my own mistakes. Although I wish she'd forbidden my eighth- grade perm, going undercover in Chinatown was where she drew the line. Years later, when I confessed to disobeying her, she shot me a look that could have curled hair without chemicals. Honestly, though, I never felt unsafe in Chinatown; I had anonymity. My boss was the one who received death threats. He was also the one shouting with the vendor outside the Pokmon stall, which I of course knew; I'd been expecting his arrival. Here's how it went down. A week prior, another of my fellow "spotters" had cased the same location, looking for fake versions of our clients' products. While she fingered purses and scarves, tried on sunglasses, and generally pretended to shop, she was actually memorizing all of the brands being sold, the kinds of items within each brand, in which part of the store each was displayed or behind which secret remote- controlled doors each could be found -- multiplied by however many other locations she'd been assigned to visit before she could leave that section of Canal Street and safely purge her brain via pen and paper in a restaurant bathroom. The elderly should pursue this line of work as an exercise to stave off Alzheimer's. With this intelligence my boss had obtained a warrant to confiscate Pokmon's contraband. He'd surprise the vendor by rolling in with a raid team of off- duty cops and fire fighters. But first, they needed confirmation that the goods