Year of the Dragon (43 page)

“Welcome back, Captain,” said Luang. He did not offer to shake hands, and it seemed to Powers that he almost bowed.

“Thank you, Luang.” The proper greeting, neither more nor less. Although Powers was just as glad to see Luang, who was, in effect, the only other player on his team, nonetheless he thought it best to let no emotion show. Leadership, like most other revered qualities, was mostly the performance of certain specified tricks. The captain of the ship ate alone. He did not fraternize with members of the crew.

Doubtless Luang wanted to hear about Hong Kong, but Powers offered no information, and so Luang, after hesitating a moment, began to report on the wiretap. During Powers’ absence there had been no calls at all between Hong Kong and the funeral parlor.

“Any calls to Canada since Koy’s been back?”

“No sir.”

“Or from Koy to a strange woman?”

“No. There have been no more calls in Hakka, either.”

In fact, a day or two after Koy’s departure for Hong Kong, realizing that no one in Koy’s New York entourage spoke Hakka, Luang had sent the two nuns back to the convent, and he had not seen them since. “But we can get them back any time we want,” said Luang.

This meant, Powers realized, that during the entire time of his absence Luang had monitored the wiretap all by himself. But why am I surprised? he thought. These racial stereotypes one hears so much about are, for the most part, valid. The Chinese
are
more diligent than other races. They are extremely hard workers. They put their nose to the grindstone and do not look up. No American cop would have accepted such a burden, especially in the absence of his commanding officer. But the Chinese cop had done so, and Powers felt a rush of admiration for him and fondness as well.

“I owe you an enormous amount of time off,” Powers noted, and immediately wondered if he would be in any position to accord it. How much longer would he command the precinct? How soon would headquarters discover he was back? The answer was a few days at most. And then? And then, unless he could find the heroin and arrest Koy, most likely his successor would be in here - who would be under no obligation to pay Luang what was owed. Indeed, he would probably be afraid to do so, lest he seem to associate himself with Powers’ profligate expenditure of police man-hours.

All of this had to be concealed from Luang, of course. It meant that from now on Powers was, in effect, lying to him, which he did not deserve, and which Powers hated to do.

Luang had the wiretap log under his arm. Setting it down on the desk, he pushed it across, but Powers only placed it to one side.

“When this case ends,” said Powers, “whether in a day or a week or a month” - he gave a wave of the hand as if no fixed limit existed, “then your temporary assignment here will be finished. Have you thought about where you would like to be assigned next? I don’t know how much pull I have in the department, but perhaps I can help you.”

After a silence, Luang said, “I’d like to stay with you, Captain.”

“Yes, well,” Powers was moved. “I may not be staying in Chinatown,” he said.

Luang smiled. “Brooklyn, the Bronx - wherever. The shield says City of New York, Captain.”

Powers was so affected that he felt like telling the - truth: I don’t see how I’m going to find a single specific shipment of drugs, and if I don’t, there is a good chance I’ll be forced out of the department entirely. He had committed no crime and couldn’t be fired, but his superiors could make life so unpleasant he would not be able to stay.

He said, “I may get a headquarters assignment, Luang. Suppose I can’t take you with me? Where else would you like to go? If you want to stay in Chinatown, that could probably be arranged. Or perhaps you’d prefer one of the Queens precincts, near where you live. Save you a lot of travel time each day.”

Luang said nothing.

“I know the commanders of the one-eleven and one-fourteen pretty well. Those station houses are near you.” He owed it to Luang to pay his debt while he still could.

But Luang only smiled. He refused to accept it. “Why don’t we wait and see what happens?”

Powers stared for a moment at the top of the desk. The wiretap expired that day, and in the absence of additional hard evidence he doubted any judge would renew it. His voice and manner became crisp and commanding. “I’ve decided to let the wiretap expire,” Powers said. No one was going to discuss drugs on the telephone anyway. “I’ve got a more important job for you - probably the last you shall have on this case. I want you to resume tailing Koy.” He did not expect Koy to lead Luang to the drugs. Koy wouldn’t go near the drugs. Nikki Han or Go Low might, and he wished he could tail them too, but this was too risky for Luang to do alone, and he had no one to pair him with. “I want to know who he meets, where he goes. I’m hoping he leads you back into Little Italy.”

“You want me to tail Koy,” said Luang. But a note of panic had come into his voice and Powers detected it at once.

