Hot Poppies (15 page)

“Hey, pal, you need a lift?” The driver looked down from the cab of the garbage truck that resembled a tank in the dark. “Come on. We'll take you home.” He stretched out an arm and pulled me up.

I let him and his partner know I'd been a cop and they shared some lukewarm beer and took me home, tooting out the garbage-truck fugue. Listening to the wise-ass on the radio, we had a few yuks. More snow was coming. Lotta overtime, said the garbage men, and passed me a bag of pretzels.

From the imperial heights of the garbage truck, I looked back and saw City Hall and the courts and the building where Sonny Lippert works. The truck skirted Chinatown and then I was home.

Upstairs, I stood in front of the window while the truck ate some garbage. I waved at the guy who gave me a ride.

The three windows on the street are eight feet high; I felt like a man in a fishbowl and it wasn't the first time I'd had the sensation. For years I thought about getting some shades, but the windows are big and the shades are expensive and besides, I love the south light, especially in the winter.

Next summer, I always say to myself. I'll get some blinds when summer hits; but I never do. It's like airport security. I only think about the bad stuff after a crash.

Exhausted, I took a shower, stuck some bandaids on the cuts on my face and climbed into bed.

But I was hungry. I rummaged in the fridge. Somewhere, a clock I couldn't find was ticking. It was driving me nuts. I called for take-out and I didn't even consider the irony of it until I buzzed the delivery guy in, looked through the peephole on my door and saw the boy carrying the brown bag with my ginger chicken in it had a big red quiff. He raised his arm, winding up like a pitcher, and, in his hand, I saw the five-pronged spike.

I woke up. I had been dreaming.

The clock kept on ticking like an alarm clock you can't find in the middle of the night. You run around, you look under the bed, dive in the dirty clothes. I stared at the ceiling. It was after four a.m. I was wide awake. The blankets were a mess.

“I don't want trouble with the Chinese,” I heard Hillel Abramsky say. It was what he said Monday morning when he called me, when he found Rose dead on his floor. Hillel said the family sold the shop in Flushing because the Chinese came in. The Flushing shop.

I got out of bed again, pulled on some jeans, got a beer, slammed on more heat. I ransacked the bottom drawer of my desk for old address books. Yes! I thought. Yes. The address on the sales slip, the address of the vacant lot was the same as the defunct Abramsky shop. A shop where Hillel's brother, Sherman, once worked. A shop where Sherm stole and Hillel fired him.

Sherman Abramsky. When Sherm was supplying hookers to a Hasidic brothel in Brighton Beach, Hillel had called me. I had only met him a couple of times, but it was plenty. Sherm the Sperm, they used to call him. Hard to believe him and Hil are brothers. But Sherm was a dirtbag, not a killer. He was also in Israel, last I heard, last time Hillel mentioned it. Fixing up his life, that's what Hillel had said.

I called an old number I had for Sherm on Essex Street. No one answered. I called Hillel's house. A machine picked up. Ash growing on my cigarette, I sent a fax to Haifa to a guy I went to college with who's a cop now. Then I called him at home.

“Adam's on his way to work,” his wife said in Hebrew. I left a message. Then I waited and I must have dozed in the chair. I had dreams where Lily posed with a white Cadillac like the dead women. Like them, she wore a pink jacket; unlike them, she held a Chinese baby that was fat like a sumo wrestler and cried relentlessly. I took the baby to comfort it, but I didn't hold it right and it slipped out of my hand and cracked its head open on the floor.

I got back into bed and, in the groggy period before I slept, an Abramsky family wedding came into focus. Sherm had left the hall, then come back, zipping his fly, so's everyone would think he'd been upstairs with some woman. Then he started taking pictures. Hillel says, “No, no, you can't take pictures here. I don't want pictures you take of my family lying around,” he says, like Sherm would steal their souls.

I don't know what time it was, but the fucking clock was ringing again. I threw the covers off and groped on the night table, knocked my gun onto the floor, crawled under the bed where all I found were a couple of rubber bands Lily uses to keep her hair out of her eyes. I couldn't breathe. I was losing my fucking mind. But it wasn't a clock that was ringing at all. It was the phone. Expecting Adam's call from Haifa, I fell on it.

