Year of the Dragon (18 page)

AT NOON the following day, a narcotics detective named Pete Spengler met with an informant in a bar about four blocks away. The informant was a junkie and, therefore, unreliable. Still, he sometimes came up with good stuff. His name was Carmelo, street name Johnny Blood. Although his clothes were filthy and he had not shaved, he looked in pretty good shape this morning, Spengler observed, not stoned anymore, not sniveling and begging yet either, which was his usual condition later in the day.

“Go ahead and drink that, Blood.” Spengler said, as the barman put beers down in front of them. “It’s got food value. The trouble with you is, you never eat.” Both took a long swallow, and Spengler noted that Blood looked excited. “Why did you want to see me?” he inquired. Blood looked so excited that Spengler thought: he may really have something. “What have you got for me, Blood?”

“That’s not the question,” Blood said archly. “The question is, what do you have for me?”

I wonder what he’s got, Spengler thought.

Spengler and the other narcotics detectives drew their expense money in monthly allotments. For this month, the detective was empty - he had already used it all up. On the other hand, he had made an arrest earlier in the week, confiscating - and neglecting to voucher - two five-dollar bags of heroin. They were in his locker back in the station house, where they lay like money in a savings account. They were like emergency rations. They were there to tide a man over.

Spengler began to bargain. “You got nothing,” he stated flatly. That’s what a cop did, he thought. Cops bargained with these germs. You beat them down. The alternative was to run out of expense money, and out of stuff as well, by the end of the first week.

“There was a shooting down the street last night,” said Blood archly.

“Oh? Where was that?” Spengler asked, pretending disbelief and disinterest both. There had been no report of shots fired in this precinct last night.

“It will cost you to find out,” said Blood.

Spengler thought about it. “Tell you what, Johnny, you take me there and if it pans out, I may have something for you.”

“You’re good,” chortled Blood, rubbing his hands together. “You’re a cop, but you’re not a prick. Come on. It’s down by the piers.”

Blood led the detective to the deserted warehouse. “You go in there,” he said archly. “You tell me what you find.”

Spengler eyed the refuse-strewn alley. “You come in with me,” he decided.

“I ain’t going in there again,” said Blood. “I wait for you right here. It’s worth a spoon.” A spoon was five bags. “When you come out, you give me a spoon.”

Ten minutes later Spengler called in the precinct detectives from the gas station down the street and he waited for them at the head of the alley. “It’s two Chinese kids,” he told the first two to arrive, and led the way across the shifting pile of doors. “They can’t be more than eighteen years old. It looks to me like some kind of ritual execution. When you make your notifications, you better notify the Fifth Precinct as well. Since it’s Chinks involved, they might want to know about it.”

By the time Powers and Kelly drove up in front of the warehouse, the street was crowded with police vehicles. A cop in uniform directed them into the alley. They mounted the stairs and came out into the second-floor loft. The police photographer had his lights up. Many detectives and uniformed cops stood around. There was no sign, thankfully, of Chief of Detectives Cirillo, who either did not realize the possible significance of these murders, or had not yet been told of them. Powers and Kelly approached one of the bodies.

“That’s him,” said Kelly, looking down. “That’s the Hsu kid.”

The medical examiner, bag open on the floor, knelt beside the body. They watched him work.

Powers, glancing across at the second corpse, said to Kelly, “Is the other one his brother?”

Kelly went to see. “I can’t tell,” he said, bending over it. “The face is gone.”

Just then the medical examiner moved the body he was working on. The head flopped sideways, as if there were no bones in the neck.

“Jesus,” said Powers.

“Bullet passed between the second and third cervical vertebrae,” grunted the medical examiner. “Neck broken. Same as if he’d been hung. Ever seen anyone been hung?”

“Yes,” said Powers. Corpses no longer made him nauseated, only depressed. A cop saw every kind of death there was.

