Hot Poppies

by Reggie Nadelson

  “Fuck that shit,” he snorted. “This ain’t Breakfast at Tiffany’s, trust me, Art. I don’t know why she was fucking dropped at your pal’s. I don’t know. These girls never fucking leave Chinatown. Was it some kind of dumping ground? Somebody used it to hide from the wife? From the cops? Who?”

  “Where we going, Jerry?” I could see he hated it when I called him Jerry.

  “Looking around.” He strolled into a shop that sold ginseng and herbs. Chen prodded some old-fashioned scales, saw the balance was off, but he only shrugged. “I’m not some beat cop,” he mumbled to me. From behind the door to a back room came an incessant clicking. Click click click. It could drive you crazy. Chen said, “You hear it?”, hammered on the door and shouted, “Police.”

  The door opened. Chen sauntered in. A man with a frightened face peered at him through rimless glasses and folded his arms anxiously. At a table, two other men played with the clicking tiles. A refrigerator stood in the corner, there was a chipped stove and Chen lifted the cover off a pot that sat on it and looked in. Flipping through the pages of a notebook, he tossed it back on the table, looked slowly around, said, “Just checking,” and smiled; the power turned him on, he got off on his own performance.

  I didn’t tell Chen I had a picture of the dead girl, of Rose. Didn’t show him the spike I had carefully bagged in plastic. We were still in the getting-to-know-you period. I didn’t like what I was getting to know—he was too volatile, too angry. I wasn’t ready to share.

  “You get any of her prints off Hillel’s place?”

  Chen didn’t bother answering.

  “Why Abramsky?” I said. “Why his shop?”

  “He’s your friend, for fuck’s sake. You tell me. The question is, who opened the fucking door? You think somebody who knows Abramsky knew the girl?”

  “That’s insane.”

  “Why’s it insane? Jews don’t fancy girls?”

  All along the street, shopkeepers shoveled mountains of snow; the scrape of the shovels was grating. My head hurt. We passed a fish stall where I saw a couple of Haitian women bargaining. In her arms, one of them held a large pink and silver fish like a baby. A fish to appease Gede, I figured, the god of misrule, god of good times. Smart.

  Chen was still laughing at his own bad joke when a kid darted ahead of us and forced him to move to the right. Chen went for the kid, pulling him up by the collar, the two of them screaming. There’s something chilling about the angry babble of hate in a language you don’t understand. Then Chen smacked the kid hard and shoved him away, but not before I saw the reddish quiff of hair.

  “Shitheel.” Chen’s mouth twitched. He dusted off his white jacket where the kid left sooty fingerprints. “Fujianese,” he added.

  “What’s that?”

  “You been on vacation the last fifteen years, Art? Most of the illegals coming in the last ten, fifteen years are Fujianese. Most of the smugglers, too. They call ’em snakeheads.”

  “Where’s this place?”

  “It’s a shit-poor province opposite the Straits of Taiwan. The other Chinese hate ’em, they consider Fujian the armpit of China, a real redneck cracker kind of a place. Also, down here in Chinatown, the Fujianese want to grab some of the power away from the old guard. The Fujianese are pro-mainland. The old guys are Cantonese who still hate the commies. All the kidnappings, the extortion, the murder you been hearing about, it’s all Fujianese. The kids are fucking feral, a lot of them.”

  “What did he say?”

  Chen didn’t answer. He was schmoozing a guy selling fresh lichees off a stall.

  “You don’t speak the language. You don’t fucking speak it, do you, Jer?”

  “Fuck’s the difference? I speak some. Enough. I can get by when I have to. These people got four thousand dialects. Anyway, speaking that shit is pretty fucking FOS,” he said. “From the other side, Art,” he added. “I got a dead girl to deal with Art, OK, so you want to talk or you don’t want to talk?”

  At the corner was a bakery, the windows piled with buns covered in pink sprinkles. Chen sauntered inside and I followed. At a table in the window, he ordered coffee and some of the buns. They weighed a ton.

  “The girl had a name,” I said.

  Chen feigned some interest. “You been doin’ a little spot of investigation,” he said sarcastically. “You been over to see some of Rosie’s friends?”

  We ate the buns and danced around each other on the issue of the sweatshop; I knew Chen had been there. He probably guessed I had, too, so I told him.

