Year of the Dragon (2 page)

“Artie,” Carol continued, “tell me how you feel about the police department, and about your own career.”

Powers’ first reaction was terrific disappointment. An interview. She only wanted to interview him and this was the start of it. She had provoked in him these inchoate romantic desires only to make him as complacent a subject as possible.

He felt his hackles rise. “My career? I’m executive officer of the seven-nine precinct in Brooklyn. As for the department, I love the department.”

“I’ve read up on you,” Carol persisted. “You’re one of the most famous cops in the city. We have a clip file on you this thick. But you’ve been a captain eleven years and never had a precinct of your own.”

“So?”

“So why is that?” Her eyes came up, appraising him as coolly as if he lay naked on a table. He had never had a woman look at him like that before, and he did not like it.

BELOW THEM in the street in the rain a car pulled to the curb. Behind the wheel sat Nikki Han, twenty-five, American-born leader of the Flying Dragons, a prominent Chinatown youth gang. In the back rode the Hsu brothers, aged seventeen and eighteen, street hoodlums and murderers from Hong Kong. Neither spoke English. They weighed ninety pounds each. They had been brought to New York three months previously for just such a job as tonight’s.

Water ran down the windshield and was swept aside. Han looked over the slick, empty streets. He kept the engine running. Chinatown streets normally were crowded with tourists at this hour. Though it had been under consideration for weeks, tonight’s job had been hurriedly laid on an hour ago because the heavy rain would ensure a minimum of witnesses.

“Do it,” ordered Nikki Han in Chinese. He spoke the dialect common to Canton, Hong Kong and New York.

He watched the Hsu brothers tug ski masks over their heads, grab weapons up out of the darkness at their feet, and throw open the car door. In an instant they were across the pavement, had pushed open the glass doors, and had begun their sprint up the ornate staircase.

Nikki Han, left behind, wore dark glasses and a snap brim hat pulled well down. Very little of his face could be seen. The engine was purring. The back door hung open. Rain drummed on the roof. He waited.

UPSTAIRS CAROL was describing the police documentary she hoped to produce and narrate. It would focus not on corruption or police brutality as in the past, but on waste, mismanagement, archaic techniques - failures that were all the more insidious because they were not against the law and were therefore resistant to change.

Powers set down his glass. “This wine really tastes sour.”

She wanted Powers to help her, Carol explained, to point her in all the right directions.

“Why me?”

“After eleven years without a promotion you don’t owe this administration anything. Do you want to know the journalist’s first rule for getting information? Seek out people who are dissatisfied.”

“Detectives have the same rule. The two professions are really quite close, by the way. Good detectives and good journalists are the same even to the bravery.” Then he added purely out of hostility: “Some of them.”

“Will you help me?”

“Why? To guarantee myself eleven more years as a captain?” He had no intention of helping her. Why should he help her when he didn’t even like her? But he never told her any of this, his concentration being fixed by then on the Hsu brothers who had just appeared in the doorway. He identified their weapons before entertaining any other conscious thought: a .45-caliber M-3 submachine gun and a semi-automatic 12-gauge shotgun of a type he had seen and handled somewhere at an earlier date, possibly when he was a rookie, an instrument said to be powerful enough to turn over cars.

He saw that the youth with the shotgun was having difficulty cocking it, whereas the one with the submachine gun had coolly chosen his target - Powers himself, apparently. Powers saw the weapon swing around until he was staring down its muzzle. The terror that came over him was instantaneous, for he had been in gunfights before - these were the news clips Carol had studied - and recognized this one before it started. Adrenaline surged. Blood rushed to his head. His perceptions became acute. He was aware not only of the decibel level of the room but even, from two tables away, of certain individual words, and when he glanced momentarily at Carol he perceived the depth of the crow’s feet beside her eyes, clues to her exact age if only he had a moment to study them. As for the two boys, they were obviously Chinese, despite the idiotic ski masks. And they were tiny. They were far less muscular and therefore less substantial than any jockey. The weapons in their hands looked as heavy as jackhammers. One expected them to be knocked over backwards when they pulled the triggers, if that’s what they planned to do. The incongruity - small boys carrying big guns - was almost comical. Though immobilized by terror, Powers almost wanted to laugh.

