Year of the Dragon

by Robert Daley

  “Nothing yet.”

  “I’ve asked them to bring you the Wanchai dossiers first - that’s Koy’s old district. Trouble is, a district that size has close to a thousand constables assigned. How many have you looked through so far?”

  “About two hundred.” He studied a dossier a moment, then closed it and moved it onto a separate pile. “That could be one of them. The driver.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t have to identify anyone absolutely. If you can collect half a dozen or ten possibles, we can have a lineup.”

  Powers sighed. “I know that.” He kept glancing through the dossiers even as the conversation continued. “How does your extradition treaty with the United States read?”

  “It depends on the charge. If we charge Koy with attempted murder, we could extradite him.”

  “Then bring me some more dossiers,” said Powers.

  “I’m going home to bed,” said Sir David. “If you should find our man, don’t hesitate to ring me up. It doesn’t matter what time it is.”

  “Thank you, Sir David,” said Powers. And he added, “However this comes out, I want you to know how grateful I am to you.”

  Sir David gave him an embarrassed smile and a pat on the shoulder, and strode out of the room. But a moment later he poked his head back in. “By the way, we picked up the car. Stolen, of course. My technicians are working on it. Fingerprints, that sort of thing. Maybe some evidence will turn up.”

  About an hour later Powers was summoned to the reception room. Grateful for a break, he walked out there rubbing his eyes, and was handed a letter by a man who introduced himself as Austin Chan. The letter, Chan explained, was from Carol Cone. He had been lucky enough to get her a seat aboard Pan Am’s 1 A.M. flight to Tokyo and Honolulu, and had driven her to the airport. She was already in the air. She had sounded almost hysterical when she telephoned Chan. He had gone straight to the hotel, and had stayed with her all the way to the gangway to the plane. He had never known anyone so frightened. All she wanted was to get out of Hong Kong. Had there been no space aboard the Pan Am flight, she was willing to take any other flight going almost anywhere.

  When Chan was gone, Powers tore open the envelope. The note was short. A footstool of a note when he might have hoped for a ladder - something to help him see into high hidden places. Carol apologized - she was less of a trouper, she wrote, than she had thought. But she could not bear Hong Kong one second longer, she was too afraid. She would wait for Powers in Hawaii at the Hana Maui Hotel. Come quickly, she wrote.

  After a moment Powers folded the letter, shoved it into his pocket, and went back to his dossiers. There was no hurry now. It was as if Hong Kong had just emptied out, as if outside this room, there were no people left alive in the town.

  BY LATE the next afternoon Powers had rubbed his eyes so much they were red and swollen. He looked like a mourner who had been weeping inconsolably for days. He felt like a jeweler who had remained bent over his table for hours chipping away at the mass so as to make a small perfect stone. His eyes ached, his back ached, his entire head ached, but on the desk now stood the work he had created: a small mound of dossiers. Not a mountain, nor even a hill, but only a mound. It was so featureless and indistinct as to seem insignificant. During the last fifteen hours he had dozed for two hours on a leather couch. He had consumed three pots of strong tea. He had examined about 5,000 dossiers. He had been through the dossiers of all constables assigned to the five districts once ruled by Koy and the other four Dragons. Five thousand Chinese constables had trekked across his optic tract numbing its sensors, packing them down. He remembered them like a desert army seen through the heat haze crossing the horizon.

  His gaze now felt fixed forever on the middle distance, fixed on nothing. Scooping up the selected dossiers, he walked across into Sir David’s office, into sunlight that streamed cheerfully in the window.

  “I’ve got seven possibilities,” he said. “Let’s have a look at them. Maybe I won’t have to go through the rest.”

  Sir David, who was again dressed in bush jacket, knee socks and short pants, had been standing at the window peering down on the harbor. Crossing to his desk, he pushed the intercom button, and gave instructions for the seven constables to be picked up and a lineup arranged. He also asked for his car to be brought around in front. “One of my men just called in,” he explained. He stroked both his muttonchops. “They found a sampan that seems to match your description. Let’s go out and take a look at it, shall we?”

