John Burdett - The Last Six Million Seconds

“She had a long affair with a mafioso. Moira mentioned that.”

Chan was startled to hear Coletti laugh. “Alberto Gambucci. Short, fat, balding, never handled a gun in his life. A laundry man. When he found Clare in bed with a black girl, he came to see me and burst into tears.”

Coletti shook his head. Amusement had collected around his eyes.

Chan lit a cigarette. “Most of your daughter’s life is clear to me, except for the end. Two triad members? In Hong Kong?”

“We need more drinks.”

Chan watched Coletti push through the dancers to the bar. He was still a striking figure, a man who’d never been afraid of any woman. Total confidence was a winning hand, even at fifty, it seemed. Coletti was talking to the blond woman and smiling while waiting for his drinks. The young man with ginger hair was scowling at the collection of upturned bottles behind the bar, turning his head as if to read them.

Coletti collected the two pints of lager, gave the blond woman one last charming smile, returned through the crowd while she glanced after him. The ginger man tried to resume the conversation with her, but she moved away.

“She was a dreamer,” Coletti said as he put the mugs down on the Formica. “Very clever, in another age might have been an academic. As a kid she wanted to know about the stars. I thought she might be some kind of scientist. And she had a smack habit. What does that add up to?” He shrugged. “A brilliant smack addict who knew almost nothing of the world outside the Bronx? Can you imagine the distorted view of reality in that kid’s brain? It took her a year, but in the end she sold the idea to Gambucci, who sold it to the don.”

“China?”

“Right. China. Why not? It made perfect sense. The Sicilian cousins had beaten us in getting into bed with the Russians, but nobody was even thinking about China at that stage. Most New Yorkers have only a hazy idea where it is. Why not establish contacts at an early stage in the collapse of another huge Communist empire so that this time the American mafiosi can run all the currency scams, sell the tanks to Saddam Hussein, the AK-forty-sevens to the Palestinians, the rocket launchers to the IRA, fragmentation grenades to Colombians, grab all that morphine moving from the Golden Triangle? Before the collapse of the Soviet Union it would have sounded harebrained. Afterwards it seemed inevitable.”

“But nobody spoke Mandarin?”

Coletti laughed again. “Right. Nobody spoke Mandarin. Approaching Chinese isn’t like approaching Russians. It isn’t like approaching anyone. How do you climb over the wall? Clare had an answer for that. Contacts between the mob and the New York triads had been pretty good for a decade. There’s a lot of respect. Admiration, you might say. Their omertà is a lot more intact than ours. Ever hear of a triad member testifying in front of a grand jury?”

“So Yu and Mao were recruited?”

“Yeah. They were recruited. There’s a deal, an understanding. The 14K thought it was a very good idea. They saw the potential and were realistic enough to see that they would need our contacts in making the sales. Middle Eastern terrorists don’t speak Mandarin either. Neither do Colombians. At the same time the 14K saw an opportunity to outstrip the Sun Yee On, United Bamboo-the competition, in other words.”

Chan’s brain was racing. It wasn’t so much the story Coletti was telling; it was the magnitude of the enterprise. A twentieth-century female Marco Polo opening a new Silk Road from East to West. Except that silk had nothing to do with it.

The band was playing “Born in the USA.” Coletti was right: Their imitation was perfect; it could have been Springsteen at the microphone. And on the floor in front of their eyes East had been meeting West for more than an hour. Joint ventures had already been agreed, the night taken care of. The ginger man was talking to the blond woman again. Now she was listening. It was that time in the evening when people began to be afraid of going home alone.

“One thing I can’t understand,” Chan said, “an organization like the American Mafia sends a young woman and two triad members to negotiate on their behalf? Would they do that?”

In the middle of swallowing more beer, Coletti shook his head. “Look at it from the other direction. Sending Clare, they had nothing to lose. It was a spearhead mission. Being a woman, it would have been easy to disown her if things went wrong. If she fucked up and lost her life, what did they lose? A dyke with a habit they could do without. And she was keen, keen. It was all her idea, her baby. I can almost be proud of her for that. And one other thing, who else would have gone? Have you any idea how afraid Italians are of the mysterious East? We have no structures out here, no references. But someone had to come. Once Clare had put the idea into their heads someone had to make the gesture. They almost got into a fever about it. It was only a matter of time before the competition thought of it. If the Sicilians tied up the East as well as Russia, it would be the biggest commercial organization in the world. Notice, I didn’t say criminal organization, I said commercial. Nothing would be bigger, not McDonald’s, not Shell Oil, not Coke-nobody. They would have a yearly turnover bigger than the gross national product of any country outside the USA and Japan. The Americans sent Clare to beat our cousins in Palermo.”

“But something went wrong?”

“Yeah. Something did. Don’t worry, I’m not here to find out what. I’m just here to tie up loose ends. The 14K, not the FBI, got ahold of the dental records. They want to know if their guys were the ones in the vat.”

“That’s why you’re here?”

“I guess.”

“The Mafia sent you on behalf of the triads?”

“I’m her father, aren’t I?”

Not helping with the inquiry, then, or trying to be a good cop. On the contrary, obeying orders even while the cancer ate his intestine. It was the only way to leave the Cosa Nostra; Chan had read that somewhere. Maybe that’s why Coletti wasn’t putting up much of a fight against the disease.

As they were saying good night outside Coletti’s hotel, Chan said, “Did Moira go and see you before she came out to Hong Kong?”

Coletti hesitated. “Sure. She had to. I paid for all of Clare’s medical bills. I was the only one with enough influence with the dentist to get the records. Moira didn’t even know who the dentist was.”

Dental records again, Chan thought. They’d been a blessing throughout the case. If the truth were known, all the breakthroughs had come without any effort on his part at all. But then the reality of detection was often thus. The detective was merely a lamppost around which informers gathered to do their business.

In the beginning was the Word. But it was sung, not spoken. Prehistoric humans from Peking Man in the East to Cro-Magnon in the West used the full range of the vocal scale to sing instructions for the hunt, sing guidance to their children, sing reverence to the gods that provided the mammoths. They would have despised the flat, dead speech of modern times for the tuneless whitterings of ghosts. A few tongues retain an echo of that Neolithic music: French has it in glacé form, Italian tries harder than most, Thai can be lyrical, Mandarin has its moments of sublime tunefulness; but the oldest language in modern usage is also the most musical. With nine tones to condition meaning Cantonese can present a challenge to a tin ear from the Bronx.

Moira played the tapes, dutifully repeated: “ Nei ho ma? How are you? Nei hui bin do a? Where are you going? M sai jaau lak. Keep the change.”