Hot Poppies (32 page)

It took six months. She took the bus to Fuzhou with her daughter and saw her leave for the airport for a flight to Guangzhou where she was to receive a passport with her name and picture in it and then to board a ship. “After eight months, I became desperate,” said Mrs Moy. “Then I heard she had arrived. I was called to the home of a wealthy cousin who had a telephone and she was on the phone. ‘Hello, Mommy,' she said. ‘I'm in America.' She was at the Golden Mountain.” For the first time, Mrs Moy smiled. Very softly, she said, “I was happy.”

Ringo stayed at the door. I sat. Helen produced Cokes and passed them around and then Mrs Moy resumed her story.

From America there were phone calls from time to time. And although her daughter sent less money than she had hoped for, Mrs Moy believed she was doing well. Until one morning, she was summoned to her cousin's to take a call from a man in New York City. Her daughter had been kidnapped and was being held.

“Four hours,” Mrs Moy said. “They gave me four hours to raise ten thousand dollars. Or they would kill her. They put her on the phone and she cried, ‘Help me, Mommy.' How could I help her? Where would I find so much money so fast?”

Miraculously, the girl was released and Mrs Moy received several phone calls from her to say she was well and happy and that she had, in fact, met a man. But Mrs Moy had a premonition. It would happen again. It had happened to other families. The snakeheads had become greedy. The price was going up.

“I had to do something. My brother had come here to Tai Po years ago, he had fled the communists and he offered to help me. So I became an immigrant, too.”

For ten dollars, Mrs Moy got herself smuggled into Tai Po in a fishing boat. She kept house for her brother who was prepared to help with money if it became necessary. She let her daughter know how to find her, but no one else.

“One evening my brother's phone rang suddenly. I wasn't expecting it, It was the news that she was dead. No one even called for the money. I had the money ready this time, but no one called me. They killed her without even calling me.” Silently, she wept. “After that I still had to pay the moneylenders. Even after she was dead they came to me for the money. They came to collect.”

I didn't ask because I already knew, so it was Ringo who said, “What was your daughter's name?”

“She was called Rose. Her name was Rose.”

For a few minutes, Mrs Moy sobbed. Then, from her pocket, she took a picture and handed it to me. It was a duplicate of the picture of Rose I knew by heart—smiling face, pink jacket, the white car. The story that began on Hillel Abramsky's floor on 47th Street ended on the other side of the world in a rusty trailer on a derelict tract of land in China.

Even through her tears, Mrs Moy watched me. When she spoke again it sounded like a script. “But there are bad people everywhere. Rose met some bad people in New York. I thought to myself, if only the officials back home had known, if only they knew in time. At least she made it to the Golden Mountain,” she said.

I turned to Helen. “Is that Mrs Moy's brother in the apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Why doesn't she stay there?”

“She says she's frightened of being trapped on the nineteenth floor. She is scared of heights. She feels safer out here. But she can't stay.” Helen helped Mrs Moy gather up her bag and the picture of Rose. “They're tearing all this down. I'll take her back. I'll talk to her. I'll meet you at the car.”

The women set off from the trailer before I could stop them.

“What's her brother's job?” Ringo called out.

Helen turned around. “He's a local official. Quite rich. Quite important. I won't be long,” she added, and disappeared into the dark wasteland.

Something was wrong with the whole set-up.

“Ringo?”

He fastened the door of the trailer with a padlock.

“Ringo, she's told that story before. More than once.”

“That's what I thought. You got this address from Sonny Lippert, didn't you?”

“Yeah?”

“How did Sonny get it?”

“I don't know. How did she expect to help her daughter if she didn't tell anyone else? How did the money-lenders know where to find her? What's going on here?”

We were already running. “Didn't you wonder why she's still a believer? Why she laid the blame off on bad men in America? I thought, if only Stalin knew. They used to say it on the way to the Gulag. If only Stalin knew . . . when Stalin had ordered the whole thing.”

“Or Mao. Christ.” Ringo ran faster. “She
had
told the story before. It's an old Chinese trick. And it only makes sense if the smugglers and the officials are complicit.”

I tried to catch my breath. “What trick?”

