Hot Poppies

by Reggie Nadelson

  Looking around the empty street, I imagined them: the women separated into groups, some with jobs and relatives, some not so lucky. I shivered, but not from the cold this time. Pansy laughed a short mirthless chuckle. “I owed a lot of money. But I had met a woman on the fruit truck who knew of a sewing shop that would take us. Someone else gave me the name of a man who owned a restaurant. He had a room above the restaurant. I rented a bed in it. He wasn’t family, but he was a decent man. A friend. Better than family,” she said bitterly and kept walking. “Is that enough or would you like to see more?”

  Plastic sheeting covered part of the site where Pansy stopped abruptly. It was the poorest edge of Chinatown, near the projects and the South Street Viaduct, a sinister stretch of raw open ground. The building had been a warehouse or garage but it was derelict now, the scarred metal shutter covered in graffiti, the glass in the door at the side of the building was broken.

  She pushed open the door.

  The warehouse was empty, the concrete floor stained with damp. In a corner, Pansy found a construction worker’s lamp on a long flex cord and turned it on.

  In the back was a door that swung on a rusty hinge. I followed Pansy into a room where there was a cot, a table, two rickety chairs and a dead television set. A sink with rust stains stood under a small window. Yellow curtains sagged from a broken rod. The window was patched with duct tape and plastic.

  Wiping the table with paper towels she took from her bag, Pansy sat down, put a thermos on the table, followed by two plastic cups, two teabags and some chocolate. “Please have something.”

  I unwrapped a Chunky and ate it and Pansy chuckled. “We steal it from the fat boy at work, you remember him? He’s an evil child. He spies on us. Do you have a wife, detective?”

  “No.”

  “A girlfriend?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Does she have a name?”

  “Her name is Lily.”

  “Is it her real name?” she asked, and I wondered if the chat was some kind of defense, a way of making the ugly hovel fit for human beings.

  “Yeah, sure. Why?”

  “Well, it’s the name of a flower. Like me. Shall I tell you about this place?”

  Pansy removed her wet purple sneakers. Wind rattled the plastic sheets outside into sails that crackled. Footsteps came, then went. Greedily, she ate more chocolate and looked up. “I am addicted.” Touching her mouth daintily with a piece of rough paper towel, she began to talk again.

  She was illegal, Pansy said. Her father was a Chinese-American who fought in Vietnam at the end of the war. Her mother was ethnic Chinese, her own parents from Fujian Province, and a Catholic. She had been a schoolteacher in Saigon. It was a last fling before the helicopters lifted off the roof of the U.S. embassy. They were stranded: Pansy who was a baby, her mother, a son from the mother’s previous marriage. Eventually they scraped up the money to buy a place on a boat and got to Hong Kong. Were put in a camp.

  “You would not put pigs in these camps,” Pansy said. “Nothing to do. Brutal guards. Hong Kong just over the barbed wire, but Hong Kong didn’t want us. No one wanted us. The young boys in the camps became monsters. Some of the monsters are here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My brother was one of them.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Dead, I hope. I haven’t heard from Thomas for years. I hope he is dead.” She crossed herself, and then leaped lightly from the chair and, in her wet green socks and the red hat, did an ecstatic little dance.

  “May 1996,” she said. “I helped to burn the camp. We danced by the fire. You could see the light for miles and miles. Then we ran. I lost Mom. A few of us got away into the hills. Later, I heard she was dead.”

  Pansy had learned Cantonese in the camp and her English was good—her mother had taught her and it was her secret weapon. She hid in the hills, then ran again. She worked wherever she could. She scraped together enough money to bribe someone who could fix papers and the passage to America. To the Golden Mountain.

  I showed her the red cloth flower Hillel found with Rose. She spread it on her hand.

  “I’ve got one. Rose made them for us. She was a simple girl. She said it would be our lucky charm. She owed the smugglers even more than I owed them.”

  A thin morning light showed through the window and I could hear the trucks rumble past and I said for the second time, “What is this place?”

