Hot Poppies (3 page)

Squatting, I looked the kid in the face. He was obviously the son and heir and he could speak English. As far as the outside world went, he ran the show. I looked at the lidless eyes embedded in his soft flesh. He was an insolent little prick and I said, “Think harder. Tell your mother to think harder.”

Ignoring me, he extracted a monster-size Pay Day from his pocket and bit off a chunk through the wrapper. I snatched the candy bar away and threw it in a garbage can.

Someone turned off the music. Work stopped. The din died away. There was a communal intake of breath. Two visits by the cops the same day was enough to scare the shit out of all of them.

Crocodile tears dripped from the kid's face. The mother reappeared and hammered on my arm and it took a while to peel her off. With protective fury, she clutched Porky and pulled him into a corner.

Two beats later, the women went back to work. Someone switched the music back on. Holding the photograph, I walked up and down the crowded aisle. Some of the sewing machines were the computerized Jap machines and they ran so fast the women who worked them, unable to stop for a second, were frozen into grotesque positions. Kids of nine or ten sat on mats on the floor snapping threads off garments. At the very back of the room the brick wall had been whitewashed and on it, someone had scrawled
FIRE EXIT
in red. There wasn't any door. The floors were filthy, the windows covered with scummy rags, the women packed into the room with hardly crawl space to stretch their legs. I could smell the stink of a toilet.

Against the wall, a girl in a red wool cap sat on a low stool sewing labels into jeans by hand. When I showed her the photograph, she looked at me and, right away, I knew she knew.

The labels read
MADE IN THE USA
and somehow the irony wasn't lost on her. She wore Coke-bottle glasses and, behind them, her dark eyes were knowing, alert, almost amused.

“Who was she?”

“Her name was Rose Yi. She's dead, is she?” The girl spoke good English.

“Yes. I'm sorry. What's your name?”

“Pansy. My name is Pansy Loh.” She looked down at her work. “She was my friend . . .” She stopped suddenly. I felt someone behind us. “Go now,” Pansy said urgently. “Please go.”

It was the fat boy. He was watching. Listening.

“OK, Fatso, tell your mother, nothing here,” I said. Then I beat it.

Desperate for a smoke, I climbed a short flight of stairs to the roof and went outside. It was a big building by Chinatown standards. It faced the on-ramp to the Manhattan Bridge and from where I stood, I could see the decayed ramparts of the bridge and hear the traffic that roared across it to Brooklyn. The snow was falling harder and people were going home early. Already, the city was closing down, and on the roof here, the black plastic garbage bags, the cardboard boxes, even the rusted pigeon coop were white with the stuff. I tried to light up, but the wind blew out the matches.

Chinatown was like a war zone. The snow falling, people scuttled in all directions, pulling plastic sheets over the produce that spilled onto the sidewalk. Split watermelons, the hot pink fruit showing between green rinds, looked surreal in the snow. There were guys selling bottled water, flashlights, and charcoal. In every grocery store, people shopped for the apocalypse.

In the twenty years since I'd been in New York, Chinatown had spread, a neighborhood on steroids. Back then it was a hermetic area, eight, ten square blocks with the ceremonial pagoda arch on Mott Street as its entry point. But Chinatown ballooned, pushing north to gobble up Little Italy where landlords complained about price gouging, then sold their bakeries and coffee houses and went, the oldsters anyhow, to live in Jersey. It bust its borders at Broadway, carried slivers off the financial district, rammed SoHo where at community meetings Chinese wholesalers and local artists screamed insults at each other. The poor bastards who work the First Precinct caught it in the ass, trying to help, but it was the 5th that ran the turf. Me, I hadn't paid much attention to it. Chinatown had been there. You shopped for groceries. You ate. Now, it was a city all by itself. “What street compares to Mott Street in July?” ran through my head, Ella singing, insistent as a jingle. What were the other lines?

“Fuck you!” a kid pushing crates of fruits screamed as I banged into his handtruck. I've always loved Chinatown for the food, the fireworks, the crowds. What was it Jimmy Breslin said? “Nature's finest site is a crowded city street.” My motto, but I felt clumsy now, and big, like Gulliver, and I couldn't speak the language or read the angles. A fishtank in the window of a restaurant caught my eye. The fish, poor suckers, would be dinner later tonight. Like me, if I didn't stop messing around down here. One ex-cop. Dinner for two. Yum.

