Hot Poppies

by Reggie Nadelson

  4

  “Oh, cheer the fuck up,” I said to myself. I turned on all the lights, looked around the loft that was all mine—white walls, big windows, wood floors. I put Fats Waller on the CD good and loud, threw off my clothes, took a long hot shower, put on clean sweats so old they were soft like cashmere, did six push-ups to prove to myself I could, and called Lily’s machine so I could listen to her voice.

  Upstairs, the guy who moves his furniture every few days was at work on his sofa and the hardwood floors creaked under him. Across the hall, the banker put on Woody Guthrie. Next door, the dachshunds yapped and the kids yelled. People were home, tucked in, safe against the weather. I was starving.

  In the fridge I unearthed some hot salami, a jar of roasted red peppers and a chunk of real provolone from Joe’s Dairy. I heated up some black bean soup, opened another bottle of Merlot and tossed a bottle of olive oil into the garbage, impelled by the weird stink it gave off. This was no virgin, as Ricky would have said. In the microwave I zapped a loaf of semolina bread. I scooped up some law school catalogues and the Sunday Times car section, sat on a stool at the counter that divides my kitchen from my living room, and ate. People could be dead and you could still be hungry.

  I ate. I tried to imagine myself in a suit in an office, a picture of Lily on my desk, money in the bank, and a red Cadillac in the garage. Except for Lily and the car, the image was blurry. I changed the CD to Tony Bennett doing Rogers and Hart.

  “Party time, Artie,” someone shouted through my door. “On the roof.”

  I got dressed, grabbed my ski jacket, shoved open the back window and climbed out onto the fire escape.

  The air was cold. Snow fell. Yawning to suck extra oxygen out of the thin air, I tripped over the pots of dead geraniums and climbed up to the roof.

  Snow had gathered in knee-high drifts on the roof, on the water tank, on the shed where Mr Tae lets me keep my bike and pieces of a boat I bought one summer but never sailed.

  In the downy snow, some of my neighbors had lashed a pair of canvas beach umbrellas to the shed and, underneath the yellow striped umbrellas, they sat, wrapped in blankets, playing poker with their gloves on. There was a yellow light fixed to the roof of the shed; in it, the faces were like Halloween pumpkins, round and flat and grinning.

  From a portable radio, Springsteen sang “Born in the USA”. A blue plastic pail was filled with snow and planted with bottles of beer and wine and vodka. Lois passed a jar of nuts. The door to the roof opened and Louise appeared. Head encased in a knitted hat with a pompom, she held a huge steaming box.

  “Pizza,” she called, triumphant.

  “Beer, Artie?” It was Dave, an architect who lived on the second floor. “Rescue me from all these babes,” he laughed.

  “Where’s Kathe?” I said.

  “Still at the hospital.” Dave’s wife, Kathe, was a doctor; more than a few times, she had stitched me up in the middle of the night. “You in, Artie?” Dave said. “You want to play a couple hands?”

  But the view in the other direction distracted me. Chinatown. That night, looking down from the roof, I saw it obscured by the storm, lost in snow, a village, a rural backwater, its lights almost invisible. It was an illusion. But it was there all right, spreading inexorably. It lapped at my feet. I had to go. That was what I told myself, but it was a fucking lie. I wanted to go.

  Yesterday, I’d been a guy without much going on, now I was spinning a bunch of plates. I was wide awake, the adrenalin was flowing for the first time in a long time. It felt good.

  “Save me some beer,” I called to Dave. Then I scuttled back down the fire escape and through my loft, slamming windows. In the street, I jumped in my car. If it couldn’t make it to Riverdale, it could get me to Pansy. To make sure she was OK. To make sure she wasn’t next. To see her. I was a jerk to drive.

  Halfway down a deserted street on the eastern fringe of Chinatown, my car skidded on the black ice that had formed under the fluffy deceptive snow and went out of control. I had to go with it or end up hamburger. For what seemed a lifetime, the car swerved in sickening, irrational spins, like a punch-drunk boxer, and then, finally, took a nose dive into a snow bank, pitched forward a few more inches and stopped dead.

