Year of the Dragon (3 page)

As he took both Carol’s hands, he imagined her an hour from now, standing in front of cameras giving an eyewitness account of the massacre. He imagined her describing her precious life saved by her date, the fearless gunslinging hero of the action, Captain Powers. And so he began to plead with her.

“Call your story in, then disappear,” he begged. “Let some other reporter handle it. I’m a married man. If the media finds out we were together-”

“There’s nothing between us.”

“They’ll turn it into a scandal anyway.” Outside the sirens were closer. There wasn’t much time. “You know they will.”

“You’re asking too much. This is an important story. It’s one of the biggest stories of my life. You can’t ask me to give it up.” Her eyes, still roaming, had located phones, and she strode toward them.

Ting staggered out onto the landing above. Blood from his scalp leaked down the side of his face, and he grasped the balustrade for support.

Powers took the steps two at a time.

“The police are on their way, Captain,” said Ting.

In a few minutes this place would swarm with uniformed cops, and in his head Powers began to apportion jobs. A crime scene needed to be established. Witnesses had to be prevented from leaving and statements taken. Detectives had to be summoned. Ambulances too, of course. Commands had to be notified: precinct, division, borough, the chief of detectives’ office, the police commissioner’s office, the medical examiner’s office, the district attorney’s office, even, for something this big, the mayor’s office. Until the top brass arrived he was in charge. He would use Ting’s office as his command post.

He would have to phone his wife before she heard whatever news bulletins went out on the air, and became terrified.

He glanced down at Carol, now turning away from the phone. The press would turn up in droves. He would have to station cops at the door to keep them out. Carol too. She was on the outside now, and would remain there.

“It’s bad, Captain,” said Mr. Ting.

Powers strode past him into the slaughterhouse inside.

THE RAIN started again. It fell straight down. Carol waited under an overhang while the street, already full, swelled fuller. People running. Sirens. Shouts. Cars. Slamming doors. Despite cordons at both ends, vehicles kept entering the street: detectives’ cars, commanders’ cars. She didn’t know what all of them were, but she saw they were official, for they double- and triple-parked, they parked on sidewalks. Cops in dripping black slickers worked to keep the crowd back, and to keep one lane open. Forensic vans inched through. Ambulances backed up to the restaurant entrance. Their back doors were flung apart and men in white coats jumped out.

Carol had found her crew and her standup began. Her face intruded into a million houses, a living presence in living color. Uninvited, she interrupted a sitcom for sixty seconds, replacing four weak jokes and their canned accompanying laughter. The jokes became like the corpses upstairs. Not even a machine would laugh at them now. Her grim report turned the next jokes unfunny also, a thought that occurred to her as she spoke. Well, that’s television.

She told what she knew, or thought she knew, which wasn’t much. An attack on a Chinatown restaurant with automatic weapons by unknown assailants for unknown reasons. Casualties unknown. Assailants escaped after a gun battle in the street with the well-known hero cop Captain Powers. She could not as a conscientious journalist keep him out completely. She would have lost her fat contract had she tried. But after much thought she had decided not to present herself as an eyewitness, nor even to place herself inside the restaurant. She didn’t do it for his sake. But she had, after all, witnessed nothing. She had spent the entire action on her back under a man, a position that was familiar to her, though the circumstances were not. There seemed no way to describe her part in this without making it sound like kinky sex. For her the experience had a distinct flavor of kinky sex anyway, as if birth and death had been present at the same time. She had never before lain under a man while people died around her, and her remembered sensations were acute. She could feel Powers’ weight on her still - he was heavier than he looked - while his hands learned all about her. She could feel his hands on her also, and this disturbed her.

As she did her report she was wearing her plastic rain hood, but not her coat, which was upstairs checked. She considered it lost and planned to replace it, billing the network. Her blond-streaked, lacquered hair, being protected, was still neat, but her dress was soaked through. This was spring rain, and she was cold. Microphone at her lips, she stood in the sudden blinding glare, sunlight without warmth, which illuminated her face and upper body, the facade of the Golden Palace behind her, and that segment of sidewalk that had become her stage. As she spoke she was aware as always of spectators. She felt them pressing forward to hear her secrets.

The illumination was cut off. She handed back her microphone. A sound man threw his coat over her shoulders and was rewarded by two seconds’ worth of her famous smile.