“The other one is the same,” said the M.E., throwing a glance toward the second body. “I already worked on him. Except in his case, the bullet also tore up the front of his face. You can’t see what he used to look like so good. Hey, look at this, he’s got a bullet wound in the leg, too. About a month or five weeks old, I guess. Maybe a little more. Somebody’s sewed it up.”

That’s my bullet for sure. Powers thought.

“There’s no exit wound, and no sign it’s been worked on,” said the medical examiner, probing the puckered thigh. “So the bullet is probably still in there. When I get back home to my place I’ll extract it and send it up to ballistics.”

To this guy, Powers realized, “home to my place,” meant the morgue.

He went to stand at the window. He looked out at the river, at the water that sparkled in the sun. On the other side the skyscrapers of the financial district rose straight up like the wall around a medieval town. Overhead reached the three soaring bridges. The bridges seemed to him a symbol of man’s vision, of his desire to join hands and to create, as opposed to his equally fantastic need to kill and destroy.

These dead kids might have been vicious murderers, he thought, but they were babies. What went wrong? And who did this to them? He wanted to get his hands on him, whoever it was. But how?

Kelly came over and stood beside him, and they looked back at the corpses. “Seeing dead kids is hard,” the detective said. Powers nodded, and they stood side by side not as commander and subordinate but as two cops forced to look at this kind of thing far too often.

Ting is involved in this, Powers thought. One day after I give him Hsu’s name, the kid gets whacked out. But Ting is old and out of power. He must have taken it to the tong. The decision must have been made high up in the tong, and the head man of the tong is Koy.

It
is
a Mafia, Powers thought, and Koy is the godfather, and I want him.

“Call up your friend in the lab,” he told Kelly. “I want to know whatever ballistics turns up on these bullets.”

“No problem, Cap.”

“Now let’s get out of here before the chief of detectives shows up.”

They strode past the bodies and down the stairs.

POWERS STOOD in front of the desk of Chief of Patrol Duncan. Of the two uniforms, his own was newer, better cut, more freshly pressed, and for a moment this gave him confidence. Appearance counted. The visual expression of a man’s will to excel counted. However, Duncan’s uniform did surpass his own where it counted most, in the insignia on the shoulders, Duncan’s shining gold, opposed to his own dull silver. If you stared at Duncan’s three stars long enough, their candlepower had the power to blind.

Like a job applicant, Powers carried that morning’s
Daily News
under his arm. But it was not folded open to the want ads. “I wonder if you saw this,” he began, placing the paper on the outside edge of Duncan’s desk. If he wanted it, let him reach for it. Powers was interested in scoring points, big or small, in any way he could.

The headlines read: “COPS SEEK CLUES IN TONG EXECUTIONS.” Beneath was a photo that showed the corpses being carried out of the warehouse, while a number of cops looked on. But Duncan, who could see the headlines from where he sat, only glanced at them, then leaned back in his swivel chair ignoring the newspaper altogether. “Chief Cirillo and I went out there,” he said. “We heard you had been there earlier. We were surprised you didn’t hold a press conference.”

They stared briefly at each other.

Powers said, “If you got there before they wrapped them up, then you know it wasn’t pretty.”

“No,” Duncan conceded, “It wasn’t pretty. What’s your point?”

“I’ve got one Chinese cop,” Powers began carefully. “His name is Lawrence Lom. He’s pushing fifty years old and his specialty is community relations. I don’t think he’s ever been on the street in his life. I need help. You’ve got to assign me a cop who speaks Chinese, who is Chinese, and who can do me some good on the street.”

Duncan responded with a smug smile. The battle was joined, and he saw he would win it easily. “There are only six Chinese cops in the job. All of them were offered Chinatown at one time or another. The other five turned it down, and they all gave the same reason. They know everybody in Chinatown. They don’t want to be seen as cops in Chinatown. The Chinese people despise cops.”

Powers said: “Everybody despises cops.”

“Their argument,” said Duncan smugly, “and I agree with it, is that they are no good in a community where they call everybody Uncle. The Chinese are very big on calling people Uncle. As I understand it, they have three words for Uncle, did you know that?”

