remained on- site. Enter me. By 11:00 a.m. on a Saturday, almost every square foot of Canal Street, including parts of the road, is occupied by merchandise. Items spill out of stores onto the sidewalk: card tables whose legs splay under the weight of backpacks and wallets, buckets that brim with baby turtles crawling to the top of a mound of themselves. Food carts sell dumplings and noodles curbside. Women wheel jerry- rigged carts stacked with pirated DVDs. Adolescent boys hawk water and soda from coolers on wheelbarrows. Be careful not to trip over one of the dozen or so varieties of motorized toy that flip, flop, slither, and writhe through the squares of municipal concrete just beyond the cash registers that could make them your own. Invisible hand of the market? If Adam Smith could wander modern Chinatown, he'd have seen it plain as day. And people call the Chinese communists. I hit our target, near Baxter on Canal, in my tasteless denim ensemble, around 11:10 and immediately saw what I was after: counterfeit purses. They were on display, so I didn't need to weasel my way through a back room, down a secret staircase, or into a crawl space in the ceiling. It's the little perks that matter. At that point I acted as if I felt my phone vibrating. When I flipped it open, pretending to answer, I punched the last- number dialed button. "Hello?" I said. Ringing. "Hey Carol! What's happ'nin'?" Ringing. "Not much. I'm shopp