Year of the Dragon Page 5

  “Powers rubs people the wrong way,” said the chief of detectives.

  “For instance,” added Duncan carefully, “when he was a lieutenant he had command of a midtown burglary squad. A sniper with a rifle got into a comfort station in Central Park and began killing people. Powers went in there and blasted the guy.”

  The PC stared hard at Duncan. “I may be missing the point here.”

  “He was a burglary lieutenant,” explained the chief of patrol. “That was a job for the patrol forces or for Emergency Service.”

  “I see.”

  Duncan was trying to decide how far he dared push this. “When he had command of the Auto Squad, he managed to get an entire magazine article written about himself. In The New York Times. He promised to cut auto thefts by twenty-five percent.”

  “And did he?” inquired the PC.

  Feeling the heat, Duncan waited for Cirillo to comment. The chief of detectives, Duncan considered, would always rather talk than keep his mouth shut, a flaw that could be useful.

  “The then-PC transferred him,” said Cirillo.

  Duncan added carefully, “A series of police commissioners up to and including your predecessor decided that he had too many friends in the press.”

  “He wasn’t above criticizing his superiors in print,” added Cirillo helpfully.

  The PC picked up the list Duncan had given him, and again studied it. “Captain Gibson is in command in Chinatown at present, I see,” he said. “Who is Captain Gibson?”

  “Gibson is a good man,” said Duncan. “Used to have the Mounted Squadron. Very popular in Chinatown. Keeps his horse there, you know. Likes to ride it up and down the streets. Believes it helps establish the police presence in people’s minds.”

  The PC walked to the window and stared out. When he turned back it was to announce his decision. “It’s not Gibson’s fault necessarily, but he’s got to go. I don’t know any of the names on your list. The mayor wants a name that will take the heat off the mayor. I want the same thing, is that clear? The mayor would be satisfied with Powers.”

  When Cirillo and Duncan walked out, their faces were expressionless. From his desk the deputy inspector smiled up at them, but they ignored him, and once outside in the hall they began muttering. Their own offices were one flight down. Both went into Duncan’s.

  “Is it worth trying to talk him out of it?” asked the chief of patrol.

  Cirillo was making no jokes now. “I don’t know that you could.” After a moment he added, “There’s a yellow curtain around Chinatown. If Powers wants the job, give it to him. When he falls on his ass, we’re rid of him for good.”

  The two men stared briefly at each other. Then Duncan strode to the door and called out to his own chief secretary, a captain. “Reach out for Captain Powers for me,” ordered Duncan. “Get him down here. Give him a ‘forthwith.’”

  Forthwith was the most urgent command in the police lexicon, and commanders enjoyed using it. It made subordinates hop.

  About an hour later Powers, in uniform, arrived at headquarters, and asked Duncan’s secretary, an acquaintance, what it was all about. But the secretary didn’t know, and Powers began to wait.

  Duncan might have received him at once, for he had nothing pressing to do. But partly out of spite after last night, and partly to impress upon this subordinate as on all subordinates his own rank and power, Duncan had decided to make the wait a long one.

  And so thirty-two minutes passed before Powers, cap under his arm, stood in front of Duncan’s desk, gazing into Duncan’s flat stare.

  “You are to take command of the Fifth Precinct forthwith,” said the chief of patrol.

  Duncan was not a stupid man. He saw the emotions pass across Powers’ face: at first surprise, and then bitterness. Powers, Duncan saw, perceived exactly what was being done to him, and also why.

  “Eleven years I’ve been waiting for a precinct,” said Powers, “and now I get one forthwith. Suppose I refuse?”

  “Then I think it unlikely you’ll ever be offered another. The two men stared at each other. Neither dropped his gaze. Stand-off.

  “Who’s in command there now?” asked Powers.

  “Gibson,” said the chief of patrol. “Do you know him?”

