I headed over to the Five Precinct on Elizabeth for the 0800 to 1600 shift. It was a cold January morning, but I was sweating. Something didn’t feel right. I chomped down on a Tic Tac and toyed with my right collar.
The street was filled with high-school kids heading to the subway. After school was over, they’d head off to college-prep classes and/or piano lessons. Saturdays were for Chinese school and Sundays were for Chinese church. Chinese kids learned how to cram, or they learned how easily their skin bruised.
The kids stared at me as I walked by. I could see they were worried that if they didn’t get into a good college, they’d end up with a dumb, low-paying job like mine. That was the Chinese attitude about it. I smiled and said, “Good morning,” to the kids closest to me as I went up the steps.
“Good morning,” the kids said to their socks.
The Five Precinct is an old brick building in the middle of the block, on the west side of Elizabeth Street between Canal and Bayard. The Five was built in 1881, and being in there is like taking a trip back to those days. There’s no elevator and no modern heating. Someone was always on duty to shovel coal into the furnace in the basement. The giant iron hook on a chain at street level hauled out bins of coal ashes, but all the parents told their kids the hook was for hanging criminals.
When you first come in the door, the C.O.’s office is to the immediate left. There were only two reasons you’d be called in there: if you were in trouble, or if you were in big trouble.
The commanding officer was a small, thin Irishman named Sean Ahern. He had short reddish-brown hair, without a spot of gray although he was well into his 50s. His clear blue eyes twinkled when he looked directly at you, which was deceptive, because he was never nice to anyone, and the last thing you’d ever want to do was block his view of his closed office door.
The C.O. favored heavy-soled shoes that he liked to stomp, even when he was sitting. In his chair, he liked to hunker down, pound his fist on the table, and look up at you, as if you were some bully out of his childhood that he never got to settle the score with.
His right eyebrow was missing hair about the width of a pinkie right in the middle. When he raised his voice, his eyebrow went up and you could see the muscle in that hairless part flex. That was why we called him the Brow.
The Brow kept a woodcut print framed on the wall above his head. A British soldier in a Revolutionary War uniform stood with one foot raised on a step and one hand brandishing a sword over his head. In front of him was a defiant teenager in rags holding up a dirty elbow to block the soldier’s blow.
I’ll never forget my first day at the Five and my first meeting with the Brow. I couldn’t believe I’d gotten assigned to Chinatown. It was the last precinct I’d wanted, and everyone else from my class had been assigned elsewhere. Funnily enough, everyone else wasn’t Chinese.
By the time I walked into the Brow’s office for the first time, I was already having second thoughts about what I was doing there. The reek of gun oil filled my nose and mouth while resentment throbbed in my heart. In the Five precinct I’d be dealing with people who knew me and my parents. People who would ask about the war, my father, and other stupid questions. I’d even considered putting my badge on the table and saying, “That’s all, folks!”
Instead, I stared at the British soldier woodcut. There wasn’t much else to look at apart from the Brow’s face.
He followed my stare to the woodcut and spoke.
“That dirty little boy is Andrew Jackson, the first Irish President of the United States,” he said. “That’s him being slashed for refusing to shine that bloody English officer’s shoes. Carried that scar on his arm to the grave. Now let me make something clear to you, mister. I don’t shine anyone’s shoes, either!”
He looked at me expectantly.
“Yes, sir.” Apart from being a sign of respect, it gave me something to say.
Then he exhaled slowly and stretched his arms a little.
“I understand, Mr. Chow, that you’re one of our boys from Vietnam. A good soldier follows his conscience. A good policeman, too. I’ll bet you’re wondering why you’re here and how we selected you for our rather exclusive house.” The Five had a rep for being one of the safest precincts in the city, with great cheap food. It was a nice place to work 20 years and then retire at half pay.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, it just so happens that you’re a very special person to this house, don’t you know? As a Chinese cop, you’re very important to our image in the community.”
“Yes, sir.”
“In fact, from time to time, I’d like to ask you to represent us at community functions and other gatherings. Just talk to people. Smile. Show them you care.”
“Sir, I’m not one of the more experienced men. . .”
