Year of the Dragon (25 page)

“I know,” said Luang. “Since I don’t speak Hakka, I can’t monitor him. The minute he starts talking Hakka, I have to shut the tape recorder off.”

“Don’t you understand Hakka at all?” Powers was almost pleading with him. “Don’t you understand it even a little?”

“Not a word, Captain.”

“This is crazy.”

“China is a big country. We have eight major languages. So what? Europe has about twenty.”

Powers was pacing hard, head down. “We’ve got to find somebody who speaks Hakka.”

“That’s not going to be easy, Captain.”

There was no Chinese-American cop they could use, and if they picked some Chinese-American off the street, he would most likely feel more loyalty toward a fellow Chinese than toward the police, and also more fear - Koy was, after all the Cho Kun. An individual off the street would be more likely to go straight to Koy with the news than to help make a case against him.

This deplorable tendency had been amply proven during past gambling cases. The department’s public morals division had often employed informants who would enter the gambling dens, make their observations, and afterwards testify against those individuals they were able to identify as employees. Not once had any informant ever identified a single big shot in the gambling hierarchy. Nothing but low-level arrests were ever made - this was still another reason why crackdowns on the Chinese gambling dens had been curtailed. To the police commanders involved, it had seemed clear that the owners and operators of gambling dens were men of respect in Chinatown; they were also dangerous. To finger one of them would subject the informant to swift, vicious reprisals.

It was useless to imagine that an ordinary Chinatown citizen, no matter who he was, could be trusted to monitor the wiretap on Koy.

“Wait a minute,” cried Powers. “I’ve got an idea.” He was suddenly beaming. “I think I know where some Hakka-speaking people can be found.”

A crazy idea, as yet insubstantial, he tossed it this way and that. But possible, an idea that might work.

“Stay on post. I’ll be back.”

From an office down the hall Powers made a number of phone calls. He could scarcely believe his luck. Gathering up the notes he had made, he ran down to his car and drove to the district attorney’s office at 5 Leonard Street. By then it was supper time and the district attorney, waiting for him, looked annoyed. He listened impassively as Powers outlined the situation. Trustworthy Hakka-speaking people were needed to monitor the wiretap, and he had found them. He had their names right here.

He pushed the new names across the desk. But the district attorney, who sat with his lips pursed, his fingers steepled, was shaking his head negatively. “All we have to do is add these names to the existing wiretap order,” Powers said.

“Wiretaps must be monitored by law enforcement personnel,” the DA declared. “These names you have given me, they’re women, and they certainly would not be mistaken for law enforcement personnel. I don’t know if a judge will sign this.” But he was already beginning to change his mind, Powers saw. A half-smile was creeping onto his face. Powers’ plan amused him. He looked willing to try it.

“They are not law enforcement personnel,” Powers persisted. “They’re retired missionary nuns who speak Hakka. Their integrity is beyond question. There have to be exceptions to these rules from time to time. The law can’t be that strict. Now would you please sign this thing and let’s get it to a judge.”

And an hour later Powers led the two old women into the station house. He knew heads would turn and stare. He watched it happen - the cop on security duty at the door, the desk sergeant. Powers wanted to laugh. He was like a practical joker observing the results of his joke - his joke on this station house, on the police department, on law enforcement, on the world.

“Right this way, Sisters,” chortled Powers, and the two aged nuns, dressed in the flowing black habits and starched cowls of many years ago, followed him looking neither right nor left, great frail blackbirds with sharp white beaks.

In all that large room, as Powers and the two women crossed it, no one else moved. About ten officers and detectives stared. Their shoes seemed screwed to the floor.

What were these women doing here?

