Hot Poppies (6 page)

“Art, you listening? This girl did not buy it from the blade. She was fucking strangled first. Piano wire,” said Chen. Then he waved at a waitress. “Where's my fucking coffee?”

“What are we talking about here?”

“You tell me.” He held out a red and gold box of Dunhills.

“I thought we were talking about Dawn Tae. I thought that's why you called me.”

“You called me. I left the message and you called,” Chen said, as if the distinction mattered. The waitress brought coffee and toast and Chen buttered a piece.

The chairs were fake black lacquer, the napkins stiff pink linen, the plants green and dusted. Trapped by the storm that had dumped two feet of snow on the city overnight, disgruntled tourists drank orange juice and sulked. Three Chinese guys in Armani shouted into portable phones; the oldest wore his cashmere coat over his shoulders and smoked a stinky little cigar.

Chen put down his toast, glanced at the old man's coat and said appreciatively, “Nice. Vicuna.”

“Whatever you say.” My legs were killing me.

“Look, man,” Chen said. “I can't fucking help you with Dawn Tae. I can't stalk her. Billy Tae knows my uncle. He thinks that's how it works, the old way, favors, associations. I don't have the time and if I did I wouldn't fucking do it. If the old boys think she has a problem with some kind of shit, let them put her into Betty Ford. Look, I was in school in England with Pete Leung for a while. At the end of the day, it's Pete's bloody business. Ask me, he could fucking slap her around a little.”

Chen's accent was a mess, so was the lingo. He'd grown up in London, he told me, he worked there a while. He came to New York, became a citizen. He talked part New York, part Brit. The swearing got on my nerves. Some days, it's like the whole city has Tourette's syndrome, but Chen's mouth was world class. Shit-for-brains, he said, shit a brick, shit-scared, shithead, shit and derision, whatever that meant, and all of it in the first few minutes after we met. Shit this, shitty that. Fuck fuck fuck. It didn't mean anything. I swore I'd clean up my own filthy mouth. Fat chance.

“So how come we're talking, if we're not talking about Dawn?”

“They told me to call you. I'm a good chap. I'm the fucking cop prince of Manhattan. Also, I knew your name.”

“Yeah? How's that?”

“The Abramsky thing,” he said. “There's a dead fucking girl. Chinese. When there's Chinese shit, they call me. I'm Chinese but I'm not Chinatown if you get the drift. I'm special squad. I'm not part of the shit that goes down here where no one trusts a cop and the cops gotta pay attention to all kinds of bullshit from the family associations. Abramsky got lucky, I was in town. I took his rolodex. You were in it. I had heard the name. Out of the blue the bleeding Taes ring me up. I think, fuck-a-duck, everywhere I go, it's bloody Artie Cohen.”

“Small world,” I said.

“I know a lot of people.”

“So let's talk about the girl. Who was she?”

“Some fucking miserable illegal. There's loads of money in illegals down here, thirty, thirty-five grand per. You put three hundred in a boat, that's nine mill plus add-ons. For a single load. We're talking two billion a year. It's big. Bigger than anything around here. Bigger than dope. But you know all that.”

I didn't answer.

“Where you been, Art?”

The check came and I reached for it, but Chen tossed a few bills on the table, changing the game so I owed him. He got out of his chair and looked at me like I didn't interest him that much; maybe I didn't.

Jerry Chen was slick. He pulled on the silky white parka, snapped the pockets, zipped the sleeves, Velcroed the front panel, slid the cigarettes and the lighter into his jeans, put on the shades, smoothed the high-priced hair and extracted a pair of cashew-colored suede gloves. “Let's take a walk,” he said.

On Lafayette we set off towards Canal Street, Chen walking in the snow-covered streets like he owned them. Twenty-four hours after the snow started, the stuff was still falling from the sky.

“So who do you think let her into your pal's place?” Chen watched his reflection in the shop windows. I saw mine next to him. Chen was wired. I was the color of tripe. I needed sun.

“It was 47th Street. Could be it had to do with diamonds.”

