Year of the Dragon (31 page)

The next morning was cloudless, as always just in advance of the monsoon, with a damp heavy heat. By 10 A.M., when Koy strode out through the hotel gardens, the temperature was already over 100 degrees, and it would go higher. He wore his dark glasses, of course, and a loose net blouse that hung outside his trousers. He walked along the embankment to the wharf at the head of Siphrava Street, paid five bahts for a ticket, and jumped aboard the stern platform of the first river bus that backed in to take on passengers. The bus left the wharf with a lurch that nearly toppled Koy. Propeller churning, it gained speed quickly. Its bow cleaved the current, its stern leaving a heavy wake.

A long low barque with a canvas roof and no sides, it already carried about twenty passengers, most clustered in the rear where there was less spray, either sitting in rows on iron benches or standing on the platform, waiting to jump off at the next stop. Koy made his way forward past the craft’s source of power, a naked automobile engine that looked twenty or more years old and that must have come out of some long-dead Cadillac or Rolls. A huge thunderous thing, it throbbed and shivered amidships as it drove the boat upriver, and it was intensely hot, far hotter than the day itself. It sent off waves of superheated air that Koy could feel against his face as he turned sideways to step on past. It was hot enough to cause severe burns to anyone that an errant wave might throw against it, for he noted that it turned spray to steam in a fraction of a second. Drops of spray sizzled and vanished instantly, even as they struck it.

Forward of the engine were more iron benches. Koy chose a place in the second row next to the low gunwale, as arranged, wiped it dry with his handkerchief, and sat down to wait for this Praleep Kitcharoenwong. Moving upriver through the heart of the city, the bus veered in toward shore every few hundred yards to take on or discharge passengers. There were many temples on both sides of the river, most with golden domes glistening in the sun, and there were many shacks on stilts as well: rickety open things that hung over the water, housing whole families, the Bangkok version of New York’s Chinatown tenements. In places the green lawns of the tourist hotels came down to the water, and in others the river ran past mud banks where the sewage and garbage of the city had washed up in rounded dunes. The poverty of Bangkok did not disturb Koy. Sitting out in the breeze and the spray he was cool enough, and was enjoying the ride, and then a young man sat down beside him and started a conversation in halting Hakka. This was Praleep Kitcharoenwong, whose family had come here from Koy’s native village many years ago, before Praleep was born.

“You speak Hakka very well,” said Koy, studying him.

“My parents taught it to me, Uncle.” The young man had good manners, anyway.” Your father and I were classmates at a school called the Pavilion of Literature when we were boys.”

“He died of illness some years ago.”

“And after that we went to the Dragon River Middle School together.”

“He sometimes spoke of those years, Uncle.”

A great deal rode on this young man. Koy had wanted to size him up. He had wanted to hear him speak Hakka. It was almost like betting on a horse. One could take all precautions, but there was no sure thing.

Koy got down to business. “Do you think you can do what is asked of you?” Praleep was a Hakka, his ancestral village was the same as Koy’s, the scheme itself was sound: all together, the odds could not be better.

The young man, sensing that he had passed inspection, became more self-assured. “I am sure of it.”

“You do not need to know what is in the mailbags,” said Koy. “Neither the ones that come into Bangkok, nor the ones that go out. And if something should go wrong, you do not know anyone’s name.”

“That goes without saying.”

“Good.”

Koy got off at the next wharf and caught a taxi back to the Oriental, where he checked out.

Praleep Kitcharoenwong returned to the Central Post Office where he worked, and dreamed about the business he would buy, and the house he would buy after that. He believed he would soon be a rich man. His job, to which he had been newly assigned by Hla Nu, consisted of driving a postal truck that carried letter mail in sealed bags between the Central Post Office and the nose cones of airliners. Mailbags, whether entering or leaving Thailand, were not exposed to customs inspection at Don Muang airport in any ordinary sense. Normally Praleep drove his truck right onto the tarmac. He would park under the plane’s nose and exchange on the average ten outgoing bags of letters for ten incoming ones. The bags weighed over a hundred pounds each, sometimes more, were handled by forklift, and if a customs inspector came out to watch at all, he merely counted the bags against the manifest, he did not open them. He did not need to, for one could smuggle nothing significant in letters and the bags carried post office seals. Praleep understood that duplicate mailbags had been prepared that were identical to real ones in every way, except that they were bigger - big enough to contain a real mailbag, plus twenty or fifty pounds of contraband. Between downtown and the airport, when meeting certain specified flights in the future, he would pull off the road for a few seconds and open the doors of his truck. Men would leap aboard and he would close them inside. The risk was really minimal - his exposure would last literally seconds. Further on he would stop to let the men out - again his risk would last only seconds. Depending on which way the contraband was moving, the men would either drop the real mailbags inside the false ones they had brought with them, or dump the real mailbags out of the false ones, which they would carry away. The false bags would always contain contraband sewn into the bottom. At all times Praleep would have the requisite number of mail bags in his truck.

