Year of the Dragon by Robert Daley

Author:Robert Daley [Robert Daley]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction/Crime
ISBN: 9781612307831
Publisher: New Word City, Inc.
Published: 2014-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

POWERS AND his wife sat at dinner at a table under a chandelier in Ting’s restaurant.

“This is my precinct,” Powers said. “Which means I have to be seen here more or less around the clock. It’s called showing concern.”

“More tea?” Eleanor poured it into both cups. “I’m a little gun-shy about eating in this place, though. After what happened to you here the last time, I mean.”

Powers’ own memories of that night were focused at this moment on Carol Cone. The machine gunning was over. His affair with Carol was not.

He said, “Besides, I want Ting to think I’m keeping an eye on him.”

“He hasn’t so much as glanced this way since we sat down. Somehow I don’t think he’s as afraid of you as you might like.”

“It’s not funny, Eleanor.”

“You don’t have to snap at me.”

Powers looked across at Ting, who stood armed with menus at the door. “I could have sworn he was straight,” he said, “a victim, like nearly everyone else in Chinatown. Until he went with Koy to meet that Mafia guy.”

“You can’t really be sure who Ting met, or what was said,” Eleanor told him. “Maybe you’re leaping to conclusions.”

“I don’t think so.”

“The police mind is always so certain when it thinks it has discovered evil.”

A deeper remark, Powers reflected, than perhaps Eleanor knew. With his chopsticks, he pushed unknown ingredients around on his plate, for he was not hungry. Instead he watched Eleanor eat, and brooded about the nature of evil, a popular topic these days, especially among liberal intellectuals, of whom this city was so full. Such persons talked about evil in abstract terms, which cops never did. To cops evil was not abstract. It was physical, and usually extremely bloody. Often it was repulsive, often it stunk - you had to hold your nose to get into the room with it. To cops it was also commonplace. They came upon it every day, and thought about it more than they wanted to, and struggled with insights about its nature - insights denied to those moral philosophers and political philosophers who only talked so much about it, without ever having had to clean up after it. It was cops who carried the corpses out. That was the principal difference in outlook between cops and thinkers. It was also the reason cops took evil so much more seriously, so much more personally, than thinkers did. And yet the most evil-prone among us, Powers reflected, devoted only a minuscule percentage of his time to committing evil, probably less than one percent a day. However, the tendency in him to commit evil was most likely constant, and therefore so terribly dangerous to other people that it had to be extirpated, and the only way the person’s deplorable tendency could be extirpated was by extirpating the person himself - which was what cops did. That was the line of work they were in. So yes, to cops and to Powers evil was not abstract, not intellectual, but physical and personal.

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