Year of the Dragon

by Robert Daley

  “Something the matter, Captain?”

  Powers flashed a smile. “No, nothing’s the matter.”

  “What next?” asked Luang, beaming with pleasure. “Do I go back to the funeral parlor and sit on him, or what?”

  “Yes,” said Powers. He stood up and came out from behind the desk. It took effort, but he forced the words out: “You’ve done a great job,” Voice and step became brisk, and that took effort too. “But with a difference. Put a uniform on. Stand on his doorstep. I want him to know who’s been tracking him all these weeks. I want him to see you and start worrying. Let’s make the bastard sweat.”

  Powers had resolved that he would wait no longer. He would go with what he had. He would shake the tree and see what fell out. Criminals of this type were not statues. They were men who lived on the edge, and knew it. Often it was far easier to scare them, to push them toward panic, than you might imagine. While Luang changed, Powers began to make calls: to Baumgartner of Immigration, to Wilcoxon of Drug Enforcement, to the DA, to Eleanor - he would be home late tonight. But he told no one exactly what he was planning.

  “How do I look, Captain?” It was Luang in uniform in the doorway.

  “It’s the first time I ever wore it.”

  “Tomorrow,” said Powers, “I’ll let you make your first arrest.”

  “Who?”

  “How would you like to lock up Nikki Han?”

  “Captain, I’d like that very much.”

  “You can count on it,” said Powers, and waved him out.

  After some thought, he picked up the phone again and dialed Carol at home.

  “I wasn’t sure you were back,” he said when she came on the line.

  “Today. How are you? I’m so glad to hear your voice.”

  He had neither time nor inclination for small talk. “I want to ask a favor, Carol. I want you in Chinatown tomorrow with a film crew. I want you to go into the funeral parlor and attempt to interview Koy.”

  Carol was silent. This was not what she had expected to hear.

  “How does that help you?”

  “You need footage of him for your piece, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but how does that help you?”

  “I want to put him in a state of psychological shock and keep him there. He probably thinks you’re dead. If you’ve come back to haunt him, then I can’t be far behind.” First Koy would see Luang, then Carol. And then?

  “I don’t want to face him just yet, Artie. I’m not ready.”

  He spoke to her almost brusquely. “If you don’t get him tomorrow, you might not get him.”

  “I’m - I’m too afraid.”

  “I’ll send fifteen uniformed cops in there with you. You’ll be perfectly safe. Fifteen.” The idea pleased him. Fifteen uniforms. The shock on Koy would be tremendous.

  Her inflection changed, became personal. She wanted to talk not about Koy but about Powers. “Will you be there,” she asked, “tomorrow?”

  Tomorrow? She meant much more than tomorrow, they both knew it, and he hesitated.

  “No Carol, I won’t be there.”

  Her voice became wistful. “You won’t be there?”

  “I’m sorry, Carol.”

  “I’ll always be your friend, Artie.”

  “I’ll always be yours, too,” he said. “Hey, who else have I ever been almost murdered with twice?”

  There followed a long silence. “Can I count on you, Carol?”

  “What time?” she said.

  THE NEXT morning, Powers distributed to the pairs of arresting officers his scant supply of warrants. Arrest warrants were like airline tickets. Detectives were like travel agents assigned to deliver each one in person. The passengers were out in the city waiting for them, but did not know it. They held reservations to the end of the line, but would try to disembark along the way, and most would succeed. It was impossible to tell in advance who would land where. The tickets were expensive, and perhaps not worth what they cost.

  The New York Police Department made more than 100,000 felony arrests a year, rarely two alike. There were rules - those imposed by the courts to protect suspects’ rights, and those imposed by the Department to protect cops’ lives. The arresting officers obeyed most of them most of the time if they could. The job called for brutality and delicacy at the same time, like the setting of broken bones, and although correct procedures had been exhaustively worked out, it was no exact science. One arrested killers, if possible, in their beds at 5 A.M. Squads of cops burst in through every window and door. One caught them napping. One caught them with their pants down as well. It was really quite safe. Naked men - even killers - are not brave, and dreams are more immobilizing than handcuffs; they encapsulate people and render them benign. On the other hand one arrested corrupt cops at home at dinner time, if possible, snatching them from the bosoms of wives and children, uprooting them from their own dining room tables, because that way they would confess quickest; often they began babbling before they reached the car.

