Hot Poppies

by Reggie Nadelson

  Tolya, who was no clown, watched Chris go. “He’s a jackass, but he’s right, you know,” Tolya said. We drank for a few minutes silently, watching the skyline and the harbor.

  “Do you know, Artyom, that Hong Kong is one nine-thousandth the size of China?”

  “You looked it up.”

  “I always liked school. Hong Kong Island is a tiny rock. Out there across the harbor is Kowloon, the New Territories, and then China. China all the way to Mongolia, to Tibet, to the Russian border. Think of it in terms of your New York City. Hong Kong Island as the Manhattan you love. Kowloon, the New Territories, are the boroughs, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx. Worker housing, factories, airport, cargo terminal, power plants, water supply. Also beaches, universities, fishing villages. Like New York, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Borough of Bronx, it’s connected with mainland of America, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So imagine if on the border of Bronx is one billion Chinese. One fucking billion plus, all wanting to take a bite. Prada meets the People’s Liberation Army. This is a city on the fucking edge of a nervous breakdown but you know what? End of last year, stocks soared, real estate went through the roof. You can make a shitload of money waiting for Armageddon.”

  Tolya had reserved himself a suite at my hotel, and when we got back, we stood in the lobby for a minute. In the wrinkled green suit, he looked terribly tired. “Tomorrow we begin. Tomorrow, we begin with Lily. The other thing, also.”

  “Tolya?”

  “What?”

  “You said Sonny told you about the dead girls in New York, the kidnapping, the extortion. You actually think they can pull the strings here in Hong Kong on stuff that goes down in New York?”

  He kissed me on the cheeks three times, Russian-style.

  “If there is money involved, you can pull any string.” He held up his cell-phone. “The world is only about this big, Artyom. It’s only about as big as your dick.” He laughed. “And you can carry it in your pocket.”

  25

  The next day, and most of the day after that, Tolya turned on the juice. By the time Lily was up, he was waiting for us in the coffee shop, dressed in a black Armani suit, his guy at his side, a list of appointments in one hand, his cellphone in the other.

  Sober, Tolya’s English was charming. He greeted Lily and ordered breakfast for her. Unfurling her napkin, he put it on her lap and then buttered her pancakes and poured the maple syrup delicately between the layers. “It’s nice?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then eat some more.” Tolya smiled and listened to Lily talk.

  After a while, he said gently, “I think, Lily, that you should step out of the picture for a few days. People know you have been making noises about Chinese. Noises about adoption, about girl babies.”

  “So what?”

  “This looks like the West,” Tolya went on, “but is not exactly the West. I told Artyom, a person could get hurt here for talking too much. Please, Lily Hanes. Would you consider this, stepping out of the picture for a few days?”

  “I can’t do that.”

  In Russian, Tolya asked his guy to get the car. Then he got up. “I understand. Come. We’ll try to fix something.”

  In the Hummer, we criss-crossed Hong Kong all day, visiting men and women in government offices, visiting consuls from three countries, also bankers, policemen, friends. Like the night before, Tolya was welcome everywhere; by day, though, Tolya was jolly but sober. This was a city built for business by day. With Lily he was lovely. He made her buy some clothes. At a restaurant he ordered snacks she found irresistible. He even got her to laugh.

  For a day and a half, we were on the move or on the phone. I tried Pete Leung. Eventually, I tried Dawn. I came up empty handed. I took a call from Sonny Lippert, who gave me some names. While Tolya took Lily shopping, I introduced myself to Sonny’s contacts who seemed like good cops. But they were busy men—trouble brewing, they all said, and I was unofficial.

  For most of the day and most of the day after, I watched Lily suck hope out of all the activity; when she insisted on buying tiny outfits for Grace, I wanted to cry for her.

  The official we were looking for, when Tolya finally tracked him down, was a middle-aged man with an ashen, drained face, and he sat at a desk in a government office on Ice House Street, a tensor lamp on his desk, feeding paper into a shredder. Between the thumb and forefinger of the other hand he held a cigarette. His short-sleeved white shirt was buttoned to the neck. He looked up. “What can I do for you?”