“But, son, you’ve got the right look.” I felt honored to be asked to represent the house, but at the same time, I was being asked to be the resident wok jockey. I leaned back on my heels and stared at little Andrew Jackson.
“You really like that woodcut, don’t you? That little lad Jackson stood up to that English bastard, and he went on to become one of the great Presidents of the United States of America.” The Brow squinted his eyes at me before continuing. “He’s the only Irish President I care for. That Kennedy was a dirty, dissolute man who got everything
he deserved.”
“What do you think about McKinley, sir?” I asked. I knew that William McKinley was Irish because in grade school.
I’d gotten stuck writing a profile about him.
The Brow’s brow went up.
“I don’t think about McKinley!” He pounded the desk and cocked his head at an angle. “And neither should you, mister! There are crimes being committed right this second! Now go do something about it!”
But of course, he didn’t really mean it. Well, sure he did want me to go write up tickets to bring some more money into the city. But he didn’t want me to seriously fight crime at large. That was for the real policemen.
I was the guy who proved that the NYPD could get along with people with sing-song names and black hair. I went to graduation ceremonies, new restaurant openings, and Chinese New Year celebrations.
It was great at first, but then I got to feeling like I was a teddy bear in a police uniform for the kids to hug, a prop for the newspaper photos. Once in a while they would let me handle a domestic complaint, the kind that broke up as soon as I rang the doorbell and resulted in nobody willing to press charges.
The other blues thought I was a joke.
In time I got to hating what I was doing and, worst of all, hating Chinese New Year and the rash of ceremonies I had to attend before, during, and after. That holiday used to mean a mouthful of candy to me. Now I was gritting my teeth through it. The NYPD liked us Chinese, all right. As long as we didn’t try to be more than a lowly beat cop.
Most daytours and nighttours would end with me drinking my fucking eyeballs dry.
—
Directly opposite the C.O.’s office, the desk sergeant sat up in his pulpit. The muster room for roll call and assignments was farther back inside, where it was always drafty. The door to the staircase going down into the backyard and the rear tenement would never stay shut. The back wall
of the muster room had an RC Cola machine and a candy machine. The holding cell for patrolmen was off to the side.
When you trudged up the wooden staircase to the second floor, you’d come across the detective squad and their holding cell. The third floor featured showers, lockers, and the most diverse collection of Hanoi Jane stickers in the world.
The fourth floor was called the lunch room, but the lights were off for the most part because cops on the turnaround and some old-timers liked to nap there. The place stank of cigarettes. The volume on the black and white TV was broken, probably on purpose, and the screen would bathe the sleeping cops in a fizzy light. The open and empty pizza boxes and crushed Coke cans on the table made the room look like a teen sleepover party that had run out of steam.
I was glad that I lived close to the Five. When I was coming off the 1600 to 0000 I could go home and sleep, then come back for the 0800 to 1600.
The only reason I’d go to the fourth floor was because, like a lot of the newer guys, my locker share was there. It was a big deal to get a share on the third floor when one opened up — a big enough deal to get into a pushing match.
It never mattered to me because I lived in a walkup and my legs, numbed to climbing, could take it. One more floor wasn’t going to change my life. But if you were planning
on doing 20 and out, one more floor every day for the next X number of years could drive you to murder. If a share on the third floor ever opened to me, I’d trade it for season Rangers tickets.
I got changed and got down to the muster room on time. I slept with my eyes open through most of roll call. They were telling us to look out for delinquent youth activity. But kids weren’t stupid. I’d been in a gang when I was a kid. Cops might as well look for signs of witchcraft. You weren’t going to catch anyone in the act of anything here.
I thought about my old partner, a guy named John Vandyne. He had moved on, and was now running with the detective squad of the precinct, so he didn’t have to stand for roll call anymore. Just before the layoffs and cutbacks kicked in, Vandyne and I had lost our sector car, but he’d found a way to pick up investigative assignments. He’d been on the job a year longer than me and the extra experience must have helped him.
They’d told me to walk a footpost to get in touch with the community. Yeah, that was how they put it. In one way, they were right. Most cops on the footpost sulked around, chatting more with tourists than with the Chinese.
The way the Chinese felt about it, talking in English to an American cop could only invite misfortune, like how visiting an American doctor can only cause you to become sick or start an entire chain of events to get you deported.
