Hot Poppies (8 page)

“Don't hold it like dirty Kleenex,” I said and she laughed. It was hot out and, when we got to the American Hotel for dinner, Lily realized I only kept my jacket on because I didn't want to walk around in a place like that with a gun showing. She just leaned over and said, “I'll take it,” and put the gun in her straw bag.

After I left Mike Rizzi's, I got a cab over to Gansevoort Street where Lily was working in a makeshift studio near the meat markets. Glasses on her nose, the red hair stuck behind her ears, she was typing stuff into a laptop like she was competing in the Olympics. She glanced up and blew me a kiss.

In her office, CNN was on a portable TV, the radio was playing and a guy I'd never met was leaning over her, gazing at the computer screen.

I like watching Lily work, and I leaned against the wall while a stream of people flowed in and out of her office, yakking, laughing, asking her questions. Currently she was helping set up a talk show for one of the cable channels. With luck, she said, she'd get to host it for a few months. It was what she did, and she was good, on screen and behind the cameras. She could write like a dream, but freelancing was pot luck. Before I met her, she'd been a correspondent for a network for a while, but she couldn't cut the corporate style. She was lousy at the politics, she admitted to me once. “I used to burst out laughing during the strategy sessions. I couldn't keep a straight face when they wanted to do hard news about the possibility of angels. So I became the in-house wiseacre.”

In the end, she had quit because she got scared, first in East Berlin back before the Wall came down, then in Colombia where she just missed getting blown up. Enough, she had said and came home.

“You want to eat something?” I said. But Lily shook her head, introduced me to the guy who leaned over her again and punched something into the computer, then disappeared.

“We're heading for a total white-out,” Lily said. “We are trapped in some all-time awesome weather system, and there's maybe another storm coming in after it. Sixty inches! More!! All the weather guys say so, Al Roker, Storm Field. Storm says it is mighty big.” She stretched her arms over her head. “You look a little wan, Artie, you OK? I missed you last night, doll.”

“I'm fine,” I said. “Honest. I just needed to see you.” I wasn't going to let some two-bit hoods with a spike screw up my life. The way you got a regular life was that you just let stuff be.

“Lily!” A skittish demanding voice summoned her from the hall.

“Gotta go,” she whispered. “Some of these guys you got to remind them to breathe. I'll see you later. Meet me over at my place if you want,” she said and tossed me her keys.

“My cat is dead, OK? I got four more and they almost froze to death also, so gimme some space, Artie, OK. I'll do what I can for you.” Eljay Koplin was next to nuts when I got up to his studio on Carmine Street. The place stank of cat, the shelves sagged under old camera stuff, but Eljay knew what he was doing. An orange cat, a nasty piece of work, slithered across my ankles.

“I got a dead girl,” I said, but I knew, for Eljay, it didn't equal a single hair on a cat's ass.

“Like I said, Artie, I'll do what I can.” He turned over the picture of Pansy. “Not with this one. This one's a Polaroid. I can't do nothing with this one. This doesn't leave any tracks,” he said and gave it back to me and turned to Rose's picture which interested him. He shoved his glasses up on his forehead and perused it like Kuntsler in court reading evidence. “This is something else.”

“Why?”

“See the numbers on the back? Before this kind of system, if you had one print, it didn't mean shit. It was impossible to track. This leaves tracks. These numbers, see, it's a new system, Advanced Photographic System, they call it. APS. They all got it, Kodak, Fuji. It's got a bunch of crucial identifiers. Time and date. Conditions under which it got taken. A lab ID number that would allow you to track it back to the individual lab that did the processing. A number of the film cassette. You can program this thing to print out Happy Birthday, if you want, that kind of shit.”

Bingo, I thought, and I said to Eljay, “Get me the lab.”

“I'll do what I can. There's a million tons of shit falling from the sky out there, maybe you didn't notice, Artie. A lot of places are shut down.”

I handed him the phone.

“There's another thing with this system.” He waved the picture of Rose. “It allows you to take the same shot in three different formats.”

“What formats?”

