Hot Poppies

by Reggie Nadelson

  “Come on.”

  “I was, you see.” She reached for my hand. “I really was.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I was a kid. You weren’t interested.”

  “That’s not true. You never said.”

  “You always had two girls on the go, the ones I knew about, the rest of them. You could never make up your mind.”

  “And I was always broke.”

  “I didn’t care about that.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Lightly, in her bare feet, Dawn leaped off the kitchen stool, picked up her glass and, holding the coat that must have cost a hundred thou, went to the window. “I hate the snow. It’s so lonely.” She put her head back and swallowed the Scotch. “I don’t want to talk any more, Artie, not now. I want to stay here and feel safe. You know what I’d really like?”

  “Tell me, darling.”

  “Fun. I’d like to have some fun again. What scares me is I feel like an old lady and I’ll never have any fun again.”

  I’m not sure what time it was when Dawn wandered towards the bedroom and I followed, Scotch in hand. From the other room Stan Getz played “My Funny Valentine”. I reached for the light.

  “Don’t.” Dawn tossed her fur coat onto my bed. All she wore now was the leather skirt and silk shirt. “Perhaps I should take you back to Hong Kong,” she added suddenly. “Come with me, Artie. I want to have some fun.”

  “Why go back if you hate it? New York is your home.”

  “I have things to finish there. While I can.”

  “You’re going back soon. Aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What things?”

  “If you came to Hong Kong, I could take care of you. I’ve got loads of money.” The laugh, soaked in wine and Scotch, was husky. “I could keep you. As long as you want. I miss you, Artie. You always made me laugh.”

  We were standing next to the bed—there isn’t much else in the room—and I could feel the desire as I put my arms around Dawn. “I don’t want your money,” I said, but it wasn’t completely true.

  The allure of dough was always part of Dawn’s charm. She smelled of money—her parents’ money, money she made trading commodities. Smelled of it like she smelled of perfume—Dawn was always drenched in Joy. And there were the clothes, the cars, the casual spending, the laughs. Dawn was the first American girl I fell for in a big way, and it was hard to separate her from the sheer pleasure the money made available. But she had married Peter Leung. Hong Kong was Dawn’s big adventure. Also, she was crazy about Pete.

  “Stop, stop. I can hear those ball bearings in your brain, Artie. Stop it now.”

  She unbuttoned my shirt and her hand was cold on my chest. Her pearls were warm from her skin.

  This was Russian roulette, being with her. People always found out. The driver in the car outside, still waiting. There was Pete. And Lily. There was the frustration with Lily who I couldn’t seem to make happy. I guess the way I feel for Lily, I wasn’t supposed to want Dawn. Some shrink would probably say I was a psycho for wanting Dawn. I reached down and picked up my glass and finished the rest of the Scotch.

  “I really was crazy about you back then,” Dawn said again. The sense of missed opportunity smothered me and I pushed it away.

  “If you won’t come to Hong Kong, how about we hole up here for a while?”

  Dawn took my arm. She pulled me onto the bed and I could feel the fur of her sable coat against my back. She wrapped herself around me.

  “Make me feel better, Artie,” she said softly so I could smell her voice. “Make me feel better like you used to when we sat out on the fire escape and you put your hand under my skirt. We never finished, did we?”

  I didn’t even try to move away. “It’s so nice here,” she said, and unbuttoned her shirt, slipped out of it, took off her bra, arched her back and pushed her leather skirt up high over her hips. She had nothing else on.

  Dawn left before it was light. I hadn’t slept much for two nights running and there was the booze and the painkillers. I got into bed meaning to sleep for a few hours. I slept all day while the blizzard switchbacked its way in and out of the city, dumped a few more inches of snow on it, let up, hesitated, and started again. When I woke up, it was almost dark.

  I looked out of the window where night gathered over the street. Towers of snow trembled on my fire escape and icicles the size of cucumbers hung off the rusty railings.

  When I swung my legs over the bed, I put on the TV. The schools had shut again. In parts of the city, there were power outages and telephone lines were down. When I tried to phone Dawn in Riverdale, I couldn’t get through. A second storm was on its way up the coast from the Outer Banks, whatever the poor goddamn Outer Banks are, always getting socked in the face by some storm.

