Hot Poppies (25 page)

23

It was almost five in the morning and Lily had talked through the night. Now, still on my bed, she was weeping as she said it over and over. “They took her away from me. They took Grace.” Then, suddenly, her tears seemed to run out and she got up. “I'd like to walk a little. Can we go out?”

The hotel lobby was empty except for the cleaning women who were polishing the marble staircase and a couple of guys in striped pants who stood behind the desk yawning. As we left, one of them smiled politely and covered his mouth.

It was mild outside and the clammy air lay on my skin. Along the waterfront was a promenade. There was some milky gray light in the sky now, but the Hong Kong skyline across the water was hidden by fog. Lily leaned on the railing and looked out at the water.

“The group left China,” she said. “I stayed. I went everywhere I could think of, I called everyone. It was like the shutters went up. Someone was punishing me, but for what? For what, Artie? There was too much flak, too many people averted their eyes. I thought I might crack up.”

“What about Pete Leung? He helped you fix the adoption.” I put my hand on her shoulder.

“It was the first thing I did. From Guangzhou. I called. I called his house. His office.”

“And?”

“All I got was bullshit. Secretaries, assistants. He was away on business, they said. Somewhere in China.” Lily held onto my arm. “When I left Guangzhou, I thought I could get help here in Hong Kong. I thought I'd look for Pete Leung.” She stared at the water, her face dry as a bone and now as white. “I left him a million messages.”

“Then you called me.”

“No. First I tried TV people, I tried the papers. A Chinese woman I know at the BBC tried to help. I went to the consulate. Wherever I went I said I was a friend of Pete's. I thought it would carry some weight. Everyone was unavailable or furtive, worried or coy. I couldn't tell what was going on at first. Then I realized how delicate an issue adoption is. Hong Kong is trapped, you know. It's going to blow up when the Chinese get here in a few months. People I met all said, ‘It's rough for you. We're sorry. But we're not that brave. We're not Harry Wu.' Then I didn't know who to call except you. I could give you the money for your ticket. The rooms are paid for. I fixed a deal. There's a guy in the hotel business I used to know. I hope you're not mad. I behaved like a jerk at home, it's just I want this baby so much.”

“I'm not mad. Shit, Lily. I'm not mad. Is that what you think?”

“You're a nice man, Artie.”

“What about Phil Frye?”

She turned her back to the water and faced me. “You were right all along. Phillip's a prick. He said he was OK with this. I went to London. I did go. I lied to you. I went to London on the way to Beijing. He played hard to get. He said that, in any case, the Chinese adoption system was exploitative. Phillip's very big on human rights. Not mine, maybe, but everyone else's.” Lily laughed bitterly.

“Do you think it's because of him? Do you think they connected you to Frye and stopped the adoption?”

“God knows. But I'll tell you something. I had a friend who did a story that the Chinese didn't like. She moved to a different TV company and they knew, they knew she had moved, and when her new company wanted to do a story on China, they said no. And it was because my friend was there. They keep very close tabs on who gets in and who doesn't. I'm not saying it's anything to do with me or with Grace, I'm just saying that they know, Artie. The Chinese don't like us telling them their business.”

A sultry little breeze came in off the water. The promenade was deserted except for two old women who practiced Tai Chi and a third who performed a self-obsessed foxtrot all by herself. Lily took a cigarette out of a pack in my shirt pocket. “You were jealous of Pete, weren't you?”

“Yeah.”

“You saw him come out of my building, he told me that. I'm sorry. I couldn't tell you any more about it. He made me promise. He said, ‘I'm a businessman, Lily, I don't want to look like some do-good jerk. If I make a lot of noise publicly, nothing works. I do what I do in private.' And he helped me.”

“So where is he?” I lit the cigarette for her.

“Business, I guess. I saw him briefly in London and that was the last time I heard from him. But God knows he tried.”

“Did you sleep with him?”

“Screw you.” Lily laughed and punched my arm lightly. Then she inhaled a lungful of smoke and sighed. “I told you, no. But I think I would have done anything I'd been trying so hard to adopt. Then you introduced me to Pete at that awful club you worked at and it was some kind of miracle. He said, ‘Maybe I can help.' He asked me not to say anything. Then, out of the blue, the picture of Grace arrived. I had something that mattered.”

