Chan offered her the open box, took one for himself, lit both.
“Well, I have to backtrack to tell you why I joined the NYPD. I joined because it was the religion I was brought up with. My father was a captain, three of my brothers were already on the force, one of them a sergeant, and we were that other kind of Irish family you don’t hear too much about. I mean honest like an iron girder. So when a year into my marriage I found that Mario was taking money from the mob, I broke with him even though we already had Clare by then. I flipped from violent love to violent contempt in about twenty-four hours. After all, I’d heard my dad preach against corrupt cops every mealtime for as long as I could remember. And I was very young. The young think in black and white; Americans think in black and white; cops definitely think in black and white. Mario was wrong; I was right.
“Italians don’t think in black and white, though. To them it’s all negotiable. I think that was our real point of disagreement, looking back. He was shocked, pleaded with me, told me how much he loved me. But I turned myself to stone.”
She smiled up at Chan, paused to inhale from the cigarette.
“There’s nothing wrong with criminals,” Chan said, “except that they break the law.”
“Looking back, I think I could have saved him. I’m old-fashioned enough to think that a woman can do that for a man. Now let’s fast forward a bit. Clare stays with me, sees her father weekends; I throw myself into my work. Sure, I go through a man-hating period, but it didn’t last that long. I’m one of those women who actually like men. My feminism was the political, economic kind. Still is, for that matter. Equal rights, equal pay. A lot has to do with being a single-parent family and with some frustration I’m getting with my promotion prospects. This is still early days for women in corporate slash institutional America. I honestly don’t believe I was especially strident. It just happens that Clare absorbed the message that men are rotten through and through and just there to be used.”
Moira paused, musing. “The other stuff I tried to instill in her, like respect for others, respect for the law, be a good citizen, work ethic—the more challenging part of my message, you might say—that washed right over. And we were living in the Bronx. In the back of my mind I know she’s doing bad things, but I have a life of my own. Men come and go; I’m losing a lot of my hard edges; I even dream of hooking up with Mario from time to time, although he’s turned into a womanizer pure and simple. Clare still sees him once a week. He gives her money, more money than anyone on the NYPD payroll could afford to give a teenage girl. What does she spend it on? I don’t even dare to ask. All I can do is check her body, her eyes, the color in her cheeks. As far as I can tell, she’s not doing anything real bad. She even goes skateboarding in Central Park. Her coordination is excellent. I take some comfort from that.”
Moira threw the remains of her cigarette on the ground, rubbed it out with her shoe. “Sure is beautiful here, Charlie. Kinda mind-blowing, considering that this trip, this moment, wasn’t even in my thoughts five days ago. Where was I?”
“Clare.”
“Right. So, the first time I find her making love with another girl I’m shocked, I mean shaken to the bones.”
“Another girl?” Chan frowned. There were plenty of Chinese
who looked on male homosexuality as a recent Western import. Lesbianism was a vice so exotic it was hardly more than a myth. What did lesbians do?
“Correct. This is not something my Catholic upbringing prepared me for despite sixteen years on the force. I restrain myself, though, tell myself it’s just a phase. But frankly I’m disappointed. I don’t have a problem with gays anymore, it’s not a moral issue for me, strictly speaking, but in Clare’s case it just strikes me as so damn—well, selfish.”
“Ah, yes.”
“Still, what’s done is done. Fast forward to her eighteenth year, high school graduation. She’s a beautiful young woman. A beautiful young lesbian actually. But cunning. She’s gotten herself a lot of street wisdom growing up where she did, and she sure as hell ain’t going to join the NYPD. She can see the world is more or less still run by men, and being a lesbian isn’t going to get her a whole lot of mileage in most conventional jobs. She goes to her father, who by now is deeply in with the mob.
“I mean deeply. He’s a millionaire captain of the NYPD. It’s only a matter of time before they catch him, but he doesn’t care anymore. He’ll do some time, not too much, and retire. What help can he give a girl just about to enter the real world? He assumes she wants money, but it isn’t that. She wants entry. To the mob.”
