Year of the Dragon Read Online Free Page B

and had begun now to vomit. More stretchers. Shouts. Projectors blazed. Cameramen ran. Stretcher-bearers ran. Doors slammed. Engines came on. Headlights came on. Vehicles lurched into motion. Sirens wailed. The building was expelling all it could not hold down.
    It was a scene of wild disorder, and Carol watched it enthralled. High tragedy and low comedy had become the same, funeral and carnival were the same. Disorder had become beautiful, as seductive as illicit sex, as seductive as vice. She felt giddy with excitement, and at the same time felt that her excitement was somehow lewd. She was taking pleasure in a perversion. Violent crime, she saw, created disorder and disorder created more disorder. And she wondered if it was not the disorder that men - beginning with the police - found so dangerous, rather than the crime itself. If disorder of such magnitude was allowed to prevail, then no one was safe. Perhaps it was to this intellectual concept, and to no other, that the police responded. They had rushed into the Golden Palace to restore order. On a room littered with corpses they rushed to impose routine. They closed off the room and would let no one in until they had done it. Without being able to see them, Carol saw what they were still doing in there, filling out forms, drawing diagrams, signing their names.
    First the room, then the street itself. When the last ambulance had squealed away a squad of patrolmen came out. These cops, she saw, had their orders: they had been ordered to order the crowd to disperse. Their uniforms were buttoned. The buttons shone. Their caps were straight. They moved forward blunt as truncheons.
    “Go on home now.”
    “It’s all over here.”
    She heard the lines they spoke, and foresaw the result. Their roles were poorly acted and had been poorly written in the first place. As they moved into it, the crowd became amorphous. The cops sank in like blows into dough. They intimidated no one. Tonight’s play had at least one more act to run, and the crowd was eager to see how it ended. The crowd was single-minded. Recognizing this quickly - that the crowd was more disciplined than they were - the cops recognized also their own failure, and since there were no commanders urging them into the breach against such hopeless odds, their bullying ceased. They pretended to become nonchalant. They attempted to make jokes, and even friends. They accepted the status quo, and so did the crowd.
    The doors to the Golden Palace sprang back once more, and Chief of Detectives Cirillo strode forth accompanied by Chief of Patrol Duncan. Cirillo was short and fat. Gray hair. Gray suit. He was chewing on a cigar. Carol did not know him. Duncan, who wore braid on his cap and three stars on each epaulet, was a man of commanding presence and ramrod-straight posture. When in civilian clothes he was often taken not for a policeman but for a general. Carol did not know Duncan either.
    But the news crews, recognizing both officers, grasped immediately what their appearance meant.
    Press Conference.
    The outlying citizens only pressed more firmly against the barricades, leaned more perilously out of windows, but the crowds of news crews converged. Truth was to be dispensed, and they wanted some. They sprinted for position, fought for it. Encountering resistance they shouldered forward. Elbows flailed. Gear flailed. Women’s handbags flailed. It was as rough as a cavalry charge. It was punctuated not by bugles but by curses. Like many searches after the truth, this one was not pretty.
    Cirillo and Duncan, one step up on the stoop, were responsible for what was happening. They had willed it to happen for they wanted to shine, and this was their moment. Yet they pretended indifference. They were superior to the moment and to the scuffling news crews as well, and wore half-repressed half-smiles to prove it. They were as smug as film stars. While microphones were lashed into place in front of them, they made whispered