This Is a Bust

by Ed Lin

  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. “Whi
le 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.

  Chapter 3

  My year with Vandyne, 1974 to 1975, was spent driving from crisis to crisis. When we had creeps handcuffed in the back, we liked to stop the car short so that their faces would slam into the glass divider. We only did that when they took swipes at us first, though, or if they really deserved it — purse-snatching punks from Canal Street and men who had beaten their children badly.

  The murder rate was soaring through the rest of the city, but being in Chinatown was like being in the rear in Nam, away from the front, with few homicides to speak of. We were relaxed, but always alert to trouble. Some nights nothing happened, and we would just talk.

  Still, the Brow was worried for my safety, me being the precinct’s little public-relations poster boy. He made sure to keep the two of us in mostly backup positions. When Vandyne moved onto investigations, they shifted me to a footpost that was as tame as a chihuahua.

  The best thing about my friendship with Vandyne was that we always pretended that we were hearing the same stories from each other for the first time. Sometimes it would be like you were hearing the story for the first time, because the other person would change around the details or make up new ones. We would even take details from each other’s stories and tell them as if we had lived it. It was the right attitude to have, especially when we talked about Nam.

  “How many Negroes do you think there are in New York City?” Vandyne had asked the first time we ate together.

  I think he was feeling me out, to see if I was cool or not.