She watched rival correspondents, also using the Golden Palace as background, perform similar rites. Projectors came on. Fragments of rainy night were transformed into hallucinatory day. In an earlier age the same thing would have happened, Carol reflected. A generation ago press photographers had used strobe lights, and a generation before that, with press cards stuck in their hatbands, they had exploded the flash bulbs attached to the sides of their speed grafflexes. The tradition extended backwards through the flash pans of daguerreotypers to the up-thrust flaming torches of cavemen. Disaster was and had always been a riddle that had to have light thrown on it. Present-day illumination seemed brighter and longer-lasting only by comparison; it conquered no greater darkness, revealed the essential riddle no better than anything in the past.

The Golden Palace seemed to her like a bastion under siege. Its defenders could not be seen. She and her colleagues had it surrounded. Network vans waited on the perimeter, as watchful as tanks. Cameramen moved into position, their instruments primed and aimed. Light men carried projectors forward, their job to throw up flares for the gunners to sight by. Television was the besieging army, no question about it, and if you did not believe this, ask the police. The police knew who the enemy was, and hid.

At last the bastion’s doors were flung open. The crowd became agitated and pressed forward: mixed tourists and Chinese crowding the barricades, Chinese faces in windows and doorways, individual crowds of wet, uncomfortable newsmen in the street. The first stretchers came out. It was as if the building had dined too copiously and had begun now to vomit. More stretchers. Shouts. Projectors blazed. Cameramen ran. Stretcher-bearers ran. Doors slammed. Engines came on. Headlights came on. Vehicles lurched into motion. Sirens wailed. The building was expelling all it could not hold down.

It was a scene of wild disorder, and Carol watched it enthralled. High tragedy and low comedy had become the same, funeral and carnival were the same. Disorder had become beautiful, as seductive as illicit sex, as seductive as vice. She felt giddy with excitement, and at the same time felt that her excitement was somehow lewd. She was taking pleasure in a perversion. Violent crime, she saw, created disorder and disorder created more disorder. And she wondered if it was not the disorder that men - beginning with the police - found so dangerous, rather than the crime itself. If disorder of such magnitude was allowed to prevail, then no one was safe. Perhaps it was to this intellectual concept, and to no other, that the police responded. They had rushed into the Golden Palace to restore order. On a room littered with corpses they rushed to impose routine. They closed off the room and would let no one in until they had done it. Without being able to see them, Carol saw what they were still doing in there, filling out forms, drawing diagrams, signing their names.

First the room, then the street itself. When the last ambulance had squealed away a squad of patrolmen came out. These cops, she saw, had their orders: they had been ordered to order the crowd to disperse. Their uniforms were buttoned. The buttons shone. Their caps were straight. They moved forward blunt as truncheons.

“Go on home now.”

“It’s all over here.”

She heard the lines they spoke, and foresaw the result. Their roles were poorly acted and had been poorly written in the first place. As they moved into it, the crowd became amorphous. The cops sank in like blows into dough. They intimidated no one. Tonight’s play had at least one more act to run, and the crowd was eager to see how it ended. The crowd was single-minded. Recognizing this quickly - that the crowd was more disciplined than they were - the cops recognized also their own failure, and since there were no commanders urging them into the breach against such hopeless odds, their bullying ceased. They pretended to become nonchalant. They attempted to make jokes, and even friends. They accepted the status quo, and so did the crowd.

The doors to the Golden Palace sprang back once more, and Chief of Detectives Cirillo strode forth accompanied by Chief of Patrol Duncan. Cirillo was short and fat. Gray hair. Gray suit. He was chewing on a cigar. Carol did not know him. Duncan, who wore braid on his cap and three stars on each epaulet, was a man of commanding presence and ramrod-straight posture. When in civilian clothes he was often taken not for a policeman but for a general. Carol did not know Duncan either.

But the news crews, recognizing both officers, grasped immediately what their appearance meant.

Press Conference.

The outlying citizens only pressed more firmly against the barricades, leaned more perilously out of windows, but the crowds of news crews converged. Truth was to be dispensed, and they wanted some. They sprinted for position, fought for it. Encountering resistance they shouldered forward. Elbows flailed. Gear flailed. Women’s handbags flailed. It was as rough as a cavalry charge. It was punctuated not by bugles but by curses. Like many searches after the truth, this one was not pretty.