Why is he frightened? Powers asked himself. What happened to him during the last tail that he didn’t tell me about?

“Koy is dangerous,” Powers conceded. “We both know that. I wish I could give you a backup, but I can’t.” Powers got up and began to pace behind his desk. He remembered Orchid Koy, and to calm Luang down, to make the assignment sound less dangerous, he said, “He’s got another woman here somewhere, or soon will have. See if you can find out where.”

Again their eyes met. Luang’s fear still showed, Powers believed, but it seemed more under control.

“Well, Captain, I certainly would like to have a backup,” said Luang.

“Nobody’s asking you to take crazy risks, Luang,” said Powers coldly.

Luang was unsmiling. “It shall be done as you ask, Captain,” he said, and he bowed and left the office.

Powers turned to the log, and began to thumb through it. But nothing of importance caught his eye.

When he glanced up his executive officer and administrative lieutenant were still standing just outside his door peering in. They waited their turn with clipboards clasped like shields to their lower bodies, as if to protect that place where, since the beginning of time, man - even bureaucrats - had always felt most vulnerable. But Powers marched out past them and crossed to the switchboard, where he asked if he had received any calls of a suspicious nature during the last several days.

“Suspicious? No sir,” said the switchboard cop. “What’s suspicious?”

“People asking for me who gave phony names or no names.”

“Just some English guy who called a couple of times.”

“Thank you,” said Powers. Was it Koy calling? “What did you tell him?”

“That we hadn’t had no word from you.”

“Any word,” corrected Powers. “If he calls again, tell him the same thing.” It must be Koy, trying to find out if he was still alive. Who else in Chinatown had an English accent? I’ve got him worried, Powers thought. “If headquarters calls I’m not in either. I’ve taken some personals.” In addition to vacation time, cops could take off three days a year on personal business, and he was taking them now.

AND HE left the station house. If he was to put together a major case there was much work to do and very little time left. A major case meant finding a drug shipment and tying Koy in with the Italians. Or else it meant arresting the others and forcing one or more to give Koy up in exchange for leniency. Powers’ emotions, like his ideas, had hardened. He had begun to be driven almost entirely by hatred. If all else failed, he felt capable of killing Koy himself.

In an espresso bar across in Little Italy he met with Detective Kelly, who believed he had an informant willing to testify against Nikki Han and Go Low as extortionists. Also, the word on the street was that a new drug pipeline had opened up. Marco was supposed to be involved. Leaving Kelly, Powers strode across Federal Plaza, and took the elevator up to Immigration. An agent named Baumgartner met him at the reception desk, led him inside, and briefed him on immigration law. An hour later he crossed back over Centre Street to the district attorney’s office, where he spoke of the probable new pipeline, and described the case he thought he could bring in against Marco, Casagrande, Han and Low. This evidence was at the moment interesting but probably insufficient, he was told. It would be best to keep the investigations open and wait for something solid to develop. And he had nothing hard against Koy at all.

He went back down to the street, found his car, and drove to Drug Enforcement where he met with Wilcoxon and with the chief of the New York office, a deputy director named O’Reilly. They had heard about the new pipeline too and were very worried about it, they said. The original word had come from Gorman in Hong Kong, who had got it from a paid informant. Other informants in New York had been contacted, and had provided confirmation.

“The word on the street,” said O’Reilly, “is that the stuff is already here and is being distributed.”

“Word on the street?” said Powers. “What word on the street? It’s impossible.” He was counting backwards to the day of the summit meeting Sir David had almost bugged. If the drugs had already been in the pipeline there would have been no such meeting. “The stuff can’t be here yet.”

“How do you know?” said O’Reilly.

Powers didn’t know how he knew. Was it instinct, and therefore reliable, he asked himself, or only wishful thinking? Because if the stuff was already here then the case was closed, as far as he was concerned, and he had lost it.

“It’s not here yet,” said Powers doggedly. “You can’t move a large quantity of drugs halfway around the world that quickly.”

O’Reilly sat behind a big desk. It was bigger than Gorman’s in Hong Kong. The same two flags stood to either side of his ears. He said, “I wish I knew as much about heroin as you do, Captain. I’m only a deputy director.”

Powers let this pass. “What about Marco and Casagrande?”

Wilcoxon said, “We’ve been watching them.”

“And?”

“Nothing.”

Powers said, “Let’s assume for sake of argument that the stuff is not here yet. What can we do to find it when it comes in?”