  Powers walked to the window. “The Lone Ranger? Sure I know him. We went through Captains School together. You, me, the chief of detectives, Gibson. As I remember, he finished at the bottom of the class, and he’s had two precincts already. Him and his horse. Can I think about your kind offer?”

  “You have twenty-four hours.”

  “Don’t threaten me.”

  Again their eyes locked. Another standoff.

  “You have twenty-four hours,” said the chief of patrol.

  BEFORE THE arrival of the Chinese in Chinatown most of the buildings there already stood. That is, earlier waves of immigrants had used them first and they were of indeterminate architecture that could best be described as Lower East Side tenement. They were narrow four- and five-story buildings, as narrow proportionately as the chests of the consumptives who so often in the past had inhabited them, and they were pressed one against the other, rib to rib. Their roofs extended into beetle-browed eaves that protruded above the topmost windows like scar tissue above the eyes of boxers, like evidence of generations of pain. Extending out half the width of the sidewalks below, they served no purpose except to shut out sunlight, and perhaps dreams. They made the sky look small. From street level the sky, and by extension the horizons, appeared more limited even than the congested streets themselves, and the streets of Chinatown offered the Chinese very little hope. Nowhere else in New York were so many people crowded into so small a space, nowhere else was the mean income so low. Although New York was not China, most families lived in a single room, five or six families to each flat, to each kitchen, to each toilet. But then the Chinese were used to limited horizons. To the Chinese a sense of privacy was unknown. They were a realistic people, and their dreams were not large.

  A few structures, however, did pretend to Chinese-style architecture. The new branch of the Manhattan Savings Bank was thought by those of its officers who had approved its design to resemble a Buddhist temple. This was expected to be good for business, because the industrious Chinese, if you could attract them, were great savers. Similarly, the Bell Telephone Company some years ago had removed all its standard street-corner phone booths. It had yanked them out like teeth, and had replaced them with booths in the shape of miniature Chinese pagodas - their peaks peeked above the hurrying throngs the way real pagodas peeked above the morning mists back in China. Or so the company liked to believe. The coin boxes inside were American.

  And, finally, at the confluence of Mott and Pell streets there stood a single Chinese-type building that was as spurious architecturally as all the others but which, nonetheless, was the most important structure in Chinatown at the moment. The corner of Mott and Pell was where, even today, the heart of Chinatown was said to beat most loudly, because it was here around 1880, with the installation mostly in cellars of a handful of Chinese laundrymen and restaurateurs, hard-working men, not stupid men by any means, men without women, that the oldest of the world’s civilizations had first taken root in New York. The early Chinese, in self-preservation, had formed themselves into numerous associations. Men with the same family name grouped together as did men from the same village back in China. Restaurateurs formed their own group, and merchants, laundrymen, and other tradesmen. In addition, there were the tongs. Chinatown had always had tongs, and the new building at the corner of Mott and Pell was today headquarters of the Nam Soong Tong, and the Nam Soongs ruled the New York Chinese.

  Tongs, whether in New York or elsewhere, were never quite the benign, fraternal organizations - Chinese versions of the Rotary Club, or Kiwanis - that the Chinese pretended. But neither had they been, at least until now, the sinister criminal conspiracies that the police liked to believe, although certain of their activities, according to Ameri
can law, had always been and were still criminal. Tongs were not charities, though they supported worthy causes, nor were they political parties, though they supported on occasion particular politicians. That the Chinese conducted tong business secretly was clear. That tongs were nationwide in scope, each chapter having its affiliate in every other American and Canadian Chinatown, was also clear. That these tongs exerted dominance over the Chinese in America was clearest of all, because they both imposed and collected taxes. From their subjects they exacted tribute - keeping no records of how much money they took in, or what they did with it. Or at least no records had ever come to light. That the tongs dominated the Chinese in America was never questioned, but whether or not this was solely due to fear was never clear. Violence, until now, had been rare. In San Francisco a hundred years ago two tongs went at each other with meat cleavers and the blood ran, but such unsavory deportment had not been repeated. Lately there had been, especially in Vancouver and Toronto, in San Francisco and New York, a spate of what appeared to be executions - numerous corpses had turned up - and there had been other acts of violence as well. To the police eye there seemed to be patterns emerging, though no common motivation, and the cops blamed the tongs, which were said to be acting for reasons obscure to the western mind. One other thing the police noted: the leaders of nearly all the tongs had grown extremely old. This was almost the only hard information about them that law enforcement possessed. The same men had been in power half a century more or less, meaning that there was perhaps a struggle for succession going on.