  I was alone with Lily. Tolya had moved on to another appointment.

  “I understand you might know what happened to this child.” Lily pushed a photograph of Grace across his desk. He turned off the shredder and glanced at it, then snapped open a drawer in the metal desk and riffled a few thick manila files. Behind him was a pile of brown cartons. Books stood in stacks on the floor.

  “Where is she?” I said.

  “This child is no longer yours.” Ignoring me, he picked up some more paper and spoke to Lily. “She will be placed with another family. Currently she is in a facility, probably in Guangzhou. Possibly in another city. I think you have been told before.”

  “When? When will she be placed?” Lily was very tight, very tense. I could see the skin on her neck pulse with rage.

  “As soon as possible in order not to cause disruption in her life. There are always many families waiting.”

  “Show me the file. I want to talk to your boss.”

  “I am the boss,” he said.

  “What about trying again?” I said. “We have time.”

  “I have no time.” The man had heard it all before. “I am leaving this job. This country if I can. Someone else will come. Someone from the new government.”

  “From China?”

  “Yes. From the mainland.”

  “Is that why you’re shredding your files?” I didn’t care why, but I figured if I showed some interest, he might do a little extra work for Lily. She was restless and obsessed. I think she had forgotten everything except the child. I said to him, “You expect trouble?”

  “Some of my employees have been involved in pro-democracy rallies.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Anywhere I can,” he said as the shredder hummed.

  Lily leaned over the man’s desk, her face a few inches from us. “You don’t care because Grace is a girl, isn’t that right? In China, all the abandoned babies are girls. If they get lucky, if someone doesn’t drown them. Ninety-seven per cent female it said on the adoption forms.”

  “Lily, let’s go back to the hotel.”

  Lily turned to me, but the caustic words were for the man. “Did you know, Artie, that children in China, especially girls, can’t be adopted? They have to be abandoned. Formally. Then they’re put up for adoption. Grace was tossed on the sidewalk near a paint factory in some godforsaken village and left to die. Adoption is actually illegal. It’s people like him who make the rules.” To the man himself, she said, “Why don’t you do something?”

  Removing his wire-rimmed spectacles, the man behind the desk got up, walked to the door and opened it. “I don’t make any rules. Now please go.” Staring at Lily, face impassive, he added coldly, “I have three daughters.”

  By the time we got back to the hotel, Lily was wrung out. There was no more room for maneuvering, no more time. I think she knew it, too, but all she said was, “I want to take a shower, Artie. Then I’m going to sleep.”

  “I’ll stay with you.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’m not going to kill myself.”

  I stayed a while anyway.

  Whatever shit’s going on, it’s better for me when Lily’s around. That night, waiting for her to fall asleep, I brushed the hair away from her face and I thought, suddenly: I’d like to marry her. I wanted to marry Lily.

  Later, in my room, I made some more calls. Tolya sat on the bed, his cellphone in his hand
. On a table was the remains of the room-service dinner we had eaten. He looked up. “Tomorrow night I have to go to my place on Macau for a couple days. You and Lily must come with me.”

  “We’ll see,” I said. “Tolya?”

  “Artyom?”

  “Get me that gun.”

  26

  The gun was delivered to my room along with a bottle of eighteen-year-old Scotch ten minutes after Tolya went to bed. He had wrapped the Gluck neatly in a hand towel, then placed it in a leather bag. Gucci, I think. A room-service waiter brought it on a tray. I felt better.

  In the morning I left a note for Tolya and one for Lily. The gun in my pocket, I got a cab and gave the driver the address that Tolya had obtained for me.

  The house itself, when we got there, was on the top of Hong Kong Island. The Peak, they call it. Thick morning mist swirled around the mossy green mountain and, from the road, I could barely see the front gate. The driver, an accommodating young guy, agreed to park behind a stand of trees, the cab hidden from the house by the foliage and the fog. I went up the rest of the way to the house on foot.