“More than me.”

“Yes. More than Phillip. More than you. Yes.” She tossed the cigarette she held into the water. “I think I need to sleep, Artie. I think maybe now I can get some sleep. Is that OK? Can we go back to the hotel?” She leaned in towards me.

My arm around her, we walked back to the hotel. It was light now, but the city was socked in by fog.

Lily began to walk faster and faster. “Artie, I think there's someone behind us.”

But there wasn't. Even the dancing woman had disappeared. There wasn't anything except noise from the boats. I held Lily as tight as she let me.

“What do you want, sweetheart? Just tell me.”

“I'm going to get Grace back. I'm going to get some sleep. And then, if it kills me, I swear to God, Artie, I'm going to get her back.”

When I opened my eyes and swung my legs over the side of the bed, I wasn't sure where I was. I looked at my watch. It was ten to six. I fumbled with a TV remote. On TV people were dancing ballroom stuff, tango, foxtrot, two-step, faces rigid with effort. It was ten to six in the evening and I went and knocked on Lily's door, which was next to mine. She opened it, eyes half shut, kissed me and said she could sleep through the night, so I grabbed a shower, changed my clothes and went downstairs. I had been on the ground almost twenty-four hours; I was hungry.

The hotel lobby was immense. The bellboys in white criss-crossed the marble floor like the cargo tugs in the harbor, hefting luggage as guests checked in and out.

The Regent Hotel was at the very edge of the harbor as if floating on the water. The back wall of the lobby was made of glass and tourists, drinks in hand, stood there mesmerized by the city: the water, sky, the lighted skyscrapers against a dark mountain. The sky was thick with the humidity, and the sunset had left a streak of violent colors that appeared to fire up the night and the neon signs that blazed into orange and red. It was spectacular. It was Andrew Lloyd Webber: Hong Kong, the musical. In the lobby behind me, the piano player, foot glued to the pedal of a Steinway grand, switched from “A Whiter Shade of Pale” to “Memory”.

A waiter brought me a beer. “What happens when there's a storm?” I asked him.

“We drop the typhoon nets, sir,” he said, impassively, but I could tell he was pleased at my discomfort. “We drop the nets.”

I carried my beer to a table in the bar area and slumped into an armchair, wondering if I should call Sonny Lippert even if it was only six in the morning back home in New York. I was here on Sonny's nickel and I better get busy, I thought, but there were cashews on the table. Looking for a waiter to order another beer, I was stuffing some nuts into my mouth when I felt a huge hand grab me from behind. I flew out of my chair and spun around, but I wasn't prepared for what I saw.

“Christ. Jesus Christ!”

“Sorry. Anatoly Sverdloff.”

What could I say?

“So, Artemy Maximovich, you were not precisely expecting me?”

It really was Tolya. Goddamn Tolya Sverdloff picked me up in his arms and jumped up and down. I'm six one, but Tolya can pick me up like a pet. Around us, the tourists stared.

“Put me the fuck down.”

“Sure. OK.” He swung a snakeskin briefcase onto the table and sat. He stretched out his legs. On his feet, Tolya wore green suede Guccis with gold buckles the size of a sandwich. “Gold,” he said. “Eighteen carat.”

I wasn't going to admit how glad I was to see the son of a bitch looming over me in the hotel lobby, all six six, all three hundred pounds of him encased in a green linen jacket as big as a tent and a black silk shirt. In one ear, he wore an emerald stud and, with his square head, he resembled an Easter Island statue with an earring and dimples.

“Just like old days, Artie, just like old days.”

“What old days?”

A little less than two years back, in New York, Tolya had entered my life. He drove me nuts, then he saved my ass and became a friend.

“Always I love Hong Kong,” he said. “First taste capitalism.” He said it lovingly, caressing the idea like a Moscow crooner with a big ballad. He was drunk. For Tolya's English to deteriorate, he had to be completely soused. With me, he always talked a crazy mix of his lovely purring Russian, the first class English, and gangster slang in both.

“You remember also, Artyom, I am Chinese expert.”

