He exhaled steam through his upturned collar. The precinct was just a dash across Bowery now, the businesses on the empty boulevard still shuttered in the frozen Chinatown dawn. The Tofu King, however, would be open for the early bird special, a two-for-one deal on bricks of fresh tofu to kick off the day. Baker’s hours. The Chinatown grandmothers bought jong and tofu early, before the free bowl of congee breakfast at the Seniors’ Center.

At the corner of Elizabeth Alley, Jack didn’t see the captain’s car outside the station house, but maybe one of the squad had already moved it to parking.

“THE CAPTAIN IN yet?” Jack asked.

The uniformed officer stepping out of the station house hesitated and regarded Jack with suspicion before answering, “Haven’t seen him, but we got CompStat this morning.”

Fuhgeddaboudit, Jack imagined Marino saying. Computer statistics analysis, CompStat, could take the entire morning, if not the whole day, with Commanding Officer Marino answering to the issues and anomalies of the Chinatown precinct.

So forget the early bird catch-up meet with the good captain.

Jack turned and went down Bayard toward the Tofu King.

From the corner of Mott he could already see the steamy air gushing out of the tofu factory, the morning belch from hot bean products cooking out of the vats and slats behind the front counter and refrigerator cases.

He’d want to pay for the sweet desserts before Billy Bow, who’d inherited the third-generation family business, could dramatically refuse his money. Billy, his last neighborhood friend, eyes and ears in Chinatown, an embittered divorcé. It was just a few bucks that Jack was happy to pay, but Billy refused to value their friendship against the products of his lifeblood, tofu. So they regularly bought each other drinks at Grampa’s bar, fortifying their Chinatown bond. Two budding alcoholics feeding off each other.

Billy had an interesting take on Chinese marriage and never needed much prodding to complain about his ex-wife.

JACK STEPPED INTO the foggy shop front and grabbed two plastic containers of bok tong go and wong tong go, angling toward the hot dao foo fa and determined to pay before Billy Bow noticed.

The cashier was on the phone, but after she hung up she refused his money in her guttural Toishanese and signaled to the next customers in line.

“Saw you on the surveillance camera,” said Billy, stepping out from behind the steaming vats of beans. “You’re an early bird today?” He eyed Jack’s bag of desserts. “That for the lawyer chick again?” He grinned. “I warned you. Baggage.”

He meant Alex’s grade-school daughter, Chloe, aka Kimberly.

Homeboy Billy, Jack mused, his eyes and ears on the street but his nose always in other people’s business.

“Tell me again,” Jack countered, “why you got divorced.”

“Whaddya watching Oprah again? There’s a hundred reasons. How many you want?”

“I got time for one,” Jack said, grinning.

Six Skirts, Ten Shirts

BILLY CHECKED THE steam vats as he began. “Okay, for one thing, we had laundry problems.” Jack narrowed his eyes skeptically.

“No, really.” Billy continued, “You know my little girls went to Transfiguration, right? Catholic school.” Jack knew, as most Chinatown residents did, the Church of the Transfiguration on Mott Street had served the Chinatown area for more than a hundred years and was a popular alternative to the rough public-school education Jack had gotten.

Billy continued, “So the girls got these school uniforms. Shirts, skirts, sweaters, like that. Two sets each, rotate from week to week, right?” Jack nodded, urging him on. “Well, wifey, she’s having everything dry-cleaned, dig? And after a while I see that it’s costing me more than the fuckin’ parking space at Confucius! And don’t get me started, that’s another fuckin’ matter. Anyway, so I took over the laundry duties. Got everything washed at Danny Chong’s Laundromat. Everything comes back folded, neat. Then I do whatever ironing myself, right? Cool.”

Jack took a shaolin patience breath as he nodded again, still refusing to interrupt Billy.

“So one day I’m ironing, right? Just the touch-up stuff. And she comes over to supervise, starts telling me I’m doing it wrong. ‘Collar first,’ she says. ‘Then the cuffs, and sleeves,’ blah, blah, right? This advice from the mother who never lifted an iron for her girls. Supervising me. ‘And you have to put a towel under the buttons,’ she says. ‘Yeah?’ I said, ‘Who says?’ ‘Martha Stewart,’ she says. She saw it on cable. ‘Fuck Martha Stewart,’ I said. ‘This is how I been doing it, not you. Between the yum cha with the ladies, and the da mah jerk, I don’t see you ironing shit.’ ”

“What did she say to that?” Jack ventured.

“Called me an ignorant Chinatown lowlife.”

“No shit.” Jack laughed.

“Not for nothing, Jacky,” Billy began, his jaw clenched, “our people got history doing laundry in America. So telling a Chinaman how to iron a shirt is like telling a nigger how to eat a watermelon.”

Jack shook his head and snickered in spite of himself.

A timer went off somewhere, and Billy turned to check the hot slats of tofu. Jack glanced at the wall clock and saw his chance to exit. Still, he felt bad for Billy, the bitter divorcé who found solace in loose women and the occasional whore at Chao’s.

“Gotta roll,” Jack said.

“Breeze, homeboy.” Billy grinned, looking up from the hot mist. “And remember. She’s baggage.”

AJA

THE FREEZING WIND seemed even more brutal as Jack stepped out of the steamy tofu shop, and he went east on Canal at a brisk pace, passing the firehouse and the Buddhist temple, going through the old junkie parks that led into Loisaida, the Lower East Side. He clenched his jaw against the cold, and soon the renovated bodega that had become Alex’s office came into view.

The sign over the storefront read ASIAN AMERICAN JUSTICE ADVOCACY and a banner with the letters AJA fluttered in the wind. Jack could see Alex through the front window, in her back office. She wasn’t alone.

Jack went in quietly and placed the bag of desserts on the receptionist’s desk. He recognized the man standing in Alex’s office as Assistant District Attorney Bang Sing, a prosecutor he’d worked with on a previous Chinatown case. Sing looked pissed off, and Jack overheard him say, “Look, I only got assigned this case because I’m Chinese. And you know it. They want to put a yellow face on it,” he groused. “What are you gonna do? So if there is a tape, I need to see it. And if I have to, I’ll drop the damn case. It’s a no-win situation for me.”

Alex noticed Jack’s quiet arrival with a nod, but kept her game face on.

Jack knew what ADA Sing was referring to. The city had resurrected an obscure ban on fireworks for future traditional Chinatown celebrations, like the Chinese New Year. Many residents and activists were outraged, but one Chinese-American Iraq War veteran had protested the ban by lighting up a strand of tiny ladyfinger firecrackers on the steps of City Hall. He got arrested and was charged with trespassing, disorderly conduct, inciting to riot, and resisting arrest. Then the sudden appearance of a home videotape of the incident put the lie to the NYPD charges of inciting riot and resisting arrest. The tape cast doubt on disorderly conduct and trespassing as well, and now ADA Bang Sing was going to have to eat one for the blue team. Jack knew it would be a hard pill to swallow for the driven Chinese ADA, and he sure wouldn’t be happy with Alex for taking the Chinese veteran’s side pro bono, along with the local American Legion Post. The incident had aroused a sense of pride in Jack, but as a cop he felt tainted by police misconduct.