  Beyond a low stone wall was the compound, an elegant sprawl that consisted of two houses and a swimming pool, a detached garage and a tennis court. Slowly, I made my way around the perimeter, glad for the enveloping fog. It was early Sunday morning and I wondered if everyone in the house was away or only asleep. The gardens were gauzy green and gray, and when I got a better look, I saw that the tiles in the pool were green, too. Chinese green. Celadon, they call it. It looked like old porcelain. There was a pool house and a gazebo. It had Dawn’s mark on it. It was all very expensive, and even the security was subtle. It took me ten minutes to find the spy cameras; they were tucked into artificial birds’ nests cunningly placed in ornamental trees.

  “You know how much land costs on an island like this?” I could hear Tolya saying. But Tolya was down the mountain, across the harbor, asleep in bed. Me, I was up here, like a burglar on the prowl in this thick green fog.

  Was Dawn in there, asleep, refusing to answer my calls? If she had vanished, I would find her and she could lead me to Pete Leung. But I had tried everything, every number in Tolya’s book, every contact.

  It was only instinct that made me lurk there at the edges of the house instead of ringing the bell. Somehow I thought the house might give up some kind of secret. But there was only the silence and the beautiful gardens and the cameras whirring in those silly little trees.

  “She’s one of us,” the Russian hooker had said. “A whore.” She was lying, Tolya said of the hooker. All I knew was Dawn was a junkie and they always lied, but I’d known that since the night in New York. And when she had pushed her leather skirt up over her hips, I had gone for her like a dog in heat.

  The ancient bronze bell-pull at the low wrought-iron gate tinkled faintly, but it was enough.

  The front door flew open, and a maid in slippers and a pink bathrobe appeared. Arms piled with clothes, she flapped furiously towards the gate, knocking into bushes, shouldering them away imperiously. “No one home,” she shouted. “No one. Everyone vacation. Go away.”

  I turned as if to go. The maid retreated. I waited two, three, four minutes. Nothing moved. I was getting ready to leave when I thought about the clothes. What was the maid doing with all those fancy clothes in her arms?

  Making my way slowly towards the garage—it was a hunch, but what else did I have?—I saw a black Jaguar parked outside. The maid appeared and so did an elderly man in a chauffeur’s cap with a suitcase under his arm. He stowed it in the trunk of the car. The maid gave him the heap of clothes and he put them in the trunk, too. I waited. Clouds moved lower across the peak; it started to rain.

  The branch of a cherry tree poked me in the eye. Sweat ran down my back, rain dripped on my head; like a rat in a puddle, dripping, I waited. Something crackled again. I got hold of the gun.

  “Private property,” a man screamed. I turned around. In one hand, the old chauffeur had a long rake. In the other hand, he had a gun and, as I turned, he pointed it at me. My gun was already in my hand. Somehow, it misfired. I never knew how.

  The old man dropped his weapons like a couple of hot potatoes and scuttled back to the house. He yelled plenty, but he could run, so I figured he wasn’t hurt bad. At least I hadn’t killed him, but I was deep in shit. Deep shit Hong-Kong style, and it smelled nasty.

  It didn’t take much to figure Hong Kong wasn’t the kind of town where you could trespass on the rich and shoot up their servants without anyone noticing. I ran like fuck for my taxi, wondering if the driver had waited. Wait for me, I thought. Goddamn it, wait!

  He was there. I jumped in and, as I shut the door, I saw the black Jaguar slide out of the gates of the house. In the driver’s seat was the elderly chauffeur. He looked healthy enough. I had missed, thank Christ.

  “Can you follow him without him seeing us?”

  “Sure,” said my cabbie. “Sure.”

  “Then go. Go!”

  The old man drove the Jaguar for about half an hour doing fifty. We followed. At a palatial house somewhere off a coastal road, he picked up two women. We followed the Jag inland for maybe another twenty minutes, keeping a distance. The streets got poorer, the apartment houses were festooned with laundry, the shops run down.

  In the middle of nowhere—it could have been Queens—the black car drew up in front of a low building with a tiled roof. Two women got out. As the Jag pulled away and the women walked into the building, I saw that one of them was small but with the elegant posture of a dancer. The other woman was Dawn Tae.