Moira paused again. Chan was aware of a diminishing of the intimacy between them as she retreated more deeply into her memories, and his cop’s instinct made him wonder what was coming next. He didn’t want to lose her, though. He wanted that touch of love for one more night, that mature caress. God knew there had not been many in his life. He drew her closer, and she smiled gratefully.
“Of course a lot of this stuff I didn’t know at the time. I’m giving you the benefit of some years of research and a whole decade of soul-searching. Mario explains that the mob doesn’t employ women, at least not on the executive level. It’s a very old-fashioned organization. Now, I don’t know how she got from there to being the mistress of one of the senior members in the Corleone branch,
but Mario must have introduced her. For that I’m unable to forgive him. Nor do I know how she managed to fake it in bed all those years because this daughter of mine is very, very gay. I guess it was one of those dirty weekend affairs and she was only too glad when he went home to his wife.”
Moira sighed. “I guess she gets plenty of money to live on and time to decide what to do with her life. One thing about her, she likes to learn. She’s good at it. She reads a lot, and the mob is always on her reading list. She finds out that the way the American Mafia makes most of its dollars these days is by laundering money for less sophisticated operations, especially the Colombians. The Colombians have so much cash from the cocaine boom in the States and in Europe, they actually contract out the laundering to the Mafia, which charges twenty cents on the dollar. So Clare comes up with a proposition: Send me to college; let me learn about high finance; give me something to do, I’m bored. The consigliere shrugs, why not? The mob hires Harvard M.B.A.’s to count their cash; maybe she could be useful.
“So, she spends three years at the university and actually enjoys it. Her thesis was money laundering and the effect it had on the national economy. I think the mob really fascinated her.
“So she goes back to the consigliere, massages his ego, pours his favorite whiskey down his throat and talks about her future. We’re in late 1989, early 1990 now, when the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR ceased to exist. There’s a new boy on the block; he’s called the Russian Mafia. In the NYPD we expected war between the mobs when the Russians started coming in with a whole new spectrum of drugs, scams, weapons of all kinds, multimillion-dollar frauds, swindles like Al Capone only dreamed of. But the streets are strangely quiet. There’s no war. Why? Because even the Russian mob needs to launder money, and the local Mafia actually likes staying away from the heat. They’ve taken a few hits from FBI investigations, and anyway, they’ve got all the money they need. They’ve sent their own kids to college and told them crime doesn’t pay. Why not sit back and rake in twenty or more percent on the narco dollar while the other guy takes the risk?
“This news excited Clare no end. After a hell of a lot of cajoling she persuades the don to take her to East Berlin in the summer of 1990, which is a high-level meeting between Russian gangsters and the heads of the five New York families and a few others as well. You don’t have to take my word for it; this meeting was monitored by the FBI. Journalists have written articles, books about it. It sounds like a bad novel, but what happened at that meeting was organized crime from different countries carved up the Western world. The main play was between the Russians on the one hand and the Americans and Sicilians on the other. The Americans had the expertise in laundering, the Sicilians had access to every member state of the European Community and the Russians—well, they had everything that was left in Russia. There was no government there anymore. You could buy tanks by the dozen, rocket launchers, AK-forty-sevens by the truckload, gold, oil, silver, aluminum, copper—just about everything people want and need. Of course I didn’t know at the time that Clare had gone to that meeting. I just remember how proud of herself she was around that time. She looked like she’d conquered the world. Can I have another cigarette?”
Chan took the box out of the pocket of his white jacket. While Moira had been talking, the night had thickened. Lovers strolled past arm in arm, Japanese photographers screwed thousand-dollar cameras into tripods, trying to find an original perspective on one of the most photographed night scenes in the world. Sitting on the bench, he had heard about twenty different languages spoken by the people passing behind their backs. If Moira was telling him that there was a truly international dimension to the murders he was investigating, where would he start? People moved around these days almost as easily as money. Dual, triple nationality was common, and most successful gangsters had upwards of fifty bank accounts.