  Pansy hesitated for a few seconds. In a low expressionless voice she said, “This is where they brought us.”

  “Brought who?”

  “Rose and me. We were kidnapped together. They brought us here.” Pansy clasped her hands around her cup. “They were waiting for me after work. They took Rose off the street on her way home. There was a man they took, as well.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “They killed him. They made us watch. They strangled him with piano wire and dragged him away. Later I heard that they had tossed the body somewhere off the Long Island Expressway.”

  I held out a pack of cigarettes, but Pansy shook her head and broke a chocolate bar in half. “That month, I didn’t even owe, I was on time with my payments. But they have become impatient. They take you even if you do not owe them. They take you and squeeze you for more money. I thought it would never happen to me. I was too intelligent.” She got up and stood at the window and I wanted to put my hand on her shoulder, but I didn’t. I just didn’t.

  “How long did they hold you?”

  She stared out at the building opposite. “A few days, I think. Rose was a silly girl. She was a good girl, but she wasn’t pretty. She couldn’t earn extra money like some girls. As a whore, you know? She worked all the time, but she could never keep up with her payments.”

  Quietly, Pansy emptied her thermos into the sink, screwed the cap on, put the chocolate wrappers in her bag and began pulling on the purple sneakers.

  “They raped us.” Her voice was barely audible. She tied her shoe laces very carefully, first into knots, then into bows. “They raped us over and over. They made us have sex with each other, Rose and me. They were animals and they drank whiskey and watched. They made bets on how long we could go on, and behind their masks, they laughed. They were cowards who wore ski masks. Do you want me to continue?” she asked formally.

  “The men wore masks all the time?”

  “Yes. But I felt they were young, boys, not men.”

  “Could you see the hair?”

  “It was dyed. Henna. But so what? Many of them do this. Do you want to hear about the flashlights they put in some of the women? Do you want to know how they cut off their fingers?”

  “Tell me what you want to tell me.”

  “They called Rose’s mother in her village.”

  “How? How did they call?”

  “There are telephones everywhere now. The snake-heads have phones. They put Rose on with her mother and she cried. Then they grabbed the phone away and told her mother she had four hours to raise ten thousand dollars. Four hours. They hit Rose some more. I heard them in the next room. They hit her and she cried. Then they went away.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? God knows why. It happens. They hear something. They get scared. The boss tells them to stop.”

  “What boss?”

  “I don’t know.” For the first time she averted her eyes as if there was a lie embedded in what she said. “I don’t know. I broke this window and dragged Rose out with me. After that, I rarely saw her. She went to work in a different shop. She called me and said she was all right, she had met a man. Then you told me she was dead. I tried to call her mother. I left a message. Rose gave me a few things to keep and I sent them to her mother, but her mother had gone. Maybe she is also dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Do you know that I am not sure if, until the day she died, if Rose ever had a day off, if she ever left Chinatown. She was always frightened. Always.”

  We left
the warehouse and Pansy said, “I must go now.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Things are getting worse. More illegals. More kidnapping. More opportunity. When Hong Kong goes, or the year after it goes, it will be a field day. Smuggle, kidnap, extort, kill.”

  “How do you know so much?” I asked. Pansy didn’t answer.

  “I’ll try to get you some papers. Some money.”

  I could see she didn’t believe me. “Thank you,” she said. “The money will be good.”

  “Does Jerry Chen know all this?”

  “Some. He knew about me.”

  “How?”

  “He knew because I told him.” Pansy looked at me as if trying to divine something from my face.

  “I’m not Jerry Chen.”

  “I went to him. I asked around. Chinatown, immigrants, news travels like wild fire, especially about the cops. Everyone gossips about the cops. Even about you,” she said. “ ‘I’ll take care of you,’ he said. But he lied. No one took care of me. Or of Rose.”

  “Who took the pictures?”

  “I told you I don’t know. A large man. He never said his name.”

  “American?”