“This is Pansy.”

“Where are you?”

“On the corner,” she said. “Canal near Mott. There's a telephone booth.”

“Do you want to come to my place?”

“No.”

“I'll be there.”

It was dumb, what I did. I got on my boots and some ski stuff and I ran.

When I got to Canal Street, Pansy was leaning against the payphone, plastic shopping bag over her arm. She was wearing the red hat, two down vests, sweatpants and purple high tops.

“I've been looking for you.”

“I want you to stop. Stop leaving messages for me,” she said. “Please.”

“Is someone bothering you?”

She glanced up and down the street and hesitated and bit her fingernail.

“Shall I show you something? Do you want to see?”

“Show me.”

We crossed Canal Street. A few trucks rumbled towards the bridge. Some of the ice had melted under the heat of traffic and in the gutters were rivers of slush. The frozen ooze poured over Pansy's thin canvas sneakers as she turned into Eldridge Street. A ball of crumpled newspaper tumbled along the curb in the breeze, but nothing else moved.

Pansy walked into the middle of the street and looked at an empty parking lot. “This is where they unloaded us,” she said.

“Unloaded who?”

“Are you cold?” she stalled. I shook my head and she started to talk. “I was lucky. There was a boat that was only ninety per cent full. That's how they do it: ‘Let's put a few more on,' they say. They count the bodies. So many bodies, so many dollars. I received a stolen passport with my picture and name already in it. We traveled to Thailand first. Something was wrong with the ship, and a few of us were put on an airplane to Canada. Winnipeg, Canada. On the plane we flushed our papers down the toilet, so that we could claim asylum if we got lucky. The Indians took us over the border.”

“Indians?”

“The reservations straddle the border. The Indians make their own laws. They're very poor. Then we got in the fruit truck.” She walked towards the parking lot. She remembered.

“It was summer and you could smell the spoiled fruit. The truck pulled up before dawn. They said, ‘You over there, you on this side.' There were three men who had quite a lot of guns. Several more arrived soon after in a large black car. It was very hot.”

Walking slowly around the lot, Pansy conjured up the summer morning, humidity like primal ooze, a squad of men in Raybans with guns. The fruit trucks. The women climbing out of them, arriving in New York weeks, maybe months after they left China, faces glazed with incomprehension and fear. They climbed out of the stinking fruit trucks with only a small bag and a little silk pouch that contained a souvenir from home. A hundred women were divided into lines by men with guns and lists of names.

“ ‘You over there,' they would say,” Pansy recalled. “ ‘You there.' It depended on who had paid the smugglers in full and could be delivered to relatives or friends, who had a deal with another smuggling gang and would be bussed to Brooklyn or Flushing. Others with no connections. Like me,” she said. “A phone was passed. For fifty dollars, you could buy two telephone calls, one home, one to a friend or relative here. I didn't need the phone. I have no family.” She paused. “Did you know you can order illegals? Two dishwashers, one cook.”

Looking around the empty street, I imagined them: the women separated into groups, some with jobs and relatives, some not so lucky. I shivered, but not from the cold this time. Pansy laughed a short mirthless chuckle. “I owed a lot of money. But I had met a woman on the fruit truck who knew of a sewing shop that would take us. Someone else gave me the name of a man who owned a restaurant. He had a room above the restaurant. I rented a bed in it. He wasn't family, but he was a decent man. A friend. Better than family,” she said bitterly and kept walking. “Is that enough or would you like to see more?”

Plastic sheeting covered part of the site where Pansy stopped abruptly. It was the poorest edge of Chinatown, near the projects and the South Street Viaduct, a sinister stretch of raw open ground. The building had been a warehouse or garage but it was derelict now, the scarred metal shutter covered in graffiti, the glass in the door at the side of the building was broken.

She pushed open the door.

The warehouse was empty, the concrete floor stained with damp. In a corner, Pansy found a construction worker's lamp on a long flex cord and turned it on.

