Hot Poppies

by Reggie Nadelson

  “Nice,” I said.

  “Sure. Nice vehicle. Traffic sucks. Let’s walk. Do you know why I came to Hong Kong, Artie?”

  “Why’s that?”

  “In a way, because of you.” As we plunged into the crowded street beyond the hotel, he switched to Russian. “You always thought that I was a greedy vulgarian, a Russian of the sort you had left behind long ago. Too loud. Too sentimental. Too idle. When my father gave me the land, I took it and I sold it and I made money. I became myself, Artyom. Every man has a certain size to his life, and he can refuse to fill it or he can use it all. I intend to use mine. I have become who I am. Thanks to you.” He smiled a melancholy smile, then changed back into his slangy self. “You got that, dickbrain? Huh? Art? Now, you need some help? You got troubles? Double troubles? Sonny Lippert? Women?”

  “Yes. All.”

  “Here.” From his pocket Tolya took a sleek cellphone and handed it to me. “I told the hotel to forward your calls. In case anyone needs you.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like Miss Lily Hanes.”

  “You know about Lily?”

  “This is a small town, like I’ve been telling you. I knew because your friend Lily Hanes made noise. Too much noise, Artyom. Everyone talks about it. Screaming at people about this child. Calling consulates, TV stations. Saying she is best friend of Peter Leung.”

  “For Chrissake, Tolya, she lost a child,” I said. “And Pete helped her with the adoption in the first place.”

  “Here, you talk too much, they cut out your tongue. Then kill you. Phone’s OK?”

  “Thanks.”

  “You also need a gun, Artie?”

  “Do I? You tell me.”

  “I think yes.”

  Away from the hotel, the streets were festooned with neon signs and jammed with people. It was bright, hot, noisy, seductive. By comparison, New York in winter had been a bleak monochrome with people muffled in cold-weather clothes. Here, girls, their arms and legs bare, swirled by in glamorous colors. Boys with gold necklaces cruised the blazing shop windows. Families swarmed in and out of restaurants, and the pungent smells wafted through the ventilator shafts onto the night air. Making his way through the crowd was a man with a pole across his shoulders, baskets hanging from the pole. With him was a woman who pulled a handcart piled with suitcases. They moved through the crowd like characters from a period movie and no one turned to look.

  “Moving day,” said Tolya. “Everyone always moving here.”

  The shops, which were jammed with watches, cameras, electronics, furs, emitted the pulse and pop of phones and faxes, and on the street, people clutched their cellphones like cans of oxygen; the air literally crackled with them. In every doorway or bar or café, boys in stone-washed jeans slouched over their phones like a love object.

  “My town,” Tolya said in Russian. “Fast. But efficient, you know? Everything is illegal—whores, gambling, drugs. Everything is available.” Around us the streets throbbed with people looking for action. The neon avenues went on for miles.

  “Look. I will help you. I will help Lily Hanes. But it’s late. Tomorrow, I will fix things officially. Where is Lily?”

  “Asleep.”

  “Good,” said Tolya. “I’ll let my guy know. He’ll be nearby. Just in case. So.”

  “So.”

  “So let’s look around. Let’s see if we can run into Pete Leung who can perhaps help us over Lily’s baby. Let’s see if we can meet a few people who can help us with Sonny Lippert’s requests.”

  “Sonny told you about the dead women? The fire? Some guy he calls the Debt Collector?”

  “He told me some.”

  “Tolya?”

  “Yes, Artyom darling, what?”

  “You ever heard of a kind of smack with the name Hot Poppy?”

  “If some new drug exists, I know where we can find out.” Tolya winked. “Maybe even if it doesn’t exist. Hot Poppy. I like it.”

  24

  Between two department stores, the windows crammed with mannequins wearing leather and fur in spite of the weather, was a nondescript hotel with a revolving door. Tolya stopped in front of it, the doorman bowed us in and spun the door for us. Down a winding flight of stairs, I followed him to the foyer of a cavernous club that heaved with shadowy figures. A blast of arctic air met us. Hong Kong was a tropical city; the more luxurious the environment indoors, the colder the air.

  In the distance I could hear karaoke: on an ascending note, someone warbled, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”.