  “Yes. He always wore sunglasses. He changed places. Someone always knew where to find him. We all wanted pictures. To send home, show we made it on the Golden Mountain. Then he started coming to us. He wanted pictures for himself, he said. But for what? Not for Playboy magazine, surely,” she joked.

  “Do you think he killed Rose?”

  “Perhaps.”

  We stood together on the street and I said I thought she had guts, but it embarrassed her.

  “Some of us are normal. Human, you know? Not all of us are pathetic girls with the names of flowers. You always think of us as girls, don’t you? You don’t even ask our real names.”

  “Is Pansy your real name?”

  “My mother was a good Catholic. She attended a French convent in Saigon. I was baptized Marie Christine.” She took a slip of paper from her pocket and wrote neatly on it.

  “Try this address. It’s a playground. You might find the white car in the photo. I have to go to work now.”

  “I’ll walk with you.”

  “No thankyou.” She pulled her hat down hard and glanced at the whitening sky. “I’m not frightened. There is nothing left they can do to me.” She looked back at the warehouse and behind the glasses her eyes glittered the way they did when she told me she helped burn the camp down. “If they come near me again, I will kill them.”

  “Again?”

  “It happens. They have no souls. While they were still beating Rose, one of the boys yanked her hair so hard it came out in his hand, and then he said to his friend, ‘Why don’t we just strangle the ugly one?’ ”

  14

  But Rose had been outside Chinatown before she died, it turned out. I found the evidence in the white Caddy the morning I left Pansy at the warehouse. I headed towards the river, her words echoing in my ear. “Why don’t we strangle the ugly one?” Pansy wasn’t ugly. Did that make her safe? If being pretty somehow protected you, why did she hide her looks? Who was she behind the glasses?

  The white Cadillac was parked, like Pansy said it would be, behind the backboard of a handball court in one of the rag-tag parks near the projects along the East River. The car was stranded in frozen snow, the bodywork streaked with grime. Someone had dumped it in a big hurry.

  I’m lousy at picking locks. Breaking into cars is something else. The way I carry a gun, I carry a couple of car remotes. It took me about thirty seconds to tune one of them to the right frequency for the Caddy. I was in.

  One whiff of the interior had me reeling. Someone had been sick as a cat inside the car. On the red leather seat was an empty pizza box, a pile of girlie magazines, the pink jacket with fur around the hood and a shoebox. Holding my nose, I grabbed the box and slammed the door. In the street, I butted heads with a delivery guy on a bike. An order of sesame noodles flew up in the air and fell on him. I didn’t care. I had the car. The license. A box of goodies. Finally.

  Even before I got home, I pulled a handful of cassettes of undeveloped film out of the shoebox. By the time I got to my place, the fax had spit some paper onto the floor. I threw off my jacket. The fax was from Haifa. Call me, Adam said. Call me ASAP. Kicking off my boots, I dialed Israel. Adam came on the line.

  “Artie? We picked up some guy similar to the one you mentioned, but a different name. Maybe it’s an alias. I’m looking to get you a picture of him. You got e-mail or what?”

  “Fax me,” I said. “What did you pick him up for?”

  “We found out he was dealing in a little light porn. Not worth upsetting you Americans by holding a citizen. We put him on a plane and told him to scram for good.”

  “What kind of porn?”

  “Girls. Young women. Mostly Oriental.”

  “Put a rush on this.”

  “We’re overloaded here, but I’ll do my best. You want me to look in on your mother, Artie?”

  My mother’s in a nursing home in Haifa, her mind claimed by Alzheimer’s as if by some evil cult master. Every year, I make the trip. She doesn’t know who I am.

  “Artie?”

  “Thanks, Adam. Yeah. Take her some candy, OK?” I hung up and called Hillel. A machine answered.

  “Hillel, please, pick up the fucking phone.” By now I was cheesed off. Hillel Abramsky had been evasive, he had lied to me. “Pick it up.”

  “Yes?” Hillel sounded dog tired.

  “You know this address in Flushing?”

  “I know.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s my uncle’s old shop. The little shop he sold when the Chinese took over the neighborhood. I have to get off, Artie.”

