False Allegations by Andrew Vachss

Author:Andrew Vachss [Vachss, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780375719110
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2001-09-25T07:00:00+00:00

The next morning was a Sunday. The blue dragon tapestry was in the window of Mama's restaurant. Cops inside. I wasn't worried about it—cops were always dropping in, wasting their time asking questions. There was plenty to ask about. The Chinese youth gangs had pretty much given up trying to get a toehold on the gambling industry. Their elders had been at it too long, had too many connections. And the young ones had decimated their own ranks in bloody turf wars that made the old Colombian kill–crews look like Quakers.

The new crew was mostly Fukinese, and their latest game is kidnapping. They aren't any good at it. The wild kids snatched shop owners right out of their houses, dragged them to some abandoned apartment building, tortured them into calling their families. The snatching was easy, but the vicious amateurs never mastered the art of the ransom exchange. Though they mostly got nabbed, the body counts kept going up, and the business community was pressuring the cops hard.

When I was a kid, one of my foster homes was right on the Chinatown border. The old border, next to Little Italy. Some of the kids I knew had real mothers, not the State–paid ones I got. I always listened to what real mothers said, trying to see if I could hear the difference in their voices, how come they had wanted their kids. The real mothers always pointed to the Chinese kids as role models. So studious, hardworking. So polite and respectful. You wouldn't see those kids hanging out on street corners or in some stupid gang. No, not then. We let immigrants build this country, then we leave our mark on them for gratitude.

Mama wouldn't touch rough stuff and the cops knew it. They knew she wouldn't talk to them too, but they kept coming.

I had time to kill, but I didn't want to leave the neighborhood, so I drifted over to a sidewalk kiosk.

"You got the Racing Edition?" I asked the Chinese woman, pointing at the comics section that covers the Sunday News.

"Not ready yet," she said, nodding her head at various stacks of the different sections waiting to be assembled into one edition. "You need coupons?" she asked brightly, holding out a colorful sheaf.

"No thanks," I said.

The woman deftly flicked the coupons sideways into a large carton without looking and went back to her work. A little girl, maybe nine years old—her daughter—was sitting at a makeshift desk inside the kiosk. Someone had jury–rigged a single bare lightbulb for the child to work by. Behind her was a perfect cardboard imitation of the wall of slots they use for mail at hotel desks. The scissors in her small hands flashed as she snipped the brilliantly–colored sheets of coupons into individual units, sticking them in the pigeonholes without looking.

I stopped by the door to light a cigarette. A white woman wearing a quilted green parka pushed past me, asked the kiosk operator: "You have any for Pampers?"

"Sure, we got. How many you need?"

"Twenty?"

"Pampers?" the Chinese woman called out to the little girl.

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