  “Some dump, huh, Art? They all are. But business is good, you know? You remember that celeb chick who did the big boo hoo on TV over the fact her schmates were made in some shitty sweatshop? All the garmentos do it, every designer name you ever heard of, one way or the other. Piece goods. Labels. Knock offs.” Leaning forward, Chen’s voice was quiet and hard as steel. “The rag trade died in this city by the seventies, same time a lot of illegals start coming over, so someone smells the coffee. All these ills arriving. Spics. Slants. Pay ’em a buck an hour, pay ’em a dime an hour, they take what they can get. Boom time for the sweatshop business. Retailers buy from manufacturers, manufacturers sub-contract out with the shops, they pay slave wages, if they pay. The garmentos say, ‘It’s not my fault, darling. I don’t hire them.’ What the hell? I’m no bleeding bloody heart, am I? They do what they do.”

  He wiped pink sprinkles off his lip, swallowed the rest of his coffee and looked out at the snow. “Art, I got to rescue my car before any more of this shit piles up. You want to walk me?”

  “Whose side are you on, Jerry?” I said.

  “Mine,” he said.

  We walked. He kept the patter going, impressing on me his knowledge of sweatshops, gangs, tongs, internecine war, Chinese gang relations with Vietnamese, Jamaicans, even the Russians, God help me. In Jerry Chen’s head, every immigrant that ever lived was a criminal or a victim. Except him.

  Near headquarters where his car was parked Chen tossed a five to a kid who had been watching it, pushed some snow off the hood and opened the door. As far as I knew, you couldn’t buy Jeremy Chen, but he liked it when people backed off; he liked the fear in their eyes. “Get in,” he said. I got in. I had wondered how a cop got a Coco Katz jacket and a Porsche, but the car was on its last legs, it was practically held together with string. And style. I had to give him that. Chen had style. He passed me some cigarettes.

  “So you want to tell me about the girl, Art? You thinking of doing that?”

  “What girl?”

  “You fucking well know which girl. Pansy, she calls herself.”

  “And if I did meet her?”

  “Don’t let her work you over, man. She’s a tough cookie,” Chen said. “And she’s mine. I want her, Art. I got something coming up next Monday that could put away a few of the bad guys. I want her to testify. Tell her that for me, if you see her.” He paused. “And you will see her, won’t you? What is it with you? You wanna do her?”

  “Leave her the fuck alone.”

  “Or?”

  “I’ll let you know, Jer.” I opened the door.

  “You don’t know shit about Chinatown,” he said. “We’re top of the pops crimewise now that the Italians are toast. When we Chinkies only preyed on each other, no one gave a rat’s ass. When we started selling smack outside Chinatown, people took a view. The City took a view.” He paused, looked me up and down and said, “You got some taste, Art. Tell me what you think of the jacket.” He stroked the white fabric of his own sleeve.

  It seemed to matter a lot, so I said, “Nice. Yeah. Very nice.”

  “Yeah. Well, keep in touch. And remember, we’re secretive bastards. No matter how many of us come on over from Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei—open banks, buy houses in Scarsdale, go to Princeton—we look different. You can’t make us out, can you? We are the yellow peril, and we are one out of every goddamn five people in New York City. Babe, we are the inscrutable East. You are going to need my help, Art
.”

  Through the window, I looked out at the snowscape, pristine except for the clutter of human beings. I closed the car door. Chen was probably right. I wouldn’t give him Pansy, though.

  Taking the bag with the spike out of my pocket, I tossed it on the dashboard.

  “What do you make of this?”

  He picked up the bag. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Some piece of crap tossed it at me.”

  Thoughtfully, Chen turned it over. He was impressed. “This is scary stuff. These pricks are pros. You can’t buy a thing like this outside Hong Kong. You want me to check the prints? See if they match anything we found at Abramsky’s? They throw a thing like this at your face, you can lose an eye.”

  “Yeah? Also, there’s a warehouse.” I told him the address. “You could check out the freight elevator.”

  Chen picked some imaginary lint off the impeccable jacket and said, “I’ll do what I can.”

  “They took my wallet. I figured it was a mugging.”

  “Screw that,” he said. “It wasn’t a mugging. It was a message. A hit.”

