Hot Poppies

by Reggie Nadelson

  27

  “I am Ringo Chen,” a polished British voice said. I was in the hotel coffee shop when a thinner, younger version of Jerry Chen appeared, unbuttoned his natty navy blue blazer and held out his hand. “Inspector Ringo Chen. May I sit down?”

  “Look up my goody-two-shoes cousin, Ringo,” Jerry Chen had said. “He’s your kind of cop.”

  Seeing Ringo, I wondered if he knew about the shot I’d taken at Dawn’s chauffeur. But he only shook my hand, and said, “Sonny Lippert asked me to get in touch. How can I help you?”

  A waiter appeared and I ordered coffee and toast and a mango. “So how’s Cousin Jerry?”

  “Jeremy has taken some leave. Also leave of his senses.” He tittered at his joke. “Before either, however, he told me about his case. He wanted my help. I avoided him, at least until Sonny Lippert called me in on it.” He was clearly anxious to put some distance between himself and his scumbag of a relative.

  “Coffee?”

  “I’ll get some tea.” At the same time, Tolya and Lily arrived, Lily in a new shirt and pants, her hair washed.

  She kissed me. “I behaved like a fool yesterday.” She turned to Ringo. “Are you from Hong Kong?”

  “Yes, I am. But I went to London as a teenager. I lived with some relations in a place called Milton Keynes. Horrible place. The Chinese love it. You can have a big modern house. We don’t like old houses, most of us.”

  “And you became a cop over there?” Lily was curious.

  “In our family, there had always been policemen. Jeremy was the hero. He became a heroic New York cop. To tell you the truth, I never liked him. His recent activities confirm my feelings.” The tea came and Ringo splashed some milk into it. “I never cared for London myself.”

  “In what way?” Lily leaned forward, listening.

  “When I was first a policeman in London, ‘Boy,’ they’d say, ‘go and make the tea.’ They called me Chink and Chow, they slashed my tires—I’m talking about London. I hated it. I hated the corruption. I could understand the corruption in third world countries, but in London it wasn’t necessary. It was accepted, and I hated it. Egg the pudding, gild the lily, that’s what they all thought.”

  “Perfidious Albion, my father always said.”

  Ringo put his cup down. “Was your father a policeman too?”

  “In a way,” I said, thinking about my pop, poor bastard, a star of the KGB in his youth, him and his pal Gennadi. When they kicked him out I was only twelve. “In a way, he was. They’re all dead.”

  “What’s on for today?” Lily asked Tolya.

  “I’m sorry,” Ringo said to me. “I’ve been making chit-chat. How can I help you?”

  “We have an appointment at some agency, don’t we, Tolya?” Lily said, and showed Ringo Chen her picture of the baby.

  “I don’t think you should go into Central,” Ringo said.

  “Why not?”

  “There was a deadline on emigration permits yesterday. Sometimes it gets sticky.”

  She tossed her napkin onto the table and looked at Tolya.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It will be OK.”

  Ringo got up and walked towards the men’s room; I followed.

  “I can’t help your friend over her baby, I’m afraid. It’s way off my turf. She’d be better off going back to America.”

  “If I could find Pete Leung, I could help her,” I said.

  He turned his head sharply. “What’s Leung got to do with it?”

  “He helped her with the adoption.”

  “You’re joking.” He said it half to himself.

  “Why should I be?”

  “Let’s just say Peter Leung’s reputation is not as a warm and fuzzy chap. Still, your friend is obviously very well connected. The Leungs have a lot of power here. Very rich. Very social. Perhaps he’s simply preoccupied.” Ringo was unconvincing. “Look, I’ll do what I can. But things are tough, we’re tight on manpower.”

  “On the other business, Ringo. Sonny put you in the loop? You’re up to date?”

  “That’s actually why I came over. Sonny Lippert has put me in the picture. I have a few ideas. Get a visa for the mainland,” he said. “Get a visa from the concierge. Double entry. It never hurts to have it. But first, do try to get your friend Miss Hanes to go home, if you can.”

  “What kind of sticky?” I asked.

  “There have been demonstrations,” he said. “Nothing much to worry about. Not yet. Just sticky.”