  In New York there were two important tongs, plus a number of minor ones, but the Nam Soong was the most powerful by far. It had the largest membership and the fullest coffers, it controlled the most businesses both legal and illegal, on the most streets - it controlled the most territory.

  The meeting of the Nam Soong hierarchy that Koy had called began at three o’clock in the afternoon in the pagoda-style building, at Mott and Pell streets, in a second-floor conference room whose far wall was decorated with tablets commemorating past presidents of the tong - the ancestors, in effect, of those present. Beneath the tablets on a raised dais sat a statue of Tien Hau, queen of heaven and goddess of the sea, who was said to have power over the storms that beset men’s lives. Smoldering joss sticks stood upright in an urn before her and their smoke imparted a cloying incense to the room.

  The conference table was oblong, and when Koy entered the room six men were already seated around it. All were in their late sixties or seventies, or even older, and all were millionaires. Because there are only about a hundred Chinese surnames, all of one syllable, and because even fewer than that are current in New York’s Chinatown, it happened that three of the six men, none of them related, were named Lee. Two of the others were named Hong, and the sixth was named Lau. Koy, entering, bowed to each of the men in turn - good manners demanded that he bow, not shake hands - and took his place halfway along the table. The head chair was vacant and remained so for some minutes. There was a porcelain, handleless teacup in front of Koy, and he picked this up and toyed with it, while the other men made small talk in Chinese - conversation in which Koy did not take part. All waited.

  Presently the door opened and Mr. Ting entered, his head heavily bandaged, followed by a waiter carrying tea on a tray. There was more bowing and smiling, and the waiter poured tea into all the cups. Oolong tea, Koy noted, scented with jasmine. Oolong was tea from the area of Canton, southern tea to match the southern goddess on the dais, to match these southern gentlemen. Every man at the table was from Canton or one of the villages around it.

  Ting’s right eye was swollen nearly closed. He looked like a man winking at some colossal joke. But there was nothing funny about him or this meeting.

  “We have come together,” Ting said in English, “to consider last night’s incident at my place of business.”

  His English, Koy noted, was as perfect as that of any other American, bearing no trace of the sing-song accent he offered to patrons of his restaurant.

  The man named Lau, New York’s largest importer of jade and ivory, spoke in his cracked old-man’s voice. “The word in the street is that the attack was carried out by members of the Wee Ching gang, an offshoot of the Ghost Shadows. The Shadows, as you all know, are affiliated with our rival tong across the street.”

  “If the Shadows themselves had carried out the attack,” said one of the men named Lee, “it would be clear that our rival tong was responsible.” Lee owned textile factories employing Chinese immigrants under sweatshop conditions, and he was the oldest man in the room, eighty-one.

  Another Lee, a landlord, owner of most of the buildings on Pell Street, murmured, “But we cannot be sure who ordered the attack, or even why. It is simply not clear.”

  Ting said, “It is difficult to see how to react appropriately. And in any case, to react directly against our rival tong would be bad for business. There has been too much violence in Chinatown lately. It has affected all of us. Tourists are afraid to come to Chinatown. Receipts have fallen in many of our businesses. We all hold shares in gambling places and whatnot, and receipts there have fallen too. Although our own people still frequent these places, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans and others from uptown are becoming afraid to enter Chinatown. The violence must stop.”

