Year of the Dragon Page 10

  “You are in luck, all right,” murmured Kelly. “See that older guy?”

  A young Chinese - he looked to Powers to be in his early twenties - stood peering through the chain link fence into the school yard. “That’s Nikki Han,” said Kelly. “He’s the leader of the Flying Dragons.”

  “He’s looking for someone,” said Powers.

  “Right. And I think I see who.”

  In the school yard a group of long-haired white students had begun tormenting a Chinese boy. The Chinese boy was almost shaven above his ears and to hide such a disgrace he wore a cap which the others were trying to snatch from him. Victim and persecutors were about the same age, about fifteen. The Chinese kid was dressed differently from the others too: black trousers, an open-necked white shirt. He looked like a waiter. Having lost his hat, he found himself inside a circle. Around him the hat was tossed from hand to hand while he lunged for it. There were tears in his eyes, and he seemed to be begging for his hat in Chinese.

  Nikki Han went through into the school yard. As he approached, the group around the Chinese boy broke up. The hat was dropped on the pavement and kicked away. The other boys melted backwards. The whole schoolyard had gone silent.

  As Powers watched, Nikki Han picked up the hat, put his arm around the Chinese boy, and led him to a corner of the yard. They sat down on a bench, and Nikki Han, leaning close to the boy’s ear, began talking earnestly.

  “I don’t know that kid,” said Kelly. “But from his clothes and his haircut he’s an F.O.B. - fresh off the boat. That’s what the American-born Chinese call them. The kid’s parents probably work twelve hours a day in sweatshops and don’t have time to take care of him. Maybe one parent speaks a little English, maybe not. The kid obviously doesn’t. Yet he’s in class with American kids his age. The principal put him there. It’s a junior high. What else could he do with him? But the kid can’t keep up. He can’t speak or read or write English. He doesn’t know our alphabet, or our numerals. Probably his teacher makes a special effort to be nice to him. But it’s hopeless. He doesn’t understand a word she says. This is a very ordinary story in Chinatown, Captain. It’s happened many times in the last few years.”

  The two police officers stared through the fence. Nikki Han, still talking earnestly, still had his arm around the boy. “To the other kids, this kid is a clod,” continued Kelly. “So they steal his hat and make him cry. You just saw it. You know how cruel kids are at that age. By the end of a few weeks he’s ripe to be taken over by one of the gangs. That’s what is taking place now, I believe. Once he makes contact with someone like Nikki Han, it’s all over. Nikki speaks to him in his own language. Nikki saves him from persecution. Nikki offers to put meaning in his life. All he has to do is join the gang.”

  Nikki Han and the boy got up off the bench, went out of the school yard, and walked down the street toward Chinatown.

  “Now he’s probably taking him to a restaurant,” said Kelly.” We’ll follow them.”

  “Sure.”

  They gave Han and his recruit a hundred-yard head start, then trailed them into a restaurant on Canal Street called the Jade Urn, where they took a table on the other side of the room from the two young men. If Han knew they were there, it did not show. They watched him order lunch for himself and the kid.

  “We might as well eat, ourselves,” said Powers. “What’s good here?”

  Kelly, who had put on glasses, peered at the menu. “Try the candied chicken wings, Captain.”

  They waited to be served.

  “Fifteen-year-olds are very useful,” commented Kelly. “They carry the guns, for instance. Nikki never carries. We’ve stopped him many times. He’s always clean. Some fifteen-year-old carries, and if we lock up a juvenile on a gun charge, most likely the judge lets him go.”

  Nikki Han was still speaking earnestly. The boy was grinning, and his eyes were bright. He kept nodding his head up and down. He was also wolfing down food. His chopsticks flashed. Powers admired the way he used them. He was like a doctor in surgery. He plucked morsels big and small from the center dishes, and never dropped one. He was an expert.

