Year of the Dragon

by Robert Daley

  “That makes me more or less a total flop, doesn’t it?”

  Sir David shook his head impatiently. “I say, my dear chap, have you learned nothing about the Chinese yet? You’re in a position to cause our Mr. Koy a great deal of embarrassment.”

  “I’ve thought of that. Why do you suppose I asked you to go on tailing Orchid? It just doesn’t seem very satisfactory at the moment.”

  “You underestimate this thing, I think. What, to a Chinese, is the world’s most precious commodity? Is it gold? Is it jade?

  “Face,” said Powers.

  “Precisely. Without face a Chinese can’t operate. A Chinese who has lost face sometimes chooses not to go on living. Take away Koy’s face and you neutralize him. If Wife Number One turns up in New York, you have the means to do that.”

  Sir David stroked his muttonchops. His fingers made love to them, both at the same time. He caressed them. “A man with two wives has problems,” he murmured.

  “Koy is a murderer, an extortionist, a drug dealer. I was hoping for something better than catching him with his pants down. I don’t want to embarrass him, I want to destroy him.”

  But the idea was perhaps worth pursuing. It perhaps constituted a fall-back position. Powers said, “Sir David, when I leave the Colony I would like to take with me copies of a number of documents, and I wonder if you could get them ready for me.”

  “Certainly. Which documents did you have in mind?”

  “I’ll make you a list.”

  At the airport two days later Powers thought briefly of Carol. He could still join her on Maui for a day or two. It was not too late to change his mind. His confrontations with the PC, and with Koy, would wait that long. He was booked by Pan Am through Tokyo and over the Pole to New York, but in Tokyo could easily change planes for Honolulu. There would be no additional fare. It did not even add greatly to the length of the flight, except for whatever time he might spend on the ground in Hawaii. But as he waited in the departure lounge, he began to examine again his own concept of adultery, and many of his newly discovered insights into life and love as well. To go on vacation with another woman while one’s wife remained at home coping with everyday chores seemed to him the ultimate betrayal. There could be nothing left in a marriage if a man would do that. It was a line that he had not crossed, and had no desire to cross. Nor did he desire to tell Carol so by telephone. Stepping to the telegraph desk, he wrote out two brief telegrams. The first, to his wife, confirmed his flight number and arrival time. The second went to Carol on Maui, words that he wrote out in block letters: MUST RETURN IMMEDIATELY. And signed his name.

  He was hardly thinking about Carol. He was thinking about heroin and how to find it. A few minutes later his flight was announced and he boarded it. He had been halfway around the world, and now was on his way back.

  KOY, home several days, resolved to telephone Hong Kong, for he had had no signal. However, he was a careful man, and wary of tapped phones; therefore he assigned the job to the embalmer, Chang, and stood by his side while the call was made.

  In Hong Kong a telephone rang, but no one answered.

  This did not quite alarm Koy. It was an irritation, like tea that has overflowed into a saucer. It could not be overlooked. It could make a mess out of all proportion to itself. He liked things to be exact. In an uncertain world exactness was to be valued above all things.

  Outside he went down the front steps and strolled up Mott Street. His bodyguards, seated beside the door, had followed him out. He walked in crowds in the hot noonday sun. It did not seem to him likely that the two constables had failed in their assignment. They were experienced men.

  But Koy’s uneasiness persisted. Having reached busy Canal Street, he stared across through many lanes of traffic. Canal was like a thunderous river filled with rapids, and not easy for the Chinese to cross. To him, as to many generations of Chinese, the other side, the Italian side, resembled a distant shore. The topography was different over there, language and customs too. For more than a century the Chinese had remained on this side, crammed into their ghetto, afraid to venture out. Only in the last few years had a few adventurous ones pushed out into the current. Some had made it across, and had established a Chinese beachhead over there. Almost half the storefronts, it seemed to him, were now Chinese.

  On the corner of Canal and Mott, about five feet from Koy’s elbow, stood a pagoda-shaped telephone booth. Stepping into it he dialed the Fifth Precinct.