“You could talk to Customs,” said O’Reilly. He was studying his appointments calendar. To him the meeting was over.

“Good idea,” said Powers. “Why don’t we meet here tomorrow morning, we three and some of the brass from Customs. Maybe we can figure out how the stuff might come in. Maybe we can even figure out how to find it. Will you call Customs, or should I?”

Unwilling to be upstaged by a police captain, O’Reilly said he would do it, and Powers waited beside his desk until he did. The meeting was arranged for ten o’clock the following morning.

But as soon as Powers had left his office, O’Reilly decided he should clear this with the police commissioner, and he asked his secretary to put in the call.

Powers, meanwhile, drove home, where he loaded Eleanor and a picnic basket into the car and drove out to Jones Beach. He would spend the rest of the day hiding from headquarters, brooding about hard evidence, about Koy.

Where the pathway met the beach they stooped to remove shoes and they crossed the hot sand barefoot, scampering a bit on scalded soles. Powers carried a blanket in one hand and the basket in the other, his gun and shield in there under the sandwiches. Eleanor, who wore a transparent blouse over her bikini, stripped it off. Like a gigantic butterfly it fluttered to the blanket Powers was trying to spread, and she headed for the water. Once he had the corners weighted down he followed, wading in, diving into the next wave but surfacing quickly, and looking back, careful to keep the lethal picnic basket always in view.

Eleanor slogged toward him through water that sometimes surged over her knees. She had been self-conscious about her body when younger, and would never have worn a bikini. Now she did not care. He studied her as she came closer. Not much cellulite for her age, not much flab. A narrow waist still. A nice body, but a number of scars. Some stretch marks from the pregnancies. An irregular dimple near her navel from the gall bladder operation just after Phil was born - do you remember, he thought, she was convinced it was cancer.

“The water’s nice,” said Eleanor. Her hair hung like snakes.

“Yes.” But he watched a teenage boy who seemed to be edging very close to the basket.

“Will you please forget about your gun for a change?”

He stood with his arm around her. The sea surged at them from behind, slapping now their calves, now their thighs.

There was a four-inch scar down the lower part of her spine - his hand slid down over it - from a disc operation about ten years earlier, after she had lain most of a month in pain in traction. Powers had sat beside her day after day wondering if she would ever walk again. It would be wrong to say he loved these scars, but they were part of his life. They represented pain and trauma, comfort given and received, a life lived together. She would carry them to her grave, and so would he. He could not bear the idea of parting with them.

He slid his hand down further, down inside her bikini. It was like putting his hand in her back pocket. He cupped a cold wet buttock.

“Artie,” cried Eleanor, squirming away from him, glancing around in embarrassment.

She almost blushed, but he could tell she was pleased. She was forty-six years old and her husband still liked to grab her bottom. She kicked water in his face and ran off through the shallows, and Powers sprinted after her like a schoolboy, then stopped, as if attached to the picnic basket by a rope.

Carol’s body bore scars too - he had wondered about some of them but never asked. They were not his business. It would have been like asking her to produce college grades, or her job resume: technical information. Scars represented emotions, not facts, and there was no way to transmit this emotion to one who had not been there.

Eleanor seemed happy. She had two days off and was spending today, at least, with her husband, and at the beach too - a treat. On the blanket later she fed slices of tomato into his mouth, segments of egg, and all the while Powers was sick with the fear that his life was about to change - home life and professional life both. His possessions would be stripped from him like chevrons. A single brusque rip to remove years. His sword would be broken. He would be forced naked out into the cold, where he would perish. The world was too frigid a place; a man flayed could not survive, except the way Bowery winos survived, propped briefly against walls. Defeat was not noble. It was anguish, frustration and despair. Not just for him - for Eleanor too. And all due to Koy. He stared out to sea and was entirely coldly conscious of the corrosive nature of his emotions. He blamed nothing on Carol. He did not hate Carol. He blamed Koy, hated Koy, and was focused on his need to destroy Koy. He wanted to settle the score - his personal score. He wanted to find the drugs even now en route to New York, but not because of the drowsy misery that came with them. The extorted shopkeepers of Chinatown no longer moved him. He did not mourn the victims of the restaurant massacre; he had forgotten the murdered Chinese boys. But Koy had murdered the old Arthur Powers too, and must pay. It was not justice Powers wanted, only vengeance.

THE NEXT morning in O’Reilly’s office Powers was introduced to two senior customs officers, to whom he outlined the situation as he saw it.