At first, as Praleep understood it, all such traffic would be between Bangkok and Hong Kong, meaning that some Hong Kong postal driver was performing the same function there that he performed here. But if the scheme worked it would be expanded to other countries. And it should work. It required the collusion of only one or at the most two post-office people at either end. That was the beauty of it. That and the fact that the pay was so good in exchange for so little risk.

He had not been told the nature of the contraband he had agreed to help smuggle, and did not need to be: cash in one direction, obviously; morphine or heroin in the other. He had no qualms about helping to smuggle narcotics, and in fact felt almost patriotic about it. The heroin was destined for Western Europe and the United States where it would poison only foreign demons, not Chinese, for a change. It was the foreign demons who had introduced opium dens to China. During the more than one hundred years that most of China lay in an opium stupor, foreign demons had systematically raped the country. Well, it was their turn now.

These were Koy’s thoughts too, whenever the morality of the heroin trade occurred to him, which was not often. That afternoon he caught his flight to Hong Kong. All was in order, he was on schedule, and his organization, pending meetings in Hong Kong, was now almost entirely in place.

WHERE TO start? When in trouble, thought Powers pacing his room in the Mandarin Hotel, you turned toward your own. You did not need to be part of an ethnic minority - or an ethnic majority like the Chinese either - to know that. The principal brotherhood to which Powers belonged was the New York Police Department, but by extension this included all other police departments as well. Possibly because cops constituted the most despised minority on earth, they not only clung together fiercely, they also tended, like the Protestant churches, to be ecumenical about it. The brotherhood was both vast and generous. Most times it admitted not only all cops, but also all law enforcement agents of whatever kind worldwide. As with any religion, there were bound to be sects that had fallen away. Rites differed with the jurisdiction, dogma differed, but not much. In general all held the same faith. Their priests were all sworn, all ordained. All believed in the one true god. Nearly all would help out, once you identified yourself, would let you use their facilities, so to speak, anything from the bathroom to their power of arrest. In theory, those whose jurisdiction was closest to your own usually would help most - unless they were competing against you on the same case. Because the various agencies were also like sports teams in the same league. All wanted the glory of victory, but only one could get it. Whoever made the arrest would be champion.

On the morning after his arrival, Powers did turn toward his own - he made a phone call to a man named Gorman, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Hong Kong bureau, the only American police presence here, and explained briefly what he wanted. When Gorman, sounding neither friendly nor unfriendly, said come on over, Powers hiked up a street that seemed to him steeper than anything in San Francisco, up past the Hilton Hotel, past the American Consulate, up to 26 Garden Road, the Peak Tram building. Out of its entrails, even as Powers watched, a cog railway car loaded with tourists began its climb up the steeply forested mountain toward Victoria Peak, whose presence looming over him Powers could feel, even though he could not see it. The peak wore a ball of fog or cloud around its neck like a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

The DEA office was on the twelfth floor, and security was tight. Powers came off the small elevator into a small alcove, and was examined through a spy hole before being admitted. The door was steel and, once he had entered, the Chinese clerk barred it shut behind him - which made Powers wonder exactly what role Gorman played here. The office had become a vault, and he was inside it. Something immensely valuable must be kept here, but what?

Gorman was about forty. It turned out he had once been – briefly - a New York City detective. He sat behind his desk with an American flag to one side of his head, and the Drug Agency shield to the other. Across from him sat Powers. Both wore open-necked sport shirts.

Powers, though still holding back his Chinese Mafia theory, began to describe the case he was trying to make against Koy.

But Gorman interrupted: “Do our guys in New York know all this?”

It was a more aggressive question than Powers might have hoped for. Gorman was like a boxer shuffling forward at the bell. He had already landed a solid jab.