  The expanse of permanently moored junks seemed both vaster and more squalid than it had last night. Weathered, rotting wood. Decks and superstructures as patched as sails. Limp, frayed mooring lines. Hulls, after decades of floating on filthy harbor tides, that were as black and scum - covered as the engine compartments of trucks. Powers sniffed the fetid air. At the moment the tide must be out - the odor of sewage and of stinking mud assaulted his nose. Following Sir David and a constable, he started out across acres of decks.

  The sampan had been nosed in under the sterns of two junks, where it rode like a suckling calf nursing in a herd of elephantine cows. Powers looked down at it and, whether from fatigue or residual fear, felt himself begin to tremble. The sampan was of course empty, but on the platform in the prow still rested the wired-together cinder blocks.

  Sir David eyed Powers. “From the look of you, we have the correct sampan. Do you feel certain enough to identify it in a courtroom?”

  Powers shook his head. “No. What I’m mainly reacting to are those goddamn cinder blocks. My toes are curled up tight. The hair is sticking up on the nape of my neck.”

  He turned away and gazed off toward the town. The onrush of violent emotion surprised him. He found he had to swallow hard. But when he turned back to Sir David, he had himself under control. “You’d think they’d be smart enough to get rid of the cinder blocks,” he said. “All they had to do was drop them over the side somewhere.” He was again considering the sampan from the point of view of a policeman. He shook his head in disgust. “Criminals are idiots, aren’t they?” To the police mind getting rid of the evidence would have been paramount. To leave the cinder blocks to be found was inconceivable. Yet to the criminal mind, and to cops when they became criminals, other imperatives took precedence, apparently. They left evidence around all the time. Powers said, “Tell your men to check the sampan out. Who owns it? Where was he last night? Where did the cinder blocks come from?”

  “Calm down,” said Sir David. “We’ve taken care of all that. Would you recognize the sampan driver if we did find him?”

  Powers found himself unable to stare very long at the cinder blocks. By now they might be wired to his ankles, or his neck. Carol’s neck or ankles, too.

  “I never saw the guy’s face,” he said. “It was too dark.”

  “What about Mrs. Cone?”

  “I don’t know. We could ask her.”

  “Do you think she’d be willing to return here to give evidence?”

  “I don’t know,” said Powers. “I don’t feel sure of very much right now, if you want to know the truth. Do you mind if we leave?”

  THE LINEUP took place immediately after dinner. Powers, Commissioner Worthington, Sir David, and an assistant Crown Counsel named Downes stood in a darkened office peering through a one-way window into a second room that was brightly lighted, and in which ten men sat on a bench opposite them - the seven constables whose dossiers Powers had selected, plus three of Sir David’s officers. Around their necks, the men wore placards numbered from one to ten.

  “We’ll have them walk up to the window one at a time,” said the Crown Counsel.

  “You don’t have to,” said Powers, turning away from the glass. “Numbers six and seven.” This is chilling business, he thought, and imagined he felt no emotion whatever. His mind felt absolutely cold.

  “Are you certain?” asked Crown Counsel Downes.

  The question enraged Powers.
Residual terror surfaced - those two Chinese thugs in there had tried to kill him - and turned itself into fury, all of it directed toward the young Crown Counsel. “Yes, I’m certain,” he snarled, and stared at him, breathing hard.

  “Okay, okay,” said Downes. “Calm down. Nobody doubts your word.” Stepping to the door, he ordered someone in the hall to clear the lineup room except for numbers six and seven.

  As he watched this happening through the one-way window, Powers’ mood changed again, and he tried to explain to himself his physical aversion to these men. It was like looking at cobras behind glass in a zoo. Take the glass away and they’d be in the same room with you. Their bite would be fatal.

  He watched eight men troop out of the room. The two left behind attempted to gaze steadfastly at the floor, but were too agitated. Their collars suddenly seemed too tight. They squirmed. Beads of sweat appeared on their foreheads.

  All this Powers observed. “Any further doubts, Sir David?” he asked.