  It was the third night of the blizzard. Crime was way off, some newsjerk announced. The crooks, not caring much for snow, stayed home and watched TV sets they had lifted off the back of a truck. In Bed Stuy, a tenement went up in flames because of faulty space heaters. Always a problem when the weather got cold, the landlord said, and there followed, on some dumb-ass talk show, a string of city officials who blamed each other and the landlord, a grisly Serb in a shiny suit. The mayor, with his bad hair and that rictus of a grin, popped up everywhere, shaking hands with the snow removal guys, congratulating himself on a great job, remembering, no doubt, how mayors before him lost their job over the lack of snow removal in the boroughs.

  Still groggy, I got dressed, went out and wandered up towards SoHo. The city was suspended in a kind of surreal ballet: spontaneous parties spilled in and out of the bars; people brought their kids out of doors and showed them how to lie down in the fat new snow and make angel shapes. Underneath Broadway, a century-old water pipe had burst and flooded the street and where the water froze up, older kids twirled down the sidewalk on ice skates like something from a Dutch painting.

  On Sullivan Street, on the steps of St Anthony’s, the AA crowd was out, smoking cigarettes during a break. It was always a sharp crowd, the St Anthony’s AA—models, actors, designers—I know people who joined up just to cruise the talent. Two doors down, Pino the butcher cut me some of his Newport steaks; across the street at Joe’s Dairy, I stocked up on fresh mozzarella and provolone. Then I walked south to the Broome Street Bar where I ordered a bacon cheeseburger and a beer.

  In my head, I reviewed the situation. A girl was dead on Abramsky’s floor, her face raked with a spike that turns out similar to the one the creeps throw at my head in a freight elevator in Chinatown, maybe even the same spike. Some red-haired jerk who’s pushing toilet paper shakes down Hillel Abramsky, drops by Mike Rizzi’s coffee shop, and gets in Jerry Chen’s face on a street in Chinatown. Chen, it turns out, knows Pete Leung and is also pally with Sonny Lippert, and Hillel Abramsky is running around Chinatown asking about cameras in a building where there’s a lab that processed the picture of the dead girl. A lab that’s shut up tight as a drum and, me, being out of the loop, I can’t get a warrant. And who was Mr Snap?

  What was Hillel’s part in it all? Did Hillel kill her? Did Hillel get in over his head because the Chinese were eating up the family business?

  I finished my burger and started home. Later I heard that that same night a couple of FBI sharpshooters went off their heads and sat on the sea wall in Battery Park shooting seagulls. Snow fever, we called it in Moscow. At home, I called Lily and left a message. I missed her. Lily could cure the fever. Then I called Jerry Chen.

  Chen was slick and he was volatile, but I needed him. A sour woman answered the phone and said Jerry was out of town: Atlanta, she thought, or Toronto. He didn’t keep her up to date on his whereabouts, she said bitterly, and I knew Chen was cheating on her; in this weather, no one left town.

  Standing, phone in my hand, listening to Chen’s bitter wife, I noticed something on my couch. A trace of white. I looked closer. Dawn had left her smell behind, and she had
left this. I tried to scrape it off, but there wasn’t enough. I tried to taste it but all I got was the flavor of old couch. What the hell was she doing? Where did she get her stuff? What was Dawn on?

  11

  “It can make you bleed from the ears, the stuff Dawn is using,” Pete Leung said. Not that I asked him right out when I saw him at the club. I felt lousy enough, having climbed out of bed with his wife that morning without asking him what her favorite flavor of dope was. Pete didn’t give any sign he knew about me and Dawn, but I didn’t believe it. Not in my gut. People always know.

  It was around seven when I got to the club, which is when Pete hopped off a souped-up mountain bike. Chance? Coincidence? My stomach churned.

  “Good, don’t you think?” Pete showed me the bike. It was fitted out with a contraption made of Velcro and nails. “I swiped the bike idea off a kid I met. It works brilliantly in this weather,” Pete said, shucked his gloves and shook my hand.

  There wasn’t much traffic, but a couple of cabs rattled by, leaning on their horns, and a Range Rover with stereo speakers mounted on the front blasted out something by Tupac, who was dead now, and not missed, not by me, anyhow. “Fuck off back to New Jersey.” The raucous voice came from the loft building next to the club. It was followed by the pop of an egg that spattered onto my jacket. Leung tried hard not to laugh.