“I brought the matter to their attention. Nobody seemed much interested.”

“So they don’t know. It’s a drug case, and that’s our jurisdiction, not yours, particularly here.”

Powers was already on the defensive, already back-pedaling. “Fine. That’s why I came to you. I’m asking you to take over the case. Or at least to help me out. Will you do it?”

Gorman was shaking his head negatively. “That’s not my function here at all. I’m a federal agent. I represent the DEA in Hong Kong. I have no police or investigatory powers of any kind. I’m a guest here. I can’t take a step without advising the Hong Kong Police Department of what I’m doing. If I try to work on my own and get caught, then my guest status will be revoked, and I’ll be kicked out, and that would be very bad for my career in the agency.”

“What exactly then do you do here?”

“Is that some kind of snide remark?”

“No. I’d really like to know.”

Gorman was not even head man in Southeast Asia - region 16, he called it. The regional director worked out of regional headquarters in Bangkok. “Which is probably where this Koy is right now,” said Gorman. “You should have cooperated more with our guys in New York.”

Gorman’s principal function, it seemed, was to sit in this office with his small staff and a great deal of cash money provided by Washington, and wait for informants to contact him with news of major drug shipments. He paid tens of thousands of dollars to such men, who were usually drug traders themselves, often direct rivals of whomever they informed on, and then turned the information over to whichever police department had immediate jurisdiction and hoped that arrests would be made and the merchandise confiscated. The DEA made no attempt to advertise the presence of Gorman, or his counterparts in offices like this one around the world. Gorman said there was no need to. He nodded sagaciously, indicating that the system as it now worked, worked perfectly. The advertising was done by word of mouth. The magic was in the immensity of the sums he was able to pay - magic that spread from one informant to the next. Gorman really had as much business as he could handle. The barred door, the vault-like quality of this suite of offices was necessary to protect the great stacks of cash that he sometimes kept on hand, and also the filing cabinet containing the names of the recipients of American largesse.

“So you see,” he concluded, “I can’t help you.”

Powers said, “You can’t help me.”

Gorman’s attitude changed slightly. He had made all his points. That Powers had disregarded proper channels. That he, Gorman, handled a lot of money and was therefore a man of great stature. This much accomplished, his police sentiments came into play. “I’d like to help,” he said. “I’m a cop too, and that guy Koy is dirty. Everybody knows it. This office was after him years ago, before I came here. We got nowhere at the time. I don’t know if you have a better chance now, or not. But my function here is liaison.”

“Where can I go?”

“The one place you don’t go is to the cops. The Royal Hong Kong Police Force is about two percent British and about ninety-eight percent Chinese, just like the city itself, and it’s the most corrupt police department in the world. If you go in there and ask about Koy, the word will get back to him within an hour. And once that happens your life is in danger.”

“They kill cops here that easy?”

“Here you’re not a cop. You’re a tourist.”

“You can’t help me. I can’t go to the PD. What do I do?” Powers was almost pleading.

“If we had known he was in Bangkok,” mused Gorman, “we could have set something up. We have a bigger office there. My regional director-”

“We don’t know he’s in Bangkok,” said Powers. “We know he had a reservation to London. We know he comes into Hong Kong today. We don’t know where he went in between. I had every airline in New York trying to track him. They couldn’t find him.” But Powers’ tone had become desperate. “What do I do?” he asked again. He had known all along he could do nothing here by himself. Alone, it was hopeless. He had counted on the fierce loyalty of cop toward cop. The loyalty of the tribe. He had counted on the brotherhood. Where was the help he had counted on?

Gorman was tapping a pencil on the desk. “You had a corruption commission in New York a few years ago,” he said. “The Knapp Commission. Turned the NYPD upside down, I heard. How many agents did they have?”

“About fifteen. Why?”

“There’s a corruption commission here too. The Independent Commission Against Corruption. It has about eleven hundred agents. New York knows nothing about corruption compared to Hong Kong. If I were you I would go to the commission. The chances are they still have an open file on this guy Koy. They might be willing to help you. See Sir David Wynne-Jones. He runs it.” Gorman reached for his telephone. “Do you want me to call him for you?”

Powers could only nod.

