Year of the Dragon Page 7

Gibson turned to Powers. “Why should they be Chinese? This is not Chinatown here, Artie. This is Little Italy here.”

  “Were they Chinese?” repeated Powers.

  Carniglia turned away. “I got nothing to say, pal. You got any questions, you put them in writing and send them to my lawyer.”

  “I’ll handle the interrogation if you don’t mind, Artie,” said Gibson stiffly.

  Powers, needing a place to sit down so that he could think, went back to the 79th Precinct in Brooklyn where he was second in command. Although technically not on duty at this hour, he went into his office and sat in his swivel chair and stared out the window. After a time his attention was caught by the messages on his desk. There had been two more calls from Carol Cone. That meant five in all, including yesterday’s. He had not returned any of them. He was surprised at her persistence. The next thing he knew she would call him at home. Although his home number was not listed, nonetheless she was a reporter and could probably track it down if she tried. Either she would call him at home or she wouldn’t. He did not care one way or the other. He was not interested in Carol Cone at the moment, but rather in whatever might be left of his career. His entire life seemed at stake in the next few hours, and he was trying to figure out what to do.

  An idea came to him, and he mulled it over. After a few minutes he picked up the phone and dialed a number. The police commissioner’s eunuch came on the line. Powers, who did not know him, said he had confidential information on Chinatown to give the PC. He asked to meet with him alone. The man said he would call Powers back, and hung up.

  By Police Department standards, Powers had made an outrageous request, outrageous for two reasons. First, because the PC’s time was precious. He met only with two-star chiefs and above. He met only with deputy commissioners. Even they never dared seek audiences, but were summoned. To communicate with the PC, captains like Powers were supposed to write out their grievance on a forty nine and send it, unsealed, up through precinct, division and borough commanders, collecting endorsements and comments along the way, until maybe it reached headquarters a month later. Or it might get short-circuited by someone, either deliberately or accidentally, producing the police-department equivalent of total darkness. Or it might just get bucked right back down again. The PC might never see it.

  So Powers’ request might outrage the PC. Certainly it would outrage any intervening commanders who heard about it. Powers had just taken a terrible risk, and knew it, and for what? Even if granted ten or fifteen minutes with the PC, what could he hope to accomplish in so short a time?

  And secondly, he had promised confidential information. “Confidential” to cops was a sacred word. To police ears it had a pure bell ring to it. Confidential information came to cops from confidential informants, usually criminals, so that the word signaled each time the existence of a human relationship that was wholly new, fragile, rarer than love, as dangerous as life itself. “Confidential,” in the police world, signaled usually the first step in the triumph of good over evil; the triumph of man’s noblest ideal, justice, over all of his other baser instincts. It signaled the onset of emotions that were basically religious in nature. It was a word to raise hopes sky high. It was almost another word for God. Like certain other words, “fire” or “wolf” for instance, it evoked unreasoning responses. For a cop to abuse it was blasphemy, a sin against faith.

  It was a word that unlocked doors. It was a word that captains could use to get in to see police commissioners. And yet, what could Powers tell the PC that was justifiably “confidential”?

  He spent the next twenty minutes seated at his desk arranging and rearranging the five telephone messages from Carol Cone. He laid them out vertically, and horizontally, and in a circle. He pushed them around like playing cards and wondered why he imagined that the PC would give him an answer right away.

  After a time he noted that Carol had given two different call-back numbers, so he got out his address book and wrote in both. He entered the numbers, but not her name, in the W section, under the call letters of her station.

  His phone rang. The deputy inspector. He said the PC would see Captain Powers at 8: the following morning.

  As Powers hung up he felt a smile come onto his face. It was his first that day, and he went out into the muster room, where the desk sergeant stopped him.

  Chief Duncan’s office had just called. Powers was to call back forthwith.

  Powers thought about this a moment. His smile had vanished.

  “Do me a favor,” he told the desk sergeant. “Call back Duncan’s office. Tell them that I was in earlier, but I’m not here now. Tell them I’m not on duty tonight. Tell them you re trying to find me.”

