French Kiss, page 5
At that moment, as if on some kind of sadistic cue, the food arrived. Gable was not a man to talk while he ate, so there was silence for some time. He ate quickly, as if there were a board meeting he had to get to. When he pushed his plate away from him, Chris was only half through with his tuna. That did not stop Gable from talking again, or from ordering a double espresso with sambuca.
“So,” he said, somewhat more expansively, “tell me what happened to your hip. You get hit in ‘Nam?”
“No,” Chris said. He had not, in fact, been in Vietnam, as
Gable had assumed. He was as ashamed of that all over again as he would have been if he were talking with his brother, Terry. “In Paris.”
“France?” Gable stirred the liquor into his coffee. “Hey, come on. Don’t tell me you were fighting a war in France.”
“In a way,” Chris said. “I was in the Tour de France, the bicycle race.”
Gable laughed. “You call a fucking bike race a war? Oh, Jesus, that’s good!”
“I was part of a nine-man team,” Chris said, “that biked nineteen hundred miles in twenty-two days. We started in a town called Roubaix, went into Belgium and Holland, through the French Alps, and ended up in Paris.” He was through with his fish. “Believe me, it was a war, all right.”
“Not like ‘Nam.” Gable said it in an odd tone of voice. It seemed to Chris almost as if he were speaking about a woman, or a precious object he considered to be his personal property.
“No,” Chris said. “It was very different.”
“Like pulling a fucking tuna out of the sea,” Gable said. “Hard work, yeah. Like you said, maybe even a war. Well, okay, I threw up all over the fucking fish, like I said. But, hell, it turned out to be worth it, ’cause Monique took me below, licked the sweat off my face, stuck her tongue into my mouth while she opened her bathing suit. The goddamned thing snapped under the crotch. She fucked my brains out while my buddy was wrestling with that big sonuvabitch tuna right over our heads.”
Chris could hardly believe what he was hearing. This was the point of Gable’s little fish fable? A lesson on how to cheat on your wife while cuckolding your friend? “What about your wife?” he asked.
“What about her?”
“Wasn’t she there?”
“It happens she wasn’t,” Gable said. “But what if she was? She wouldn’t have known any more about it than my buddy did.”
“You told me that you loved your wife, Mr. Gable.”
“Yeah, so what? I told you a lot of things, counselor, and judging by your tone of voice, I’m damned glad I did. You’ve just confirmed my faith in my own judgment of how to play you. You’re a fucking Elliot Ness, you know that?”
Chris was sitting very still. “Are you saying that you lied to me?”
“I’m not saying anything one way or the other,” Gable said. “You’re the genius here. You read between the lines.”
“There is a mistress.”
“Counselor, I do believe your face has gone white.”
“You fought with your wife. It all happened just as Alix Layne contended.” He watched with a cold kind of dread creeping through him as the wolfish grin expanded on Gable’s lips. “You took out the gun and—“
“Pardon me, Mr. Haye.” The waiter had reappeared. “There is a call for you.”
“Just a minute,” Chris said. He could not tear his gaze from Marcus Gable’s terrible face.
“They said it was urgent,” the waiter said.
“I said I’d be there in a minute,” Chris said harshly.
When the waiter had gone, he went on, “You took out the gun and you killed her, didn’t you? You murdered your wife.”
“Do you really think I’d tell you that?”
Chris, thinking, What have I done?, leaned across the plate-strewn table. “I just saved your skin, Gable. I think I deserve the truth.”
Gable finished off his espresso, wiped his mouth. “Now I’m gonna tell you the way of the world, counselor. You don’t deserve shit, and here’s why. You’re charging me two hundred and fifty bucks an hour and, all things considered, I’d have to say you’re worth every penny of it. You send me your bill, and my check will be messengered to you the same day. That’s how I do business.” He stood up. “And business is all this was.”
“Are you crazy,” Chris said, “or am I?” And all the time Alix Layne’s accusing face hung before him. “I believed you. I wouldn’t have taken the case otherwise.”