  “You’ve got some angry people up there,” he said.

  “Yeah. Poor bastards buy these lofts for half a mill, then this greaseball clubster opens up on the block, the drunks come, the junkies, when New York Magazine mentions real estate prices could tumble, they go berserk, so the clubster hires me to stand around a few nights a week and keep the peace, which is bullshit.”

  Pete looked up. “If it was me I’d want to kill someone. Can I buy you a drink, Artie? I need to talk. Can you spare me half an hour? I want to talk about Dawn.”

  Sly, as the doorman dubbed himself, held the moth-eaten ropes aside to let us pass. With his piggy face and a ring in his nose, he derived all his power from those ropes, like the immigration officer of some crappy country. I stuffed a five in his pocket and said I’d be inside.

  We went in. I was hoping Lily would come by later, so even though I was edgy with Pete around, I figured it was better for Lily to find me inside with him than out in the street wiping egg off my face.

  The club was a huge brutal cement space dotted with armchairs and leather sofas. Fake ancestral portraits adorned the walls and potted palms stood in brass tubs on frayed rugs. I wondered, like I always do, why anyone came to this place. It looked like shit. The music was canned crap, you couldn’t dance, anyhow, but the place was packed every night, people trying to score or getting drunk or hoping they could eyeball Oliver Stone or Brad Pitt. It never happened. Mostly, it was kids in their twenties, micro-celebs, aspirant models, wannabes, the dregs of Euro-trash, though lately I was seeing a lot of Orios. Orio-trash, Jerry Chen had called them, which is what passed for wit with Jerry. Manila, Singapore, Hong Kong, Jakarta, they drank the most expensive malts. I don’t know, could be I’m getting old.

  Even in a seedy leather chair, Pete Leung looked like an aristocrat. His charm came from his enthusiasm. I think I had always been jealous all the years he and Dawn were dating.

  He ordered Bud for both of us. “Thanks,” he said when the waiter brought it. “Cheers, Artie,” he added. “You saw her? Dawn?”

  “Yes.” I tried not to look furtive. “At her parents’ house.”

  He swallowed some beer and took a cigarette from my pack and lit it, so I wouldn’t see the pain, I guess. Like a lot of guys, he kept it in.

  “I feel so ashamed. It’s my fault and I don’t know how to help her.” He turned away, pretending to admire a couple of girls who blew him kisses. “You’ve known Dawn almost all her life, Artie. And you saw.”

  “When did it start?”

  “I don’t know. When we got married eighteen months ago, I felt as if we’d known each other for ever. We came from the same kind of family. We knew each other in grad school, we were friends, we were both crazy about movies, we even thought of starting a company together. Did you know that? Then we fell in love, everyone was happy. The parents were happy. The gifts flowed.”

  Pete was rich, but Pete was unhappy. Currently, I was broke enough to work at the club. My car was in the shop and I found myself doing comparison shopping on paper clips, so to speak. In my dreams, the cash machine clanks and rolls, then fails to produce any cash for me at all.

  “She loved her job, she loved Hong Kong. My mother’s a bit nuts about the kid thing, but I said, look, Dawn’s not a baby machine.” His story matched Dawn’s except for the miscarriage, but maybe he felt it was none of my business.

  “I came home from a trip a while back—Dawn wouldn’t come to the mainland, she said the Chinese were barbarians—and I knew right away she was using. The eyes, the highs, the sallow skin, the capricious behavior. There was a swagger about her when she was high. When she was low, she became crafty. I said, we’ll go home to New York. I bought an apartment for us over on West 12th Street on the river. Dawn always liked being near the water. Now she stays in Riverdale and I stay downtown alone in that apartment and look at the water. You know how I pass the time?”

  “How’s that?”

  Pete blinked. “I sit in the archives over on Varick Street. I work on the family. Mine. Dawn’s. Things have gone so wrong. I keep thinking, maybe I’ll find something in the past. Perhaps I’ll find a clue. It’s a pretty Chinese idea, I guess,” he said with a wry smile and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Hey, it keeps me busy.”

