Hot Poppies

by Reggie Nadelson

  I should have been celebrating. I had a date with Lily for the next night. Jerry Chen had Sherm locked up. Pansy was safe.

  Before I returned Mike’s station wagon, I drove down to the river, parked near the Seaport and got out. I thought I’d grab a beer at a tavern on Water Street, but first I needed air and a smoke. I strolled to the river and lit up. It was cold and dark, but I didn’t care. It was beautiful and I could breathe.

  In that wintry setting, snow blanketing the old fish market, without a single car or human being anywhere around, the period buildings, the clipper ships looked eerily real. I took a last drag on my cigarette and made to toss it into the inky river when from the corner of my eye I saw the ashy tip of a cigar go red hot. Someone was just behind me, smoking, waiting, watching.

  The muscles in my legs tensed. I wasn’t sure how long I could stay this still. Finally, I threw my cigarette into the water and reached into my pocket.

  “Don’t do that,” a muted voice said. “Leave your hands by your sides, please. Don’t turn around. And listen to me.”

  “Where’s your creeps tonight?”

  “My monkeys?” He laughed. “I sent them home to bed.”

  “How many are there? Two, three? How many?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. You ask these boys to show up, you tell them to blend in, they carry on like knucklehead extras from a cheap Kung Fu flick. What can you do?” The quality of the voice was pleasant, bland almost. California, I thought. Or Canada.

  I started to turn my head, but I felt a hand on my arm.

  “Please. I really dislike violence. Just listen.”

  “Who are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  The wind came up. It whistled on the water. Across the East River, tucked under the Brooklyn Bridge, was the River Café. It was lit up like Christmas. People would be finishing dinner, ordering one last drink. It’s Friday night, they’d laugh and order another nightcap to celebrate the end of the blizzard.

  “Please, Artie Cohen, please mind your own business,” the voice said. “We’re not interested in you, we don’t want you to be interested in us.”

  “Who is us? Who?”

  “It’s over. You’ve solved your case. Now leave it alone.”

  I was silent.

  “Stay away from Chinatown. Stay away from the girls. For your own sake.” The voice was unthreatening. Except that it knew my name.

  “Or?”

  “Oh, I’m sure you can imagine. Now, I’m going to leave. I’m going to leave and I’m going to suggest you do the same. Think of me as a friend.”

  “Is Jeremy Chen your friend, too?”

  But no one answered.

  16

  After the guy spooked me on the pier I needed answers, and by Saturday morning I was pissed off with not getting them. I hunted down Sonny Lippert. I called his house. His wife Jennifer said she was going over to meet him at High Five, the discount clothing store near the Trade Center. I got there first and found him ferreting among the fine shirts that were always on sale. His arms heaped with goods, he saw me, waved and strolled towards the dressing room. I went after him, but Walter Cohen caught my arm.

  “So Artie, sweetheart, last time, did I hit your taste level?” Walt said, grabbing me in a bear hug. He asked about Ricky who was his favorite customer because he looked good in everything.

  Briefly, keeping an eye out for Sonny, I admired the tweedy black and white Hugo Boss jacket Walter held out. I put it on. The color of expensive ebony himself, he studied the effect of the jacket on me, like he was Leonardo studying perspective.

  “Try on the pants. I’m sure I can do something with the price,” said Walt, who was a former point guard for the Utah Jazz. He had left New York, where he was born, for the west, then come back home to study opera at Juilliard. He’s a basso profundo and he’s good; already he has a following in the opera world. When he performs, groupies hang around outside the stage door.

  I once asked Walter, who I’ve known for years, how he came to be Cohen, like me. “My great-grandaddy was a rabbi in Spanish Town, Jamaica,” he said. “Me, I was raised Catholic. I like Jews, though,” he added quickly because Walt’s a diplomat. “I like ’em fine. They shop well. Very fine shoppers. You know who else is an excellent shopper? The Chinese. Very good. Thin. Rich.”

  “That suit is good on you, Artie. It’s beautiful goods.” Walt fondled the material. “This wool crepe, everyone’s using it this season. Awesome. Giorgio. Donna Karan. Calvin, Coco Katz, everybody.”

