Hot Poppies (31 page)

“Artie!”

Half an hour later, we were up to our neck in bubbles and I couldn't keep my hands off Dawn and I felt shitty about it, but not shitty enough to stop. Not scared enough, either, which was bad. Stupid.

Guys all lie about how crappy they feel, how the low hum of guilt keeps them up nights; maybe it does. Like me, they'd put up with the low hum—or the high howl—in exchange for this.

She ducked back under the water; I didn't know Dawn could do stuff like that with her tongue. When she surfaced, hair streaming, she reached over the edge of the tub, retrieved a joint she'd put in an ashtray on a stool, then sucked up the pot with long delicate drags. It smelled very sweet. She passed it to me and I sucked some up, too.

“Pete was lovely, at first, you know.” Dawn leaned back, arms behind her head. “He showed me around, he gave me all the money in the world for cars, clothes. We played games. Sometimes, we'd go out to dinners at Government House, I'd put my hand in the lap of some guy next to me, some ambassador, some cabinet minister from London, some princeling, and I'd look at Pete and he'd know what I was doing and he'd put his hand in some woman's lap, and we'd get off on each other. It was so much fun.” For a while she lay dreamily in the tub smoking the pot, then slowly she climbed out and, still naked, started drying her hair.

I scrambled out after her and grabbed one of the plush hotel robes. “So where is Pete?”

“Who knows? Who cares? China. Taiwan. North Korea. Cuba. Making deals. AKs from Deng's arms factory. New kinds of burgers. Sell. Buy. He's the new China man, my husband. The new comprador class, they call it. Like the men who brought the opium once upon a time.”

“What about the orphanage where I saw you?”

She picked up a towel and wrapped herself in it. Her tone sharpened up. “It's just a thing I do. I help out. Give some money. It's nothing. I don't want to talk about it.”

“Who are you so frightened of? Why are you holed up at Alice Wing's?”

“Stop interrogating me. I'm not afraid,” she said. “Peter doesn't like me working is all.” She was lying and she knew I knew.

“You ever hear of someone called the Debt Collector, Dawn? Is there an Eiffel Tower around here? Dawn?”

“What is this, the third degree? You miss being a cop? You want some handcuffs, darling? Would you like that?” Dawn went into the bedroom and I followed. Laughing now, she pushed me onto the bed. “Should I show you more of what I learned since I got here, Artie?”

She took off the towel, stretched out on my bed on her back and wrapped her legs around me. “Like this, Artie, darling? Or you want me to put the leather skirt back on?”

“What about the Eiffel Tower?” I said again, but she held me tighter and said, “Don't be silly, darling, everyone knows the Eiffel Tower is in Paris.”

She was like a drug. All I could think about was getting more. For a few hours after Dawn left, I slept badly, woke up, watched TV, slept again, then went downstairs to get my passport from the concierge. The visa wasn't ready.

“I'm sorry, sir,” he said. “It's not back yet. It will be back tonight.”

“I need it now. You said morning.”

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“What if I have to get to China?”

“I don't think it would be wise to go without your passport. You have a special need to get there today?”

Whatever answer I gave would be in a whispering gallery before long. “No. I'm just doing some sightseeing is all.”

“Would you care to look at some brochures? Various packages for visiting the mainland.” He handed me a sheaf of slick tourist brochures; I handed him some money. His expression was polite.

“So, you know anything about some Eiffel Tower?”

“Yes, of course. You'd be talking about Shenzhen. The theme park. Small-scale replicas of all the great buildings of the world. It wouldn't be of interest. It's mostly for Chinese tourists, sir. If you want to go, however, you can take a train, if you don't want a package tour or a private car. You would get off at Wo Lu and cross the border.”

Pansy had said, “Look for the Eiffel Tower.” I had thought it was a hallucination. “The Eiffel Tower is in Paris,” Dawn had said.

“Is that something everyone would know? About the Eiffel Tower? Locals, I mean.”

“Probably they would, sir. Yes.”

After that, I killed time waiting for Ringo Chen and Helen Wong and wondered why Dawn had lied to me. The whole business was beginning to stink from all the lies.