  And there was every gradation of arrest in between. There was one common theme - at the moment of arrest an attempt was almost always made to achieve psychic domination of the prisoner. Emotionally, no one ever really wanted to leave home. The start of every journey, even pleasurable ones, tipped every passenger, even vacationers, into a state of emotional imbalance. It was this imbalance that enabled common carriers to control passengers so easily from journey’s start to journey’s end. If psychic domination was important to airlines and shipping companies, it was vital to the police.

  Powers had given his men explicit instructions. The drug dealer, Marco, was arrested by Kelly and a second detective in the social club at 7 Mulberry Street in Little Italy just before noon. They had been sitting outside in their parked car almost four hours waiting for him. When they went in to take him, Marco was seated at a corner table with his hat on, sipping cappuccino with two other men, also Italians, also wearing hats. Powers wanted the most blatant arrest possible. He wanted the news to spread from there throughout the narcotics trade - it might queer either this transaction or another - and throughout the community too. He wanted Marco disgraced, if that was possible.

  Kelly and his partner approached the table. “Marco? I have a warrant for your arrest.”

  There was no violence except by them. The two detectives grabbed Marco under the arms and lifted him kicking into the air. Hands manacled behind his back, they dragged him out to the street, where they threw him as roughly as possible into the back of their car. The second detective leaned over the seat and read him his rights, while Kelly drove. All this time Marco spoke not one word.

  Casagrande was arrested at his house in Queens an hour later. His bell was out of order and the knocking at his front door came as he was eating lunch. He answered wearing a napkin tied around his neck. There were tomato smears on the napkin where he must have wiped his mouth several times.

  Facing him were two detectives he had never seen before. One said in a flat monotonous voice, “Mr. Casagrande, I have a warrant for your arrest. You have a right to remain silent, you have a right-”

  “Let me see the fucking thing,” said Casagrande.

  He read it.

  “Do I call my lawyer now, or at the station house?”

  He was pretending that no psychic domination had occurred, but the arresting detectives knew otherwise, because his pinky ring was twitching.

  “At the station house,” said the detective, and handcuffed him, squeezing the cuffs tight enough to hurt, giving him a shove so that he fell slightly off balance going out the door, letting him learn at once that walking a straight line with his hands manacled behind him was less easy than it looked. They marched him out to their car still wearing the stupid napkin around his neck - since he couldn’t reach it he couldn’t remove it. He cut a ridiculous figure, which was what they wanted. He knew this - in the street several neighbors who happened to be outdoors stood gawking at his passage - and it added to his anger an
d humiliation.

  Nikki Han and Go Low came out of Koy’s gambling parlor about two o’clock in the afternoon. These arrests too had been orchestrated by Powers for maximum community impact. The arresting officers were to be Luang and his partner for the day, Lawrence Lom, the middle-aged community relations patrolman who had not made an arrest in over twenty years. The pair had been loitering up and down Mott Street for almost six hours, waiting. They did not even know for certain the two gang members were inside the den, and had no search warrant with which to go in looking. Detectives - good ones - were like hunters. They didn’t stalk their game, they put themselves in its path and waited for it to walk by. For six hours Lom had been bored stiff, had complained constantly. But Luang, having tuned him out, had remained alert and excited the entire time. The case on which he had worked so hard and taken such risks was about to break, and he was exactly where he wanted to be - in at the climax. He was eager to make his first arrest, to lock up Nikki Han.

  When he saw Han and Low come up the steps from the gambling den he dug his elbow into Lom’s ribs.

  “Let’s go get them,” said Lom nervously.

  “Let them get into their car first,” ordered Luang. “Then we have the right to search the car.”

  Nikki Han had unlocked the door on the driver’s side. He got in. They saw him lean across to open the far door. Go Low still stood on the curb, peering around.

  “Now,” said Lom nervously.

  “Wait till the other guy gets in the car too,” said Luang.

