Year of the Dragon (16 page)

What was he to say to this? Was she being theatrical? Was she so lonely that it was perhaps true? Was she experiencing the equivalent of a teenage crush, and was she so unstable a woman that she would indulge herself, and call it love? His reaction was intellectual rather than physical because he was too old to accept such declarations at face value. He felt none of the hot and cold flashes, no headlong rush of emotion as in the past. Love he knew to be as unruly as a mob, as unpredictable as a riot. Love to his regret, he knew too much about. It was very expensive. It raised a lot of questions.

He didn’t know her well enough to answer any of them but when he looked at her across the candle flame her eyes appeared to be moist, her lips were parted, she seemed to totally vulnerable, and he was perplexed.

Their bill was presented and paid. While they waited for change neither spoke. The change would change nothing.

It came, “What do you want to do now?” asked Carol with false brightness.

If the principal intimacy of lovers was their display to each other of naked pleasure, the next greatest intimacy was a display of naked pain, for pleasure and pain are so closely related it is sometimes impossible to tell them apart. Carol had shown him her pain, holding back almost nothing. The intimacy between them at this moment was certainly very great. It was almost as if they were lovers already.

He pocketed his money. If she wanted to play the role of teenager, then so did he, for it would be amusing. It also seemed safer than any other. “Let’s go out to the car and neck,” he suggested.

“Yes, let’s.” Smirking at each other like adolescents planning deviltry, they pushed back from the table.

His car was the last one left in the parking lot. They slid in on either side and kept sliding until their arms were around each other. Their knees knocked together, and then their teeth. Powers was unused to kissing in cars. So was she, he supposed. But it brought back nice memories. He had always enjoyed kissing girls, and he enjoyed it now. The next move, as he remembered, was to begin stroking her sweater, and then to get her skirt hiked up, but under present circumstances these notions were repugnant.

The chaste kiss ended, and Powers did not know what to do next, so he started another.

“Let’s drive to Ardsley and look at the moonlight on the Hudson,” said Carol. “I know a terrific place.”

So he drove there, steering at her direction into a small park and nosing his car up to the low fence that overlooked the view. The moon was a little past full. Below them, wearing the lights of the great bridge like a necklace at its throat, flowed the dark river. It was a mile wide here, wider than most people’s worlds, wider than ten Chinatowns. On its moon-dappled surface millions of silver dollars floated downstream.

It was a sight to stir blood that was already stirring.

“See,” said Carol.

“Yes.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“You’re beautiful.”

He embraced her, but this kiss was doomed to be interrupted, for a police cruiser was rolling silently into the park behind them. Without warning the cop turned his floodlight on. The beam landed hard as a blow. It struck Powers in the back of the head, glanced off and turned Carol’s face ashen. It turned white everything it touched, dashboard, steering wheel, seat. It bled out all color instantly, and all intimacy, security, emotion.

In candlepower it matched an explosion, and was therefore as shocking. But it made no noise and so the shock did not last.

Powers and Carol turned blinking toward the light’s source, and the cop, seeing he had surprised two adult taxpayers, hurriedly shut it off.

“He’s now as shaken as we were,” noted Powers. “He thought we’d be eighteen years old. Now he’s worried. For all he knows I’m the mayor of this town, and you’re my secretary. He may be in bad trouble.” Powers began to laugh. “Shall I get out and reprimand him?”

Carol was laughing too.

“This park is closed after dark,” boomed the loudspeaker on the cop’s roof. He was certainly not coming over. He did not want to know who they were.

Powers started the engine. As he drove out of the park, he gave the cop a wave. The cop merely looked sullen; he gave no wave back.

“Did you ever sneak up on lovers in cars when you were a young cop?” asked Carol, snuggling against his arm as he drove.

“No. I had too much respect for lovers to do that.”

“Are we going to be lovers?”

He looked at her, but did not reply.

“Where are we going?”

“I’m driving you home,” he said, which did not answer her question. The answer to her question was that he did not know.

When he had rolled into her driveway, had doused lights and ignition, he kissed her again. Her big house loomed over them both, one of two looming presences he was trying to cope with. His marriage was the other.

He followed her into the house and up the dark staircase. In her bedroom they undressed separately. Beside her bed he found himself behaving exactly as if beside his own; not having undressed his wife in many years, why undress this other woman now? He didn’t even look at her as she took her clothes off, though he did watch her a moment later when, naked in the moonlight that came in the windows, she threw back the covers. Then he was in bed with her, making love to her, and then she was weeping. It astonished him more than anything so far. She had screamed with pleasure - louder by far than Eleanor ever had - and a moment later she was sobbing just as loudly.

