by Robert Daley
Powers glared at him, but Koy’s face remained expressionless.
Powers snatched up more documents. “Here I have warrants for the arrests of Mr. Marco and Mr. Casagrande, your partners in the narcotics importing scheme you put together a few weeks ago. Mr. Marco may or may not make admissions eventually. Mr. Casagrande, as you are no doubt aware, is a weaker type of individual. As a matter of fact, he is given to blabbing. We know, for example, the date, and the address on Mulberry Street where your meeting with these individuals took place. Mr. Casagrande has told us he was not present for the major part of the transaction.”
It was the second time today that Powers would try to braid this fact into a usable lie. It hadn’t worked the first time, and he saw no reason to suppose it would work now. Nonetheless he continued: “However, I am informed that whatever testimony he now decides to give will be sufficient to send you to Attica or Green Haven, or one of those places for a considerable amount of time.”
Koy’s wrist watch flashed in the dim light. He studied its face, while Powers studied its quality. It was gold and as thin as a subway token. “Captain Powers, it is now past dinner time, I’m hungry, and this exercise in experimental theater which you appear to have so carefully orchestrated has begun to bore me. Good night.” And he pushed back from the table.
“Sit down,” Powers shouted. “I’m not finished yet.” He watched Koy sit back down. “In your position I would be most anxious to know what the police had on me, or thought they had on me.” For the first time an expression of uncertainty seemed to flit across Koy’s eyes. “You see my point?” said Powers.
But Koy recovered quickly. “What is your point, Captain? Having served many years as a policeman, I have sat often enough in your chair to understand your strategy, your tactics, and even your mind, which I find transparent. Am I supposed to break down in tears and admit to these preposterous allegations? While you record them? Are you wired, Captain? Is that the point?”
Powers could visualize the spools turning downstairs in the car. He could imagine Kelly and Luang listening tensely, ready to spring, their guns in their laps.
“You are silent, Captain.”
He could feel the adhesive tape constricting his middle, and the microphone button that pressed into the middle of his sternum, at the same level as the religious medals he used to wear around his neck as a boy. Like them, the microphone was a talisman. It was also the modern equivalent of an iron breastplate. It was the best protection a cop could wear. He was safe as long as he wore it, because it connected him not only to those two cops in the car, but also to the legions of cops behind them. He stood behind a shield of twenty-five thousand cops, and could imagine himself invulnerable. But for as long as he wore it Koy was safe too, for he would make no move. Unbuttoning his shirt, Powers reached in, found the microphone, and ripped it out. He laid it down on the table between them: a dead tadpole. There would be no metamorphosis. It would not transform itself into anything.
The loft was vast. Powers could not see the end of it. Beyond the dim aura of light was outer darkness. “I am seeking to understand evil,” he said. “Those two young men were kneeling,” he pointed “just over there. You sent bullets into the napes of their necks. Did you - did you sleep well afterwards?”
Koy impatiently said, “You have not learned much about the Chinese, have you? The Chinese is moved by self-interest, not brutality. He is calculating, not cruel. The answer to your question is that one must sometimes sacrifice a finger to save an arm.”
“That fifteen-year-old boy, Quong. You turned his head to mush. Can you justify that?”
“As a Chinese proverb has it,” murmured Koy, “it is sometimes necessary to kill the chicken to show the monkey.”
“Have you no concept of evil?” cried Powers.
Koy shook his head sadly. “Heaven does not speak, Captain. It has no fixed will. There is no god in the sky who hands out fantastic rewards or lamentable punishments. The Chinese do not fear future damnation, Captain. Only discord on earth.”
It made Powers furious. “Do you have some Chinese proverb to justify trying to kill me?”
Koy shrugged, “You angered the tiger by thwarting it, as the Chinese say. You put meat in the path of the tiger.”