30

There was a stink of fish and sewage as Ringo pulled off the highway onto a feeder road that night. Most of the day, I'd done what I could, but it was scraps. Scraps from cops and bankers I talked to. Some from Chris Roy. Names of enforcers and errand boys, most of them in China beyond our reach. Anecdotes. Everyone was polite but distracted. Like Tolya said, Hong Kong was a town on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

In these godforsaken suburbs and villages around the border, hide-and-seek would be real easy for the creeps. You could almost taste the corruption that already leaked over that border, like fall-out from a nuclear melt-down.

“Christ, it really does reek,” I said to Ringo who was driving a snappy red BMW roadster.

Pollution was suspended on the air like a layer of grease and Ringo put up the top of his car. Helen Wong was in the back seat. “She does good work, but she offends a lot of people,” Ringo had said when I told him Helen was coming with us. I didn't care. Helen Wong knew her way around the New Territories.

Ten miles north of the hotel, the village of Tai Po was close enough to the coast to account for the fishy stench. We bumped around muddy roads looking for the address on Sonny's fax. Hulking jerry-built apartment buildings stood on tracts of raw ground so barren there weren't even weeds, only empty cans, dead dogs, and sewage. Forests had thrived here a few years earlier, Ringo said. It was the ugliest place I'd ever seen.

Leaning over my shoulder, Helen peered through the front window at a group of buildings. “I think this is it,” she said.

Ringo stepped on the brakes, I snuffed out my cigarette. We all got out of the car and I looked at my watch. I had lost all sense of time and place. Millions of people inhabited these buildings: they had kids, got married, went to work, celebrated their birthdays. They aspired, lived, died, but I couldn't see it. All I could see was air so thick you could chop it up with a meat cleaver. My own paranoia, the feeling things had gone off the rails, made it feel like a dead zone. The three of us walked towards one of the buildings. Only the whine of traffic kept us company.

“Tell me about the illegals at this end,” I said to Ringo.

“There's a million stories.” Ringo walked faster, eyes clicking right, then left. “Some go overland to the old Soviet bloc. Some go in container ships to America, which means six months at sea, packed in like sardines, or slaves. There's big unemployment on the mainland now. In certain regions, the government encourages the smugglers. It's an old story here,” Ringo said. “When the communists took over China, in '48, '49, the bravest boys would jump into Mirs Bay and race the sharks to Hong Kong. Later on, when there was bad famine, the Chinese let people go if they could bribe or finagle their way out. So they walked to the border. The Hong Kong guards played another kind of game. If you could make it through the barbed wire and avoid the guns, you could stay. Mirs Bay is a few miles from here,” he said, pointing into the dark. I thought of Henry Liu in Chinatown, who had raced those sharks.

“Hong Kong has always been a gateway, the first stop on an illegal's route to paradise. Look, we deal a case at a time, when we can; we try to put some connections together. It can take years.” He looked at the building in front of us and then at me. “We haven't got years any more. We've hardly got months. We haven't got anything.”

“But who's the money in Hong Kong? Where's the beef? Who's the Debt Collector?”

Ringo grimaced. “I don't know.”

“Quiet! Quiet!” Helen put her finger over her mouth as a pair of men passed us. Then she stopped. “It's here. I'm sure this is the building.”

The apartment was on the nineteenth floor, and while the elevator slipped and shuddered on its cables, I jammed my hands in my pockets, sweating.

Helen Wong found the door and knocked and an old man opened it. The two of them talked rapidly, gesticulating, pointing. Helen shook his hand and turned to me. “Come on. I know where to go,” she said and I had the chilling sense that it was all too easy, too smooth. Everyone was too accommodating. The old man shut the door but not before he took a good hard look at us.

“We'll walk.” Helen was in charge. We walked away from the building. Ten minutes later, we reached the site of a half-demolished building. Next to it was an old silver Windstream jacked up on concrete blocks. It must have been someone's vacation home once; now the trailer was webbed with dirt, rust, dead bugs.

“Let me go first.” She knocked on the trailer. Her knuckles made a hollow metallic noise. “I'm going to have a look.” She went inside, then stuck her head back out.

