Year of the Dragon

by Robert Daley

  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.”

  DIMLY LIT side street. Tree-lined. Small trees of the upper East Side. Trees striving to live. Head-high bars wrapping each one. Trees in protective custody, Powers thought, witnesses too valuable to lose. Driving, he checked the address - 109 East 62nd Street - and matched it to the building itself, Koy’s building. High-rise. New. Penthouses on top, probably. Uniformed doorman out front. Brocade and epaulettes. More brass buttons than an eighteenth century admiral. Glass doors. Luxurious lobby. Second admiral inside reading the Daily News.

  Powers didn’t stop. Rest of street mostly brownstones. Brass plaques beside several doors. Light through the meager leaves let him read two. Embassy of Pakistan. Embassy of Finland. Cop in front of third embassy. Powers couldn’t read the plaque. Israel? Iran? This street and a few others constituted New York’s embassy row. Very clean street. Total absence of plastic garbage bags piled out front, of litter against the curbs. Sanitation Department pickups here were regular and thorough, or heads rolled. In revenge the men skipped Harlem. Under the trees, signposts like planted spears. Signs like guidons. Threatening red signs: TOWAWAY ZONE. But soothing blue ones: EXCEPT DISPLOMATS. Diplomatic immunity, modern version, meant cars with DPL plates parked along both curbs from corner to corner. Immunity from that most modern of plagues, the municipal tow-truck.

  Driving across to Third Avenue, Powers turned and started uptown. Big bright street. No parked DPL cars. No trees. Overflowing litter baskets on every corner. More litter blowing along the sidewalks. Stores. Movie theaters. Bus stops. People in line waiting for buses. Lines in front of the theaters, too.

  At Seventy-second Street Powers pulled to the curb, threw the passenger door open, and Luang jumped in. Powers continued uptown.

  “What makes you so sure it’s Koy’s house?” said Powers. To him a vital question. If you knew where a man lived you knew a lot about him. You knew where he could be hurt, and were close to knowing how to do it. “You’ve only been on him one day,” he said. “You only tailed him there once.”

  “I asked the doorman, Captain.”

  Powers was like an archeologist digging for a city in hard-packed earth. Except that archeologists did not have to worry about alarming what they uncovered.

  “That was risky, wasn’t it?” he said.

  Luang gave a smug grin. “Risky? I don’t think so.”

  Luang’s orders had been to measure the extent and area of the dig - to discover Koy’s habits and patterns, to probe for his life style, which, like long-buried walls, would delimit what they were looking for.

  “Why don’t you tell me how you did it?”

  “Sure, boss.”

  Luang had tailed the Cho Kun home. Or at least he supposed he had tailed Koy home. There were no short cuts in surveillance and the proper way to make sure, cops were taught in the Police Academy, was to tail him there several nights in a row, and then pick him up there several mornings. But Luang had decided he couldn’t at this stage wait several days for each piece of confirmed information. Koy’s car, a white Mercedes containing two other men - chauffeur and bodyguard, he assumed - had driven off. Luang had waited only long enough for the elevator doors to close on Koy, then had sauntered up out of the darkness.

  “That Chinese guy that just walked in,” he had asked the doorman, “he’s an ambassador at the United Nations, right?”

  New York doormen did not usually gossip about the great men who inhabited their buildings, the same great men who tipped them so lavishly at Christmas. They could be as correct as divorce lawyers, as tight-lipped as psychiatrists. At least until money showed. This particular doorman, gazing into the Chinese countenance before him, saw no money there, saw nothing of interest there ever, and so did not deign to acknowledge the question. He looked away.

  “He makes great speeches,” said Luang, wondering how far to risk pushing this. “So this is where he lives.”

  The doorman, insulted that such an individual should even approach him, much less believe a conversational exchange possible, was stung to reply, “In a penthouse. Him, his wife, and three little yellow kiddies. You a Chinaman?”

  Tailing this close, Luang was bound to leave footprints from time to time. The important thing was to keep their indentations as vague as possible. “No, a Jap,” he confided. “From the land of the Rising Sun.” And he sauntered on.

  “What a moron,” Luang told Powers now, and he laughed.

  But Powers stared pensively out over the wheel.

  Three nights later Powers stopped on the same corner and Luang again jumped into the car.

  “I don’t know how it fits in, Captain, but he’s certainly a devoted family man.”

  This was possibly important, for it suggested other ways and places that Koy could be hurt. “How do you know that?” asked Powers.

  On Saturday morning Koy had come out of his building accompanied by a young Chinese woman whom Luang took to be his wife, because the two adults were pushing a carriage and a stroller, and had a third child by the hand. The bodyguard and chauffeur were waiting beside the car, but Koy spoke to them and they stayed there while Koy and his entire family went down the sidewalk and into Central Park. There Koy lifted the two older children into chair swings, pulled the bars carefully down across their laps, and then pushed them indefatigably until they tired of it. He kept both swings moving at once, leaping back and forth with the energy and mindlessness of a coolie laborer, the sweat running down his face, his shirt showing wet semicircles under the arms.