  “We mustn’t count on them giving up Koy,” said Sir David. “They are surely Triads, with a code of silence thousands of years older than the Mafia code of omerta. I doubt they’ll give up anybody. Too worried about death by a myriad of swords, what?”

  “Perhaps after they’re convicted,” said Powers.

  “Perhaps. I don’t think so. One can always hope so.”

  It was up to Downes to prepare the strongest possible case against them, and Powers spent the next several days with the expatriate young Englishman. Downes had never prosecuted a case of this importance before, but he was filled with enthusiasm. He wanted to trace the route of the suspects’ car from the Mandarin to Aberdeen, and Powers rode beside him in a government car while, with yellow legal pad on his knee and stop watch in his left hand, he noted down the mileage and probable elapsed time of each portion of the ride. He wanted to know exactly how the car had entered the lot at Aberdeen and in which direction it was pointed. He got a tape measure out and measured not only distances, but even the height of the staircase, and the depth of the water beside the dock, and he noted all such details on his legal pad while Powers stood beside him in the bright warm sunshine and shivered as if from chills.

  Powers was astonished that such violent physical reactions continued so long after the event. He thought it must be age. Life got more precious every year - and fear penetrated deeper - and this young legal genius kept making him relive the fear over and over again.

  “You were standing here,” said Downes pacing it off. “And Chin, the older of the two defendants, was on your left side. The other man was slightly in front of him, about there.”

  Powers shook his head. “No, you have it reversed. Look, if you don’t mind, I’ve had enough of this for the moment.” He walked up the dock to the staircase and up to the car, hugging himself for warmth, and the young prosecutor came up behind him looking solicitous, remarking, “I say, you must have caught a virus, a bug of some kind. You don’t look at all well.”

  THE MORPHINE bricks, sewn into the bottom of the bogus mailbags, had reached Hong Kong from Bangkok, had been offloaded from the airliner and then from the postal truck without incident. In a shed on the outskirts of Kwu Tung, a village in the New Territories up near the Chinese frontier, chemical conversion had taken place. The resulting No. 4 heroin was sealed into flat plastic pouches, and delivered by car at night to a textile factory in the city of Tsuen Wan, where two men inserted the pouches into a shipment of children’s dresses at the rate of one pouch per box. These boxes were then sealed and loaded in an airline container addressed to the Hong Kong and Formosa Trading Corporation of the Netherlands, a company controlled by former Sergeant Hung. The container reached Kai Tak airport on a truck, part of a load of similar containers, none of which were examined closely by customs officials. It went out on a KLM flight to Amsterdam the next day.

  AT DOWNES’ request, Powers phoned Carol on Maui. The connection with the hotel was made quickly enough, but there was a considerable wait as she was located - apparently at the swimming pool - and brought to the phone.

  “Oh, Artie, I was so scared.”

  “You were no more scared than I was.”

  “I’m so glad to hear your voice. When are you coming here? It’s so lovely. A hot trade wind blows all day long. We can walk on the beach, or hike up to the volcano. It’s so gorgeous. I can’t wait to see you. When will I see you?”

  “I have the Crown Counsel here with me,” answered Powers. “Those two men are in custody, and we’re trying to put together our case against them. The Crown Counsel wants to know if you would agree to testify at the trial.”

  At the other end of the line, some eight thousand miles away, there was silence. “Do I have to?” asked Carol.

  “It would strengthen our case. But I don’t suppose they can make you come back to Hong Kong if you don’t want to.”

  “I’d rather not then. Tell them I won’t come. That’s all right isn’t it? I’ve been having nightmares. I wake up sweating. I don’t want to have to see those men again.”

  “They’d certainly like you to testify, though. It wouldn’t be for about six months, as I understand it.”

  “It’s all so sordid - which wouldn’t do my image any good, would it? If there’s no other way to put them in jail, I’ll come. Otherwise I’d rather not. Now tell me how soon you can get here.”

  “Carol, I wish you would realize that I don’t have your kind of money and I do have other obligations. I’ve got to get back to New York.”