After dialing, Gorman spun his chair toward the window, and leaned back with his feet on the windowsill, the telephone at his ear. He talked to Sir David for some time, amicably it seemed. Powers could not hear the words. At last spinning back towards his desk again, Gorman clapped down the phone. “You may be in luck,” he said. He was smiling. “Sir David sounded quite interested. He’s sending his car for you.”

“Thank you,” said Powers humbly. “Thank you very much.”

But Gorman ignored Powers’ gratitude, for his mind had gone on to something else. “All these Brits have official cars,” he complained. “Our government doesn’t provide me with any car. I meet informants in dark places in the middle of the night and I have to use my own car. But these Brits all have cars, even men I outrank by two or three grades.”

Powers smiled, because he was feeling a new onrush of hope. “Life just isn’t fair, is it?” he said.

At Commission headquarters at 10 Harcourt Road twenty minutes later he was shown into the office of Sir David Wynne-Jones, and such was the appearance of the room, and of Sir David himself, that his onrush of hope petered out on the spot. It was as if all of his money had run out through a hole in his pocket, every cent he had in the world. He felt suddenly destitute. Sir David, who rose to shake hands with him, was a man of about fifty-five or sixty with muttonchop sideburns, and he was wearing a bush jacket, knee socks and short pants. Powers looked at him in dismay. Street cops, and Powers was a street cop, were used to appraising all contacts on very little evidence, almost instantly. They had to. It was how they stayed alive. Powers now appraised Sir David and wanted to weep. He was in the presence not of a police official but of an aging safari guide or lion tamer, and such a man could not help him.

“Captain Powers,” murmured Sir David.

“Sir David,” said Powers in response. He managed a smile, the best smile of which he was capable at that moment. It felt like a crack in a pane of glass.

In appearance Sir David was no more a policeman than this room was a policeman’s office. On the wall behind his desk was the stuffed head of a lion. There was a leopard-skin rug in front of the desk, and a hollowed out elephant’s foot served Sir David as a wastebasket. On other walls hung spreads of horns of various African beasts, and their hooves, hollowed out, served as ashtrays on Sir David’s desk.

“Are you a career policeman, Sir David?” asked Powers. However rude the question might sound, he was as compelled to ask it as he might have been compelled to cough or sneeze.

“Colonial administration,” Sir David replied. “Spent most of my career in Kenya, what? My job now is to clean up the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, what? To paraphrase Winston Churchill, crime is much too important to be left to career policemen, don’t you know. No affront intended, Captain.”

Affront? Powers scarcely heard him. He stared at the really bad hand he had dealt himself. He studied it. He was focused totally on himself. The brotherhood wasn’t going to help him. The brotherhood couldn’t be found and perhaps didn’t exist. He had only one card left to play, and it was not an ace. It was not even a face card. It was represented by this silly-looking big game hunter. It was about a ten, maybe even lower. But he had no choice left except to play it.

“Yes, well,” he said, hesitating. And threw it onto the table. “Sir David, I have a bit of a problem,” and he began to explain what it was. Again he did not speak of the Chinese Mafia, but only of Koy. He was trying to make a case in New York against Koy, who was suspected of complicity in several murders and in countless cases of extortion and other crimes, and also of directing a drug importing empire. But there was no legally admissible evidence against Koy on any of these things. He had trailed Koy here hoping to find evidence or information that could be used against him in New York. News of a specific drug shipment, proof of the transfer of large sums of currency, the names and whereabouts of accomplices.

“Indeed you do have a problem,” said Sir David, when he had concluded. “Don’t dare show your face in New York again without some results, I shouldn’t wonder.” And he gave a rather odd smile. He’s not going to help me, thought Powers, trying to read it. It was the smile, Powers thought, of a proud father who, seeing his son in trouble, declined to help him on the grounds that it would strengthen the boy’s character to get out of the mess by himself.

If he could.

“There’s nothing personal between me and Mr. Koy, Sir David,” Powers said hurriedly. “I don’t know him. I only talked to him once. I’m not out to get him in any personal sense. But he appears to be a dangerous criminal at the head of a dangerous organization, and there has been a lot of violence. A lot of teenage boys are getting it in the neck - literally.”

“Yes. Time-honored means of execution out here,” said Sir David, and he began stroking his muttonchops with both hands. He was listening, but with what interest Powers could not tell. Would he help? Could he help? Assuming he wanted to. Did he see Koy as a trophy he might hang on his wall?