He lit their cigarettes. Moira took a long pull. “Then the world came to an end for her. It happened all at once. The consigliere finally found her in bed with another woman. There’s a fight, Clare threatens to inform on him—something you just don’t do, right? A few days later she’s busted for marijuana. Ironic, considering what
she had been doing for most of her life. She maintained it was the mob planted it on her as a warning. Anyway, she was cut off, out in the cold. Not total excommunication but a punishment. They knew she couldn’t survive without them; they wanted to make sure she knew it too. The message was pretty clear: Shape up, dahlin’, or next time the frame-up will send you to jail for the rest of your life. I don’t think Clare had ever shot up on reality before; she’d assumed she’d survive on street cunning and teenage luck forever. She wasn’t free at all. They owned her, all of her.”
Chan grunted. Enslavement by organized crime was as old as China.
“Worst of all, the smack she’d been using for over ten years was pure, the stuff that arrives in bulk before it’s cut with all kinds of junk. She’d been getting it through her mob connections and was able to pay for it with mob money. When she couldn’t get it anymore, she got real sick. That’s when she came back to live with me. She would lie on her bed most of the day shivering, groaning. Sometimes she would double up with cramps that lasted hours. Sometimes she would lash out at me with her fists. Elegance was only ever skin-deep with her. The best I could do was get her small hits off the street and some methadone to ease the sickness. I took time off work to sit with her. It went on for over a month, and during that month I think I aged inside about a hundred years because it was then that she talked, mostly in a semicoma.
“Little by little I pieced together everything I’ve just told you—and suffered my first clinical depression. I had to accept that even in the depths of her sickness all she could think of was getting back into the mob, shooting up on the best-quality smack, setting up a money-laundering operation bigger than anyone else’s, finding some homeless young girl to seduce.
“Flesh, drugs, power—they were what she lived for. Well, for her the clouds dispersed one day. She’d been right about one thing: The mob wanted to use her services. They figured she’d been punished enough and knew a little more about the lines of power. If she belonged to a made member, she belonged to a made member, no more girls. She got hold of her favorite drugs, started to smile
again, forgot about me. She moved out as soon as she could. Last I heard from her was about two and a half years ago. She came around, tried to give me a bunch of money, which I refused. I remember she was talking about China a lot, had been to a bookstore and bought a whole load of books. It seemed to spin off from the book I gave you,
The Travels of Marco Polo
, that she’d read over and over while she was sick.
“So, Clare was back on her feet, but I wasn’t. I started drinking heavy. And stealing. The first time I did it I was so drunk I couldn’t believe it the next day. On the third occasion I took early retirement from the NYPD so as not to embarrass the force. Crazy the way some of us cling to morality, isn’t it? Why did I start stealing? My probation officer says it’s common, a psychological reflex he calls flip-flop. People who’ve followed one rigid path all their lives when hit by a serious trauma do a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree flip. They act out the very behavior they’ve always deplored. Being a Catholic, I can’t help seeing it as a kind of punishment for pride. I sure don’t despise anyone anymore the way I used to despise Mario. I started lying a lot too, to cover up. I always wanted her to study sociology, to be interested in people. So often as a cop you get to thinking there must be a better way of helping pathetic people than locking them up—you ever think that?”
Chan inhaled. “And you haven’t heard from her at all since she stopped by with the money?”
Moira shook her head. “No. Not a word. I can’t give you any more help, Chief Inspector, because I don’t know nothin’. I guess you’re glad now I’ll be out of your hair tomorrow, huh?”
Chan took her hand, gazed into her eyes. He reminded himself: Directness was a virtue with Westerners. “I’ve got a hard-on,” he said.
23
C
han wanted badly to know if the divers had discovered anything at the second dive site where he had seen the trunk, but he resisted calling Higgins. It was Sunday. Moira’s plane would be leaving early the next morning. He took her to breakfast in a large hotel in Central, then proposed that they check into the Grand Hyatt for a day and a night. Chan’s flat wasn’t designed for full-time habitation by adult humans. Moira agreed on condition she pay half the bill.