Year of the Dragon

by Robert Daley

  He got Luang and they left the building. Powers stumbled going down the stairs. That’s when he realized that his own eyes too were full of tears. He could barely see. In the street Luang caught up with him and asked bleakly, “What do we do now, Captain?”

  Luang went back to the wiretap, and Powers to his office where he sat blaming himself for all three executions. It got dark outside, and still he counted up the blunders he had made and wondered what to do next. Finally he signed out and went home. He did not want to see Carol. The decision was instinctive. Hers was not a lap where he could lay his head. Whether stalking a woman or a bear - this was one of the first lessons primitive man ever learned - weakness was likely to be fatal. The stalking hunter must appear to be hard, ruthless, cruel. Doubt was out, mercy unmanly. Remorse was counter-productive.

  And so Powers sat at home at the kitchen table eating soup. One could afford to show weakness only in the cave, though not very much even there. It was late, and his wife in her bathrobe stood by the stove cooking him a hamburger.

  “Don’t blame yourself,” said Eleanor. “It’s not your fault.”

  “I set him up though, didn’t I? I put Luang on to him. And I was the one who decided to leave him out there.”

  “Eat your soup.”

  “You should have seen what his skull looked like,” said Powers. Today he had learned a new definition of evil. “His skull was mush. He was fifteen years old.”

  “You’ll feel better tomorrow.” Her bathrobe was like chain mail - his misery kept glancing off it. He wanted sympathy and wasn’t getting any.

  “Koy ordered it,” Powers muttered. “I have to believe that. It’s as if he was sending me a message personally.”

  Eleanor frowned. “There’s nothing personal about it. He may not be responsible at all. He may not know you exist.”

  Every man could remember a time when he was loved precisely for his weaknesses - by his mother, who was stronger than he was. As an adult he went on seeking the same relationship whenever he was hurt, but he never found it again.

  “Your witness is dead,” said Eleanor, “and your suspect is on his way to Hong Kong. That means your investigation is dead.”

  Wives usually remained friends with their mothers, having no substitute. Whereas husbands did not, having assigned the role of mother to their wives. Wives, realizing this, were offended, even insulted, and when their husbands came to them in pain usually refused to mother them - as Eleanor refused to do now.

  “When he comes back you’ll never get your wiretap renewed. That’s what you’re brooding about, isn’t it? Do you really care about the dead boy?”

  “Of course I care about the dead boy,” snapped Powers. “I’ve seen a lot of ugly things since I’ve been on the job, but that’s the ugliest, and I mean to get the man behind it.”

  Eleanor at the stove slid his hamburger onto a plate. “How?”

  “If he’s going to Hong Kong, I’m going with him,” said Powers. He added lamely, “He’ll be less on his guard there.” But so far he had only bungled every aspect of this investigation. He was like a man in a dark shop who, while fumbling for the light switch, kept knocking precious vessels off shelves. They crashed to the floor all around him.

  Eleanor was annoyed. It seemed to her that a grown man, when hurt enough, or disappointed enough, reverted to the emotional level of a small boy, a syndrome that did not exist in women. Although there was a little girl hidden inside every adult woman too, it almost never showed, no matter what the stress.

  “You’ll stick out like a sore thumb amid all those Chinese. He’ll spot you from a mile away. Besides, how would you get there? The City’s broke. I can’t see the police department springing for your ticket.”

  Powers looked up from his soup, and their eyes met.

  “Oh no,” Eleanor said, “you’re not using our money.”

  Her husband shook his head. “No, of course not.”

  THE FOLLOWING morning the police commissioner, in shirtsleeves, sat behind his desk signing papers, when the deputy inspector, his chief secretary, entered the office to say that Captain Powers was on the phone.

  “What does he want?”

  “It’s personal and confidential, he said.”

  The police commissioner barely hesitated. “Tell him to speak to Chief Duncan.” Having accorded Powers approximately ten seconds of his time and brain power, he resumed scanning the long memo - something about the reorganization of the Bronx detective command - that had reached the top of the pile before him.