  “I don’t get it, Jerry. You run me a laundry list of every fucking thing, smugglers, diamonds, sweatshops, illegals, extortion, murder, hitmen, so which the fuck is it? Which?”

  “All of them. Money is what we’re talking. But this is bizarre.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “These scumbags don’t usually go after cops. Not white guys like you. There’s no fucking profit in it. Still, you never fucking know, there’s always a first time. Could be they made an exception of you,” he said, and I thought of the elevator that stank of green rot and it made my stomach turn.

  “You’re one of those guys who believe the city is a hundred per cent shithole, aren’t you, Jer?” I said and Chen smiled.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I believe it all, all the darkest fucking things you ever read about.”

  “That’s fucking paranoid.” I opened the car door again and made to get out.

  “If you need me, Art, most nights I eat at Henry Liu’s, OK? And like they say, if you ain’t fucking paranoid, Art, you ain’t paying attention.”

  6

  “Someone’s asking for you, Artie.” Short and wiry, with sandy hair like Brillo, a crooked grin, and a fighter’s shoulders, Mike Rizzi stood in the doorway of his coffee shop flagging me down.

  Mike’s place is on the ground floor of the building opposite mine. On my side of the street, most of the cast-iron buildings have been converted into apartments. A few of them, like mine, have great nineteenth-century period detail carved into the façade. On Mike’s side, too, there are a couple of great buildings with columns and pediments. His side is still commercial, though the art dealers and film people have mostly elbowed out the tool and die shops.

  On one side of Mike’s is a tailor shop and next to it a wholesale fabric outlet. On the other side, there’s a pretty ratty gym, then a drugstore and a parking lot. Above him is a sweatshop. I can look out of my window and see the gim-crack chimneys, and when it’s hot, the stink of illegal cleaning fluid drives Mike crazy.

  “Artie? I said someone’s looking for you.” Mike jerked his head towards the coffee shop. “In there,” he said.

  “Yeah, who’s that, Mike?” I said. “Let me in, I’m freezing.”

  Planted in the front booth of Mike’s place was Sonny Lippert. As I entered the coffee shop, he saluted me with his cup. “Long time no see, Art, man.”

  My legs were killing me, I was preoccupied with the dead girl, the spike, with Pansy. What’s more, Mike’s kid, Justine, was perched on a stool at the counter eating a jelly donut. She grinned and waved. I blew her a kiss. What I didn’t need right now was Sonny Lippert.

  “Take a pew,” he said. “I want to talk to you. I know you usually hang here, so I came over, just for you. Buy me some lunch?”

  “I’m busy, Sonny.”

  “You’re not too busy to do breakfast with Jerry Chen.”

  “How’d you know about that?” I sat down opposite him and while Mike brought coffee for me and seltzer for Sonny, Sonny let me dangle in the silence of the empty coffee shop.

  “You look good, Sonny,” I tried to make amends. “Have the BLT.”

  Past fifty-five, Sonny Lippert looks fifteen years younger, the tight curls still black, the skin smooth, the body maintained by a trainer who’s at his office every day, the snazzy suits perfectly cut.

  When I first got to New York, Lippert, who’s a federal prosecutor with a fiefdom all his own, helped me get a job, then a Green Card. When I got sworn in as a citizen, he was there. I paid him back with help on several cases—his obsession was wiping out the Russian mob in Brighton Beach—and that was that. Recently, Sonny had been cross-designated from Brooklyn to Manhattan, to the Southern District. This means his office is on the edge of Chinatown, not far from where I live. Not far enough.

  He’s a real hot-shot with dozens of investigators who work for him and he oils his relationships with all the bureaus, but especially the police. Most times, it gets him what he needs.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve got a few problems, Sonny.”

  He drank his seltzer. “You can drink that horse piss?” he said, pointing at the coffee, shutting his eyes as if the idea gave him pain. “What kind of problems, man? Look, it’s me that owes you this time. I know about the girl at Abramsky’s, I had to figure you’d take an interest, being Hillel’s your friend. I’m your friend, man, and I don’t want to babysit your sorry ass again, OK?”

  “Don’t patronize me, Sonny.”