“Think of it as normal, widescreen or extra widescreen. Look, you could have a picture of this girl with the car normal size, the way it is. But if you set it for widescreen, you'd get a different version, more panoramic. You would cut off the top and bottom, though.”

“But you could see something on the sides you didn't see in the first picture.”

“Right on.” Eljay picked up a cat and made purring noises in its ear.

“Get me the fucking lab, Eljay, OK? Just get on the phone and get me the lab. Now. Please.”

The address Eljay got me was on Ludlow Street. It was a shabby four-storey building on a street that had been Jewish for most of the century but was Chinese now. On the ground floor was a souvenir shop, the window crammed with nylon Ninja outfits and Hong Kong girlie mags. And inside, filling up most of the cramped space, as out of place in the black hat and coat as a medieval holy man, was Hillel Abramsky.

His back was to me, but I could see his body shake with rage. He towered over the minuscule Chinese owner, who had a face hard and prickly as a lichee and was waving his hands. Even through the dirty glass window, you could feel these were a couple of men seized up with hate.

Without any warning, Hillel turned and strode out of the shop, the owner behind him, indifferent to the snow, fury driving him. Hillel moved fast, not seeing me, not seeing anyone, just running, running. A few hundred yards away, the street slick with ice, he crashed to the ground. The old man stood over him, yelling. I persuaded the old guy to beat it. Then I helped Hillel up.

Black coat wet, beard speckled with snow, he clutched a string shopping bag like a prop.

“You're a long way from home, Hil.”

“I'm on my way to Orchard Street.” Hurriedly, he looked around. “OK? Shopping. Some things for the children,” he added, but he didn't look at me.

“Wet night.”

“It's not night, not yet. Trust me, Artie, OK. I am here to do some shopping.”

“I'll walk you,” I said.

“No, that's OK. I know you're trying to help me get some answers about the dead girl and I been thinking that maybe I got you into something that it wasn't right to ask. I was going to call you.” Hillel kept moving. I walked alongside him.

In some way I didn't understand, Hillel Abramsky was messed up in this whole thing. Was it that the Chinese had eaten up the neighborhood? That his uncle had to sell the shop on Canal Street? That some hood was shaking him down?

“Go home, Artie,” he said. “Forget the whole thing. Forget I asked you, please. You don't owe me.”

“I'm not sure I can do that, Hillel,” I said, but he walked away from me. I followed him. I saw him turn into Essex Street, not Orchard like he said. What was there to take him to Essex Street? Abramsky was lying about something.

“The big man in the black coat, what did he want?” I said to the Chinese guy in the souvenir shop on Ludlow Street.

“The Jew?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't know. He was like a crazy man. I saw him running in and out of buildings all along the street. He said, Did I sell cameras? Did I sell film? I tell him no. No camera. No film. I say, It's snowing, go home. Forget film.”

“This number 218?”

“What if it is?”

“There's some kind of photo lab in this building?”

“I told you, like I told the Jew, no, no film, no camera, no lab, OK?” Like Hillel, the old man lied.

There was a lab in the building all right. It was on the second floor and it was shut up tight as a drum, tight as Jerry Chen's little mouth. I tried it. I banged on the door. No one came. I considered breaking in but it's not one of my skills and anyhow, I was out of the loop. I would catch major static if I broke down a door in the middle of Chinatown.

Outside I ran for a lone yellow cab that rattled down the street, but someone else got it and anyhow, something caught my eye. It was a shop window. The array of weapons took my breath away.

There were swords, broadswords, hooked sickle swords, swords in fancy cloisonné sheaths. There were spears, double headed, triple headed, Ninja spikes and a Ninja fan that could slice your head off with a snappy flick of the wrist like a girl cooling herself with a fancy paper fan. Grappling hooks were big, it appeared, so were blow guns and a thing called a golden melon hammer, not to mention the assortment of axes, all of them neatly labeled. What really had me glued to this window of horrors, though, was a rake with nine sharp teeth. It resembled a large-scale version of the multiple-blade spike that was maybe used to rip up Rose's face and intended for my head. Could Hillel Abramsky put a thing like that to a woman's face and rake away her skin? Christ, I thought.

