This Is a Bust (32 page)

The midget turned
and spat. Then he looked at me hard. “Hey, you okay?”

“I'm fine,” I said. “Just that I knew the guy.”

“I know. You were pushing that poor old man around.”

“I didn't push him around!”

“You pulled
him out of the post office. All he was doing was
helping people with their mail. He wasn't selling drugs or girls.”

“It's against the law.”

“Helping people with English is against the law?”

“People should learn English and not depend on someone
to
do it for them all the time,” I said.

The midget scratched his chin and said, “When
people learn English, that's when they stop writing back to China.”

“But anyway, you understand that what he was doing was
illegal. He was taking money.”

“I guess it was.”

“It's federal property. There are laws.”

“Sure there are. Of course.”

“He shouldn't have been there, and he forced me to do what
I had to do.”

“You're absolutely right, Officer Chow.”

We didn't say anything for a few minutes and watched
people slip into restaurants and dried-beef stores. I looked at the midget's open denim jacket and saw a tie that reached down past his belt.

“What's
this?” I asked, opening the jacket some more.

The
midget was also wearing a dress shirt and slacks.

“Remember that tourist, the one who wanted
to play
Sorry! against me? He's a filmmaker and he wants to do a documentary about me. We're shooting in a studio tonight.”

“You're going to be a movie star! People are going to ask for
your autograph.”

“He brought down Chinese chess players and American
chess players from Boston. I'm going to play a dozen people in a row.”

“You don't need to dress up for it. You might hurt your luck.”

“Believing in luck is for people who don't believe in
themselves! I only wanted to look better for the camera. I don't want to make the Chinese people look bad.” The
midget fidgeted with his tie. “So Paul really cleaned up, huh?”

“Yeah, he came back with two bags of toys.”

“Those aren't toys, they're precision models.”

“I can't believe Lonnie lent him all that money.”

“It wasn't much, it was only $40.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Lonnie wouldn't give him the money, so I did.”

“Hey, I'm going to make that stupid kid pay you right back!”

“Don't worry about it! It's not much money to me. He'll pay
me back.”

“How's he going to pay you back? He doesn't have a job.”

“I wanted to give him a break, just like you're giving him a
break by letting him live with you. You know, nobody ever helped me, not that that stopped me from becoming who I am. I carved my own first chessboard pieces from dirty, dried-out sponges the cleaning lady threw away. I got sick a lot because there were germs and bacteria on all those pieces. My mother used to say that that was why my body didn't grow up right.”

“That's not true. It's genetics.”

“Yeah,” said the midget. “Anyway, I wanted to loan the
money to Paul to get him started.”

“How is he going to make a career out of toys?”

“I've never made a bad investment in anything or anybody,”
said the midget.

Paul wasn't around when I came home, but he had placed
all his robots in a small plastic washing tub in the corner
of the living room. When I went to sleep that night, I had a nightmare that Paul's robots were lined up and shooting at me.

—

The next morning, I went to Martha's to find Lonnie.

“Paul didn't come home last night. Do you know where he
is?”

“He wasn't at my parents' house. Did you hit him?”

“No, I didn't hit him! I didn't even yell at him. He's been
hanging out late at night, but this is the first time he never came back.”

“I'm
sure he's okay. Robert, are you okay? Your eyes are 
all
red.”

“That happens when I get worried.”

“Maybe you should ask the midget.”

I went to the park. When I found the midget, I went up and
said, “Paul didn't come home last night.”

The midget looked at me.

“I'm sure Paul can take care of himself,” he said.

“This is the first time he's been out all night. Maybe
something happened to him.”

The midget folded up his arms and crossed his legs.

“Paul said you were pushing him hard to get a job, so he got
one serving drinks in a gambling hall. He works late.”

“Where's this gambling hall?”

“I don't know.”

“Why would he work in a gambling hall?”

“Hey, it beats waiting tables,” said the midget.

—

I waited until about 0200 before going over to an unremarkable storefront on Chrystie Street. I went into an adjacent alley and found crude, uneven concrete steps leading down to a lower level.

I could
hear upbeat Cantonese pop music and men's 
voices
talking loudly and quickly. I held onto an unpainted metal handrail as I made my way down to the noise in the dim light.

I stood in front of a dull gray metal door and
heard a peephole cover swing open and shut.

“I'm not real good at secret knocks or passwords,” I said to
the door, at about where someone's head would be on the other side. “But I've got on steel-toed shoes that can bust this door off the hinges.”

“Officer!” said a muffle
d voice from the other side of the
door, “This is a private club. Members only.”

“I'm not here as a cop,” I said. “I'm here to see someone who
works here.”

“Who are you looking for?”

“I'll show you when I see him.”

Someone cranked a bolt back and the door opened. A light
cloud of smoke poured over my face as I walked into the Tang San Cai gambling parlor. Taiwanese KMT money had set up the place, hence the Mandarin name. It was a pretty classy joint. Tang San Cai referred to the tri-colored glazed pottery of the Tang Dynasty, large replicas of which bookended the gambling tables. Cameras sat atop the urns, barely hidden by plastic shrubbery.