“Oh, come off it, counselor,” Gable said. He was grinning as he swept his arm outward. “There’s nobody here but us chickens. You can save all that constitutional garbage for the media; you’ve worked it out, you’ve learned that’s what they eat up. It’s why they love you. It’s sure as hell why I wanted you to defend me.”
“I told you, Gable, that I wanted the truth from you.”
“Sure. Sure. I understand. From the beginning I told you all you needed to know. That isn’t gonna change now.” He threw a couple of hundred-dollar bills onto the table. “Counselor, you’re the master when you step inside a courtroom but, otherwise, you don’t seem to know shit about anything. You have to learn that in life all questions don’t get answered.”
Five minutes later Chris took the call, and was told that his brother had died in Tourrette-sur-Loup, France.
Lieutenant Seve Guarda watched the ceiling drool. It was pouring outside, and it was clear that this tenement he was in was in desperate need of repair ten years ago. Now it was no doubt being held up by the grimy buildings on either side of it.
Drip, drip, drip. The drool became a full-fledged leak. Lifting his head, Seve could hear the rats behind the walls, squealing as they scrambled to get out of the way of the encroaching damp.
Seve was in the darkness of the hallway on the topmost floor of this tenement. One foot still on the last stair riser, he clung to the darkness; it was his most trustworthy ally now. Through a window cemented open by decades of city soot, Seve could hear the swift, musical jabber of Cantonese, its broad sentence-ending interrogatives like a song of the sea. Through the miasma of the tenement’s urine stink, he could scent star anise and Szechuan peppercorns, roasting pork and drying skate. Seve had once been in Hong Kong on official business, and the confluence of smells here was identical. Outside, beyond a garbage-strewn alley, was New York’s Pell Street not Hong Kong’s Ladder Street; but, otherwise, he knew, there wasn’t much difference.
Seve, his service revolver at the ready, was listening very carefully. He risked a quick glance at his watch. It had been nearly seven minutes since they had had any communication with Peter Chun: given Chun’s personality, a dangerous sign.
Seve went over again in his mind the salient facts relating to the situation. Peter Chun—known as Loong Chun, the Dragon, among the Chinese—was at the head of a widespread drug ring. It was said that Chun owned half of Chinatown, and what businesses he didn’t own paid him a monthly tithe to remain in existence. Seve remembered the roaring fire that had engulfed three stores on Pell Street late last year. It was never proven, but the consensus among Seve’s people was that Loong Chun had used those businesses as an example to others.
Long before that, however, Seve’s operation had been in place. He had a mandate from the mayor himself to break the drug trafficking that threatened to strangle Chinatown and all of New York with it. Seve had been chosen because, in part, he had spent eighteen months with the DEA in Hong Kong, Thailand, and the treacherous mountains of Burma’s Shan Plateau, tracing the route of the tears of the poppy, as the Asians called opium. He was still connected with the DEA via their InterNat-Link course on the global implications of drug smuggling.
And so he understood from every angle what it would take to burrow inside Chinatown to exorcise the menace represented by Dragon Chun. He also spoke Cantonese fluently, which helped immeasurably. All the Chinese policemen under his command trusted him implicitly. They would follow him into the sea if he gave the command.
But he had been chosen for another, equally important reason. It was well known that if Seve Guarda believed in one thing, it was the line from Blaise Pascal that he had had reproduced on a piece of polished stone. It sat on his desk where otherwise his name plate would have been. It read: “The property of power is to protect.”
Seve did not have to look behind him to sense his backup. Two of his men crouched halfway up the stairs in absolute darkness. For an instant the smell of oil from their drawn guns came to him on a moist gush of wind, before being overwhelmed by the other smells of the environment.
Ten minutes since the Dragon had been heard from.
At least everyone else is out of the building, Seve told himself. It had taken a full six months for Seve’s people to discover the brothel that Loong Chun frequented, seven more to worm their way inside. Jesus, Seve thought. How many sleepless nights, how many packages of Maalox, how many busted relationships did that represent? He had lost count a long time ago.
