Year of the Dragon (22 page)

“I’ll tell our guys what’s probably going down,” Wilcoxon said. “But don’t expect too much.”

Wilcoxon showed them out of the airless little office, walking them as far as the elevator. “If we manage to drop anybody,” he said, just before the doors closed, “we’ll send you a thank-you card.”

Downstairs Powers and Luang stood in the sunlight in the plaza in front of the building.

“What next, Captain?” asked Luang.

But Powers’ euphoria was evaporating fast. It was clotting like blood. Scar tissue had begun to form over it. The scar tissue was called reality. He believed more strongly than ever that a Chinese Mafia existed and that Koy was the head of it. And yes, he had begun to discern the edges of the case he might make against Koy. But, no, he still had no hard evidence, nor even hard information he could take to Duncan or Cirillo or the PC. And he did not have the resources to break up the Chinese Mafia without their help.

“If I had a few more of you,” he told Luang, “I’d keep the tail going at least another week.”

Luang shook his head. He did not like the sound of this. He wanted no more of Koy who, if he was protecting a drug empire, would stop at nothing. “I’ve got to have some time off, Captain,” Luang said. Though nothing showed on his face, he was terrified of Koy, who would certainly order him killed, might already have done so. “The Chinese cop is not like you American cops,” he said and gave a broad grin. “We Chinese like to eat. We devote a lot of thought to it. I got to have a decent meal, Captain. Maybe some butterfly shrimps. I can’t take any more surveillance work for a while. Maybe a dish of stir-fried sliced beef with oyster sauce. Have you ever had that, Captain?” He tried the grin again, but this time it failed. “For me that is as close as you can come to ecstasy at a dinner table. You make it with black pepper, soy sauce, thinly sliced onions, chopped fresh ginger and-”

“Stop,” Powers said with a smile. He had failed to notice Luang’s fear - by American standards it simply did not show. “You are making my mouth water.”

“I want to sit down at a table and eat with chopsticks,” Luang said. He was grinning, pleading and sweating all at once. There were beads of sweat on his brow.

This time Powers did observe the mismatched symptoms but they only confused him. He could not figure out what they meant.

“And drink a pot of hot jasmine tea.” Luang said. “I can’t take any more hamburgers for a while, I can’t take any more of these meals out of a paper bag.” He watched anxiously for his commanding officer’s reaction.

Powers, brooding, thought of Koy as the lord of a fortified encampment. Not only did he rape and brutalize his own subjects within, he also manufactured poison in there, and sent it outside to contaminate the wells for miles around. Stopping Koy was more important than Luang’s dinner habits. On the other hand, there was probably very little more to be gained by tailing the man.

An idea came to Powers, a way to infiltrate the Flying Dragons and to go after Koy from inside the gang. For about a minute he was silent, mulling the idea over, kneading it
like dough, watching it take the shape he wanted.

His hand clapped down on Luang’s shoulder. “Take a week off, and when you come back we’ll try a different plan. It’s one I think might work.”

He did not notice Luang’s vast, interior sigh of relief.

“Thank you, Captain,” said Police Officer Luang.

HE TOOK Carol to the movies in a village ten miles from her house, and at the ticket window the woman in line in front of them turned around, recognized Carol, and gave her husband a violent dig in the ribs, causing him to turn and stare too.

“Oh,” he said, looking startled. “Oh, it’s you.”

Although this had happened before, each time Powers was both surprised and pleased. His pleasure was pride - for the moment this valuable object belonged to him. Carol gave the couple the frosted smile she reserved for such people and they advanced into the lobby where the man who tore the tickets at the door recognized her too. On came a friendly grin and he nodded to her, but Carol ignored him altogether and plunged forward into the darkness, Powers following.

They took places in the last row, and stared at the screen, and Powers tried to examine his emotions, which seemed to him unworthy. The ownership instinct was one of man’s strongest and most base. No human being owned any other, Powers thought. Carol certainly existed independently of him, they weren’t even married, so why did he continue to preen when she was recognized at his side?

He was experiencing many emotions these days that were strange to him. To be in love at forty-six was in some ways as vivid and compelling as at twenty-three, and the object of that love was just as irresistible, though she did not always seem as perfect. Because love then had blotted out all else, whereas now it had to compete for his attention. Often it produced sensations that only resembled those of the past, the way his face in the mirror only resembled a snapshot from his youth; the two faces were far from identical.

There were ritual aspects to love, and these were much the same as before. In fact Powers sometimes found himself engaged in the same actions and conversations as twenty or more years ago. Such experiences were not always thrilling. Often they were simply confusing. Take one of the more simple questions lovers always put to one another: age. He remembered the day he had asked Eleanor how old she was. “Twenty-two,” she answered, with a touch of pride at being so old. Casual question, casual answer, as if he had asked how much change she had in her purse, and she had replied: twenty-two cents.