Station houses, every cop knew, were not cathedrals. They attracted neither worshippers nor tourists. They were as forbidding as cemeteries, as repugnant as garbage dumps. They were monuments to human degradation. One avoided them out of an almost superstitious dread. Even neighborhood people sometimes crossed the street to walk by, they crossed their breasts, as if the building itself had unknown power, gave off some vague occult emanation. No one strolled in off the street out of idle curiosity. No one strolled in at all except cops whose gear creaked, rough men, hearty, ribald. Most visitors were dragged in, hands manacled, cursing and screaming, or else stunned and bloody. They were sometimes accompanied by their victims, who were likely to be stunned and bloody also. Women visitors could be either one category or the other, prisoner or victim. If prisoners, they were principally shoplifters or whores. They could be axe murderesses too, but this was rare. If victims, they had suffered usually at the hands of their husbands, either legal or, more often, common law. The more impermanent a relationship, the more violent. These were the categories of women cops were used to in station houses, and so now they froze and gawked, eyes like radar disks.

Nuns in station houses were totally outside every cop’s experience. The two old women now parading past them could not have aroused more shock, created more questions, started more talk if they had been stark naked. Chiefs Duncan and Cirillo, Powers knew, would hear about this in an hour. There would be no keeping of secrets now.

Upstairs he threw open the door on Luang. The phones were still at the moment, and the Chinese police officer, wearing jeans and a sweater, sat with his feet on the desk reading a book. But he jumped quickly to his feet, and his gaze switched from Powers to the nuns. Unlike the men downstairs, he showed no surprise at all, so that Powers wondered: is it because he is Chinese? Have the Chinese seen so much more than we that nothing surprises them anymore?

In this room Powers’ joke had fallen flat, and he did not know why.

“Sisters,” he said, “this is Police Officer Luang. Luang, this is Sister Mary Bartholomew and Sister Mary Jeanne. They’re retired nuns. They were missionaries in China for many years, and they speak Hakka. Show them what to do.”

Sister Jeanne said, “Oh, Captain, this is so-”

She must be eighty, Powers thought, and she’s as excited as a girl.

Sister Bartholomew was more pensive: “I do hope we can be of help.”

As Luang began to explain the intercept console, the tape recorder, Powers excused himself. “I’ll be back a little later, Sisters.”

But once in the corridor he hesitated, for he could hear Luang’s voice through the door.

“I’ll work the machine, Sisters. All you have to do is tell me the gist of the conversation. If it’s just ordinary conversation, the law says we can’t listen.”

Inside that room, Powers reflected, three people were engaged in eavesdropping. Outside the room, one more: himself.

Privacy, invasion of. An intellectual concept. A legal concept. In most of the world privacy did not exist. To the Chinese, it was unknown. Both here and in China they lived packed too close together. When families were separated by curtains hung on wires, if that, every fart and belch was common property. Yet in New York, although conversations in the street were not protected, the privacy of those carried electronically had been declared by the courts to be inviolable, as privileged as marriage, sacred, like love - a concept that was not even rooted in customs and morals. It was entirely new. In the days of open lines, party lines - not very long ago - it was unheard of. No one supposed that telephones were or ever could be private. A wiretap would have offended nobody.

Whereas now a villain such as Koy had to be tracked according to rules as refined as those that governed a banquet. The table had to be set just so, the guests arranged just so. A single breach of etiquette and all the foregathered food had to be dumped into the garbage-disposal unit, the wine poured down the sink, the guests sent away hungry.

“But if the subject sounds promising,” said Luang’s voice through the door, “we listen, all three of us, and you tell me what it’s about.”

There came a muffled, nervous giggle. Sister Bartholomew, Powers thought. A homely sound, encouraging to him, wholly pleasing, as if God (if there was a God) would surely reward the efforts of these noble ladies. Reward them, reward him, reward the wiretap.

Cops often set a thief to catch a thief, Powers reflected. The old adage was also conventional police technique. That’s what informants were all about. He had gone one better. He had set two virgins to catch a crime lord - man’s oldest and most revered symbol of purity manning the ramparts against the powers of darkness.

Powers went down to his car, parked in front of the station-house door, and drove home.