“Yes, I heard,” said Powers.

“The three words mean Young Uncle, Old Uncle and Real Uncle.” Duncan smiled patronizingly. “So you can’t have any Chinese cops.”

“There’s a Chinese recruit in the Police Academy right now,” said Powers. “I want him.”

If Duncan was surprised by this news, his answer was no less automatic. “You can’t have him. He’ll give you the same story anyway.” The subject, as far as Duncan was concerned, was closed. He came forward in his chair. He looked pleased with himself.

“I’ve talked to this guy,” said Powers doggedly. “He didn’t grow up in Chinatown, he grew up in Hong Kong. He moved to San Francisco when he was fifteen, and he moved to New York five years ago. He’s never lived in Chinatown. And he’s willing to work for me.”

“I’ll consider it,” said Duncan. He began to rearrange papers on his desk. “I’m not promising anything.” Duncan sent a smile out into the void, and Powers sent a glare. The two different tools, both unsuited to the job at hand, collided in midair, and crashed to the desk top.

“Considering it is not enough,” said Powers. “You owe it to me. You’ve given me this impossible job, and I need him.”

Duncan’s smile had faded. He stared across at Powers, who stared back. Their stares strained against each other with equal force and weight. Stares as blunt as walls. In the absence of a cutting edge, no breakthrough seemed possible on either side.

“What are you planning, Powers?”

“Planning? Nothing. Nothing at all. I’m trying to break up the youth gangs, that’s all. And I need help.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I want this Chinese cop,” Powers said, “And you’d better give him to me or-”

“Or you go to the press,” said Duncan, leaning forward across his desk. “If you do, you won’t survive it.”

“I didn’t say I’d go to the press.”

“With you there’s always that possibility.”

“I’m asking you please.”

“You move through this department like a piece of heavy machinery, Powers. You want to know why you don’t get ahead? That’s why.”

“Can I ask you something? Can I have this recruit sworn in secretly? I want to use him undercover. I don’t want him to show on the Fifth Precinct roster. Can I have him assigned to me personally? Can I have him, or not?” And he added, though it cost him heavily in pride: “Chief, please.”

THE POLICE ACADEMY firing range was in the basement. Powers came down the stairs and through the multiple doors whose purpose was to confine the tremendous daily noise as much as possible inside the range itself. The range was a place of almost perpetual gunfire, and most days the noise seeped out anyway, rising like smoke into the classrooms above.

Door after door closed behind Powers. The racket got louder, like a fanfare announcing his arrival. When he entered the range itself, the noise was deafening. Ten cubicles. Ten fire lanes, all active. He could see the backs of ten recruits practicing with revolvers. They wore gray training uniforms, gray baseball caps and, clapped over their ears, sound barriers. They were firing at will, the many individual reports blending into what was almost a single unending explosion. An instructor, hands clasped behind his back, paced like a football coach up and down behind them, sometimes stepping forward to correct someone’s flawed technique, or to reel in and examine one of the targets.

Powers walked the length of the alley behind the shooters looking for the Chinese recruit, Luang, who was supposed to be there. But the men were all focused down-range, and he could not pick him out. From the front a Chinese face was distinctive, particularly down here in this private sanctuary of New York cops. But from the rear, all men looked much the same.

Powers approached the instructor, who saw him coming and lifted one sound barrier off one ear politely. “I’m looking for the Chinese guy,” Powers shouted in under it.

“Lane three,” the instructor shouted back.

Powers stepped over and tapped Luang on the shoulder. The shooter turned, smiled to see Powers, and stepped back out of his cubicle. He pulled the sound barriers off.

“Okay, it’s done,” Powers shouted at him. “Come with me.”

Luang handed gun and sound barriers to the instructor, and followed Powers out through the doors.

“Any trouble?” Luang asked.

Powers thought about this, and decided to say: “No. None at all.”

