Year of the Dragon (23 page)

“But it is one man? A specific guy?” purred Carol, wanting to make him tell, and her cheek moved down him, crossed his abdomen cool as ice, crushed his curls. Her tongue darted out once, twice, and left a blind part of him questing it in the darkness.

“Yes,” he said. His whole body had stiffened, and the word was almost a gasp.

“A Chinese guy. What is his name?”

“Oh Carol.”

His hand cupped her upthrust buttocks.

“I can’t tell you that.”

“But he’s big?”

“The biggest.”

“A Chinese godfather,” said Carol triumphantly.

“Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh, Carol, yes.”

“The most important man in Chinatown?”

“Yes.”

As he rolled her on to her back, she was in a state of such sexual excitement that she was almost overwhelmed by it. She thought the Chinese godfather must be the mayor of Chinatown, Mr. Ting, and she was satisfied she could find the rest out for herself, and in any case she could no longer concentrate on that story, she was working on this one. She wanted Powers now. She had a grip on him, and he was ready, he was always ready. He was like a teenager with her, a fact they had not discussed, but that no doubt surprised him as much as her every time. She had never had a more willing lover, he was always ready, and she guided him where she wanted him to go.

As he began to ride her she knew he wouldn’t last long. He was too close to the edge for that, but so was she, her whole body tingling, her mind tingling too, delighted with what she had found out, delighted with Powers both as lover and news source, delighted with herself. She heard him begin to gasp and squeal, noises that came to her over and above the racket she was making herself. For once the tumult of a man’s completion, this man’s completion, was enough to release her own. She almost never had orgasms during sexual intercourse, only three or four times in her life, but now she experienced an unending, unendurable, agonizing, exquisite series of convulsions; she was so totally unraveled that she cried out, “Marry me, Artie, oh marry me. Divorce your wife and marry me.”

ANOTHER SMALL, airless room. No window. A desk, two chairs, one beside the desk, one thrust into it. A filing cabinet that occupied an entire corner. Add two people and the room would be full, overfull. With two people, thought Luang, this room - any room - became a theater. The drama could take place. With only one person you had nothing, an actor without an audience, an audience without a play. Luang, hands on the backrest, stood behind the chair rammed into the kneehole. He had not sat down because the second person had not yet arrived. A Chinese newspaper, printed that morning in Chinatown, lay splashed open in front of him. It was a stage prop only. Luang was waiting, not reading. He was rehearsing his lines.

He wore his one business suit. It was six or seven years old, gray, threadbare, shiny, and in places as thin as paper. In Chinatown, where threadbare suits tended to seem reassuring, there were many like it. The Chinese asked that form be preserved. They did not ask for proof of prosperity. Some of the richest men in Chinatown showed no wealth ever. They owned blocks of buildings, but wore suits like Luang’s. Ostentation was dangerous. There was a Chinese adage: If you do not wish your house disturbed by robbers, do not fill it with jade and gold.

Koy was an exception, of course, Luang reflected. Koy wanted everyone to know how rich he was. But Koy was not your usual Chinese.

The door opened and a woman teacher led in the boy, Quong. A middle-aged Jewish lady, small. Taller than Quong though. Smiling, she had him affectionately by the arm. Quong wanted nothing to do with her. His expression was surly, and he kept trying to shrug his arm loose from her grasp like a hooked fish flapping against the floor of the boat, a reflex action, automatic, mindless.

“I’ll send him back to class in a few minutes,” said Luang.

Both Chinese watched the door close behind her.

Upon first noticing that Luang was Chinese, the boy’s face had lit up, and for a moment he had ceased to struggle.

“Who are you?” he said now. His former surly expression had returned. Luang was perhaps Chinese, but to the pupil he was still the enemy.

Luang folded the Chinese newspaper, thrusting it back into his briefcase. Under it a nameplate now stood revealed. Luang had more than one prop and was using them carefully. The nameplate too had come out of his briefcase. It read: GUIDANCE COUNSELOR.

This meeting with Quong had been arranged through the school principal, Mr. Goldfarb, another middle-aged Jew. Goldfarb was sympathetic to the problems of his young Chinese newcomers. He was also aware of the threat posed to them by the Chinese youth gangs. If Luang wanted to interview Quong, this was fine with Goldfarb. But Luang had said nothing to him about passing himself off as a school guidance counselor.

“I didn’t know they had Chinese teachers here,” said the surly child. There were no Chinese words for guidance counselor. Supervising teacher was as close as he could come.