  “Why the visa?”

  “It’s always useful.”

  “Ringo? The cops here in Hong Kong. You guys are armed?”

  “Yes, indeed.” He buttoned the blazer. “Very much so,” said Ringo Chen, and he strolled out of the room.

  28

  “Sticky!” Ringo’s idea of sticky was a lot different from mine when the riot started later that afternoon.

  After Ringo left the hotel, we took the Star Ferry to the Central District. There was an hour to kill until Lily’s appointment. We strolled, her, me and Tolya, in the heart of the town.

  The sun glinted off the massed skyscrapers, the gold and silver, the bronze and glass, the competitive architectural marvels bankers had built to testify to their god. Mammon never lived better and Hong Kong was his Olympus.

  Pocket parks and gardens were tucked tight between the endless skyscrapers that then rose in stands up and up against the mossy green mountain. Down in front of the City Hall, a bride and groom, the boy in white tie, the girl in a dress like a pile of meringue pies, posed for a wedding picture.

  Suddenly, the chatter of a thousand voices spiraled towards us from the main square. Hundreds, maybe thousands of women, awash in shopping bags, sat, stood, sprawled, sunned themselves in the square. Like birds, they flocked and twittered in the sunshine.

  “What’s the language?”

  “Tagalog,” Tolya said. “They’re Filipinas. They’re the housemaids. They get Sundays off, so they come here to see their friends.”

  I was mesmerized. Women sat on the edge of a fountain. They read newspapers and letters. A girl in red shorts rolled her friend’s hair on pink plastic rollers. Transistor radios played and some of the women danced together. Others ate or swapped plastic casserole dishes; the spicy smells circulated towards us. A man appeared with a guitar and began to play. Before long he was joined by more musicians.

  “I have heard rich women here say that a full-time maid is the ultimate Valium,” Tolya laughed. “The guy with the guitar is very good. Let’s listen.” He took Lily’s arm and we moved closer to the square. Lily looked at her watch. “It’s all right,” said Tolya. “We’ll make the appointment. Don’t worry.”

  In the square, the mood was festive, the women all laughing, the music growing louder. The whole town seemed to rumble with the noise and the music. I thought it was the music, but then Tolya looked at the sky and I heard the thunder, too.

  “What is it?” Lily asked. The sky was still clear.

  The noise got louder. A murmur of panic ran through the crowd as women started packing their belongings into the shopping bags. There were shouts. Women began to wail.

  “What is it?”

  “They think it’s an earthquake.” Nervously, Tolya flipped open his cell-phone. “I’ll call my driver.” It was too late. Much too late.

  Police sirens screamed. Tolya held onto Lily, I took her other hand and we tried to move out of the square, away from the sound of the sirens. We made it half a block.

  “Look,” Lily cried. “Look!”

  Coming down the avenue was a mass of bodies moving steadily. As they came closer, the noise grew, the thunder-like roar, the rumble that scared the Filipina maids, who even now flapped around like trapped birds.

  “What’s the time?” Lily shouted.

  Tolya said, “You’ll have to forget your appointment,” and she replied, “I see. Yeah. I understand.”

  The crowds tried to get out of the way of the marchers. Above us, peopl
e came out on hotel balconies. Someone began dumping shredded paper. Covered in the stuff, as if for some macabre celebration, Tolya managed to get hold of a man in the crowd near us. For maybe thirty seconds, they talked intently to each other, then Tolya turned to us. He was very tense. He spoke to me in Russian.

  “It’s a pro-democracy demonstration. There are rumors the Chinese are planning to crack down even harder on free speech. Rumors of more corruption. Also, many people who tried to get exit visas yesterday failed. They were turned away. Hundreds. Thousands. I can’t tell. It’s bad. Very bad.”

  Lily said, “The white banners are for the color of death.”

  As the marchers came even closer—I could see the headbands they wore now and the slogans on their banners—a band of thuggish kids materialized from God knew where and began taunting them. They jeered and screamed, provoking the cops who streamed in from the other direction.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I yelled.

