Hot Poppies

by Reggie Nadelson

  We made our way to the elevator shaft and looked up. It appeared that some workers had tried to shimmy down the cables, but had failed and were burned to death inside the shaft.

  “Artie?” Sonny was shaking me. I was still looking at the elevator, but he grabbed my arm.

  “I talked to one of the chiefs,” Sonny shouted through his hood. “The doors of the sweatshop were locked from the outside. The fabric caught fast. All that was left was part of a brick wall,” he said. It was the wall that had no door but where someone had scribbled FIRE EXIT in red. The flames had traveled through miles of flimsy fabric, eating up the building, the workers, everything. Nothing could stop it. Nothing.

  “It has to stop.” Ripping off his hood, Sonny dragged me across the street. “It has to fucking stop. I’m going to tear out their hearts if they don’t crack down on these buildings.” We leaned against the old stone ramparts of the bridge next to the park where the body bags were piling up like black rubber logs, and he began to cry. His face was the color of dirty snow and he looked old. His body shook. Tears bled from his dark eyes.

  “My grandmother burned to death in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire,” Sonny said, wiping his face. “Did I ever tell you that, Artie? 1911. A few blocks from here, did you know that? She burned alive. She came over on a boat from Russia and died in a building in New York City because no one gave a rat’s ass, man. She was an immigrant, a piece of shit in the eyes of real Americans. My mother was there with her. She was eleven. Someone hauled her down in a basket, so she was on the sidewalk when her own mother fell out of the window in flames. She always remembered her mother’s hair, how it held the fire. She ended up like that.” He pointed to body bags. “Except they didn’t have bags then. It was just bodies.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “No,” he said.

  “I need to find someone, Sonny.”

  Wiping his face again, Sonny looked at me. “You knew someone in the building? My God. I’ll see what I can do, man. Come on. You got a car? I’m too fucking mad to drive.”

  In my car, Sonny worked the phone the way only he could, pestering, cajoling, begging, ordering. He checked the ERs, he got through to the morgue, the MEs, the cops he knew at every precinct in the area. I called Al Huang at the restaurant where Pansy lived, but there was no answer. Al had been at the fire site wandering like a lost soul.

  The whole of downtown was ablaze with blue lights and sirens. The radio said there were more than a hundred dead, there were burns like napalm burns, burns from a war zone and not enough units. By now, I knew and Sonny knew that Pansy was one of the smiling skulls in the sweatshop or a heap of ashes. Pansy the chameleon, serious in her red hat and glasses, seductive in the whore’s costume, she had slipped into my life and taken over. As I drove down from Beekman over to Beth Israel so we could check the ERs, my face was wet.

  I told Sonny about the errand boys who were probably twins. “We’ll get them both. We’ll fry them both. But I want the guys that call the shots.” Sonny fiddled with the radio and for a minute we listened to the news, then he switched it off. “You want to try a couple more hospitals? Look for your friend, Pansy? I know some people. I got friends,” he said, and I kept driving.

  “I’m going to crucify them, you know. I’m going after all of them, you hear me? The creeps who smuggle the girls to New York, then extort them so they have to work double shifts in these hell-holes. I want the scum that contract with the sweatshops right up the line, the department stores, the fancy designers, I don’t care who the fuck they are, if any of them are doing it, I want them. I want whoever makes dough off the insurance on these places. Also, the building inspectors who get paid to ignore violations. I want the whole fucking bunch.” The rage imploded.

  “I think we took our eye off the ball a long time ago. I think we ignored that all this stuff is connected, the illegals, the sweatshops, the extortion rings, the kidnapping. We ignored that the strings are pulled in China.”

  “Yeah?”

  “My opinion? My opinion is a lot of the money, wherever the smuggling gets done, the money, which is what counts, is run through Hong Kong. I’ve been reading up, Art. Did you know that the richest people in Shanghai got rich printing bibles? Now the fucking snakeheads are selling a different kind of paradise. The Golden Mountain, man. They use the photographs for propaganda. Come to America. Get a Cadillac car.” Sonny looked at me. “You know how, once in a while, we get a lead on one of the big boys? Let me tell you. Once in a while, someone in a Chinese village tells a local cop and he’s got a conscience. He calls someone in Hong Kong, they get in touch with us. If we get very lucky, one of the bad guys lives in Hong Kong. Or he goes for a visit.”