They’d let Vandyne work in plainclothes and someday soon he was going to have a detective’s gold shield. That was what I wanted, but I was too valuable as a Chinese face in uniform. I got to collar bad guys, but most of them were older Chinese men who frankly were no match for me.
Roll call droned on. I yawned into my fist through the last bit. Then I hit the street.
Right away, I had to stop for someone’s car that had gotten scraped by a tofu truck off of Baxter. I lifted up a flattened cardboard box on Bowery and told the guy under it to move on now that he’d had a full night’s sleep.
It was still cold, although the sun was bright as hell. My eyes felt raw and red. I rubbed them a little. I did a quick circuit of my footpost, just to make sure everything was set for the time being before heading for Martha’s Bakery. You don’t want buildings to burn down while you’re out for coffee.
Martha’s makes iced coffee by pouring old coffee into a foam cup, mixing in condensed milk from a can, and spooning in sugar like it was healthy to have. They stir it before they add in the ice. After they put on the lid, they turn it upside down and give it a few good shakes.
Two women at the counter handled several hundred customers in the morning rush hours, and neither was named Martha.
If Lonnie is making my coffee, I’ll take two hot-dog pastries fresh from the oven and damp with steam inside the wax-paper bag. A hot-dog pastry is a unique Chinese American invention. They use the same dough as for the custard buns and taro buns, only they wrap it around an Oscar Meyer hot dog. The ends stick out like horns on a Viking helmet. They’re good.
Lonnie was young, only 20, but very good-looking, and not too skinny. Well, how skinny can you stay working in a bakery? She had thick black hair that looked pretty okay
by me. Sometimes she’d tie it up with a plastic hair loop that helps women style hair that perms can’t curl.
Lonnie would shake my coffee upside down and say, “Officer Robert, how are you today?”
I’d say, “I’m fine, Lonnie,” and ask how her classes at Borough of Manhattan Community College in midtown were going. Lonnie was a business-communications concentration because she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. She was thinking about journalism. She once showed me her review of an Alexander Fu Sheng movie for the college newspaper. They’d spelled her last name wrong, but she had that clipping laminated. Of course, non-Chinese had no idea who Alexander was. We saw him as the new Bruce Lee, only with a sense of humor.
If Dori ended up making my coffee, I’d take three hot-dog pastries. Dori is in her 40s, unmarried, and not real eligible. She looks like the Pillsbury doughboy with a wig and talks at you, not to you. She’d slap my change on the counter so I’d have to pick up each penny.
I take that extra bun because Dori always made me think of what I had to look forward to in a few years. She made me not care what I looked like or what people thought of me.
One day, some other woman with about the same physical characteristics as Dori was behind the counter. But it was Dori. She wasn’t wearing any makeup and looked like she hadn’t showered. The collars of her uniform were wrinkled. I had to ask for my change that day. Lonnie told me later that Dori’s mother back in Hong Kong had died. Dori had been devastated about not making her mother a grandmother. But that didn’t stop her from coming into work. They got no sick days at Martha’s Bakery. A day out was a day with no pay and no free mistake pastries.
—
After getting two hot-dog pastries from Lonnie, I went back on the footpost. I checked meters and wrote out some parkers.
It was Monday, so I stopped by the toy shop on Mott to see if Moy wanted to have lunch. I’ve known Moy since second grade, when his family came over. He had wanted me to teach him English, but I’d referred him instead to “Hawaii Five-O.” His parents had opened a laundry at first, but they went with the toy shop when hula hoops got really big.
His parents were good at picking up on trends. Their store was the last place in New York you could get the sold-out G.I. Joe dolls with the special Kung-Fu Grip, marked up in price, of course.
It was just the two of them now, Moy and his dad. His mother had died of cancer when we were in high school. The lumpectomy hadn’t worked. She was nice.
Moy worked at the store almost 12 hours every day. His father never trusted anyone else to get behind the counter except me.
After Nam but before I got my head on right, Moy’s dad was nice enough to give me a job unpacking toys from boxes from Hong Kong. I couldn’t believe how much money kids had to spend. They were either skimming from their family businesses or selling fireworks to the tourists.