  “Jerry Chen is very smart. He knows which side his bread is buttered on, so to speak. He keeps in touch. He’s an obliging fellow. They think of me as one of them.”

  “The Chinese, you mean?”

  “A cop, man.” Sonny Lippert had been a cop a long time ago. He loves it. He walks the walk. Talks the talk. It makes his wife cringe with embarrassment, but he doesn’t care.

  I was never that kind of cop. I didn’t go to other cops’ houses much. People would say, “So what’s it like being a cop?” I don’t know.

  “Artie? Man? You with me?”

  “So you’re a cop. So that means everyone I take a meeting with reports to you on it?”

  “I don’t know. Might only be Jerry Chen, babe.” He looked out the window. “Don’t get involved in this thing, Art, sweetheart, not without telling me.”

  “You’re not interested in the Chinese, Sonny.”

  “Russians, Chinese, it’s all the same. Cubans. Albanians. There’s Vietnamese in East Berlin shooting AKs. There’s East Germans swiping nukes from the Russkis. There’s crazies in Hungary cutting up Arabs for body parts. The whole frigging commie bunch got let out of jail. And they’re everywhere. They’re here. They want a big piece of pie. They want the whole pie. You think Russians and Chinese don’t get into bed together? They been doing it to each other in the ass since the 1950s. Before that. Where’s your historical perspective, Art, babe? Wait until China really gets its hands on Hong Kong and the financial dominoes go down all in a row. Just wait for it.”

  “Thank you for the history lesson. You ever heard of a Mr Snap, Sonny?”

  “What the fuck’s a Mr Snap?”

  “A guy that takes pictures of Chinese girls.”

  “For you, I’ll ask around. You know I’m your friend, Art, and I want you to take care, OK? I already know that you got your head banged in a warehouse by some dirtbag. Next time they’ll cut your head off. Chinatown might be around the corner, man, but it’s not your turf. You need eyes there, an ear. You need a whole etiquette book. There are rules. Behaving like the schmendrick you obviously are could end up them dissecting you. You fuck around, they’ll carve you up like Peking duck.”

  “I like Peking duck.”

  “Very nice, Art. Very funny. Talk to me, man, I’ll help you. Like we always help each other. Anyhow, I can get you something you want.” Sonny stretched his legs. He wore beautiful brown boo
ts instead of the usual tasseled loafers. Who was it said a man’s vanity is invested in his clothes? Tolstoy? Dostoyevsky? No, it couldn’t be, Dostoyevsky was always too hung up on Christ and sin to think about his shoes. I read all that stuff a long time ago. I forgot most of it.

  “What is it I want, Sonny?”

  “Your job back.” He got up and put some money on the table. “I love you, Art. But you’re a fake. You say to me, I hate the life, Sonny. I want a change. I call up this professor I know at Columbia, I say, Mrs H, I got this cop. He graduated college, he speaks languages. Smart. He should go to law school. But you didn’t send the applications in, did you? So don’t kid yourself, toots. You need the life, it’s the air you breathe. That’s why you’re up to your ass in this Chinatown thing when you could have walked away.”

  Sonny put on his sheepskin coat and his leather gloves.

  “Art, babe, if you are in it, watch your back,” Sonny said as he got ready to leave. “Keep me posted how you go, OK, and follow the money.”

  “Where to, Sonny?”

  “In the end? I figure, in the end, it’s Hong Kong.”

  Hong Kong. What’s he talking about? I thought. I waited while Sonny buttoned up. Hong Kong was a dot on the rim of China a zillion miles away, another planet from this frozen city and the miserable murder of a local girl. It was the snow making him nuts.

  “Mikey? How many inches?”

  “Sixty, Artie. More coming.”

  It was the snow. People were talking bullshit. Sonny was at the door and he said, “So did I tell you I got a part in the new Pacino movie? Lines also.”

  “Good for you, Sonny. I hope you win an Oscar.”

  Seeing Sonny leave, Justine jumped off the stool and pulled at my hand. She was twelve, very pretty and completely self-possessed, and she said, “Come outside,” and pulled me into the street. She knew I’d do anything for her.

  “Put on your jacket,” Mike yelled.

  “You any good at math, Artie?”

  “I stink at math, you know that. What’s going on?”

  Opening her mouth, she collected snow on her pink tongue, stalling.