Hot Poppies (24 page)

“Officially?”

“No. I could get you a ticket and some cash, but this is not department stuff. This is between us. Go find the guy who runs the bank for the snakeheads.” Sonny Lippert pleaded. “Before anyone else dies, Art. Before anyone else burns to death. Find the man they call the Debt Collector.”

PART TWO

Hong Kong

21

A wave of humid sensuous air that clung to my face like Saran Wrap to a boiled chicken hit me as soon as I got outside the terminal building in Hong Kong. After the frozen white and gray New York winter, Hong Kong drenched me with its heat and colors. And, pushing her damp red hair off her face and searching for me in the crowd of arriving passengers, Lily was waiting.

In the end, I went to Hong Kong for Lily. She had called me, crying, and Lily doesn't cry, not often. “Please, Artie, I need you. If there's any way you could come,” she said. “Please.” Sonny Lippert needed me there, and then Lily called, and I went.

“Enjoy the flight, Mr Cohen,” the girl at the desk at JFK had said when she handed back my passport. Years ago, Sonny Lippert helped me fix my passport. Artemy Maximovich Ostalsky had disappeared completely. In my US passport, I am Artie Cohen, b. New York City. USA.

“Hi.” Forehead damp with sweat, her clothes wrinkled, Lily held on to my arm.

“Hi,” I said. I felt embarrassed. After the endless flight, I was also soaked in Scotch.

“Thanks for coming, Artie. Thank you. I called because I couldn't think of anyone else.” I loaded my suitcase into the taxi she had waiting.

In the month Lily had been away from me, I had missed her. What got me most when I saw her wasn't the blotchy skin or the lank hair, the purple shadows under her eyes. What got to me when I met Lily at the airport was her silence, and the disjointed platitudes we exchanged.

“Everyone is Chinese,” she said. “Isn't that weird?”

“Yes,” I said, “just like in Chinatown. Look at the boys with the pony tails. Look at the old woman carting vegetables onto a plane,” I said.

“How amazing,” she said, and then we were in the taxi, driving through the sultry neon-lit night. Something was terribly wrong. There was bad stuff going on. I waited for her to tell me what it was.

At Lily's hotel she had fixed a room for me adjoining hers. “I can't sleep,” she said. “I got you a room, Artie. Is that OK? Is it OK?” I had never seen Lily so unsure of herself and I put my arms around her and held her as best I could.

Even before I was unpacked, she came into my room and sat cross-legged on the bed next to me. In her hand was a picture of Grace, the baby she had come to China to adopt. She propped the picture against a lamp on the bedside table. I looked at the chubby child and the child smiled back at me.

“Where is she? Where is your baby?”

“I'm going to tell you. I'll tell you. I will.” Lily picked up the brandy I'd ordered and swallowed it neat. “I'm OK. I'm OK now,” she said, as if to persuade herself, and then she told me her story.

“Did you know they skin live monkeys in the market in Guangzhou?” Lily said. “Did you know that, Artie?”

22

That they skinned them alive and you could hear them scream from a mile away was the thing she remembered. As you got deeper into the market, the dust settling in your hair, the air clotted with pollution, sweat pouring off you, you heard the monkeys shriek at their own death.

Lily had not gone to Guangzhou first. She had first traveled to Beijing. She had had help getting the baby quickly, but now, now she knew she had Grace, as soon as she received notification the baby was waiting for her, she wanted to do it right. She could have pulled more strings, but she thought to herself, “No, I'll go through channels. I'll do it right.”

At Beijing Airport, all she noticed was that two out of every three lightbulbs were burned out and the erratic sound system squawked out intermittent announcements and Paul McCartney tunes. The Chinese Beatle, people called Paulie. Otherwise, things went OK. Mostly, she remembered stupid things like the burned-out bulbs, that and the tour guide's white umbrella.

Mrs Ling was the official guide and she carried the white nylon umbrella everywhere. She refrained from expressing surprise when Lily arrived, but Lily always knew Mrs Ling was thinking that she, Lily, being a single woman, would not know how to care for a baby. It wasn't Mrs Ling's business to think, however, Lily calculated. Ministry apparatchiks appeared and whispered to Mrs Ling from time to time, and Lily enjoyed the spectacle of the guide's changing wardrobe, the diamanté spectacles, the sweet perfume, the perm that seemed to have been stamped into Mrs Ling's hair with a waffle iron. Mrs Ling was New China Woman, official-style. “Not to look pretty is to be a dumb bear” was Mrs Ling's motto, Lily decided.

