Hot Poppies

by Reggie Nadelson

  “Yes. I should have been inside. I wish I had been.” Getting up, Pansy looked in the direction of the fire again, then gazed around the desolate playground.

  “The Golden Mountain. You saw my friend Al with his little restaurant where he works all day and all night. “America good, work here good.” Everyone wants to come. They will keep coming. You do what you can.” She hesitated. “Do you remember when I told you if they got me again, I would kill someone?”

  I thought of Sonny. “There are people who think this is all connected in Hong Kong.”

  “I don’t know.” Pansy took off the glasses and her eyes narrowed, as if she was in pain and didn’t want me to know. “I’m sorry. My eyes bother me.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “Work. Try to pay my debts. Testify, if you ask me. Pray. I’d like to leave here alone now. Unless you want to have me arrested,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I won’t do that.”

  It was a week since Hillel called me, a week since I met Jerry Chen in Chinatown. Chen with his Porsche and his designer duds. Chen who went after the killers who extorted, kidnapped, butchered. But it was Jerry’s insane, doggy devotion to Coco Katz that probably sucked him in. And the ambition. Maybe Chen thought he could play it both ways. And if he could solve the big cases and get rich, maybe all the self-loathing would stop.

  I watched Pansy leave the park and walk away, her sneakers making prints in the last fine dusting of snow.

  Someone was paying Jerry Chen. Someone in Chinatown who owned bad buildings and had good insurance. Someone uptown who contracted with the sweatshops. The smugglers fed them with illegals, fueling the garment business like a can of gasoline in an alley fed the fire.

  My fix on this place had changed. For a week, I’d been scratching around this patch; I was still a tourist. Chinatown was a walled city, even if the walls were invisible. It was hidden, not just under the snow and ice but in a deserted warehouse, a basement brothel, a room where people slept in stacks of three on eight-hour shifts.

  On the surface, the place was the same aggressive sprawl of streets, sidewalks crammed, shops bulging with food. Guys like Al Huang worked eighteen-hour days, cooked, put food into take-out bags, sent their kids to school, tried to make a life.

  Bursting now with international banks, shiny condos and high livers eating abalone at $800 a pound, the new Chinatown still made its deals in private rooms at Henry Liu’s. Cantonese, Fujianese, halfway around the world from home, New York’s Chinese fought out their ancient feuds and loyalties—to Hong Kong, the mainland, to Taiwan. The criminals moved as fast as they could dial a phone. Electronic hoods, they used photographs they got off digital cameras for extortion and sent them back to China by computer for propaganda. They referred to a job by its area code and their most potent weapons were the beeper on their belt and the cellphone in their pocket. Electronic thugs.

  Billions changed hands. New York. The Golden Mountain. Hong Kong. What was it that Justine always said when she was little? “If we dig all the way down to the other side, will we come out in China?”

  But this case was over. Sometimes I don’t know if I should laugh or cry. There’s always a two-bit slimebag like Sherm. Once in a while, there’s a Pansy to break your heart. But not often.

  Tossing my cigarette away, I left the park. Sherm Abramsky’s lawyer would fix him some kind of deal. The twin creeps, the errand boys who killed Rose and Babe Vanelli and probably the woman on 23rd Street, would maybe even fry, which would be sweet.

  I was glad Pansy had escaped from the kidnappers. She had done it twice. Twice. A bell went off in my head.

  Was she that smart? Or lucky? Who put up the initial money for her passage? How did she get here, to the Golden Mountain? Who would the snakeheads squeeze for money if she couldn’t pay? “I have no family,” she had said. “No one.”

  I was running. It was late. The streets were nearly deserted. I ran toward the site of the fire. On the other side of the street, under the bridge, I found her.

  “Pansy?”

  “Yes?” Her voice was cool.

  “The first time they kidnapped you, when they took you and Rose, why didn’t they come after you like they came after her? Why didn’t they kill you?”

  She stared at the smoldering wreckage across the street and said, “Perhaps I had some protection.”

  “What protection?”

  “I told you I had a half-brother. Do you remember? I thought he was dead. Perhaps he is not dead. I think the man who gave the orders to the errand boys is my own brother.”