“Fuck that shit,” he snorted. “This ain't
Breakfast at Tiffany's
, trust me, Art. I don't know why she was fucking dropped at your pal's. I don't know. These girls never fucking leave Chinatown. Was it some kind of dumping ground? Somebody used it to hide from the wife? From the cops? Who?”

“Where we going, Jerry?” I could see he hated it when I called him Jerry.

“Looking around.” He strolled into a shop that sold ginseng and herbs. Chen prodded some old-fashioned scales, saw the balance was off, but he only shrugged. “I'm not some beat cop,” he mumbled to me. From behind the door to a back room came an incessant clicking. Click click click. It could drive you crazy. Chen said, “You hear it?”, hammered on the door and shouted, “Police.”

The door opened. Chen sauntered in. A man with a frightened face peered at him through rimless glasses and folded his arms anxiously. At a table, two other men played with the clicking tiles. A refrigerator stood in the corner, there was a chipped stove and Chen lifted the cover off a pot that sat on it and looked in. Flipping through the pages of a notebook, he tossed it back on the table, looked slowly around, said, “Just checking,” and smiled; the power turned him on, he got off on his own performance.

I didn't tell Chen I had a picture of the dead girl, of Rose. Didn't show him the spike I had carefully bagged in plastic. We were still in the getting-to-know-you period. I didn't like what I was getting to know—he was too volatile, too angry. I wasn't ready to share.

“You get any of her prints off Hillel's place?”

Chen didn't bother answering.

“Why Abramsky?” I said. “Why his shop?”

“He's
your
friend, for fuck's sake. You tell me. The question is, who opened the fucking door? You think somebody who knows Abramsky knew the girl?”

“That's insane.”

“Why's it insane? Jews don't fancy girls?”

All along the street, shopkeepers shoveled mountains of snow; the scrape of the shovels was grating. My head hurt. We passed a fish stall where I saw a couple of Haitian women bargaining. In her arms, one of them held a large pink and silver fish like a baby. A fish to appease Gede, I figured, the god of misrule, god of good times. Smart.

Chen was still laughing at his own bad joke when a kid darted ahead of us and forced him to move to the right. Chen went for the kid, pulling him up by the collar, the two of them screaming. There's something chilling about the angry babble of hate in a language you don't understand. Then Chen smacked the kid hard and shoved him away, but not before I saw the reddish quiff of hair.

“Shitheel.” Chen's mouth twitched. He dusted off his white jacket where the kid left sooty fingerprints. “Fujianese,” he added.

“What's that?”

“You been on vacation the last fifteen years, Art? Most of the illegals coming in the last ten, fifteen years are Fujianese. Most of the smugglers, too. They call 'em snakeheads.”

“Where's this place?”

“It's a shit-poor province opposite the Straits of Taiwan. The other Chinese hate 'em, they consider Fujian the armpit of China, a real redneck cracker kind of a place. Also, down here in Chinatown, the Fujianese want to grab some of the power away from the old guard. The Fujianese are pro-mainland. The old guys are Cantonese who still hate the commies. All the kidnappings, the extortion, the murder you been hearing about, it's all Fujianese. The kids are fucking feral, a lot of them.”

“What did he say?”

Chen didn't answer. He was schmoozing a guy selling fresh lichees off a stall.

“You don't speak the language. You don't fucking speak it, do you, Jer?”

“Fuck's the difference? I speak some. Enough. I can get by when I have to. These people got four thousand dialects. Anyway, speaking that shit is pretty fucking FOS,” he said. “From the other side, Art,” he added. “I got a dead girl to deal with Art, OK, so you want to talk or you don't want to talk?”

At the corner was a bakery, the windows piled with buns covered in pink sprinkles. Chen sauntered inside and I followed. At a table in the window, he ordered coffee and some of the buns. They weighed a ton.

“The girl had a name,” I said.

Chen feigned some interest. “You been doin' a little spot of investigation,” he said sarcastically. “You been over to see some of Rosie's friends?”

We ate the buns and danced around each other on the issue of the sweatshop; I knew Chen had been there. He probably guessed I had, too, so I told him.