Twenty minutes later they stood in the office of the commander of the Police Academy, a one-star chief named Devaney. Powers knew him. He had once been a hard-nosed, ill-mannered street cop - rude, uncouth, insensibly brave. He had become prissy, pedantic and preoccupied. He looked like what he was, a headmaster.

Present also was the department’s chief clerk, who held his bible outstretched in one hand while he read the oath off a card in the other. In this way Luang, who still wore recruit gray, was sworn into the police department.

“This is all highly irregular,” said Chief Devaney. Like most headmasters, he was frightened by irregularity of whatever kind. He pushed a gun and shield across the desk at Luang. “You’re assigned to Captain Powers personally. But you pick up your paychecks here in this office every two weeks. I’ll have to ask you to sign for that gun. The shield, too. You sign here, and here.”

Luang, leaning across the desk, signed.

“Well, I guess that’s that,” said Devaney. He looked unsettled. Something was happening that he did not understand. “I guess Captain Powers has some undercover assignment ready for you. Is that right, Powers?”

“We’re in a bit of a hurry, Chief,” Powers said gently. The headmaster of the Police Academy, despite his exalted rank, normally went no higher. The man could neither hurt him nor help him. Headmasters, unless you were a student in the school, were not forces to be reckoned with. “I’ll be glad to talk it over with you another time,” said Powers. “We’d better get going, Luang.”

The Police Academy faced onto Twentieth Street. Outside they got into Powers’ car, and in heavy afternoon traffic, started down Second Avenue toward Chinatown. The red lights were staggered. They moved slowly, steadily away from safety - what could be safer than a school, even a police school - into the battle zone.

Powers, trying to think it all out in his head, was silent for so long that at last Luang asked, “What’s it all about, Captain?”

From Houston Street south they were in Little Italy. Second Avenue had changed its name to Chrystie Street. The store fronts had Italian names and sold Italian products. “Do you know Koy?” said Powers.” The undertaker? I know who he is. I’ve seen him a few times. They call him the Cho Kun. As I understand it, he’s the top guy in Chinatown right now.”

Powers, who had stopped at a light, was still wondering how much to tell Luang. He turned to face him directly. “I want you to wake up with him in the morning, and put him to bed at night. I want to know everywhere he goes, everything he does, everyone he sees. I want to know everything about him.”

Luang whistled. “You don’t want much, do you, Captain?”

For a moment they appraised each other. Luang, Powers knew, was thirty-two, and stood under five feet seven inches tall. He was too old for a police trainee, and too short, and he ought to have been disqualified on both grounds. But he had wanted to be a cop so badly that he had instituted a class-action suit charging racial discrimination, and had fought his petition through the courts for over four years. In the interim he had worked as a prison guard at the City’s house of detention on Riker’s Island, while also earning a college degree nights from City University. He was not married.

So he was industrious, strong-willed, smart, knew prison from the inside, knew criminals up close - knew cops up close too, presumably.

And he was Chinese.

That was all Powers knew about him. Was it enough? Could Luang help him?

Horns were blaring, making Powers realize that the red light had changed. He put the car in gear and started forward. “Keep track of your overtime,” he told Luang. “I can’t give you money, but when this is over I can give you equivalent time off. And don’t get made. I’ve got no one to replace you with.”

“And don’t get killed either,” said Luang, and he grinned. “You forgot to put that in, Captain. You forgot your best line.”

It made Powers smile. For several blocks neither spoke.

“What’s the point of this exercise?” asked Luang.

The point, thought Powers, was to break up the Chinese Mafia. But to say this to Luang was to place his career in Luang’s hands, and he did not even know the man yet, much less trust him.

“To put Koy in jail, Luang. To put Koy in jail.”

“On what grounds, Captain?”

“You sound like my wife,” said Powers cordially. “On any grounds we can find. That’s your job. To find the grounds.”

“It sounds like an interesting assignment,” said Luang. He sounded happy. “You know something, Captain? I think I’m going to like working for you.”