This Is a Bust (19 page)

“Officer Chow, how are you?”

“Good! And you?” I asked.

“Hey, stop talking! You're trying to disrupt my thinking!”
growled the midget's opponent.

“It's too late to think your way out of this one,” I said.

“Maybe you could use ESP to flip the board. That's the only
way your brain could help you now,” said the midget. His opponent laughed quickly, then his face returned to being grim. He tightened his left hand into a fist and propped his chin on it.

“Officer Chow, can you suggest a move?” he asked with
exasperation. His name was Chi and he ran a small restaurant over on Market Street under the Manhattan Bridge overpass.

“Maybe one of the cannons. . .” I start
ed, but the midget
tapped one of his own pieces. “My mistake. Missed that. Maybe you should just come back and lose again tomorrow.”

“You
better believe it's hopeless if Officer Chow is telling you
to quit. He's the law,” said the midget.

“It's just as well,” Chi said, getting up. As he stood, I saw a

horrifically bloodied apron wrapped around his waist. Most restaurants bought cut-up pig and chicken meat to roast, but Chi bought carcasses and chopped up his own meat.

The apron looked like something a flesh-eating zombie would wear.

“I've got to go back to work now,” said Chi. “Officer Chow,
you come by some time after closing and have some spare ribs with me and the rest of the kitchen. I always save the best for the staff.”

“Thank you, I will,” I said.

“One quick game,” the midget said to me. And it was quick.
It took longer to set up than to play. Then I went home and had a nightmare about the apron.

—

Vandyne and his wife lived in a big ugly brick house in Elmhurst, Queens. The grouting was stained. Two bony evergreen bushes crouched on either side of the door. I came up the three steps to the porch and pressed the plastic doorbell.

Someone inside came over and shook off chains before
opening the door.

“Robert, I'm so glad you could finally come over,” Rose said.
Vandyne's wife was wearing a flower-print dress with a Winnie-the-Pooh apron over it. Her braids had been tied back and her forehead was glistening with sweat. She was light-skinned and had metallic flakes of green in her brown eyes that sparkled when you looked right into them.

“I hope you're in for some heavy lifting. I've made six of my
favorite dishes.”

“Rose, I didn't know you were going to go through this
much trouble. We're slobs — we're not worth it,” I said.

“It's no trouble!” she said.

“As
long as you've got rice and chopsticks, everything's cool.”
I came in and wiped off my shoes.

“I've got some yellow rice with the chicken. . .” she said in
a searching and apologetic tone while shutting the door behind me.

“Rose, that's a joke, about the rice and all. Anything you've
made will be wonderful.”

Vandyne got up from the reclining chair and clapped my
back.

“Glad you came out all this way,” he said.

“I'm pleased and honored to be here.”

“Would
you guys like beers?” asked Rose. Vandyne shot her a
look and Rose stuttered, “Or some Coke or juice or water?”

“Yeah, tonight's not a drinking night,” I said. “I'll have a
Coke.”

“Have a seat, Cho
w.” I dropped onto the plastic-covered
couch next to Vandyne's chair.

“What's the idea with this?” I asked, drawing my hand up
and down my chest.

“This?” asked Vandyne, flopping his tie up. “We don't have
company over often, so I wanted to air out this tie while I had the chance.” It had a loud orange paisley pattern on it. Vandyne flopped the tie again. “Christmas present.”

“From who? Santa Pimp?” We had a good laugh about that.
Rose dropped off two Cokes and Vandyne and I turned to the television. It was a show about snow leopards.

I
looked under the television stand and saw a dusty 
plastic
box.

“What's that?” I asked.

“Tha
t's a video-tennis game down there. I haven't played 
it in months. I just keep it hooked up because I get better reception with it plugged in.”

“With the money Rose brings in, you should look into
getting WHT.”

“I'm not going to order pay television. That's the dumbest
thing I ever heard of. Paying for something you already 
get free.”

On the coffee table was a program for the funeral of Paul
Robeson, who had died back in January.

“You went to Robeson's funeral?”

“Yeah, we did.”

“How did you feel about it?”

“Felt sad, then mad, then glad.”

“You think he was a communist?”

“No way! C'mon now, he was an emperor. Emperor Jones!”

“Whoa, that's a good one!”

I pointed to an acoustic guitar that was slumped behind his
La-Z-Boy. “That's the guitar your mother forced you to play?”

“That's the one.”

“Play something for me, man.”

“Oh, I don't feel like it. I picked it up from the house
after my mother passed, but I haven't had the heart to play it.”

“Just for me, Vandyne, can't you? You said you were good.”

“I'm sure I could still play pretty, but you know, all sorts of
memories are tied to that thing. We lived in a tough area of Philly. We could have cracked the Liberty Bell if it weren't already. Understand?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, my mother got me that guitar when I was five.
Imagine me, this little kid, holding that big thing?”

“You were telling me she forced you to play Fats Domino
and Elvis.”

“She'd go to work and give me a 45, and if I didn't have
one of those songs done perfect by the end of each week, I'd catch hell. My childhood helped define the term ‘child abuse.' But she did it because she loved me. If I wasn't trying to pick out chords sitting on the floor in front of that phonograph, I might have been out on the streets on dope.”

“But the experience scarred you. You can't have fun playing
guitar when you had to learn like that. You can't even play a song for your best friend in the world.”

“Yeah,” said Vandyne in a neutral voice. “Music should be
uplifting. Motivating. Something to give you a reason to keep going on.”