“Some dump, huh, Art? They all are. But business is good, you know? You remember that celeb chick who did the big boo hoo on TV over the fact her schmates were made in some shitty sweatshop? All the garmentos do it, every designer name you ever heard of, one way or the other. Piece goods. Labels. Knock offs.” Leaning forward, Chen's voice was quiet and hard as steel. “The rag trade died in this city by the seventies, same time a lot of illegals start coming over, so someone smells the coffee. All these ills arriving. Spics. Slants. Pay 'em a buck an hour, pay 'em a dime an hour, they take what they can get. Boom time for the sweatshop business. Retailers buy from manufacturers, manufacturers sub-contract out with the shops, they pay slave wages, if they pay. The garmentos say, ‘It's not my fault, darling. I don't hire them.' What the hell? I'm no bleeding bloody heart, am I? They do what they do.”

He wiped pink sprinkles off his lip, swallowed the rest of his coffee and looked out at the snow. “Art, I got to rescue my car before any more of this shit piles up. You want to walk me?”

“Whose side are you on, Jerry?” I said.

“Mine,” he said.

We walked. He kept the patter going, impressing on me his knowledge of sweatshops, gangs, tongs, internecine war, Chinese gang relations with Vietnamese, Jamaicans, even the Russians, God help me. In Jerry Chen's head, every immigrant that ever lived was a criminal or a victim. Except him.

Near headquarters where his car was parked Chen tossed a five to a kid who had been watching it, pushed some snow off the hood and opened the door. As far as I knew, you couldn't buy Jeremy Chen, but he liked it when people backed off; he liked the fear in their eyes. “Get in,” he said. I got in. I had wondered how a cop got a Coco Katz jacket and a Porsche, but the car was on its last legs, it was practically held together with string. And style. I had to give him that. Chen had style. He passed me some cigarettes.

“So you want to tell me about the girl, Art? You thinking of doing that?”

“What girl?”

“You fucking well know which girl. Pansy, she calls herself.”

“And if I did meet her?”

“Don't let her work you over, man. She's a tough cookie,” Chen said. “And she's mine. I want her, Art. I got something coming up next Monday that could put away a few of the bad guys. I want her to testify. Tell her that for me, if you see her.” He paused. “And you will see her, won't you? What is it with you? You wanna do her?”

“Leave her the fuck alone.”

“Or?”

“I'll let you know, Jer.” I opened the door.

“You don't know shit about Chinatown,” he said. “We're top of the pops crimewise now that the Italians are toast. When we Chinkies only preyed on each other, no one gave a rat's ass. When we started selling smack outside Chinatown, people took a view. The City took a view.” He paused, looked me up and down and said, “You got some taste, Art. Tell me what you think of the jacket.” He stroked the white fabric of his own sleeve.

It seemed to matter a lot, so I said, “Nice. Yeah. Very nice.”

“Yeah. Well, keep in touch. And remember, we're secretive bastards. No matter how many of us come on over from Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei—open banks, buy houses in Scarsdale, go to Princeton—we look different. You can't make us out, can you? We are the yellow peril, and we are one out of every goddamn five people in New York City. Babe, we are the inscrutable East. You are going to need my help, Art.”

Through the window, I looked out at the snowscape, pristine except for the clutter of human beings. I closed the car door. Chen was probably right. I wouldn't give him Pansy, though.

Taking the bag with the spike out of my pocket, I tossed it on the dashboard.

“What do you make of this?”

He picked up the bag. “Where'd you get it?”

“Some piece of crap tossed it at me.”

Thoughtfully, Chen turned it over. He was impressed. “This is scary stuff. These pricks are pros. You can't buy a thing like this outside Hong Kong. You want me to check the prints? See if they match anything we found at Abramsky's? They throw a thing like this at your face, you can lose an eye.”

“Yeah? Also, there's a warehouse.” I told him the address. “You could check out the freight elevator.”

Chen picked some imaginary lint off the impeccable jacket and said, “I'll do what I can.”

“They took my wallet. I figured it was a mugging.”

“Screw that,” he said. “It wasn't a mugging. It was a message. A hit.”

“I don't get it, Jerry. You run me a laundry list of every fucking thing, smugglers, diamonds, sweatshops, illegals, extortion, murder, hitmen, so which the fuck is it? Which?”