Like a special perfume, she wears the city in her skin, has its confidence, style, class. It’s the air she breathes, and she reminds me of my dreams. When I met her, I felt I’d sailed into a safe harbor.
Outside the window, weird fat flakes of snow were failing very fast. I love New York when it’s cold and sharp and the air has that awesome clarity, when you lie in bed and watch the day come up and do its tricks with light all over again.
Half asleep now, I drifted. Maybe it’s the only Russian thing left in me, loving the winter. It’s twenty-five, twenty-six years since I left Moscow, the asshole of world cities. Skating in Gorky Park is one of my good memories. That last winter, a daring park apparatchik put Domenico Meduno doing “Nel Blu del Pinto del Blu” on the sound system. We bribed him to put a Beatles number on and our parents caught a lot of shit for it, but my mother, who always laughed at the system, laughed even harder. A long time ago, I thought, trying to settle into the warm pocket of sheets next to Lily’s back. But I was restless.
Lying there, I tried to reclaim the guy I’d been a couple of hours earlier. We’d been good, me and Lily, ever since I quit. Mellow is what I’d been feeling right up until Hillel called. I tried to get it back. I didn’t want to tell Lily about the dead girl. My last case, the one in Brighton Beach, had scared the shit out of her, and I figured if I stayed off the job, if I finally quit, maybe we could have a life together. But maybe I was kidding myself.
“What’s going on?” Lily opened her pale blue-gray eyes, rubbed them, switched the TV on. “You OK? Artie?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing much.”
“Who was on the phone before?”
“Hillel Abramsky. He needed a favor.”
“What kind of favor?” The voice grew tart. “Artie? What kind of favor?”
“Some trouble at his shop. I helped him out. I owed him.”
“You owe too many people,” she said, but she was smiling, sitting up, watching the weather report as intently as a gambler at the track now, watching his horse come in. “I think this is going to be the biggest blizzard in New York history, you know.” She got up, grabbed her green silk pajama top from the floor and put it on.
“Come back to bed,” I said, but Lily was already at the window.
“Snow.” Gathering her hair into a pony tail and tying it with a rubber band she found in her pocket, she beamed. “Lots of snow. Lows, troughs, gale force winds, the whole awesome thing.”
Her clear eyes liquid with delight, she blew me a kiss, then headed for the bathroom door, where she turned and grinned like a cat that’s just spotted a huge dish of cream. “Like I said, impending disaster, toots.” She meant the snow.
I was sweating bullets. By now I had realized what was driving me nuts. I knew her.
I knew the girl. I didn’t know how I knew her or where, but what kept me awake, what made me sweat, was I knew the dead girl on Hillel Abramsky’s floor.
2
The girl looks up at me hopefully from the photograph I’ve swiped from the scene at Hillel’s. Half an hour after I left Lily’s, I was drinking coffee in the front booth at Mike Rizzi’s, the picture on the table next to me, trying to figure out how the hell I knew the girl in it.
At the counter, three taciturn customers knocked back their coffee like it was booze and, behind it, Mike fried eggs.
The photograph is crumpled and grimy, but the girl is fixed up like a million bucks. She’s wearing the pink jacket with fur around the hood. She’s posed next to that Cadillac, with its wire wheels and red leather interiors, and it confers some kind of status on her, you can see that in the sexy pose, one hand on her skinny hip, the other on the gold hood ornament in some imitation of possession. She has on too much make-up—she’s maybe eighteen, nineteen, but she looks like a kid—and her head is tilted jauntily at the camera, the aspirant smile outlined in bright red lipstick.
“Artie? You want the eggs over easy? You want anything on the bagel?” From behind his counter Mike was peering over at me.
Farm girls in the 1930s is what I was thinking of. In the Depression, girls went to Hollywood to make it in the movies. Had their photos taken in fancy clothes, with big cars, then sent them home to show they had it made in Tinseltown. Most of them ended up on dope or as whores, or dead, like this one, this Chinese girl in the picture in front of me. Who was she, this girl, this kid who is all make-up and longing?
Digging in my pocket, I pulled out the matches where I’d written her address, and I grabbed my jacket as the pulse in my forehead began to pound. Who was she? I looked out of the window. In the street, the snow gathered on the cars, the buildings, the sidewalk. Hurrying to work, people kept their heads down against the snow that fell now in a thick white sheet.
Through the snow, I could see my own building. It was opposite Mike’s coffee shop. Home. I could crash, I could climb into bed and forget it, but adrenalin shot me out of the booth where I sat and I grabbed my coat.
“Artie? What about your breakfast? Where in the hell you going, man?” I heard Mike yell as my bagel flew from the toaster and he caught it. But I was already halfway out the door and into my car. Praying the sucker would hold out for one more day, I drove like fuck the few blocks to Chinatown.
Rats scuffled behind the door on the seventh floor of the building on Market Street. Something like rats, something that scuffled and chattered and scraped its claws along the floor. Taped to the door was a sign with Chinese characters; under it was a scrawl in English: Joy Fun Sewing Company, it said. I banged on the door. No one answered. In the dank hallway, the linoleum tiles were shredded and gray slush ran into puddles. I looked around. I banged some more and felt in my ski jacket for the gun; the little Seecamp was a gift from an old friend and I carried for it luck. “Police,” I shouted and hoped to God I didn’t run into any other cops.
Bolts turned. The door opened. A woman with a rough Asian face flew at me, screaming in Chinese. I shoved the picture of the dead girl under her nose and pushed my way in. The racket in the room was terrifying.
Most of it came from the sewing machines. Women, forty, fifty of them, were hunched over, pedaling like it was the Tour de France, like their lives depended on it. Lit from above by savage fluorescent lights that dangled from the ceiling, the room was about 1500 square feet. It was freezing. Drafts blew in under the big windows. A few decrepit space heaters gave off the stink of propane but hardly any heat. But it was the noise that got me, the rat chatter of the manual machines, the hiss of steam irons, the shouts of the pressers when they banged into metal rails where garments hung shrouded in plastic. From a boombox came the whine of “Yesterday” played on windchimes. Everywhere in the freezing shop, the women coughed.
On TV I had watched celebrities burst into tears over the sweatshops, but no one mentioned the noise could fry your inner ear so bad you couldn’t stand up straight.
“Yes sir?”
The high-pitched voice belonged to a fat kid, a regular little Moby with a face like an undercooked dumpling. Zipping his pants up with one hand, a chocolate chip muffin in the other, he lumbered out from behind a curtain. He took it all in: me with the picture in my hand, the rough-faced woman staring at it. As soon as he appeared, she retreated.
“Is that woman your mother?”
“Yessir,” he said.
“Is this her shop?”
“Yessir,” he said again and ate the muffin.
I showed him the picture. “Do you know the person in this photograph?”
Prodding his teeth, he looked at it. “There is no such person here. Go away now. Cops already came.”
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.
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