  Luang, gun in his hand, rushed the car even as the second door slammed shut. He rammed the barrel in through the window into Nikki Han’s ear. He speared him in the ear with it. The gang leader squawked and ducked away, clapping his hand to the pain, peering up at Luang in surprise.

  “What’s this?” he cried, first in English, then in Cantonese. His head darted about, because by now Lom’s gun showed in the opposite window.

  “Get out,” ordered Lom, who was beginning to enjoy himself. There was no further risk, and he was remembering emotions as distant as courtship but no less pleasurable now as then. He was acting like a cop again, and it felt good to him.

  “Out,” shouted Luang in English. Throwing the door open, he grabbed Nikki Han by the collar of his shirt, and heard it rip and was pleased. He dragged him half out of the seat and, once he was suspended over the street, let go. Nikki fell out the rest of the way, crashing to the pavement.

  A crowd had begun to gather. Luang’s shield was cupped in his free hand and he was flashing it all around. Lom’s shield was pinned to his shirt.

  “Up against the wall,” shouted Luang, waving his gun. “Give them a toss, Lom.”

  Lom frisked both prisoners, and he remembered to be rough about it, as in the old days. His hands, snaking up their legs from their shoe tops, turned into karate chops at the crotch. He doubled both men over.

  “They’re clean,” he said to Luang, grinning. They were doubled over and gagging.

  “Cuff them,” Luang said.

  Lom did it, squeezing the cuffs down to the last notch on slim Chinese wrists. He had never arrested a Chinese before. It was like cuffing a child.

  “Search the car,” said Luang.

  Behind him he heard Lom rummaging through the glovebox, under the seats, opening the trunk. He heard Lom’s voice say, “Well, well, well, what have we here?”

  Without taking his eyes off the prisoners, Luang began to laugh. “What did you find, Lom?”

  “I found a piece,” said Lom, and he went on searching.

  “See,” said Luang. “I told you to wait till the other guy got in the car. Now we can charge both of them with possession.”

  “This car is a veritable arsenal,” said Lom. “I got a thirty-eight behind the spare wheel to go with the Browning nine-millimeter under the seat.”

  Luang stopped laughing. “One of those brothers was killed with a Browning,” he said. “Is this the gun, Nikki?”

  When Han gave no answer, Luang said, “We’ll soon know, won’t we, Nikki?”

  At gunpoint, they marched the two handcuffed gang members down Mott Street to Bayard Street, across Bayard to Elizabeth, and up Elizabeth into the station house. An enormous, murmuring crowd followed most of the way. Chinese merchants came out of their shops to watch. It was as great a spectacle as the parade of dragons on Chinese New Year’s Day, and this too was according to Powers’ instructions. Luang, like any ham actor, played the scene to the hilt, barking the Miranda warning in stentorian tones as he walked, reciting it over and over both in English and in Cantonese: “You have a right to remain silent. You have a right to demand counsel. You have a right to-”

  Powers watched as the prisoners were brought up the steps and into the station house. All were docile and none spoke. They were manhandled past him anyway. He stood in the doorway to his office just inside the entrance while the arresting officers pushed and shoved and dragged them across the board floors toward the staircase to the squad rooms above. They were like men whose arms had been cut off, and once again Powers was struck by an old notion - that to a large extent a man’s dignity resided in his hands. Take his hands away and he looked incompetent and therefore foolish. Without hands the illusion of dignity could not be sustained.

  Upstairs the prisoners were thrown into a cage, like gloves into a bin. They were later extracted, one pair at a time, to be fingerprinted. Dignity, and with it psychic balance, continued to be broken down. Each prisoner was forced to answer questions, to sign forms, to stand here, sit there. They were made subject to ritual. They were forced to kneel at mass. The police department was like the Catholic Church, employing ceremony to prove its absolute dominion over souls.

  The interrogations started. Could one of the prisoners be made to talk about the narcotics shipment, or to turn against Koy, thus saving his own skin, and Powers’ as well? Marco the hardened Italian mobster, was brought into an empty office off the squad room.

