Hot Poppies

by Reggie Nadelson

  “I want to help,” I said. “Tell me how I can help you.”

  “If you want to help me, find out who killed Rose.” Pansy turned to go. “You see, if Rose is dead,” she said briskly, “I’m next.”

  3

  “I’m next.” “I’m next.” “I’m next.” The subway clattered along the tracks. The train was packed. I hung onto a pole and closed my eyes. “I’m next.” “I’m next.”

  I took the train because I didn’t trust the piece of shit that passes as my car to make it more than a few blocks in the storm. I had to go. For days I’d been promising myself I’d visit the Taes. “Please come, Artie,” Mrs Tae had said on the phone. “Please.” Ricky Tae is my best friend and her son and he’s been sick for a long time, because of me, in a way. Rick has a place in the same building as me down off Broadway. His parents own the restaurant on the ground floor. When he got sick, though, the Taes took him up to their house in Riverdale.

  Before I went uptown, I had stopped by Eljay’s place. L.J. Koplin is a guy I know who services camera buffs. I dropped off the two photographs. On the back of Rose’s picture was a bunch of letters and numbers. There was nothing on the back of Pansy’s. Eljay swore he’d see what he could make of them and call me, and then I got the train to Riverdale.

  At the Taes’ house near Wave Hill, the old trees were already heavy with snow; in the forty-mile wind, the branches wheezed eerily. By the time I got inside, my feet were soaked. I left my shoes in the hall and went into Ricky’s room. It was dark. It was always dark, the shades down. The light hurt his eyes, Ricky always said.

  “Hello, Artie.”

  In the corner, on a sofa, Rick was asleep, but out of the gloom came a voice that sent a shiver up and down my spine. It was a docile, girlish voice that said, “Hello, Artie.” I felt a light dry hand brush my face.

  “Dawn?”

  “Hello, Artie,” she said for the third time in the same pale whisper that was like a ghost talking. Ricky’s sister, Dawn had come home from Hong Kong. I put my arms around her and she looked up and said plaintively, “Will he get well? Artie? Will Rick ever get well?”

  I looked at Ricky. One leg hung heavily over the side of the sofa, as if he’d had a stroke. It had happened the October before last. I was in the middle of the Russian case in Brighton Beach and some hoods came after me. But Ricky was in my apartment and they whacked him instead. It should have been me. It was me that found him on the floor, twisted like a rag doll. We never caught the creeps who did it.

  At St Vincent’s, the medics said the best you could hope for was Rick would end up a vegetable. Persistent vegetative state, they called it. A bunch of celery, they meant. A cucumber. A Sunny Von Bulow. His brain was all screwed up. I had to call the Taes and tell them their handsome, brilliant son was a vegetable at twenty-eight. If they got lucky.

  Later, Hillel Abramsky started sitting with him. He went on talking to Rick until he came out of the coma. Then the depression claimed him and now he stayed in this darkened room, barely moving, a TV flickering in the corner. His misery infected everyone in the house: Mrs Tae never listened to the Italian operas she loved and Mr Tae locked himself in his study and played solitary chess against a machine. Dawn, who usually radiated an almost glittering excitement about life, was drawn, ashy and very thin. She clung to me and I could feel her sharp bones.

  “Turn the fucking TV off,” Ricky said angrily, opening his eyes. “The noise is driving me nuts.”

  I switched off the television and tried to talk to Ricky, but he turned his back to me. Dawn glanced at her brother and motioned me to the other side of the room where there were a couple of chairs. Tiredly, she sat on one of them. I sat down next to her.

  “When did you get back?” I said because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “A while ago,” she said. “Pete had business in New York. He said I should come too.”

  “You didn’t call me?”

  “I didn’t call because I didn’t want you to see me like this.” She constantly twisted the diamond rings Pete had given her when they got married. She had loved the big white stones, but now her fingers were thin and dry as twigs and the rings were too big. Dawn’s long silky hair was unwashed. Her eyes were dull, the pupils dilated, the whites like rotten eggs. I knew that Dawn was on drugs.

  The dark was oppressive. There was a floor lamp near me and I reached for the switch. Dawn pushed my hand away. “No,” she said. “Don’t.”

  “Come on, Dawn. Sweetheart? What’s going on? Talk to me.” I heard myself, garrulous, voluble, pretending nothing had changed.

