The Last Six Million Seconds

by John Burdett

  Coletti nodded. “I can’t blame her. I never saw it her way till now. Italians, poor ones anyway, we’re brought up to see the U.S. as a potentially hostile environment where we need to pull together to survive. Taking money was just a part of it. I was a member of a tribe, that’s the truth. And I will be till I die, actually. As Clare grew up, it wasn’t so easy to keep it from her during her weekly custody visits. And she was intrigued. Moira never understood, but I did. It was very simple. Clare was growing up in the South Bronx just off Southern Boulevard in an environment more hostile than anything Moira or I had been exposed to in our youth. Indian Country, the cops called it. Alligators grow scales; snakes use poison; cats grow claws; dogs bite. Everything in nature adapts to the environment. What was a smart, attractive blond girl supposed to do? The boys were savage; the streets were a jungle. In the Bronx the government had abdicated. Big-time crime was the only activity that was organized. And Clare wanted to get ahead. I still don’t blame her. I blame myself. I could have done better.”

  “She had a long affair with a mafioso. Moira mentioned that.”

  Chan was startled to hear Coletti laugh. “Alberto Gambucci. Short, fat, balding, never handled a gun in his life. A laundry man. When he found Clare in bed with a black girl, he came to see me and burst into tears.”

  Coletti shook his head. Amusement had collected around his eyes.

  Chan lit a cigarette. “Most of your daughter’s life is clear to me, except for the end. Two triad members? In Hong Kong?”

  “We need more drinks.”

  Chan watched Coletti push through the dancers to the bar. He was still a striking figure, a man who’d never been afraid of any woman. Total confidence was a winning hand, even at fifty, it seemed. Coletti was talking to the blond woman and smiling while waiting for his drinks. The young man with ginger hair was scowling at the collection of upturned bottles behind the bar, turning his head as if to read them.

  Coletti collected the two pints of lager, gave the blond woman one last charming smile, returned through the crowd while she glanced after him. The ginger man tried to resume the conversation with her, but she moved away.

  “She was a dreamer,” Coletti said as he put the mugs down on the Formica. “Very clever, in another age might have been an academic. As a kid she wanted to know about the stars. I thought she might be some kind of scientist. And she had a smack habit. What does that add up to?” He shrugged. “A brilliant smack addict who knew almost nothing of the world outside the Bronx? Can you imagine the distorted view of reality in that kid’s brain? It took her a year, but in the end she sold the idea to Gambucci, who sold it to the don.”

  “China?”

  “Right. China. Why not? It made perfect sense. The Sicilian cousins had beaten us in getting into bed with the Russians, but nobody was even thinking about China at that stage. Most New Yorkers have only a hazy idea where it is. Why not establish contacts at an early stage in the collapse of another huge Communist empire so that this time the American mafiosi can run all the currency scams, sell the tanks to Saddam Hussein, the AK-forty-sevens to the Palestinians, the rocket launchers to the IRA, fragmentation grenades to Colombians, grab all that morphine moving from the Golden Triangle? Before the collapse of the Soviet Union it would have sounded harebrained. Afterwards it seemed inevitable.”

  “But nobody spoke Mandarin?”

  Coletti laughed again. “Right. Nobody spoke Mandarin. Approaching Chinese isn’t like approaching Russians. It isn’t like approaching anyone. How do you climb over the wall? Clare had an answer for that. Contacts between the mob and the New York triads had been pretty good for a decade. There’s a lot of respect. Admiration, you might say. Their omertà is a lot more intact than ours. Ever hear of a triad member testifying in front of a grand jury?”

  “So Yu and Mao were recruited?”

  “Yeah. They were recruited. There’s a deal, an understanding. The 14K thought it was a very good idea. They saw the potential and were realistic enough to see that they would need our contacts in making the sales. Middle Eastern terrorists don’t speak Mandarin either. Neither do Colombians. At the same time the 14K saw an opportunity to outstrip the Sun Yee On, United Bamboo-the competition, in other words.”

