Year of the Dragon (41 page)

From the floating restaurants searchlight beams probed the darkness. They splashed the harbor with excitement, with fun. The restaurants were big business, they advertised their presence with vivid bursts of light. They illuminated for a moment the oncoming motor launch. A sampan. One man steering from the rear. On the front platform Powers discerned what he took to be a pile of cinder blocks wired together.

Are those cinder blocks for me? he asked himself.

He was as terrified as he had ever been, but it was an intellectual kind of terror and did not incapacitate him. He was still flexing and unflexing his fingers. He was still able to think. He had known terror before. The sensation was not new to him. Keep calm, he told himself. Think it out. If you panic you are lost.

And he began to flip a new set of filing cards through his head.

If he turned and rushed them they would fire. Rushing them was out. They would have no choice. From their point of view, this thing had gone too far to turn back now. He had to confuse them. He had to give them an option of some

kind. Make them stop to think before firing.

What about Carol? If he could save himself, did he care what happened to Carol? Whose fault was this anyhow? He felt an overpowering hatred for her, and yet they had shared so much together in so short a time - and were sharing this experience now - that even as he hated her he loved her more than ever, for her flaws as much as her virtues, the way one loves a wife grown old, grown heavy, grown no longer beautiful but part of one’s life since forever. It was Carol’s fault they were here, but his fault too. They were here together. She was the one who had steered Koy toward him, but that was his fault as much as hers because he was the one who had steered her toward Koy in the first place. Was there not some way he could save her, even at the cost of his own life? But he was not married to her. Did he have to die for her anyway?

The sampan had slowed, and was drifting in toward the pilings. Four pairs of feet clapped rhythmically down on the boards, making a sound as hollow as walnuts. The end of the dock - the end of life itself - that sampan - came nearer. He knew that if this was Eleanor he would gladly give his life for her, and then it seemed to him that Eleanor and Carol were the same, his one and only wife, and that he would give his life for Carol too if necessary. He did not fully understand it, or see it clearly. It was muddled by terror, and by the need to improvise some action fast. It was all very mystical, but in loving the second woman he loved the first one more, and from now on, somehow, he must take care of both of them. He looked across at Carol and saw that she was stumbling along, sobbing. She hardly knew where she was, only that her life, her beloved life, was behind her. She would disappear tonight and no one would ever know what happened to her.

Powers had come to the end of the file cards. There was not an idea written out on any of them, nothing. His mind had become a void, and as a result fear at last took control of him. Love turned back into hate again - the impotent man blamed the woman. He did not have two wives, only one, whom he would never see again - and the void was filled with rage.

“Are you happy now?” he shouted at Carol. “I told you you were going to wind up in the South China Sea. I warned you.”

And then an idea came to Powers, and he thought he saw a way to save both of them - perhaps to save Carol anyway. He would give the torpedoes their option and himself a slim chance to survive.

“Look ahead of you,” he shouted at Carol. “That’s the South China Sea. Are you happy now?”

It stopped Carol in her tracks. She gazed at him with stricken eyes, below which tears and makeup coursed down her face. Behind them the two detectives had stopped also. She reacted even better than he hoped. She swung her handbag at him. It struck him in the side of the face, and he felt its clasp rip open his cheek. He had not put up his hands to defend himself. Instead he had lunged into Carol, and sent her flying off the dock. He had picked his spot carefully, and had driven her off the dock into the well between the prows of two junks. He saw her fall straight down into darkness, and even as he crouched and lunged again, he heard the splash. The surprised detectives had not had time to sort out what was happening, and he drove his shoulder into the middle-aged one, and sent him off the dock also, crashing down on his back onto the forecastle of the nearest junk. The other man fired even as Powers turned and ran. Crouched and running hard, Powers raced zigzagging up the dock toward shore. He was praying as he ran. He had never prayed so hard before. There were still more shots, and he prayed the detective would not think to chase him, and that the bullets would miss. He was praying that Carol had sense enough to swim between two junks, to stay hidden under the curve of two hulls. If she did, she would be safe. They could not linger long looking for her.

When he had covered about fifty yards, Powers rose upright and sprinted for the staircase. To hit anyone with a handgun at the range this had become would take an extremely lucky shot, and the detective behind him must be out of his mind with distraction. Should he help his colleague? Should he go after Carol? Should he go after Powers? What should he do? Shooting was an athletic event. It required absolute concentration, which the shooter was totally without; his problems had become too complicated to solve, and the target was diminishing all the time.