  Captain Powers was out of town, he was told. No one had heard from him or knew when he would be back. Any message? Who’s calling please?

  Koy hung up, dialed a second number and asked to be put through to Mrs. Cone. A secretary answered, and gave him much the same information. They believed Mrs. Cone might have gone on a brief vacation. In any case, they did not know where she was. Who was calling please?

  Again Koy hung up. But as he backed out of the telephone booth, he was smiling. It was faint, but definitely a smile. He had been ready to halt the flow of merchandise to New York, but no news was good news, and he decided to let it come in on schedule. Feeling more cheerful, he walked back to his office, where he canceled his remaining appointments, and had himself driven home toward an unpleasant job that had best be got out of the way today.

  THE CONTAINER of dresses had reached Amsterdam, where it was held up by Dutch customs officers until a broker representing Hung arrived to sign the forms and pay the duty. The container was then released. The Dutch officers did not examine it because there had been no request from any agency to do so, no tip from any informant. It was impossible to examine every container of goods that entered the country.

  At the Hong Kong and Formosa Trading Corporation the pouches were removed from the dresses and packed into a number of watertight suitcases.

  Former Sergeant Hung did not go near the merchandise, neither then nor later. He was merely advised of its arrival, and he ordered it safeguarded pending further instructions.

  Hung had already heard from the three other ex-sergeants. They wanted their own portions held back until they saw what happened to Koy’s in New York. Koy’s insistence on haste seemed to them contrary to Chinese tradition, as it did to Hung. All had been taught to revere patience. Haste, they had found, most times proved unproductive or dangerous or both.

  Hung had expected similar instructions from Koy, who in the past had sometimes seemed too patient, more patient than any of them. But these instructions did not come. At length Hung had Koy’s suitcases carried on board the S.S. Rotterdam, a luxury liner, by a Hakka Chinese stoker who stowed them in the crew’s luggage compartment. The Rotterdam, carrying eleven hundred passengers, sailed for New York that night.

  Just prior to landing the stoker, if he obeyed his orders, would empty the suitcases and disperse their contents under the steel floor plates in various corners of the bilge, in case of any “serious” U.S. Customs inspection.

  He had been equipped with a recognition signal. He would be contacted in New York and the merchandise taken from him - he was not told how - for transfer ashore.

  THE AFTERNOON Koy took his wife and children out for a stroll through Central Park, and this time he had the bodyguard follow at a discreet distance. Once under the trees he left Betty pushing the carriage and allowed the older little girls, each clutching one of his hands, to run him along the path until they were giggling and he was out of breath. After that the girls wanted to swing.

  They had come to the playground area. Koy lifted their little bottoms onto the seats, pulled the bars down over their laps, and decorously arranged their short skirts. He got them started swinging, running from one swing to the other, pushing them high. Betty, meanwhile, had taken a bench. The carriage was at her side, and when he looked back she was gently rocking it, while at the same time leafing through a magazine on her lap.

  Koy went over and sat down beside her. He heard her take a deep breath. She seemed to know what was coming.

  “You said there were di
fficulties in Hong Kong,” she said. She wants to get it over with, Koy thought. How American!

  Betty Koy was thirty-five years old. She had been, when he met her, a director of an import-export firm that did business principally with Taiwan. She had an American accent both in English and Chinese. She had been something new in his experience - not only a female in business, but also a woman who was not a whore who had had other men. She had seemed to him very exciting.

  “Inevitably there are business difficulties,” said Koy. “These I took care of, and they don’t concern you in any case.” He paused and looked across at the two little girls; the swings were slowing. He got up, walked over, and got them started again, running from swing to swing, pushing the girls high, making them laugh. When he came back to the bench, there was sweat on his brow.

  “The personal difficulties were not so easy to solve,” he said, sitting down again. “I’ve been obliged to bring my son to New York. In the fall I intend to enroll him in Yale. Yale ought to be possible. We endow a chair there, you know.”