  Her voice became low and hurt. “When will you leave Hong Kong?”

  “The day after tomorrow.”

  “Are you mad at me because I don’t want to testify? Is that why you won’t come to Maui?”

  “Not at all, Carol. It’s just that I have to get home.”

  “To your wife?”

  “To my wife,” he answered firmly. To soften the blow, he added: “And to my job. I do have a job you know.” He half expected her to berate him.

  But Carol said only, “I’ll wait for you. I hope you’ll change your mind. Promise me you’ll think about it.”

  “I’ll think about it.” Rejection was not easy. Neither to give nor receive.

  “Will you call me again before you leave there?”

  “If you like.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  Powers looked across the desk at Downes. “The Crown Counsel is waiting for me,” he said.

  When he had hung up, he said to Downes, “She doesn’t want to testify.”

  “Shit,” said Downes.

  “Listen,” said Powers. “I wonder if you’d do me a favor. I wonder if I could use your phone to call up my wife? Can we take a break for a few minutes?”

  “Call her later,” said Downes. He was flipping through his notes, thinking out how to get by in court without Carol.

  Powers shook his head. “I want to call her right now.” When Downes hesitated, Powers added, “Just give me a couple of minutes to talk to my wife, and I’ll be at your disposal the rest of the day.”

  When Downes had gone out of the office, Powers dialed his home number. The phone rang five times before Eleanor, sounding groggy, came on the line.

  “Oh, it’s you.” It was the middle of the night there. She was in bed and still half asleep but sounded glad to hear his voice. “When are you coming home?”

  “The day after tomorrow.” He had worked out his flight number and arrival time in New York, and he gave these details to her. He said he was finishing up the final details of his work in Hong Kong, and when she asked how it had gone, he dodged the question. He wasn’t sure yet. He would tell her all about that when he landed. She gave him news of their sons, both of whom had come home from college in the last two days. Summer vacation had started. She had forgotten how much food grown boys could eat. “Artie,” she said, “I’ve missed you such a lot.”

  “I’ve missed you t
oo,” he said, and although he had made this same remark to her many times over the years, he thought he had never meant it as much as now.

  “Tell me how you feel.”

  “You mean my strongest feeling at the moment?”

  “Yes.”

  “I feel sex-starved,” he said. “Sex-starved for you.”

  Eleanor laughed. “It’s nice when a man can say that to a woman he’s been married to for twenty-three years.”

  “Twenty-four next month,” said Powers. “We should really celebrate it. We should give a party.”

  “We can talk about it when you get home.” She sounded very pleased.

  When he had rung off, Downes came back into the room, accompanied by Sir David.

  “There has been another development,” said Sir David. “Koy’s wife has booked passage out of Hong Kong this afternoon.”

  “Destination?” asked Powers.

  “Vancouver. Holders of Hong Kong passports need no visa to enter Canada.”

  “And from Canada, she can walk across. If she’s stopped, she can show that phony green card. It’s a pity it’s not her I’m after.”

  “Fellow has two wives,” Sir David said, almost to himself. “What’s more, he appears to love them both.”

  “When I get back to New York, they’re going to crucify me.”

  “Situation’s not so unusual,” said Sir David, still musing. “It does happen. Not just to Chinamen either, don’t you know? Could happen to an Englishman, Captain. Could happen even to a New York police officer, what? Ask Mrs. Cone.”

  “I don’t happen to have two wives,” Powers snapped.

  “Sorry. Dirty habit of mine. Thinking out loud, what? You’re not going home entirely empty-handed, you know. You did put two corrupt Hong Kong constables in jail.”

  Powers snorted. “The PC is not going to be impressed.” Then he added, “I suppose I can hope that my presence has disrupted the flow of drugs.”

  “Negative, I’m afraid. I was talking to your colleague, Gorman, at Drug Enforcement only this morning. He seems to have purchased information to the effect that the drugs have already come and gone. Nothing more specific than that, unfortunately. The first shipment may reach New York before you do.”