  So by noon Powers was at police headquarters in front of Duncan’s desk. He told Duncan he had confidential information linking Koy to the murders in Brooklyn and to other Chinatown rackets as well, and-

  “The Chinese Mafia again,” Duncan interrupted.

  “I haven’t used that phrase with anybody.”

  Cirillo, who stood to one side, said, “You used it with that television broad, and she used it with me.”

  Powers, surprised, said: “I did not.” What had Carol said and done behind his back? He looked from one man to the other. But he could not worry about that now.

  He began to explain that he wanted to follow Koy to Hong Kong.

  Duncan interrupted. “Are you crazy? I can’t authorize that.”

  “I’m not asking you to authorize it. I’m asking you to go to the PC with it.”

  “You have no police powers in Hong Kong,” scoffed Duncan. “You have no contacts.”

  “He’d be less on guard there,” Powers persisted. “And I do have some ideas-”

  “You don’t speak the language. You don’t know the city. You wouldn’t have a chance. It would be wasting your time and the City’s money.”

  “It wouldn’t cost very much.”

  “Too much.”

  “I’ve worked out the costs and the possible advantages. I’ve written you a forty-nine on it.” Power’s attempted to present the memo, but Duncan ignored it.

  “Let me tell you my plans when I get there.”

  “The answer is no.”

  “But-”

  “The subject’s closed.”

  Powers spun on his heel and strode toward the door.

  “Come back here,” said Cirillo. “I want to know more about that wiretap.”

  “I want to know why I wasn’t informed about it,” said Duncan.

  Powers, at the door, said, “You’d better talk to the district attorney.” Though he might have walked out slamming the door, he did not quite dare to do it.

  There was a long pause. Finally the chief of detectives said: “I spoke to the DA last night.

  “What did he say?”

  “That it was too sensitive to talk about over the phone.”

  And when you offered to go over and see him in person, thought Powers, he refused to see you.

  “So why don’t you tell me.”

  The two men eyed each other.

  There was no other explanation, thought Powers. The elected district attorney of New York County did not need to answer to Cirillo. To prove his stature, or because he was annoyed, or to humiliate Cirillo perhaps - who knew why? - he had decided to protect the wiretap, to protect Powers.

  “I’m sorry,” Powers decided to say. “I can’t help you.” And he went out. Behind him a fist - either Cirillo’s or Duncan’s - was slammed down on the desk. He heard it through the door, but felt no satisfaction. He was trying to figure out a way to follow Koy to Hong Kong.

  From a pay phone in the lobby, he dialed the district attorney, and to his surprise was accorded an immediate appointment. Ten minutes later, having walked briskly up Centre Street, he stood in front of the man’s desk and again explained where he wanted to go and why. All he needed was money.

  “Why come to me? The police department has far more money than I do.”

  “You have a special fund you can draw on for cases such as this.”

  The district attorney stepped to his window and stared out. “But I think it
’s a crazy idea too. I don’t see what you imagine you can do when you get there. It’s his city, not yours. And if he spots you - you wouldn’t be the first individual to disappear in that place.”

  Powers had his hands on the DA’s desk, leaning forward over it, and he was pleading. “Why is he going to Hong Kong? He hasn’t been back in five years. We know there was an open investigation on him there until a short time ago. He’s taking a risk to go back. Something important must be about to go down. Whatever it is, it’s connected with Chinatown here.”

  The DA had turned from the window. He studied him silently.

  “Look,” Powers pleaded, “It’s the only chance we’ve got.”

  The district attorney shook his head again. “I have too little money to give you any of it.” But after a pause he added: “I’ll do this for you. I’ll call the PC and tell him I think you should go. I won’t lean on him. I’ll simply tell him that much. I think you are being foolhardy, but in a way I admire you for it. If you go, be careful, and good luck.”

