanchions passed by, making rhythmic thumps, each one a single drum beat, a gasp of fear. The steel was corroding fast, his headlights showed, rusting away, the stanchions getting thinner, like old nails, like old men. The world changed. New York changed. Maybe, Powers brooded, even his own life changed, was changing now, and he glanced at Eleanor who reclined on the backrest, eyes closed, half asleep. She didn’t know that Carol Cone existed. She was unaware of the sword that hung over her life.

  On Powers’ left the piers extended like fingers into the Hudson. There were cargo ships tied up, but some piers were empty, and from time to time he caught glimpses of the black water, flowing like a bride toward its marriage with the sea a few miles farther on. Close to midtown came passenger piers and Powers saw that three cruise ships were in, their sharp, lopsided prows extending over the road so that he was almost driving under them.

  Evil, Powers reflected, could not be defined as the opposite of good, because good being an absolute, was in itself indefinable. Both concepts had to be reduced to some level at which human beings could comprehend them before they could be discussed at all, and so perhaps it was fair to define evil as a betrayal of trust. The degree to which a human action was evil bore, therefore, a direct relationship to the type and sanctity of the trust violated.

  He glanced across at his wife.

  “Will you work an eight-to-four tomorrow?” murmured Eleanor.

  “An eight-to-four?” He would tour his precinct in the morning, then spend most of the afternoon at the wiretap. In the evening he had been invited to a community meeting and had to attend. Three hours on a dais. “No, an eight in the morning to midnight is more likely.”

  At Fifty-seventh Street he swooped up the ramp onto the West Side Highway. On his right was a long narrow park. To his left ran the river. It was almost at eye level, and only a few yards away, black and empty, tumbling tumultuously through time. Nothing floated on its mile-wide surface except probably garbage. It was this sumptuous river that had made New York into the most important city in the world. Dutch traders had come up this river, and after them the wooden ships, and then the ocean liners of almost every nation you could name, bringing wave after wave of immigrants who came ashore and moved out into the country, riding other rivers and later the trains, filling up the whole continent. The monumental impact of the Hudson River on America and thus the world could not be over-described, though it had little importance today. Today the foreigners came in by airplane, or across the Canadian border in the false bottoms of tanker trucks, and were betrayed, usually, by their own kind. Foreigners had always come to New York and every wave of them had been exploited by someone, but it seemed to Powers that no group had come here more foreign than today’s Chinese, who had the misfortune to arrive when the immigration was over, when there was simply no place left for them anywhere, nowhere to go, no one to look out for their interests except - Powers hesitated to say it, or even to think it - himself. It was a responsibility he had accepted, but did this make him better than other men or as capable of betrayal as anyone else? He glanced at his wife, whose eyes were closed. Though he was driving very fast, she was not concerned, thinking her life was in the best hands possible, his own. How much evil was he capable of, really? He did not know. He had never really been tempted until now.

  At Dyckman Street he exited from the highway, then turned north up Seaman Avenue past Isham Park, where he had sometimes played as a child. He had to get out of the car to open his garage, then climb behind the wheel again. Eleanor did not stir.

  He steered into the garage. His headlights shone on the whitewashed wall one foot away. He switched them off. Eleanor was sound asleep. He kissed her on the lips.

  “Wake up, sleeping beauty,” he said, “You’re home.”

  About ten minutes passed. Eleanor had trooped up the stairs to bed. Powers’ eye, as he passed the front door, had been caught by that day’s mail which, having fallen through the slot, lay scattered on the floor like fragments of his life. Gathering up the letters and bills, he had carried them into his study where he stood now, opening envelopes.

  The phone on his desk rang. It rang also, he knew, upstairs on the table beside their bed where Eleanor perhaps already slept - she was a woman who could fall asleep in seconds.

  Instantly Powers grabbed up the phone. Like a fighter he had responded to the bell - muscles tensed, senses alert, brain suddenly crowded. The precinct, he thought; A catastrophe. A cop shot. Or else one of his sons. Who else would call at this time of night?

  “Hello,” the female voice said, “are you all right? How are you?”

  It was the worst catastrophe he could have imagined: Carol.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “If your wife had answered I was going to say I was from the network checking out some facts.”

  He could think of nothing sufficiently noncommittal to reply. He could think of nothing to reply at all.

  Eleanor might already have picked up the bedside phone. She might pick it up even now to see who had called - what the emergency was. She would hear Carol’s voice, at first be puzzled by it, then comprehending.

  “Let’s go away together,” he heard Carol say. “Let’s go to Antigua. I know a neat place there.”

  Powers was stupefied, terrified.

  “Do you know Antigua?” she asked.

  “I’ve never been there, no.” He was listening for any sound Eleanor might make, her breathing, the click as she hung up.

  “Or Bermuda. That’s nice too.”