“I’m not a teacher,” said Luang, and he nodded toward his nameplate. But the deception irked him. It was necessary, probably. If the kid was to lead him anywhere he had to pose as something. So he had had no choice. But to deceive another human being was evil, and law enforcement personnel, he already realized, did as much lying - maybe more - as the criminals they arrested. They played roles, as Luang was doing now, sometimes giving virtuoso performances - without ever warning the audience that the show was a show. They made promises to witnesses, to informants, that they knew they couldn’t keep, and in the interest of taking felons off the street they swore out false search warrants and arrest warrants. If necessary to secure a conviction they often enough gave perjured testimony on the witness stand. All this was unfortunate. To combat fraud they multiplied fraud. Criminals, in the course of their depredations, murdered victims relatively rarely; cops murdered truth every day. They destroyed trust. They were guilty of one of the worst crimes of all, the proliferation of the lie.

Luang, staring at the boy before him, chased all these thoughts from his head, or tried to. They would never have occurred to a white demon he was sure, and if he was to do his job properly he had best not dwell on them. This kid would be easy to deceive, and nothing else counted.

“Say, it’s good to talk Chinese for a change,” he said jovially. He leaned on the joviality. He hammered it home, drove it in like a spike.

“You don’t talk Chinese like an American,” conceded Quong grudgingly. He was trying to sound tough, one adult conceding a point to another adult. “You talk like us.”

“I was fifteen when I came to this country,” said Luang. “Same age as you.” The memories were still sharp. Year by year the pain got duller of course, but when remembered it still hurt, the way a broken bone could still hurt long after it had healed. “I was homesick for China every day. Sometimes I walked along the streets crying.”

Luang’s pain must have shown on his face. The child saw it. His eyes went to the floor, and his chin quivered. “Then you know what it’s like.”

“Yeah.” The vivid trauma of being fifteen. It was like remembering a car crash. One could still feel oneself going through the windshield. Fifteen was an age when a boy was more insecure, more vulnerable, and therefore more conservative than he would ever be again. He had discovered the real world, the one outside the home, its cruel rhythms, its harsh tones. Though shocked, he did not desire to change it. He did not know it could be changed. He desired only to adopt protective coloration so as to survive. Only the approval of his peers, it seemed, would save him. He wanted this desperately. He wanted it every day, every hour. He needed it more than food. He could not live without it.

“In classrooms I didn’t understand a word,” said Luang. All this was more than fifteen years ago, but he flinched from it as if from a blow. “School was so incredibly boring.” True, but the least of it. After school was when a boy got his threshold of pain raised. How could you be accepted by your peers when you were Chinese in an American school and did not speak the language? It was impossible, but you hoped for it anyway, day after day.

“You feel so stupid,” confessed Quong. “All the other kids look at you and you know what they’re thinking. They’re thinking you’re stupid.” He was trying to describe emotions that were so intense and immediate as to become for him indescribable. It was like asking a boxer to describe the blow that had stunned him. The boy was only fifteen, and it was like asking him to explain digestion, or sleep. The subject, though entirely normal, was too complex. At thirty-two, thought Luang, the answers would be only slightly easier to come by.

In his chair beside the desk young Quong was leaning forward, almost smiling, almost crying, on the edge of elation as well, thinking he had found a sympathetic listener at last.

I’ve got him, thought Luang, and immediately he became depressed. I don’t care about this kid, he reminded himself. My one and only job here is to nail the undertaker, the Cho Kun. He said: “And a year or so later I got interested in girls. I didn’t go to this school. The school I went to in San Francisco was outside of Chinatown. There were no Chinese girls. The American girls wouldn’t look at me.”

“I’m interested in girls, venerable sir,” said the boy eagerly. Luang noted the ‘venerable sir.’ Surliness was entirely gone. Chinese politeness was back in place. “But most of the Chinese girls around here were born here. They talk English to each other, not Chinese. They only want to make fun of me.”

How like a young girl Quong was, Luang thought, reaching out to his supposed guidance counselor the way a girl reached out to a new boyfriend, timid, tentative - she had been hurt so often in the past. There was no equivalent relationship among males except perhaps for this one, a boy seeking a surrogate father.

Talking his way into the school proved easier for Luang than talking his way out. When he had sent Quong back to class, Mr. Goldfarb invited him into the principal’s office. Goldfarb wanted to chat.