Every detail of the trip became a diversion for Lily; she was thrilled but anxious; in a week she would have her child. In a week, in Guangzhou, she would meet Grace. Grace was from Guangzhou, or Canton as Lily always thought of it, but a visit to Beijing was required first for the acculturation of the adoptive parents, according to Mrs Ling. “This translates to the spending of much foreign currency,” said Clare O'Mara, one of the other women on the trip.

At the hotel in Beijing, Lily met her group. The five middle-class couples were from the LA suburbs—Long Beach, Glendale, Northridge—and they were nice, decent people, Lily said, but they were uninterested in anything except the babies they had come to adopt. Clare was different. Clare and her husband, Les, were black. Clare was a lawyer and Les, who played jazz clarinet in a San Francisco trio, taught music at UC Berkeley. Like Lily, they had no other children. Like her, they were thrilled, thrilled and scared and full of the adventure of it.

Lily said, “We palled around together once in a while, me and Les and Clare. I was the only person alone. I was so lonely.”

Lily saw the Forbidden City and, on its north side, the million-dollar mansions of the new rich. She shopped at the Friendship store and bought aimlessly—porcelain boxes, straw baskets, silk jackets, toys. In Tiananmen Square, she stood where the tanks had rolled over the students. Was it seven years already since those heroic kids had stood up to the tanks on June 4th? It was one of the stories Lily was sorriest she had missed covering.

“I was so nervous, Artie. All the time we were in Beijing I was nervous, and excited,” she said. “Then it was time to leave for Guangzhou. Remember I told you at home how it is. How the picture of the baby comes and she's yours. You think of her as your own. Grace was mine. As soon as I got her picture. Finally I was going to see her.” Lily looked at her empty brandy glass. “Is there anything else to drink?”

I opened a bottle of duty-free Scotch. Outside the window of the hotel room, I could hear the boats in the Hong Kong harbor, the constant buzz and whistle of the ferry boats, cargo tugs and yachts as they criss-crossed the water. Lily didn't seem to notice any of it. She drank some Scotch greedily and went on talking. At first her words were stilted and she spoke in staccato bursts, but the whisky smoothed her out some.

The day Lily's group departed Beijing for southern China, everyone in the group got food poisoning.

“Take chopsticks,” Lily's friends had told her. “Take your own. They wash chopsticks in a common washing bowl.” But Lily considered it was patronizing; that was the stuff of the Ugly American, and she would do what the locals did. “We were all sick as parrots,” she said. “Me, because I was a fool, the others because no one told them. Sick as parrots. Sicker.”

A heatwave blanketed southern China the day the group arrived in Guangzhou. There were no porters at the airport, no toilet paper, either. It didn't matter because Mrs Ling, waving her white umbrella to call the group to attention, said, “You'll get your babies tomorrow evening.”

Drinking her Scotch, Lily leaned on my shoulder. “God, I was so excited. That's what she said. “Tomorrow night you'll get your babies.” I was so excited I couldn't sit still. We stayed at the White Swan, this huge palace of a hotel. It made me claustrophobic, and I had to get out. To kill time during the day I went sightseeing.”

At the train station, Lily saw the migrant workers who squatted there, waiting for jobs, thousands of them. In the markets, she saw the babies begging, and they ran after her, chattering, getting hold of her hands, shoving plastic bowls at her.

A truck rattled by and the crowds in the street looked up because on the back of it were six young women with ropes around their necks. Lily found someone who spoke English and asked what it was. “An execution,” the woman said. “A good thing too,” she added with fierce insistence. The girls, who were prostitutes, had “lured railway workers to their death with sex”, as the woman put it. It was right they should be executed; crime had to be punished. The government had executed ten thousand persons in the interest of destroying the criminal element, the woman said. As the truck disappeared, Lily saw the trembling girls were only kids of fifteen or sixteen and, as she watched, she heard the monkeys scream.