  Wind blew past the blank faces of the warehouses that lined the street, loading docks empty, metal shutters down. It snapped snow against my face like iced gunshot. The streetlights seemed to shiver, seemed alive as the snow and wind and mist whirled around them. There were no cabs, no traffic at all, only the eerie sound of the weather, like a white-noise machine, as New York slipped back a century, when the cast-iron buildings went up, the streets were piled with horseshit and gas light flickered. I looked for a cab.

  Chinatown gave me the heebie jeebies, as my Aunt Birdie used to say. From nowhere, the thing came at me with the force of an ox.

  At first, I thought I had slipped on something greasy under the snow. Then my legs turned into jello and folded up like a cardboard box. Jello. Boxes. My head hurt like a bruise as I crashed to the sidewalk. Fog draped over the buildings and mixed with snow. I was blinded. I licked my lips and tasted wet snow. Did I pass out? Was it my own head I heard bump down the sidewalk? Thump thump thump, I seemed to be listening to the sonic boom of my own heart like when your ears are stuffed, or maybe it was my skull, bumping on cement. Somewhere, I heard someone giggle. I heard the cackle of derision. I was their joke, their prey. I was dead meat.

  When I opened my eyes, I was in a freight elevator in one of the warehouses. In the dark, I made out that there were two of them, but they had on ski masks. Cold creepy fingers clutched at my neck and pressed on nerves I didn’t know I had. Sweat dripped down my side like snakes. I heard the elevator doors snap shut, I heard the gears grind.

  The elevator lurched and rose. Then it stopped. Panic drenched me. I was trapped and I couldn’t get up. The floors were slimy from decayed vegetables. The gassy green smell made me want to puke.

  One of them grabbed my arms from behind; the other one got me in a choke. He had muscles like an ox, like a bull. But there was no pain. I lost oxygen; he let up. I came to. He knew where to press. He came at me with moves that knocked the stuffing out, and I lay on the crates in the dark like a rag doll.

  Somewhere a flashlight flickered. Light shone on a metal blade. It was a meat cleaver, the kind of blade gangs use to sever muscles in your arm, your back, so you can’t work or feed yourself. You end up still alive and a complete cripple. He must have pulled off the mask because I got the impression of a face. A Chinese face, I thought, but the elevator creaked and then plummeted two floors. I was falling. Couldn’t breathe.

  Something whizzed so close to my head I could feel the molecules move. I was sucking air.

  I’m in Moscow, twelve years old, stuck in the elevator of the Intourist Hotel on Gorky Street, it was then. It’s winter. We had gone in to sample the exotic pleasures of the forbidden—foreign tourists, espresso coffee. A kid I know has an uncle who sells busts of Lenin to the tourists. The other kids dare me. Who can get to the top floor? Who dares?

  I love a dare. It is the only thing that makes life OK, that and my mother who laughs at the system, and the scratchy copies of black market rock and roll records you can sometimes buy on the street outside GUM, the department store.

  No one else is in that Moscow elevator. No one comes. I press the button. The elevator moves up. Then it sticks. I don’t know what to do. If I press the alarm bell, I will be discovered and punished in ways that I can’t imagine. So I sit on the floor. The light goes out. I sit on in the dark. Panic produces sweat, and although it’s winter in Moscow, I’m drenched with it. Time passes. Eventually, someone reports there are problems with the elevator and I hear noises. Workmen are banging on the cables. They lower the elevator to the ground floor. They pry open the doors and find me.

  A policeman, a gray cardigan under his greasy gray jacket, hauls me in, puts me in a cell for a whole afternoon. When my mother comes to get me,
she isn’t laughing.

  Now, suddenly, in the freight elevator in Chinatown, the doors opened, shut, slammed. I waited. They were gone.

  Scrabbling in the gloom, my hands felt the elevator panel and I hoisted myself up on it and shoved on the metal lever. The doors split open. I found a light switch.

  My watch said ten-thirty. I had only been there five, six minutes. Legs shaking, I peered around the elevator, then felt along the wooden panel at the back until I hit something cold, something metallic. I yanked it out. When I got into the street I saw it was a five-sided spike. Four inches across its flat back, it had five vicious three-inch spikes on the other side, sharp as knives. It was what the goons threw past me in the dark.