  From the throbbing gloom, men emerged and surrounded Tolya, laughing, bowing, a squad of men paying some kind of tribute to Tolya Sverdloff in the dark vestibule. Having claimed Hong Kong’s nightlife as his own, he thumped them all on the back and shook their hands. Then I followed him over the threshold of the club itself. A scaled-down Rolls Royce was parked there, along with several other cars. Tolya clambered into it and gestured for me to follow. The turquoise Rolls was the size of a golf cart.

  After a few seconds, my eyes adjusted to the dark and I could make out that there was a track, like the track of a kid’s train set, that ran into the club.

  “A hostess club, they call it.” Tolya chuckled as a girl came alongside the car and handed me a picnic basket with a bottle of Champagne and some glasses. I opened the wine and poured. Tolya pressed a button and we set off down the track into the club in our kiddie car.

  “Hostess club run by—how you say?—not quite nice people.” He had switched back to his own brand of English. “But friends. And many pretty women.”

  The club was as big as a football field. There were several dance floors, two restaurants, bars, mirrored doors that led to private rooms, a cabaret, conversation pits with plush purple sectional seating. Music played from behind mirrored ceilings: Barry Manilow, Janni, the Canto-pop I’d already heard on the local MTV.

  The car track ran in and out of the various areas; in all of them, stupendous women lounged or danced. When the men in the cars saw a woman they wanted, they disembarked.

  Tolya stopped the car a few yards from a bar where six or seven women danced, some naked, some still peeling. A disk jockey sat at the end of the bar, and now he was playing the Bee Gees. “Staying Alive,” they warbled, and the women strutted up and down the surface of the mirrored bar, pubic hair shaved into a narrow strip, enormous tits like melons, but hard, shiny, smooth melons that never ever moved.

  “Some knockers,” Tolya exclaimed as we got out of the car. Instantly, a young guy hopped in and drove it away, back to base.

  Tolya was sweaty with excitement as we sat down at a table near the bar. A girl in a G-string teetered by on spike heels and he slapped her on the ass, then tossed her a thick wad of bills. The Bee Gees went on singing.

  Tolya ordered caviar and more Champagne. The club filled up. The air got colder. More girls got up on the bar and took their clothes off, and in an area a few yards away, on a curved sofa were a couple of guys with women on their laps. On their dicks to be more precise. The women wiggled and moved their hips. Just watching, Tolya grinned with pleasure. He quit drinking Champagne and ordered brandy.

  “You always had an appreciation of artistic women, I recall,” I said. “With unnatural tits.”

  “Yeah. The bigger the better,” he agreed. In the corner, a guy getting a lap dance exploded. The woman looked relieved and jumped off him as fast as she could. But Tolya’s attention was diverted.

  “I’ve been waiting for you, darling.” He rose to greet a woman clad in only a rhinestone G-string. She was over six feet tall. With her, she had a wolfhound on a leash.

  “This is Catherine the Great.” He kissed her hand. She held out her hand to me. I shook it.

  “So, Katya, darling,” he said in Russian. “You liked caviar I sent? And this?” Tolya put a fold of large bills in her G-string. “Best hookers in Hong Kong all Russian. Naturally.” He patted her dog and fed him a spoonful of the caviar.

  “Katya, liste
n. Mr Leung is a friend of yours?”

  “No,” she said quickly; Tolya pinched her thigh gently.

  “That costs,” she said, flicking his hand away.

  “How is it you always need so much money?” Tolya chuckled, peeling off more bills.

  “I would prefer American dollars, Anatoly, darling,” she said. “I am saving up to go to America. When the communists arrive in Hong Kong, I am going. Communists are all cheap bastards. Which Mr Leung?” she asked.

  “The son. Peter. Your boss told me it was OK for you to help me, darling. He wants you to help me.”

  “I never met the son. The father once. Before he died. A cousin. I heard the cousin uses girls to move dope over the border. I don’t know the son. I know people who know the son.”

  “What kind of people, darling?”

  “Girls,” she said. “A lot of girls.”

  “Working girls? Some of them working here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where else?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t lie.” Tolya’s smile faded. “Don’t lie to me after what I gave you.”

  “Macau,” she said. “Maybe China. Maybe across the border.”

  “What else?”