People had come out onto the decks of the junks. Powers had reached the staircase and had run up onto the embankment. He was ready to sprint into downtown Aberdeen if necessary, but when he looked back he saw he was not being pursued. Instead he discerned the shapes of the two detectives, who seemed to be grappling with each other at the outer end of the dock. They looked like men dancing, or perhaps kissing; and then Powers realized it was merely the second man hauling the first one from the junk back onto the dock again. A moment later he saw them run to the edge and jump down onto the sampan, and seconds after that the sampan, heading outwards, crossed the same searchlight beam as before, all three men staring back toward shore, toward Powers up on the embankment - to them an increasingly remote figure, safe, untouched, as invulnerable as a hero, as a god.

As for the hero himself, he stood now hacking and coughing, trying desperately to catch his breath. As the reaction set in fear overtook him. It was as if he had swallowed poison. He not only couldn’t breathe, his knees had turned to soup, and he could barely stand.

But when he had lost sight of the sampan in the darkness, he ran back down the stairs and out to the end of the dock. He could not be sure exactly where he had knocked Carol into the water, he could see nothing down any of those wells, and he began to call her name, but she did not answer. Was she still alive? Perhaps the detective had killed her, one shot into the top of her head. Perhaps he had killed her himself in driving her off the dock. Perhaps she had become mired in mud. Perhaps she had drowned. “Carol,” he called, and was amazed to hear his voice come out in a series of sobs. “Carol, oh Carol, Carol.”

He heard a groan, and the word “Artie,” half choked off. He ran in the direction of her voice, and leaped down onto the deck of a junk, where he hung over the railing, reaching for her face, for her slimy upraised hand. He locked his grip around her wrist, and in a single violent jerk extracted her from the water. He had heard stories in the past about mothers who could lift automobiles off kids they had accidentally run over. Such stories, he realized, must be true, for Carol weighed at least 130 pounds, yet he had yanked her out of the water and six feet into the air with one hand. They stood on the deck of the junk embracing. She was again sobbing against his chest. Her hair was plastered to her head, and from it hung seaweed and bits of garbage. Her dress sucked at her body, and her shoes were gone. But she still had her handbag. What does it take to make a woman let go of her handbag, Powers asked himself, even as he began studying the outer darkness. Could the sampan come back? Could bullets come at them over the water? Holding Carol’s hand, he ran her up the dock toward the staircase, up onto the embankment and across it. The car they had arrived in was still there, and he looked for keys in the ignition, but found none. He made a mental note of the license plate - that was his training and it could be important - and then they were in the street beyond, and running toward the lights of the town: some closed gas stations, a seedy hotel, an open pharmacy. They came to a taxi stand. Three taxis in a row. Powers yanked open the door of the first cab in line, and pushed Carol into it. He jumped in beside her and slammed the door.

During most of the ride Carol lay in his arms sobbing. But when the cab drew up in front of the hotel, where elegant doormen helped elegantly dressed people into and out of cabs, she tried to gather control of herself. “I’m a mess.”

“It’s all right, Carol.”

“I can’t go in there looking like this.”

As he led her across the lobby, heads turned. Carol herself stared only at the floor. Powers had never before seen her so embarrassed. They rode the elevator up. But once in her suite her momentary self-control vanished once more and she began violently to tremble.

Powers held her. “You’re safe now, Puss,” he said to her. It had slipped out - his pet name for Eleanor; he did not know why.

“Stay with me tonight, Artie. Oh, please stay with me.

But Powers had work to do, and could not stay.

He took her into the bathroom and undressed her. The muddy dress, the muddy underwear, fell to the tile. Her body was muddy too, her hands, her hair. He stood her under the shower. The hot water streamed down.

“You can’t leave me alone, Artie.”

“You’ll be all right, Carol.” He had to phone Sir David, report this, get the investigation started.

“Stay with me.”

If it were Eleanor as hysterical as this would he stay? Probably. But he was married to Eleanor. He was not married to Carol, and duty came first.

She began to cry. “Stay with me,” she sobbed. “Don’t leave me alone. Oh, please stay with me.”

“I can’t,” Powers said.