Mr. Ting stepped forward to intervene.

The youth with the submachine gun swung it sideways. The jackhammer clubbed Ting to the floor, then began to break up walls. Carol had her back to all this. Powers observed it only over her shoulder while she prattled on about her stupid documentary, putting her smile into it, and her eyes, and her body, seeming to promise him the untold wonders of her person if only he would cooperate.

She had no suspicion of what was about to happen, what was already happening. No one did except Ting on the floor and Powers at last rising out of his chair, certainly not that waiter there, carrying a tray burdened with silver tureens, who was about to step between the doorway and himself, thus saving Powers’ life, if he lived that long. He saw the weapon begin to spit, and saw what came out - not bullets, which are invisible, but smoke and flame, followed immediately by incredible crashing noise. He saw that the shooter was leaning into his job, trying to hold the barrel down.

Powers dove across the table onto Carol, a skidding belly flop that cleared the table even of its cloth. His shoulder caught her above the breasts. Her chair went over, and she went down beneath him. He heard all the air go out of her, noted the grimace that contorted her face. Lying on top of her he tried to get to his gun, but she was writhing, whether in pain or surprise he could not tell, so that his hands became entangled in the tablecloth and in her dress, and he could find no way to get the revolver out of his pants.

The waiter crossing in front of the submachine gun was thirty-eight years old and the father of seven children. He was an illegal immigrant who had been in New York almost a year. He carried a counterfeit green card for which he had paid $20,000 in Hong Kong, this sum representing the life savings of himself, his brothers, his parents and other members of his family. He worked fourteen hours a day, and spent virtually nothing, so as to pay off the loans, plus 30 percent per year interest, as fast as he could. Once this was done he planned to bring his oldest sons over at the rate of one a year, after which they would pool their combined savings and be able to save faster. He hoped to be reunited with his wife and youngest children within nine years.

The submachine gun’s first bullet caught the edge of his tray and spun it like a Frisbee against the back wall. The silver tureens, unsupported, crashed to the floor. The second bullet, as the barrel climbed, took off the top of the waiter’s head. His family would not now be reunited with him. Since the green card in his pocket was in another name, they would never even learn what had happened to him.

The rest of the bullets from that burst went into the ceiling. The boy - the older of the Hsu brothers - had never fired such a weapon before and could not control it. In Hong Kong one killed with knives. He began firing in longer bursts, yanking the barrel downwards as he did so, indiscriminately hitting the floor, the ceiling, people.

When at last he got the weapon level its kick drove the butt back into his belly, folding him in the middle, and he sat down heavily on the floor, from which position, still firing, he shot off the toes of his right foot. This too was almost comical. Once again, no one laughed. For a moment the boy only stared stupidly at his ragged shoe, then resumed firing.

The younger Hsu, having solved the mysteries of the shotgun, had begun firing also. Its kick was, if possible, even more tremendous. Its first round took a tourist in the nape of the neck and decapitated him, and its second brought down the chandelier, which was the same size as the table and which hung directly over it. The third round tore the gun out of the younger Hsu’s hands, breaking his thumb, forefinger and wrist in the process. He went to his knees scrabbling for it, sprang up again and, like his brother, resumed firing.

The noise was deafening. It was like an anesthetic. It numbed all sensation. The Hsu brothers were conscious of no pain. They stood shoe to shoe absolutely single-minded, guns bucking, creating a racket so thunderous that it submerged all other reality, it appeared even to impose some dreadful sense of order. In all that tumultuous scene only their noise was important. All other noise - of crockery smashing, of tables going over, of people screaming - was not.

Five seconds had passed, perhaps less. Magazines empty, the Hsu brothers turned and ran.

Powers had observed almost none of this. Seeking to extricate himself he was impeded by cloth, crockery, upended chairs, and also by the thrashing Carol. His face was buried in her left armpit, and the table itself lay across the back of his knees. He was still trying to free his gun. His hand, searching for it, searched Carol - himself too - in intimate places, without gaining the access he needed. Afterwards he would remember these frantic seconds in erotic detail, like his earliest sexual gropings in the back seats of cars: the feel of her body through silk, or whatever her dress was made of, of her belly that was soft and pelvic bone that was not.