It was all true. His father, Anatoly, Sr, was a famous actor, and everyone in the family was a brilliant mimic. Tolya's privileged youth had included the Moscow language schools. For Tolya, before the commie cocksuckers departed—the real commies, I mean, not imitation crud like Zhuganov—language was escape, the ticket out. He spoke Chinese. He could do dialects. As a result, he got a job as a DJ at Radio Moscow where, even before glasnost when rock became acceptable, he broadcast the news of Russian rock to the Chinese in Chinese.

“Half the time the scumbags in Moscow didn't know what I'm telling the Chinese. The Chinese officials didn't know shit about rock and roll,” he told me once. “We say whatever we want on air. Good times.” Above all, Tolya was an operator; he could bargain your liver out of you.

“Hong Kong.” He waved his arm to take possession of the whole lobby. “Last great grab on earth. MMMhmmm. You're hungry, Artyom? Yes? Come.”

In the restaurant, the maitre d' practically kissed Tol's hand and led us to a table by a window. Several dozen oysters were set between us by a waiter who also opened a bottle of Champagne. “Krug Grande Cuvée.” Tolya raised his glass. It made me think about Dawn Tae. She had been on my mind since I knew I was coming to Hong Kong, but I wasn't in a hurry to call her.

Between Sonny's brief and the business with Lily and the child, I had plenty on my mind. For me, Dawn had been trouble. Big trouble. And still I didn't know if I could resist her, if I was honest. I sipped the Champagne. In Russian, I made Tolya a toast that lasted five minutes and included good fortune for twenty generations of Sverdloffs. I really was pretty fucking glad to see him.

Wiping away tears of laughter, he said, “Russian stinks, Artyom. Rusty. You lost the habit. More oysters?”

I nodded and said, “How's the family?”

“Wife left,” he said cheerfully. “Kids great. One already working in movies. Best teen actor at Mosfilm, Anatoly III.” He beamed.

I had met Tolya's family during the only trip back to Moscow I ever made. It was more than a year and a half ago now that I had met them, his parents, his kids, and his cousin Svetlana, the woman I fell in love with and planned to marry; Svetlana, blown up by a car bomb outside Tolya's village on a balmy night in early fall when the woods crackled with Russians picking mushrooms. It was Svetlana who glued our friendship and we both knew it, me and Tolya; his eyes teared.

“Mom puts flowers for Svet every day,” was all he said.

I changed the subject. “How did you find me? Sonny Lippert called you to babysit my ass?”

Did Tolya have connections with the KGB in the old days? With the Russian police now? I knew that once in a while, when Sonny Lippert needed help with the Russians in Brooklyn, Tolya and Sonny did business together.

“For Mr Sonny Lippert I do some times few phone calls now and then. Here, I am businessman, Artyom.”

The waiter tied linen bibs around our necks, brought more Champagne and then some white Burgundy that tasted like nectar. Tolya sipped the wine and leaned over. “Not bad,” he said, as another waiter delivered a two-foot mountain of crushed ice that cascaded shellfish—clams, crayfish, shrimp, sea urchins.

“Good, huh, Artie?” Tolya winked at me and I said, “Great,” and went on eating.

A gaggle of suits, six of them, sat at the next table and Tolya bowed to them and they bowed back. Dark suited, white bibbed, the men ate oysters and read the time from half-million-dollar watches on their wrists.

“You like mine?” Seeing me look at the watches, he stretched out his own massive hairy arm where a diamond Rolex was embedded. Then he patted his lips with his bib, took a sea urchin in his paw, swallowed it and watched the waiter serve us a crystal platter of baby lobsters. Silently, Tolya ate. I ate. Finally, he scrubbed his whole face with the bib and took it off. He didn't ask me about my business once. I think he knew. From the minute I saw him, I think he knew all of it, so I let him talk. Tolya did things his own way.

“Me, I have become rich Russian,” Tolya said. “Business of Hong Kong is making money. Bedrock. Money machine, stainless steel. Money money money. Great.” He looked out the window at the spectacle of lights and buildings and water. “My adorable pimple on ass of China, all up for grabs. Jewel in crown. Whatever. Also, you know what I love?”

“What?”

“No one is shy about this, no one shy about money. Here money is religion. Old rock and rollnik like me, now entrepreneur. Indian, Jew, Jap, Russki, Chink. All making money. Money for all.” He whistled a few bars from “Fiddler on the Roof ”.