THAT MORNING, wanting to look his best for an appointment with Carol Cone later in the day, Chief of Detectives Cirillo had himself driven in his official car by his official chauffeur to a barber shop he favored on lower Broadway opposite City Hall. His chauffeur was a detective named Harold Sutherland - Mafia dons were not the only New Yorkers customarily driven about by armed men, nor the only ones who enjoyed lying under hot towels. As Cirillo went inside and mounted the tonsorial throne, as he lay back and closed his eyes, he was confident that no one would shoot him - few Mafia dons could share this confidence, their mortality rate in barber chairs being rather high. There was a second difference. As the manicurist, a young woman with dyed hair, kneaded the chief of detective’s gun hand, as she soaked, massaged and pared his nails, Cirillo was on duty and being paid by the City. He was half asleep, half aroused and on duty all at the same time.

Sutherland, meanwhile, sat parked out front where, also at city expense, he waited.

If questioned, Cirillo would have maintained that this was the department’s image he was grooming here, not his own - for the department’s TV appearance later: he only wanted the Department to look its best on camera. Besides, he was underpaid by civilian standards, and a little barbering on City time was a perk that came with the job. Harold’s presence in the street could be justified also. The chief of detectives’ car contained some expensive radio equipment, which Harold was both guarding and monitoring; in addition, like any cop on patrol, he was presumed to be eyeballing all the sidewalk he could see. Let a crime be perpetrated within eyeshot of Harold, and he would be out of that car in an instant, gun drawn.

In fact, Harold had all frequencies turned down as far as they would go, except for the rarely used confidential band, because he had the
Daily News
spread open on the steering wheel and was reading. Harold was one of those individuals who required absolute concentration in order to read at all.

Cirillo, who was fifty-one years old, wore an exquisitely cut gray suit made for him by an exclusive Madison Avenue clothier - in return he had provided the store with about ten minutes of free security advice on his own time. He had provided it after hours, on the day he had driven up to the store in his police car to collect the suit.

Now, freshly scented, shaved and coiffed, his fingernails lacquered, he came out to the car. Harold folded the
News
and started the engine.

Sliding into the front seat, Cirillo nodded at the radio. “Anything come over, Harold?”

“Not a thing, Chief.”

An hour later Cirillo’s intercom buzzed and his chief secretary, a captain, announced the arrival of Carol Cone.

Cirillo straightened his tie, shot his monogrammed cuffs so that his gold cuff links showed, and was ready for her. He met her at the door.

He had expected to greet a three- or four-person crew. To his surprise she was alone. A sexy, brassy broad in a tight suede dress, but alone.

“Where’s the cameras?” he demanded, giving her a wolfish grin. Though he pretended to be joking, he was annoyed. “I get all dressed up nice and there’s no camera. What is this?”

“It’s called preliminary reporting, Chief,” Carol assured him. “The cameras come later.”

Cirillo’s annoyance began to recede. He liked looking at her, she was a celebrity, and her presence here made him feel important. In addition, she was a woman, and therefore easy to manipulate. All he had to do was give her whatever story she had come for. If he played his cards right, she’d be back again tomorrow to interview him on film.

“What’s on your mind?” he said, stepping behind his desk. He ogled her up and down, exaggerating it, oozing charm. “I mean, I know what’s on my mind, but what’s on yours?”

He gestured to the chair beside his desk. She took it, crossing her legs, giving him a flash of thigh. Then she looked up at him, blinking her eyes - provocatively, he thought. A definite come-on, he decided, once he had thought about it a moment. She’s too old not to know exactly what she’s doing. He puzzled over what it meant.

“I like your suit, Chief.”

He nodded, and grinned. “Yours fits nice too,” he said, and gave her bosom another exaggerated stare. Compliments of this nature were the kind women liked best, Cirillo believed.