In the morning, Mrs Ling assembled the group over breakfast. “You have your money in a belt under your clothes?” Mrs Ling said. “When we get to the other hotel, you will make the donation to the orphanage,” she said. “I will tell you when to hand it over. Only pay money when I say this: ‘Pay now.' ”

A minibus took the group to a Chinese-style hotel where all the chairs in the lobby were occupied by taxi drivers who all resembled Mao Tse Tung. “Like hotel porters in Moscow looked like Leonid Brezhnev,” Lily said to me. “Remember? Remember that?”

A man from a ministry was waiting and Mrs Ling said to Lily's group, “Pay now.”

“Except for me, the husbands were carrying the money,” Lily said. “They went into the men's room to get it out. I didn't want to be alone, I went with them.”

In the toilet with the cracked tiles, she thought: fifteen thousand dollars between us. We could all be killed in this toilet.

As they got their money out, they found the bills had stuck together in the heat. Lily got a battery-operated hairdrier out of her shoulder bag. On the dank toilet floor, the men laid out the bills and Lily squatted and blew the money dry with her hairdrier. Everyone laughed. Les, the musician, pulled a bottle of Kaopectate out of his bag and passed it around; another guy had a pint of Scotch. They toasted Lily.

“To Lily,” the husbands all said and, in the toilet in China, they clapped their hands for her and drank the Scotch.

That evening, the phone in Lily's room rang. “Come to Suite 1001,” a voice said.

Mrs Ling, a nurse, foster parents, the couples were all in the suite, everyone milling, waiting, clutching gifts and baby clothes. Thirty people were in that room. In her arms, Lily held her old teddy bear. In the other room of the suite were the babies.

“Then they gave her to me,” Lily said. “Without any ceremony. Some woman just brought Grace out and put her in my arms just like that. She was about five months old, very cute, like her photograph, and fat, like a little sumo wrestler. I gave her my old teddy bear. She didn't like it, but she was transfixed by some fancy gift paper I had and my colored rubber bands.

“At first I didn't feel anything much, it was too chaotic in the room, but I put my hand under her and she wasn't wearing a diaper. They put them in pants slit back to front, you know; when they have to go, they just open the slit. So I was actually touching her skin,” Lily said. “That got to me.

“I took her back to my room. Late that night, Clare, the lawyer, came in with Maria—her baby was named Maria—and said, “Does yours cry a lot?” I said I thought it was normal but Clare, who knew about children, said, “They think westerners like fat babies. They feed them up. Then the babies cry all the time because they're used to so much food.” So we did what good American mommies do,” Lily said. “We put on the television and we lay on the bed, me and Grace and Clare and Maria, and we watched TV, and the babies stopped crying, and I realized Grace had never seen TV. Then Clare took Maria back to her room, and I spent the whole night alone with my daughter. The whole night.” She stopped, downed another drink, then put her hands over her face. Lily looked at me. “Followed by two weeks in hell.”

When she applied for a passport for Grace, Lily discovered some of the paperwork was incomplete and she entered a hell that consisted of building after building of bureaucrats and offices, heat, noise, smoke, of parents yelling and babies crying.

On the third day or maybe the fifth, she could no longer remember, in one of the concrete buildings that had no windows and no air conditioning, a man in a white nylon shirt smoked in Lily's face. Grace in her lap, she sat opposite him and thought to herself, concentrate on the cigarette hanging from his mouth, concentrate on the big yellow stain on his nylon shirt, concentrate on the fact this man is nothing.

“Paperwork has to be completed in America,” he said, and Lily thought, they're going to take her away from me. “I knew,” Lily said. “Oh God, I knew.”

In the hotel, Mrs Ling was waiting. “There has been an error,” she said to Lily. The child would be returned to foster care until Lily's papers and the baby's passport were properly arranged. A nurse appeared.

“They picked Grace up and took her away. I couldn't get anyone to listen.” She took a cigarette from my pack and lit it, filling her lungs with nicotine. “I had quit smoking, you know. As soon as I heard about Grace I just quit, but what's the point now?”

She twisted her hair around a finger incessantly, then scraped it back and tied it with a rubber band she had in her pocket. Without make-up her face was white; the freckles showed. Her voice trailed off. “They gave her to me, Artie, they gave Grace to me for a whole night. Then they took her away.”