  “You’re on parole, Marco,” said Powers. “We got you consorting with known criminals and we got you tied in with the Chinese. You go back into the can to finish your sentence. Is that what you want?”

  Marco, rubbing sore wrists, only glared at him.

  “How much time you got left on that parole, Marco? I can look it up, but why don’t you tell me?”

  Marco examined the ceiling.

  Powers walked to the desk and thumbed through Marco’s file. “It says here seven years, Marco. Is that what you want to do?”

  “When do I get my phone call?” said Marco.

  Casagrande was brought into a second office by Detective Kelly, who pushed him roughly into a chair. Powers came in. He was like a dentist who kept chairs going in adjacent rooms. He was running back and forth from patient to patient, drilling hard, no Novocain. If he struck a nerve, the object was to lean on it.

  Casagrande, still manacled, was sitting on his hands.

  “Who’s got a handcuff key?” said Powers. “Take the cuffs off him.”

  Casagrande flexed his wrists, his fingers. He stared at his hands as if he had forgotten what they looked like.

  “As I see it,” Powers began, “you’re the little guy in this conspiracy. Your brother-in-law and Koy are the big shots. They’re the ones who should do time, not you. But the jury probably won’t see it that way. The jury will probably decide you’re equally guilty. There’s a mandatory twenty-five-year sentence for the type of business you’ve been doing. Do you want to go away for twenty-five?”

  Casagrande said, “You got nothing on me. I didn’t do nothing. I want to see a lawyer.”

  “Why should you protect Koy?” said Powers. “What’s a Chinaman to you?”

  “Who’s Koy?” said Casagrande. “I don’t know that name.”

  Powers drummed a pencil on the desk. “I’ll make a deal with you, Casagrande. Never mind your brother-in-law. Just give us the Chinaman, and you walk.”

  He was talking to the man’s left profile on
ly. Casagrande rubbed his wrists, gazed into the middle distance, and gave no sign that he heard a word.

  Powers met with Kelly outside. When Marco and Casagrande were arraigned later, it was possible the judge would release them. He might not even set high bail. The purpose of these arrests was to elicit information about the narcotics and about Koy, and most judges considered such arrests as affronts against civil liberties.

  “So the questioning gets rougher,” said Kelly. “Come on.

  Casagrande first. Kelly stood two feet from his chair, slowly slapping his sap into his open palm. Casagrande watched the sap as he might have watched the head of a cobra.

  “You ever been hit with one of these things?” asked Kelly conversationally. “Turn your brain to jelly and never leave a mark. When I was a young cop, all the fellas carried one. You don’t see them much anymore.” The sap kept slapping down. Sweat had popped out on Casagrande’s brow - whether from concentration or fear was impossible to determine. “If we killed one of you pricks by mistake nobody cared.” This was true. Powers had been there. He had seen such things happen, and had turned away, and had kept his mouth shut afterwards.

  “Nowadays we gotta be more careful,” said Kelly. He dropped the sap into his coat pocket, and continued the intimidation by other means.

  “What we do nowadays,” said Kelly, “is, we let you go. Then we put word out on the street that you gave up a made guy, a man of respect such as your brother-in-law. Then two or three days after that we find your body in the trunk of a car. And you want to know something, pal? When one of you ginnys turns up in the trunk of a car, nobody cares. Now what I suggest to you is, you give us Koy like we asked you. Otherwise, I figure you got about two days to live.”

  Kelly was nodding his head up and down. “You think about it a minute, while I go next door and tell your brother-in-law all you’ve been saying about him.”

  Kelly, as he entered the adjoining office, was shaking his head sadly. “Marco, you got problems. Your brother-in-law is blabbing his head off. You know that meeting with Koy you had at 7 Mulberry Street? He was just telling us how he got sent out into the street. Koy didn’t want to talk in front of him, it seems. He was insulted. I guess that’s why he’s talking so much. Unfortunately, he’s telling us a lot about your operation, too. Which don’t interest us, by the way. Now if you want to shut him up, why don’t you give us Koy? Otherwise, the ways things are going, he’ll cause you so much loss of respect you’ll have to put out a contract on him. I know you don’t want to do that. Your sister’s husband and all.”