“It’s about Chinatown, Chief.” And again her glance, her half-smile, the way she leaned toward him in the chair seemed to him provocative. If he played his cards right, he thought, he might get more out of this than a bit of television time. The notion did not surprise him. In New York he was just as much a celebrity as she was, and a man of power as well. Women responded to power, as everyone knew, and they responded to cops too, which only cops knew. Women were always jumping into bed with cops. Some of them called in fake crimes just to bring cops to their doors. Cirillo had never bothered to think it out, but certain women were as attracted to cops as others were attracted to baseball players. Probably it was the dark side of the policeman’s life that drew them. Cops were society’s hunters - and sometimes killers. They carried guns. They represented force and public safety at the same time. Perhaps all women secretly wanted to be raped by a cop because he would protect them while he was doing it. This idea appealed to Cirillo’s sardonic sense of humor, and he smiled at Carol.

“Chinatown, eh?” he said.

As an inspector, he had commanded the public morals division’s gambling raids in Chinatown, he said. PMD was a kind of headquarters-based vice squad.

“Did you work on drugs too?” asked Carol. She had her notebook out.

Cirillo frowned. Why had she asked that?

No, not drugs, he told her. He intended to accord this subject one sentence and go past it, like a train rushing through a station. She would get only a glimpse, not enough to tempt her to return. Drug addiction was practically unknown in Chinatown, he said. There, that was the one sentence. And it was true, too. So was prostitution unknown, he added. There were almost no Chinese prostitutes or pimps. Prostitution was a low-profit business, and Chinese criminals were not interested in low-profit businesses. Gambling, on the other hand, was big, the Chinese weakness, and Cirillo had raided a lot of joints.

“What about Chinese organized crime?”

“There’s no such thing, doll. The Mafia in this country is still run by the Italians.”

Partly to get her off this dangerous subject, partly just to be funny, he began to tell her gambling stories. He would charm the pants off her, as the saying goes. In her case literally, he hoped.

He talked of police battering rams knocking down flimsy tenement walls and crashing in on rooms full of Chinese gamblers. “You should have seen the surprised faces on those Chinamen,” chortled the chief of detectives. “Their steel door is still standing, but the whole wall is down.”

Carol grinned encouragingly, pen poised. To Cirillo she seemed an appreciative audience. She waited for whatever pearls he might drop next.

He used to station men in the back courtyard, he said. “All those Chinamen would go pouring out the back door right into the arms of my guys. Worked every time.”

“You’d think they’d know better than to run out the back door,” encouraged Carol.

“The back door is instinctive with people,” said Cirillo. “When a man is caught in a raid, you can’t tell him not to run out the back door.”

Cirillo, laughing at his own joke, realized that Carol seemed less amused than previously, and had not written anything down in some time.

“What about drugs?”

“No drugs. Not in years. I told you that before.”

“I’ve been hearing stories about a Chinese Mafia,” she said.

“There’s no evidence of that at all,” stated Cirillo immediately. “Who could have given you that idea?”

“It’s something I heard.”

Cirillo thought he knew where she had heard it. He asked carefully, casually, “Have you talked to the precinct commander down in Chinatown yet?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Well, he seems like a nice fellow, but he doesn’t say much.”

They looked at each other, both nodding carefully, casually.

“He’s a good cop.” said Cirillo, looking for a response. But he got none; Carol did not reply.

Cirillo decided she was not stupid. He had best make a small concession. “Chinese organized crime, maybe. In a minor way. Chinese Mafia, no,” he said.

Carol uncrossed her legs, and Cirillo got a second look up her dress. It made his shirt collar feel too tight. “Maybe you’re thinking about the tongs,” he said. “In a way the tongs might be considered organized crime, since they control the gambling. The other big crime down there is extortion by the youth gangs. But we’re beginning to break that up now.”

“And murder,” said Carol.

“Yeah. Once in a while they knock each other off.”

She had a way of gazing at him half smiling, the tip of her sharp tongue showing between her teeth. Cirillo imagined how she would look with her hair spread out on a pillow.

“Well, the tongs then,” said Carol. “Who should I see about the tongs?”