Powers waved another paper. “This is a copy of a message that the Drug Enforcement Agency sent out to its bureaus in Boston, Vancouver and San Francisco, requesting them to put your three colleagues, the other three sergeants, under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Let’s see them get something going under that kind of attention.” He thrust the message into his briefcase and grabbed up the next document in the pile. “And this is the result of another surveillance. We were on you in Hong Kong the moment you stepped off the plane there. One morning you took your wife shopping - her name is Orchid, isn’t it? You left her and rode up to the seventh floor where you entered a certain office and purchased a forged green card in Orchid’s name. Five minutes after you left that office we took the forger into custody. Here’s the warrant on that.” Powers thrust it out.
Koy’s hands did not move, but his eyes, as if he could not stop them, scanned the paper.
Powers said, “You are sweating, Mr. Koy. You can control your voice and your mind, but not your glands. In that respect the Chinese are no different from anyone else, are they?” He thrust that document into the briefcase. Until yesterday he had had no others. Now, thanks to Luang, he did. He waved the next one. “We’re getting near the end now,” he said. “I have here an order of deportation for Orchid Koy, your first wife, who arrived in New York yesterday from Toronto and Hong Kong.”
“At last the clouds part to show the true sky.”
“Note the address of her apartment on Confucius Plaza in Chinatown. It is correct, I believe.”
Koy accepted the document Powers held out to him.
“Officer Luang trailed the two of you there from the airport on my orders, after which I personally took the information to Immigration. An immigration officer stopped your wife earlier today and asked to see her green card. Perhaps she spoke of it.”
“No,” said Koy.
Powers took the document back, pulling it out of his hands. “You betrayed her, Mr. Koy. You betrayed her twice, once in Hong Kong, once here. You led us right to her.”
IN THE CAR in the street the tape recorder spools were still turning, but the voices had stopped coming in.” What’s happened?” demanded Luang.
“I don’t know,” said Kelly. He was fiddling with the dials. “I don’t even know if it’s him or us. It was working perfectly.”
Luang had his gun in his hand. “Let’s go in there,” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Kelly. “He told us to stay here.” They gazed at each other indecisively. Neither knew what to do.
“I’m going,” said Luang, and he sprang from the car and ran into the alley. But at the door he stopped. Powers had ordered him not to come in and he hesitated to disobey.
KOY’S FOREHEAD glistened in the light. “I too have a briefcase to open,” he said. “If you will allow me.” When Powers nodded, Koy released the catch on his attaché case and allowed the lid slowly to rise. He then turned the case around, so that Powers could note its contents: more money than he had ever seen before.
There was a gun in there too. “Do you have a permit for that?” said Powers.
Koy said, “In China, if an official is honest, we say he has clean wind in his sleeves. Let me see your sleeves, Captain.”
Powers ignored Koy’s gun. He stared only at the money. Guns to him were normal. But money in amounts such as this was not. He saw Koy’s hand reach into his field of vision. He watched it shuffle the stacks of bills around.
“With money,” said Koy, “a man is a dragon. Without it he is a worm.”
“Close the briefcase,” Powers said. He had been momentarily dazzled by what looked like hundreds of thousands of dollars. He had been blinded as if by automobile headlights. It had taken time t
o refocus his eyes.
“Dollars are like small fish,” Koy said, stirring the pond, “difficult to catch, and not to be thrown back except as bait for something bigger.” Was this a way of saying there was more? How much more?
“Stop talking like a fortune cookie,” cried Powers, alarmed by Koy’s gun. It seemed to be swimming through the money, now on the surface, now in the depths.
“Close the briefcase,” he ordered, and to prove he meant it, took his own gun out, and clapped it down wobbling on the table.
Koy misunderstood, perhaps deliberately. “Your thoughts lack subtlety, Captain. One cannot master temptation with a revolver. One cannot conquer greed with bullets. Please study my briefcase a moment longer.”
Powers could feel that his face had become flushed. I could arrest him for attempted bribery, he thought, but it wouldn’t stand up. It isn’t on tape, and he never actually offered me anything, my word against his, and he’s mayor of Chinatown.
Koy said: “I ask you to question your standards as you have forced me to question mine.”