  THERE WAS a leather box on Powers’ dresser. It held cuff links and tie bars that his sons had given him over the years and that he never wore. Flipping open the cylinder of his off-duty gun - the other was in his locker at the station house - he ejected the five bullets into the box with the other jewelry, then went downstairs to the laundry room where, because he could not bring it with him, he handcuffed the gun through its open cylinder to a water pipe. This done, he was ready to leave the house. Eleanor was already waiting with the car in the street, and he went out through the garage, slung his suitcase into the trunk, and they started for the airport. All the way out he was afraid he might observe a crime in progress. Without his gun he felt totally impotent. If they came upon a crime, what action would he take? Should he intervene anyway?

  At the Pan Am terminal he kissed his wife goodbye and watched her drive away. He had an hour before takeoff and knew he would need most of it, and after checking in and passing through security, he phoned Carol Cone.

  “Look, I have to go away for a while,” he said to her. Since late yesterday, when the okay had come down, he had been deliberating how - and how much - to tell her.

  “When do you go?”

  “Today.”

  “I don’t like the sound of this. Are you really going away?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t seem unhappy about it.”

  “Well, I have to go.” How he hated the telephone, which promised so much more than it gave. It was as if its capacity to convey emotion was limited by the thinness of the wire. It was unsuitable for any message more complicated than you could send by Morse code.

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “A week, a month. I don’t know.” He hoped it would be for long enough so that he might decide where his life went from here. Perhaps whatever hold this woman had on him would be broken.

  “Will I see you before you go?”

  “There isn’t time. I leave in about an hour.”

  Communication by telephone was simply not normal, and perhaps was not even possible. One interpreted the sounds and one measured the pauses. These were the only clues to whatever messages one hoped to exchange. Powers measured Carol’s pause now and judged it to be an unhappy one. But her next words betrayed no emotion at all.

  “Where are you going?”

  There was no reason not to tell her. “Hong Kong.”

  “Is your wife going with you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t make me interview you. Why are you going to Hong Kong?”

  “Because the guy I’m chasing is going there.”

  “Then the police department is sending you.”

  “Yes.”

  “It seems odd.”

  “Well, maybe it is. But the PC approved it.”

  “The man you’re chasing - it’s the same one you told me about the other night?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  Another pause. Powers wished he could see her face, watch her chest move as she breathed, touch the life that was in her, instead of guessing at the timbre of a few words that, these days, might just as easily be coming from a machine.

  “What hotel will you stay at?”

  “Why? Are you going to call me up?”

  “Sure.”

  “The Hotel Mandarin.”

  “Well,” said Carol, “I have to get off. Have a good trip.”

  Powers stared at the dead phone in his hand, and thought that it isolated those who used it into worlds as small, as sterile, and as separate as their individual phone booths. It was perfect for causing pain.

  He spent most of the next twenty-four hours in the air, staring out the porthole at vacant sky. The plane set down in San Francisco and Tokyo to refuel and he did not leave the transit lounge in either place. It was midnight in Hong Kong when he checked into the Mandarin. The Chinese bellhop led him to his room, stood his suitcase upright on the low baggage rack, accepted the tip and left, and Powers pushed open the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the small balcony. The air was balmy, and the city quiet. All around him slept millions of Chinese and he looked off across the black water at Kowloon and the mainland. There were ferries crossing, and cargo ships anchored here and there in between. It was noon New York time, he was not particularly tired, and he came in off the balcony and began pacing the room. He felt very much alone.

  AS SOON as she had hung up on Powers, Carol dialed the Flowering Virtue Funeral Parlor still again. She had left messages each of the last three days, but Koy had not returned them.

  Again a Chinese voice answered. “Boss no here.”

  “Is he on a trip?”

  “Gone oversea, mebbe.”

  “He’s gone to Hong Kong?”

  “Mebbe. Hong Kong mebbe.”

  Carol rushed down the hall to see Lurtsema. Her story, she told him, had just gone to Hong Kong and she wanted to go there after it.