Thirteen months of the most intensive work of his career. All in an effort to apprehend one man: Peter Loong Chun. The trap had been set, and was about to be sprung, when a pair of rookie beat cops, their hearts full of zealous duty, had broken into the brothel to make routine arrests. What had they been doing here? Seve asked himself for the hundredth time. They should have been briefed by the precinct duty commander before beginning their shift. This block was strictly out of bounds.
But, in any event, there they were, walking right in on the Dragon, whose bodyguards had shot them both. And when Richard Hu, one of Seve’s surveillance team, had killed the bodyguards in rushing the apartment, Chun had shot him.
Christ, Seve thought, three officers. From triumph to disaster in the blink of an eye.
The only thing Seve knew for certain was that the Dragon was still in there with a female hostage, no doubt the woman he had been with when the rookie blues had burst in on him.
Now the objective had shifted. The apprehension of Peter Loong Chun had become secondary, and Seve was concentrating on shifting the focus of his mind. Because it was his job to extricate alive everyone in the brothel. Whoever had been hurt or killed up there was his responsibility. That included the blues. It was his stakeout—he should have seen the rookies and intercepted them before they could get into the building. Somehow that hadn’t happened. Seve would find out why; that was his methodical way. But not until the crisis was over.
Now that the rats had gotten away from the wet, it was quiet in the tenement. Still as a tomb. Outside, the dark sky rumbled.
Seve peered into the gloom. He could see the doorway to the apartment. Keeping his eye on it, he slipped along the hallway. He heard his men reach the landing. When he was within arm’s reach of the door, it opened inward a crack, and Seve heard a woman’s high-pitched scream. This was followed by a stream of Cantonese invective spat out so rapidly that Seve caught only parts of it. Then absolute silence.
The door remained open a crack. From it, brilliant yellow light poured into the hallway, illuminating rain from the open window running along the floorboards.
“Cheng neih maahn maan-gong?” Seve asked. Could you speak slowly?
Another stream of invective. This time Seve understood every disgusting form his mother was supposed to have taken. Seve ignored this; his concern now was for the young woman.
“Ni-go neuih-jai jouh-mat yeh a?” he asked. What happened to the girl?
An evil peal of laughter from behind the door. “Keuih sin-dai.” She slipped and fell.
“I don’t believe you.” Playing it straight.
A rustling from behind the door. Then, abruptly, the door was pulled back and a Chinese girl’s face was revealed. She was pushed harshly forward so that Seve could see the muzzle of a gun pressed hard against the bone behind her right ear.
Seve had only a split second in which to see the expression on the girl’s white face, but it was all he needed. Her terror filled the hallway between them.
“But I’ll bet you’ll believe this,” Peter Loong Chun said.
“No!” Seve shouted at the same moment that Chun pulled the trigger. Blood spurted from the place where the girl’s right ear had been. She was screaming as the Dragon pulled her back inside the apartment.
Sonuvabitch, Seve thought, watching the blood slide down the walls to mingle with the rain. I’ve got to get in there. Creeping slowly down the hallway.
“Come any closer and I’ll blow her brains all over your clean, white shirt.”
The proximity of Loong’s voice brought Seve up short. He stood as still as the shadows around him, a part of them.
Keep your head, Seve cautioned himself. “Who else is in there?”
“What do you care? She’s the only one who’s still alive.”
“Give it up, Loong,” Seve said, deliberately using Chun’s Chinese name. “It’s hopeless here. Any way you look at it, you’re going down for the count.”
“I’ve heard about you,” the Dragon said. “The loh faan who speaks.” Loh faan meant barbarian, which was how Chinese thought of any Caucasian. “I should blow your brains out as well.”
Which was all the opening Seve needed. “I’ll give you the chance, then,” he said. “Me for the girl. A straight swap, okay? She’s an innocent, Loong. A victim. Whereas, me, I’m after your guts. Bad joss to kill her now for no reason.”