But the more I walked, the more I thought about the girl in the sweatshop. Pansy didn't seem surprised when she came out of her building for a break and discovered me loitering in the doorway. Although she walked by without saying anything, I had the feeling she was expecting me.

“Can I talk to you?”

“There's a park near Bayard Street.” She hurried ahead of me until we got there. The park was deserted. To get some shelter, we huddled underneath a kid's slide.

“I only have fifteen minutes for my break,” she said. “What do you want?”

“Tell me about your friend, Rose.”

“Do you know Detective Jeremy Chen?”

“No. Why?” It was the name of the cop I'd seen outside Hillel's earlier. Chen. Jeremy Chen.

“He came this morning. I don't trust him. If I talk to you, you must promise not to tell him anything.”

“Sure.”

From a large plastic bag Pansy took a photograph and handed it to me. It was a picture of herself. It was identical to the picture of her friend, Rose. Same pink jacket. Same white Caddy. “You can have it if you like,” she said.

“Who took the pictures?”

“I don't know. A white man. Sunglasses. Hat. He took a lot of pictures. Made a fuss with the cameras. He always had several cameras. Fancy bags for the cameras, too. Snap snap. We called him Mr Snap. All the girls wanted pictures.”

“What for?”

“To send home. To prove we have made it in America.” There was sarcasm in her voice. “We call it the Golden Mountain.”

For a few seconds we stood, watching the snow. Then Pansy took a thermos out of her bag along with a cup. “Would you like some tea?”

Moving to the swings, she sat down on one, poured the tea and drank some. The red hat concealed most of her oval face, but when she took off the thick glasses, I saw that some freak of nature had given her dark eyes a greenish cast. She couldn't have been more than twenty-two or three, but she had real guts, real moxie, talking to a cop down here. She figured I was a cop on duty. I didn't clarify. Her English was old-fashioned but it was good, and I said so.

A hard glint of amusement passed over her face. “We're not all rednecks and peasant villagers, you know,” she said.

I said, “I'm sorry. Really. Where did Rose live?”

“Sometimes with me. She needed money. She worked nights in a restaurant,” Pansy added. “On Canal Street.”

“Shit. Shit.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your friend—Rose—it's the dumpling place on Canal near Lafayette?”

Pansy looked wary. “You knew her?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I knew her.”

Behind the counter at the take-out joint over on Canal Street, Rose had worked the late shift. It was a place where, after work, I had sometimes dropped by to eat. The dumplings were tasty. The place was open all night. No one bothered you.

She had been a plain, small girl with lonely eyes. She didn't speak much English. She hardly spoke at all. One night, she tried to make a joke with me, but she got tangled up in the language and hid her face in her hands. I didn't help her. I didn't make her feel better. I ate and paid and left and, now, she was dead. The naked girl on Hillel's floor. Christ, I thought.

“I'm glad if she had a friend,” Pansy said and I kept my mouth shut. “Is there anything else you can tell me? How she died?” Pansy looked at me. “Please. I'd like to know.”

“You knew Rose was pregnant?”

“I didn't know. Was it a girl?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not really.” Pansy stamped her feet. The cold was savage. “I ought to go now.”

“How can I find you when you're not at work?”

From her shopping bag, she produced a take-out menu, then handed it to me as stylishly as if it were an engraved calling card from Tiffany's. “The phone number is on it,” she said. “You can leave me a message in the restaurant. The owner is a friend. I share a room in the apartment upstairs.”

“Can I keep your picture?”

“Yes. I have no one to send it home to,” she said without self-pity.

“Would you like something to eat?”

She brushed some snow off her hat. “Some chocolate would be nice,” she said.

Opposite the park was a newsstand where I bought her a handful of candy bars. Pansy selected the Almond Joy, ate it quickly and put the others in her bag. “You won't tell Detective Chen you've seen me, will you? He wants too much.”