She stood under the spray with her eyes closed, her arms hanging limply at her sides, sobbing. He pulled the shower curtain shut on her, hurried out to the sitting room and made his call. Sir David said he would get to his office as quickly as he could; Powers should wait for him there. It would take him a few minutes.

Powers went back into the bathroom, and peered around the shower curtain. Carol was quietly crying. Her eyes, when they met his, seemed to plead with him to stay, but she said nothing. Reaching into the spray of water, he took her hand, drew her out of the tub and led her naked and dripping across the rug toward the door.

“When I go out, lock the door, and put the chain on. Don’t open for anybody but me. You’ll be all right.” He was trying to think of a way to reassure her and so decided to translate his thoughts into the idiom she best understood. “Nobody will be interested in you anymore tonight. You see, you’re not the star here, I am.”

But as he reached for the doorknob she clung to him, her arms around his neck, and only by disengaging her hands was he able to step back. “You’ll be all right,” he said again.

Then he was in the hall waiting for the elevator and looking down at the sopping wet front of his suit. His fear had entirely passed, and had been replaced by an emotion that was far stronger, that was perhaps the headiest emotion ever given man to enjoy. He had saved Carol, and saved himself, considerable trophies both, but the emotion was not pride. He felt like a man who could turn over cars with his bare hands, or drive his fist through stone, but the emotion was not related to virility. It was one he had experienced twice before, both times after surviving shootouts. After killing the stick-up man in the store, and the sniper in Central Park, he had known exactly this same exultation, this desire to shout at the top of his lungs: hey, I’m not dead. I didn’t get killed. Look at me, look. I’M STILL ALIVE.

“THEY WERE cops,” said Powers.

He sat with other men around Sir David’s desk: Police Commissioner Worthington was there, together with two deputy commissioners; Sir David had been joined by his chief of operations. It was nearly two in the morning. Everyone in the room looked somewhat discomforted, somewhat disheveled. Most had been awakened out of sound sleep, and their clothes looked as if they had come out of a bin that had been rummaged through.

“The credentials could have been forged,” said Commissioner Worthington. “How can you be sure?”

Powers stared him down. The man was angry, for his men were being accused without proof, but Powers was angry too. “Their credentials had nothing to do with it. They looked like cops. They behaved like cops. Chinese cops, but cops. It’s something a cop can feel.”

“Rubbish,” said Worthington. “The accusation is unfounded.”

“You’re a cop,” said Powers. “You know very well what I’m talking about. They were cops.”

A half-smile came onto Sir David’s face. Sitting behind his desk, he suddenly leaned forward and knocked the dottle of his pipe into an antelope’s hoof. “Well, it takes one to know one,” he said. But when Commissioner Worthington glared at him, the half-smile disappeared. “You brought us a real headache,” he said to Powers. “A real headache.”

“How many cops in the Hong Kong police department?” demanded Powers.

Commissioner Worthington muttered, “About twenty-two thousand.”

“And photos of all of them on file.”

“Right,” said Worthington.

Sir David said, “Twenty-two thousand photos.”

“I feel sorry for me,” said Powers. “But they tried to kill me, and this case has become entirely personal. Where are the photos? How soon can I start?”

He was brought down to an office opposite the personnel section and two of Sir David’s officers were assigned to cart stacks of dossiers in and out of the room. Powers sat in shirtsleeves, his tie loose, opening each dossier, glancing at the photo stapled to the inside cover, then closing it and going on to the next.

The trouble with The Chinese was that they did all look alike - at least in photos. There were no redheads or blonds, no one with wavy or curly or kinky hair, or with blue eyes or freckles, or with Nordic as opposed to Mediterranean complexions. There were no aquiline or hooked noses - all noses were more or less flat. Powers wished Carol were there to help him. Women had a better eye for faces than men did, usually. In the morning she would be in good enough shape to work beside him, he believed. It would cut the workload in two, and she could confirm or reject any choices he made in the meantime.

When he had been working an hour, Sir David came into the room. “How’s it coming?”

“Nothing yet.”

“I’ve asked them to bring you the Wanchai dossiers first - that’s Koy’s old district. Trouble is, a district that size has close to a thousand constables assigned. How many have you looked through so far?”

“About two hundred.” He studied a dossier a moment, then closed it and moved it onto a separate pile. “That could be one of them. The driver.”

“Are you sure?”

“No.”

“You don’t have to identify anyone absolutely. If you can collect half a dozen or ten possibles, we can have a lineup.”