  “I want to see what’s happening, Artie. Take Tolya and get out of here,” Lily shouted, but I clutched her arm.

  The marchers, the goons, the cops, the onlookers merged into a heaving mass, thousands of us, tens of thousands—I couldn’t tell. The Filipina maids got caught in it. I could hear their shrill tweet as dozens of them went down. Shopping bags flapping, they stumbled and fell and the crowd trampled them. One woman reached for me and I felt her fingers on mine, but the crowd carried her away.

  We were trapped, the three of us locked together in a nightmare. The nightmare where you’re drowning in glue.

  Like a movie shot out of focus at the wrong speed, the buildings moved by. At the intersections, the crowd broke apart, people crashed away into the narrow side streets, then the mob reformed. The noise was indescribable. The crowd roared its slogans. The cops screamed through loudspeakers. I heard glass break. Overhead, a fleet of helicopters buzzed in the humid afternoon. The heat was suffocating.

  Suddenly, a banner flapped down on my face like some angry predator. I felt an elbow in my ribs and thought I heard a crack. We kept on moving. “Sticky,” Ringo had said. Sticky! Christ!

  Tolya towered over everyone. Sheer brute force on his side, he shoved through a wall of bodies into a smaller tributary of people, a breakaway demonstration that wound its way up a narrow hilly street, past a row of shops and stalls. We stumbled over rattan furniture. A cage full of snakes burst open.

  All the time, I could feel Lily next to me. When she heard Tolya’s nervous shouts, she yelled at him, “It will be OK,” and I saw her face. She was flushed, but her eyes were bright, as if she was looking out at the world again instead of turning in.

  Lily saw the gap in the crowd before I did. “Go. Go.” She held Tolya’s arm and my hand, and we ran like fuck into a narrow alleyway. Dipping in and out of back streets, moving in the opposite direction to the mob, Lily in control, somehow we got back to the middle of town where we shoved our way through the door of the Mandarin Hotel. From somewhere outside came the crack of a rifle shot. Then more sirens. The riot police massed in ferocious ranks.

  The Mandarin lobby was jammed with reporters, camera crews, tourist and hotel guests, all of us milling, fretting, demanding service. Hotel guys in striped pants ran around reassuring everyone. Waiters hefted trays of booze and tea. Champagne corks popped. More rifle shots could be heard outside.

  Tolya, who was drawn and ashy—the riot got to him bad—commandeered three chairs and ordered a bottle of brandy. Then he took both of Lily’s hands in his.

  She sat down. “I know. No appointment. Grace is gone for good. With all this, who has time? With riots and chaos and the Chinese settling in, who can think about one baby?” Her smile was wry. “And why the hell should they?” She looked at the lobby. “The cocktail party at the apocalypse, eh?” She rubbed her left temple. Her hand came away streaked with blood.

  “Do you want a doctor?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  A cameraman in a flak jacket separated himself from the crowd in the lobby and began running towards us. “Lily? It’s you? My God, Lily Hanes. How the fuck are you, man?”

  Lily practically leaped out of her chair into his arms. She hugged him and, beaming, they pounded each other on the back. She dragged me out of my chair and introduced me. Cambodia, Salvador, Colombia, Moscow, East Berlin, Northern Ireland, Eritrea, they traded war stories and made plans to meet at the next revolution.

  “We had a lot of fun,” Lily said when her pal had gone.

  “You were very cool out there in the streets. You were sensational, Lily.”

  As if she had reclaimed her old self, she grinned at me. “Toots, this is nothing compared to when we left Saigon.”

  “You were there?” Tolya, who had finished most of the brandy, was impressed.

  “I used to be a reporter, didn’t I? I was there the day we lifted off from the embassy.” I thought of Pansy. Pansy had been a baby that day in 1975 when the helicopters lifted off from the embassy roof in Saigon. Lily took my hand.

  “I knew it was finished for me and Grace today, that I’d have to get over her or I’d be completely braindead. Somehow, out there, I realized having an obsession would never be the same as having Grace. And I’ll never have her.”

  “If you want to keep on, I’m here for you.”

  “I’m going home.”

  “I’m so sorry about the baby.” I put my arms around Lily.