“I told you. I don't know Chen. Too much what?” I asked, but she didn't answer. “There are other cops. Good cops.”

“I'm an illegal.”

“You trusted me.”

“No,” she said. “No, I don't. But you're all I've got.” She folded the candy wrapper into tiny squares and put it into her bag. “Forgive me, that doesn't sound terribly nice. I am grateful.”

She could have been at a tea party instead of on a corner in Chinatown where the snow fell on used needles and crowds fighting for space on the sidewalk. Pansy's elegant turn of phrase and her self-possession hooked me. I didn't know if she had me figured out, but I didn't care. I felt bad about Rose, but Rose was dead. Pansy was something else. With her alert eyes, the sense of humor, the survivor's tough charm, even the crafty perception of how to work me, I was hooked.

We stood on the crowded street, Chinatown pushing at us from all sides, the snow coming down, the wind burning her cheeks red, and I wondered what I could do for her. I hoped to God I was wrong, but I had the feeling that this was the first inning of an obsession and I was already up to my ass in it, floundering in it, like the city in the snow.

“I want to help,” I said. “Tell me how I can help you.”

“If you want to help me, find out who killed Rose.” Pansy turned to go. “You see, if Rose is dead,” she said briskly, “I'm next.”

3

“I'm next.” “I'm next.” “I'm next.” The subway clattered along the tracks. The train was packed. I hung onto a pole and closed my eyes. “I'm next.” “I'm next.”

I took the train because I didn't trust the piece of shit that passes as my car to make it more than a few blocks in the storm. I had to go. For days I'd been promising myself I'd visit the Taes. “Please come, Artie,” Mrs Tae had said on the phone. “Please.” Ricky Tae is my best friend and her son and he's been sick for a long time, because of me, in a way. Rick has a place in the same building as me down off Broadway. His parents own the restaurant on the ground floor. When he got sick, though, the Taes took him up to their house in Riverdale.

Before I went uptown, I had stopped by Eljay's place. L.J. Koplin is a guy I know who services camera buffs. I dropped off the two photographs. On the back of Rose's picture was a bunch of letters and numbers. There was nothing on the back of Pansy's. Eljay swore he'd see what he could make of them and call me, and then I got the train to Riverdale.

At the Taes' house near Wave Hill, the old trees were already heavy with snow; in the forty-mile wind, the branches wheezed eerily. By the time I got inside, my feet were soaked. I left my shoes in the hall and went into Ricky's room. It was dark. It was always dark, the shades down. The light hurt his eyes, Ricky always said.

“Hello, Artie.”

In the corner, on a sofa, Rick was asleep, but out of the gloom came a voice that sent a shiver up and down my spine. It was a docile, girlish voice that said, “Hello, Artie.” I felt a light dry hand brush my face.

“Dawn?”

“Hello, Artie,” she said for the third time in the same pale whisper that was like a ghost talking. Ricky's sister, Dawn had come home from Hong Kong. I put my arms around her and she looked up and said plaintively, “Will he get well? Artie? Will Rick ever get well?”

I looked at Ricky. One leg hung heavily over the side of the sofa, as if he'd had a stroke. It had happened the October before last. I was in the middle of the Russian case in Brighton Beach and some hoods came after me. But Ricky was in my apartment and they whacked him instead. It should have been me. It was me that found him on the floor, twisted like a rag doll. We never caught the creeps who did it.

At St Vincent's, the medics said the best you could hope for was Rick would end up a vegetable. Persistent vegetative state, they called it. A bunch of celery, they meant. A cucumber. A Sunny Von Bulow. His brain was all screwed up. I had to call the Taes and tell them their handsome, brilliant son was a vegetable at twenty-eight. If they got lucky.

Later, Hillel Abramsky started sitting with him. He went on talking to Rick until he came out of the coma. Then the depression claimed him and now he stayed in this darkened room, barely moving, a TV flickering in the corner. His misery infected everyone in the house: Mrs Tae never listened to the Italian operas she loved and Mr Tae locked himself in his study and played solitary chess against a machine. Dawn, who usually radiated an almost glittering excitement about life, was drawn, ashy and very thin. She clung to me and I could feel her sharp bones.