  “But I did find you, Captain.”

  “Just tell them you don’t know where I am, okay?”

  Outside it was nearly dark. Powers got into his car and began the long drive home.

  BY 9 A.M. Powers had been waiting twenty minutes, but above the PC’s door the red light remained lit. He wore his best and newest uniform. His wife had worked hard on it. Its creases were perfect, its buttons shone. He had stood by the ironing board cheering her on. He had worked on his shoes himself. He had polished them twenty minutes He had polished them to a gloss. They shone like black glass.

  The deputy inspector continued to open and stack the PC’s mail. He did not look up.

  Powers, pacing and fretting, stared up at the red light. He was in custody here. The red light was as restrictive as handcuffs or a jail cell. It was a means the PC used to exert his will through the door. There was no way that Powers waiting, or anyone waiting, could exert his own will back. The PC was untouchable. Waiting, Powers could not even sit down for fear of wrinkling his uniform. Men were geniuses at thinking up ways to unnerve other men, he reflected – “the games men play to give each other heart attacks,” was the way his wife described it.

  The red light winked out.

  The deputy inspector got up and went into the PC s office. Left behind, Powers became as conscious of his appearance as a boy waiting for his date to come down the stairs. He straightened his tie, his hair. He tugged his jacket down so that it would lie smoothly over his gun belt and service revolver.

  “The PC will see you now.”

  As Powers went through the door he saw that the PC’s office was dark. The drapes had been drawn, and they were heavy drapes. A thin sliver of sunlight sliced across the rug. It cut the rug in two. Whether by accident or design it formed a barrier that Powers chose not to cross. He advanced only that far and stopped. The PC, in shirtsleeves behind his desk, glanced up.

  Powers’ opening line was rehearsed and he spoke it with assurance: “It was good of you to agree to see me privately, Commissioner.”

  But at once he became conscious of other men in the room. He felt their presence in the shadows behind him. With a stir of movement they came forward.

  “You know Chief Duncan, I believe,” the PC said. “And Deputy Commissioner Glazer of Public Affairs.”

  Powers, trying to reorient himself, said, “I was hoping to speak to you alone, sir.”

  “I have no secrets from these two men,” said the PC. His eyes narrowed, he appraised Powers briefly, then shifted his gaze to Duncan. “And Chief Duncan, as chief of the patrol forces in this city, is your commander. Properly speaking, he’s the one you should be reporting to, not me.”

  Duncan said, “Your twenty-four hours were up last night, I believe. In fact I asked one of my men to reach out for you, but he was unable to locate where you were.”

  Powers fixed his attention on the PC. “Commissioner, I’ve been offered command of the Fifth Precinct, as you know. Before deciding whether to accept the assignment, I determined to talk to people with knowledge of Chinatown, Federal agencies in addition to our own people I’ve now talked to Immigration, the FBI, to Drug Enforcement. I’ve talked to our own Intelligence Division, and to the present commander of the Chinatown precinct. I’ve learned some things. I conclud
ed that I would be derelict in my duty if I made my decision without talking over with you what I’ve learned.” It was a rather lengthy speech, and perhaps a pompous one, and long before it ended the PC had begun stirring through papers on his desk.

  If he wasn’t going to listen, thought Powers, why did he agree to see me at all?

  “Go on,” the PC said, but his attention had been caught by something and he was reading it.

  Powers stepped forward across the sliver of sunlight. He raised the volume of his voice, changed its cadence and added energetic gestures. He was like an actor in a play trying to control an audience that had begun to cough.

  “There are now more Chinese living in New York City,” he proceeded, “than in any other city, including San Francisco, anywhere outside the Orient. Most of them are honest, hard-working and very poor people. Most of them have escaped from Red China into Hong Kong, where they were exploited by the Chinese already there. So they kept going. They emigrated to the United States - they call this country the Gold Mountain - where they are still being exploited. There are at least two highly sophisticated organized-crime syndicates preying on these people and on the rest of the city as well. The syndicates are allied in some mysterious way to the major tongs, or perhaps they’ve taken over the tongs, we’re not really sure. The syndicates run about twelve gambling dens that are open around the clock, and at the moment we allow them to stay open.”