  When the children at last had had enough, Koy sat with them in a sandbox, helping them make sand patties, and the proud, foolish smile - Luang could describe it no other way - never left his face.

  “Go on,” said Powers.

  Later Koy did sleight of hand tricks for them, plucking coins out of their ears. Or he sat gently rocking the baby in the carriage, from time to time peering inside, his face illuminated by the same fatuous smile.

  “All this is typically Chinese, Captain,” said Luang.

  The Chinese made doting parents, he told Powers. Their world revolved around their kids. They spoiled them. Always had. It was traditional. They loved big families. For centuries in China a man’s wealth was measured by counting the number of children he had fathered, and how closely he was able to group them around himself. The Chinese simply loved everything about having lots of kids.

  “Mrs. Koy,” Luang said, “struck me as being American-born.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “I don’t know, Captain. There was a quality about her.” He sought a better word but couldn’t find it.


  She had seemed as American as the park itself - she was totally at ease there, and Koy in some vague indefinable way was not. Also, Koy had been totally focused on his children. For him nothing else existed except this world he had created for himself and when he gazed at his kids, he looked like a teenager in love. Whereas Mrs. Koy had pretty much ignored the kids. She had spent the whole morning reading a book.

  “Where were you all this time?”

  The answer was, draped belly down over a boulder in a high spot watching through binoculars, and suddenly something hard had prodded Luang in the small of the back. He sensed what it was even before he had rolled out from under it and sat up. A cop’s nightstick. And the cop who owned it was glaring down at him.

  “What are you, a peeping torn?”

  Luang, recounting the story, laughed. “The rest of the department,” he said, “carries nightsticks only at night.”

  “In Central Park they’re allowed to carry them daytime as well,” said Powers. “What did you do?”

  Luang might have pulled out his shield and identified himself, but he was afraid of any commotion that might cause Koy over in the playground area to turn around. He had decided to slink away, saying nothing, if he could, and to his relief, the cop had let him go. He had looked back as he left the confines of the park, and the cop still stood on the boulder watching him.

  “Are you sure Koy didn’t see you?”

  “Certain. He never took his eyes off his kids the whole day.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I waited in my car, Captain. About an hour later here comes Koy back from the park. He’s pushing the carriage, looking exhilarated, like an American looks who has spent the day at Yankee Stadium watching the Yanks come from behind to win in the ninth. He looked high, Captain. High on love for his kids.”

  Powers didn’t understand it, but filed it away. He was like a prospector who had found a strange rock. Better hold on to it, it could be priceless.

  “The bodyguard jumped out of the car and helped him in with the carriages.”

  The reports continued, usually every other night, so that, as Luang tailed Koy through the streets of Chinatown, Powers, figuratively speaking, walked at his side. Koy attended regular meetings at tong headquarters, and at the benevolent association building also, and some of these meetings, experience showed, were long ones, so that Luang seized the opportunity to pay his respects to whatever corpse was laid out in Koy’s funeral parlor. In this way he was able to attach names and functions to the faces in Koy’s entourage. There was the embalmer, Chang. There were two or three bodyguards who also served as pallbearers. There were several assistant funeral directors.

  “That funeral parlor has got to be losing money, Captain. They don’t change corpses in there twice a week. That place is a front for something else.”

  “For the gambling,” murmured Powers. “And for whatever else he may be involved in.”

  “Like what, Captain?”

  But Powers said only, “That’s what we’re trying to document.”

  Often Luang trailed Koy to the gambling house one flight down under 61 Mott Street. But always he waited in the street, for he feared approaching Koy too closely, and he also feared being caught in there in a raid carried out by some federal agency, or some other unit of the police department. The Fifth Precinct had formal orders to leave the gambling houses alone. Luang had not been a cop long enough to be willing to flout these orders. The risk to him was unacceptable.

  “I’m surprised to find out how crowded Chinatown is, Captain,” said Luang.

  They were sitting in Gough’s bar on West Forty-third Street, across the street from the New York Times plant. From snatches of overheard conversation Powers judged that everyone in the bar, apart from themselves, was a Times reporter or editor.

  Luang had never spent much time in Chinatown before, he told Powers. It was as crowded as the Hong Kong he remembered, as crowded as the cities of mainland China were reputed to be. It was far more crowded than the rest of New York, and it was these dense crowds that enabled Luang to move as close as he did to Koy, who was usually accompanied by a bodyguard; often Luang was only a few paces behind them, or to the side. Also, he was using disguises. From his surveillance instructor at the Police Academy he had borrowed eyeglasses in various shapes, a pair of mustaches, and some different hats. He wore somber clothing, changed his appearance frequently, and was careful never to be caught looking at his subject directly.