  “What’s wrong with picking them up in China?”

  Sonny snorted. “We can’t deport. You probably knew. Every illegal knows it, word travels, man, but so what? These people got a lifetime of fear about the authorities. The illegals know. The crooks know. But maybe you didn’t know we also got no extradition with China. None, nada. Fucking nothing.”

  He pulled open the glove compartment. “You got any cigarettes?” he said and I tossed him my pack.

  “No extradition.”

  “You got it. After Tiananmen, George Bush signed a nice little executive order outlawing deportation with Chinese. I have to worry about the civil liberties of a scumbag that makes the victim drink his own vomit just before the scum strangles him.” In the dark of the car, I could see Sonny’s profile. He was possessed. He had begun to ramble.

  “Did you know, Artie, that cockroaches can survive a nuke attack? With Hong Kong, at least we got extradition treaties. Hong Kong is the only place we can do business. Not for long.”

  “You told me.”

  “It’s going to get worse. Enforcer types just cottoned on to all the possibilities. Some miserable Fujianese spends thirty-five grand to get here’s gonna spend ten more to stay alive. Most of them too scared to talk. These days, they take them right off the boat. Victimize them, terrorize the community. Kill ’em. It comes in all forms.” Sonny, who had quit years ago, puffed on his cigarette and coughed while I looked for a parking space.

  “It’s going to get bigger. People running from the commie dicks that already ran from them before. They did it before, ’48, ’49, when they used to race the sharks over from China. They’ll be doing it again when time runs out.

  “July is coming. This July, China takes back Hong Kong. The nuke attack is coming, so to speak. Trust me. So it takes a few months until the Chinese settle in. A year. Two years. For us cops, there’s no time left at all. There’s a billion capitalists in China, man, and as many as possible gonna want in on Hong Kong. I don’t think human rights is high on the charts. What is it Chairman fucking Deng said? ‘Not to get rich is to be a dumb bear.’ Man, they ain’t no dumb bears in China. Hong Kong neither. People are going to die, Artie. A lot of people.”

  Sonny’s phone rang just then and we both jumped. He flipped it on, listened, then covered the mouthpiece.

  “I got something. I got something.” Sonny listened to his cell-phone. “Let’s go.”

  I drove to St Vincent’s, and we ran into the hospital.

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” Sonny kept saying as we ran, running even while someone gave us sterile gowns and masks and took us to a temporary burns unit where we saw her, a creature in so much bandaging, so wrapped up, it was hard to tell. They gave me a second or two and I crouched as close as I could and whispered. “Pansy? Marie Christine?” I whispered, using her real name, but there was no sound and only a faint whimper of horrible pain before a doctor pulled me away.

  “Was it her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Outside the hospital we sat in the car and drank coffee we got in the cafeteria. “I’m sorry, man, I am truly sorry.” He sipped the scalding brew out of the paper cup. It slopped over the edge. He put it in the cup holder, then held his head between both of his hands like it woul
d split open from the anger.

  The tension subsided, the adrenalin dried up, we sat, two sorry guys in a car.

  “Where’s Chen?”

  Chen wasn’t at home, he didn’t answer his beeper or the cell-phone. But my foot was already on the pedal.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To see Jerry Chen.”

  “You know where he is?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

  The building on Chambers Street was dark. The security guard was asleep. The elevator was waiting. We got in and it took us to the tenth floor where a sleek white door was set into an interior wall made of glass bricks. Through it came the sound of flashy Latin music and laughter. The door was ajar.

  We went in. The corner room was large and white and the huge windows faced north and west, the direction of the fire. Through the windows I could see the red tinge in the thick black sky.

  In the room were three women with pins in their mouths and needles in their hands. They were fitting a trio of ravishing models—two Asian, one white—into skin-tight satin jumpsuits the colors of fruit.