  “The fifteen-year-olds also do the killing,” commented Kelly. “They’ll pull the trigger on anyone for Nikki. Fifteen-year-olds are mindless. They think he’s a god, because he tells them he is. They believe him. He’s been shot several times. Not by us. By other gangs. He shows young recruits his scars and tells them he can tense up his muscles so bullets won’t penetrate. That makes him a god, and so they both fear him and adore him. If he says kill someone, they do it. Yeah.”

  Powers stared into his candied chicken wings. He was trying to absorb all Kelly was telling him.

  “The gangs recruit constantly,” said Kelly. “The older members get arrested, or killed. There have been about thirty of them killed in the last three years. Being a member of a Chinese youth gang is a dangerous occupation.” He paused. “Or members get married and drop out, or simply scared and drop out. A gang is a volatile thing. It needs constant new blood. The gang leaders are all like Nikki, twenty-five or so. They are getting paid by the gambling dens and the tongs, and they are extorting money from shopkeepers. We figure they keep three or four thousand dollars cash a week each. They pay the younger gang members practically nothing, a hundred fifty a week tops.”

  Across the restaurant, the waiter placed the check face down beside Nikki Han.

  “Watch,” said Kelly. “He’ll sign it ‘Flying Dragons.’ There.”

  Having scrawled something on the check, Nikki Han carried it toward the cash desk, where the owner waited, smiling nervously. Nikki walked with the arrogant, frightening swagger affected by gang thugs the world over. The smiling owner watched him coming. To Powers the smile looked like a gash in meat, like evidence of pain.

  “Chinatown is terrified of all the gangs,” said Kelly, “but particularly of Nikki’s gang because it’s the most violent. No restaurant owner would dare try to make Nikki pay. I shouldn’t be surprised if Nikki asked for a donation, as well. There. What did I tell you?”

  The smiling owner handed the gang leader two twenty-dollar bills. After handing one bill to the boy, Nikki reached for the door. The owner ran to help him. He bowed them out. Only when the door closed did he cease smiling.

  “C’mon, that’s extortion,” said Powers. “We can arrest him for that.”

  “You need a complainant, Captain,” said Kelly, “and that owner is not going to sign any complaint.”

  Powers had risen to his feet. He placed his napkin beside the plate. Though supposing that Kelly was right, he was hopeful. “We’ll see,” he said.

  They went forward, where Powers introduced himself, showing his shield. “Those boys who just left,” he said, “I noticed they didn’t pay their bill.”

  The owner was again smiling nervously. “They flends, Captain. Velly flendly boys.”

  “How much protection money do you pay the Flying Dragons each week?”

  “I no want trouble, Captain.”

  “We have laws in this country to protect you,” said Powers. “We can protect you against the gangs. But you have to ask us to do it. That’s the law. You have to sign a complaint. For instance, if you sign a complaint against those two who just left, we could arrest them. Detective Kelly and I are witnesses to what happened. Ultimately they would go to jail.”

  The smile never left the owner’s face. “Take too long, Captain. Many court appearances. Much delay. Too many gangs in Chinatown. I don’t want trouble, Captain.”

  Powers found that his fists were clenched. He went out of the restaurant and stood with Kelly on the sidewalk.

  “Every store and restaurant in Chinatown pays protection to one gang or another,” Kelly said. “The Flying Dragons have Canal and Mott streets. The Ghost Shadows have Division and Catherine. Two other gangs are disputing control of Pell Street at the moment. The extortion payments aren’t all that much. But most Chinese merchants don’t have much.”

  N
ot ten feet away, Powers noted, Nikki Han leaned against a lamppost smirking at him. But the young boy was not in sight and had perhaps gone back to school.

  THE COP on duty on the switchboard handed Powers a sheaf of telephone messages as he came into the station house. All were from newsmen, none from Carol Cone. All requested interviews he could not afford to give. He handed them back. “Refer these people to Deputy Commissioner Glazer’s office,” he told the switchboard cop.

  “Er, Captain, a package came for you.”

  The cop wore a half-repressed grin.

  Powers glanced around. The desk sergeant seemed secretly amused, too.” It’s on your desk.”