  My driver was antsy. I gave him some money and a piece of paper. He copied down the sign on the front of the building and the name of the street. He hitched up his jeans and offered me a cigarette, then got into his cab.

  “What is this place?” I said.

  “It’s an orphanage,” he said.

  Dawn was in the playground. The rain had let up. The sun was out. A dozen kids of five or six ran around, shouted, climbed up a jungle gym, rolled on the ground, jumped rope, kicked a soccer ball and tried to sock each other. Little girls pulled at Dawn’s arms, kissing her. She kissed them back and laughed. It was a performance; it was as if she knew I was watching. She looked up at me.

  “Hello, Artie. I’m glad you came.” It was the same thing she had said that night in Riverdale and again in Ricky’s apartment. She said it like a mantra. Dawn’s allure was that she made you think you were the only guy on earth that could satisfy her, or save her, or both. There was also her appetite for raw sex.

  “You look well.”

  “I feel better.” She introduced me to Alice Wing.

  The woman with the dancer’s posture held out her hand. It was small, soft and perfectly dry, the most expensive hand I had ever touched.

  Alice Wing wore a green jacket and black jeans, but the pearls she had tucked discreetly under the collar of her polo shirt were as big as cherries.

  “Alice takes care of me. And the kids,” Dawn said. “I needed help, Alice got it for me. I’ve been staying at her house for a while. But you probably know that.”

  Alice put her arm around Dawn. “She’s like my own.”

  “Who are these kids?”

  “Local orphans,” said Alice Wing. “A few from over the border, the lucky ones. The physical plant here may look a bit run down, but the staff is terrifically good. Well trained. Caring. Hong Kong has very good policies, very good facilities, like this one. I don’t usually come out here on Sunday, but I wanted to check on one of the babies. Would you like to see the rest?”

  “Sure.”

  “Dawn will show you.”

  I followed Dawn into the building where she showed me a school room and the dormitories. Road Runner grinned loonily from posters on the wall. The children Dawn passed chattered at her; she spoke to all of them. She knew their names. She had learned Chinese at school and in her parents’ restaurant, a willing student. “It will come in handy,” she
used to say, “when I’m a big tycoon.”

  The masonry walls sweated in the heat, but in the nursery four nurses sat patiently in a circle, feeding the babies they held on their laps. In a large blue crib were three more infants. Two crawled and yelled, but it was the third child Dawn picked up.

  “Ducks and geese, we call the babies. The geese are the fatties, the ducks are the skinny ones. I’m not sure why—ducks aren’t really skinny, are they?” She bounced the child in her arms. “We’ll make her fat too. We’ll make her well. We will, you know.”

  “So how’s Pete?”

  “I don’t see him much.” Her tone changed. The smile disappeared. Dawn’s face disengaged and became a mask.

  “Where is he?”

  “Away. Business as usual.”

  “Can we talk?”

  “Now?”

  “Why not now?”

  “I wasn’t expecting you yet. I have some things to do. I’ll call you tonight. I promise.”

  “Yet?”

  Dawn babbled on cheerfully. “It was a slip of the tongue, darling.”

  “Then aren’t you going to ask where I’m staying?”

  “So where are you staying, Artie?” It was a charade, of course. She knew exactly where I was staying. I had left her messages and she had obviously received them, but I said, “I’m at the Regent. Call me. OK?”

  “I’m glad you found me.” Dawn walked me to the front door. “I’m glad you couldn’t resist. And Artie, darling?”

  “What?”

  “I’m thrilled you’re here. But do me a favor. Don’t go around taking pot shots at my chauffeur any more.” She kissed my cheek. “If you do, I might have to turn you in.”

  She lifted her gorgeous face to look me in the eye and I had the feeling Dawn was what I was looking for. Volatile, impetuous, she was always high on something, dope, men, even this thing here with the orphans, and her fix, whichever it was, required money. Lots of money. In that split second when she looked in my eyes, I had the crazy idea it was Dawn Tae who was the Debt Collector.