  You could cut the air in Coco Katz’s showroom it was so thick with blue smoke the color of French cigarettes. There was the sweet tang of dope, too, and on every surface were cans of Diet Coke and thickets of wine bottles, full, empty. Wearing only some satin bikinis and nothing on top, a fourth model—she was the color of coffee ice cream—lounged in a director’s chair and ate chunks of iceberg lettuce off a head of the stuff she held in her hand. Katz herself was not visible, but there was a door to the right and I figured it for her private office.

  “I look like a fucking pear! I hate it.” A shrill voice came from behind a screen that stood near one of the windows. It was made of sheer fabric and behind it were figures that bent and moved in silhouette. The salsa blared into the night.

  “You needed that change.” Now I could hear a soothing male voice from behind the screen.

  The pear woman replied, “Yeah, I was fucking bored, you know. I fucking hated those highlights. I was bored.”

  “What about the red tone?” the man said. “Did we hit the red tone right? Coco has fruit in mind. Fall fruit. Apples, pears. Try to imagine you’re a pear or at least a fucking bunch of grapes. Purple grapes.”

  Behind the screen, the shadows jumped some more and bent over and screamed at each other.

  “Hi.” The lettuce-eating model looked at me.

  “Hi. We’re looking for Coco Katz. We’re friends of hers.”

  Legs up to her neck, she got out of her chair, sashayed in my direction and leaned down so we were eye to eye. “Tread carefully, darling,” she cooed. “Coco’s in a bitch mood. The show’s in a couple of days and the collection’s a mess. Coco should stick to men’s clothes. She should stick to conventional. Now she thinks she can put us in this fruit shit like Isaac did with the bugs. She thinks she’s Isaac. But she ain’t. Hope you’ve got your bullet-proof vest, darling.” She pointed at the door. “She’s in there.”

  Chen was in Coco’s office with her and we saw him first, saw his reflection in the mirror that lined Coco’s wall, as he strutted and preened and appraised himself and the plaid suit he was wearing. A coffee table held the wreckage of a meal and a couple of empty Champagne bottles. Lying on the leather sofa was Coco Katz. She was watching Chen. He saw us and span round.

  “Fuck off,” Chen said.

  “I think you ought to leave us,” I said to Katz. She rose from her sofa, raised a single eyebrow and said, “Sure. I’ve got more to worry about than him,” then strode away into the other room.

  Sonny turned to Chen. “Tell me, detective. Did your friend Coco there lose any business in the fire? Did she cry over it? Did she have contracts with the Joy Fun Sewing Company?”

  “Don’t be a fucking ass,” Chen said. He took off the jacket and held it in front of him. “This is high quality goods. This stuff gets made in Italy, not in a shithole on Market Street.”

  “All of it? You don’t know that for sure, do you? Do you?”

  Sonny was sarcastic. I saw he was also boiling. “I think that what Jerry’s girlfriend had was insurance. I think she had a piece of the insurance action on the building on Market Street, that was the game she played, her and a lot of other garmentos and some of their pals in Chinatown. The designers sub-contract with the sweatshops. They profit from the slave labor. The shops are fire traps. Anything goes wrong, the building goes up, maybe they lose some garments, but they win big with the insurance. Nice, huh? Nice. You win both ways. Did you help her get in on the deal, Jerry? Did you introduce her around? Henry Liu, maybe?”

  “You don’t know anything,” Chen barked, the slick charm disappearing. “All you know is what you got from some two-bit claims adjuster. There is absolutely no fucking evidence you can fucking pin on me. None.”

  “I didn’t mention any claims adjuster. You did.” Sonny Lippert had done his homework. He looked at Chen. “You’re an expensive guy, detective. You got an expensive car, pricy clothes. And I got someone who says she saw you at the building around the time the fire caught. Says you didn’t exactly run for the fire department. Says you ran in the other direction.”

  “I didn’t set the fucking fire,” Chen said.

  “But you didn’t stop it, did you? Did you, Jerry?” I thought of Pansy. Of the other women. Of the body bags. I socked him. I couldn’t help it. Sonny gave me a warning glance.