  Powers went across to his office and closed the door. The package that had made at least two cops grin - and how many others, Powers wondered - was a bouquet of flowers. It lay wrapped in green paper on his desk. Cops, he reflected as he searched for the card, have the mentality of teenage boys. They see flowers as sissy, or something. Flowers provoke mirth.

  The envelope was not sealed. The card read: “Good luck in your new job.” It was signed Carol Cone.

  How many cops had read this, Powers wondered. Not an important question yet, but it would become one the first time some cop saw them together. That, plus these flowers, would be enough. Evidence plus an eyewitness equals a conviction. Any jury would agree. The news would sweep through the department.

  She must be crazy, Powers thought. She risks all kinds of problems for me. She can’t be trusted to be prudent, he thought. Watch out for her.

  The flowers made him feel even more embarrassed about last night. He was frustrated in his career, yes, but not sexually, and he wondered why he had come at Carol so crudely.

  He wanted to blame it on Carol, but was not sure. Had she attempted to seduce him and then, for some reason, changed her mind? Men did not often seduce women, Powers believed. Men were blunt and solid, not seductive at all. Whereas women dealt in emanations that were invisible to the naked eye. Women sent these emanations out like radio beams. Nothing showed. One could not even accuse them of it afterwards.

  Powers reached for the flowers. Tonight he would take them home to his wife, no card attached. He would collect a kiss and a hug for his reward, and then perhaps take her out to dinner.

  He took Carol’s card, tore it into small pieces and dropped them in the basket beside his desk.

  EVERY PRECINCT in the city had a patrolman assigned full time to community relations, usually a member of whatever ethnic group predominated there. In the Fifth Precinct the slot was filled by a fourth generation Chinese-American named Lawrence Lom. Lom’s great-grandfather, along with thousands of other coolie laborers, had helped build the Union Pacific Railroad. Afterwards he had stayed on, moving to New York and, twenty years later, importing his wife and full-grown children from China. Lom, now forty-nine, had grown up on Mott Street. A portly, moonfaced man, he spoke perfect New York English, of course, plus halting Chinese - in Chinatown the Cantonese dialect was always called Chinese, as if there were no other. Lom had learned it partly in the streets, but principally in a Chinese school to which his parents had sent him two afternoons a week; they’d sent him religiously, spending too much of their meager earnings on it, but putting first things first. He had attended Chinese school the way Jewish boys in other parts of the city attended Hebrew school, the way Catholic boys attended catechism classes. But most of Lom’s teachers had spoken the language of Canton poorly. Too many generations had gone by, the United States had been closed too long. There were no new Chinese coming in. The Chinese in New York were by no means being assimilated, and did not want to be, hut they were, in Lom’s youth, beginning to lose their language.

  Lom had graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School, one of the two or three elite high schools of the city, for he had been taught like almost all of his race to revere scholarship and he was a brilliant student. But he was also Chinese, and he went to work as a telephone lineman, the best job he could find. Later he took the police department test because the job offered both security and a 33% raise in salary; of course, he passed it easily.

  Upon being appointed, Lom was sent back into Chinatown, supposedly as an undercover cop, even though he had grown up there and, in the Chinese fashion, still called almost every man uncle. The Cantonese dialect has three words for it: ah-bok, which means older uncle; ah-sook, which means younger uncle, a title to be used when a younger man was either rich or a dignitary; and ah-ke, which means real uncle - Lom had a number of them in Chinatown also - and he was quickly recognized as a policeman. That was when he learned how shameful in Chinese eyes such an occupation was held to be. His parents were considered disgraced. To save family honor his father was required to make donations to both major tongs, and Lom himself was required to get out of Chinatown. He spent most of the next five years in midtown writing out traffic tickets from the back of a scooter.

  Then the community relations program started. In every precinct a single experienced officer would serve as liaison between the community and the department. The rumor was that all community relations cops would soon be promoted to detective, and so Lom had applied and been accepted. He was sent back to the fifth precinct, and this time the Chinese simply absorbed him, the way their forebears had absorbed entire invading armies for four thousand years. They used him when they could and ignored him otherwise, and Lom used them also, as will be seen. He had been there now twenty quiet years.