The work was pretty mindless, but it kept you busy. Two years went by like that, and, like Moy, I didn’t meet any girls there.
Like a lot of guys, I hadn’t had sex until I got to Nam. Some of the girls didn’t know what to make of me, but they took my money and let me go at it. It was five minutes of humping and 10 minutes of shame. I haven’t had sex since I came back to the world in 1972. I haven’t killed anyone since 1972, either. I kind of associate the two.
Moy had never had a girl ever, and sorting out spaceship models and monster replicas doesn’t sharpen social skills. He was average looking and at 26 he was only getting older. Like me.
The big problem with Moy was the hearing aid in his right ear. He was born with some kind of defect, but until he saw a doctor about it, he’d gotten hit on the head by various balls in gym class. Even now when you talked to him, Moy would cock his head and point his good left ear at you.
I popped my head into the toy store.
“Moy, you up for lunch?”
Moy leaned back against a glass case that showed off astronaut figures. He had freckles like Howdy Doody and bushy eyebrows shaded his watery eyes. Moy reached up with one hand and played with the wire that ran from his ear to the shirt pocket of his dark blue t-shirt.
“I’m hungry,” he said, “but I can’t leave. Dad’s at the post office and we’re getting a shipment in soon.”
“What’s coming in?” I asked.
“Models of robots and Godzilla.”
I left, got some noodles from a sidewalk cart, and walked them back to the toy store. We were almost done eating when Moy’s dad came in. He was wearing a worn felt beret and holding an orange plastic bag and a cane with side legs and a tiny seat that a folded out into a tiny stool. He looked like Moy, but with about 25% less fat, and had a voice harsh enough to tear through a sheet of Reynolds Wrap.
“You idiot, I said I would bring lunch! Why did you waste your money on that?” Moy’s dad growled.
“I’ll eat what you brought. This is just noodles,” said Moy.
“How are you, Uncle?” I said to Moy’s dad. “You’ve made enough money here. Time to move to California.” He frowned as he took plastic soup containers out of the orange bag.
“What for? Everything I ever knew about America is right here. I still have my friends here,” he said. Little bits of saliva sprayed on the glass counter as he talked. “I like it here. Don’t have to change anything.”
“You have to find a wife for your son,” I said. He laughed while Moy put his head down. I jabbed Moy’s arm. It felt a little flabby.
“Only thing I have to do is stay away from blacks,” Moy’s dad said. “When you see a black face around here, you better watch your wallet. They can slip it out of your pocket and you won’t even feel it. The only places they know how to behave are on the basketball court or in jail.” Then he laughed like he was saying, “It’s funny but it’s true!”
I stayed quiet. What can you say to a guy who was old and ugly, and had such a heavy accent when he spoke English it would make the white guy in “Kung Fu” cringe. He just wanted to be surrounded by Chinese faces for the rest of his life, which wouldn’t last much longer. Let him die like that.
—
After the 10-minute lunch, I left and walked to Columbus Park. A dark-skinned black man with a medium build was leaning against the iron fence. He was wearing a brown leather jacket with a ripped vest pocket and a Yankees hat with the brim curled down as far as blinders. He was watching men playing Chinese chess and frowning.
“Chow,” he said, and clapped my back. We did a one-arm embrace.
“Vandyne,” I said.
“I got a message for you from that Willie Gee. He said he wants police protection from the protesters. And he said he wanted to talk to a Chinese cop, because I wouldn’t
understand the cultural subtleties of running an honorable business.” Vandyne was smiling like he could prove someone wrong.
“Yeah, I’ll stop by later today,” I said. My footpost was Sector Alpha, which took me past Jade Palace on Bowery, south of Canal. It was the biggest dim-sum place in Chinatown, and Willie Gee was the owner.
“What are we supposed to do about the protestors?” I said. “They’ve got a permit. They’re staying behind police barricades. They’re not even that loud. And they only come out in force on the weekends for the dim-sum crowds.”