Finally, the cold creeping through me, I backed off from the shop and got a cab to take me to the restaurant near the Seaport. Pansy was out. The owner was out and it was empty except for a part-time cook and two delivery guys. The guys sat at one of the three tables, complaining how the rich were the shittiest tippers in New York. There was no girl, they said. No girl named Pansy Loh, the guys said, but maybe they didn't understand me. Maybe they didn't. Or maybe everyone was telling lies.

I let myself into Lily's apartment. Someone was there ahead of me. Someone was in the apartment, padding across the living-room carpet towards me, and I felt for the gun, the old .32 I'd got out of my drawer the night before, and then a woman toweling her hair emerged and I felt like a jackass.

“Lily forgot to tell you I was here. Oh, God, I'm sorry. I'm Babe Vanelli.” She held out her hand. “I live across the street and my hot water's on the fritz. Heat too.”

I held up the bottle of wine I'd brought. “Lily's on her way. You want a drink?”

We were standing in the hall of Lily's apartment. To the left was the kitchen with the swing doors, and Babe went to get some glasses while I went into the living room. Lily's living room is yellow, it's full of comfortable overstuffed furniture, the shelves are jammed with books, the walls with pictures and photographs. The cream linen shades were up that night so, through the windows, you could see the snow like lace curtains. On the upright piano was a glass vase full of yellow-and-red-striped tulips.

I put Sarah Vaughan on the CD player. Babe brought the glasses and curled up on the sofa. I opened the wine and sat in one of the armchairs. In my pocket I found a painkiller and swallowed it and the pain in my legs eased. The apartment was warm and bright and, for a while, Babe brushed her wet hair and we sipped our wine and listened to the music without talking at all.

“Better?” she said. “You arrived looking like a guy who just walked away from a plane crash.”

“Much better.”

Babe put her bare feet on the low glass coffee table; with the back of her hand, she wiped away the red stain the wine left on her upper lip.

I knew something about Babe. Beth Pressman Vanelli, known as Babe, sometimes Baby, was Lily's oldest friend. She and Babe grew up together in New York. After school, Babe, who married young, dumped Frankie Vanelli, as he styled himself, and headed west. She planned to be in movies. She wound up in make-up. When Lily worked a talk show, if Babe was free, she did the guests. We had never really met, though. Babe was always on the move.

“You do make-up, don't you? Lily says you're some kind of genius.”

“Mostly I do movies now. For Lily, I'll do a talk show. She loves for me to work them over before she does an interview. I let them look down my shirt, you know? Then I wrap this gold towel around them and I whisper, ‘Gold is for STARS.' They all fall for it. Put that out,” she ordered as I lit up a cigarette. “It's bad for the skin, hon. You got nice skin, too. Tight. You could use some sleep, though.”

“It's not always an option.”

“In this town, hon, looking lousy is never an option.”

Wet tendrils of hair curled over Babe's ears and, like so many women in New York, where there are more great women than anywhere else on earth, Babe could have been thirty-five or fifty. The three top buttons of her white shirt were undone and her skin was still damp. When she leaned forward to put her glass down, I could see she didn't wear a bra and the tits were spectacular: big, soft, the nipples hard. A smell of talcum powder and Chanel #5 came off her skin and the black jeans were so tight she must have put the powder on her thighs to get into them. I wanted to put my hands inside the tight black jeans and run them along those powdered thighs.

“Gimme some more of that wine.” She held out her glass. “Hon, I'm fifty-three years old. And I'm pretty good at what I do. I do the gold towel thing, it works. You know what Richard Nixon once told me? He said it was thirty-five years since he had enjoyed conjugal relations with his late wife, Pat. ‘Conjugal relations', that's what he called it. Lily says watching me make up some guy is like watching people have sex.”

“I can believe it.” The wine went down easy. In the kitchen I found another bottle and opened it. Flirting was Babe Vanelli's automatic mode and I was happy to fall in, drinking the wine, wiping out the worries, waiting for Lily.