Jesus, he thought.

All he said was: “You’re crying.”

“Because I’m so happy,” she sobbed.

Not knowing what to do or say, he stroked her arm, her shoulder, her face until she was quiet.

“You’re beautiful, you know that?” she told him. The tears had stopped. “I love your neck. I love the way the hair is on your chest. And you’re a very good lover.”

He lay beside her. “How many lovers have you had?” The eternal male question. He was ashamed to have asked it, and he saw she did not intend to give a figure anyway. “Hey, I withdraw that. It makes no difference, and it’s none of my business.”

There were many mysteries to women, but this was one of the central ones, the one most of them would preserve at all costs.

“Not many,” she said, moving across him. “And no one like you.”

She lay on him, kissing him, and he found he wanted her again already. She kissed his eyes, his nose. “I’m crazy about you,” she said, beginning to move. “And you’re married, and you love your wife. What am I going to do?” Sweat glistened on her upper lip, and between her swaying breasts. She punctuated her efforts with more words. “Oh, I’m so hung up on you.”

“Not just figuratively,” he muttered. “Literally as well.” Her breath came in gasps.

“Promise you won’t just drop me. Promise I’ll see you again. These next weeks are going to be agony for me. Promise you’ll call me every day. At least until I get over you a little. At least give me a chance to get over you. If you have to drop me, promise you’ll let me down easy.”

He felt as virile as a boy.

“I love you,” she said. “I love, love you, love you.”

He was exultant. It was true he loved his wife, but he loved Carol too, somehow, at least at that moment. Because she loved him, and because-

“Promise me,” she pleaded. “Promise, promise.” She was handing him a bill that would have to be paid regularly, a bill as recurrent as mortgage payments. But she was gorgeous in this light and totally open to him, body and soul, and his heart was near bursting that a night like this, a honeymoon night, could have happened to him again at his age.

“I promise,” he heard himself say. “Oh Carol, yes, I promise.”

AN HOUR later he was sitting up in bed in pajamas, half-glasses halfway down his nose, studying the volume open on his lap. He heard his wife come home, heard the complaints of her crepe-soled shoes as she moved about down in the kitchen, and he stopped reading to listen to her. A cabinet opened and shut, and her shoes crossed to the stove. Then he heard her climb the stairs, and it pleased him to think that in a moment she would come into the room.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I thought you were asleep. I should have made two cups.” She had entered carrying a cup of tea close to her lips, sipping as she walked. In her nurse’s uniform, wearing her hair tied back, she looked tall and slim, but also rather tired.

“That’s okay. I had some earlier.”

She held out her cup to him. “Take this one. I’ll go back down and make another.”

He shook his head. “Sit down and drink your tea, Puss,” he said.

She obeyed, sitting on the edge of the bed beside him. He watched her drink and felt content that she was home. After a time she reached down to take off her shoes.

“Well, what did you do with yourself all evening?” she asked, and began massaging her white-stockinet toes. “My feet hurt.”

“Oh, I was out gallivanting,” said Powers lightly, misleading her, avoiding the outright lie. To him each new lie would constitute an additional betrayal.

“Good.” Her fond smile caressed him. “Did you get a decent dinner?”

In an expensive restaurant with another woman, he thought.

“It was okay,” he said, still not lying. Lies didn’t kill outright. They produced flesh wounds, like jabs from a pen knife. The victim later bled to death. In the long run they were as damaging as ax blows. They cut out chip after chip until the tree went down.

She leaned over and kissed him on the nose under his glasses. “Did you miss me tonight? Tell me how much you missed me.”

She craned her neck around and peered at the book in his lap. “What are you reading?”

“Liang Shan Po.”

“And what does Liang Shan Po have to say for himself?”

Powers grinned at her. “This you’ll like. He writes that the rich man and the policeman are regarded by the people with equal suspicion. The outlaw, on the other hand, is regarded with sympathy, because he must have had an excellent reason for becoming an outlaw.”

“Sounds like a Black Panther,” said Eleanor.

“He writes of the ‘holy mission of the outlaw.’”

“Are you suggesting that Liang Shan Po writes drivel?”

“I’m suggesting that the Chinese invented Robin Hood too.”

“Those people sound awfully deep.” She got up and began to get undressed. “What kind of day did you have? Any complainants?”

Powers, shaking his head, said: “Not one. So far, the new commander of the Fifth Precinct is as ineffectual as the last guy. Maybe more so. At least he amused them with his horse. They don’t find me funny at all.”