A bunch of former Jade Palace workers and their families were picketing the restaurant for paying below minimum wage and taking waiters’ tips. What was pretty dumb on the restaurant’s part was that they had rounded up stool-pigeon dishwashers and bus boys to stage the management’s own counter-picket, which they also had a permit for. That made the protest seem twice as large to tourists coming in for dim sum, because you had two groups holding signs in Chinese and yelling at each other
in Chinese.
“You know what the protesters are doing now?” asked Vandyne. “They started a hunger strike. The Daily News picked up on it and the Jade asshole wants it stopped. He said nobody wants to eat in a restaurant while people are starving outside.”
“What does he want? Someone to shove food down their throats? It’s not illegal to not eat. If they’re spray-painting the walls, then we can do something. You know, if it was white people demonstrating, they would’ve chained themselves to the doors, or something dramatic like that.”
“Yeah, and if it was black people out there, they’d cover
the whole block, shut that place down. They’d have to call the dogs out.”
“I think I’m going to head over there now,” I said, checking my watch. “You looking to get a game in?”
“I’m taking on the midget next,” he said, pointing to a four-foot-tall man sitting on an upturned bucket that used to hold bean curd. The small man pointed back, making a gun with his thumb and forefinger and pulling the trigger.
The midget had thick, half-opened eyelids, making him look eternally sarcastic, which he was. He kept his face unshaven, as if he were conscious of looking too much like a kid. His smooth, combed hair was shiny like wet licorice.
Vandyne had picked up Chinese chess from a book and from playing against the midget, who had tipped off Vandyne about an upstart heroin ring a year before, when he was starting investigative assignments. Helped him a lot.
The midget was a small guy, but no one had bigger eyes, ears, or brains. A game against him was all in good fun, because everyone knew that no one had ever beaten the midget at anything.
I swung out from the park and walked up Bayard. Something somewhere in Chinatown hummed. It could have been sewing machines in a sweat shop. It could have been old Chinese in freezing apartments trying to clear their throats.
—
The gaudy gold characters on the awning of Jade Palace hit you when you were about two blocks away. If you were driving to Manhattan from Brooklyn on the bridge, you’d see it flaring in the distance like a comet streaking over rooftops cluttered with TV antennas and crooked brick chimneys. I never understood why they wanted to use gold letters. Why not make it the “Gold Palace”? Or if they didn’t want to rename the place, they should’ve made the sign as green as Oz.
The customers didn’t care what the place was called. They knew the clams in black bean sauce were the cheapest around. They knew the place was big enough so that the wait for a table — even for four people who’d driven in from Long Island or New Jersey — would never be longer than 10 or 15 minutes. And that was all they cared to know about the place.
Of course, I’m a little biased about it, because my father had been a Chinatown waiter. It was fifty cents an hour and he was only allowed to keep half his tips.
He came home enough times with nothing in his pockets but fingers blackened with ink from the racing forms. Luckily, my mother had a job sorting punch cards for Chemical Bank, and we’d survived on her pay alone. But good Chinese people don’t want to merely survive — they want each successive generation to have more.
—
In front of Jade Palace, two hunger strikers, a man in his late 30s and what looked like a college girl, were sitting
on flattened cardboard boxes. They had bilingual signs in their laps. One said, “Jade Palace Steals Our Tips,” in English and, “Jade Palace Drinks Our Blood,” in Chinese. The other, held by the girl, said, “Your Dim Sum Dims Our Hopes,” in English and, “Jade Palace Worse Than Communists,” in Chinese.
I walked by them and found three frosted glass doors at the entrance of the restaurant. I picked one and swung it open.
Two escalators went up to Jade Palace dining room. A discreet elevator to the side went straight into the offices. A big, bored-looking man leaned against the closed elevator door, his eyes pointed like ICBMs at the hunger strikers outside. His bangs gave him a boyish look, but it would take two strong thumbs to make that face smile. He had on a suit tailored to accommodate his muscles without making him look too much like a monument.
“I’m here to see Mr. Gee,” I told him.
The big man tucked in his chin and grunted into a bulge in his shirt pocket. He waited a few seconds before opening the elevator with a key and stepping aside. I slipped in and rode up. The doors opened directly in front of a giant rosewood desk.