Cirillo and Duncan, one step up on the stoop, were responsible for what was happening. They had willed it to happen for they wanted to shine, and this was their moment. Yet they pretended indifference. They were superior to the moment and to the scuffling news crews as well, and wore half-repressed half-smiles to prove it. They were as smug as film stars. While microphones were lashed into place in front of them, they made whispered sardonic comments to each other. They made each other chuckle. Many among the newsmen recognized this for the arrogance it was, and hated the two men for it. As they set up their gear hatred and need vied for the upper hand. Need, as always, won. Hatred was a luxury, and would have to wait.

The press conference began.

Chief of Detectives Cirillo read from notes in his hand: “At approximately 2100 hours this date, two as yet unidentified Asians-”

Cirillo and Duncan were the same age, and had moved upwards in rank concurrently, one in the detective division and the other in patrol. These were parallel rather than competitive courses. For more than twenty years, principally because they had not been rivals, they had imagined themselves friends. At the next stage of their careers, if there was a next stage, they would collide, for there was only one four-star chief on top of them, and on top of him only one police commissioner. Lately, because the chief of detectives had by far the more dramatic and therefore more visible job, Duncan had been reluctant to let Cirillo out of his sight. The chief of detectives could get press attention any time he wished to announce that a major crime had been committed or solved. In the first instance Cirillo would be showing off his deep concern and in the second he would reap his detectives’ glory. In both cases he would reap the publicity. Duncan, who had no such access to the press, was like a runner who risked being lapped. He could not afford to let it happen. Therefore on nights like this when the mayor remained in his mansion and the police commissioner chose not to appear (both fearing no doubt to be identified in the public mind as messengers of bad tidings) Duncan had taken to standing always at Cirillo’s side. Duncan could not worry about bad tidings. To him bad tidings meant not to be there at all. As for the sardonic Cirillo, he was an expert in black humor and when microphones were present knew how to present catastrophe in an amusing manner.

In other words, both men had resolved to exploit press conferences, the only terrain available to them, as much as possible. If there was tension between them it did not yet show. When they looked at each other, both still smiled.

Tonight’s plan was for Cirillo to describe the crime and for Duncan in his turn to identify the casualties. It was a reasonable, workable plan but it was foiled by Captain Powers, who came out the door behind them and attempted to sneak away unnoticed. Since Powers, though only a captain, was better known than the two chiefs, and was the hero of the evening as well, the news crews abandoned Cirillo in mid-sentence, and the still mute Duncan as well, and surged off to the side to surround Powers. They pinned him to the wall.

“Captain Powers, can you give us a statement?”

“Captain Powers, can we ask you a few questions?”

Powers, blinking from the glare, threw a glance back at Cirillo and Duncan. They were watching him, and they did not look friendly. “Chief Cirillo and Chief Duncan have all the facts,” said Powers.

Hand microphones were being thrust into his face. He kept glancing from the microphones to the two chiefs and back again.

Reporters continued to clamor.

“We understand you were in a gun battle with them out here in the street.”

“We have a report that you shot one of the gunmen.”

“You’ll have to see Chief Duncan-”

“Did you hit him?” asked Carol.

“Yes.”

“Did you get the make and license number of the car?” asked Carol.

For a moment Powers eyed her. “Yes. Chief Duncan will-”

Though Carol lapsed into silence, the clamor continued.

“Duncan only got here an hour ago.”

“Be reasonable, Captain Powers. You were an eyewitness. You were in the shootout.”

“There was no shootout,” said Powers.

“You’re the one we want to talk to.”

Powers again glanced over at Duncan and Cirillo. It was so dark over there - in contrast to the lights he had been staring into - that he could barely see them. But he could tell they were glaring at him. After a moment he moved in their direction, stepped up onto the stoop beside them, and then, when voices below insisted on it, stepped between them. He took center stage. The two three-star chiefs flanked him.

“Your public awaits you, Powers,” muttered Duncan.

“Mustn’t disappoint your public, must we, Powers,” said Cirillo.

Powers was aware of Duncan beside him grimly folding his notes, and he was aware of Carol in the crowd holding her microphone outstretched as close to his mouth as she could reach. He was more aware of Carol than of the chiefs. He was aware of her raincoat which he carried in his clenched fist, having first folded it over several times so that it might pass for his own; and he saw her eyes go to the raincoat also. Since he could not give it to her in front of all these people, he was forced to keep it, which transformed it from a raincoat into a hostage. It would be tomorrow at the earliest before she could ransom it back. She would have to phone him to open negotiations.