  “Who else has keys to your place on 47th Street, Hil? Don’t fuck me over.”

  “No one. Like I told you, we got excellent security. I keep a set at home, but only Judith knows where.”

  “Who else? If you won’t tell me I’m coming out there. Talk to me. You got me into this. You owe me the truth.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Don’t ask me that, Artie,” Hillel said and the phone went dead.

  The rest of the day, I worked the phone. There were still a few friends out there I could call and I got someone to try running the license plate on the Caddy. Eljay Koplin came by and picked up the film cassettes and swore he’d get the prints back that night.

  I slept for a few hours, but the phone woke me and I fell on it, figuring it was the picture Adam had promised. The American who took porn pictures. I was wrong.

  “You don’t care, do you?” Dawn was so wired she could barely speak; she was needy, demanding, incoherent. Someone took the phone away from her and I heard her gasp.

  “What should I do?” Pete came on the line, voice imploring me. “What do you think? What do you understand about all this, Artie? Tell me. Help me.”

  I said to keep her at home, if he could, and then I called Uncle Billy Tae and told him to get the locks on Ricky’s apartment changed. Some break-ins in the building had been reported, vandalism due to the storm, I lied. Lying was second nature by now.

  Billy didn’t ask any questions. He said, “I’ll do it right away,” and I wondered if I had dropped Dawn Tae into worse shit, if I had forced her onto the street to buy what she needed. Hot Poppy was what she scored, snorted, smoked. Hot Poppy that could make you bleed from the ears, according to Pete.

  That night, Eljay returned with some prints; most of them were of scenery. The tenth snap I looked at was of Rose.

  It was identical to the picture I’d found on her body, except this one was a widescreen view. It showed Rose and the car, but included in the margins now was a piece of boardwalk, a scrap of ocean, a sign in Russian. I knew exactly where that boardwalk was, I knew better than I wanted to. Rose had been out of Chinatown before she died all right. She had been in Brighton Beach. And if he took this picture l
ike he took the other one of her, I was betting she’d been there with Mr Snap.

  Huge snowdrifts were piled along the side of the Belt and the river spat up gray chunks of ice as I drove out to Brighton Beach in Mike Rizzi’s old station wagon. Lily was with me. She had called early that morning and said she wanted to talk. Wanted to see me. Now, the road was clear, the sun out, she drank coffee and ate a raisin bagel, passing me bite-sized chunks and declaring her delight at a brief jaunt out to the beach. “I love the beach in the winter,” she said.

  After the night with Pansy in the basement, after the vision of hell down there, I needed to be with Lily. With her, even Brighton Beach would be OK. The last few days it had hit home: it was better for me with Lily around. I was a jerk not to tell her why I was going to Brooklyn.

  She didn’t ask me why we were going even though she knows I hate Brighton Beach. For half an hour, while I drove the ten miles south from Manhattan, Lily and I laughed and drifted apart and it was my fucking fault because I didn’t tell her.

  Brighton Beach. The Atlantic Ocean and the boardwalk, the main drag covered by the elevated train, the ugly side streets, and everything Russian—the chatter in the streets, the restaurants—Odessa, Café Arbat—the food shops, even the Hello Gorgeous Beauty Salon, all Russian. A few years back I spent a lot of time in Brighton Beach. It had raised the specter of a past I’d worked real hard to obliterate. I hated coming here. What’s more, I’d helped put away a few of the creeps who terrorized the neighborhood. People knew my face. If Jerry Chen had been right that first morning on the street in Chinatown, if the Russians and Chinese were doing some business together, it could make a guy like me very paranoid.

  But Lily was with me and the sun felt good. We strolled, I kept an eye out for the sign in the photograph of Rose. It was probably a wild-goose chase, but I had to do it.

  On the beach where the ocean pounded the sand, scavenger birds who didn’t make it south for the winter hunted for crumbs like homeless guys looking for soda cans to recycle. Two old men lumbered across the snowdrifts that clung to the sand and dove into the freezing water.