  Duncan said, “I didn’t know captains had received orders to criticize department policy.”

  “A statement of fact is not criticism,” said Powers, “it is a statement of fact.”

  But the PC, who might have smiled or in some way encouraged Powers’ recital, did not look up.

  “The cash from gambling,” Powers continued, “finances all their other illegal activities, especially drugs. The Chinese are now the largest importers of drugs in New York. The heroin comes through Hong Kong from Southeast Asia. Cash flow from the gambling and the drugs is so great that the Chinese syndicates are buying up legal businesses and real estate The syndicates are in conflict with each other - these recent killings seem to point to a struggle for power within Chinese organized crime itself - and they are in conflict with the Italians. That’s what yesterday’s assault on the candy store in Little Italy was all about, we think.”

  Chief Duncan interjected coldly, “There is no evidence whatsoever that the assault on the candy store was carried out by Chinese.”

  “Yes there is. I talked to witnesses.”

  “The detectives found no such witnesses, Commissioner.

  “Maybe by the time the detectives got there, the witnesses were gone,” said Powers.

  “I don’t believe this, Commissioner.” Duncan turned back to Powers. “Why would the Chinese shoot up an Italian candy store?”

  “The Feds had information that guns were being sold out of that store to Chinese youth gangs.”

  “If the Feds had such information, they would have acted on it. Why didn’t they?”

  “Ask them, don’t ask me,” snapped Powers.

  The PC had glanced up sharply. He peered over his glasses first at Duncan, then at Powers. He peered at them almost with amusement, like a parent watching a squabble among children.

  Deputy Commissioner Glazer said: “Are you saying that in just a year or two the Chinese have managed to establish their own Mafia here?”

  “No sir. They already had their own Mafia in Hong Kong. They simply spread here, and the Chinese crime families appear to be both more sophisticated and richer than the Italian families ever were. The Mafia concept is not Italian anyway. It’s Chinese. It was invented in China three or four thousand years ago. The Chinese crime syndicates are called Triads. What we are suddenly facing here are offshoots of the Hong Kong Triads.”

  Duncan said to the PC, “Commissioner, I’ve heard this claptrap before, and that’s all it is, claptrap, which Chief Cirillo can verify, and I suggest we get him in here.”

  The PC agreed, and the chief of detectives was sent for. All waited in silence until he came through the door, moving softly for such a chunky man, glancing around carefully to see who was present, searching for clues as to what the subject might be. The half-chomped cigar he affected everywhere else was missing here, Powers noted. Cirillo is another of the PC’s eunuchs, he thought.

  “Repeat what you just told us,” ordered Duncan.

  Powers paraphrased it. It came out, unfortunately, not only briefer, but also weaker.

  “Where did you get your information from?” asked Cirillo.

  “Well, first I went to the Drug Enforcement Administration, and-”

  “Commissioner,” Cirillo interrupted, “the DEA has been peddling that Chinese Mafia theory for years. There’s absolutely nothing in it. And I wouldn’t believe anything those clowns said anyway. About ten years ago they made a few cases in Chinatown. They haven’t done a thing since.”

  Powers said, “According to Immigration-”

  “Those guys,” snorted Cirillo. He gave a short laugh. “Commissioner, that’s the most corrupt agency in the country. It doesn’t require any Chinese Mafia to bribe them. They take money from anybody. They ought to spend some time investigating themselves.”

  “That candy store was shot up by Chinese,” insisted Powers.

  “So you say,” said Cirillo. “I’ll look into it.

  “Satisfied?” inquired Duncan.

  Powers was not satisfied. He said stubbornly, “There is too much interconnected crime down there for it all to be free-lance.”

