Year of the Dragon (47 page)

Powers pursued him. “Let me give you an address. It’s the perfect place to conduct our business without anybody bothering us. Let me suggest you meet me there in thirty minutes. Got a pencil?”

AT THE other end of the connection Koy took down the address given him and recognized it. Then he hung up the phone. Obviously shaken, he stared across at Orchid.

“You said the phone was put in only this morning,” he remarked in Hakka. “You said the number was unlisted? You’re certain?”

Orchid said: “Yes, I’m certain. What’s the matter? All of a sudden you look awful.”

Koy’s attaché case lay on the table beside the phone. He snapped it open. Inside were stacks of bank notes with bands around them, and a .38-caliber short-barreled revolver for which he had a permit. The contents of the case renewed his confidence, and he snapped it shut.

“I’ve got to go out for a short time,” he said. Without even glancing at his perplexed wife, he grabbed up the attaché case and left the apartment.

POWERS STOOD stripped to the waist, his belt buckle undone, his trousers hanging at half-mast. He held the transmitter and its batteries against his abdomen - a package about the size of a Zippo lighter - his forefinger poking it in, while Kelly wound surgical tape around it, and around his body. The Zippo was being embedded in flesh that hadn’t been there, Powers reflected, when he was a young cop. Kelly was being careful, patting the tape smooth, so that no bulge showed. Koy would not make him on sight as wearing a wire. Kelly was unconcerned about peeling the tape off later. That was Powers’ worry. It was going to hurt, Powers knew.

He held the antenna wires to his collarbone like suspenders and Kelly taped them down. He lifted the microphone to his sternum and Kelly taped it in place. A button about the size of a female nipple at a spot where no nipple, male or female, ever grew. Modern technology could not change the construction of the human body, nor the nature of evil, and perhaps its principal effect was always psychological. Its effect was perhaps less significant than men supposed. And what would be the effect of this gear tonight?

When finished, Kelly stepped back to admire his handiwork. Powers pulled his T-shirt on, buttoned his uniform shirt up the front, then knotted and drew up his tie.

“Pretty good, if I do say so myself,” said Kelly, circling him. “Nothing shows.”

“Good,” said Powers.

Kelly looked at his watch. “We’d better hurry.”

“Wait for me outside, Kelly.”

Kelly said, “You told him half an hour, and it’s past that now.”

“He’ll be there early, and he’ll wait. The longer he waits, the more nervous he’ll get. Please close the door on the way out.”

As the door shut behind Kelly, Powers sat down at his desk, where he found an envelope and on it wrote his wife’s name. Then he took a sheet of paper, and studied it. In a moment his pen began to move.

I am about to meet Koy, he began. I have taken every precaution. I’m not trying to get killed, but it could happen. If so, you should know the following.

He paused. He had been in many dangerous situations in twenty-three years. Why did tonight feel so much more dangerous than all the others? But he knew the answer. Because I’m going to make it more dangerous, he told himself. I’m going to force Koy into a corner from which there is no way out. I’m going to force him to kill himself or to kill me. Either way, the case ends tonight.

What does one write at such a time to a beloved wife of so many years?

The insurance policies are in the safe deposit box, he wrote. Its key is in the top drawer of my dresser. We have two savings accounts, whose passbooks are in the same drawer. Taped to the underside of the drawer is $100 in cash, an emergency fund. It has been there many years. Also in the safe deposit box are the wills we made right after Phil was born, our marriage certificate and other papers you may need.

He stopped writing and brooded. Now he had to be personal, and that was harder. What should he write?

His glance was caught by the television set fixed to the wall beside the door to his office. When he got up and switched it on, he saw that he had come in, as expected, at the tail end of Carol’s Seven O’clock News.

This afternoon, according to one of the cops he had talked to, she had managed to photograph Koy entering and leaving his funeral parlor and getting into and out of his car. On the sidewalk she had thrust her microphone into his face and fired off questions that he had not answered. Useful footage, Powers supposed, to go with the film she had shot in Hong Kong. None of which would alter in any way his confrontation with Koy a few minutes from now.