  This was not the problem, but when they gazed at each other, Koy noted that his wife’s face already looked stricken. She knows what’s coming, he thought again.

  “When does he arrive? When he arrives, of course he’ll stay with us.” But her voice broke. “There’s plenty of room,” she said, “for your son.”

  “It’s better if he stays with his mother,” said Koy, and paused. “I’ve been obliged to bring his mother to New York also.”

  “I knew I should never have let you go to Hong Kong,” burst out Betty Koy. She perceives all, as a Chinese woman would, thought Koy - but reacts emotionally with typical American self-indulgence. The Chinese side of Betty Koy was forever at war with the American side, thought Koy. It was part of what made her dear to him.

  “When are they coming?” she asked. Her voice sounded almost normal to him. She has recovered quickly, he thought, as a Chinese woman should, and he was proud of her.

  “In a few days. I’ll put them in a flat in Chinatown. They’ll be more comfortable there.”

  He studied her downcast profile. The unpleasant job was over and he had handled it well. “I’ll have to spend some time with them,” he said. “You must understand that. I care for you too much to be other than perfectly honest with you.” In her ways Betty was American, but in her soul she was Chinese. She would bow to the inevitable.

  “I see,” said Betty Koy.

  POWERS CAME out through the customs barrier and found his wife there, and they embraced. It was an ordinary embrace on her part, for he had not been gone that long, but an intense and passionate one on his. For the last ten hours she had scarcely been out of his mind. The plane had seemed to be butting against a wall. It was too slow, it would never get him to her door. He had been intoxicated with the idea of seeing her - had felt the same excitement and expectation as when they were courting. The long flight home had brought his life to a pinpoint focus. All he wanted, as he stared out the porthole, was to see her again, to hold her close again. He had felt as eager and consequently as frustrated as a boy, and he found so narrow a focus extraordinary in a man of forty-six.

  Now, his arm around her, they went out to their car in the parking lot, Powers carrying his suitcase in his other hand. You’re the one I want to grow old with, he thought. There was no one else he could say that to. Twenty-three years of your past belong to me, he thought. Your future belongs to me too, all of it, and I want it. His feeling toward her was akin to the way he felt about his sons. He wanted to know what their lives would become and he wanted to know what Eleanor’s life would become also. I want to know what you’ll look like when you are an old lady, he told himself. I want to be with you when you are an old lady. But he sensed already that this was not going to happen. He felt like a criminal about to be indicted, as if there was too much wrongdoing in his past and investigators were sure to find it.

  By the time he had steered out onto the Van Wyck Expressway and was driving home, he had fallen completely silent. His liaison with Carol would come out during the trial of the two constables, if not before. World headlines would play it like an operatic love duet - passion plus thwarted assassination. The song would carry all the way to New York. At most he had a few more months. The headlines could start at any time, and perhaps he should confess now.

  His wife watched him, waiting for him to speak.

  “Both boys have summer jobs,” she said.

  Powers, driving, flashed his teeth, as if for a dentist: “Great. And how were their grades?”

  “Jimmy has a B average. Phil had some Cs.” Still studying him, she said “So what did you come home with?”

  Powers tried the same smile again. “Oh, I have a little something in a box for you.” He had bought her jade earrings - he had had no money left for anything better. I gave the gold necklace to the wrong woman, he thought. The necklace was the most devastating detail of all, though one he could probably keep from her. Instead he would offer her international humiliation.

  “That’s not what I mean,” said Eleanor. “What else did you come home with?”

  Powers frowned. “I’m more convinced than ever of the existence of a Chinese Mafia. But I still can’t prove it. There are drugs coming in here that I may not be able to find.” He certainly wasn’t going to tell her how close he came to being killed, and Carol with him.

  “As bad as that?” said Eleanor. Even worse, he thought. Some enterprising reporter in Hong Kong could be nosing through court papers even now. And what about Carol’s special on television? One look was all Eleanor would need.