  His fear was like antelopes galloping across a plain, feverish eyes, drumming hooves, headlong, out of control.

  “I’ll give your suggestions some thought and call you back on it.”

  “You can’t talk freely,” she said. “Okay. I understand. Sleep well. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” She hung up.

  Now what, thought Powers. At some point his chest had begun to heave. He could barely breathe, was close to tears. If he went upstairs what would he find? Eleanor grimly waiting for him?

  If so, what would he say?

  But perhaps she hadn’t answered at all. Perhaps she was in bed leafing through a magazine, waiting to ask him who had called, was it an emergency? When he came into the room she would inquire idly: “Who was that?”

  If so, what to answer? He couldn’t even think of a convincing lie.

  A marriage was as delicate as a pane of glass - it could split or shatter at the slight
est sharp blow. A split down the middle could not be fixed, it was in there permanently, and the glass itself was now more fragile than ever. It could only be replaced, not repaired. Or you could stick tape over it, hold it together one day after another, learn to live with it, like learning to live with a deformity or a terminal disease.

  He went to the stairs and stared upwards. What would he find up there? He turned back toward the study, where he waited half an hour then, like an old man or a toddler, climbed the steps one at a time.

  The light was out in their bedroom - a good sign, he supposed. From outside the door he listened to her breathing, the way, years ago, he had listened to his small sons breathing. Eleanor was either asleep or pretending to be, so he went in.

  He lay in the dark beside his wife. After an hour or two he convinced himself he was safe. She seemed to be sleeping deeply. If she had intercepted Carol’s phone call, she could not have feigned sleep like that.

  In the morning, as soon as he reached his station house, he phoned Carol at home.

  “Don’t you ever do that again.”

  She said in a little girl’s voice, “Don’t scold me.”

  Last night’s titanic fear, now reduced to bite-sized morsels, poured out of him in chunks, like breakfast cereal out of a box.

  “That phone rings all over the house,” he said. “It rang right beside my wife’s ear. Don’t you understand that? She might have picked it up. She might have listened to all that talk of Antigua. How could you do a thing like that, how could you?”

  Carol’s voice was even smaller this time: “Please don’t scold me.”

  But he could not stop.

  “I won’t do it anymore,” said Carol, sounding close to tears, her voice scarcely a whisper. She sounded so contrite that Powers’ mood changed, and he began to soothe her.

  “I’d love to go to Antigua with you, but it’s impossible,” he said, and asked himself why he was mixed up with this woman, who dealt only in emotional extremes. She had him perpetually on the edge. No woman had ever pushed him about like this. “I’ll see you tonight, and we’ll talk about it,” he said gruffly, and rang off.

  THE TWO nuns had switched roles, Powers saw. Now it was Sister Jeanne’s head in the padded vise. Her protruding cheeks hung like the folds in drapes. It was Sister Bartholomew, wrinkled and smiling, who looked up from her breviary.

  “Nothing yet, Captain,” said Luang, coming forward.

  As Powers studied the log, the next call came in, and was intercepted by Sister Jeanne. Cool as a detective, she sat listening, pen poised. But after a moment she put the earphones down, and switched off. “He’s talking to his wife in Hong Kong again.”

  “No, no,” said Powers quickly. “Keep listening. His wife is here in New York. He may be talking to a drug contact.”

  The old lady obeyed, again clamping her black veil to her ears. Her eyes watched Powers as she listened, and almost immediately she began shaking her head. “He’s telling her he’ll see her very soon, and his son. He wants to sit with her in the garden. Now he’s asking about the health of relatives.”

  She switched off. She did not ask Powers’ permission, nor did she hesitate. She knew what the law was, and obeyed it. The nuns of his childhood had all been equally decisive. When you know what the Word is, Powers reflected, life becomes brisk, predictable. And you become arrogant. Arrogance and moral certitude are the same. One cannot exist without the other. It is choices that make life uncertain, that make men clumsy.

  “Maybe it really is his wife, Captain,” said Luang. “One of them. It’s in the Chinese tradition. Many rich Chinese take more than one wife. Especially if business keeps them away a long time. How long since this guy’s been back in Hong Kong, five years? So he took a new wife here. Who’s to know?”

  Sister Bartholomew nodded. “He’s right, Captain. We saw it often in China. It was one of the most pernicious moral problems we missionaries faced. It impeded many conversions. There was one man - a good and just man in every way, except that he had two wives. He took instruction, and wanted to be baptized. But we couldn’t baptize him. He even gave us money to build our church. We told him he had to get rid of one of his wives first, and he refused to do it. He later died. We felt badly about it. We prayed for him and said masses for his soul, but he was a man with two wives, and I don’t know what good it did.”

  The old lady shook her head darkly, sadly.