  “You didn’t ask me about the wife of the son.” Sipping the Champagne with her pillowy lips, she flirted with the words, teasing us.

  In Russian, I said, “You know the wife of Peter Leung?”

  She smiled. “Not exactly. But I know about her.”

  “What do you know?”

  She swept her impossibly long arms out to include all the women in the club then looked at Tolya, who said, “Tell him.”

  Katya let the lids fall over her pale blue almond-shaped eyes and the lashes were like spiders on the high-boned face; then, languidly, she opened them. “People say she is one of us,” Katya purred. “A dancer,” she added. “A whore.”

  “You’re a liar,” Tolya said. “Now tell me one more thing, darling, to make it worthwhile spending all my dollars. Tell me where can I get some Hot Poppy.”

  But Katya only shrugged. Until, as we started to leave, she ran after Tolya, her high-heeled mules going tippy-tap on the floor. She whispered something in his ear and he took some more money and pushed it under her G-string.

  “She says she knows this Hot Poppy but she was lying,” Tolya said when we were out in the street. “They all lie.”

  “I’m going back to the hotel.”

  “No, Artie. The night is—how do you say?—young. Come on.” He hailed a cab.

  In the taxi, while Tolya chattered at the driver in Chinese and we did ninety through a tunnel under the harbor, I used the cell-phone to check in with Sonny Lippert and with Lily. Sonny said he was faxing me. Lily said all she wanted was sleep and I told her Tolya’s guy was there for her—he was in the hotel parking lot. I gave her his number. I gave her mine. “I’ll just sleep now,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here, Artie.”

  The taxi pulled up in front of a waterfront bar. I looked out and saw we were on the other side of the harbor from my hotel. We were on Hong Kong Island among the skyscrapers. For twenty-four hours, I had been looking at that skyline from across the harbor.

  The drunker Tolya got, the more agile he was, and he navigated the night like a hippo in water. We went from bar to bar, hotel lounge to hostess club, stopping for drinks, for barbecued ribs, to buy the Monte Cristos Tolya adored. In Hong Kong, he had friends everywhere. Everywhere we went, people were edgy, anxious. “Shall I stay, Tolya?” an old British reporter said to him. “Should we go?” asked a retired Russian general. Like the humidity, anxiety seemed to have settled onto everyone.

  “Anatoly Anatolyvitch, welcome!” Don Ho was not anxious. Don was making barrels of bread, he told me. Like everyone else, Don was an old pal of Tolya Sverdloff. With a string of Hawaiian theme pubs across Asia—Don had taken his idol’s name as a kind of nom de guerre—he was making money hand over fist. Business was very very good, he said, as he seated us in his pub. On the stage, hula girls did their thing. I remembered that, by a weird coincidence, Don, who was Shanghai born, was a remote relative of the Taes. I asked about Dawn. Don held out his hands, palms up, wrinkled his nose and gave his grass skirt a shake. “We do not occupy same social scene.” He offered us drinks in a coconut shell. We drank several of them. With the rum in me, I could barely see straight.

  “I can’t drink any more. I’m not sure if I can stand up any more. I’m tired, Tolya. It’s one in the morning and I’m weary as fuck.”

  “One more for the road. Then I call driver,” he said.

  “It’s all bullshit, you know. All this sniffing around is Russian melodrama.”

  “I am Russian, I do what I can, Artie, you know. I told you. OK, Sonny Lippert asked me. Help him, Tolya, he says. Help him help me before more girls die in New York City. This is how I know to help. Look around. Call me James Bondski. I call you Yankee Doodle Dandski. What do you want from me?”

  “American Club,” Tolya answered, as we emerged from an elevator on the forty-seventh floor of a skyscraper in the business district. “Home sweet home. America the beautiful. CIA. ABC.”

  At a Steinway grand, a guy played Cole Porter and he was good. Tolya chose a table near a window, went to the long bar himself and returned with three vodka martinis and a man in a suit.

  “Chris Roy,” Tolya said. “Artie Cohen. Chris is a friend of Pete Leung.”

  “Hi,” Chris Roy said.

  “Hi,” I said, and we shook hands and the three of us settled into deep chairs. Chris Roy polished off his martini in one gulp. “Great view.”