On the screen Carol was talking about strikes in Poland, and she was wearing a summer print dress he had not seen before. He studied her face and listened to her voice, the timbre rather than the words - what did he care about strikes in Poland? But he found it impossible to believe in the intimacy that had once existed between them, the various forms of sustenance they had shared: the intimate dinners, the hours glued together in the dark.

He wished her luck putting her piece together. He wished her luck with her entire life. “Goodbye, Carol,” he murmured, and realized he was saying goodbye not so much to a memory, as to an ideal, and ideals had no more reality than that image on the screen up there. Saying goodbye to images on TV screens was not even hard to do, and he switched the set off.

Back behind his desk, he resumed his letter to his wife: If tonight ends badly, he wrote, the police department will want to throw me a spectacular funeral. You don’t have to let them do it. That is up to you. You can cry for me a little. Don’t cry too much. Most people have only a few good years, or none. We had much, much more, and I never wanted to be married to anyone else the whole time. Love.

And he signed his name. The sealed envelope he tucked into his desk blotter, with Eleanor’s name showing. He wondered if some cop would hand it to her, and when.

Looking and feeling extremely sobered, he started to leave the office. He had reached the door, had actually grasped the knob, before he realized he could not say good-bye to Eleanor only by letter. He could not bear to leave her without hearing her voice one last time, and so he stepped back to the desk and phoned home.

“I have nothing special to say,” he told her. He kept his words casual. She must suspect nothing. “I’m going out to meet someone. I don’t expect any trouble.”

“What about dinner?” asked Eleanor.

“I’ll call you as soon as I get back to the office.”

“Okay.”

“Talk to you later.”

“Okay.” She sounded as if this was the most casual conversation of their twenty-three years together, and he wanted to hold on to her voice as if it were a lifeline, the world’s flimsiest. Instead he hung up the phone and strode out through the muster room and down the front stoop toward Kelly, who waited in an unmarked car at the curb.

As he slid into the passenger seat, Kelly said, “Your transmitter works, Captain. I heard you talking to your wife.” It was almost an apology.

Powers gave him a brittle smile. “All right, let’s go.”

Kelly said hesitantly, “Shouldn’t we have a few more people with us?”

“No,” said Powers. “Like I told my wife, nothing is going to happen.”

“How can you be sure?” asked Kelly.

Kelly had been a cop longer than Powers. He had the splayed feet, the paunch, the red nose, the tired manner to prove it. He probably had the wisdom to prove it too. You should listen to him, Powers told himself.

“Drive, Kelly,” he said.

KOY GOT out of the taxicab on a lighted street and walked in. He could have kept the taxi with him, motor running. He could have come in his limousine and left it parked outside. He could have brought men with him. He had decided otherwise. He had convinced himself that Powers only wanted money. Powers was a blackmailer, neither more nor less. He was not afraid of Powers and needed no help to take care of him.

Yesterday, seeing the Chinese cop in uniform on his doorstep, this man who had been tailing him for weeks, had shocked Koy. But behind it he had seen Powers, then as now an unthreatening figure, though tenacious, and obviously the tail had produced no results; if it had results would show. Results meant hard evidence, and in the realm of evidence, as all cops knew, hard did not mean hard at all. Evidence was a volatile substance. It bubbled and frothed. It called attention to itself. Evidence, if left alone, bubbled over or exploded - it could not be left alone.

No, Koy saw nothing to worry about in that Chinese patrolman. So he told himself.

The television woman earlier today had produced a second shock - proof that the plan in Hong Kong had misfired. He did not know how or, now, care. Fact was fact, and this particular fact could neither be changed nor linked to him. He had felt disappointment to see her still breathing, and in a matter of seconds had got over it. So he told himself.

But the moment he saw her he knew that Powers must have escaped also and was still after him, and the man’s tenacity was puzzling because it was unreasonable. Powers seemed to have a fixation on him, and this could not be explained. Except as a prologue to attempted blackmail. He had been expecting the call from Powers for several hours, and then it had come. The only surprise was to hear the new phone ring - the new, unlisted number. How had Powers found out about that? But he was not afraid of Powers. So he told himself.