“Are you ever going to play again?”

“It would have to be some special occasion. Something
really happy.”

“You'd have to pick it up to practice, though, right?”

“I am what I play. I don't have to practice how to be me.”

“You know, my mother used to force me to read the Chinese
newspapers. If she hadn't, I wouldn't know how to read Chinese. I would have been just another American-born Chinese who doesn't know how to read characters.”

“Is it hard to lear
n to read Chinese? Harder than learning to speak
it?”

“It's easy to lean, but just as easy to forget. If I don't read the
newspaper every day, I start to slip.”

“Maybe you just have a bad memory.”

“Oh, I got more than one bad memory!”

We were laughing, but were interrupted by Rose calling
from the kitchen.

“Can I have a hand in here, John?”

“Coming!” said Vandyne. I got up but he said, “Keep your
seat, you're the guest.”

“Let m
e help out. There's nothing on TV anyway.”

—

Rose scraped another heap of sweet potatoes onto my plate.

“If I put that in my mouth, they're gonna have to take me
away in a hearse. And I don't have clean underwear on,” I said.

Rose wasn't fazed.

“Show me how much you love my cooking,” she said.

“I'm surprised you don't weigh a million pounds,” I said to
Vandyne as I stuck my fork into the side of the potatoes and left it there. “Or a million kilograms, or whatever that comes out to.”

“John hates the metric system,” said Rose. Vandyne nodded
his head and chewed.

“Who likes it? Some bureaucrat just wants us to act French,”
said Vandyne.

“Well, ‘bureaucrat' is a French word,” I said.

“John thinks Congress is pushing it to dupe consumers.
Gas will be priced by the liter, not gallon. The deli will weigh meat in grams, not pounds. Since the public will be confused by the conversion, they won't realize that their dollars are buying less.”

“That actually sounds pretty believable. Your man gets to
the bottom of everything.”

“I want you to get to the bottom of your plate! What am I
going to do with the rest of this food?” said Rose.

“Rose knows I'll eat until I bust, so she controls my intake
accordingly,” said Vandyne. “You have to make up the difference, partner.”

I shoved a forkful of potatoes into my mouth. I couldn't
taste it, and chewing on it made my head and throat ache. I swallowed and put my fork down.

“No more. Thanks so much, Rose,” I said.

“Now
if you gents wouldn't mind doing the dishes, I'm
going to leave you two alone,” said Rose, unwrapping her apron and hanging it on the oven handle. “I've got to do two cost-analysis reports tonight. Or maybe I'm going to meet some Illuminati.”

“They're around,” muttered Vandyne.

“You can't argue with a General Electric executive,” I said.

“I'm just an accountant there, silly Robert. Honey, make
some coffee,” she said as she left the kitchen.

Vandyne shuffled over to the freezer door and opened it.

“We got Blue Mountain View, vanilla bean, and some
instant
General Foods International,” he said. “Watcha want?”

“What's the most expensive?”

“Blue Mountain View.”

“I'll have that.”

“Just as well. Keep in mind that it's not 100% Jamaican Blue
Mountain — it's a blend. But we're still scared to drink it because we paid so much for it.” Vandyne held the bag of coffee beans like a punching bag and took a few shots at it before pouring it into the coffee machine.

“Don't you need to grind them first?” I asked.

“Got a grinder built in. Saves time. It helps when you're
groggy in the morning, too.”

“I wish I could live it up like you rich people. You got it all
figured out.”

“I've been thinking,” Vandyne said as he put the coffee
beans away. “You know about the ‘20 and out' thing. After we do our 20 years and start collecting pensions, we should already have our own businesses going.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“I got a cousin in Hawaii. Been there since the service
dropped him off. Anyway, he came up with the idea of selling Hawaiian coffee in little shops here in the city. They grow it in volcanic soil. It's incredibly rich.”

I shook my head.

“You know,” I said, “I think Chock Full O' Nuts has you beat
on that front.”

“But it would be better stuff. Gourmet coffee. We could
charge 75 cents a cup!”

“Nobody's gonna pay that!”

“Well, maybe you're right. But I'm still working on a plan to
have some kinda business.”

“You and all of Chinatown.”

“Yeah,” said Vandyne, drumming his fingers with his eyes
to the floor. The last time I'd seen him like that was when we were in the sector car, talking about how our fathers had died.

“There's
something I gotta tell you, Chow,” Vandyne said. He
came over and sat back down at the table.

“What have you got?”

“They're giving me a gold shield. I'm going to be third-
grade.” My stomach hurt but I smiled. Vandyne was now 
officially a detective — the lowest grade, but still a detective.

“That's great! That's wonderful!” I said, slapping his
shoulder. “When does this happen?”

“On
Monday. I just wanted to tell you first, so that you heard
it from me and not from an announcement.”

“I'm happy for you, Vandyne. You deserve it. I mean, it's
what you want, right? You wanted to be a detective, right?”

“Yeah, that's right. And I know you do, too. But they don't
give you the investigative jobs and there's no other way to get the gold shield.”

I wasn't understanding what Vandyne was saying. The
coffee machine gurgled.

“Did they say something about me?” I asked.

“Hold on a sec.” Vandyne got up and poured two cups. “Cream?” he asked.

“You know how I like it.”

“Bittersweet.” He came back to the table with the coffees.

“They say anything about me, partner?”

“Well, they haven't said anything about you in terms of
making it to the detective track.”

“What did they say about me?”