The white-haired educator evidently took him for a scholar, having learned that you could not judge a Chinese by his poverty or his clothes. Most Chinese were poor, and Chinese scholars, though highly honored by other Chinese, were usually among the poorest. Luang’s threadbare business suit was as reassuring to Goldfarb as to most of Chinatown.

Goldfarb had long realized that the Jews and the Chinese held the same values, he said. Same clannishness. Same reverence for learning and the arts, for hard work.

He stroked his white mustache and chuckled. “I understand the Chinese are sometimes called the Jews of the Orient.”

Luang nodded politely.

Goldfarb had tried to stop the gangs from recruiting in his school yard, he said. One day he went out there and confronted Nikki Han - ordered him to leave. When Han refused, the frustrated Goldfarb - to his own amazement - gave the gang leader a vicious kick in the balls. “I didn’t know who he was at the time,” said Goldfarb. “He doubled up on the ground. He puked his guts out.”

Han’s followers had helped him out of the school yard, while Goldfarb rushed inside to phone the precinct. A Detective Kelly had come around, had provided Han’s identity, had described his reputation for violence. This had terrified Goldfarb, who feared reprisals. But there had been none.

“No,” said Luang. “For the most part Chinese gangsters won’t touch non-Chinese. They know you people will testify against them, whereas their own people are usually too frightened, and won’t. That’s why Chinatown crime is as successful as it is - and why it is expanding so fast.”

“If I see Han or any of the others out there in my school yard,” said Goldfarb, “I still will go out there and throw them out.” But he sounded surprised by his own conduct, like a man who learns that he has committed an act of insane courage while drunk.

When the school bell rang that afternoon, Luang was waiting outside the fence in his car. He could hear the bell, then the drum roll of feet on the staircases. In a moment, he saw Quong, carrying a book bag, wearing now his Chinese cap, come running across the school yard and through the gate. The car door was yanked open and the boy, grinning with pleasure, jumped in beside him.

“Is this your car, venerable sir?” He looked around the car in wonder as if at the inside of a palace.

“This is my car.”

“You’re pretty rich.”

The car was a Volkswagen Beetle, not new. It was older than Luang’s suit. Certainly no American kid would have been impressed by it. But in Chinatown very few people owned cars at all.

“I went to school,” said Luang. “I learned to speak English. I got a job, and I bought myself a car. You can do the same. Your first problem is to learn to speak English. I can help you there. I know a place that’s run by the city for Chinese kids.” Luang had spent the last several hours researching this. “I can get you in there. But only if that’s what you want.”

“Hey, I’d like that.”

Luang, driving, thought he had never seen a happier-looking boy, and for a moment he felt less guilty.

“Well, what would you like to see? Would you like to see Central Park, the Bronx Zoo?”

Later in the afternoon they drove down Fifth Avenue. The office buildings were just letting out. Traffic thickened. Two-toned blue buses that plowed straight on. Yellow cabs that darted toward individuals who stepped out from between parked cars, hands waving frantically.

“You’ve been running with some bad kids,” said Luang.

The boy had been gawking at the crowds, at the tall buildings. Immediately his defenses sprang up. Drawbridge raised, barbed wire out front. “They’re my friends.” He was as hostile as Luang had yet seen him. But it did not last. He turned pleading eyes on Luang. “They understand me.”

“What makes you think they’re your friends?”

Quong said nothing.

“They’ll get you in trouble.” His glance flicked sideways at Quong, who looked suddenly miserable. “Maybe they already got you in trouble.”

“I don’t know,” the boy mumbled, his voice so low the Chinese police officer could barely hear him.

“This is Fifth Avenue here,” said Luang cheerfully. “I guess you’ve never seen Fifth Avenue before.” He was changing the somber mood, the mood of siege. He was pulling his troops back out of sight. He could not afford to alarm the boy too much.

“It’s more crowded than China.” There was gratitude in Quong’s voice, relief. Detecting it, Luang was satisfied. Whatever the boy was afraid of, ashamed of, whatever he was hiding, it would come out. It was inevitable. He was like the Chinese maiden awaiting the arrival of the bridegroom she had never seen before. The only question was, how soon?

“Say, how about taking me home to meet your parents,” said Luang. He would keep the pressure on. “I’d like to meet them very much.”

This meeting proved not easy to set up. Both parents worked more than twelve hours a day, and were rarely off work at the same time. And so about a week passed.

The Quongs lived on the fifth floor of a tenement on Elizabeth Street, about one block north of the station house. Luang had to climb five flights of stairs. By the time he knocked on the apartment’s front door he was breathing hard.