Jack tossed the incense into his locker and was closing it when the desk phone jangled.
It was Paddy, the desk sergeant, downstairs.
"There's a man down here," he said, "who needs to speak to a Chinese."
"Where's the translator?" Jack asked.
"Chin's out on meal, and Wong took a personal day."
"Coming down," Jack said as he hung up the phone.
Sergeant Paddy, behind the desk, loomed over the man, who was watching Jack approach. He was Chinese, forty-something, dressed like he might be an office worker, shift manager, something like that.
"How can I help you?" Jack asked, his Cantonese sharp.
The man responded in Toishanese, the tongue of laundrymen and waiters.
"I would like to report that there has been a rape," he said guardedly. "But there are conditions…"Jack's eyes narrowed-"that I need your help with."
Jack waited, then said, "Okay, what do you need?"
Paddy jerked his head toward the rear of the room. Jack walked the man slowly to the benches by the back stairs. After he was seated, the man said, "My niece was raped. She is ten years old. Her grandmother is beside herself-"
"Slow down," Jack said quietly, his Toishanese all slang now.
"Her father does not like the police. He does not want to report it. My sister, the mother, feels the shame of it will harm the girl further."
Jack was beginning to have a bad feeling about this.
"Not one of them will speak to a gwailo officer."
Sex Crimes Unit, Jack was thinking.
"I am hoping to convince them. To speak to you."
Jack took a breath, through his nose the way a boxer does when he's under pressure. "Come upstairs," he said.
In the empty room, Jack asked, "When did this happen?"
"This morning. About five hours ago."
There was a pause. Jack knew the victim should already have been examined, valuable time had been lost. He wasn't on the clock yet, but to see if this man's story was true, he was good to go.
Normally, a call would have come into the precinct and they would have processed it. Ms. Chin, the translator, would get involved if needed. Get the basic information from the complainant. A uniformed officer would be dispatched to the scene and determine the facts, report back to the sergeant. They would notify EMS, get the victim to a hospital, administer a rape kit test. The detectives of the Sex Crimes Unit would be called to respond, the experts, to determine the who's and why's. Ask the victim to identify photographs. Check local and state files for pedophile predators of the type involved. Track and locate. Surveillance if necessary. Bring suspects in for questioning. Draw up timelines to trace the crime back and forth. Check the prison population based on the perpetrator's profile. Post composite sketches of the suspect. Seek help from the local population. The news media, TV, radio, and newspapers, could help.
The uncle's eyes went distant as he continued. "The grandmother and the little girl. They had gone to the supermarket. It was around ten-thirty or eleven this morning. They were in the elevator, coming home."
Jack was seeing it clearly in his mind.
"There was a man inside, riding up with them. I think he followed them in. On their floor they started to get off. But the man pushed grandmother, Ah Por, down, and took the little girl to the roof."
The uncle's jaw clenched. He swallowed, took a breath.
"The mother and the grandmother found her on a landing, crying. Her underwear was missing. And she was bleeding.
The uncle's chest heaved, his hands clenched, his knuckles turned white.
"What did he look like?" Jack asked.
"The grandmother said he was cleancut, that he wasn't an older man, but not a kid either. Maybe twenty to thirty years old. Chinese, it's hard to tell sometimes."
"What else?"
"The mother is concerned the girl may be pregnant."
"Is the family there now?"
"I will take you to them." He showed Jack a Con Edison bill with an address on it.
Jack went to the photo file cabinet, pulled all the pictures of Asian men involved in sex crimes. There were seven photos in all, men of apparently different ages, but possible perps. Hard to tell with Asian men. He picked up the phone and tapped up Paddy.
"Sarge," he said, "it's a possible rape. I'm going to need the Sex Crimes Unit."
"Forget about it," Paddy answered, "there's reports of Hispanic men attacking women protestors along the parade route. Snatching them near the Penn Yards. Sex Crimes is all tied tip."
"I'm going with the man to the scene. I'll work up the information." He looked at the Con Ed bill. "It's 10 Catherine Slip. In the Smith Houses."
"I'll patch it along, but Sex Crimes won't be available until after the protest march."
Downstairs, Sergeant Paddy watchedJack and the man exit the stationhouse, both of them somber. Jack flashed him a hard look and shook his head as more uniformed officers trooped in.
The four to midnight shift was finally arriving.
Catherine Slip was six blocks off. Along the way, Jack stopped at Tong's Variety Toys and purchased a black-and-white panda bear, a prop he hoped would help put the victim at ease when he interviewed her.
The uncle appeared nervous, anxious, as they walked together.
"You're doing the right thing," Jack said. The uncle nodded, uncertainty in his eyes.
"Why?" Jack asked. "Why does the father dislike the police?"
The uncle shook his head, a look of disdain crossing his face.
"He was mugged by some loy sung, Spanish men. Over there somewhere. When the police came, he felt they did nothing. Another time, a policeman wrote him a traffic ticket. He couldn't speak enough English to argue. He felt he did nothing wrong. Just sitting in the car. It still cost him a hundred dollars."
They were approaching the fringe of the neighborhood.
The Smith Houses were brown brick buildings, each seventeen stories tall, a low-income housing development located in the bowels of the Lower East Side. They had been part of the post-war boom in public housing construction, stacking poor families, black, Latino, white, in isolated areas, families that lived off Welfare programs, generations growing up on WIC coupons, and food stamps. Subsistance on assistance.
Twelve buildings hunkered down next to the East River, by the Brooklyn Bridge and the South Street exit ramp of the FDR, beginning just a block away from the city's police headquarters.
Jack remembered schooldays, when he and Wing Lee came by the community center gymnasium, looking to play basketball, fearfully avoiding the black men who drank from quart bottles of Colt.45, pitched quarters against the gym wall, and rolled dice when they weren't selling bags of marijuana, coke, maybe heroin. Pa had told Jack not to go down there, to the jingfu Iangovernment housing projects-where every Chinese resident had been mugged at one time or another. One day that last summer, a group of black kids stole his basketball, and tore his Knicks T-shirt. He never went back. Fond memories.