  “I’ll think about it, Walt,” I said, and slammed into the dressing room where Sonny was admiring himself in the mirror.

  “We got to talk, Sonny. Now.”

  “Relax, man. It’s Saturday. You look like shit. Why don’t you come on back to the office, Artie? I got something for you anyhow. I was going to call.”

  At the front of the store, Sonny handed Walt the shirts and broke into a toothy grin.

  “Say hello to Jennifer.” Lippert put his hand on his wife’s arm.

  I’d met her once or twice—me and Sonny didn’t socialize—and she was an elegant woman with dark hair and pearl earrings and very fine legs. Sonny looked at her like he couldn’t believe his luck.

  “Jen? Honey?” She nodded and smiled, but she was caught up in a fistful of silk ties she had clutched in her hand like noodles.

  “Let’s talk about Jerry Chen,” I said when we got to Sonny’s office. It was a loose end. I planned to tie it up and forget it.

  “Is this about that poor schmuck Sherm Abramsky?”

  “You already heard about Sherm.”

  “Sure I heard about Sherm, man. You could have told me yourself, though.”

  “So forget that for now, OK? Just tell me what it is between you and Jerry Chen? What’s going on?”

  Sonny occupied himself with making coffee. He focused on the espresso machine that’s brass and glass and has an eagle on the top, and while he measured and brewed the stuff, I looked at the scraps of colorless sky out the window. A second storm was blowing in that day; more snow was falling. I was sick to death of the snow now.

  On Sonny’s partner’s desk were stacks of books. Dogeared books, paperbacks, books marked with slices of yellow legal paper. A history of China. Melville. Twain. Once, when he’d had a few, he said, “Did you know my father believed that ninety-seven per cent of all hardcover books in America are purchased by Jews?” It was the father who named him Leo, for Tolstoy. But his mother was past forty when she had him, he was her youngest, she dubbed him Sonny, and it stuck.

  Sonny Lippert believed books contained information he could use if he read them right. Clues, evidence. For instance, if you wanted to understand Russian hoods, you read Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn.

  For a minute he seemed to drift into some dream world, eyes distant, a late, delicate child whose real world was in those books, who went out for sports only because it made him popular with other kids. He picked up a volume of Pushkin and turned it around like some delicacy he might savor eating slowly.

  The coffee brewed, Sonny poured some for both of us, sampled it and put his cup down.

  “Let’s talk about Chen, Sonny.”

  His expression hardened up, the black eyes opened wide. “Jerry Chen uses me when he needs me, I told you. That’s about it. He uses everyone. Sometimes I can use him. You talk to me, Artie. Tell me what you know,” he added, then he shut up. He lay back in his leather swivel chair and kept his mouth shut.

  I took him through it: Hillel’s call, Rose, the attack in the warehouse, the spike, the creep who sold toilet paper to both Mike Rizzi and Hillel Abramsky, the same creep who turned up at Henry Liu’s. I talked about the second dead woman, the one on 23rd Street. The gallery of whores in the photo lab. About Chen and Pansy. About the hoods who e-mailed photographs of illegals back to their village. I left out the Taes and Dawn, because that was private, and they weren’t involved.

  Sonny leaned forward.
“It fits, doesn’t it? I’m beginning to see how it fits, Art. Tell me something. What would you say connects all this stuff?”

  “Illegal immigrants. A community of illegals trying to cut it, exploited by the smugglers, is that what we’re talking, Sonny?”

  “What else?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Women. Female illegals. Girls and women for the sweatshops. Prostitutes. Bodies. Cheap labor for the rag trade means big bucks for the garmentos. Whores make life bearable for male illegals. Big bucks for fake papers mean huge profits for the gangs. With extortion for the icing, for the extras. Snakeheads, enforcers, errand boys, the debt collector at the top of the pyramid. An empire of trade in humans.”

  “And even the respectable get a piece of the pie. The more illegals come, the bigger the Fujianese community gets, the more they grab a piece of the political turf. Not bad for China either. The lines to home are always open.”

  “You’re a smart guy, Art.”

  “And you want your taste. You want to collar as many as you can of the scum that exploit the whole situation.”