But two days ago in a restaurant he had put both his hands over Carol’s and said, “Carol, how old are you?”

It was not a casual question at all. It was as if he were asking the contents of her bank account. Her eyes dropped at once to the tablecloth, and she looked about to cry, as if he wanted too much from her, more than she could give.

He had been circling the subject for days, the way, as a boy courting Eleanor, he had circled the subject of sex, edging ever closer to the big mystery. Sooner or later they would plunge in together, and it would be revealed for both of them.

Powers knew Carol was sensitive about her age, for he had watched her hide the clues, burying them deep. She had avoided this subject as Eleanor had avoided that one, almost desperately.

Powers said stubbornly, “Tell me.”

“What do you want to know for?”

If he had met her years ago when such questions were important, he would have asked her, “Are you still a virgin?” A hesitation then or now, meant only that the answer she must give was the wrong one, would reveal tainted goods, threatened their relationship, might even end it.

“Please tell me.”

Her guilty secret, she saw, could not be kept, though she went on trying. “What difference does it make?” There were always mysteries between couples she seemed to be saying. Her voice was pitched very low. And she was almost pleading. Why could he not accept this, and let the matter drop? Why crave the bad news that would make neither of them happy?

“I want to know,” he said. Back then he would have wanted to know the answer to the other question too, because that was the way a boy fulfilled his function, was it not? Or so it seemed to courting males of whatever age - a boy’s job was to undress a girl completely, strip her naked, leave her nothing.

“I am forty-two years old,” Carol said. Her eyes did not rise.

Immediately he was satisfied. “So what’s so bad about that?” he said cheerfully. “I’m not interested in eighteen-year-olds, you know.”

“I don’t see why you had to know so badly,” she muttered, and now she sounded annoyed.

One’s age, Powers told her somewhat pompously, was the single most important fact you could know about him or her. It set that person in a historical perspective. In the case of a cop, for instance, it told you who was commissioner and what the climate was in the department during his impressionable years in the job. It told you how far he had advanced in his career. In the case of a woman, it told you little things, the kind of clothes she had worn in college and the music she had danced to. And big things, such as what kind of world she had grown up in, affected by which specific political and social traumas. If you knew a person’s age you could tell approximately how he or she was likely to behave under certain pressures. Powers nodded his head vigorously. Oh yes, you could tell a lot about a person from his or her age. “How old are you?” Carol asked.

To his surprise, he found he did not want her to know.

“Forty-six,” he said.

“You have a hang-up about your age,” she told him.

Now in the dark in the movie theater, he became aware that Carol had shifted in her seat beside him, snuggling up into his armpit, so that he put his arm around her, and she in return grasped his thumb in one hand, his pinky in the other, holding the two fingers like someone milking a cow. His remaining three fingers and hand she draped over her left breast. Her nipple rose up promptly under the tissue - thin bras women wore these days - Eleanor wore them too - and he began to rub it gently, like someone polishing the brass ferrule on a walking stick, making circular motions which kept it caught within his palm.

So here he was feeling up a date in the movies twenty-five years later, and he found the experience as unsettling now as he did then. It was exciting, he certainly did not want anyone to catch him doing it, and he could not keep his attention on the screen. His attention was on Carol.

She slid her hand into his lap. “I see you’re not concentrating on the movie.”

“Neither are you.”

“Let’s go home.”

He parked in her driveway, and as they crossed the lawn, she told him conversationally that something was wrong with her dishwasher, perhaps in the morning he could fix it. Seemingly she took it for granted that he neither had to go home nor wanted to, as if, in the jargon of teenage girls, he would be “sleeping over,” as if sleeping over was as innocent for him as for children, and fraught with no more implications.

To Powers it was the biggest shock of the night and one of the biggest of his life. Had he really moved this far from Eleanor, from his marriage, his sons, his home, from all that he had cared about during more than half of his life?

They stepped up onto her front step.

“Carol.” He laid the words out rough as bricks, sharp-edged, hard. “I can only stay about an hour,” he said. And her head spun around.

She was really very perceptive, which was part of what fascinated him about her - that she was so quick. It was as if he had tossed her a heavy object. She had caught it at once and begun to examine it. It was like a diplomat’s pronouncement. It had weight. He watched her turn it this way and that. It could be benign - or set armies marching - which?

“You stayed all night the last time.”

She had unlocked her front door and switched on the lights.

“Yes,” he said as they entered the hall, “and felt awful about it after.” Did he really want to say this to her?