  Chan’s brain was racing. It wasn’t so much the story Coletti was telling; it was the magnitude of the enterprise. A twentieth-century female Marco Polo opening a new Silk Road from East to West. Except that silk had nothing to do with it.

  The band was playing “Born in the USA.” Coletti was right: Their imitation was perfect; it could have been Springsteen at the microphone. And on the floor in front of their eyes East had been meeting West for more than an hour. Joint ventures had already been agreed, the night taken care of. The ginger man was talking to the blond woman again. Now she was listening. It was that time in the evening when people began to be afraid of going home alone.

  “One thing I can’t understand,” Chan said, “an organization like the American Mafia sends a young woman and two triad members to negotiate on their behalf? Would they do that?”

  In the middle of swallowing more beer, Coletti shook his head. “Look at it from the other direction. Sending Clare, they had nothing to lose. It was a spearhead mission. Being a woman, it would have been easy to disown her if things went wrong. If she fucked up and lost her life, what did they lose? A dyke with a habit they could do without. And she was keen, keen. It was all her idea, her baby. I can almost be proud of her for that. And one other thing, who else would have gone? Have you any idea how afraid Italians are of the mysterious East? We have no structures out here, no references. But someone had to come. Once Clare had put the idea into their heads someone had to make the gesture. They almost got into a fever about it. It was only a matter of time before the competition thought of it. If the Sicilians tied up the East as well as Russia, it would be the biggest commercial organization in the world. Notice, I didn’t say criminal organization, I said commercial. Nothing would be bigger, not McDonald’s, not Shell Oil, not Coke-nobody. They would have a yearly turnover bigger than the gross national product of any country outside the USA and Japan. The Americans sent Clare to beat our cousins in Palermo.”

  “But something went wrong?”

  “Yeah. Something did. Don’t worry, I’m not here to find out what. I’m just here to tie up loose ends. The 14K, not the FBI, got ahold of the dental records. They want to know if their guys were the ones in the vat.”

  “That’s why you’re here?”

  “I guess.”

  “The Mafia sent you on behalf of the triads?”

  “I’m her father, aren’t I?”

  Not helping with the inquiry, then, or trying to be a good cop. On the contrary, obeying orders even while the cancer ate his intestine. It was the only way to leave the Cosa Nostra; Chan had read that somewhere. Maybe that’s why Coletti wasn’t putting up much of a fight against the disease.

  As they were saying good night outside Coletti’s hotel, Chan said, “Did Moira go and see you before she came out to Hong Kong?”

  Coletti hesitated. “Sure. She had to. I paid for all of Clare’s medical bills. I was the only one with enough influence with the dentist to get the records. Moira didn’t even know who the dentist was.”

  Dental records again, Chan thought. They’d been a blessing throughout the case. If the truth were known, all the breakthroughs had come without any effort on his part at all. But then the reality of detection was often thus. The detective was merely a lamppost around which informers gathered to do their business.

  41

  In the beginning was the Word. But it was sung, not spoken. Prehistoric humans from Peking Man in the East to Cro-Magnon in the West used the full range of the vocal scale to sing instructions for the hunt, sing guidance to their children, sing reverence to the gods that provided the mammoths. They would have despised the flat, dead speech of modern times for the tuneless whitterings of ghosts. A few tongues retain an echo of that Neolithi
c music: French has it in glacé form, Italian tries harder than most, Thai can be lyrical, Mandarin has its moments of sublime tunefulness; but the oldest language in modern usage is also the most musical. With nine tones to condition meaning Cantonese can present a challenge to a tin ear from the Bronx.

  Moira played the tapes, dutifully repeated: “Nei ho ma? How are you? Nei hui bin do a? Where are you going? M sai jaau lak. Keep the change.”

  The single-syllable words were difficult to memorize, but with effort she built a modest vocabulary. Where she suspected failure was in the rising and falling tones. The textbook warned that the same word could mean “mother,” “box,” “opium” or something even more controversial, depending on the tone you used and whether you ended on an up beat or a down beat. Even after hours of practice she found it hard to hear the tones when the instructor used them. She doubted she was reproducing them with any accuracy.