The soft terrain pulled at my feet, the mud and shit pouring into my shoes as we ran.

Ringo was breathing hard, talking fast while we ran. “In the story the officials are good. It's only a few bad people who are to blame. Usually foreign dogs. Say some Western reporter is nosing around, or a cop from New York like you. You wheel in Mrs Moy. She pours out her heart. Who wouldn't believe her? She is telling the truth, more or less. The foreigners are satisfied. The reporter writes the story, people in the West are shocked, but nothing happens. The story goes away. You're right. She has told it before and her brother is an official. It's a set-up.”

“So people know we're here. Us. Helen.”

“Christ, yes!” was all Ringo said. Gun in hand, he reached the apartment building ahead of me. “Where is she? Where's Helen?”

When we found Helen Wong in the playground behind the building, she was hardly breathing, her face covered with blood.

“Mrs Moy said she would go upstairs alone.” Helen spoke haltingly. “Mrs Moy. Said her brother didn't like strangers. I let her. I came out. They were . . . waiting . . .”

“Stay with her. I'll get help.” Ringo ran.

I was alone with Helen, her head in my lap. “Animals. Waiting. Held my arms,” she gasped. “Used my face . . . a punching bag. Bare hands. A knife. Knives.”

“Don't talk.”

“Have to tell you . . .”

“Later.”

There was blood everywhere. Helen's white shirt was sodden with fresh blood.

“Artie?”

“What is it?” I leaned down. Her breathing became more irregular as she whispered, “Unstable . . . Dawn . . . dangerous,” and then it stopped completely.

All I could do was sit on the raw ground in the dark, the ugly buildings looming over us, and hold her hand, but by the time Ringo appeared and an ambulance came, Helen was dead.

“She's dead, Sonny. You happy? She's fucking dead.” I was yelling into the phone from my hotel room. I told him about Rose's mother and Helen's death. “Who gave you the address? Who?”

“Pansy gave it to me.”

“Where is she?”

“She's still in the hospital. But she's started talking. That's what I was waiting for. As soon as she started talking, I got the mother's phone number and we traced the address. So we know that the contacts run from Fuzhou into Hong Kong. We know that for sure now. We got Pansy's brother, too. He was the enforcer, he ran the errand boys in Chinatown.”

“Yeah, and I bet he's already got one of OJ's lawyers on the case. Was it really worth it, Sonny? Was it worth another woman dying?”

31

In the morning, the invitation was under my door. It was from Alice Wing for the races and a cocktail party beforehand. I had promised and then I forgot. It was Wednesday. I called Alice Wing and thanked her and asked for Dawn. She picked up the phone. “I'll see you tonight,” I said.

Flirting, she said she wasn't sure and did I really want her; I could barely keep from snarling. “Be there. OK? Dawn?”

Then I did the one thing I had resisted. I called the Taes. I almost fell off the chair when Ricky answered.

“Ricky? Rick, is that you?” I was shouting.

“Yeah,” he said. “I'm better, Artie. I'm getting better. It shook me up, Dawn leaving, you know? It really got me that I wasn't here for her. She's OK, isn't she? You're there for her if she needs you, aren't you?” he said and so I couldn't ask him what I needed to ask. I couldn't ask if he knew what his sister really was.

“Good,” I said. “Everything's good. I'll be home soon. You take care, Rick. I'll be back soon and we'll go raise some hell.”

The races would be perfect. I wanted a confrontation with Dawn in a public place because I didn't trust myself alone with her. I
had
to know if it was her—the Debt Collector. Then I could leave her to her husband or Ringo Chen and I could go home. There was a late flight out of Hong Kong. I reserved a seat on it. Then I packed.

To clear my head and get death off my brain, I got a ferry to Cheung Chau Island about an hour from Hong Kong and found a café where I ordered a beer and watched the banners on the fishing boats in the harbor. It was a gorgeous day. I inhaled some unnaturally clean air; the sun felt good on my face. At the next table, an old man, a crumpled straw hat on his head, sat sketching the harbor. We got to talking—he was British—and he ordered a beer and invited me to join him. He had been in Hong Kong for sixty-five years, he said. He was a professor of some arcane form of Chinese art.

