Year of the Dragon (4 page)

“All right,” said Powers to the newsmen, “what did you want to know?”

THE PHONE rang louder than the sirens outside. Though the proprietor of the Flowering Virtue Funeral Parlor had been half expecting it, it made him jump. He had been checking over ledgers at his desk, the safe open behind him. He had ignored the sirens but could not ignore this. He took the call. After listening a moment, he spoke only two words into the mouthpiece, then hung up, and stood up.

He was big for a Chinese, almost six feet tall; in the villages of Kwangtung Province where he was born he would have seemed a giant. His name was Koi Tse-ven but he went by the name Jimmy Koy. It was difficult to guess his exact age because he affected smoked glasses even at night. He was wearing them now and they turned his normally impassive face into something totally inscrutable. But his hair was still black, as was his mustache, so he was probably in his mid-forties. He had very white teeth but rarely showed them. He rarely smiled, and when he did it was usually, in the manner of the Chinese, behind his hand.

Moving without haste, he put the ledgers into one side of the safe, and withdrew a small package from the other, then swung the door shut, spun the dial, and rang for Chang in the basement mortuary. But Chang did not respond, and Koy found him, as he had expected, on the outside stoop peering up the street at the commotion in front of the Golden Palace.

“Something’s happened,” said Chang. “I heard the sirens.”

“What else did you hear?” asked Koy. “Did you hear shots?”

“I heard no shots. Why, did you hear shots?”

“No,” said Koy. “There’s a package on my desk. Put it in your bag. We’ll take the hearse. We have work to do.”

“What do you think happened?” Chang was still peering up the street.

“Every day there are seven Chinese newspapers published in Chinatown,” said Koy. “Tomorrow morning you buy one and read about it. Get your bag.”

Koy, waiting, stood under the canopy. The rain was coming down. People were hurrying past him along both sidewalks. Every restaurant and curio shop in Chinatown must be emptying out as the news spread. In front of the Golden Palace, three blocks ahead, the entire street was choked with traffic. He saw that a number of police cars had been abandoned on sidewalks up there, red dome lights still turning. From this distance, seen through the rain, the lights looked orange, and they stained the walls of the buildings orange all around.

“That’s auspicious,” said Chang, who had come back out. He stood beside Koy, clutching his medical bag. Chang spoke in Cantonese dialect, his only language. If you wanted to converse with Chang, that’s what you spoke.

“What’s auspicious?”

“Orange means good luck. Orange is always a good omen. With an omen like that nothing bad can happen to us tonight.”

“I see,” said Koy.

“Of course real oranges are best.”

They got into the hearse, Chang driving, the medical bag on the seat between them, Chang prattling about omens, demons, evil spirits. Good omens, as everybody knew, protected only Chinese people, Chang said. He gestured toward the tourists flocking toward the Golden Palace. These white demons and demonesses, would not be protected, he said.

Koy, preoccupied, scarcely listened. Many Chinese still believed such nonsense. Half the businessmen in Chinatown bought and sold according to omens. Women consulted horoscopes before setting a date to wash their hair. Major decisions were made only on auspicious days and astrologers were consulted first - a number of these charlatans still did a brisk business in Chinatown. Superstition, when dealing with the Chinese, was not a variable but a predictable, Koy knew. One factored it in.

They crossed the bridge into Brooklyn, and on the Expressway headed north toward Queens. Presently they were driving down dark residential streets. There were trees on both sides, no oncoming traffic, and Chang began weaving from one side to the other.

“Stop that,” ordered Koy sharply.

“Just a precaution,” explained Chang. Possibly they had picked up evil spirits before leaving Chinatown. If so, Chang had just shaken them off. “Evil spirits can move only in straight lines,” he said.

“I didn’t know that,” said Koy. Chang was a distant cousin who came from the same ancestral village as Koy. Chinese loyalties were rigidly prescribed; family first and then co-villagers, and family alone was usually a burden and often an albatross. The Chinese albatross, Koy thought: family.

Two blocks from the house Koy ordered Chang to pull over and park, and they walked the rest of the way. The risk began now, and Koy watched carefully for activity in lighted windows or for men seated in parked cars - anything that could constitute police surveillance. But he noted nothing. He was not worried about being conspicuous on the street. This neighborhood in the Flushing section of Queens was about twenty-five percent Asian - Koreans and Japanese mostly. Koy had placed his safe house there as a means of hiding it. Americans could not differentiate one Asian from another, and fellow Asians, who could, were not likely to consider the arrival in their community of one or several Chinese to be in any way significant.

The apartment was in the basement of a six-story building. Koy and Chang entered through the lobby. No one saw them. They went down the service stairs, being met by a blast of rock music as soon as they opened the service door. To Koy the music was loud enough to attract attention, and therefore in itself it was dangerous, but behind it, overriding it, more dangerous still, rose what sounded like the sustained bleating of farm animals being tortured, goats or sheep perhaps, animals in terrible pain. Outright screams might have attained a more penetrating noise level, but not much. Such bleating would be audible to anyone who happened down into this cellar - a housewife doing her laundry would hear it, and her instinctive reaction would be to call the police.

The police could be en route even now, and would find Koy inside the apartment.

As Koy rang the bell, he felt the hair raise on the back of his hands, felt the rush of blood, and the sudden shortness of breath, sensations every gambler felt, sensations that he found, despite himself, intensely pleasurable. The risk quotient had just risen amazingly high. Well, he told himself, it was already high. Men of wealth and power were involved and depended on him. They had waited a long time, and Koy himself had come under increasing pressure. They would not be pleased to fail now. It would be unwise to frustrate them further. He was obliged to accept this crazy risk because, although the first part of tonight’s activities had evidently succeeded, the second part was deteriorating fast. This needed to be reversed, and decisions made, something only he could do. And so he told himself he was glad he stood where he did. Heady triumphs came only after risks such as this. The risk was often more fun than the triumph. Man had to risk his life constantly in order to enjoy it.

