This Is a Bust Read Online Free Page A

frowning.
    â€œChow,” he said, and clapped my back. We did a one-arm embrace.
    â€œVandyne,” I said.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œYeah, 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.
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œWhat 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.”
    â€œYeah, 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.”
    â€œI think I’m going to head over there now,” I said, checking my watch. “You looking to get a game in?”
    â€œI’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.
    â€”
    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