  Since returning from Hong Kong, she had installed a fax machine in her small apartment. She typed out her answers to Chan’s questions, reread them before transmitting to Mongkok Police Station.

  STRICTLY PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL

  attn Chief Inspector S. K. Chan

  Criminal Investigation Department (Homicide)

  Mongkok Police Station

  Dear Charlie,

  Got your fax. Using your numbering, the answers to your questions are:

  1. Yes, Mario came to see me when he got back. He’s pretty sick; in fact he had to spend a couple of days in the hospital.

  2. I’m sending some books by air that explain a lot of what I’ve been telling you about the expansion of organized crime and deals between the various mobs. You’ll see that the Russian Mafia has done some important business with our local boys since the fall of the Soviet Union (it all started a bit before that, under Brezhnev as a matter of fact). I’m also including a report from some UN committee that sort of puts it in a nutshell.

  3. Yes, uranium and other valuable radioactive metals are part of a black market run by American and Sicilian Mafia (mostly the Sicilians). Enriched uranium of the sort needed to build an atomic bomb has turned up in various places in Europe, including in the trunk of someone’s car. It’s been in all the main English-language newspapers. A couple of crooks nearly died of radiation poisoning a few years ago because they didn’t know what they were handling. Unenriched uranium is more common.

  4. Mario is right when he says that Clare was a fantasist. Even as a kid she lived in a world of her own, but she was also very smart. She was able to get people to do what she wanted most of the time. She had brains (from me-ha-ha!).

  5. I don’t know anything about the relationship between the local Mafia and the Chinese triads, but you’ll see from the books I’m sending that there seems to be something going on.

  Moira Coletti

  P.S. I’m learning Cantonese. I don’t need to tell you why. I’d like to see you again. It’s all right if you don’t want to, though.

  In his office Chan reread the fax, then turned to the UN report (Special Commission Report to the United Nations Assembly, March 20, 1990): “International criminal organizations have reached agreements and understandings to divide up geographical areas, develop new market strategies, work out forms of mutual assistance and the settlement of conflicts… and this on a planetary level.

  “We are faced with a genuine criminal counter-power, capable of imposing its will on legitimate states, of undermining institutions and forces of law and order, of upsetting delicate economic and financial equilibrium and destroying democratic life.”

  “What d’you think, Chief?” Aston said when he’d read the fax.

  Chan gazed out of his office window. It gave an unobstructed view of some of the dirtiest air conditioners he’d ever seen on the other side of the street. It didn’t stop the amahs from hanging washing out on long colored bamboo poles, though.

  “I think this is getting too big for us. Much too big.”

  “Too big?”

  “Think about it.”

  Chan left Aston alone in his office while he went to buy cigarettes. Fighting through the crowds to cross Prince Edward Road, he thought: “Too big” is not quite the phrase. Too delicate? Put another way, why hadn’t he been stopped yet? The date on Moira’s fax was two days ago. Everyone would have read it before it was passed on: the commissioner, the security chiefs, Cuthbert, everyone. And it was all there: the direction of his inquiry; the implications for the present and future governments of Hong Kong; the unspoken aspersions on the conduct of the People’s Liberation Army over the border. The spade was under the rock. Did Cuthbert really want that? Did the commissioner? Xian? Chan promised himself a private fax machine installed at home as soon as he got the chance.

  On the other side of the street an old lady a little under five feet tall sold every internationally known brand of cigarette from shelves in a steel frame set against the wall. It was a corner where addicts gathered, sure of being able to find a clean nicotine fix. Gitanes noires, Gitanes blondes, Camel, every Philip Morris, every Players, Italian cigarettes with unpronounceable names, Turkish, Russian. For those who preferred roll-ups there was Dutch Drum tobacco. For joints there were giant cigarette papers. The little old lady knew her clients and her business.

  “You have Long March? Imperial Palace?” Chan said.

  She glared, spit contemptuously. “Go back where you came from. I don’t serve Communists.” She turned her back.

  “Okay, okay, just testing. Benson. Two packs.”