She turned swiftly to face him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He was being forced for the first time to take a position, to dig in like a soldier on one hill out of several. But he could not decide which hill to choose, nor was he sure how strongly he wished to defend it. He did know that, for the most part, she focused only on her own needs, never on his, and this could not be allowed to continue. He had obligations both as husband and policeman, which she treated, for the most part, as though they did not exist.

“It means I’m still married, that I have a wife I care about, and sleeping all night with you feels to me about ten times more unfaithful to her than simply making love to you.” He realized he was trying to explain the unexplainable. He couldn’t really explain it even to himself. He just knew it was there, his guilt, his remorse, or whatever it was.

He found he was staring into the hardest blue eyes he had ever seen.

“Maybe,” said Carol, “you had better decide which one of us you want, her or me.”

Her words were as inflexible and transparent as glass. As brittle as glass also. “Please, Carol. I’ve known you a few weeks. I’ve been married to her for twenty-three years. You’re asking too much too fast.”

“Do you want to stay all night, or don’t you?”

He shook his head gently, a gesture to smooth over the hard words, like a trowel smoothing out cement.

She said: “Don’t shake your head. Say what you mean.

His jaw became set. “I’ll stay an hour.”

“I didn’t invite you to stay an hour.”

“Okay.” He turned toward the door. “Good night, then.”

When she neither moved nor spoke, he stepped out into the darkness. Pulling the door shut behind him he moved off across the lawn to his car, and though he scrutinized his emotions, he couldn’t tell which ones he was feeling at the moment. It wasn’t misery or disappointment or elation or grief. Perhaps it was relief. She had torn him in too many directions for too long and now it was ended, and perhaps he was relieved. He remembered having felt much this way on nights that various girls had thrown him over - the pain of loss did not begin until the next morning.

The grass was wet on his shoes. There was a big high moon. Standing beside his car he looked up at it, sucking in drafts of cold damp air. He grasped the Mustang’s door handle.

He did not hear Carol’s front door open nor her footsteps on the lawn. He did feel her bosom pressed against his back, her arms around his waist, her forehead against the nape of his neck.

“This is crazy,” she murmured into the space between his shoulder blades. “You’re right, I want you too much. I want you on any basis I can have you. An hour can be worth a lifetime. If that’s all I can have, I’ll take it. Come back into the house.”

Arm and arm they recrossed the lawn, adding two more sets of footsteps to those imprinted so clearly ahead of them in the dew in the moonlight.

“WHAT’S THIS case you’re working on?” she asked a little later.

“Oh, just a case.”

“Don’t trust me, eh?”

It was a joke, but not a joke - he had to tell her something, and it occurred to him that he could use her. He could get her interested in the story, so that if ever he needed it leaked - if, say, Duncan or someone tried to take administrative action against him - he could hand her the rest of it and she would tell it for him.

Carol had decided to use him too, if she could. There was no reason why he couldn’t be a news source as well as a lover, and in truth there was no better place to worm information out of someone than in bed. Either from passion, contentment, or gratitude men were always anxious to accord women favors in bed, to give them presents. In bed woman was not queen, but king. If a woman could ask for diamonds at such a time, then why not for information?

“Of course I trust you,” he said, trying to decide how much to tell her.

“What kind of case is it? Is it drugs?”

Now they were each attempting to use the other.

“Drugs, gambling, extortion, murder - you name it.”

“Pretty big, eh?”

“Pretty big,” he conceded.

“Is it the Mafia?”

“Not the Italian Mafia.”

“The Chinese Mafia?”

“Headquarters says there’s no such thing.”

He felt her quicken, the way a woman did sometimes in the course of sexual arousal.

“But you think there is?”

“I’m obliged to believe what headquarters believes.” That was all he intended to tell her.

She purred with contentment, and he thought it was because he was idly stroking her back, her hip, her behind. It wasn’t. She was thinking not of Powers pressed naked against her, but of Lurtsema. She had her hook at last. The Chinese Mafia - a headline Lurtsema would go for.

Since she sounded aroused, Powers moved his hand over her. Mat of hair as coarse as bark. She stirred, still purring.

“Who’s the head of it?”

“Not a name you would know.”

Carol was annoyed. She wanted to give herself over to what Powers as lover was doing to her, but couldn’t until she got Powers as news source to give her a bit more information. She half rolled over, kissing him, and her fingers surrounded him, though only barely. From this she realized that the conversation was proving extremely sexy to both of them. It was kinky sex, in a way. It was like an erotic game they had invented to heighten their excitement. They might have played at being father and daughter in bed together, but this game was better. It was like sex between fourteen-year-olds; their innocent questions were not innocent at all, this conversation was dangerous and forbidden, and both of them knew it.