Eleanor, having undone the buttons on her white dress, pulled it off over her head and threw it into the hamper in her closet. Her slip went into the hamper also, after which she patted her blond-streaked hair back into place. Over his half-glasses her husband watched her.

“Well, do you have a plan?” she asked conversationally. “What do you do next?”

He watched her remove her bra, pull her nightgown on over her head, and then reach up under it to take her panties off. Every night she got undressed the same way, and he always wondered why. She was not shy. In sex she enjoyed being nude. He had asked her why, but she could not tell him. Puzzling over it, he had decided that girls of Eleanor’s generation - Eleanor herself, anyway - must have grown up with some deep psychological block about removing their last article of clothing. As if without it they became suddenly overly vulnerable. Back then, and it wasn’t very long ago, her underpants constituted a girl’s last bastion before catastrophe.

Of course Carol tonight had displayed no such fetish. She couldn’t wait to get completely naked. Carol was rich, Carol was glamorous, and Carol was sex-starved.

Powers brought his knees together so that the book in his lap slammed shut.

“What’s the matter?” Eleanor asked.

“What?”

“You looked sad just then.”

“No, just thoughtful.”

He dropped the book onto the floor. That story was over. He might never forget what he had read so far, but he would not read on.

His wife came toward the bed. “I think I’ve seen you somewhere before,” she said. “Aren’t you the hero of Chinatown?”

Powers smiled.

“That’s better,” she said. “I like you much better when you smile.”

But his smile faded. “They sent me to Chinatown to suppress the youth gangs,” he muttered. “They want no more massacres. They want the crime rate down, and the arrest rate up. But there’s no earthly way to stop the youth gangs without going after the conspiracy as a whole. It’s impossible. I’m going to fail. Six months from now, maybe sooner, they’re going to fire me. Puss, I don’t have any choice. I
have
to go after the Chinese Mafia. I have to prove it exists and I have to bring it down.”

“If they find out,” said Eleanor, “they’ll ruin you.”

“I’m ruined anyway. I have nothing to lose.”

“Calm down,” said Eleanor, sliding into the bed. “I’m on your side. How do you go about it?”

“I go after the biggest hood in Chinatown. I go after Koy.”

“Poor Koy. The hero of Chinatown is after him, and he doesn’t even know it.”

“It isn’t funny.”

“I know it’s not funny.”

“I had a long talk with him this afternoon,” said Powers. “It was one of the most disagreeable conversations of my life. Look, we know the tongs control the gangs, and Koy controls the richest tong. If there is a Chinese Mafia, then he has to be the leader of it. There is no one else in Chinatown with his stature. If I can nail Koy I can decapitate the conspiracy and then pick off the gang thugs one by one. Also, I’ll have more face than any man in Chinatown -enough face, maybe, to turn Chinatown around.”

“I like your face the way it is,” said Eleanor. “And anyway, what do you have on him?”

“Nothing at all. I’ve been to every law enforcement agency in the city. No one has anything on him. He’s absolutely clean.”

“Then how can you be so sure he is dirty?”

“It’s something a cop can read,” said Powers doggedly. “Particularly in another cop - which is one of my problems, by the way. Being a cop himself, Koy will see me coming.”

Powers reached to turn off the light, then slid down into the bed, and moved up against his wife, his sole support in a hostile world. There was no one else he could talk to like this, but tonight she had left him alone and he had betrayed her with another. “I wish you wouldn’t work these four-to-midnight tours, Puss,” he said.

“Hey, that’s what I always used to say about you. What I still say about you.”

“Dinner time is a bad time to be alone.”

She thought about this. “I agreed to work four-to-midnight until the end of the month. After that, we’ll see, okay?”

“I wish you wouldn’t work at all.” There, it was out. He had felt it for a long time and now, finally, he had said it. They were face to face, breathing on each other, and he held her close.

“We have two kids in college, Artie. It’s costing us a fortune,” she reminded him gently. “We need the money.” She kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Now go to sleep like a good boy.”

He held her in the dark, her exhalations beating regularly against his throat. He felt her fall down deep into sleep, and then the telephone rang on the bedside table beside his ear.

He lunged for it, trying to catch it halfway through the first ring, before it could awaken her, and he answered almost in a whisper.

But his wife’s bedside lamp had gone on, and she sat up and watched him.

This long strange day was not over after all. “I’ll be right there,” said Powers and hung up. “They’ve found the getaway car from the restaurant massacre,” he told Eleanor. “I have to go out.” He got up and began to dress. “This has been some day,” he said.

“Want me to come with you?” she offered.