He saw that Koy was offering him a new life, as Carol had offered him a new life, the one great dream, he supposed, of every man his age: to start over. The end of struggle. Life as excitement and pleasure. Life as a perpetual party. This time there would be enough money and knowledge to gratify every whim. But life was not a party, and whims were insubstantial, impractical, unreal. Whims could not accord pleasure, did not exist on the same plane as pleasure.
“My sleeves,” Powers said, “are clean. Now close that goddamn briefcase.”
He reached over and closed it himself. “I don’t want his money,” he thought. “I want to kill him. Is that clean?”
“Your rice bowl is broken, Koy.” He leaned across the table. “You’re out of business. Tell yourself that those two thugs in Hong Kong won’t testify against you. That Nikki Han and Go Low won’t testify. That Marco and Casagrande won’t testify. Tell yourself there is still time to make any other witnesses change their testimony or disappear. Your wife still gets deported, Koy. You have committed, as I understand it, the one unforgivable Chinese sin. You have betrayed your family, betrayed all your ancestors. You could live here and your wife there for years, as long as you continued to send back money and honor. She gets no more honor from you, Koy. She goes back under a deportation order, and you lose face. You’re a speculator, Koy. Face is your collateral. Without it you have no credit. I’ve deprived you of your most precious possession. That’s what I’ve done, Koy. I’ve cut your balls off. I’ve cut off your face.”
A bead of sweat began its slow trickle down Koy’s forehead. Look at him suffer, Powers thought. It was the sweat of a man being tortured, and he felt an emotion akin to joy. He was inflicting mammoth amounts of pain, and reveling in it.
“She gets arrested tonight, Koy. She spends the night in the can.” What suffering, thought Powers. It was always so much easier to hurt someone through a loved one. “Tomorrow she goes before a judge for a deportation hearing.”
However, Koy’s hand began to toy with his briefcase.
“She gets escorted to the airport by armed guards.”
Koy frowned.
“Perhaps I can arrange for her to be taken out in handcuffs.” Keep pushing him, Powers thought. Make him take action. Make him lose control. “I have one last document,” he said and pushed it across. “This is a warrant for your arrest, Koy. The charge is not murder or extortion or narcotics. The charge is one people find funny, Koy, bigamy.”
Koy’s forefinger tripped the catch of his briefcase. As the lid sprang open his hand dived into it, scattering money, grabbing up his gun and pointing it across the table. From one second to the next Powers found himself staring down a gun barrel. Instantly his body felt frozen. Sweat began to drip down his back like ice cubes defrosting. But isn’t this exactly what you wanted, he asked himself. This is assault with a deadly weapon. Now you can kill him. You’re within your rights.
But he was in no position to kill anyone. His own revolver was on the table, and as his eyes fixed on it the hands in his lap began to twitch. I’ve made a mistake, he thought. A bad one. The worst. It was only slightly out of reach. It was as out of reach as yesterday, as last week. If he went for it, how many bullets would strike him before he could grab it up? It was about two feet away, the same distance as Koy’s, identical, you could measure it out mathematically. But the one gun was too distant, the other much too close, proof that nothing is absolute, not even numbers, much less life and death.
This has worked out perfectly, he told himself. You’ve got a major case against him now. If he kills you, Kelly and Luang arrest him for murder. If not, you have him for assault.
Both faces glistened in the dim light.
“Though a man dies, Captain, he is still part of the cosmos,” said Koy in the voice of a priest murmuring a prayer over Powers’ corpse. “He is one with the universe. He is not lost.”
Out of terror, Powers found, came additional hatred. He was not going to listen while Koy read him the last rites, he was going to cause more pain first. Hatred: the inexhaustible emotion, the true bottomless pit. It dominated even fear. “Bigamy, Koy, you’ve got both wives right here. It will be very easy to prove. Everyone always laughs except the husband serving the sentence.”
Behind the gun, Koy said, “I seem to detect moral indignation, Captain.” Powers waited for him to study the warrant, but he did not do so. Instead he asked in a soft voice, “Do you find bigamy such a terrible crime?”
“The usual sentence is two to six.”
