This Is a Bust (8 page)

“This is going to be a very lucky year for you. I can tell.” He
placed my hands together in a finished clap and shook them three times before opening them. His moist eyes flitted as he looked at the lines in my palms. “When were you born?” he asked without looking up.

“December 2, 1950.”

Wang reached inside his vest pocket for a pile of sticks and
singled one out.

“You're married.”

“I'm not married.”

“Umm. You're not married.” Some of the women giggled. I
recognized them as the second-shift workers at a garment shop on East Broadway. They all looked as if they had kids to cook for at home. “You have a girlfriend.”

“No, no girlfriend.”

“You don't have a girlfriend.” He opened his mouth and
then closed it. He nodded and then asked, “You have a boyfriend?” The women laughed and the midget kicked his heels in the air.

“No, I don't have a boyfriend.” Wang waved his hands.

“Doesn't matter, doesn't matter.” He looked at the stick and
read the characters, blocking out parts with his thumb and forefinger. “You're going to have a son this year,” he said.

“How can he have a son without a wife?” asked one of the
garment workers.

Wang ignored her. “Your life will be changed.”

“Just tell me if I'm going to be rich or not!” I joked. Chinese
people pray for riches more than world peace.

“I can tell you that now!” said the midget. “As long as you
work for the city, you won't be rich!”

“You're going to have a son,” the fortune-teller repeated.
“You don't have to worry about money, just worry about your son.” I took my hands back and squeezed my knees.

“Okay, Wang. Thank you.” He nodded. After a moment of
hesitation, I pulled out two bucks and gave it to him. “If I don't pay you, the prediction doesn't come true, right?” I asked. Wang laughed and folded the bills up. The women shuffled home to make dinner. I stood up. The midget zipped up his knapsack but made no other motion to leave.

“There's still some daylight left,” Wang said. “Maybe there
are some fortunes left to tell.”

“I'm still waiting for a goo
d game of Chinese chess,” said the
midget. “I'm going to teach you how to play, officer. It's a shame you don't know how to play something Chinese.”

“We're in America, not China,” I told the midget.

—

The Chinatown Girl Scouts had their ceremonies in the Ocean Empress Palace on Bowery, down a ways from Jade Palace. One of the girl's fathers had a hand in running the place.

It was one of the nicer large Chinese restaurants, and the
menus had English translations for everything. They must have paid decently and reliably because there was almost no staff turnover. When I walked in past the tied-back bead curtains at the entrance, I saw older waiters who had been old when I was young.

A
short man with crooked teeth came up to me and grabbed
my right shoulder.

“You! I remember you when you were this tall,” he said,
slapping his thigh and laughing. He was completely bald on the top of his head, and the white hair he had left looked like a toilet brush from my point of view.

“Hello, uncle,” I said. “How are you doing?”

“I remember when we had a going-away party here for
all of you who were going off to the war. We were so proud

of all of you. Say, where did they all go? I never see any of you anymore.”

“I don't know.”

“Well, the communists couldn't have killed all of you, right?
You can't all be dead.”

“I'm really a ghost.”

“Don't try to fool an old man, now. I've seen you in the
newspapers. You're the Chinese police captain.”

“I'm not a captain.”

“You must be important, I see your picture all the time!”

“I'm only a low-level cop.”

He screwed up his face.

“Agh, you think I'm just a lousy little waiter. You don't
think
I'm worth your time.” I watched him walk back to the kitchen
with a slight limp. The sounds of mothers fussing over their little girls got to me and I headed to the other end of the dining room.

Freestanding wall sections on wheels separated the Girl
Scout event from the regular diners. As I went around the far side of the wall, I came face to face with someone I hadn't seen since high school.

The moment I saw her, I felt the sudden jab of a sharp
childhood memory.

“Barbara,” I said.

“Robert! How are you? I was thinking you might be here.”

“How come?”

“I've been seeing you in the papers! You really get around!”

I did a nervous fake-laugh and looked at a freckle on her
neck. She shifted and I looked up and into her bright eyes. Was this really the fastest runner in the class? Was this really the first girl I had ever kissed?

“I'm here and then I'm there,” I said, fake-laughing some
more. God, how stupid did that sound? “So, you help out around here?”

“I'm here for my youngest sister. You know I have three
sisters, right? My parents never did get that boy they were trying to have.”

“She's going to win one of the prizes tonight?”

“She dropped out of the awards ceremony. This is the
last thing she volunteered to help organize. I have to help out because she couldn't make it.”

“I don't like it wh
en people just throw in the towel, you
know? Kids today aren't as diligent as we were.”

“She got into Barnard early,” Barbara said. “She's already
auditing classes.”

“Only Barnard, huh? She wasn't the smartest cookie in the
jar,” I joked.

Barbara wasn't smiling.

“Robert?”

“Yes?”

“You were in the war, weren't you?”

“Yeah.” I felt the air getting thin. Barbara grabbed my wrist.

“Hey,” she said. “I've got to round up the girls for their
presentations, but maybe we can chat later on tonight. After.”

“Sure, sure.”

I made my way over to the front table and sat down
with the Girl Scout's head girl and a committee that was lobbying for the creation of a Chinatown YMCA.

Something really bothered me about Barbara. She was
one of the beautiful people. Always had been. One of those people who never got a pimple, never got called a “chink,” never had a bad day or night ever.

