Chinatown Beat

The month before, after they'd begun to speak regularly, she gave him a fearful look and quietly said some nasty things about Uncle Four. He wished he hadn't heard it, wished he could do something about it, but knew it was impossible.

She said Uncle Four beat her and raped her, that he did this regularly. What the fock, he thought, she's his mistress. What the fock does she expect? Why stay with him then?

When he asked her why she didn't simply leave, she just cried. They didn't speak for a week after that, but he knew that she had given him part of her pain, and he was suffering along with her. She didn't have to speak. He saw it in her eyes every time they stole glances at each other, every time she touched his hand, every time she walked away behind the Mustache, never glancing back.

"Focken bitches," the other drivers said, "play you for a sooka."

"Don't let them use you," they warned.

"Money talks, bullshit walks. That's what those hei cants care about."

Joh

But eleven o'clock came around faster than he expected.

The tears welled up quickly in her sloe eyes.

"Men have hurt me tonight, again," Mona whispered.

Joh

There was no escape from these images, Joh

He couldn't say no to anything she desired.

Later, when they lay together in his tenement flat, there was no need for the words he didn't have, the only sounds coming from the slap and pull of their bodies against each other, the soft clutching groans and whispers leading to hard, fast breathing and the sharp anguished cry of desperate pleasure.

Undercovers

Jack Yu leaned back from his desk in the empty squad room, tilted his head and rolled his neck over his bunched shoulders. He heard the ligaments pop, took a deep breath. There was a rotted wood smell from inside the floorboards that floated out every time it rained. He'd noticed it when he transferred precincts in July, during a week of summer storms. Now the rain that should have come in August arrived in October, cooling down Indian Summer, giving weight to the soggy leaves that blew into piles in the neighborhood parks.

The Fifth Precinct stationhouse, the 0-Five, was the oldest in the city, a four-story Federalist walk-up made of red brick, fronted by matching lanterns of Kelly green. The lanterns glowed in the mist, and rain dripped from the scrollwork around numerals that ran across the top of the building: 1881.

The blue-and-whites parked out front, up and down Elizabeth Alley, and out to Canal Street. Scooters. Vans. Undercover Dodges.

Jack could see them from the squad-room window, rolling out. The night patrols. He checked his watch. It was after ten, at the end of a long week full of bad dreams and sleepless fatigue. He knew he should go home. He had the weekend off and much to do.

He sca

He stroked the thin line of scar tissue that ran across his left brow, a nervous tic. His mind was drifting elsewhere and he clicked off the cheap fluorescent desk lamp, pushed back from the tangle of paperwork and open-case files. He ran his trigger fingers in tight circles around his temples and closed his eyes.

Ru

Of the twenty-eight thousand, eight hundred and sixty-nine officers in the New York City Police Department, Jack Yu was the eighty-eighth cop of Chinese-American heritage. A lucky number, he once thought. At a sinewy five-foot-ten, he'd have failed the height requirement of a decade earlier. Now, four years into his career, he'd been transferred to Chinatown, back into his old neighborhood, a detective second grade.

After four months here he realized that working in the 0-Five was like living in two worlds at the same time. In a precinct that was ninety-nine percent yellow, the Commanding Officer was named Salvatore Marino, and the beat cops were ninety-nine percent white. The white cops put in their shifts, then beat a quick retreat back to the welcome of white enclaves beyond the colored reaches of the i

But Jack had grown up in Chinatown, knew what it felt like to look and breathe Chinese, to savorfoo yee, ga lei, pungent and spicy aromas that white precinct cops wrinkled up their noses at, to speak and decipher regional dialects that sounded to the others like a back-alley cockfight.

He could remember a boyhood time when there were no Chinese cops, no Asian Squad, no interpreters, no community liaison, only gwai to white devil faces in the blue uniforms howling watseemotta no speakeeEnglee?

Four months after his transfer, his father passed away in the Chinatown tenementJack remembered growing up in. Realizing Jack was a cop, the landlord graciously allowed him the full month to clear out his father's belongings, purposely Jack figured-never once mentioning the key money he'd taken from the old man those many long years ago.

When he opened his eyes, nothing had changed except the sound of the rain falling harder outside. Now, with his father six days in the still-soft ground of Evergreen Hills, he was feeling the tiredness heavy in his bones, the fung sup, arthritis, setting in. He adjusted the Detective Special nestled in the small of his back, then rose from the desk and took a black canvas knapsack from the steel lockers, checked it for disposable cameras, a pager, cellular phone, a silver flask. He went down the hundred-year-old stairs, exited onto Elizabeth Alley and followed the streets back to the Mott Street tenement he'd grown up in.

Dogs

The rain came down in thick sheets, rattled the stairwell windows as Jack climbed with leaden legs the five flights of tenement squalor.

Pa had lived here, all his forty-nine years of Chinatown life. A dead dog, the Chinese numbers meant: forty-nine, say gow.