  They never said a word. Nada. Christ! No notice given, nothing asked. Was this what they called, what was it, expressive terrorism? A taunt? A threat?

  Somehow, I got out into the street. I looked at the building and saw what had happened. The freight elevator was flush with the sidewalk. Produce could be wheeled in from the curb. The scumbags that hit me had dragged me in like a load of bok choy. When I looked down, I saw a red stain on the fresh snow. I had torn my hand on the spike. There was some Kleenex in my pocket and I wrapped the weapon as best I could.

  My wallet was gone, so was my gun. I was pissed off at losing the Seecamp pistol—they go for four, five hundred bucks these days—but I was almost relieved. It was a mugging. An ordinary everyday New York City mugging. A couple of kids. An empty street. Opportunity knocked. Everything was gone, cash, license, credit cards. All they left me was the spike.

  Think mugging. Think methamphetamines. China White. Forget terrorists. Forget the dead girl and her friend, Pansy Loh, who talked English like Princess Di. All they wanted was my wallet or a few laughs. Then I realized they had my keys.

  I had to get home; they had the keys, they had my address.

  I could barely walk. There weren’t any cabs, only a guy on skis who asked if I wanted a ride. A real comedian.

  It seemed to take hours to walk a dozen blocks, but I made it. I buzzed Lois to bring my extra keys down. Miraculously, she was back in her place instead of on the roof.

  “Get Kathe, too,” I yelled into the intercom, and the two women came down and got me off the street into the building. From my apartment, I called a locksmith.

  “Take off your pants,” Kathe said. I lay face down on the floor. She prodded me gently, but I yelled with the pain.

  “Who hit you?”

  I rolled over and sat up. “Put something against the door,” I said to Lois.

  “It’s locked.”

  “Just do it. Just do it. Do it. There’s a gun in the top drawer of the desk. Just please do it, Lois, OK?”

  Lois got the gun, put a chair in front of the door and sat on it.

  “For Christ’s sake, tell me, Artie,” Kathe said.

  “Muggers. Chinese goons, maybe.”

  “They do anything else to you?” she said.

  “They choked me. I went out for a few seconds, I think.”

  “I don’t know much about it, but it looks like some kind of martial arts thing. Amateurs. This stuff shouldn’t leave any marks but there’s already bruises on the backs of your legs. Even amateurs, you don’t learn this shit at Harvard. You want me to make you an appointment with someone, a specialist?”

  I didn’t. I wanted painkillers. Kathe gave me some Percodan while I called Lily who was still out. I left a message: see you tomorrow. In my apartment, the women made nervous conversation and stopped me from drinking a bottle of Scotch with the pills, while I somehow canceled my credit cards.

  Eventually a ratty-looking white guy with rasta hair showed up and charged me three hundred bucks to change the locks.

  “Emergency overtime,” he said. “It’s snowing.”

  I was an accident of the freaky weather. It was just a couple of creeps cavorting in the snow. Muggers, I muttered, a couple of angry specimens with time to kill. I wanted to believe. How could there be a connection? Only paranoia could make me think I was a target.

  “I’m next,” Pansy said. “Dawn’s in trouble,” Mr Tae said. “Help me,” said Hillel. Then someone threw a spike at my head.

  Eighteen hours after Hillel calls me, I’m in something and I don’t know what it is.

  That night I was more numb than scared. The next morning I would be shit-scared, but that night, after it happened, after Lois and Kathe went home, I swallowed more painkillers, and before I passed out, I crawled to the phone and dialed Jeremy Chen.

  5

  “She didn’t die from being cut,” Jeremy Chen said. It was the next morning. We were in the restaurant at the Chinatown Holiday Inn. He examined his gold cigarette lighter and tossed me a menu. “You want any of this shit?” He leaned back, a sleek, good-looking guy, medium height, chunky, with tough thighs like a body builder. Tight black jeans. A black turtleneck, a fleece shirt. And silk thermals. In the cold, he always wore silk thermals, he told me. Tossed over the back of his chair was a white jacket. A Coco Katz, he said. It must have cost five hundred bucks. For a guy with his macho posturing, only Chen’s mouth was wrong. It was a tight round mouth with plump lips, a mouth shaped like an asshole. Literally.