Cirillo leaned back and studied her. She was sending forth conflicting messages. He read her as an intensely sensual woman who was also a celebrity, and therefore proud. She would come this far toward him, and no further. If he wanted her he would have to make his play.

“Why don’t I get some men in here to talk to you, honey,” he suggested. “The inspector who has PMD is a fellow you should talk to. And the intelligence sergeant in charge of my Chinatown section as well.”

“Fine,” said Carol.

Cirillo nodded at her, grinning broadly. “And after you finish with them, why don’t you and I go out to lunch? I have something on for lunch, but for you I can break it.” His hand hovered over his intercom button, as if to signify that the two offers went together.

Carol’s smile was late. “Lunch would be swell, Chief. I’m sure you and I have lots to talk about.”

Cirillo punched the intercom. “Reach out for Inspector Appell and Sergeant Torres,” he ordered. “Get them in here forthwith.”

About five minutes later the two men entered Cirillo’s office. “Pete Appell, Sergeant Torres,” said Cirillo, “meet the best-looking broad on television. She wants to know about Chinatown.”

After showing them all into his conference room, Cirillo went back behind his desk, ordered his secretary to reserve a table for two at II Cortile, one of little Italy’s finest restaurants, then began to catch up on the messages and paper work that had accumulated during the morning. He bossed about 3000 detectives, a force bigger than the entire police departments of most of the world’s cities.

In the conference room, Inspector Appell was mostly silent, whereas Sergeant Torres proved a journalist’s dream. He had more and better facts than the chief of detectives, and was delighted to disgorge them. He had headed the Chinatown section for five years. The intelligence had piled up and no one until Captain Powers a few weeks ago, and now Carol, had even talked to him.

“Did you go to Chief Cirillo?”

“I sent him a memo after these recent killings. I haven’t heard back yet.”

“I see.

“The Chiefs a busy man,” interjected Inspector Appell. “He’s got the whole city to worry about. Chinatown is only a small part.”

“You’re right,” said Carol.

“I’m only a sergeant,” said Torres.

Carol began to fill pages in her notebook, scribbling quickly. Her questions became ever more explicit. She made Torres prove every important statement.

How did he know the Chinese were taking over real estate formerly owned by Italians? Answer: Gino’s Roadhouse in Queens, a mob hangout, had just become the Shanghai Palace. And a “social club” on Mulberry Street in Little Italy was now a gambling den. The two sides seemed to have come together, as was proved by certain recent funerals: Mafia chieftains at Chinese funerals, tong officers at Mafia funerals.

“Give me a specific case.”

A year ago, when Big Bob Fong died, the
consigliore
and one of the
capos
of the Gambino family were both there. They were photographed by both the NYPD and the FBI, and knew they would be, but they had been sent to Fong’s funeral to show respect.

“So now we have a Chinese Mafia,” said Carol.

“You could call it that,” said Sergeant Torres.

“I wouldn’t call it that at all,” said Inspector Appell.

Torres caught the ball on one bounce. “Actually I wouldn’t either,” he said.

“We don’t have enough information to call it anything of the sort,” said Inspector Appell. He looked to Carol more and more nervous, as if he knew Torres was talking too much but didn’t know how to shut him up.

“And,” suggested Carol, probing carefully, “the godfather is this Mr. Ting, the mayor of Chinatown.”

“Ting is out,” said Torres. “The new mayor is a man by the name of Jimmy Koy.”

“Who’s he?”

Torres began to recount gossip. It was law-enforcement gossip, but it exactly resembled Hollywood gossip, and for the same reasons. The police were as constrained as studio heads to operate within certain defined limits, whereas the hoods were like film stars - rich, notorious, and unpredictable. They were likely to do any crazy thing they felt like. They were fascinating, and so gossip accreted around them and was propagated by the police as a means of making themselves and their profession seem more interesting. Koy, explained Torres, was a former Hong Kong police sergeant who had escaped from there five years before with an enormous amount of money. The sum had grown in legend in recent weeks, and Torres put it at 500 million dollars.