Blackjack, poker, dominoes, and pai gow
tables spread out in
the four directions. Smoke from cheap Chinese cigarettes swirled around the ceiling lights. Looking at the gamblers, mostly men in their 40s and 50s, I thought about my father. I thought about how he and his waiter buddies would hang out in these gambling joints to take the edges off of their 12-hour workdays. Every time these old men opened their mouths, they added to the overall reek of alcohol, which was strong enough to make my eyes go googly.

The two busiest tables featured attractive young female
dealers with collared shirts that were open down to the third button. I might have liked them if they had showed some emotion, good or bad. The girls looked practically catatonic as they pulled in chips and tossed cards with the same unblinking efficiency as their male counterparts.

Nearly every block in Chinatown had a
gambling den but
they were all going to be shut down soon, and not by the vice squad. A referendum was going around in New Jersey to open legal casinos in Atlantic City later this year. The Chinese gambling joints were trying to hold on to their clients with Chinese culture and history.

“Uncle, you don't want to give money to those foreign
devils, do you?” the coat-check girl would say.

The Brow would be on my ass in two seconds if he knew
I was infringing on an area that was strictly for the vice squad. I was risking my shield to find that little hood. I caught the attention of one of the girl dealers and she gave me the evil eye. I recognized her as someone I'd once written up for moving violations.

I suddenl
y found the patterns in the carpet very interesting
and sauntered away. I saw Paul at one of the dominoes tables. He was serving a drink with a cherry in it to a tubby old man.

I stepped in and said, “Paul, let's go home.”

He held his empty serving tray over his crotch and said,
“How did you find me?”

“I found a Polaroid of you
walking out of here in one of those Asian youth books
and I looked at the address on the back. Now let's go.”

“This
is my job. You're not my boss.” Heads were turning in
our direction. Pretty soon, some heavies were going to start making their way over.

“Paul
,” I growled, “do I have to stick my gun into your back to
get you to leave with me?”

He sighed, set his tray by an urn, and followed me out, his
head slightly bowed.

When we got down the block, he started whining.

“You know how much money I was making there? I was
getting about $10 an hour with the tips! I can pay the midget back already.”

“Where the hell were you last night? You never even called.”

“I called at midnight on the dot.”

“I don't answer the phone on the hour, you know that.”

“I can't keep track of your stupid little habits.”

“So where the hell were you?”

“One of the big bosses came in and took us out for a late
dinner. Then after, he let us sleep over at his penthouse.”

“Who are these guys, Paul?”

“The Hakka Charitable Association. They're businessmen.”

“You're not stupid, Paul. You know they're a front for a
gang.”

“All I do is serve drinks, Robert. I'm not a gunman or
something.”

“Paul, you stay there long enough, they're going to ask you
to drive cars out to abandoned lots in East New York and abandon them. You know what are in those trunks? The bodies of people who displeased the management. Yeah, think about that. Then before you know it, they'll have you beating up people who haven't paid back their loans. Maybe you'll have to cut up some girl for not sleeping with your boss. Then you'll be the one popping people, piling bodies into trunks, and telling younger boys to go abandon those cars.”

“Really?”

“I
see it all the time,” I said. It was an improbable, worst-case
scenario I was building, but what the hell. I had to scare this kid straight and for good.

“They told me i
t was a pretty clean business. They never
said anything about killing people.”

“No business is clean, Paul.”

“I know the cops aren't clean. You know the clubs pay out
bribes to stay open? I saw it.”

“Those cops are going to get caught, and that gambling den
is going to be closed.”

Wh
en we got into our building, we went up the stairs.

I
continued up, past the floor of our apartment.

“Where are we going?” asked Paul.

“To the roof,” I said.

“Why?”

“I want to show you something.”

The roof-access door had a sign over it, saying “NO ENTRY”
in both English and Spanish, so you know it had to be taken seriously. I picked the padlock with the sharp end of my key ring coil.

“Isn't this illegal?”

“I have the grandfather clause. I lived here before the sign
was posted.” Which was true. I got the lock open and the door swung back. We could see stars in the sky.

“Over here, by the water tower,” I said. We went over.

“What do you see, Paul?”

“Chinatown.”

“Look at those windows,” I said pointing.

“They're bright.”

“You know why they're bright? Those are fluorescent lights
in there. That's where they've got women and children sewing clothes around the clock. See those restaurants down there?” I pointed to the 24-hour joints on Bowery. “That's where men are working 12-hour shifts. They're working for way below minimum wage. Those are the people your gambling den's taking money away from.

“My father worked as a waiter all his life. He didn't come
over to serve uptown Chinese and tourists, but that's what he ended up doing because he didn't know any English
and wasn't too smart. He wasn't an angel, either, but he did what he could for his family. Every buck he made was honest, and he lost a lot of that honest money gambling. Those motherfuckers who run the gambling prey on their own kind, and they take advantage of this entire community.”

Paul looked out over Chinatown.

“Is that true about your dad?” he asked.

“What?”

“He jumped off the roof.”

“He was drunk. He fell off.”

“You know, you have to stop drinking, Robert.”

“I'll stop drinking,” I said, “if you just get an honest job.”

“Okay,” he said quickly. “You're on!”

“Hey, don't I get to have one for the road, at least?”

Paul shook his head.

“Son of a bitch, you fast-talked me into it!”

We went downstairs and poured out my last beers into the
sink. I was pissed at myself for crying.