  “It’s OK, Artie.” She faked a smile. “Don’t mind me, I’m just tired. We do a lot of traveling. Everyone’s cutting deals before the Chinese really get their hooks into Hong Kong. July ’97, a few months, hard to believe. The Chinese take over. After that, a year, two, then everything changes. Pete says it will be OK. Pete knows the Chinese. And we’ve both got American passports. We’re OK.” Like a hostage propped in front of the TV cameras, she seemed to be reading approved lines. “I’m only here for Ricky.”

  “Where’s Pete?”

  “I’m here. How are you, Artie?”

  Pete Leung walked into the room and we shook hands. He’s tall, rumpled and very rich. He was thirty-seven, a couple years younger than me. His shirt tails hung out of his corduroy pants, he wore wire-rimmed glasses and his hands were rough, stained with paint. Pete’s a tinkerer. He takes things apart and puts them back together. I liked him a lot. You couldn’t help it.

  Pete left the door open. Light flooded into the room from the hall and, in it, Dawn looked trapped, like a deer in the headlights.

  Just then, Rick looked up and he saw Dawn too. He tried to get up. I ran over to him and found some shoes under the sofa, but he couldn’t keep them on. The shoes were too big. Rick’s feet had shriveled up. They were gray and bony like the feet of old men at the beach.

  “Help me,” he said.

  I held one arm, and Pete took the other. Rick took a few steps, wobbled, and fell. We heaved him up again. “Come on,” I said. “Come on, Rick, you can fucking do this. You can. I swear to God.”

  “I can’t,” he said and then he crawled back onto his sofa.

  I had to get away. I loved these people, they’re as much family as I ever had since I got to New York, and I’d destroyed them. I needed air. I needed Lily very badly.

  In the hall, where thick, soft Chinese carpets covered the waxed oak floors, I got my shoes and coat. Padding after me, Dawn raised her dark unhappy eyes. “Do you want to know how it is, Artie? Do you? Do you really want to know?” But a noise startled her and she flitted away again, down the hall to her bedroom. I heard her door close.

  “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I don’t know what to do any more.” Pete looked exhausted and there were faint lines around his eyes. He took off his glasses and blinked. He had been born in Hong Kong to a very rich family, had gone to college in England and grad school in America and he was usually loose, easy, like the shirt hanging out of his pants. I wondered what it was like to have all Pete’s millions and be as miserable as he looked now. Bending down, he pulled on some green rubber boots.

  “I’ve got to get out for a while. Fancy a few beers?”

  “Yeah, sure, Pete. I could really use a beer.”

  The door to Mr Tae’s study opened unexpectedly. Mr Tae put his head out. “You are leaving?” he said to me. “I have to go out myself. Let me give you a lift please,” he said. It wasn’t a question. It was a command.

  Looking towards his father-in-law, then back at me, Pete Leung raised his eyebrows. “I’ll see you then, Artie. Soon, I hope,” he added and left the house, poor bastard, and I heard the rattle of his old VW Beetle and remembered how he loved that car.

  The lights in the Taes’ windows receded as Mr Tae’s Mercedes pulled away. Mr Tae sat in front next to the driver—I recognized Winston who used to manage the restaurant. I was in back. There was dry
classical music on the radio; Bach, I think.

  “Do you mind?”

  I said I didn’t mind.

  “You’re a jazz fan, I remember that, Artie. Mr Stan Getz, is that right? Mr Tony Bennett. And Mr Art Tatum.” Mr Tae was formal, as if conducting a conversation with a stranger.

  I didn’t know what to call him—I’d always called him Martin. But he was distant now, a stranger who tried to put me at ease with empty talk which made it worse. What did I expect? I’d fucked up his family.

  Ricky’s dad who told terrible jokes and got box seats for the Yankees had been replaced by a grave gray old man with two sick kids. We chatted. I made noises about this and that, the weather mostly. Thought about Dawn, about Pansy. Outside the car, the snow falling was a peculiar bright white in the headlights. White as the dead girl, white as Dawn’s face.

  Fog rolled in as we headed south onto the West Side Highway. Fog ate up the river. The foghorns you couldn’t see delivered their doleful toot and wind moaned as if for the chaos it would cause. The car was hot. I wanted to sleep. My lids sank onto my eyes.