  Abruptly, her voice broke off. A man rose out of the shadows like the cat that had pounced on me in Queens. He threw himself on her. “Run,” I yelled at her as I tackled him. “Run.” But the last thing I heard that night was Pansy’s voice and she seemed to say, “If you go to China, Artie, look for the Eiffel Tower.” So I knew I must have passed out. Either that, or I was dreaming.

  The bruises healed. It took me a while to get my act together and I was shook up, but apart from a tooth that got knocked out I was OK. Three weeks after the fire, when I answered my door, Sonny Lippert was standing there, arms outstretched, a bottle of fine malt in his hands.

  “How ya’ doing, Art?”

  “Have a drink, Sonny. Sit down and have a drink,” I said, but he didn’t take off his coat. I closed the door. Sonny sat on the edge of a chair.

  “I need you Art. I want to put this case together, Art. I been working on it, and we can do it, the dead girls, Rose, your friend, Pansy, the photographs, Jerry Chen, if he’s in it, if we can put it together, the deaths, the connections to China, side by side, maybe we can stop some of the dying. You with me, Artie?”

  I opened the whisky. It was nice stuff.

  “You ever talk to your friend Ricky’s brother-in-law? You ever talk to Pete Leung about all this?” Sonny said. “He’s good, Pete. He knows how money moves through Hong Kong. He helps us sometimes. He ever tell you anything interesting?”

  “He told me something about a new-style heroin they call Hot Poppy. Mostly that.”

  Looking puzzled, Sonny said, “I don’t know anything about that, kiddo. But there’s rumors. There’s someone who moves around a lot, smooth as silk sort of guy, between Hong Kong and New York. He pulls a lot of weight, a lot of strings, a money guy. We think he’s the bank for the snake-heads.”

  “And?”

  “I want you to go to Hong Kong.”

  “I don’t think so, Sonny.”

  “What will it cost me?”

  “I want you to fix things for her. For Pansy. If she makes it.”

  “She’ll make it. The doctors told me she’ll make it because of you, kiddo. What were you doing out there that night of the fire? John Wayne? John Woo?”

  “Promise me.”

  “I swear on my grandmother,” he said.

  “A Green Card? All of it?”

  “You’re some manipulator, Art. Yeah, OK, whatever she needs, but I want you to go. I want you to find him.”

  “You’re so sure it’s a him?”

  Sonny looked startled. “You got another idea?”

  “How about you go to Hong Kong?”

  “I’m fifty-seven years old, Art. I don’t run so fast. I wouldn’t have asked you, man, not to push you, but I got a medical thing. Don’t ask. I got a case to make on the fire. The smugglers this end. Bastards. We could get some of these monsters, man, between us.”

  “Officially?”

  “No. I could get you a ticket and some cash, but this is not department stuff. This is between us. Go find the guy who runs the bank for the snakeheads.” Sonny Lippert pleaded. “Before anyone else dies, Art. Before anyone else burns to death. Find the man they call the Debt Collector.”

  PART TWO

  Hong Kong

  21

  A wave of humid sensuous air that clung to my face like Saran Wrap to a boiled chicken hit me as soon as I got outside the terminal building in Hong Kong. A
fter the frozen white and gray New York winter, Hong Kong drenched me with its heat and colors. And, pushing her damp red hair off her face and searching for me in the crowd of arriving passengers, Lily was waiting.

  In the end, I went to Hong Kong for Lily. She had called me, crying, and Lily doesn’t cry, not often. “Please, Artie, I need you. If there’s any way you could come,” she said. “Please.” Sonny Lippert needed me there, and then Lily called, and I went.

  “Enjoy the flight, Mr Cohen,” the girl at the desk at JFK had said when she handed back my passport. Years ago, Sonny Lippert helped me fix my passport. Artemy Maximovich Ostalsky had disappeared completely. In my US passport, I am Artie Cohen, b. New York City. USA.

  “Hi.” Forehead damp with sweat, her clothes wrinkled, Lily held on to my arm.

  “Hi,” I said. I felt embarrassed. After the endless flight, I was also soaked in Scotch.

  “Thanks for coming, Artie. Thank you. I called because I couldn’t think of anyone else.” I loaded my suitcase into the taxi she had waiting.