His gun at last came free. He watched Carol’s eyes widen as she spied it. Tablecloth and table still had him by the legs. Gun outstretched, off balance, he had almost gained his knees when she grabbed him, yanking him down again as if to continue their furtive love-making. Crying, “No, Artie, no. They’ll kill you,” she half rolled on top of him, pinning him down.

He tried to push her off, but she fought him like a wife, and several seconds more passed before he had got free of her, had sprung to his feet, and had begun his headlong pursuit of the Hsu brothers.

Too much time had gone by. The getaway car was waiting at the curb, engine turning. Powers should have been too late. But the Hsus had been delayed also. The older brother, though not really aware of it, was now missing nearly a third of his right shoe and foot, and although this did not very much hinder him when running across the landing, the same was not true when he came to the stairs, which he attempted to take two at a time. He started down left foot first - so far so good - but as he sought the next step the distance was wrong. The toes that might have sensed its whereabouts no longer existed. The boy negotiated the rest of the staircase in a swan dive. After only two bounces, he reached the bottom where he lay in a stupor. His submachine gun, meanwhile, now bounding down the stairs on its own, had caught between the legs of his younger brother. It not only sent him flying, it also continued downstairs itself at virtually his speed, so that at the bottom it fetched him a terrific clout in the side of the head. He too lay stunned, though only for a moment, before jumping up and heading once more for the door. The sight of his brother struggling to rise slowed him. He offered a hand - the broken one as it turned out. When the older Hsu grasped it, the younger one screamed.

The noise of other screams could be heard upstairs, as well as stampeding feet, which the Hsus took to indicate pursuit. This was America, the posse was forming or formed, and if caught they expected to be lynched. Grabbing up their guns they stumbled out onto the sidewalk just as Powers reached the landing above.

The stampede they had heard was real, but not pursuit. It represented unwounded patrons surging towards Ting’s kitchen looking for a back door. The carnage was over except for whatever might happen on the street, but no one yet believed it, and all sought some other exit than the one favored by the Hsus.

Powers dashed out the door just as the brothers were piling into the car. It was raining and he had nothing to aim at but a pair of vanishing legs, at which he pegged three shots. There was no other practical target. One cannot stop a four-door sedan with bullets from a 38. short-barreled revolver, whatever the movie heroes do, especially with only two shots left. The car’s tires were not visible, the engine was forward, the gas tank was protected by the sheet steel bumper, and to send bullets through the back window at the driver was to risk wounding or killing motorists and pedestrians the length of the street. So Powers ran toward the car, waving his puny gun, a foolhardy decision if they should choose to fire back at him with any gun at all, much less with the devastating weapons they had employed in the restaurant. But the car merely surged away from him. A second later it had turned the corner and was gone.

Powers stood in the rain. He could hear the first siren coming, though it was still a long way off. Breathing hard, he turned and rushed back into the Golden Palace. Except for Carol, standing open-mouthed halfway down the staircase, the former movie lobby was empty.

As he jammed his revolver back into his trousers, Carol, her face drained of blood, came the rest of the way down, and into his arms.

He was furious with her. “I might have stopped them.”

“Might have got yourself killed, you mean.”

“Don’t you ever do that again.”

“You saved my life, I saved yours.” She giggled, whether from relief or hysteria he did not know. “One good turn deserves another, I always say.”

He held her, and she clung to him.

“There’s a human head up there on the floor.”

He found he liked her in his arms, and so let her stay.

But a moment later she had disengaged and was peering about for a phone.

“I’ve got to get a crew here right away.” She was not thinking of him any more, he saw. She recognized this as the biggest news story of the day. So did he, and the realization appalled him. Bulletins would interrupt TV programming the rest of tonight, trumpeting his name. Tomorrow’s headlines would proclaim him a hero once again, though he wasn’t. He was in for another bout of sustained publicity, and his career at this point couldn’t stand it. The reporters would make him sound like a western gunslinger. Worse, they would most likely turn tonight’s dinner meeting with Carol - an interview was all it was - into a secret love tryst in “out-of-the-way” Chinatown, and this he had to prevent at all costs.