  This story cast a pall upon the room. These holy nuns believed in a God who operated by the book, who had set up a place called hell, who had sent the rich Chinese gentleman there to burn for all eternity, and his two wives with him no doubt; and if all this was true, then the story was a grim one. Until well into his teen years Powers, as a product of women like this, had held these same beliefs, a notion that appalled him now. But so had everyone around him, adults as well as children, or so it had seemed at the time.

  Was the world really that simplistic thirty years ago?

  Sister Bartholomew said brightly, “Whatever unfinished business the perpetrator was waiting for has been taken care of. He’s leaving for Hong Kong the day after tomorrow.”

  “He mentioned his flight number in one of his calls,” said Sister Jeanne. “I copied it down. I figured that was all right because it wasn’t personal.”

  “Let me see that.”

  Powers transferred the information into his notebook, then paced the room, head down. “By the time Koy gets back,” he said to Luang, “our wiretap will have run out.”

  A phone in the room began to ring, and Powers, who had left this number with his desk sergeant, picked it up.

  Another Chinese corpse had been discovered, the sergeant said. Same place as last time. A kid. Looked like another execution. No, the corpse had not yet been identified.

  “I’ll go out there and take a look,” said Powers. As he put the phone down, a stricken expression came onto his face, for he knew intuitively what he would find.

  Luang said, “What’s the matter, Captain?”

  “Sisters,” Powers said, “we’re going to have to leave you alone for a while. Something has happened. Any calls that come in now may be vitally important. I think you would be in your legal rights to record all of them, even though they might seem to be innocent.” He didn’t know whether they would obey him or not, but couldn’t worry about that now. “Luang, you come with me.”

  The drive to the Brooklyn warehouse took twenty minutes, during which Powers spoke not one word. Relax, he told himself, but he remained hunched over the wheel. You can’t be sure. There are a hundred and fifty or more Flying Dragons, and several other gangs as well, maybe five hundred members of Chinatown youth gangs in all. They’re always killing each other. This corpse could be anybody.

  “Where we going?” asked Luang.

  But his fear made Powers deaf as well as mute, and he did not answer.

  They crossed the Brooklyn Bridge in blinding sunshine. “It’s sure a nice day,” said Luang.

  No answer.

  They pulled up in front of the warehouse. Five blue-and-white police cars parked outside. One ambulance. One medical examiner’s car. Chief of Detectives Cirillo’s car. Ten or twelve pedestrians had gathered on the sidewalk as well.

  A cop stood guard at the head of the alley. To him the corpse inside was just another corpse. “You should post a permanent guard on this place, Captain,” he joked.

  Powers and Luang went on through. The alley was unchanged since their last visit, except that somebody had rearranged the pile of doors. Probably a scavenger had sifted through them, Powers thought. The pile was more unstable than ever and he clambered across it on his hands and knees. At the back of the alley the steel entrance door still hung by one hinge. The bottom of the staircase was still missing. They went on up. At the far end of the loft, near the one open window, stood the group of cops and detectives. The body was there also, lying like a third Hsu brother, with the same medical examiner as last time kneeling over it. Power
s did not recognize the corpse and had not expected to. He stood aside to give Luang a clear view.

  Luang said, “Quong,” and gagged. Stumbling to the corner of the loft he began to vomit onto the floor.

  The medical examiner looked up at Powers. “I couldn’t say which shot caused the boy’s death. He’s been shot in each ear, in each eye, and in the mouth.”

  Powers nodded. He was looking across at Luang.

  “The one in his mouth missed his mouth.” Like a nun enforcing silence, the medical examiner put his finger to his lips. “It hit him here under the nose.”

  “He saw too much, heard too much and talked too much,” muttered Powers.

  Luang came back wiping his lips and stood over the corpse with tears in his eyes.

  “The poor kid.” Luang’s control let go, and he began weeping. Tears coursed down his cheeks. Powers, trying to offer comfort, put his arms around him. He held him into his chest as he had held his sons when they were small.

  “He must have been so scared,” sobbed Luang. “So scared, Captain, so scared.”

  Cirillo called, “Can I see you a moment over here please, Captain Powers.”

  Luang wiped his eyes on his sleeve, and Powers went over to Cirillo.

  “I hear you got a wiretap going,” said the chief of detectives. “I want to know what it’s all about.”

  “It’s about this kind of thing.” Powers gestured vaguely toward the corpse. Now the pressure starts, he thought.

  “Tell me more.”

  When Powers did not answer, Cirillo said, “I got a call in to the district attorney to find out. But maybe you can save me the trouble of waiting for it.”

  Powers said, “No, you better ask him.” He was in no mood to be browbeaten by the chief of detectives. He began to blink. “I have to go now.”

  “I’m not finished talking to you yet.”

  “I’m sorry, you’ll have to talk to the DA.”