It was tempting. But she had been on her feet eight straight hours. “They want me to make the identification. I shouldn’t be too long. Go back to sleep.”

“I’ll keep the bed warm for you.”

He grinned at her. “Can I wake you when I come back?”

“Don’t you dare.”

Dressed, he went around to her side, switched off her light, and then in the dark gave her a brief hug. He could barely see her in the darkness. He stroked her hair once, and then went out.

THE GETAWAY CAR, if it was the getaway car, was parked under a tree in front of a two-family house on a residential street in Queens. The street had been closed off to traffic by radio cars that stood sideways at both ends, red lights turning. Powers double-parked at the corner and walked in, heading for the spot where the police photographer had set up his lights. There were rows of passenger cars parked solid along both sidewalks, only one of which was floodlit.

Inside the nearest houses no one, apparently, slept. From the windows heads hung like grapes, and the front stoops were crowded with people in bathrobes. It was an attentive audience and it seemed to be waiting to applaud, but the play was proving less exciting than had been hoped; nothing seemed to be happening. The forensic van, Powers noted, was double-parked just beyond the getaway car, back door agape. There were about eight cops in uniform standing in the street, and a dozen or more detectives as well. One of the detectives was Chief Cirillo, who stood smoking a cigar, and Powers, after inspecting the car, approached him.

“Is that the car, Ralph?” Powers asked him, for they stood apart from Cirillo’s subordinates, and they had known each other a long time.

But Cirillo, after puffing on his cigar said, “Last I heard, I was chief of detectives and you were a captain.”

Powers looked at him.

Cirillo said, “The proper form of address, the last I heard, was Chief.”

Powers looked away. After a moment he said, “Is it the car?”

Cirillo let this pass. “I don’t know. You tell me.”

Powers went back and studied the car. The license plates were wrong. He walked around it. All four doors were open, and technicians were working carefully inside.

“Is it the car?” said Cirillo at his elbow, “the one you fired shots at?”

“It could be. It’s the right model and year. It’s certainly dirty enough. Who found it?”

“A foot patrolman found it,” Cirillo said. “It was on his foot post. It’s been on his foot post over a month.”

“Finally it got dirty enough that he noticed it.”

“Yeah,” said Cirillo. “We’ve got some very observant cops in this department.”

Powers peered into the car. A fingerprint technician was working in the front seat. “Got anything?” Powers asked him.

But Cirillo’s head appeared in the opposite doorway. “You tired of being a detective, pal?” he said to the technician.

“No sir.”

“In that case,” said Cirillo, “you report directly to me, got that? You don’t tell anybody else anything until I say you can. Unless you’re tired of being a detective, that is.”

The technician gave Powers a glance, shrugged and was silent.

Cirillo had moved off and was facing the other way, chewing on the cigar between his teeth, chewing on information Powers wanted. Powers went over there. “So how’s the investigation going?”

Cirillo blew smoke at him. “What investigation?”

“The restaurant massacre.”

“Oh, that investigation.” Cirillo studied him. “That investigation is proceeding.”

“What leads do you have?”

“We are following up all leads.” He again blew smoke at Powers.

Powers said, “I am going home.”

“You are not. You will sign a statement first. Detective McCoy will take your statement.” Cirillo peered about under the trees looking for McCoy. “McCoy?” he bawled. A detective ran up whom Powers did not know. “McCoy,” said Cirillo, “take down Captain Powers’ statement and have him sign it.”

“My statement is that it could be the car,” said Powers. “Some statement.”

But he was obliged to follow McCoy to the hood of an adjacent car, where he held McCoy’s flashlight on the form while McCoy, pushing hard on his pen, wrote out the statement. When it was finished, Powers signed it.

“One of my detectives ought to be here,” Powers said, glancing around. “Detective Kelly. You seen him?”

“Some of the guys went around the corner for a cup of coffee,” said McCoy. “I think he went with them.”

“What do you know about the investigation?” said Powers. Cirillo, he noted was watching both of them.

“It’s going well.” said McCoy nervously.

“What did they find in the car?”

“Nobody tells me anything,” said McCoy.

Powers found Kelly in a diner two blocks away, and took the next stool. “Cirillo is sitting on this case,” muttered Powers. “I couldn’t get any information at all.”

“This car tonight is the first break in the case,” said Kelly. “What do you want to know? You know that the back floor mat is caked with blood, don’t you? And there’s a bullet embedded in the doorjamb. What more can I tell you? They’re going to tow the car in and cut the bullet out with power tools, in case they can still identify it. And the fingerprint guy got a partial off of the ashtray.”