MY OWN PLACE is on Howard Street in Chinatown. I catch the Broadway–Seventh Avenue Line at Seventy-Second; I’m home in six stops with a change to the local at Fourteenth Street. My block, between Broadway and Mercer, was a hellhole till the ’20s, when hipsters discovered it. The Flood of ’29 and then construction on the Lower Manhattan Seawall drove them out. Now it’s a hellhole again. Rents are cheap; I wouldn’t live anywhere else. I’m in a second-story loft that’s so big I could park a truck in it, with eighteen-foot ceilings and windows on two sides. I’m directly above a Korean greengrocer. My place smells like jicama and bok choy.

There’s no such thing as off-line in DivSix. You keep your locator on around the clock and your earbud in 24/7. Mine chimes now, as I’m surfacing from the subway at Canal Street, with a voice mail from Gleason’s tech sergeant instructing me for the third time not to waste any more time following up on that “crazy Jewish shit” that came in yesterday via text. The sergeant makes it clear that Gleason knows that Manning, with me in tow, has today hit the sweatshop in Canarsie and the contraband dealer in Little Hong Kong.

This note is succeeded immediately by a text from Manning.

BULLSHIT. DO WHAT I TOLD YOU.

Manning pretends not to like or to understand tech. But I’ve noticed that very few messages, even those with his in-box blacked out, get past him.

I grab a slice and a Diet Coke at the stand-up Ray’s next to the greengrocer’s. Ethnic prejudice is interesting in Chinatown. The Chinese hate the Koreans and the Vietnamese, whom they call gooks, dinks, slants, and slopes; the Vietnamese and the Koreans hate the Filipinos, whom they call flips. Laotians and Cambodians are beneath the notice of any civilized human. And everybody hates the Japanese. Whites are a joke to the Asians downtown. In my neighborhood the man or woman on the street literally can’t tell an Irishman from an Italian. The quirk in intra-Asian bigotry is that money and social class override all. I’ll be shopping in my greengrocer’s; she’ll catch my arm and start bitching about the gooks and slopes pouring into the States by millions, fleeing the rising seas and year-round monsoons in Southeast Asia. “See those two flips over there? They steal something every time they come in.”

To her I’m not a flip because I’m a cop.