Powers sighed. “I know that.” He kept glancing through the dossiers even as the conversation continued. “How does your extradition treaty with the United States read?”

“It depends on the charge. If we charge Koy with attempted murder, we could extradite him.”

“Then bring me some more dossiers,” said Powers.

“I’m going home to bed,” said Sir David. “If you should find our man, don’t hesitate to ring me up. It doesn’t matter what time it is.”

“Thank you, Sir David,” said Powers. And he added, “However this comes out, I want you to know how grateful I am to you.”

Sir David gave him an embarrassed smile and a pat on the shoulder, and strode out of the room. But a moment later he poked his head back in. “By the way, we picked up the car. Stolen, of course. My technicians are working on it. Fingerprints, that sort of thing. Maybe some evidence will turn up.”

About an hour later Powers was summoned to the reception room. Grateful for a break, he walked out there rubbing his eyes, and was handed a letter by a man who introduced himself as Austin Chan. The letter, Chan explained, was from Carol Cone. He had been lucky enough to get her a seat aboard Pan Am’s 1 A.M. flight to Tokyo and Honolulu, and had driven her to the airport. She was already in the air. She had sounded almost hysterical when she telephoned Chan. He had gone straight to the hotel, and had stayed with her all the way to the gangway to the plane. He had never known anyone so frightened. All she wanted was to get out of Hong Kong. Had there been no space aboard the Pan Am flight, she was willing to take any other flight going almost anywhere.

When Chan was gone, Powers tore open the envelope. The note was short. A footstool of a note when he might have hoped for a ladder - something to help him see into high hidden places. Carol apologized - she was less of a trouper, she wrote, than she had thought. But she could not bear Hong Kong one second longer, she was too afraid. She would wait for Powers in Hawaii at the Hana Maui Hotel. Come quickly, she wrote.

After a moment Powers folded the letter, shoved it into his pocket, and went back to his dossiers. There was no hurry now. It was as if Hong Kong had just emptied out, as if outside this room, there were no people left alive in the town.

BY LATE the next afternoon Powers had rubbed his eyes so much they were red and swollen. He looked like a mourner who had been weeping inconsolably for days. He felt like a jeweler who had remained bent over his table for hours chipping away at the mass so as to make a small perfect stone. His eyes ached, his back ached, his entire head ached, but on the desk now stood the work he had created: a small mound of dossiers. Not a mountain, nor even a hill, but only a mound. It was so featureless and indistinct as to seem insignificant. During the last fifteen hours he had dozed for two hours on a leather couch. He had consumed three pots of strong tea. He had examined about 5,000 dossiers. He had been through the dossiers of all constables assigned to the five districts once ruled by Koy and the other four Dragons. Five thousand Chinese constables had trekked across his optic tract numbing its sensors, packing them down. He remembered them like a desert army seen through the heat haze crossing the horizon.

His gaze now felt fixed forever on the middle distance, fixed on nothing. Scooping up the selected dossiers, he walked across into Sir David’s office, into sunlight that streamed cheerfully in the window.

“I’ve got seven possibilities,” he said. “Let’s have a look at them. Maybe I won’t have to go through the rest.”

Sir David, who was again dressed in bush jacket, knee socks and short pants, had been standing at the window peering down on the harbor. Crossing to his desk, he pushed the intercom button, and gave instructions for the seven constables to be picked up and a lineup arranged. He also asked for his car to be brought around in front. “One of my men just called in,” he explained. He stroked both his muttonchops. “They found a sampan that seems to match your description. Let’s go out and take a look at it, shall we?”

The expanse of permanently moored junks seemed both vaster and more squalid than it had last night. Weathered, rotting wood. Decks and superstructures as patched as sails. Limp, frayed mooring lines. Hulls, after decades of floating on filthy harbor tides, that were as black and scum - covered as the engine compartments of trucks. Powers sniffed the fetid air. At the moment the tide must be out - the odor of sewage and of stinking mud assaulted his nose. Following Sir David and a constable, he started out across acres of decks.

The sampan had been nosed in under the sterns of two junks, where it rode like a suckling calf nursing in a herd of elephantine cows. Powers looked down at it and, whether from fatigue or residual fear, felt himself begin to tremble. The sampan was of course empty, but on the platform in the prow still rested the wired-together cinder blocks.

Sir David eyed Powers. “From the look of you, we have the correct sampan. Do you feel certain enough to identify it in a courtroom?”