“When I first arrived, no Englishman spoke Chinese,” he said. “Not even the government.” I asked if he would be leaving when the Chinese came. “Where would I go?” He turned his face to the sun. “Where on earth would I go?” We finished our beers and I mentioned Pete Leung.

“I knew the father,” he said. “I knew the grandfather. The Leungs were very raffish men,” he said. “Adventurers, all of them. But decent in their way and extraordinarily charming.”

For a while we chatted. The colorful banners snapped merrily in the breeze, the sun got hotter and it was like balm after the nightmare with Helen Wong. When I got up to go, the old man asked me my name. “Did you know that Sun Yat Sen had a bodyguard named Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen?” he said. He tipped his hat, saluted me with his Chinese newspaper and watched me as I walked away towards the ferry.

I wasn't any “Two-Gun” Cohen, but I had fallen for Hong Kong. The water was full of sampans and yachts, cargo tugs and container ships, not to mention the ferry boats. I loved the ferries, loved sitting on the water, the sun on my face. I took off my jacket.

Hong Kong. Fragrant Harbour. The Pearl River Estuary. China. The romance of it. The crime. As far back as I could remember, China was everything exotic to us Soviet kids. And big. Mao was never afraid of nuclear war because he could afford for millions of Chinese to die.

Whatever went on in Chinatown in New York was only part of the game. If you looked at it from China, we were only bit players.

It had never been a murder with a plot you could puzzle out or piece together. Rose's murder was a by-product, so was the dead woman at the sports complex, and Babe Vanelli. Helen Wong. Sonny Lippert could arrest the errand boys, he could fry the enforcers like Pansy Loh's brother, he could hammer half the criminal element in Chinatown. It was only the tip. The ties to China were indestructible. And China was endless. It could squander millions of people and survive.

But where did I fit in? Sure, I went to help out Hillel that morning the blizzard began. Sure, I found myself with some kind of stake in Pansy's survival. It wasn't enough. Neither was this Hot Poppy, Dawn's drug of choice. Almost no one had heard of it. Not Sonny Lippert or Ringo Chen, only a Russian stripper who lied for money and a pathetic ex-spook like Chris Roy.

Dawn had been in New York. Now, she was in Hong Kong. Everywhere I went she was just ahead of me, or just behind. She was ambitious, she loved money and power. Dawn was a junkie, and maybe the drug made her a killer.

I thought back. Had Dawn really been in love with me years before, like she said? Wasn't it something she invented? She knew she could divert me. She knew she could seduce me and I would let her. Had let her. The Leungs were adventurers, the old man had said. Adventurers but not killers. It was Dawn I had to confront.

The ferry docked and I went back to the hotel feeling that the morning in Cheung Chau had been a brief lull before, one way or another, all hell broke loose.

“Hi, Artie? Pete Leung. Lunch?” I was in my room at the hotel when the call came. “I hear you've been looking for me. Look, I'm really sorry, pal. It's been a hell of a week. Lunch? Drinks? Or see you at the races perhaps?”

I got ready for the races. I didn't call Sonny Lippert before I went. Ringo Chen was busy. I was on my own. Anyway, Dawn was mine.

I found her in a private room at the Happy Valley Racecourse. About fifty people swirled around Alice Wing who was the host of the party. Dressed to the nines, smiling, chattering about parties and horses, everyone drank pink Champagne. There were faces I had seen at Dawn's club. “How are you? Are you enjoying yourself? Are you going to pick a winner? Will you come to the ball?” I smiled back at all the hospitable, beautiful, charming people and all the time I was looking for Pete Leung.

“You came.” In a yellow silk suit and diamond earrings, Dawn put her arm around my shoulder, kissed me and clinked her glass against mine. “Couldn't resist me, eh? Good.” I smiled back. I couldn't show my hand until I had some kind of evidence. I told her Helen Wong was dead. Dawn barely said a word. She was a cold fish.

“Let it all be, Artie,” she said.

“I can't do that.” Just then, Tolya entered the room. Adjusting his blazer, he strolled towards me. Dawn walked away.