Year of the Dragon (12 page)

Not ten feet away, Powers noted, Nikki Han leaned against a lamppost smirking at him. But the young boy was not in sight and had perhaps gone back to school.

THE COP on duty on the switchboard handed Powers a sheaf of telephone messages as he came into the station house. All were from newsmen, none from Carol Cone. All requested interviews he could not afford to give. He handed them back. “Refer these people to Deputy Commissioner Glazer’s office,” he told the switchboard cop.

“Er, Captain, a package came for you.”

The cop wore a half-repressed grin.

Powers glanced around. The desk sergeant seemed secretly amused, too.” It’s on your desk.”

Powers went across to his office and closed the door. The package that had made at least two cops grin - and how many others, Powers wondered - was a bouquet of flowers. It lay wrapped in green paper on his desk. Cops, he reflected as he searched for the card, have the mentality of teenage boys. They see flowers as sissy, or something. Flowers provoke mirth.

The envelope was not sealed. The card read: “Good luck in your new job.” It was signed Carol Cone.

How many cops had read this, Powers wondered. Not an important question yet, but it would become one the first time some cop saw them together. That, plus these flowers, would be enough. Evidence plus an eyewitness equals a conviction. Any jury would agree. The news would sweep through the department.

She must be crazy, Powers thought. She risks all kinds of problems for me. She can’t be trusted to be prudent, he thought. Watch out for her.

The flowers made him feel even more embarrassed about last night. He was frustrated in his career, yes, but not sexually, and he wondered why he had come at Carol so crudely.

He wanted to blame it on Carol, but was not sure. Had she attempted to seduce him and then, for some reason, changed her mind? Men did not often seduce women, Powers believed. Men were blunt and solid, not seductive at all. Whereas women dealt in emanations that were invisible to the naked eye. Women sent these emanations out like radio beams. Nothing showed. One could not even accuse them of it afterwards.

Powers reached for the flowers. Tonight he would take them home to his wife, no card attached. He would collect a kiss and a hug for his reward, and then perhaps take her out to dinner.

He took Carol’s card, tore it into small pieces and dropped them in the basket beside his desk.

EVERY PRECINCT in the city had a patrolman assigned full time to community relations, usually a member of whatever ethnic group predominated there. In the Fifth Precinct the slot was filled by a fourth generation Chinese-American named Lawrence Lom. Lom’s great-grandfather, along with thousands of other coolie laborers, had helped build the Union Pacific Railroad. Afterwards he had stayed on, moving to New York and, twenty years later, importing his wife and full-grown children from China. Lom, now forty-nine, had grown up on Mott Street. A portly, moonfaced man, he spoke perfect New York English, of course, plus halting Chinese - in Chinatown the Cantonese dialect was always called Chinese, as if there were no other. Lom had learned it partly in the streets, but principally in a Chinese school to which his parents had sent him two afternoons a week; they’d sent him religiously, spending too much of their meager earnings on it, but putting first things first. He had attended Chinese school the way Jewish boys in other parts of the city attended Hebrew school, the way Catholic boys attended catechism classes. But most of Lom’s teachers had spoken the language of Canton poorly. Too many generations had gone by, the United States had been closed too long. There were no new Chinese coming in. The Chinese in New York were by no means being assimilated, and did not want to be, hut they were, in Lom’s youth, beginning to lose their language.

Lom had graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School, one of the two or three elite high schools of the city, for he had been taught like almost all of his race to revere scholarship and he was a brilliant student. But he was also Chinese, and he went to work as a telephone lineman, the best job he could find. Later he took the police department test because the job offered both security and a 33% raise in salary; of course, he passed it easily.

Upon being appointed, Lom was sent back into Chinatown, supposedly as an undercover cop, even though he had grown up there and, in the Chinese fashion, still called almost every man uncle. The Cantonese dialect has three words for it:
ah-bok,
which means older uncle;
ah-sook,
which means younger uncle, a title to be used when a younger man was either rich or a dignitary; and
ah-ke,
which means real uncle - Lom had a number of them in Chinatown also - and he was quickly recognized as a policeman. That was when he learned how shameful in Chinese eyes such an occupation was held to be. His parents were considered disgraced. To save family honor his father was required to make donations to both major tongs, and Lom himself was required to get out of Chinatown. He spent most of the next five years in midtown writing out traffic tickets from the back of a scooter.