Powers shook his head. “No. What I’m mainly reacting to are those goddamn cinder blocks. My toes are curled up tight. The hair is sticking up on the nape of my neck.”

He turned away and gazed off toward the town. The onrush of violent emotion surprised him. He found he had to swallow hard. But when he turned back to Sir David, he had himself under control. “You’d think they’d be smart enough to get rid of the cinder blocks,” he said. “All they had to do was drop them over the side somewhere.” He was again considering the sampan from the point of view of a policeman. He shook his head in disgust. “Criminals are idiots, aren’t they?” To the police mind getting rid of the evidence would have been paramount. To leave the cinder blocks to be found was inconceivable. Yet to the criminal mind, and to cops when they became criminals, other imperatives took precedence, apparently. They left evidence around all the time. Powers said, “Tell your men to check the sampan out. Who owns it? Where was he last night? Where did the cinder blocks come from?”

“Calm down,” said Sir David. “We’ve taken care of all that. Would you recognize the sampan driver if we did find him?”

Powers found himself unable to stare very long at the cinder blocks. By now they might be wired to his ankles, or his neck. Carol’s neck or ankles, too.

“I never saw the guy’s face,” he said. “It was too dark.”

“What about Mrs. Cone?”

“I don’t know. We could ask her.”

“Do you think she’d be willing to return here to give evidence?”

“I don’t know,” said Powers. “I don’t feel sure of very much right now, if you want to know the truth. Do you mind if we leave?”

THE LINEUP took place immediately after dinner. Powers, Commissioner Worthington, Sir David, and an assistant Crown Counsel named Downes stood in a darkened office peering through a one-way window into a second room that was brightly lighted, and in which ten men sat on a bench opposite them - the seven constables whose dossiers Powers had selected, plus three of Sir David’s officers. Around their necks, the men wore placards numbered from one to ten.

“We’ll have them walk up to the window one at a time,” said the Crown Counsel.

“You don’t have to,” said Powers, turning away from the glass. “Numbers six and seven.” This is chilling business, he thought, and imagined he felt no emotion whatever. His mind felt absolutely cold.

“Are you certain?” asked Crown Counsel Downes.

The question enraged Powers. Residual terror surfaced - those two Chinese thugs in there had tried to kill him - and turned itself into fury, all of it directed toward the young Crown Counsel. “Yes, I’m certain,” he snarled, and stared at him, breathing hard.

“Okay, okay,” said Downes. “Calm down. Nobody doubts your word.” Stepping to the door, he ordered someone in the hall to clear the lineup room except for numbers six and seven.

As he watched this happening through the one-way window, Powers’ mood changed again, and he tried to explain to himself his physical aversion to these men. It was like looking at cobras behind glass in a zoo. Take the glass away and they’d be in the same room with you. Their bite would be fatal.

He watched eight men troop out of the room. The two left behind attempted to gaze steadfastly at the floor, but were too agitated. Their collars suddenly seemed too tight. They squirmed. Beads of sweat appeared on their foreheads.

All this Powers observed. “Any further doubts, Sir David?” he asked.

“We mustn’t count on them giving up Koy,” said Sir David. “They are surely Triads, with a code of silence thousands of years older than the Mafia code of
omerta.
I doubt they’ll give up anybody. Too worried about death by a myriad of swords, what?”

“Perhaps after they’re convicted,” said Powers.

“Perhaps. I don’t think so. One can always hope so.”

It was up to Downes to prepare the strongest possible case against them, and Powers spent the next several days with the expatriate young Englishman. Downes had never prosecuted a case of this importance before, but he was filled with enthusiasm. He wanted to trace the route of the suspects’ car from the Mandarin to Aberdeen, and Powers rode beside him in a government car while, with yellow legal pad on his knee and stop watch in his left hand, he noted down the mileage and probable elapsed time of each portion of the ride. He wanted to know exactly how the car had entered the lot at Aberdeen and in which direction it was pointed. He got a tape measure out and measured not only distances, but even the height of the staircase, and the depth of the water beside the dock, and he noted all such details on his legal pad while Powers stood beside him in the bright warm sunshine and shivered as if from chills.

Powers was astonished that such violent physical reactions continued so long after the event. He thought it must be age. Life got more precious every year - and fear penetrated deeper - and this young legal genius kept making him relive the fear over and over again.