Year of the Dragon Read Online Free Page A

accompanying laughter. The jokes became like the corpses upstairs. Not even a machine would laugh at them now. Her grim report turned the next jokes unfunny also, a thought that occurred to her as she spoke. Well, that’s television.
    She told what she knew, or thought she knew, which wasn’t much. An attack on a Chinatown restaurant with automatic weapons by unknown assailants for unknown reasons. Casualties unknown. Assailants escaped after a gun battle in the street with the well-known hero cop Captain Powers. She could not as a conscientious journalist keep him out completely. She would have lost her fat contract had she tried. But after much thought she had decided not to present herself as an eyewitness, nor even to place herself inside the restaurant. She didn’t do it for his sake. But she had, after all, witnessed nothing. She had spent the entire action on her back under a man, a position that was familiar to her, though the circumstances were not. There seemed no way to describe her part in this without making it sound like kinky sex. For her the experience had a distinct flavor of kinky sex anyway, as if birth and death had been present at the same time. She had never before lain under a man while people died around her, and her remembered sensations were acute. She could feel Powers’ weight on her still - he was heavier than he looked - while his hands learned all about her. She could feel his hands on her also, and this disturbed her.
    As she did her report she was wearing her plastic rain hood, but not her coat, which was upstairs checked. She considered it lost and planned to replace it, billing the network. Her blond-streaked, lacquered hair, being protected, was still neat, but her dress was soaked through. This was spring rain, and she was cold. Microphone at her lips, she stood in the sudden blinding glare, sunlight without warmth, which illuminated her face and upper body, the facade of the Golden Palace behind her, and that segment of sidewalk that had become her stage. As she spoke she was aware as always of spectators. She felt them pressing forward to hear her secrets.
    The illumination was cut off. She handed back her microphone. A sound man threw his coat over her shoulders and was rewarded by two seconds’ worth of her famous smile.
    She watched rival correspondents, also using the Golden Palace as background, perform similar rites. Projectors came on. Fragments of rainy night were transformed into hallucinatory day. In an earlier age the same thing would have happened, Carol reflected. A generation ago press photographers had used strobe lights, and a generation before that, with press cards stuck in their hatbands, they had exploded the flash bulbs attached to the sides of their speed grafflexes. The tradition extended backwards through the flash pans of daguerreotypers to the up-thrust flaming torches of cavemen. Disaster was and had always been a riddle that had to have light thrown on it. Present-day illumination seemed brighter and longer-lasting only by comparison; it conquered no greater darkness, revealed the essential riddle no better than anything in the past.
    The Golden Palace seemed to her like a bastion under siege. Its defenders could not be seen. She and her colleagues had it surrounded. Network vans waited on the perimeter, as watchful as tanks. Cameramen moved into position, their instruments primed and aimed. Light men carried projectors forward, their job to throw up flares for the gunners to sight by. Television was the besieging army, no question about it, and if you did not believe this, ask the police. The police knew who the enemy was, and hid.
    At last the bastion’s doors were flung open. The crowd became agitated and pressed forward: mixed tourists and Chinese crowding the barricades, Chinese faces in windows and doorways, individual crowds of wet, uncomfortable newsmen in the street. The first stretchers came out. It was as if the building had dined too copiously