“You have never loved two women at once, have you, Captain?”
“It’s a Class D felony.”
“It can happen,” said Koy. “It’s rather an exalting experience. It does not prove a man depraved. But you would never permit yourself the experience, would you?”
Powers said nothing.”
A pity, Captain. A pity.” Koy studied him. “You must admit it’s a poor reason to put a man in jail.”
Keep hitting him, Powers thought. Hit him again. If you want to live it’s your only chance.
“You were granted citizenship as the spouse of an American citizen - which legally you never were. So when you get out of the can, you get deported too, Koy, right behind Orchid, right back to Hong Kong, with no face left.”
“One must allow oneself to be swept along by the current of universal change,” Koy commented. “Death is not to be feared.”
Whose death?
“Your partners and associates will be waiting for you. They’ll want explanations.”
“The universe is a delicately balanced, infinitely complex mechanism.”
“You’ve cost them money. They’ll whack you out, Koy.”
“Man must submit to the universe-”
Powers, sweating, eyes fixed on the single eye said, “My men have this place surrounded.”
“The way water submits to the terrain on which it lies.”
“If you’re going to do it, Koy, make the first one count, because that’s all you’re going to get.”
“Let me give you a piece of Chinese wisdom, Captain. Do not fight unless sure of winning, the Chinese say. Do not shout unless sure of being heard. Do not strive unless you can change something. And there is nothing you can change at this moment.” With his free hand he wiped the sweat from his forehead, a concession to the strain he was under, his first real sign of weakness, so that Powers thought: you have a chance to get out of this, you’re on the right track, keep up the pressure.
The gun, which had been pointed at the middle of Powers’ chest, swung up to eye level. Very slowly Koy’s thumb pulled the hammer back. The cocking mechanism clicked, and the thumb was removed. Hair trigger or not, any pressure at all now would set it off. For a moment there was total silence.
“Courage is like jade,” Koy said. “It can be broken, not bent.”
“You’re under arrest, Koy.”
The trigger knuckle, Po
wers saw, did not whiten.
“The three magic words,” murmured Koy. His voice had become increasingly soft. “You’re under arrest. The supreme celebration of a policeman’s life. The biggest words in the language. The supreme domination of one man over another, the power to close a door on him. How many times have you pronounced them, I wonder? How many times have I?”
Powers made the move he hoped would save his life. He pushed back from the table. “That gun is not for me, is it Koy?”
“How well do you really understand the Chinese, Captain?”
Powers rose slowly to his feet.
“We both know who it’s for, don’t we, Koy? You have no choice. There’s no other way out for you.”
Powers was sure, but not sure. Though erect, he was immobilized, as if awaiting permission before moving in any direction at all.
“Do it,” said Powers, “and Betty Koy won’t be stigmatized by a bigamy trial. Orchid will simply be allowed to leave. I’ll see to it she won’t be deported. That’s all I can offer you. Make up your mind.”
“To kill you,” said Koy, “would make you a hero. Perhaps the worst I can do to you is to let you live.”
Make him do it, Powers thought. “Otherwise you’ll be marched through crowds up Mott Street with your hands cuffed behind you like a common thug, like Nikki Han. I’ve alerted the TV crews.” He’s ready to do it, Powers thought. “You’ve, been had, Koy. Kill yourself or kill me. You have no other choice.”
Koy again wiped his forehead. “A question, Captain. Why? What is in this for you? A medal? They don’t give medals for serving a bigamy warrant on the mayor of Chinatown, and an order of deportation on a middle-aged Chinese lady. And you had no other evidence against me.” He glanced down at the gun in his hand. He had been a cop. He knew the charge as well as Powers. “Until now. Perhaps, having disposed of me, you imagine you will gain much face in Chinatown. However, no police commissioner could afford to let you go back there after tonight, if - if I do what you want. You’ll be accused of killing me, you see. There will be a grand jury investigation, headlines. Your superiors will convict you even if the courts do not. I’m afraid you’ll never make it to deputy inspector. So why have you done this to yourself and to me? What do you gain?”