  In the month Lily had been away from me, I had missed her. What got me most when I saw her wasn’t the blotchy skin or the lank hair, the purple shadows under her eyes. What got to me when I met Lily at the airport was her silence, and the disjointed platitudes we exchanged.

  “Everyone is Chinese,” she said. “Isn’t that weird?”

  “Yes,” I said, “just like in Chinatown. Look at the boys with the pony tails. Look at the old woman carting vegetables onto a plane,” I said.

  “How amazing,” she said, and then we were in the taxi, driving through the sultry neon-lit night. Something was terribly wrong. There was bad stuff going on. I waited for her to tell me what it was.

  At Lily’s hotel she had fixed a room for me adjoining hers. “I can’t sleep,” she said. “I got you a room, Artie. Is that OK? Is it OK?” I had never seen Lily so unsure of herself and I put my arms around her and held her as best I could.

  Even before I was unpacked, she came into my room and sat cross-legged on the bed next to me. In her hand was a picture of Grace, the baby she had come to China to adopt. She propped the picture against a lamp on the bedside table. I looked at the chubby child and the child smiled back at me.

  “Where is she? Where is your baby?”

  “I’m going to tell you. I’ll tell you. I will.” Lily picked up the brandy I’d ordered and swallowed it neat. “I’m OK. I’m OK now,” she said, as if to persuade herself, and then she told me her story.

  “Did you know they skin live monkeys in the market in Guangzhou?” Lily said. “Did you know that, Artie?”

  22

  That they skinned them alive and you could hear them scream from a mile away was the thing she remembered. As you got deeper into the market, the dust settling in your hair, the air clotted with pollution, sweat pouring off you, you heard the monkeys shriek at their own death.

  Lily had not gone to Guangzhou first. She had first traveled to Beijing. She had had help getting the baby quickly, but now, now she knew she had Grace, as soon as she received notification the baby was waiting for her, she wanted to do it right. She could have pulled more strings, but she thought to herself, “No, I’ll go through channels. I’ll do it right.”

  At Beijing Airport, all she noticed was that two out of every three lightbulbs were burned out and the erratic sound system squawked out intermittent announcements and Paul McCartney tunes. The Chinese Beatle, people called Paulie. Otherwise, things went OK. Mostly, she remembered stupid things like the burned-out bulbs, that and the tour guide’s white umbrella.

  Mrs Ling was the official guide and she carried the white nylon umbrella everywhere. She refrained from expressing surprise when Lily arrived, but Lily always knew Mrs Ling was thinking that she, Lily, being a single woman, would not know how to care for a baby. It wasn’t Mrs Ling’s business to think, however, Lily calculated. Ministry apparatchiks appeared and whispered to Mrs Ling from time to time, and Lily enjoyed the spectacle of the guide’s changing wardrobe, the diamanté spectacles, the sweet perfume, the perm that seemed to have been stamped into Mrs Ling’s hair with a waffle iron. Mrs Ling was New China Woman, official-style. “Not to look pretty is to be a dumb bear” was Mrs Ling’s motto, Lily decided.

  Every detail of the trip became a diversion for Lily; she was thrilled but anxious; in a week she would have her child. In a week, in Guangzhou, she would meet Grace. Grace was from Guangzhou, or Canton as Lily always thought of it, but a visit to Beijing was required first for the acculturation of the adoptive parents, according to Mrs Ling. “This translates to the spending of much foreign currency,” said Clare O’Mara, one of the other women on the trip.

  At the hotel in Beijing, Lily met her group. The five middle-class couples were from the LA suburbs—Long Beach, Glendale, Northridge—and they were nice, decent people, Lily said, but they were uninterested in anything except the babies they had come to adopt. Clare was different. Clare and her husband, Les, were black. Clare was a lawyer and Les, who played jazz clarinet in a San Francisco trio, taught music at UC Berkeley. Like Lily, they had no other children. Like her, they were thrilled, thrilled and scared and full of the adventure of it.

  Lily said, “We palled around together once in a while, me and Les and Clare. I was the only person alone. I was so lonely.”