There had been, also, today’s arrests to consider. They meant - what? He was certain the
Rotterdam’s
narcotics had not been intercepted. If it had he would know about it. It was the Italians’ responsibility now anyway - no concern of his.

So many shocks inside a period of about twenty-four hours - they were like tremors in an earthquake zone. Tremors in such places were not significant, he told himself, for the terrain was prone to them. The quake itself might start at any moment, or never. Earthquakes were unreliable, and could not be factored in. One could only ignore the possibility. Philosophically speaking, man was condemned by his nature to overlook earthquakes entirely.

No, Koy saw Powers as a business crisis only, neither more nor less. There had been others in his past of different types, each one recognized and surmounted. Business crises were inevitable, given a career as high-powered and exhilarating as his own. If you do not wish to risk spilling the wine, he had been taught as a child, do not fill the cup to the brim. He had not at the time understood the meaning of this proverb. But from the age of perhaps twenty-one, his cup had always been filled all the way up.

Attaché case in hand, he moved through a neighborhood as desolate and foreboding as any in New York. Tenements in rows, some of them boarded up. Smashed street lights. A burnt-out car. Addicts or winos skulking in the doorways. He did not expect to be accosted, and was not. He knew what every cop knew. Predators could smell fear - it was what set them off. They could also smell the absence of fear which identified their prey as something else, either a fellow predator or a cop - who was only a predator under another name; in any case not prey at all, but something best left alone. In the absence of visible fear they became afraid in their turn, and drew back into the darkness.

Powers had promised to come alone, and Koy believed him. Otherwise Koy would walk out, there would be no meeting, and no shakedown would take place. And what else could Powers want? Powers could have, as Koy saw it, only two possible purposes. The first was that he wished to scold Koy, to threaten him, to heap abuse. Obviously Powers had tried and failed to put a case together against him, and perhaps his instinct now was to act out his own frustration and rage in person. But the expenditure of energy would be great, and the results zero. Answer number one was not the answer. It did not fit what he knew of Powers, who must be, at the least, an escape artist to rival Houdini, and therefore no fool.

The second answer, blackmail, was the obvious one. It was impossible for Koy to conceive of a cop Powers’ age who still took evil personally. He had not been such a man himself and had never known one. Evil – crime - flowed forward like the clouds, or tides. One could stand in its way forever without affecting it in the slightest. It just kept coming. Most cops at the start of their careers tried to stop it, or at least slow it down, but instead began passing through various stages of disillusionment. In Koy’s experience they all reached the same place at the end - the place he imagined Powers had reached now. They saw people who were so rich as to seem aloof from evil altogether - it simply never touched them, and they wished to join such people on the high ground. Searching for a way to do this without becoming disgusted with themselves completely, many fixed on a method that ran like a dirt road through the brains of all cops, a road every cop seemed to think he had discovered for the first time. Koy was convinced that, five minutes from now, or an hour, or whenever Powers turned up, he would offer to drop his case - a broken case anyway - in exchange for payment of a certain sum of money. And if this sum was reasonable, Koy would pay it. It was part of the cost of doing business. It was perfectly normal. It happened all the time. It was nothing to be alarmed at. So he told himself.

If Powers wanted too much, then perhaps Koy would simply shoot him and leave him there.

He had come to the dark street that ran behind the waterfront warehouses. Widely spaced traffic lights. One or two parked cars. An occasional taxi that flashed by. It was not easy for him to find the warehouse he was looking for - he had only been there once. He peered into alleys until he found the one with the piled doors.

Someone had cleaned it up, or cleaned it out. The bedsprings, the disused furniture were gone. The doors were stacked neatly against the wall in a pile higher than his head. He shined his flashlight on them. Crossing them had been difficult the last time. The doors had rolled around on their doorknobs. It was like crossing an undulating sea. Now their doorknobs had been removed; the sea they represented was forever calm. He walked past them to the end of the alley, from time to time pausing to listen. The only risk was to come upon some derelict unexpectedly and get hit on the head before he could react. But there was no sound.