“You see that sign out there?” exploded Willie Gee even before the doors were completely open. He was in his late 50s, had hair that swept in a helmet around his head, and wore prescription shades. He looked like an evil Roy Orbison. “They’re calling us communists! They’re calling us murderers! My father gave all people a chance to work here! I still offer a job to anyone who wants one! Now they’re calling me this? You should take them to jail now! If they want to starve, have them die in jail, not out here! They don’t deserve to die here!”
Willie’s office was adorned with photographs. Willie with Mayors Robert Wagner, John Lindsay, and Abe Beame. Hong Kong singers and movie stars with Willie. A signed Cosmos jersey from Pelé. Willie and Barbara Streisand.
A photograph of the grand reopening of Jade Palace (after the installation of some wall ornaments and fire sprinklers) featuring Willie in the middle of a chorus line of smiling, happy people. The jerk in the cop hat was me.
Willie twirled a pen in his left hand and squeezed his right hand until there were red and white stripes across his fingers. I looked around for a chair on my side of the desk, but there wasn’t one.
“Mr. Gee,” I said slowly, “They have every right to protest here. They have a permit. They don’t have to eat if they don’t want to. There’s nothing illegal going on. . .”
“They are liars! They are liars and they’re going to hell! They can eat misery! They can eat their lies!”
“Mr. Gee, if you have a problem with their signs, you can sue them in court for slander. Get your lawyer and file a claim. I can’t do anything here.”
“You’re a policeman! You’re Chinese, too! Whose side are you on? How can you support the law when you let those goddamn liars sit out there in the street? You know how bad this looks for the Chinese people?”
I scratched my thigh. Don’t let the Chinese people look bad is beat into the head of every young Chinese kid. But the truth was that we made ourselves look bad, and look worse whenever we tried to make ourselves look better.
“We’re all Chinese here,” said Willie, even though we were the only two in his office. He lowered his voice. “We could arrange something mutually beneficial.”
I took the elevator down and sauntered out of Jade Palace. King Kong took two steps after me and then withdrew and stood still as the front door closed in his face. I continued up Bowery and took a quick glance back at the strikers, trying not to look sympathetic. A little less food never hurt anybody.
—
On Tuesday I was on a 1600 to 0000. Iced coffee and hot-dog pastries are as good in the afternoon as they are in the morning. Maybe a little less fresh. Lonnie was at the counter trying to open the wax-paper bag with one hand, but she ended up ripping it.
“Lonnie, goddammit, you keep ripping bags! You’re so clumsy!” growled Dori as she snatched the useless bag and tossed it somewhere under the counter. “What a waste!”
“That bag wouldn’t open, I think it was defective,” said Lonnie, who looked away from Dori.
“It’s defective now!” said Dori. “What a disgrace you are. I think we need to have a training program here. Now watch me, little girl!”
Dori whipped her arm and snapped a new bag into a crinkled pyramid. “See? Easy!” She extended the opened bag to Lonnie, who ignored it and grabbed her own.
Lonnie shook the next bag open and looked like she was going to cry. Dori called out to the person behind me.
“What do you want? What!” Dori yelled. Her face couldn’t have been more defiant if she were holding a battle flag in one hand and a grenade in the other.
“See what she does to me?” Lonnie asked in a voice ready to shatter. “Every time, every day, it’s like this.” She stuffed two hot-dog pastries for me into the bag.
“Lonnie, you don’t need this,” I told her. “You can get a job anywhere else.” She creased the bag shut, put it on the counter, and turned around to make my iced coffee.
Here was the girl for the lead role for the Hong Kong remake of “Cinderella.” The hag for the wicked stepmother was here as well.
Dori was at the other end of the counter, reaching into a rack of sponge cakes for her customer.
“Job doing what?” Lonnie asked, with her back to me. “Doing hair, doing nails? Another bakery? There’s always going to be bitter, old women who hate everyone younger than them. Stupid, old, ugly women who don’t know how to do anything else. Don’t even know how to speak English. I’m not going to end up here the rest of my life.”
Then to Dori she said, “I’m graduating college in a year!” Some of my coffee spilled over onto the counter when she slammed it down.
“Hey college girl, wipe off that counter!” yelled Dori. “I can’t be responsible for all of your screw-ups!”