  The Bach ended. Mr Tae put on the radio. Some of the trains were already out, the tracks icing up as the temperature dropped; all three airports were shut. A white-out was forecast, freaky in early March; Manhattan would be cut off from the mainland.

  Traffic clogged the highway in both directions. Sirens screamed, blue lights flashed through the snow and fog. The exit to the 79th Street Marina was blocked; a motorbike was flipped on its back like a massive bug. Around us, cars skidded and spun their wheels on the slick highway. Mr Tae never asked me where I was going. He never said what he wanted from me. Winston kept driving.

  A flash of flame shot up near the Holland tunnel. Winston turned off the highway onto Canal Street and I saw three men standing over a fire in a garbage can. In the street, shadowy figures wrestled grocery bags home, and on West Broadway, a kid selling pink fur earmuffs shared the corner with a pair of shivering Senegalese who hawked fake gold watches out of a briefcase.

  On Broadway, the car turned south and now I knew where we were going. I guess I’d known for a while: we were going home.

  The cast-iron building where I live is seven stories tall and a hundred years old. When Mr Tae bought it it was a wrecked commercial hulk. He opened the restaurant on the ground floor and converted the rest into apartments. The entryway for us residents is separate from the restaurant’s entrance. Now, instinctively, I looked up at my own windows. I saw something move, but there was snow in my eyes and I figured it was only shadows up there, that or paranoia. It was fourteen, maybe fifteen hours since Hillel got me out of Lily’s bed that morning. I was so tired, I was hallucinating.

  “Please.” Martin Tae put his hand on my arm and walked me into the restaurant. It had been closed for business since Rick got sick, but the door was unlocked and, from the back, a pink light glowed. Someone was waiting for us.

  “Do you remember when Rick made us change the name to the Tiananmen Café, Artie? He said we should celebrate, commemorate. And we did. And then, my friend, the old PRC consul had to sneak in the back. His chauffeur had to park the Rolls in the alley. Remember?”

  “I remember.”

  I remembered. For a lot of reasons, I remembered. I remembered how the Taes indulged their only son, Ricky, when he wanted to change the name of the restaurant. I remembered the celebrations. Mr Tae owns property all over town, but the restaurant was always the center of their family life. Dawn had had her wedding in the restaurant; we danced there together that night. Ricky got up on the bandstand and sang to her. “I Love You Just the Way You Are”, he crooned. But now the Taes kept to the big house in Riverdale, Ricky lay there on a sofa in a dark room, and Dawn had come home from Hong Kong looking like death.

  Mr Tae played me beautifully. As we walked to the back of the restaurant where I’d lost a million games of backgammon to him, he reminded me of all the good times. I’m a pushover for good times.

  The light I’d seen came from the lamp on the last table in back. At it, a man waited, hands folded around a cup of tea, a cigarette gathering ash on a saucer.

  “Artie, it’s been a long time.” Billy Tae rose to shake my hand. He embraced his brother and the two men whispered in Chinese. I was in a foreign country.

  Billy Tae is Martin Tae’s brother, Rick and Dawn’s uncle; everyone calls him Uncle Billy. The family dandy, he wore his Irish tweed jacket over his shoulders and a silk ascot tucked into his shirt. Billy is a rich man with interests in shipping in Hong Kong, but he’s a streetwise guy and he can always get a pair of the best seats for the Knicks.

  I loved those games at the Garden with the Tae uncles: the hot dogs, the beer, the celebrities. “Woody Allen!” they’d whisper, pointing along celebrity row. “You saw?” They would nudge each other. “Whoopi! Spike!” They would slap their knees. “Harrison Ford!”

  A plate of cookies in one hand, a bottle of Johnny Walker Black in the other, Winston appeared and served us and returned to the kitchen.

  “Will you help us?” Uncle Billy asked me.

  “Sure,” I said. “Yeah, of course I will. But with what? What can I help you with?”

  “You’ve seen Dawn. We don’t know what’s wrong with her. You’re a detective.”

  “I’m not a policeman any more,” I said. I lit a cigarette. The door rattled. We all looked up, but it was only the wind. Billy poured a little Scotch in a glass and offered it to me. I took it.

  Martin Tae said, “Our family is being destroyed,” and I said again, “I’ll do anything, but you got to help me here, OK?”