  With time he had become, perhaps, more cop and less Chinese. He was a practicing Lutheran, as was his Chinese-American wife and their four children, and they lived in half of a two-family house in a section of Queens that was literally infested with other cops and their families. He belonged to the PBA, the police union, of course, but not, like other cops, to one of the ethnic, so-called line associations. There was a line association for Italian cops, Jewish cops, German cops, but not for Chinese cops because there were too few of them. So, Larry Lom, who had learned to play the fife in grade school, had become an honorary member of the Emerald Society, the line organization for cops of Irish origin, and he wore a kilt and played his fife and marched in all the parades in the Emerald Society marching band. He was still not a detective. Like many police-department rumors, that one had proven totally unfounded.

  However, Lom had few other complaints. He had learned to sell himself to each new precinct commander as indispensable to the peaceful solution of any Chinatown problem that might arise. He knew most Chinese elders, and pretended to have access to all of them, which was often not the case. He attended most community functions from kindergarten graduations on up, and chairs were kept for him, though not usually on the dais. The Chinese community seemed to treat him almost as a kind of chaplain -one representing a faith that was not theirs; he was not to be taken seriously. If he realized this, he never said so and perhaps did not care. He lived a far better life than most Chinese. He worked only eight hours a day only five days a week. He had twenty-seven paid vacation days a year. He was rarely in uniform or in the station house, and he moved through the community more or less unsupervised.

  He had convinced each precinct commander in effect that verbal intercourse with any segment of the Chinese community was not possible unless it took place in Lom’s presence, and through the intercession of Lom. This magnified his importance, of course, but at the same time it reduced the commander’s stature in Chinatown to the same level as Lom’s, and Lom’s rank was patrolman. The Chinese were among the most class-conscious people on earth, and each time a new commander spoke to them, not from a posture of command but through Lom, Chinatown took him at once for a fool.

  On this particular morning Lom sat in an office on the second floor of the station house tapping out on an upright Underwood typewriter a long memo to Captain Powers. The typewriter had been used by a generation of detectives for booking prisoners, and all the keys stuck. Typing on it was like chopping wood - pulling the axe out after each stroke was more work than driving it
in. Lom was writing thumbnail sketches of the ten most important men in Chinatown - Ting and Koy were both on the list - to whom he proposed to introduce Powers at their places of business during the next several days. The memo also promised that Lom would serve as Powers’ translator and adviser at each of these meetings.

  Detective Kelly stuck his head in the door and said, “Lom, they want you downstairs.”

  The two men went down the stairs.

  A middle-aged Chinese named Quong waited just inside the station house door. He was ill at ease and therefore smiling. The smile looked pinned on. He was skinny. All his bones showed. He reminded Lom, of one of those flimsy Chinese shacks he had seen in photos. They stood on stilts by rivers. They were made of sticks - you could see the skeleton. You could see Quong’s skeleton too, he was that frail.

  Cops moving in and out of the building paid not the slightest attention to Quong, brushing past him as if he weren’t there.

  “Very good to meet you, sir, thank you very much,” said Quong to Lom in Cantonese. He bowed to the community relations patrolman, who did not bow back.

  “Do you speak English?” said Lom.

  Quong did speak English, though badly, for he had been a schoolteacher in China and before that had been partly educated by American nuns. His English was better than Lom’s Cantonese. “What’s your problem?” said Lom. Quong, smiling more nervously than ever, apologized for taking up the valuable time of such an estimable gentleman as Lom. His problem was really such a small one, hardly significant - his son.

  Lom brought him up to the second-floor office, closed the door, and listened for about fifteen minutes, then went in search of the new precinct commander. Captain Powers should perhaps meet this man and hear his story. It would be educational for him, and he would surely applaud Police Officer Lom for bringing it to his attention. Lom knocked at the jamb beside Powers’ open door.