Year of the Dragon Read online

  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 th
e 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.

  As he took both Carol’s hands, he imagined her an hour from now, standing in front of cameras giving an eyewitness account of the massacre. He imagined her describing her precious life saved by her date, the fearless gunslinging hero of the action, Captain Powers. And so he began to plead with her.

  “Call your story in, then disappear,” he begged. “Let some other reporter handle it. I’m a married man. If the media finds out we were together-”

  “There’s nothing between us.”

  “They’ll turn it into a scandal anyway.” Outside the sirens were closer. There wasn’t much time. “You know they will.”

  “You’re asking too much. This is an important story. It’s one of the biggest stories of my life. You can’t ask me to give it up.” Her eyes, still roaming, had located phones, and she strode toward them.

  Ting staggered out onto the landing above. Blood from his scalp leaked down the side of his face, and he grasped the balustrade for support.

  Powers took the steps two at a time.

  “The police are on their way, Captain,” said Ting.

  In a few minutes this place would swarm with uniformed cops, and in his head Powers began to apportion jobs. A crime scene needed to be established. Witnesses had to be prevented from leaving and statements taken. Detectives had to be summoned. Ambulances too, of course. Commands had to be notified: precinct, division, borough, the chief of detectives’ office, the police commissioner’s office, the medical examiner’s office, the district attorney’s office, even, for something this big, the mayor’s office. Until the top brass arrived he was in charge. He would use Ting’s office as his command post.

  He would have to phone his wife before she heard whatever news bulletins went out on the air, and became terrified.

  He glanced down at Carol, now turning away from the phone. The press would turn up in droves. He would have to station cops at the door to keep them out. Carol too. She was on the outside now, and would remain there.

  “It’s bad, Captain,” said Mr. Ting.

  Powers strode past him into the slaughterhouse inside.

  THE RAIN started again. It fell straight down. Carol waited under an overhang while the street, already full, swelled fuller. People running. Sirens. Shouts. Cars. Slamming doors. Despite cordons at both ends, vehicles kept entering the street: detectives’ cars, commanders’ cars. She didn’t know what all of them were, but she saw they were official, for they double- and triple-parked, they parked on sidewalks. Cops in dripping black slickers worked to keep the crowd back, and to keep one lane open. Forensic vans inched through. Ambulances backed up to the restaurant entrance. Their back doors were flung apart and men in white coats jumped out.

  Carol had found her crew and her standup began. Her face intruded into a million houses, a living presence in living color. Uninvited, she interrupted a sitcom for sixty seconds, replacing four weak jokes and their canned accompanying laughter. The jokes became like the corpses upstairs. Not even a machine would laugh at them now. Her grim report turned the next jokes unfunny also, a thought that occurred to her as she spoke. Well, that’s television.

  She told what she knew, or thought she knew, which wasn’t much. An attack on a Chinatown restaurant with automatic weapons by unknown assailants for unknown reasons. Casualties unknown. Assailants escaped after a gun battle in the street with the well-known hero cop Captain Powers. She could not as a conscientious journalist keep him out completely. She would have lost her fat contract had she tried. But after much thought she had decided not to present herself as an eyewitness, nor even to place herself inside the restaurant. She didn’t do it for his sake. But she had, after all, witnessed nothing. She had spent the entire action on her back under a man, a position that was familiar to her, though the circumstances were not. There seemed no way to describe her part in this without making it sound like kinky sex. For her the experience had a distinct flavor of kinky sex anyway, as if birth and death had been present at the same time. She had never before lain under a man while people died around her, and her remembered sensations were acute. She could feel Powers’ weight on her still - he was heavier than he looked - while his hands learned all about her. She could feel his hands on her also, and this disturbed her.

  As she did her report she was wearing her plastic rain hood, but not her coat, which was upstairs checked. She considered it lost and planned to replace it, billing the network. Her blond-streaked, lacquered hair, being protected, was still neat, but her dress was soaked through. This was spring rain, and she was cold. Microphone at her lips, she stood in the sudden blinding glare, sunlight without warmth, which illuminated her face and upper body, the facade of the Golden Palace behind her, and that segment of sidewalk that had become her stage. As she spoke she was aware as always of spectators. She felt them pressing forward to hear her secrets.

  The illumination was cut off. She handed back her microphone. A sound man threw his coat over her shoulders and was rewarded by two seconds’ worth of her famous smile.

  She watched rival correspondents, also using the Golden Palace as background, perform similar rites. Projectors came on. Fragments of rainy night were transformed into hallucinatory day. In an earlier age the same thing would have happened, Carol reflected. A generation ago press photographers had used strobe lights, and a generation before that, with press cards stuck in their hatbands, they had exploded the flash bulbs attached to the sides of their speed grafflexes. The tradition extended backwards through the flash pans of daguerreotypers to the up-thrust flaming torches of cavemen. Disaster was and had always been a riddle that had to have light thrown on it. Present-day illumination seemed brighter and longer-lasting only by comparison; it conquered no greater darkness, revealed the essential riddle no better than anything in the past.

  The Golden Palace seemed to her like a bastion under siege. Its defenders could not be seen. She and her colleagues had it surrounded. Network vans waited on the perimeter, as watchful as tanks. Cameramen moved into position, their instruments primed and aimed. Light men carried projectors forward, their job to throw up flares for the gunners to sight by. Television was the besieging army, no question about it, and if you did not believe this, ask the police. The police knew who the enemy was, and hid.

  At last the bastion’s doors were flung open. The crowd became agitated and pressed forward: mixed tourists and Chinese crowding the barricades
, Chinese faces in windows and doorways, individual crowds of wet, uncomfortable newsmen in the street. The first stretchers came out. It was as if the building had dined too copiously and had begun now to vomit. More stretchers. Shouts. Projectors blazed. Cameramen ran. Stretcher-bearers ran. Doors slammed. Engines came on. Headlights came on. Vehicles lurched into motion. Sirens wailed. The building was expelling all it could not hold down.

  It was a scene of wild disorder, and Carol watched it enthralled. High tragedy and low comedy had become the same, funeral and carnival were the same. Disorder had become beautiful, as seductive as illicit sex, as seductive as vice. She felt giddy with excitement, and at the same time felt that her excitement was somehow lewd. She was taking pleasure in a perversion. Violent crime, she saw, created disorder and disorder created more disorder. And she wondered if it was not the disorder that men - beginning with the police - found so dangerous, rather than the crime itself. If disorder of such magnitude was allowed to prevail, then no one was safe. Perhaps it was to this intellectual concept, and to no other, that the police responded. They had rushed into the Golden Palace to restore order. On a room littered with corpses they rushed to impose routine. They closed off the room and would let no one in until they had done it. Without being able to see them, Carol saw what they were still doing in there, filling out forms, drawing diagrams, signing their names.

  First the room, then the street itself. When the last ambulance had squealed away a squad of patrolmen came out. These cops, she saw, had their orders: they had been ordered to order the crowd to disperse. Their uniforms were buttoned. The buttons shone. Their caps were straight. They moved forward blunt as truncheons.

  “Go on home now.”

  “It’s all over here.”