  From the other room came more laughter; someone changed the music to reggae.

  “What is this, Art? Sonny been schmoozing you, Art?” Chen said. “Sonny been going on about the Hong Kong connection? I’m the one that ought to go to Hong Kong.”

  “You’re not going anywhere.” Sonny was livid.

  “If you get to Hong Kong, Art,” said Chen, “why don’t you look up my goody-two-shoes cousin, Ringo Chen? He’s your sort of cop. Him and Sonny are tight. You want me to be sorry, guys. OK. I’m sorry. Mea culpa.”

  “Please, Jer. Spare me. What is it you want to tell me?”

  “You’re wasting your time trying to pin stuff on me and you know it. You know fucking well that it’s me the brass trust when it comes to Chinatown. If the city fucking wants to make things better, they got to cut guys like me some slack. Chinese guys, you understand. Guys that can grasp the culture. When I deliver the errand boys, no one’s gonna care about some claims adjuster, Sonny, and you know it. Yeah, I picked him up, OK? They were twins. It’s why the one with the hole in his eye said he did it all, to protect his son-of-a-bitch brother. I made the collar. Nothing else matters. Right? But you can see me on TV.”

  We both knew he was right. But I had one more question.

  “Sonny, ask Jerry here if he’s been playing games. Ask him if he’s got some jerk following me every time I take a walk, some dirtbag asking where my friends are living, shaking down my pals.” I opened the door.

  “Hey, Art.” Chen called me back.

  “What do you want?”

  “She’s alive.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Henry Liu found her. She’s at Henry’s. Marie Christine, isn’t that her name?”

  Pansy was waiting for me just inside the door of the Red Swan. Her hat in her hands, when she saw me, she pulled it on, opened the door and asked me for a cigarette. We went out into the street. Pansy headed north and I walked alongside her. For a while, she was silent. When we reached the park where we had first talked on the day Rose died and the blizzard started, Pansy stopped. She looked at the sky, then turned to me.

  “I did it, you see,” she said.

  “Did what?”

  She tossed her cigarette into the gutter. “The fire,” she said very softly. “I started the fire.”

  20

  “Tell me.”

  The snow had stopped completely. The park was empty. Pansy brushed off a bench and sat down. “May I have another cigarette please?” I gave her one and lit it.

  “Last night after you left
me at the whorehouse. It was Sunday last night?” She puffed delicately.

  “Yes.”

  “It seems such a long time ago.” In her pocket, she found some chocolate. Elbows on her knees, she held the cigarette in one hand and the chocolate in the other. “After Chen threatened me, after you left me in the whorehouse, I went out on a job, as a whore, you know? I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if someone knew I had spoken with you. If someone thought I might talk. One of the pimps perhaps. I don’t know. But I was going out and they were waiting in the street.”

  “Again?”

  “Yes. But different men from before, I think. Behind the building where we sew is a church. There’s a smaller building in between, in a courtyard. They took me there last night. It was a room on the ground floor. They kept me all night and all day. I lost any sense of time. I could hear the noise of them hitting me as if it was happening to someone else, and I thought: I’d like to be dead. I prayed to die.” She rolled up her sleeve to show me the bruises. “I didn’t care any more. I can’t ever make enough even as a whore to pay them. Even while they hit me, I thought about it. I was watching. I was outside myself. There was a space heater.”

  She paused and ate some more chocolate. “Excuse me,” she said as she swallowed. “I had a silk scarf around my neck and I used it for a taper. I lit the curtains. If I could make enough fire, I thought someone might see it. But there was garbage under the window, a box of scraps or fabric, or a can of gasoline, I don’t know. I saw the fire travel. The men who kidnapped me saw it and got scared. They ran away. I got out.”

  Delicately, she tossed the cigarette butt on the ground and crushed it with her foot. “The fire traveled into the factory building.” She took a deep breath. “I tried to get in, but it was too late. The door to the sweatshop was locked. I ran.”

  “I thought you were inside. You told me you were doing both shifts.”