  To be in love with two women at once was the biggest feeling Powers had ever known. It had seemed to him an emotion of incredible power and allure. It set him apart from other men. But at the same time he saw it as a perversion, because it was totally destructive - destructive of both women, and of himself as well. Its allure had masked its destructiveness for a time, but the destructiveness had always been there and he had seen it as such from the first.

  He steered onto the Harlem River Drive. They would soon be home. He would go to bed with Eleanor as he had done now on many thousands of nights. That was something. He would clutch her tight in the dark, and try to hold off the rest until tomorrow.

  He entered his precinct at 7 A.M. the next day and went out onto the street at once so as to visit all sectors and foot posts before the midnight-to-eight tour went off duty. He was like a gardener after a long absence, rushing into the greenhouse to discover the condition of his plants. By 8 A.M. he was back in the station house - in time to turn out the next tour personally, after which he entered his office. His executive officer and the administrative lieutenant followed him in and stood beside his desk. Both men carried clipboards thick with the accumulated TOPS, sixty-ones and other memos relative to running the precinct. All this paper, they were about to tell him, demanded his immediate attention. But when he spied Luang through the doorway he sent both of them out. He would meet with them later, he promised. They were perplexed, annoyed, perhaps even hurt to be dismissed - he saw their emotions pass across their faces - and in favor of a Chinese patrolman they hadn’t known existed. But their injured feelings were the least of his problems at the moment. He sent his voice like a forward pass between their departing shoulders and out the door.

  “I’ll see you now, Officer Luang.”

  Luang, who wore a new seersucker suit, his shield pinned to the lapel, entered beaming. He looked glad to see his commander back, and pleased to be summoned so quickly to report. It was as if this confirmed all of Luang’s hopes - that he was trusted and valued by Captain Powers, and was working on his most important case. An ordinary New York cop, Powers realized, would have displayed arrogance under the same circumstances, would have come in here looking cocky. Not Luang, whose manner was entirely deferential.

  “Welcome back, Captain,” said Luang. He did not offer to shake hands, and it seemed to Powers that he almost bowed.

&n
bsp; “Thank you, Luang.” The proper greeting, neither more nor less. Although Powers was just as glad to see Luang, who was, in effect, the only other player on his team, nonetheless he thought it best to let no emotion show. Leadership, like most other revered qualities, was mostly the performance of certain specified tricks. The captain of the ship ate alone. He did not fraternize with members of the crew.

  Doubtless Luang wanted to hear about Hong Kong, but Powers offered no information, and so Luang, after hesitating a moment, began to report on the wiretap. During Powers’ absence there had been no calls at all between Hong Kong and the funeral parlor.

  “Any calls to Canada since Koy’s been back?”

  “No sir.”

  “Or from Koy to a strange woman?”

  “No. There have been no more calls in Hakka, either.”

  In fact, a day or two after Koy’s departure for Hong Kong, realizing that no one in Koy’s New York entourage spoke Hakka, Luang had sent the two nuns back to the convent, and he had not seen them since. “But we can get them back any time we want,” said Luang.

  This meant, Powers realized, that during the entire time of his absence Luang had monitored the wiretap all by himself. But why am I surprised? he thought. These racial stereotypes one hears so much about are, for the most part, valid. The Chinese are more diligent than other races. They are extremely hard workers. They put their nose to the grindstone and do not look up. No American cop would have accepted such a burden, especially in the absence of his commanding officer. But the Chinese cop had done so, and Powers felt a rush of admiration for him and fondness as well.

  “I owe you an enormous amount of time off,” Powers noted, and immediately wondered if he would be in any position to accord it. How much longer would he command the precinct? How soon would headquarters discover he was back? The answer was a few days at most. And then? And then, unless he could find the heroin and arrest Koy, most likely his successor would be in here - who would be under no obligation to pay Luang what was owed. Indeed, he would probably be afraid to do so, lest he seem to associate himself with Powers’ profligate expenditure of police man-hours.