  Deputy Commissioner Glazer said, “The words ‘Chinese Mafia.’ I wouldn’t go bandying them about too much, if I were you:” His tone was both unctuous and anxious. “Those are dangerous words for us. The newspapers get a hold of those words, they’ll go to town with them. The mayor will want to know what we’re doing to break up the Chinese Mafia. People will be all over us. We don’t need pressure like that.”

  Powers glanced around from face to face. He was surrounded, and nearly out of ammunition. The PC, scanning something on his desk, was not even looking at him. “Commissioner,” Powers said, “you are asking me to take over what might be an impossible job.”

  The PC glanced up. “Captain Powers, as I understand it, you’ve been carping on what’s wrong with this department ever since you made captain. Here’s your chance to show us what you can do.” He gave a cold smile. “So it’s a difficult job. You wouldn’t want an easy one, would you?” This speech concluded, the PC’s attention again flagged. The man had flipped the page of his appointment calendar and begun to study it.

  “All right,” said Powers, “I’ll take Chinatown.” His next lines depended for their effect upon the assurance with which he could project them, but because he was talking to the top of the PC’s head, with Glazer, Cirillo and Duncan still in the room, he began talking too fast. “But I’ll need time.” Immediately he forced himself to slow down. “That’s the first of my conditions.”

  But trying to correct his error was as useless as trying to correct an explosion. Since the action could not be reversed, one could not correct anything. And in any case, which rate of speech was the correct one? Only an assured man would know.

  “I want you to guarantee me two years. And secondly-”

  Although it was possible to counterfeit most emotional states, hatred or love for instance, it was not possible to counterfeit assurance, which relied, like the structure of the atom, on the harmony of too many too-cunning particles. If any one were out of place, the thing self-destructed, and this was visible to all.

  “I need what the Chinese think of as face. Face is not a Japanese concept, as you may have thought.” A person who could not gauge a man’s age within ten years or his weight within fifty pounds could detect the flicker of a muscle in his cheek, or the breath that came in the wrong part of a sentence. Voice timbre that changed to a minute degree sounded as blatant as trumpets. Assurance thrived only in the absence of passion, which was why
it was so rare and so prized. It was an absolute, which hatred was not, nor love either. There was purity to it. It was perfect.

  “Face is Chinese in origin,” Powers concluded. “Chinatown has had a steady successions of captains m there. If I’m to be effective, I need more face than that. I’m asking you to send me in there as a deputy inspector.”

  The PC looked up. “Don?”

  Duncan said: “We have seventy-six precinct commanders in this city. Every single one of them has his unique problems.”

  “Whether or not there is a Chinese Mafia, Powers said, “Chinatown is about to explode.”

  “You get six months,” said Duncan. “Same as any other precinct commander. Six months to produce results.”

  The PC had stood up behind his desk. The interview was over. “Your need for extra rank seems exaggerated,” he said. “I want you to go in there and suppress the youth gangs. At the end of six months we’ll evaluate your performance, and if you’ve done a good job, we’ll consider promoting you to deputy inspector then. And we don’t want to read anything in the papers about any Chinese Mafia, eh? That wouldn’t be a good idea. You get my meaning?”

  Powers got his meaning. A man of real power, he saw, did not need to present his threats as threats.

  A slight smirk had come onto Duncan’s face. Powers saw it and his eyes blazed. He sent thunderbolts across the room, but failed to blast that smirk away. Duncan merely glanced down at the floor, still smirking.

  “Am I in charge of the Golden Palace investigation?” Powers asked the PC.

  “Chief of Detectives Cirillo is handling that investigation personally,” answered Duncan. “The Golden Palace investigation is not your business.”

  “And the assault on the candy store?”

  “That’s not your business either. Your business is running the precinct.”

  The PC said: “We just want to see the arrest rate go up, and the crime rate down.” He came around the desk, his hand outstretched like a politician’s. “I’m sure you’ll do a fine job, Captain.”