  “Why don’t you let me give the assignments around here, Carol? That’s my job.”

  “All right. How about giving me this one.”

  She had, once again, walked into Lurtsema’s office uninvited. She was once again usurping Lurtsema’s role and he did not like it or her. But instead of saying so he pointed out that such a journey was costly, nothing was prepared for her at the other end, and that the focus of her story was here, not there. Besides, they had a news show to put on every day, and needed her on it. The answer was no.

  So Carol took the elevator up to the tower, where she walked in on the network’s executive vice president for corporate affairs, to whom she complained that Lurtsema’s well-known antagonism toward female talent was hampering the network’s news-gathering capability once again. The vice president said he would look into it, and Carol was satisfied, for she knew television. She knew where the power lay. She knew all the peculiar rules of this extremely peculiar game. She had only to go back to her office and wait, and she did so.

  The vice president phoned down to Lurtsema, heard him out, and then advised him cordially to give Carol Cone any goddamn thing she wanted. When Lurtsema asked why, he said, “Because her contract is up in three months, and NBC has already made her an offer. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Perfectly,” said Lurtsema huffily. “Why don’t you give her the job of producer, in addition to the one she’s already got?”

  Having made his decision and his point, the vice president, who was always smoothing someone’s ruffled feathers, was obliged to spend the next ten minutes smoothing Lurtsema’s, which he succeeded in doing, more or less. In any case, air tickets to Hong Kong arrived on Carol’s desk that very afternoon, and she sat down and tried to decide what preparations she ought to make first. What contacts could she use? Did she have the right clothes?

  KOY, meantime, was circling the globe in the opposite directio
n, moving fast, making local stops. Some stops were business-mandated. He was setting up his organization. At others he only changed planes and airlines so as to leave a trail that turned cold as he made it. He flew more or less in a straight line. There was no need to exaggerate. But he had no reservations and no through ticket - he bought each ticket in cash just before boarding each plane.

  The essential thing was to stay off any one central computer. Instead he would appear – briefly - on many. Computers had memories that were almost human - the press of new customers caused the memory of old ones to recede; very soon it obliterated them. It would take law enforcement weeks to figure out where Koy had gone and when, much less why, and if any single computer lost his name, it would be impossible. Past fugitives stepped in and out of streambeds to throw bloodhounds, if any, off the scent. Modern man – Koy - stepped in and out of computers.

  This was a precaution only. He had no reason to believe any agency of any country was interested in him. Old cases, like old clothes, went to the bottom of the trunk and were rarely seen again. He had lain quiet, after all, five years. Law enforcement had fewer computers than airlines and, to be blunt about it, even more new business. Case closed.

  He knew of course of the existence of Luang, not his name or function, just that he had turned up in two widely separate corners of Koy’s life. It was bizarre. It defied explanation. It was surely not coincidence. It was probably Ting’s work, and he had men working to find out more. That a New York police captain was single-mindedly pursuing Koy almost on a free-lance basis would have seemed to him inconceivable. He knew law enforcement and it did not work that way. The idea simply never occurred to him.

  He landed in Heathrow Airport, London, at 8 A.M. Because it enabled him to get in and out of airports quickly, he traveled light, only a single piece of hand luggage plus $10,000 in hundred-dollar notes in an envelope in his breast pocket. His journey was a long one - more than 25,000 miles - and he would be able to replenish his funds only in Hong Kong. He also carried two passports, which would further confuse the computers. He planned to use them more or less alternately, beginning with his Hong Kong passport, made out in the name of Koi Tse-ven, here in England. The name on his new American passport, unused until now, was Jimmy Koy. By marrying an American citizen, and by completing the required years of uninterrupted United States residency, he had qualified for naturalization, which, among other benefits, gave each new American the right to choose whatever new name he wished to be known by. And so Koi Tse-ven had become Jimmy Koy – legally - and had taken out a passport in that name.