  Lily saw the Forbidden City and, on its north side, the million-dollar mansions of the new rich. She shopped at the Friendship store and bought aimlessly—porcelain boxes, straw baskets, silk jackets, toys. In Tiananmen Square, she stood where the tanks had rolled over the students. Was it seven years already since those heroic kids had stood up to the tanks on June 4th? It was one of the stories Lily was sorriest she had missed covering.

  “I was so nervous, Artie. All the time we were in Beijing I was nervous, and excited,” she said. “Then it was time to leave for Guangzhou. Remember I told you at home how it is. How the picture of the baby comes and she’s yours. You think of her as your own. Grace was mine. As soon as I got her picture. Finally I was going to see her.” Lily looked at her empty brandy glass. “Is there anything else to drink?”

  I opened a bottle of duty-free Scotch. Outside the window of the hotel room, I could hear the boats in the Hong Kong harbor, the constant buzz and whistle of the ferry boats, cargo tugs and yachts as they criss-crossed the water. Lily didn’t seem to notice any of it. She drank some Scotch greedily and went on talking. At first her words were stilted and she spoke in staccato bursts, but the whisky smoothed her out some.

  The day Lily’s group departed Beijing for southern China, everyone in the group got food poisoning.

  “Take chopsticks,” Lily’s friends had told her. “Take your own. They wash chopsticks in a common washing bowl.” But Lily considered it was patronizing; that was the stuff of the Ugly American, and she would do what the locals did. “We were all sick as parrots,” she said. “Me, because I was a fool, the others because no one told them. Sick as parrots. Sicker.”

  A heatwave blanketed southern China the day the group arrived in Guangzhou. There were no porters at the airport, no toilet paper, either. It didn’t matter because Mrs Ling, waving her white umbrella to call the group to attention, said, “You’ll get your babies tomorrow evening.”

  Drinking her Scotch, Lily leaned on my shoulder. “God, I was so excited. That’s what she said. “Tomorrow night you’ll get your babies.” I was so excited I couldn’t sit still. We stayed at the White Swan, this huge palace of a hotel. It made me claustrophobic, and I had to get out. To kill time during the day I went sightseeing.”

  At the train station, Lily saw the migrant workers who squatted there, waiting for jobs, thousands of them. In the markets, she saw the babies begging, and they ran after her, chattering, getting hold of her hands, shoving plastic bowls at her.

  A truck rattled by and the crowds in the street looked up because on the back of it were six young women with ropes around their necks. Lily found someone who spoke English
and asked what it was. “An execution,” the woman said. “A good thing too,” she added with fierce insistence. The girls, who were prostitutes, had “lured railway workers to their death with sex”, as the woman put it. It was right they should be executed; crime had to be punished. The government had executed ten thousand persons in the interest of destroying the criminal element, the woman said. As the truck disappeared, Lily saw the trembling girls were only kids of fifteen or sixteen and, as she watched, she heard the monkeys scream.

  In the morning, Mrs Ling assembled the group over breakfast. “You have your money in a belt under your clothes?” Mrs Ling said. “When we get to the other hotel, you will make the donation to the orphanage,” she said. “I will tell you when to hand it over. Only pay money when I say this: ‘Pay now.’ ”

  A minibus took the group to a Chinese-style hotel where all the chairs in the lobby were occupied by taxi drivers who all resembled Mao Tse Tung. “Like hotel porters in Moscow looked like Leonid Brezhnev,” Lily said to me. “Remember? Remember that?”

  A man from a ministry was waiting and Mrs Ling said to Lily’s group, “Pay now.”

  “Except for me, the husbands were carrying the money,” Lily said. “They went into the men’s room to get it out. I didn’t want to be alone, I went with them.”

  In the toilet with the cracked tiles, she thought: fifteen thousand dollars between us. We could all be killed in this toilet.

  As they got their money out, they found the bills had stuck together in the heat. Lily got a battery-operated hairdrier out of her shoulder bag. On the dank toilet floor, the men laid out the bills and Lily squatted and blew the money dry with her hairdrier. Everyone laughed. Les, the musician, pulled a bottle of Kaopectate out of his bag and passed it around; another guy had a pint of Scotch. They toasted Lily.

  “To Lily,” the husbands all said and, in the toilet in China, they clapped their hands for her and drank the Scotch.