  “Art, you listening? This girl did not buy it from the blade. She was fucking strangled first. Piano wire,” said Chen. Then he waved at a waitress. “Where’s my fucking coffee?”

  “What are we talking about here?”

  “You tell me.” He held out a red and gold box of Dunhills.

  “I thought we were talking about Dawn Tae. I thought that’s why you called me.”

  “You called me. I left the message and you called,” Chen said, as if the distinction mattered. The waitress brought coffee and toast and Chen buttered a piece.

  The chairs were fake black lacquer, the napkins stiff pink linen, the plants green and dusted. Trapped by the storm that had dumped two feet of snow on the city overnight, disgruntled tourists drank orange juice and sulked. Three Chinese guys in Armani shouted into portable phones; the oldest wore his cashmere coat over his shoulders and smoked a stinky little cigar.

  Chen put down his toast, glanced at the old man’s coat and said appreciatively, “Nice. Vicuna.”

  “Whatever you say.” My legs were killing me.

  “Look, man,” Chen said. “I can’t fucking help you with Dawn Tae. I can’t stalk her. Billy Tae knows my uncle. He thinks that’s how it works, the old way, favors, associations. I don’t have the time and if I did I wouldn’t fucking do it. If the old boys think she has a problem with some kind of shit, let them put her into Betty Ford. Look, I was in school in England with Pete Leung for a while. At the end of the day, it’s Pete’s bloody business. Ask me, he could fucking slap her around a little.”

  Chen’s accent was a mess, so was the lingo. He’d grown up in London, he told me, he worked there a while. He came to New York, became a citizen. He talked part New York, part Brit. The swearing got on my nerves. Some days, it’s like the whole city has Tourette’s syndrome, but Chen’s mouth was world class. Shit-for-brains, he said, shit a brick, shit-scared, shithead, shit and derision, whatever that meant, and all of it in the first few minutes after we met. Shit this, shitty that. Fuck fuck fuck. It didn’t mean anything. I swore I’d clean up my own filthy mouth. Fat chance.

  “So how come we’re talking, if we’re not talking about Dawn?”

  “They told me to call you. I’m a good chap. I’m the fucking cop prince of Manhattan. Also, I knew your name.”

  “Yeah? How’s that?”

  “The Abramsky thing,” he said. “There’s a dead fucking girl. Chinese. When there’s Chinese shit, they call me. I’m Chinese but I’m not Chinatown if you get the drift. I’m special squad. I’m not part of the shit that goes down here where no one trusts a cop and the cops gotta pay attention to all kinds of bullshit from the family associations. Abramsky got lucky, I was in town. I took his rolodex. You were in it. I had heard the name. Out o
f the blue the bleeding Taes ring me up. I think, fuck-a-duck, everywhere I go, it’s bloody Artie Cohen.”

  “Small world,” I said.

  “I know a lot of people.”

  “So let’s talk about the girl. Who was she?”

  “Some fucking miserable illegal. There’s loads of money in illegals down here, thirty, thirty-five grand per. You put three hundred in a boat, that’s nine mill plus add-ons. For a single load. We’re talking two billion a year. It’s big. Bigger than anything around here. Bigger than dope. But you know all that.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Where you been, Art?”

  The check came and I reached for it, but Chen tossed a few bills on the table, changing the game so I owed him. He got out of his chair and looked at me like I didn’t interest him that much; maybe I didn’t.

  Jerry Chen was slick. He pulled on the silky white parka, snapped the pockets, zipped the sleeves, Velcroed the front panel, slid the cigarettes and the lighter into his jeans, put on the shades, smoothed the high-priced hair and extracted a pair of cashew-colored suede gloves. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

  On Lafayette we set off towards Canal Street, Chen walking in the snow-covered streets like he owned them. Twenty-four hours after the snow started, the stuff was still falling from the sky.

  “So who do you think let her into your pal’s place?” Chen watched his reflection in the shop windows. I saw mine next to him. Chen was wired. I was the color of tripe. I needed sun.

  “It was 47th Street. Could be it had to do with diamonds.”