Then the community relations program started. In every precinct a single experienced officer would serve as liaison between the community and the department. The rumor was that all community relations cops would soon be promoted to detective, and so Lom had applied and been accepted. He was sent back to the fifth precinct, and this time the Chinese simply absorbed him, the way their forebears had absorbed entire invading armies for four thousand years. They used him when they could and ignored him otherwise, and Lom used them also, as will be seen. He had been there now twenty quiet years.

With time he had become, perhaps, more cop and less Chinese. He was a practicing Lutheran, as was his Chinese-American wife and their four children, and they lived in half of a two-family house in a section of Queens that was literally infested with other cops and their families. He belonged to the PBA, the police union, of course, but not, like other cops, to one of the ethnic, so-called line associations. There was a line association for Italian cops, Jewish cops, German cops, but not for Chinese cops because there were too few of them. So, Larry Lom, who had learned to play the fife in grade school, had become an honorary member of the Emerald Society, the line organization for cops of Irish origin, and he wore a kilt and played his fife and marched in all the parades in the Emerald Society marching band. He was still not a detective. Like many police-department rumors, that one had proven totally unfounded.

However, Lom had few other complaints. He had learned to sell himself to each new precinct commander as indispensable to the peaceful solution of any Chinatown problem that might arise. He knew most Chinese elders, and pretended to have access to all of them, which was often not the case. He attended most community functions from kindergarten graduations on up, and chairs were kept for him, though not usually on the dais. The Chinese community seemed to treat him almost as a kind of chaplain -one representing a faith that was not theirs; he was not to be taken seriously. If he realized this, he never said so and perhaps did not care. He lived a far better life than most Chinese. He worked only eight hours a day only five days a week. He had twenty-seven paid vacation days a year. He was rarely in uniform or in the station house, and he moved through the community more or less unsupervised.

He had convinced each precinct commander in effect that verbal intercourse with any segment of the Chinese community was not possible unless it took place in Lom’s presence, and through the intercession of Lom. This magnified his importance, of course, but at the same time it reduced the commander’s stature in Chinatown to the same level as Lom’s, and Lom’s rank was patrolman. The Chinese were among the most class-conscious people on earth, and each time a new commander spoke to them, not from a posture of command but through Lom, Chinatown took him at once for a fool.

On this particular morning Lom sat in an office on the second floor of the station house tapping out on an upright Underwood typewriter a long memo to Captain Powers. The typewriter had been used by a generation of detectives for booking prisoners, and all the keys stuck. Typing on it was like chopping wood - pulling the axe out after each stroke was more work than driving it in. Lom was writing thumbnail sketches of the ten most important men in Chinatown - Ting and Koy were both on the list - to whom he proposed to introduce Powers at their places of business during the next several days. The memo also promised that Lom would serve as Powers’ translator and adviser at each of these meetings.

Detective Kelly stuck his head in the door and said, “Lom, they want you downstairs.”

The two men went down the stairs.

A middle-aged Chinese named Quong waited just inside the station house door. He was ill at ease and therefore smiling. The smile looked pinned on. He was skinny. All his bones showed. He reminded Lom, of one of those flimsy Chinese shacks he had seen in photos. They stood on stilts by rivers. They were made of sticks - you could see the skeleton. You could see Quong’s skeleton too, he was that frail.

Cops moving in and out of the building paid not the slightest attention to Quong, brushing past him as if he weren’t there.

“Very good to meet you, sir, thank you very much,” said Quong to Lom in Cantonese. He bowed to the community relations patrolman, who did not bow back.

“Do you speak English?” said Lom.

Quong did speak English, though badly, for he had been a schoolteacher in China and before that had been partly educated by American nuns. His English was better than Lom’s Cantonese. “What’s your problem?” said Lom. Quong, smiling more nervously than ever, apologized for taking up the valuable time of such an estimable gentleman as Lom. His problem was really such a small one, hardly significant - his son.

Lom brought him up to the second-floor office, closed the door, and listened for about fifteen minutes, then went in search of the new precinct commander. Captain Powers should perhaps meet this man and hear his story. It would be educational for him, and he would surely applaud Police Officer Lom for bringing it to his attention. Lom knocked at the jamb beside Powers’ open door.

Powers looked up from some papers.

“There’s a Chinese guy upstairs,” said Lom. “He’s got a problem that’s typical of many of the people of Chinatown. He speaks a good deal of English.”