On my way out, I saw a few kids hanging out on the tables near the door. A few of them were smoking, and one boy with spiky hair lifted his head up and nodded at me with a leer on his face. Two other boys twisted their heads to each other and laughed. One girl turned and spat on the floor.
I thought to myself, These kids are a waste.
—
I came into the Five and saw the thin man Yip sitting in a chair by Detective 1st Grade Thomas “English” Sanchez’s empty desk. A cane lay flat on the floor between Yip’s feet. His wife had died only two days ago, and I’d never expected to see him again. I pumped two Tic Tacs into my mouth before going up to him.
“Yip, what are you doing here?” I asked.
“The police told me to come. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I’m not like you, my head was born in Canton.”
“I’m going to find out what’s going on.” I checked with the desk, but all he knew was that English had wanted to talk to Yip. I left to look for English and told Yip to stay put.
English was a light-skinned Latino who looked Italian and loved that he did. He was about my height, with a meaty and heavily pockmarked face. Parts of him were bulky but he wasn’t fat overall.
He’d gotten his name because one day, when they were looking for a Spanish speaker to talk to a hysterical man on the phone, someone had asked English if he were a native speaker and he’d said he was. But when he’d gotten on the phone, his face had slowly turned red.
“No habla Español,” he’d said awkwardly into the phone.
After that, someone had said, “I thought you were a native speaker!”
“Of English! English!” Sanchez had said.
I ran into English outside the head.
“Chow,” said English. His hands were wet and he wiped them across his stomach. “I was looking for you.”
“English. What’s going on with the guy you brought in?”
“Can you translate for now? The community-board person never showed up. The medical examiner ran a random blood test on his wife, uh, Wah, and found what could be poison. It’s a suspicious death, and now they can’t release the body for the funeral.” We went back to English’s desk.
I looked at Yip. He was looking at me, expecting me to tell him what was going on. His fingers worked at his knees.
Did Yip kill his wife? Motivation? There was no way. I thought about it, and then I felt sorry for myself. Here I was trying to think like a detective. I should have been on the detective track by now. I wouldn’t have needed a translator.
English had started talking to me again so I snapped back to the situation at hand.
“Chow, can you tell him?” English said. He faced Yip and said, “Your wife Wah died from poisoning.”
I turned to Yip and began with, “I’m sorry to tell you, something terrible has happened.”
“Was Wah working?” asked English.
I translated back for Yip: “She worked as a waitress at Jade Palace even though she had arthritis. She pushed a cart of dim sum around six hours in the morning every day. She liked to play mahjong sometimes. Her head was always itchy, but she never wanted to get a new wig.”
“Do you work?” asked English.
“I work as a dishwasher at night at a small restaurant so sometimes we’d go for a few days without seeing each other awake. I made her breakfast before she woke up because her arthritis was so bad in the morning.”
“What did she do at night when you were gone?”
English asked.
“She liked to take a nap or read some books.”
“Can you give me a list of her friends?”
“Her friends were all the people she worked with. Go down to the restaurant, talk to them. She liked her friends’ children. She was sad she never had any.”
“Was she feeling depressed about it?”
“She wasn’t happy.”
“Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
Yip’s eyes grew unfocused and watery.
“I’m also sad she never had children. We were saving and saving, and we grew old. Turns out all that money was for nothing. Why did we come here?”
When it was time for Yip to go, he said he was fine walking by himself even though I offered him a ride.
“I don’t have to hurry anywhere,” Yip said.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I still have my job, my health, and my apartment,” he replied. I picked up his cane.
“Did you hurt your leg? You didn’t have a cane the first time I saw you.”
“It’s nothing, nothing. I’m old, Officer Chow. Things like this happen.”
“You have to be careful,” I said.
Yip got up and took his cane. “Thank you, Officer Chow. Don’t worry about me.” He sighed and tapped his cane. “Just let me bury my wife.” I gave him my home number.
—
“Who would want to kill an old woman with no money who lived in a busted-up tenement?” I asked English.
“Why would anyone want to kill someone else?” he said, rubbing his nose. “You been where I been, you see kids killing parents, parents killing kids, people killing parents and kids. So what the hell. Anyway, thanks for handling that, I’ll take it from here.”