  “You been in the sweatshops?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I want them. There’s thousands of them. I hate what those pissant specimens do to women in those places.” Angry now, Sonny got up and came around the other side of his desk. He leaned against the edge of it. I got up. He told me to sit down. “You didn’t really believe that schmuck, Sherm, murdered these women, do you? You don’t believe he carved the pregnant girl with some martial arts spike?”

  “He’s a lot more ruthless than he looks.”

  “My guess is someone used Sherm to take the pictures. He held out on them. He happened to be screwing a girl who owed them money. Very convenient. They went after her. But you did good, getting Sherm. Sherm the Sperm takes pictures of girls. Some of them get dead. I don’t think it’s the camera that’s killing them, do you? I mean it’s not stealing their souls, is it, Art?”

  “So.”

  “So. Sherm’s a front man. Sherm works for them. But who do the guys Sherm works for service? Where’s the ladder go? How high?”

  “How many murders have there been?”

  He shrugged. “More than a few in the last year, two years. Do you want me to tell you about Detective Jeremy Chen now?”

  “I’m tired of asking. Did you know he’s having a thing with that designer? Coco Katz?”

  Clasping his hands, Sonny cracked his knuckles. “I didn’t know.”

  “Does she use the sweatshops?”

  “Sure she does. They all do.” He crumpled some paper in his fist, tossed it across the room into a wire basket and made the shot. “Jerry is a very ambitious guy. Very. He wants this case, he’ll do what he has to. You have to believe that on this one, Chen came to me. Told me about you. Says to me, ‘What’s the deal with Cohen?’ I say, ‘He’s my friend.’”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “For a lot of the brass, he’s a kind of addiction. They figure he’ll fix stuff up in Chinatown because he’s Chinese. Ethnic without an accent, you know what I mean, man? If you’re really asking, I don’t like him. I don’t trust him. I think he’s emotionally bent. He hates a lot. I also think the killer is still out there. More than one. They multiply like cockroaches and they’ll last just as long,” Sonny said. “This is corporate. The cockroaches got lists, they got phone numbers, beepers, e-mail, area codes. Electronic hoods. How can I beat them? Now they got pictures. It’s not going to stop until we make a paper trail. Until we find the money. Until we figure out who the banker is, then, maybe we can nuke the cockroaches. Until then, we use Jerry Chen.”

  “Or he uses us.”

  “Yeah, that, too, Art. That’s always possible.”

  Sonny finished talking and reached into his desk drawer. The manila envelope was eleven by fourteen. It was addressed to me.

  “What’s in it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t, man. It came through the Russian consulate. I was going to call you Monday. I really do have to go. But listen, remember, it’s always about money. The killing will never stop until we find the money,” he said. “I got to go meet Jen, Art. But use the office if you want. Finish the coffee, OK.” Sonny opened the door. “You look perplexed, man. You didn’t really think it was Sherm? You and I, Art, we both know Sherm Abramsky couldn’t kill a lobster if it crawled onto the Passover table.”

  Inside the envelope that Sonny gave me was a brown cardboard folder, faded, the label neatly written in old-fashioned copperplate—writing I recognized. At Sonny’s desk, I drank the coffee and looked through it. It had come from my Aunt Birdie in Moscow; I squinted in the wintry glare and my eyes watered.

  The consulate had left me messages. I never called back. I don’t want to hear from Russians. What did they have to tell me that I want to know?

  Birdie was dead. My father was long gone, my mother was in the home in Israel.

  Wrapped in tissue paper were some photographs of myself that I’d sent to Birdie, of my loft, of me clowning around with the Taes at a house in Sag Harbor. There was a picture of Svetlana I’d taken in the Russian countryside and beside her, her cousin Tolya Sverdloff who saved my life but couldn’t save hers. I had met and almost married Svetlana the one time I went back to Moscow. Because of a job, because of me, she was dead.

  I thought about Svetlana for a while. I put my hand near her face. Then I put the picture away.

  There was something terribly final about the package. Birdie wasn’t really an aunt but a distant relative who left Brooklyn for Moscow in what?—1930, ’31—to support the Revolution, and never went home. When I was a kid in Moscow, she taught me English and about New York. She had been dead for more than a year, but this package was like a headstone. The end. It stuck in my chest like heartburn, and I missed her.