  She peered at the calendar on her watch. “It’s four weeks and two days since I got Grace’s picture in New York. She was mine for more than a month,” she said. “I think that’s all I’m going to get.”

  Tolya fixed Lily’s flight home. Before he left for Macau, I told him about the gun going off and he took the pistol from me and stuffed it in his briefcase. “In case anyone comes looking for it,” he said. “Just in case. I’ll get you another one,” he promised.

  Later that day, I stood with Lily near the departure gate.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been such a pain in the ass,” she said. “I’m sorry I made you come to Hong Kong. It was for nothing.”

  “No it wasn’t. Not for me. I’m not sorry. I’ll be home soon, I swear. But I have to do something. I promised Sonny Lippert. It’s about the dead women in New York. I don’t want to lie to you again. But I need to do this. Like you said, it’s who I am. Will you be OK, on the plane I mean?”

  Lily kissed me. “Sure I will. Hey, like I said, this is nothing compared to when we left Saigon.”

  They called her flight but all I did was to kiss her back. Then, hoisting her bag over her shoulder, Lily smoothed her red hair with the other hand and tugged her sweater down over her jeans. Straightening her back and shoulders like a schoolgirl, without turning around, she marched through to the departure gate. I should have run after her right then and told her I wanted us to get married, but I didn’t.

  Ringo Chen called me at the hotel and said, “There’s a rumor you’ve been firing off an unregistered weapon.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “The gun or firing it?”

  “Can you help me here, Ringo?”

  “I’ll do my best. We’re all on overtime because of the demo today. Keep your head down. There’s nothing I can do on a Sunday, but I’ll sort it out. Leave it with me until tomorrow. And forget about carrying any weapons. You’ll do what I say, won’t you?” It wasn’t a question. There was a steely side to Ringo Chen.

  “By the way, Ringo, ever heard of Hot Poppy?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “Some kind of irradiated heroin.”

  Ringo chortled. “A fabulous name, but I don’t think so. I honestly don’t.” Still laughing, he hung up.

  After that I called Chris Roy and flattered him with some spook talk; he promised he’d get hold of Pete Leung. Then the phone rang again and it was Sonny.

  “Art? Hey? I got something for you. I think this is the information we’ve been looking for. I’m getting you an address, OK? It might
take me a day to nail it, but I think it could be interesting. I’ll fax you.”

  “What address? What are you talking about?”

  “Just trust me, man. Hello?”

  “I hear you.”

  “And get Ringo Chen to go with you, OK? I put him in the loop. I’ll fax you. If this works, then you can think about coming home.”

  “You trust Ringo, Sonny?”

  “A hundred ten per cent,” he answered.

  I hung up on Sonny, switched on CNN and watched the report of the riot. It had been contained. It was over. A hundred injured, none dead. On TV, the riot police looked like brutal bastards but they did the job.

  That evening, it was as if nothing had happened. The riot had occurred just across the harbor, but here in Kowloon, eight minutes away by ferry, people strolled and shopped and went into Pizza Hut with their kids for a slice or grabbed a Big Mac up the block. It was just another Sunday night. Idly, I drifted into Nathan Road and considered buying a watch. I had been a jerk with the gun. It was hard to know if Dawn’s maid had reported it or if Dawn herself called the cops. She had taunted me with it at the orphanage.

  Was it a threat? Was Dawn the Debt Collector? Was she fronting for her husband, for Pete? If, as Ringo said, the Leungs were very rich and very social, why would Pete run dope? Why would he use hookers at a club to run in his shit? Unless it was a particular kind of shit, the kind his wife needed. The kind called Hot Poppy.

  At the hostess club, I looked for the big Russian stripper. For a second, in the throbbing gloom, I thought I saw Dawn Tae. But then Katya materialized. She escorted me to a private room with gold plush pillows and soaked me for almost all the cash I had. For a minute, I thought about fucking her, which is what she expected, but I settled for a bottle of vodka and some talk.

  “They use some of the girls here as mules,” she said. “They carry the heroin in from China. Tolya doesn’t believe me, but it is true,” she added, and took the rest of my money. I wasn’t convinced.