  After a night out in Hong Kong, I was sick to death of views. You got views with booze, views with food, views with strippers. Spectacular views. Panoramic views. Views of the skyline. Views of the peak or the water or the out islands or all of them at the same time. OK for a bird, but views don’t tell you much about the town you’re in. Some geography, maybe. Otherwise, not one fucking thing. For that, you need people in a landscape.

  “So. You know Pete Leung a long time?”

  “I was in grad school with Pete briefly,” said Chris Roy.

  “And Dawn?”

  “No. No. I never met her then, not at the time,” he said. “I went to the State Department; Pete stayed with money. We kept in touch. You know how that is. You’re American.”

  I said, “Yes.” Tolya raised an eyebrow and flicked an olive from a bowl on the table into his mouth.

  “So. What can I do for you, Art? Any pal of Tolya’s is a pal of mine. Tolya is Mr Hong Kong, of course, as you know, I’m sure. Everyone loves Tolya Sverdloff.” He shot a faintly patronizing glance at Tolya, who was talking into his cellphone across the table. Tolya had let Chris Roy—and for all I knew, everyone else in Hong Kong—assume he was a clown.

  “Christ, I remember what a trip it was when we started getting pally with the Russkis. What a time. So. What can I tell you about Hong Kong?”

  “Whatever, Chris.” I drank the martini. “What brought you over here?”

  “Well, officially Hong Kong was British, of course. But it’s really been ours for years. Huge financial stakes here. Officially, being anti-imperialist, the US is for the return to the motherland.” He signaled for a waiter.

  “Reality is, we need the Chinese market. We need them to buy our shit, we need them to buy our cigarettes. Tobacco guys were desperate, they need markets, they leaned on George Bush. Reagan. Mrs Thatcher, too. Everyone was screaming back in ’89, ’90. With my help and our distinguished leaders, we have made this market our own. We’ve even got the Chinese girls smoking. They think it’s way cool.”

  “What about the banking rules? They’re pretty loose here, Chris, that right?”

  “Sure are, Art. Secrecy in the banking trade here makes the Swiss look downright candid. Big banks. Private banks. Gang banks.”

  “Smugglers’ banks?”

  “Why not? Smugglers. Pirates. Russkis.”


  “I see. Very interesting. Tolya, could you get some more drinks?” I said, and when he had gone, I leaned over to Chris and lowered my voice. “So, uh, between us, could we talk about other types of smokes? Christ. I mean besides the tobacco trade, you know?”

  By now, Chris was drunk. His watery blue eyes were rimmed with red. He looked to me like one of those CIA specimens who always stay on too long in a foreign country. For Chris I made like a spook. He was thrilled to talk business.

  “Sure. Sure, Artie. I get the picture. You’re talking something confidential.”

  “That’s right, Chris. You know how it is. So, look, did you ever meet anyone that scored some smack named Hot Poppy, Chris?”

  “Why?”

  “I have some interest, Chris.”

  Slowly, he smiled. “I’m surprised you know about it. It’s hard to come by. Very rare. Specialty stuff for the rich and recherché.” He was wrecked on booze. “You know someone, for instance, who’s looking to score, Artie?”

  “So to speak. Yeah. Someone.”

  “I’ll give you a call if I can help your friend, OK?” He was knowing. “And shall I tell Pete you’re looking for him? If I see him?”

  “Do that, Chris. Tell him. Tell him I’m at the Regent Hotel for, let’s say, another forty-eight hours.”

  Roy took a pill out of his pocket and ate it. “Heart. I’m thirty-six and I got heart stuff wrong.” He looked out the window. “Fucking views,” he said. “Who’s going to run it all? How’s it gonna be for the millions of poor bastards that ran away from the commies already and got themselves a life here, twenty-four grand per annum, in dollars, even a little nibble of democracy lately. You think the pricks from the People’s Republic know how to run a railroad? You think the PRC is gonna care about a western education? You want your home town defended by the People’s Liberation Army, Artie? The PLA guys that rolled the tanks over kids in Tiananmen Square? It sucks.” Chris Roy took another pill out of his pocket. “What the hell. I’ll be going home. Wherever that is. For now, Art, it’s party time. Yes!” He punched the air with his fist. “Yes!”