  He paid, opened a pack, took a few steps into the crowd surging toward the underground. Stop on any corner, look in any window, there was someone who had been maimed in body or soul by the Chinese Communist party. And that was when they were honest. Xian: Where did he get his Imperial Palace? By the truckload from across the border?

  Mongkok may be the best place in the world to lose a tail, even if the tail in question is British-trained in the best Le Carré tradition. Granted they had the sense to use four Chinese, one woman and three men, and they were following all the rules. Two trailed behind, two in front with frequent excuses for halts and backward glances: shopwindows, shoelaces, something fallen out of a pocket, spectacles needing wiping. Chan was no spy, but he’d served time on the streets. He had a patrolman’s eye. If one person in a thousand didn’t fit, the fact nagged at his mind until he understood. At first he’d thought they were a gang of robbers assessing a future opportunity. It was only when he reached Nathan Road, turned to look in a window, walked on, turned back to look in the window again, drifted along with the crowd as far as the underground, then a third time turned back to the same window that he was sure that he was the object of their attention. They were discreet, professional, but when the mark goes back to the same spot three times, it’s difficult to keep the cover.

  Chan made a point of looking directly into the face of the woman, then of her male companion. He turned abruptly, looked at the other two. Cuthbert, he thought.

  He returned to the underground, bought a ticket, passed through the barrier, then walked the length of the underpass to exit on the other side of Nathan Road. He merged into the mass of people struggling to step around the beggars stretched out on the pavement. Nobody wanted to have to touch the leper with his sores helpfully highlighted in orange lotion. Or the old man with his trouser rolled up to expose his stump.

  Near the back of the police station he lit a cigarette, paused to think. What was it the Tibetans had said when the British invaded after hundreds of years of Chinese rule? When you have known the scorpion, you’re not afraid of the toad? Probably he shouldn’t have embarrassed the watchers by exposing them. It was bad form, another faux pas. Cuthbert would be hurt.

  Chan was not going to stop, though. Not without a direct order. Or a bullet. Indeed he expected the next day to receive the developed photographs from the film he had retrieved from the warehouse.

  That evening he left work early to buy a fax machine.

&
nbsp; 42

  Chan installed his fax machine in the only room with a spare shelf, the kitchen. Ten yards of flex made a trail to the telephone jack in the dining room.

  Japanese, Korean, German, Italian, Chinese, French; he found the English section at the back of the Panasonic manual. There was a facility for ten autodial numbers, but Chan only needed one. He recorded Moira’s fax number, slid a sheet of paper into the machine until the rollers pulled it partway through. He waited, fascinated, while the machine digested his short note, murmured to itself, confirmed with three bleeps that the transmission had reached the Bronx and pushed the sheet out again. He reread it: “Thanks for the fax. It was good to hear from you. I’d like to see you again too. Ho lak ngoh yiu: Well, I must go now. Joi gin: See you. Charlie.”

  Proud of his achievement, Chan shaved and went back to work, anxious for those photographs.

  A messenger finally arrived at 10:00 A.M. with a large brown envelope bearing the words “On Her Majesty’s Service” in bold black type. Across it someone had used a red stamp: “Police, Secret.” Aston watched while Chan tore the flap and spilled a small pack of photographs onto his desk. He was about to check through them when the telephone rang. At first the noise on the line sounded like static, then acquired a more human cadence.

  “It’s me,” Saliver Kan said, still clearing his throat. “I think I can get what you want. It’ll take a few days, and it’s going to be expensive.”

  “How expensive?” Chan used his hard bargaining voice.

  “Ten million.”

  During the Ming dynasty, or perhaps even as early as the Warring States period, a formal procedure developed applicable to the first stages of a trade: The vendor states an absurd price; the purchaser walks out of the shop and returns only when the vendor offers to negotiate, usually in a submissive tone (“Okay, okay, come back, we’ll talk”). The age of the telephone replicated this everyday piece of theater with a form of words that has become equally hallowed over the years. “Fuck your mother,” Chan said, and replaced the receiver.