“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.”
“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?”