“It is the right place. Give me five minutes, then you come in.”

We squatted on a pile of tires near the trailer, me and Ringo, and smoked. From the near distance came the sound of sirens. “Your guys?”

“When there's trouble, like the riot yesterday in Central, we show our colors. We put up roadblocks. Papers get checked. But this never was a democracy.”

“How far to the Chinese border?”

“Five miles. About five.” Ringo tossed me a fresh pack of cigarettes, the Dunhills that his cousin Jerry always smoked.

“Sonny Lippert thinks he can pin something on Jerry, that he's screwed.”

Ringo looked at the sky, then at me, and said, “Good.”

On that pile of used tires on a piece of waste ground somewhere near China, we sat, smoking and staring out into the dark. A stray puppy leaped at us suddenly, but Ringo caught it and held it between his hands.

“I fixed it about the gun for you, Artie. For now.”

“Thanks. Thank you.”

“I wouldn't stick around too long. They know your name. If there are more riots, and there will be more riots, things will get very tough. Less than half of us Hong Kongers want reunification with the mainland. It's an empire of corruption over there.” He waved his hand in the direction of the border. “We are very skittish. We have to show our new masters we can police ourselves, or they'll do it for us. I won't be able to help you much after tonight. Certain Chinese dignitaries are expected. Cops like me are required, so my boss says. He already suspects me.”

“What of?”

“A touch of sedition, you could say.” He laughed bitterly. “I can't help you, Artie. I can't even help myself. I'm a lame duck.”

“How's that?”

“I'll be heading to Sydney before July.”

“With Mrs Chen? Is there a Mrs Chen?”

Ringo's tone turned scathing. “There is no Mrs Chen. That's why I'm leaving. Did you know that criminal sanctions on homosexuality were only lifted in 1991? That's why I came back from London. You know how the People's Republic treat gays? Do you?” He tossed his cigarette away. “God knows why I'm telling you this. Just don't stick around Hong Kong too long, Artie, not if things go bad. They have your name at headquarters.”

“I am Mrs Moy. My daughter was murdered in New York City one month ago plus one week.” The woman in the trailer sat on a ragtag sofa that obviously doubled as a bed, Helen Wong at her side. Helen did the translating and she was very deft. After a few minutes, I forgot she was there.

Mrs Moy held out her hand. In the other hand, she held a cigarette stiffly between two fingers. In jeans and a yellow T-shirt, Mrs Moy looked about forty. She would have been handsome if she ever smiled, but she never did. The trailer itself was cramped, the window covered with a dark plastic shade, the air stuffy, thick with exhaust fumes and fear.

I noticed Ringo's eyes were fixed on the door. “Please go on,” I said to Mrs Moy.

She was from the southern part of Fujian Province, she said. Her husband was a mechanic and she herself sewed when she could get the work. Sewing, she could make about fifteen cents a day.

She had had one child, but it was a daughter and she wanted a boy, so she tried again. She miscarried late and had to go to the hospital, she said, so it became known that she had defied the one-child policy and she was sterilized. Then her husband died of cancer.

The suffering seemed medieval and I said I was sorry for her troubles, but Mrs Moy said it was normal. There were tens of thousands of women like her. There were many women much worse off, she added, and put out the cigarette, then took another one from the crumpled pack in her lap.

In her village, several of her cousins had gone to America. Everyone saw how much money came back to the village. Mrs Moy's daughter had been married when she was very young and her husband had died. Now, the daughter wanted to go to America. Mrs Moy helped her put out the word that she was looking for a passage. In a matter of days, the snakeheads showed up and offered to deliver the girl to America for $35,000. With help from some relatives and from a money-lender, Mrs Moy raised $10,000. The moneylenders took forty per cent a year, but Mrs Moy said she had accepted that it was the down-payment for her daughter's journey to the Golden Mountain.

“We knew it was possible,” said Mrs Moy. “The snakeheads spread news of the Golden Mountain and how, if you went, you would find money almost on the streets. Girls who went sent back pictures of themselves with big cars. It was well known. We believed. There was nothing in the village, no work, nothing.” She paused. “We had to believe. And there were the pictures.”