Hot Poppies (23 page)

Sonny turned to Chen. “Tell me, detective. Did your friend Coco there lose any business in the fire? Did she cry over it? Did she have contracts with the Joy Fun Sewing Company?”

“Don't be a fucking ass,” Chen said. He took off the jacket and held it in front of him. “This is high quality goods. This stuff gets made in Italy, not in a shithole on Market Street.”

“All of it? You don't know that for sure, do you? Do you?”

Sonny was sarcastic. I saw he was also boiling. “I think that what Jerry's girlfriend had was insurance. I think she had a piece of the insurance action on the building on Market Street, that was the game she played, her and a lot of other garmentos and some of their pals in Chinatown. The designers sub-contract with the sweatshops. They profit from the slave labor. The shops are fire traps. Anything goes wrong, the building goes up, maybe they lose some garments, but they win big with the insurance. Nice, huh? Nice. You win both ways. Did you help her get in on the deal, Jerry? Did you introduce her around? Henry Liu, maybe?”

“You don't know anything,” Chen barked, the slick charm disappearing. “All you know is what you got from some two-bit claims adjuster. There is absolutely no fucking evidence you can fucking pin on me. None.”

“I didn't mention any claims adjuster. You did.” Sonny Lippert had done his homework. He looked at Chen. “You're an expensive guy, detective. You got an expensive car, pricy clothes. And I got someone who says she saw you at the building around the time the fire caught. Says you didn't exactly run for the fire department. Says you ran in the other direction.”

“I didn't set the fucking fire,” Chen said.

“But you didn't stop it, did you? Did you, Jerry?” I thought of Pansy. Of the other women. Of the body bags. I socked him. I couldn't help it. Sonny gave me a warning glance.

From the other room came more laughter; someone changed the music to reggae.

“What is this, Art? Sonny been schmoozing you, Art?” Chen said. “Sonny been going on about the Hong Kong connection? I'm the one that ought to go to Hong Kong.”

“You're not going anywhere.” Sonny was livid.

“If you get to Hong Kong, Art,” said Chen, “why don't you look up my goody-two-shoes cousin, Ringo Chen? He's your sort of cop. Him and Sonny are tight. You want me to be sorry, guys. OK. I'm sorry. Mea culpa.”

“Please, Jer. Spare me. What is it you want to tell me?”

“You're wasting your time trying to pin stuff on me and you know it. You know fucking well that it's me the brass trust when it comes to Chinatown. If the city fucking wants to make things better, they got to cut guys like me some slack. Chinese guys, you understand. Guys that can grasp the culture. When I deliver the errand boys, no one's gonna care about some claims adjuster, Sonny, and you know it. Yeah, I picked him up, OK? They were twins. It's why the one with the hole in his eye said he did it all, to protect his son-of-a-bitch brother. I made the collar. Nothing else matters. Right? But you can see me on TV.”

We both knew he was right. But I had one more question.

“Sonny, ask Jerry here if he's been playing games. Ask him if he's got some jerk following me every time I take a walk, some dirtbag asking where my friends are living, shaking down my pals.” I opened the door.

“Hey, Art.” Chen called me back.

“What do you want?”

“She's alive.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Henry Liu found her. She's at Henry's. Marie Christine, isn't that her name?”

Pansy was waiting for me just inside the door of the Red Swan. Her hat in her hands, when she saw me, she pulled it on, opened the door and asked me for a cigarette. We went out into the street. Pansy headed north and I walked alongside her. For a while, she was silent. When we reached the park where we had first talked on the day Rose died and the blizzard started, Pansy stopped. She looked at the sky, then turned to me.

“I did it, you see,” she said.

“Did what?”

She tossed her cigarette into the gutter. “The fire,” she said very softly. “I started the fire.”

20

“Tell me.”

The snow had stopped completely. The park was empty. Pansy brushed off a bench and sat down. “May I have another cigarette please?” I gave her one and lit it.

“Last night after you left me at the whorehouse. It was Sunday last night?” She puffed delicately.

“Yes.”

“It seems such a long time ago.” In her pocket, she found some chocolate. Elbows on her knees, she held the cigarette in one hand and the chocolate in the other. “After Chen threatened me, after you left me in the whorehouse, I went out on a job, as a whore, you know? I don't know what happened. I don't know if someone knew I had spoken with you. If someone thought I might talk. One of the pimps perhaps. I don't know. But I was going out and they were waiting in the street.”

“Again?”

“Yes. But different men from before, I think. Behind the building where we sew is a church. There's a smaller building in between, in a courtyard. They took me there last night. It was a room on the ground floor. They kept me all night and all day. I lost any sense of time. I could hear the noise of them hitting me as if it was happening to someone else, and I thought: I'd like to be dead. I prayed to die.” She rolled up her sleeve to show me the bruises. “I didn't care any more. I can't ever make enough even as a whore to pay them. Even while they hit me, I thought about it. I was watching. I was outside myself. There was a space heater.”

She paused and ate some more chocolate. “Excuse me,” she said as she swallowed. “I had a silk scarf around my neck and I used it for a taper. I lit the curtains. If I could make enough fire, I thought someone might see it. But there was garbage under the window, a box of scraps or fabric, or a can of gasoline, I don't know. I saw the fire travel. The men who kidnapped me saw it and got scared. They ran away. I got out.”

Delicately, she tossed the cigarette butt on the ground and crushed it with her foot. “The fire traveled into the factory building.” She took a deep breath. “I tried to get in, but it was too late. The door to the sweatshop was locked. I ran.”

“I thought you were inside. You told me you were doing both shifts.”

“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.”