  “What’s Dawn on?”

  “Heroin is very easy to get in Hong Kong. It comes in through the Golden Triangle for the most part. It always was the most addicted city on earth, but it used to be poor people who used the stuff. Now it’s the middle-class drug of choice. People are scared of what will happen next. Not only this July when the Chinese take Hong Kong back, but afterwards, in ’98, ’99. Everyone is jumpy. Heroin cools you down.”

  Around us people cruised the club, girls and boys looking for action at the bar, at the tables, but Pete never looked up. He looked at me with sad eyes and I really felt for him.

  “Go on.”

  “So the Hong Kong demimonde looked around for something special. Rich kids. Our crowd, so to speak. For a while it was LSD tabs with pictures of Mao or Deng. Then cocaine became démodé. They moved on to heroin. But not the stuff secretaries were smoking. Someone heard there were these irradiated opium poppies—weird flowers, huge, some with six or eight flowers, some that grew upside down. There was a meltdown at one of the Chinese power plants; no one reported it, of course, but everyone knew. It was bigger than Chernobyl, they said. The poppies went into the drug trade. Into some of the morphine used at the hospitals. There were rumors. A myth grew up that you could get a fantastic charge. Ripped on Poppy, it became a legend. It made you exuberant, ecstatic, people called it a trip to paradise. Or it would make you bleed from the ears and eat a hole in your gut.

  “Can I get another beer do you think?” he asked, and I waved my hand at a waiter. “One of our friends who smoked got bone cancer. Maybe it was accidental. One turned psychotic. People play Russian roulette with it. Which bag is hot? The myth got bigger.”

  “Can I have a martini?” a voice interrupted and I felt Lily’s arms around my shoulders. Pete jumped out of his seat and shook her hand. A well-bred guy, I thought; better than me.

  She took off her coat. She was wearing an old-fashioned ski suit an aunt had left her; it was one of those dark blue one-piece jobs Carole Lombard would have worn on the slopes with Gable in Sun Valley, and Lily looked terrific in it.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

  “I felt like getting out.” She slid into a chair, then leaned over and kissed me and whispered into my ear. “I’m an asshole, sometimes. I’m sorry, Artie, really I am. I missed you.”

  Pushing her hair back, she smil
ed at Pete and he smiled back, but who wouldn’t? The drinks came. For half an hour Lily kept up a comfortable stream of talk—she was a genius at making people feel good, and she understood instinctively that Pete was feeling lousy. And he relaxed. He was at ease in his skin and it made him sexy.

  People arrived. The buzz grew. But Pete never shifted his eyes. All he saw was Lily. It was all I saw and for half an hour we joked and kidded around and drank martinis, but one of the waiters caught my glance and nodded towards the office. “Phone,” he screamed over the racket of the club.

  The club’s office was a mess of party props, CD demos and samples of melon liqueurs, but I found the phone. It was Chen. When I got back to the table, Lily and Pete were laughing like kids. He excused himself and went to the bathroom, turning to call out to her, “Shall we have some more drinks, Lily? Will you order them?”

  “Bombay, straight up, three olives?” She smiled invitingly. “Like mine?”

  “Please, Lily. Yes. Just like yours.”

  “I have to go. I could give you a lift,” I said to Lily, who was flushed from the gin.

  “I think I’ll stay a while,” she said. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “So what were you guys talking about?” I put on my jacket.

  “Just talking.”

  “Yeah, what about?”

  “You’re jealous. You’re really jealous, aren’t you?” Lily put her arms around my neck; on her, even gin smelled good. “Don’t be silly. It’s nothing.”

  “OK, I’m jealous. So what were you talking about?”

  “Babies,” she said, and kissed me again as Pete reappeared. He walked me to the door and shook my hand, then held onto it like a drowning man. “I need you to tell me what you find out. I don’t know how to save Dawn otherwise. Will you help me, Artie? I’ll beg if I have to.”

  “You don’t have to beg, Jesus, Pete. I’ll help. You know that.”

  “Dawn is very mercurial. She disappears, she does odd things. I know my father-in-law asked you to check on her, and I want to honor that, but it’s hard. I guess you know that she sometimes uses her brother’s loft without telling anyone. I guess you know that, Artie. Don’t you?”