Nikki Han opened the door, closing it quickly behind them. The apartment, which served as dormitory for that part of the Flying Dragons youth gang controlled by Koy, was small, airless, cluttered. Koy glanced into the empty front room. Chinese comic books. Unmade beds - they looked like terrain that had been fought over. The cheap suitcases of boys without homes. Transistor radios, plates of half-eaten food.

The back room was similar, though not empty. The back room was where the noise was coming from. Nikki Han, who looked to Koy to be on the edge of panic, stepped into it, and Koy and Chang followed.

The Hsu brothers lay on cots, thrashing and bleating. Han or someone had wedged towels into their mouths and this was all that kept their agony from being audible in the street. The older brother’s ravaged foot was what Koy noted first. The gruesome shoe, dripping with gore, was still attached. It looked like something that had got caught in a lawn mower. But there was no lawn mower at the Golden Palace, and Koy looked to Han for an explanation.

“I don’t know,” said Han in English. His panic, Koy noted, was very close to the surface.

The brothers looked out at the world through dumb animal eyes. They were conscious only of their pain. Repeatedly they tangled and untangled themselves in bed sheets unwashed for months and newly soaked with their blood - though neither seemed to be bleeding now. This was understandable considering the tourniquets - clothesline rope twisted tight by wooden hangers. They had been stripped of trousers and just below their underpants on the right thighs the tourniquets girdled them, biting into bare flesh. Their thighs were as hairless as bamboo, as thin almost as arms, and the ropes cinched them in, making waists scarcely thicker than the bone itself. Han or someone had wound those ropes up tight as trolley wires, and both legs had turned blue. The younger brother’s hand and wrist had turned blue also, though there was no wound there that Koy could see.

Nikki Han had moved to the nearest cot. The Cho Kun is here,” he said in Cantonese dialect. “The doctor is with him. You’ll be all right now.”

The literal translation of Cho Kun is “the person seated within the lodge.” It is a rank not subject to precise English translation. Leader, boss, big brother, chairman, executive secretary - Cho Kun, when applied to Koy by his partners and associates and by the men and boys who worked for him, meant all of these things.

The Cho Kun, having caught Chang’s eye, pointed to the older brother. He pointed not with his finger but, in the Chinese manner, with his chin.

Chang moved to the bedside and opened his medical bag.

“The doctor will take care of you,” said Nikki Han, and it was clear that the word doctor had brought hope to both boys.

Chang was not a doctor but an embalmer. Reaching into his bag he held up the package he had found on Koy’s desk. “This?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Koy.

Chang took the package into the kitchen, nicked one corner of it, and brought out a quarter-spoonful of white powder to which he added a few drops of water collected from the faucet. He then turned on the stove and held the spoon over the flames. The white powder dissolved almost instantly. Setting down the spoon, Chang drew the fluid up into a hypodermic syringe. All this time the agonized bleating in the other room never ceased.

Back at the bedside the embalmer raised his needle to the light. “Are either of them users?” he asked Nikki Han.

“No,” said Nikki Han.

“This may kill him,” Chang said to Koy.

Koy again pointed with his chin, this time impatiently.

After injecting half his solution into the arm of the older brother, the embalmer stepped back to wait for a reaction.

“Now the other one,” ordered Koy.

“I should wait to see-”

The younger brother having partially spit out his towel, had begun screaming.

“Give him the whole dose,” said Koy. “Hurry.”

The reaction was not long coming. Within sixty seconds the two contorted faces began to relax, and the room became silent. For a brief moment both boys smiled almost beatifically. Then they were unconscious.

Chang had used the strongest painkiller known to man. He had injected almost pure heroin.

He withdrew the spittle-soaked towels, wiped off their faces, and loosened both tourniquets. The younger brother’s wound was in the calf, a puncture. The bullet must have struck bone. In any case it had not exited. Seeing that the younger brother no longer bled at all, Chang released his tourniquet completely. Clearly the younger brother could wait, and the embalmer began to work on the older one. When he had unlaced and removed the gory shoe, and then what was left of the sock, he saw that part of the boy’s big toe remained, and he got out scissors and clipped it off, leaving the skin. The other four toes already were gone. With tweezers he probed for pieces of loose bone, removing several, being sure to leave himself additional skin to work with. Next he threaded a big curved needle such as embalmers use on cadavers, and with it began to sew up the foot, keeping up a stream of chatter in Cantonese dialect as he worked. He would have preferred a smaller needle and thinner thread, he said, but didn’t have any. This thread was as thick as fish line, he said, you could land a ts’ang fish with it, he could barely push it through the eye of the needle - called the needle’s nose in the Chinese idiom.

Koy watched in silence. In the morning a ship would leave New York harbor bound for Hong Kong. The Hsu brothers were supposed to be on it as crewmen. They would miss their ship. Perhaps there would be another ship for them later, but Koy did not think so. Recovery would take too long. He knew he should decide about them tonight, but forbore doing so. The Hsu brothers were from his ancestral village also, and deserved to be accorded whatever small chance was left them. He would give them a week or two. He would decide then.

The embalmer moved to the younger brother. “He’s got a bullet in there,” he noted. “If I cut it out he’ll bleed.”

“Leave it in there,” Koy ordered.

The embalmer began to sew the wound shut over the bullet. When he had finished he made splints out of wooden coat hangers and bound the boy’s broken wrist. The fingers looked broken also, but would heal by themselves, he decided. He stood up.