“You need me to go to the restaurant with you?”
“Nah, I’m going to call up that community-board translator and chew his ass out and get him to go with me. Thanks again, Chow.”
“Anything else I can do?”
“I’ve got nothing for you. Thanks.”
“Sure, detective.”
There’s no formal process to get on the detective track. You could do a decade on a footpost and never get on it. Basically someone higher up had to hand you investigative assignments before you could be on your way to a gold shield.
I shuffled back up the stairs to my desk, took a pen out of my vest pocket, and chucked it into the corner. Then I tore open my brown bag and bit off half a hot-dog pastry.
After a while, I threw out the second hot-dog pastry. On my way back, I got my pen back off the floor and chewed on it.
I wasn’t getting anywhere thinking about the possible homicide or my career, so I put them both out of my mind.
I ran a quick check on my pad and cuffs.
It turned out to be a slow night. I handed out two parkers and one mover. I watched a plastic frog swimming in circles in a tub of water at a vendor’s stall. I wondered how long those batteries lasted.
—
To get to my apartment, you have to go east on East Broadway until you don’t see any other Chinese people. It’s about an eight-minute walk from Bowery. I live in a slouching walkup just past the southeast corner of Seward Park. At the turn of the century, it had been an all-Jewish neighborhood, but now a lot of Spanish live there. I took the apartment because we weren’t allowed to live within the boundary of the precinct we served, but it was still close to the job. The building was a lot nicer than anything in Chinatown, anyway. The subway was right there, too.
My mail was cooking on the radiator when I got back home. The mailman was so lazy that instead of sorting out letters by mailbox, he’d slap the entire building’s mail on the lobby radiator.
I guess you couldn’t really blame him. About 20 beat-up, wall-mounted mailboxes at varying heights were crookedly nailed into the wall, their dented lids jutting out like shrapnel. You’d cut yourself sooner or later trying to fill all of them.
Most of the stuff was junk mail. Sometimes I would get something good, though. I lived for that. I liked getting sample-sized toothpaste or cereal. Once there had been a package of tapes from the Columbia Record Club for someone in another building. The guy’s name was Robert Chew, so I figured I had dibs on it. That was like the best day of my life.
I climbed four flights of shabby stairs that only fit one person going up or down at a time. I put a key into the battered lock to #5A, and I was home.
My apartment was a sizeable one-bedroom that got too hot in the summer and even hotter in the winter. I had to leave one of the windows partially open all the time. I was lucky not to have a window that opened up to a shaft. Instead, I got to see East Broadway in all its squalor by daylight and by street lamp.
As soon as I had my shoes off, I pulled a can of Sapporo beer from the fridge and popped it. Japanese beer was pretty cheap in Chinatown because it was shipped in from a Chinatown in Japan. The busiest trading routes in the world were navigated with Chinese hands.
A Rangers replay game was on, and the blueshirts were down two goals in the last period. They skated like tin men in need of an oilcan. The goalie, John Davidson, was caught out of position, and the goal light lit up. Now they were down three goals. They were strong contenders this year — not for the Cup, but for the basement of the division.
I switched to the communist Chinese station on UHF. As the frame slide down and centered on the screen, I saw that it was an old civil war movie. “Heroic Bravery on Luding Bridge” or “Brave Heroics on Luding Bridge.” Something like that. It seemed that there was a movie for every little skirmish in the whole damn war.
The Taiwan station was airing an interview with a famous Buddhist monk.
“Is it ethical,” began the cute and unemotional female interviewer, “for people to eat tofu and gluten formed into substitute meat and still say that they have a vegetarian diet?”
The monk sucked in his lips and nodded. “No. Absolutely not,” he said. “While those people are not actually eating meat, they are still eating in the spirit of consuming flesh.
It is definitely wrong.”
Both the communist and the Taiwan stations were originally recorded in Mandarin, but were dubbed in Cantonese for the New York City market. Everything was subtitled in Chinese characters so that everybody could read what was going on.
I spoke Cantonese almost as good as a native speaker but my understanding of Mandarin was shaky at best even though both dialects used the same written language.
I settled in and drank five more beers. Pretty soon I felt the urge to shift my body over and realized that my eyes were closed.