  There was something else in the envelope, a stiff tan paper sleeve so old it crumbled in my hand. It contained a bank book. The Downtown Savings Bank, the faint logo said. Inside it, Birdie Golden had written her name. I thumbed through it carefully but the ancient paper left dust on my fingers.

  When Birdie left home, Abe, her father, put money into the savings bank. She never withdrew a cent. Maybe she was saving for a rainy day. I knew better: she had been saving it for me. There was more than five thousand dollars in the account.

  Goose pimples covered my arms. Five grand when you’re broke is enough to make you feel pretty good, and I figured it had to be a sign of more good times coming. There was a branch of the bank around the corner from City Hall. I got on the phone; it was open Saturdays. I went home and picked up some papers and some ID and went to the bank.

  The clerk at the bank said, “Nobody has touched this account for seventy years except for an annual deposit of ten dollars.” Birdie had been meticulous. She had kept the account open, somehow putting in ten bucks every single year, though how she transferred the money from Moscow was a mystery. She had managed.

  “Excuse me, sir,” the clerk said and went away and returned with a supervisor who looked at me like I was a crook. I tossed him the notarized papers that proved, in two languages, that I was Birdie Golden’s sole heir. The supervisor reconsidered and offered me a seat near a desk with a potted plant on it. Half an hour passed. Excited clerks scurried around. What’s going on? I thought, and ate a stale candy cane out of a bowl on the desk. The supervisor returned and sat down and hit the keys of an adding machine.

  He hit the adding machine a few more times, flicked his shirt collar under his jacket and tried not to touch the acne on his face. Then he talked rollovers, percentages, accrued interest. I tried to keep from getting excited.

  “You have some ID, sir?”

  I tossed it all on the desk, license, passport, ATM card.

  Triumphantly, he pulled a long paper tape out of the adding machine and presented it to me. “It’s quite a bit of money,” he said excitedly.

  “How much? How much?”

  “Fifty-six thousand
, two hundred and eighty-three dollars,” he said. “And seventy-four cents. Would you like to roll it over, sir? Would you like us to open an account for you? We have excellent investment arrangements,” he said and told me I was a valued customer. Very valuable. The bank would like to help me. What could they do to help me?

  “One thing,” I told him. “There’s only one thing.”

  “Yessir, anything at all.” He offered me more candy.

  I took a candy cane, peeled the cellophane slowly, put it in my mouth, got up, shook his hand, yawned, and said, “I’ll take the cash.”

  I was free!

  Fifty-six big ones. And change. Even after they soak you for taxes, that’s a pretty nice windfall.

  I’m off the hook, I thought. I’m free. Free. People say money can’t make you free: it’s the other big lie.

  For a minute, I didn’t care about Chinatown or death or anything at all, only about the money. Who could I admit it to? Who could I tell I had suddenly become the guy I used to be, only better. Happy and rich. In my heart, I knew if I didn’t watch it, I could easily end up one of those dorks who buys driftwood plaques that read: “Life is for the Living.”

  I took a cab to my own bank. I went to the teller and made a very large deposit. Then I went home. The first call I made was to the dickhead who owns the club in SoHo. I told him he could shove his job. He told me I was already fired, having failed to show up. I told him to go fuck himself. He replied in kind. Then I called my friend Rita at her flower store on Spring Street and sent Lily loads of yellow roses. I ordered a purple mountain bike for Justine. I was on a roll.

  I put Tony Bennett singing Fred Astaire on the CD. I did a few dance steps myself and felt I was almost as good as Fred. Then I sat down at my desk and opened all the bills, even the ones I’d been scared to look at. Some were stuffed in the bottom of a drawer. Some had fallen behind the radiator. Crawling around on my hands and knees, digging into places I had pretty much forgotten, I got them out, opened them and paid them. All of them. Mortgage, electricity, telephone, credit cards, loans, to the last cent. I called the Salvation Army and offered them a tweed sofa-bed and two beanbag chairs. I ran downstairs and across the street.