For a moment Powers looked ready to snarl at Lom. Already bogged down in paper work, he could not afford to get bogged down in particular Chinamen too.

But, instead, he followed Lom upstairs where Lom made the introduction: “Captain Powers, Mr. Quong.”

Powers’ hand shot out. Quong, smiling nervously, did not see it, for he was busy bowing.

“Is an honor, Righteous Worthy,” said Quong. “Is very great honor.”

When the bow ended Powers’ hand was still out there. After a moment, Quong took it. He seemed as timid as a young girl, and he would not or could not meet Powers’ eyes.

“Sit down, Mr. Quong,” said Powers. “What seems to be the problem?”

Lom led the former schoolteacher back over his narrative. Lom did not care about Quong, but about the impression he was making on his commander and he directed Quong to speak in Cantonese, as this would establish him as invaluable translator. But Powers quickly became impatient - the interview was taking too long - and Lom was obliged to allow Quong to explain himself whenever possible in English.

Thus the story unfolded. In a farm village at the edge of the Pearl River in Kwangtung Province, Quong had served as schoolmaster for more than twenty years, and had held the rank of learned scholar.

“The class structure in China is quite rigid,” commented Lom to Powers. “Learned scholar is pretty high.”

Quong had run a one-room schoolhouse for all grades up to age fifteen. He had taught the little ones to draw their ideographs; he had taught the older ones Chinese history and as much of the five classics as they would sit still for, and he had been an admired figure in the village.

Then had come the cultural revolution. The Gang of Four was in control. Learning became unpopular and men like Mr. Quong were suspected of deviationist tendencies. Rumors began to circulate: the schoolmaster might be sent somewhere for reeducation, or arrested, or driven out.

“When was the Gang of Four?” murmured Powers to Lom.

“A couple of years ago, Captain, a couple of years ago.”

Quong was terrified by the rumors, because he feared for his young wife and small son. On a certain night, gathering a few possessions, he led them out of the village, trotting down the road toward Hong Kong more than a hundred miles away. Quong, in the lead, carried a stick to ward off the dogs. They woke dogs in every village they trotted through, but when alone under the moon were not safe either, and had to trot more silently than ever so as not to disturb the earth gods.

“Earth gods?” said Powers. “But he’s an educated man.”

“He’s also Chinese,” commented Lom.

After many nights they reached the coast at the edge of Deep Bay, across from the British Crown Colony, and a boatman, promising to take them across, took all of their money, then forced them out into shallow water when still about a mile from shore, and they were obliged to wade and swim the rest of the way, their possessions above their heads. Once ashore they resumed trotting. They trotted three more nights toward Kowloon, where Quong’s wife had a relative she had never met. They went to his house, a small flat. She addressed him as Third Uncle and he took them in. When told they had no money, he agreed to accept all of their jade and gold instead - two pairs of earrings and a brooch. In return, he gave them part of one room sectioned off by curtains. Quong was lucky. He found work as a laborer in a land-fill project, six days a week, twelve hours a day. He saved his money, for he had conceived the idea of emigrating to America, the Gold Mountain, and he made contact with one of the Triad societies that provided false immigration papers, paying the cost in monthly installments over a period of years.

The Triad society had an arrangement with the New York branch of the Nam Soong Tong. Passage to New York would cost fifty percent of Quong’s earnings for the next ten years. He agreed.

The Quongs were flown to Vancouver, then led across Canada to Toronto where, with fifteen other Chinese men, women and children, they were crammed by white demons into the false bottom of an oil tank truck for the drive across the border to Niagara Falls. The hatch was slammed shut and bolted from the outside. There was no light or headroom and very little air. They squatted in the dark hip to hip, arm to arm, unable to stand up or shift position. The temperature rose higher and higher, reaching, probably, 120 degrees. The truck was motionless for several hours. Some of the women fainted, and some screamed, but no one came to open the hatch. Hours later, the truck began to roll again.

They were let out in New York City, drenched by then with sweat and piss, and most of them half crazed from the claustrophobia and the fear.

Here Quong’s face broke into a broad grin, and he reverted to Chinese.

“I haven’t heard anything yet,” interjected Powers, “that sounded funny.”

“He crossed the border illegally, Captain,” said Lom. “He put one over on the American authorities. He’s proud of it.”

“Great,” said Powers. “He’s an illegal alien. What do we do about that?”

But the grinning Quong had extracted his green card, which he was trying to thrust on Powers - who did not want to take it.