  Setting down his teacup, Koy glanced at each of the old men around the table. “I think all of us are missing the point,” he said. “Last night’s attack must be seen as a serious loss of face for our tong, and also, I am sorry to add, for our leader, Mr. Ting. You other men are much older than I am. You have been here longer.” Koy spoke with great deliberateness, manifesting, at least outwardly, the exquisite Chinese courtesy that was expected of a younger man when addressing his elders. “My respect for men of heaped-up years - men such as yourselves - is very great. But I must suggest that it is time for us to consider a more vigorous leadership.”

  The unspeakable had been spoken, and silence descended upon the room.

  “There is considerable justification in the words of Mr. Koy,” said Lau, the importer of jade and ivory, at last.

  “Mr. Koy, you’ve been here how long, five years?” said one of the two men named Hong. He wore thick glasses, and was nearly blind. He had arthritis, and had had to be helped to his chair by his man, who waited outside. He owned ships that sailed from New York and San Francisco to Taiwan and Hong Kong; he was the richest man in the room apart, possibly, from Koy himself. “And formerly, in Hong Kong, you were a policeman. You came here, you observed the tradition of the red envelopes, and within a year became secretary of our tong. It is perhaps better now if you await additional seasoning and experience before advancing further.”

  A number of heads nodded agreement.

  “I would of course observe the tradition of the red envelopes again,” murmured Koy.

  On both sides of the table, men began whispering to each other in Cantonese dialect. Only Ting at the head of the table sat stock-still. He had been staring at Koy for some minutes, and continued to do so.

  Ah, thought Koy, noting this, the subtlety of my plan becomes clear to him. He knows but doesn’t know. He is sure, but cannot be sure.

  The whispering ended.

  “Whoever heads our association becomes known to our people, and to the city at large, as the mayor of Chinatown,” said the elder Hong. “It is a position accomplished with honor by Mr. Ting for the last twenty years.”

  “It is no loss of face for Mr. Ting,” suggested Koy piously, “to step down after so many honorable years.”

  Ting rose to his feet, bowed toward each side of the table, and left the room. Since he was himself the subject under discussion, his presence, according to. Chinese custom, had become discourteous. And partly also, his departure was dictated by face. If Ting should be deposed while present, this would constitute a loss of face from which he could never recover. During the time it took him to stride to the door and open it, and for the door to close behind him, no w
ord was spoken. But as soon as he was gone all the businessmen except Koy leaned forward across the table. Koy himself sat bolt upright, like the goddess on the dais on her throne, manifesting the dignity and reserve of one already chosen.

  “What steps would you take?” asked Lau presently.

  “Of course the first job,” said Koy piously, “would be to find and to chastise those youths who carried out the cowardly assault last night on the mayor of Chinatown Mr. Ting.

  The men around the table had lived a long time and had acquired the wisdom that comes with years. Also they were Chinese. That Koy had engineered the massacre himself seemed to them possible, even likely. But they did not pursue their suspicions. The subject held little interest for them. The dead were dead and Ting was about to be superseded. The Golden Palace was no longer their affair. Provided the proprieties were observed, they were prepared to overlook it.

  And so the conversation continued in generalities. Business was not good. The world was changing too fast. Too few opportunities for investment existed. It would have been impossible for an outsider to understand what point exactly was being made. Too many street thugs from Hong Kong. But prosperity, they were sure, could not be far off.

  Koy nodded agreement. The leaders of the youth gangs, he said, could be “talked to.” Future violence might well take place outside of Chinatown. He knew of a number of interesting investments which he might propose at the next meeting. And they were right about the upturn, which he assured them was imminent.

  He had just dealt these aged men in as partners, but then he had known from the first he would have to. Without their approval he could not operate in Chinatown at all. Though perhaps too old to start new ventures of their own, they were still powerful enough to stop his. A word to an underling would be enough. Henceforth they would share in his profits - his losses, if any, would be his own. In exchange he could ask them for advice or contacts or for important favors, such as rerouting a ship, or moving currency around the world. For as long as the profits lasted he would have their sanction. They would not want to know too much about where the profits came from.