  Koy, on the other hand, seemed to sense that he was being followed, Luang said, and Powers on the next stool stiffened. Or perhaps, Luang added, he was only responding to the habits of a career policeman - but he eyeballed the sidewalks incessantly. Whichever bodyguard he had with him was like most of the other people of Chinatown who, on the whole, eyeballed nothing. Each man or woman formed a separate island moving alone against a river in flood. The Chinese, Luang well knew (and Powers knew this too, now), were impervious to the pushing and jostling of the crowds, to bumping against other bodies, to being guided to one side by hands so that the owner of those hands could get by. But Koy was proving to be no ordinary Chinatown citizen. The undertaker eyeballed everything, just like a cop, looking for the same face glimpsed too many times, for eyes that displayed undue interest in what he might be doing.

  “Has he made you?” demanded Powers anxiously.

  Luang shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think he would ever expect to be tailed by another Chinese.

  “Don’t count on it,” said Powers.

  This bar was ten blocks south and two blocks west of Broadcast Center, where, less than thirty minutes from now, Carol Cone would get off work - a detail of which Luang was ignorant. But Powers, conscious of the time, kept glancing at the clock over the bar.

  “And he’s a gastronome, Captain. A gourmet. He shops for Chinese delicacies nearly every day. Everything has to be absolutely fresh for him.”

  Koy shopped at outdoor stalls on Mott and Canal Streets, dealing only with the proprietors, speaking only Chinese. He bought no produce or fish or pigeon or duck that he had not fingered first. He pinched the stuff, prodded it, often held it to his nose to check the freshness of its aroma. As he moved from stall to stall he seemed to construct that night’s meal in his head, as did Luang behind him. He bought only Chinese products not commonly available outside of Chinatown: snow peas, celery cabbage and bok choi, a Chinese cabbage that had deep green leaves and yellow flowers - most of these vegetables had been trucked in that very day from Chinese - owned farms in New Jersey. He liked mushrooms, and also their counterparts, the tree fungi, called wood ears by the Chinese.

  “The bodyguard, or whoever’s with him, carries the stuff he buys,” said Luang.

  He bought water chestnuts and bamboo shoots, and he went down into Mott Street cellars and bought bean sprouts that grew there overnight in the dark. He bought the grayish-black fungus known as cloud ears, and lotus leaves and tiger-lily buds, also known as golden needles, which the Chinese savored for their pleasant musty taste. He liked abalone, sea slugs and crabs, and he favored roasted duck from a butcher shop at the corner of Mott and Canal, where the already cooked ducks hung by hooks in the shop window, making Luang’s mouth water when he looked at them. He hadn’t tasted such duck in many years, he told Powers; they were simply not on sale in the neighborhood where he lived.

  “Another beer, Captain?”

  “No thank you. I’ve got another appointment in a few minutes a bit further uptown. I’ve got to be going.”

  The next day Luang tailed Koy to City Hall. After Koy had gone inside, Luang ran up the steps and showed his shield to the cop on security duty at the door.

  “I’m on the job,” said Luang. “Where did the Chinese guy go that just came in here?”

  The cop stared down at where Luang’s shield had been, but it was already gone. Vanished. It was back in Luang’s pocket. Probably the cop was not sure he had even seen it.

 
; Luang waited while the cop decided whether or not to answer. The cop was acting, Luang thought, just like that goddamn doorman.

  “He’s in with the mayor,” said the cop.

  “Don’t burn me,” pleaded Luang. The cop, frowning, stared out at the city over the top of Luang’s head.

  That night Luang reported to Powers in a Chock full o’ Nuts coffee shop on Madison Avenue at Fifty-second Street, Luang having just seen Koy home. They sat on adjacent stools sipping coffee, watching each other in the mirror.

  “Still nothing suspicious?” asked Powers. It was more statement than question. He was beginning to give up hope.

  “He was an hour in with the mayor. Is that suspicious?”

  Not suspicious, Powers thought, dangerous. He said: “The tong is a big contributor to the mayor’s re-election campaign.” Chinese political clout in New York was based on money, not votes - they didn’t have many votes. The tong gave the money and Koy was the tong. An hour with the mayor - my God! Such a man, if he got wind of this tail, could ruin Powers with one phone call.

  They sipped their coffees in silence. “If I could just focus in on something, Captain. If I just knew what I was looking for.” Luang sent a pleading glance towards Powers.

  But Powers decided he could not tell him.

  There was a clock in this place too, and Powers kept watching it for the same reason as the last time. He was also trying to think out what to do. Continue the unproductive tail? Expand the area of the search? But that would be to increase his risks and he was already in too deep. And what about the risks to Luang’s career, to Luang’s life? There was only one obvious area to expand the search into, the riskiest of all.

  But what other choice did Powers have?

  “The next time he goes into his gambling place, go in after him.”

  Luang said nothing.

  “Watch how he acts,” said Powers. A note of urgency had crept into his voice. He tried to separate it out but couldn’t. It was like trying to push unwanted sauce to the edge of the plate with chopsticks - wrong tool for the job. The sauce leaked back. Situations imposed their own laws, obeyed their own laws, not his. “Gamble a little if you have to. If you lose money, I’ll pay you back out of my own pocket.” He was still trying to control his voice.