“If I kill her, you can bet it’ll be for a reason,” Loong said.
“But it’s no gamble,” Seve said. Gambling and sex were two things that Peter Loong Chun could not pass up; Seve knew he was fanatic about both. “She’s already hurt. She can’t harm you. I can, and I will, given the chance. Or aren’t you man enough to handle the ultimate gamble of life and death.”
Silence. Rain beating against the open window, gurgling along the hallway. The rats were quiescent, waiting, watching.
“Maybe you’ve got a point,” Loong said at last, and Seve let out a long exhalation. “First, get your goons off the floor.”
Seve turned and gestured for his backup to retreat to the staircase. They went reluctantly. He gave them their instructions. “All right,” he told Loong.
“Now put your piece on the floor where I can see it.”
“What kind of gamble is that?” Seve asked. “I’ve seen what your gun can do.”
The apartment door squealed open all the way. “We’ll put them down together,” Loong said.
Seve bent slowly, placed his revolver on the floor of the hallway. At the same time, Chun put his gun down in Seve’s view.
“Now the girl,” Seve said.
“Get over here first,” Chun said. “Do you think I’m just going to let her go like that?”
Seve took a deep breath, walked forward until he was at the open doorway. He squinted in the harsh glare of the lights. He faced Peter Loong Chun, a rail-thin man of medium height with the wide, moon face typical of many Cantonese. He had hold of the Chinese girl, and now he came away from the window where he had been surveilling the immediate environment. Seve tried not to look at the girl because that would show weakness, but his peripheral vision showed him that she was near to fainting. Her right side was stained with blood.
“Come in,” Loong said.
“Let the girl go first.”
“You heard what I said.” Loong brandished a switchblade. The steel gleamed in the glare of the apartment’s lights.
“We had a deal.”
That evil laugh again. “I don’t make deals with loh faan,” Loong snorted derisively. “You think because you can speak you’re anything more than a barbarian?” He spat at Seve’s feet, threw the girl aside, took a quick step forward. The edge of the switchblade grazed Seve’s throat. “I never intended to let her go—“
A kind of wolfish smile suffused Loong’s face as fully as the sun lights up a drab winter landscape. Its force transformed him. “I gambled on trapping you, and I won.”
“Let me at least see to the girl.”
“Not a chance, loh faan.”
Seve immediately understood; Chun fed on power. He was the kind of man—and Seve had encountered many before—for whom a weapon was a drug. Others might be content with money or women, but Loong existed to impose his will on others.
Another time, another place, the Shan, filled Seve’s mind for a moment. General Kiu looming larger than life, as he almost always did in Seve’s memory; and the scar, the omnipresent evidence of General Kiu’s “hospitality,” that ran just beneath Seve’s left ear down the side of his neck, began to throb.
Like Peter Loong Chun, General Kiu had been obsessed with power. Loong might be the Dragon of Chinatown, but General Kiu had been the Dragon—the high warlord—of Burma’s Shan Plateau, in the heart of the Golden Triangle, where the majority of the world’s opium was harvested.
Up against Loong now, Seve perhaps understood that he owed his nemesis a debt of gratitude. For it was General Kiu who had taught Seve the value of Sun Tzu’s principles in The Art of War.
“War is based on deception,” General Kiu had said. “Move when it is advantageous, and create changes in the situation.” Through the terrible pain that General Kiu had inflicted upon him—perhaps, who knows?, even because of it—Seve had never forgotten those words. And when, months later, he had finally made his way back home, the first thing he did was take out a translation of Sun Tzu’s classic from the Forty-second Street Library. He read it so many times that eventually he could recall entire sections at will.
Seve looked Peter Loong Chun in the eye and thought, War is based on deception. Move when it is advantageous, and create changes in the situation.
Seve smiled. “What will you do with me?” His eyes held Chun’s, and he forced a fatuous tone into his voice. “I’ve dealt with you Chinese for years. Will you kill me? I doubt it. I am your only way out of this deathtrap. And I know that you want out, Loong.”