  Uncle Billy smiled gently. “This is hard for us,” he said, and for a minute we drank the Scotch and smoked, and I realized I had never thought of the Taes as foreign before. Mrs Tae’s family had been in New York for generations. Martin Tae had been born in San Francisco; he had been an ace pilot in World War II. After I moved into the building, I’d spent a lot of time running up and down the back stairs that connect the lofts to the restaurant. The Taes became family. The building became my safety net, my nation state. It crumbled some when I found Ricky on my floor. The fucking barbarians had been at my gate. But they would never get inside. Never!

  “Dawn is very ill,” Martin Tae said bleakly. “Peter is unhappy. She doesn’t talk to him. She doesn’t talk to anyone, except her brother who can’t help her. You saw his feet?”

  “Do you think it’s drugs?” I knew it was drugs, but I said it carefully; I was poking around a bad wound.

  “I don’t know, Artie. I just know we need you.”

  “What can I do?”

  “I can’t believe Dawn is on drugs but, yes, if she is, God help me.” He began to weep.

  Uncle Billy took up the slack. “We need to know what she’s buying and who her contacts are. She leaves the house every day. We think she goes to Chinatown. I want to know if she’s buying on the street. If she has to have it, I would rather get her good stuff. I don’t want her dying from shit.”

  Uncle Billy glanced at his brother who nodded and I knew it had all been prearranged. “We want you to follow her. We want to hire you, Artie. Just keep an eye on her for a few days,” Uncle Billy added. “Ricky would do it, should do it, but he can’t.”

  It was the unspoken thing: Rick was sick, because of me.

  Martin Tae gestured to his brother, who took a checkbook out of the tweed jacket. I pushed it away. “I’ll do anything I can, but I don’t get it. Why don’t you just put her in a clinic?”

  “She won’t stay. Pete tried. She runs away. She’s become a cunning girl.” Martin Tae’s eyes filled up again. “It’s killing her mother. First Ricky, now Dawn.”

  “I’m sure you can use some money.” Billy Tae echoed Hillel; everyone knew I was broke. “Also, there’s a detective we know. He’s very talented. His uncle is my friend. Perhaps he can help you. I hope you don’t mind, but we already asked him to give you a call.”

  “If you know a good cop, why don
’t you ask him for help?”

  “He’s not family. Not like you. There are things we don’t take outside. You are family, Artie.”

  “Please take the money,” Martin Tae said. If I was going to help anyone, I knew I had to take it. And I knew that I’d hate myself;

  I got up. “I’ll do whatever I can,” I said, and we all shook hands. Then Billy Tae ripped the check from its holder; it made a brutal noise.

  “What’s his name, your cop?”

  Uncle Billy tilted his head back and finished the Scotch in his glass. “Jeremy Chen. His name is Jeremy Chen.”

  After I left the brothers, before I went home, I walked over to the dumpling joint where Rose had worked—it was only a couple of blocks—and ordered a beer. I had been meaning to do it all day. Another girl had replaced Rose, another shy nameless girl, this one with a weary smile. I drank up quickly and left. I don’t know why I went.

  At home, I checked the locks on my door, poured the remains of some Merlot into a glass and flipped on the answering machine. The club, where I work some nights doing security, called to say it was closing early. Lily had gone to the movies with a friend and I could meet them if I wanted, at the Angelika, but I didn’t want to see a movie or meet her friend. All I wanted was Lily. There was also a message from Eljay, my camera guy. He said he’d be in touch.

  And there was Jeremy Chen. A summons, not a message. Meet me in the morning, it said. Breakfast. I had no intention of obeying some cop I never met. I swallowed the rest of the wine and looked out the window at the street.

  Usually it was around this time of night that Ricky would stop in, and we’d drink some beer and gossip. His own apartment was locked up. I hadn’t been up there in months. All day people had been asking for help, needing help, wanting things—Hillel, Pansy, now the Taes.

  Across the narrow street, snow filled the curlicues and dusted the pediments of the cast-iron buildings. The fire escapes that criss-crossed them sagged under the quivering piles of white stuff. Snow was falling so fast the snowplows couldn’t keep up. Below, a solitary man with a shaggy dog trudged through the drifts and Mike Rizzi put his head out of the coffee shop, then pulled down the metal gates. The green neon sign—The Athens Café, it read—flickered and went out, Mike got into his car to go home to his family. I was alone.