In the back was a door that swung on a rusty hinge. I followed Pansy into a room where there was a cot, a table, two rickety chairs and a dead television set. A sink with rust stains stood under a small window. Yellow curtains sagged from a broken rod. The window was patched with duct tape and plastic.

Wiping the table with paper towels she took from her bag, Pansy sat down, put a thermos on the table, followed by two plastic cups, two teabags and some chocolate. “Please have something.”

I unwrapped a Chunky and ate it and Pansy chuckled. “We steal it from the fat boy at work, you remember him? He's an evil child. He spies on us. Do you have a wife, detective?”

“No.”

“A girlfriend?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Does she have a name?”

“Her name is Lily.”

“Is it her real name?” she asked, and I wondered if the chat was some kind of defense, a way of making the ugly hovel fit for human beings.

“Yeah, sure. Why?”

“Well, it's the name of a flower. Like me. Shall I tell you about this place?”

Pansy removed her wet purple sneakers. Wind rattled the plastic sheets outside into sails that crackled. Footsteps came, then went. Greedily, she ate more chocolate and looked up. “I am addicted.” Touching her mouth daintily with a piece of rough paper towel, she began to talk again.

She was illegal, Pansy said. Her father was a Chinese-American who fought in Vietnam at the end of the war. Her mother was ethnic Chinese, her own parents from Fujian Province, and a Catholic. She had been a schoolteacher in Saigon. It was a last fling before the helicopters lifted off the roof of the U.S. embassy. They were stranded: Pansy who was a baby, her mother, a son from the mother's previous marriage. Eventually they scraped up the money to buy a place on a boat and got to Hong Kong. Were put in a camp.

“You would not put pigs in these camps,” Pansy said. “Nothing to do. Brutal guards. Hong Kong just over the barbed wire, but Hong Kong didn't want us. No one wanted us. The young boys in the camps became monsters. Some of the monsters are here.”

“How do you know?”

“My brother was one of them.”

“Where is he?”

“Dead, I hope. I haven't heard from Thomas for years. I hope he is dead.” She crossed herself, and then leaped lightly from the chair and, in her wet green socks and the red hat, did an ecstatic little dance.

“May 1996,” she said. “I helped to burn the camp. We danced by the fire. You could see the light for miles and miles. Then we ran. I lost Mom. A few of us got away into the hills. Later, I heard she was dead.”

Pansy had learned Cantonese in the camp and her English was good—her mother had taught her and it was her secret weapon. She hid in the hills, then ran again. She worked wherever she could. She scraped together enough money to bribe someone who could fix papers and the passage to America. To the Golden Mountain.

I showed her the red cloth flower Hillel found with Rose. She spread it on her hand.

“I've got one. Rose made them for us. She was a simple girl. She said it would be our lucky charm. She owed the smugglers even more than I owed them.”

A thin morning light showed through the window and I could hear the trucks rumble past and I said for the second time, “What is this place?”

Pansy hesitated for a few seconds. In a low expressionless voice she said, “This is where they brought us.”

“Brought who?”

“Rose and me. We were kidnapped together. They brought us here.” Pansy clasped her hands around her cup. “They were waiting for me after work. They took Rose off the street on her way home. There was a man they took, as well.”

“What happened to him?”

“They killed him. They made us watch. They strangled him with piano wire and dragged him away. Later I heard that they had tossed the body somewhere off the Long Island Expressway.”

I held out a pack of cigarettes, but Pansy shook her head and broke a chocolate bar in half. “That month, I didn't even owe, I was on time with my payments. But they have become impatient. They take you even if you do not owe them. They take you and squeeze you for more money. I thought it would never happen to me. I was too intelligent.” She got up and stood at the window and I wanted to put my hand on her shoulder, but I didn't. I just didn't.

“How long did they hold you?”

She stared out at the building opposite. “A few days, I think. Rose was a silly girl. She was a good girl, but she wasn't pretty. She couldn't earn extra money like some girls. As a whore, you know? She worked all the time, but she could never keep up with her payments.”