John Burdett - The Last Six Million Seconds

Delaney reassessed Chan, who held his gaze.

“Wings still intact? That would have been something to see.”

Chan lit a cigarette without offering one to Delaney. “Actually I checked with immigration. You used your own passport. No one called Delaney entered Hong Kong in the last twenty-four hours. Someone called Coletti did, though.”

Chan sipped his beer. Coletti scanned the room.

“You know, Charlie, you might just be the smartest cop on the block. In the NYPD we all stopped thinking a long time ago-something to do with Western decadence. People just stop asking the important questions. Anything more exalted than money and flesh is a conversation killer.”

Four young Filipino men with long black hair, denims cut off at the thigh, T-shirts with sunsets bursting from their solar plexuses walked onto the low stage, picked up guitars and started in to “I Just Called to Say I Love You.”

The crowd of Filipinas near the stage began to sway and twist with the music.

“Hey, that’s a perfect imitation.” Coletti looked genuinely impressed. “And they didn’t spend twenty minutes tuning their guitars.”

“What’s more important than money and flesh?” Chan said. “God? drugs? Family?”

Coletti popped another pill into his mouth, swallowed it with a long slug of beer.

“It’s cancer, Charlie. Of the colon. Moira doesn’t know, and I’d be obliged to you if you didn’t tell her. I’ll tell her in my own way someday soon. She didn’t give anything away when she came back, by the way, but there was a cute Irish look in her eye. I was pleased for her, honest. She’s had a tough ride. Since she met me, actually. She had to come and see me, of course. Clare was my daughter too.”

“No cure? Chemotherapy?”

The American shrugged. “Sure, they can delay it, cut out bits of you, expose you to radiation till your hair falls out and you look like you’re dying of AIDS. Some people overcome it with sheer will, so they say. But I’m Italian. I have a sense that God’s telling me my time is up. Know what I mean?”

Half the young men at the bar began moving crabwise in the direction of the swaying dancers. Giggles and smiles burst out as the first contacts were made. Girls who had been dancing with girls were now half dancing with boys. Coletti was watching them.

“I don’t want my youth back, Charlie. I’d only abuse it all over again. My problem was overabundance: I was spoiled. And I always wanted more. Now I’m just trying to set the record straight. Italians like to die in peace; it’s important in our culture.”

Chan watched the dancers too. He hadn’t thought about it before, but it was in this bar that he’d first met Sandra. Not so long ago, just a few years really, he’d been like any one of those young men, who, now that he studied them, were not really so young. She’d called him with her eyes from the moment he’d walked in, although he’d gone straight to the bar and drunk for an hour before walking up to where she was waiting. Chemistry, she’d called it.

“I agree, I don’t want my youth back either. I don’t want to be that dumb again. What record are you trying to set straight?”

Despite what he’d said, Coletti was enjoying exchanging glances with a blonde standing at the bar whom Chan hadn’t noticed before. She was thirty-five going on forty. At that age it was hard for a woman to come to a bar like this and melt into the wallpaper. Coletti took his eyes away, smiled sheepishly.

“After Moira left, I ran wild. You develop a certain skill. I guess that’s what vice is in a way, an ego skill you don’t want to give up. I bet I won’t get looks like that after the chemotherapy.” He sipped his beer. “Clare, that’s the record I’d like to set straight.”

“You’re not here officially at all?”

“No. You could have me busted for impersonating Frank Delaney. He’s a pal of mine actually; he’d probably cover for me. But somehow I don’t think you will.”

“Why impersonate anyone?”

“To make it look official. Embarrassment. Because you know too much about me. You did sleep with Moira, right? So she talked to you. These days Moira talks a lot.” When Chan didn’t reply, Coletti said, “See what I mean? In our business we don’t like to admit we’re human. I’m here because I’m a pathetic dumb father who failed his wife and kid and has got cancer and can’t think of anything positive to do except help with the investigation. After all these years what I really want is to be a good cop. Fuck.” He looked Chan full in the face. He was using his soft eyes, those deep brown woman’s eyes Chan had first noticed. “If we knew that one day our values would change, that we would finally grow up, we’d be more careful how we lived our lives.”

Chan watched the other man’s eyes look away across the floor. The blond woman was listening to a balding young man with ginger hair who made intense thrusting gestures with his hands. Her eyes returned to Coletti every so often, but the frequency was diminishing. Coletti flung a hand in her direction.

“The number of times I’ve gotten myself trapped by moments like that. You wake up two years and a lot of heartache later wondering why you didn’t have the sense to go to bed early that night. If I’d stuck with Moira, I wouldn’t have wasted my life. She told you I was with the mob, didn’t she?”

It was Chan’s turn to look around the room. A small group of Filipinas was holding together chattering in Tagalog, but most of the fifty or so girls who had been standing near the bandstand were with Western men now. At the bar some more Western women had appeared. They looked around hungrily, in a hurry, perhaps, to pass on to the next stage of the evening.

Chan always found it interesting how few Chinese men came to places like this. The ones who did usually drank alone, staring intensely into their beer. Like him. That night in bed Sandra had said she was attracted by his fierce independence, the obvious strength expressed by proud solitude. She hadn’t noticed the racial wall he’d had to climb or the crippling shyness that took two pints of lager to dissolve. Even on his best nights he’d been capable of no more than one overture to a Western woman. If rebuffed, he’d go home to his flat to watch kung fu videos, like a good Chinese. The truth was, Western women were terrifying. Terrifying in their promiscuity, their fearlessness. Most of all in their bodies that were the foundation of a planet-wide advertising industry. All over the world it seemed that nothing was sold, nothing was bought without a nudge from a pair of Caucasian mammary glands to help the transaction along. What was a poor Eurasian boy to do? From puberty his hormones had been focused on the tits of the West.

“I’m not too clear,” Chan said. It was a direct translation of the most overused phrase in Chinese. All over the People’s Republic from Tibet to Shanghai his people were avoiding issues with those magic words. He added: “She said something about it.”

Coletti nodded. “I can’t blame her. I never saw it her way till now. Italians, poor ones anyway, we’re brought up to see the U.S. as a potentially hostile environment where we need to pull together to survive. Taking money was just a part of it. I was a member of a tribe, that’s the truth. And I will be till I die, actually. As Clare grew up, it wasn’t so easy to keep it from her during her weekly custody visits. And she was intrigued. Moira never understood, but I did. It was very simple. Clare was growing up in the South Bronx just off Southern Boulevard in an environment more hostile than anything Moira or I had been exposed to in our youth. Indian Country, the cops called it. Alligators grow scales; snakes use poison; cats grow claws; dogs bite. Everything in nature adapts to the environment. What was a smart, attractive blond girl supposed to do? The boys were savage; the streets were a jungle. In the Bronx the government had abdicated. Big-time crime was the only activity that was organized. And Clare wanted to get ahead. I still don’t blame her. I blame myself. I could have done better.”