“So I’m asking you for help,” he concluded, and glanced around him. Wilcoxon was studying the blank yellow pad in his lap. O’Reilly arranged and rearranged a row of ball points on his blotter. Only the two customs men would meet his eyes, and they looked puzzled.

“That’s all you’ve got?” inquired the older of the two, whose name was Glickman.

When Powers nodded, the two customs men turned to gaze at each other.

After a moment Glickman said, “I guess we came up here thinking you had something hard. The description of a specific courier. Or a flight number. Or even the name of a specific ship.” He shook his head. “You don’t really have much at all.”

“I can’t hand you the case on a silver platter,” said Powers, pretending to a patience he did not feel. “Nonetheless, we do have some specific facts to consider. Why don’t we go through them one by one?” He saw that they were unwilling, but was determined to force them to do it. “For instance, the shipment we’re talking about has made a lot of noise. We’ve heard about it in Hong Kong, and also in New York. That means a big shipment, twenty-five kilos or more. Maybe much more.”

“Very few big shipments come in by air,” admitted Glickman. “I’ll grant you that much. The passengers can’t carry big loads off and it’s hard to stash them in the planes themselves because airliners depart again too quickly. That leaves the cargo, which we watch rather closely.

“Good,” said Powers. “Then it’s coming in by ship. But from where?”

“You tell me, pal,” said Glickman. “You tell me.”

The second customs officer, Byrne, said, “Do you realize how many hundreds and hundreds of ships enter and leave the Port of New York every year?”

“If it’s coming in this fast,” said Powers, ignoring Byrne’s pessimism, “then it must have come partway by air, probably via Europe. It would get put on a ship there. But where in Europe? Marseille? Genoa? North Africa maybe? Southampton? Make some guesses.”

Wilcoxon looked up from his yellow pad. “Holland,” he said. “Koy is a Hakka. The Hakkas have Amsterdam sewed up tight. It’s their city.”

Glickman said, “I have a list of ships arriving over the next two weeks.” He opened the briefcase between his feet. After fishing out the list, he searched his pockets for his glasses and put them on. “Well, the
Rotterdam
arrives day after tomorrow,” he said, and glanced up from the list.

“Any other Dutch ships?” asked Powers.

Byrne said, “A hell of a lot of ships touch Holland that aren’t Dutch, my friend.”

Glickman laid the list down on O’Reilly’s desk, and all crowded around. They studied it.

Byrne said, “I see two ships out of Rotterdam already - bound for Boston. Maybe your shipment isn’t even coming here directly? Did you ever think of that? They can easily offload it in some other port and bring it in by truck. We’ve had shipments come in via South Carolina, via Baltimore, you name it.”

“We really should have more to go on,” said Glickman.

There had been a few moments of excitement, Powers realized. The men had seemed almost enthusiastic. But this was already gone. There were too many ships on Glickman’s list, too many possibilities.

“I say it’s the S.S.
Rotterdam,”
said Powers. Did he really believe this, or was he merely trying to rekindle their hope, and therefore their willingness to work? He was like a man with a communicable disease breathing on them, trying to infect them out of his own virulent dose.

He said, “It’s the only ship with the approximately correct dates, and the only one coming directly here. I’m getting to know this man. The
Rotterdam
is his style. It’s first class, and it’s fast. Those freighters are filthy, and they take ten days or more. Koy is suddenly in a hurry, don’t ask me why.” Powers believed he knew why. He had somehow broken through the calm tenor of Koy’s life. For five years Koy had displayed the patience of a grazing cow, but Powers had stampeded him. He was beginning to act shaken, to act out of panic.

“Koy’s style?” inquired O’Reilly. “Are you really asking us to tear a ship apart because you think the ship matches Koy’s style?”

“Do you know how big a ship is?” said Byrne.

“He’s right, you know,” said Glickman. “Usually if we find something on a ship it’s because some informant told us where to look. We could never find it otherwise. Ships are huge. There are too many hiding places. We can’t go ripping up floor plates and cutting boilers open on your hunch. We can’t just destroy this ship. The
Rotterdam
will only be in port a short time.” Glickman studied his list. “From here it goes on a Caribbean cruise, I see. Lot of money involved. Look, Captain, I’d like to help, but it’s the flagship of a foreign government, and there are eleven hundred people waiting to board it. Rich people, I might add. If you get people like that mad they can cause a lot of trouble.”