She had gone to Harvard. Free ride. Everybody knew
about it. People were in awe of Barbara and her three younger sisters. They walked through Chinatown like four princesses. Even in their plastic sunglasses and flip-flops, they were the best-looking things south of Canal. When those girls left for college — and of course, they would all go to college — they were leaving Chinatown and never ever coming back.

I didn't need to hear about how rich Barbara was. How rich
and white her stupid husband was. And you knew he had to be white. How she was expecting twin boys and how they were going to win the Heisman Trophy and the Nobel Prize.

Barbara a
nd I weren't even people to each other anymore; we were
only visions of what could have been in each other's
respective worlds.

When the event was over, I got out as soon as I could, even
though I knew Barbara was still tied up backstage. I wasn't sure what I was scared of.

A waiter on the way out handed me a brown paper bag. He
just missed giving me a clap on my back as I blew past him.

A few blocks later, I found that the bag held a red envelope
and a bottle of Cutty Sark. It was 2215. Drinking time.

Forty-eight hours to Chinese New Year. Time was slowing down. No one in Chinatown is ever in a rush, which pisses off native New Yorkers when they come down here. Chinese people like to walk slowly, and ideally, side by side. They always run into people they know coming from the opposite direction. Then they all stop, creating a logjam.

The holiday ju
st made it worse. Canal Street was more crowded than the subway. With foot traffic at a near
standstill, I had enough time to read the front of every red holiday card stacked on folding tables that crowded the sidewalks even more. “Prosperity” was the most common single character for wishes in the year of the dragon.

I sa
w a break open up. I jumped through it and turned off onto Elizabeth Street.

Two unchaperoned kids, a boy and a girl who looked too
young to talk, were lighting up fireworks on a manhole lid.

I grabbed them by the backs of their jackets and made them
sit on the curb. They started crying when I took away their fireworks and lighter.

“You're going to blow your fingers off!” I yelled at them.
They cried as if no one had ever yelled at them before.

It was likely. Probably spoiled by a grandmother while 
the mother and father put their souls to the grindstones at work.

I took two Tic Tacs from my pocket and stuck them in
their mouths. It's amazing how quickly children can lurch from miserable to happy. Candy to keep them happy in Chinatown. Cigarettes in Nam.

I felt re
ady to go to Martha's and see Lonnie. It turned out
that I got doughy Dori instead.

“How are you doing, Dori?” I asked.

“I'd tell you to eat less because you're getting fat, Officer
Chow, but that would be bad for business. Hot-dog pastries in the morning.” She was shaking her head.

“Hey, you bake them this early, why can't I eat them? My
uniform's feeling pretty loose on me, anyway.”

“That's
because you're not as fat as the average policeman.
But don't worry, you'll get there soon. Hey, take your change. I don't take tips.”

I muttered something under my breath that made her
smile.

—

Vandyne had left a message on my desk. We weren't official partners anymore, but it was as if we were forever bonded, having been each other's first. I've heard plenty of stories about cops who are closer to their old partners than their new ones.

The message said that Willie Gee had called for me again.
The tabloids had been hammering at him for a while, but the
New York Times
had just reported that the State Attorney had filed charges against Jade Palace, citing the restaurant's apparent short-changing of its workers. If Willie Gee didn't like it, he should call up the state or the newspaper, or better yet
—
pay his workers, already. I crumpled up the message and tossed it. Three points.

I wondered if Willie Gee had known Wah personally, or
if she had been just another worker bee for his hive. Her asking for a raise surely would have drawn some attention. I didn't want to think about it too much, though, because I couldn't do anything to help.

English was being a prick and obviously wasn't going to
let me get a fingernail in on the case. And I didn't want to charge in, because my old partner was on the case. So I

decided to do something that was within my power.

I swung out onto Bowery intent on finding five or six
parkers or movers. There isn't any quota, but there is a “suggested minimum” of 30 parking tickets or moving violations per month. Even Stevie Wonder could find 30 cars parked wrong in a month. Even a marginalized cop like me could do it.

Some people get passive-aggressive about it. I've seen cops
duck into storefronts when they see someone parking in front of a hydrant. They fill out the whole ticket and wait for the guy to leave before planting the ticket under the windshield wiper. I always wondered why the hell people like that wanted to be cops in the first place if they were so scared of confrontation.

I hadn't gone five feet before I found my first parker: a
beaten white van that read on the side, “Jin Fook Flushing Queens,” spelled out with pieces of duct tape. The van was parked halfway in a bus stop zone.

The next one was a little tougher. A middle-aged woman
came running out of a market with a baby in her arms and gave me some grief as I was slipping a ticket under the windshield of a black Duster.

“Hey, what's that for? What did I do?” she cried.

“See that?” I asked, pointing to the ‘No Standing Anytime'
sign.

“But I left my emergency lights on!” She shook the baby a
little. It had a rice candy stuck to the back of its right hand.

“That doesn't matter. You can't leave your car in this zone.”

“How
am I supposed to know what ‘standing' is supposed

to
mean?”

“You took a driving test, didn't you?” After no response, I
asked again, “Didn't you?”

“The sign's not even in Chinese, how am I supposed to read
it?”

“Please,” I said, tipping my hat and walking away.

I gave more tickets to a Plymouth Fury, a Bug, and a Gremlin
at expired meters. I walked by Jade Palace and saw that the protest had gained more steam. I didn't look too long. I gave a nod to the two cops by the barricades. They were busy but they nodded back.