Read Online The Delta Star by Joseph Wambaugh - Free Book Online

threat to public safety. And that what is at most unsavory in America is commonplace in Seoul and in most of the rest of the Orient and southeast Asia.
    “It’s a damn shame that in this day and age the vice squad still wastes time and money and manpower to infiltrate fine places like this and pose as customers just to write a few lousy tickets to B-girls,” The Bad Czech said for the benefit of a nighttime cocktail lounge B-girl who doubled during the afternoon as a food waitress.
    She knew that the opinions of a lowly public servant like the monster beat cop carried about as much clout with the chief of police as the message in a fortune cookie. Still, she went along with the charade with Korean forbearance.
    “Yes yes ,” she said. “Too bad.”
    “I mean, look at it this way, Cecil,” The Bad Czech said to his partner, who was wiping the dripping perspiration from his face with a napkin. “The vice squad spends maybe a hundred bucks buy in drinks in the bar here, pretendin to be customers, until they finally get one poor little hostess to ask them to buy her a drink. And then they go, ‘Dum, de dum dum !’ and pull out the shield and write her a ticket for solicitin drinks. Big deal. They protected the public morality? I ask you, is that police work in this day and age? What with the streets overrun with maniacs and insane people and murderers and rapists and all the other things we owe to the Democrats? I ask you.”
    “Uh uh,” Cecil Higgins mumbled, wondering if a glass of milk would put out the fire.
    “It’s just the Oriental culture, for chrissake! They like to come into a place and meet pretty girls and they don’t mind if the pretty girls ask them for a drink and tell them how manly they are. Hell, I used to love that when I was in Nam and Thailand and Cambodia and Japan. That’s what it’s all about.”
    “Uh huh.” Cecil Higgins had his lines down pat.
    “The city licenses taxi dancers. Round-eyed taxi dancers. I think they dump on these people cause they’re foreigners.”
    The Bad Czech looked toward the waiter clearing the next table and the waiter nodded at the monster cop and said, “Light on,” which The Bad Czech understood to be “Right on,” but which were the only two words the Korean knew, and he didn’t have the faintest idea what the monster cop was babbling about and wished he’d get the hell out.
    It was tough getting The Bad Czech to stop singing for his supper. When the boss was here, his expressions of sympathy and understanding with the Asian plight might have gone on for half an hour. But he was tired and it was time to close the show, which always ended with The Bad Czech making a gesture to pay the bill. Of course it was always refused, with lots of bogus smiles and bowing by long-suffering people who wished the boss would dump these two big dummies and start concentrating on bribing politicians and other people who counted.
    Unlike Cecil Higgins, who in a more traditional fashion would halfheartedly reach in the pocket with a mumbled, “Whadda we owe ya?” The Bad Czech had panache, and took the trouble to display his credit card, saying, “How much for the lovely chow?”
    The employees would grin through tight flesh and say, “No, no. On house. Come back soon.”
    And The Bad Czech would look surprised and say, “Really? Why, that’s awful nice. Thanks a lot. And if I can ever help ya in any way …”
    But then a singular thing happened. Not singular in itself but, as he later would consider it, something that helped Mario Villalobos come to the inescapable and troubling conclusion that most Big Events are decided by the falling of less than a sparrow. Of a leaf, perhaps.
    Or in this case, of a chopstick.
    When The Bad Czech was doing his act with the credit card he stepped on a dropped chopstick. The chopstick lodged between the ripples of The Bad Czech’s ripple-soled shoes. The chopstick clicked along the parqueted floor when The Bad Czech took a