“Why do I get the feeling you’ve been here before?” Jerry asked.
It was the building where I’d seen Hillel. The building with the photo lab. The gates were down on the souvenir shop, but we managed to jimmy the front door and now, we were outside the lab on the second floor trying to break in the door.
“I don’t know anything about a whorehouse, Jer.”
“It’s not what I fucking asked. You want to tell me what we’re looking for in this dump, if it’s not for the whorehouse?” Jerry shoved at the door. The frosted glass pane rattled.
“Trust me. Let’s just figure this is a little light burglary, official-style, OK? You’re an official-style guy.”
In his coat pocket, Chen found a bunch of locksmith’s tools and messed with the lock some more. Without any warning the door to an apartment opened and a man bolted into the hall. He was in pajamas. He shouted at us. Chen chased him back through his open door. I followed.
The one-room apartment was about ten by twelve. In three rows of triple-decker bunk beds, eight men were asleep. I couldn’t see much, but from the dark recesses came the snores and splutters, the cries and wheezes. The place was damp and fetid. Our guy stood near the doorway and stared hard at us. He got a good look, then crept back into his bunk. We backed out into the hall and went back to the photo lab.
“For Chrissake, Jerry, let me do it.” I snatched the keys out of his hand.
“Fucking fine with me.” He began to laugh. “You think this is how the bad guys do it? Try a credit card,” he said and we cracked up, the two of us, drunk as skunks, trying to pick a lock in the middle of the night.
The lab was a mess. As soon as Jerry switched on a light I saw someone besides us had been nosing around. Boxes of photographs had been turned upside down. Chen lifted some of them off the floor and dumped them onto the sales counter.
“Fucking hell,” he said. “How’d you find out about this dump?”
Rose’s picture was in my pocket. I showed him the numbers printed on the back. I told him about Eljay.
“It’s one of the advanced photo systems. I’ve got one of the same fucking cameras. Mr Snap is a state-of-the-art guy. He’s using one of these.” Chen pulled a small stainless steel camera out of his pocket. It was the size of a pack of cigarettes. Examining Rose’s picture, he said, “The pictures we picked up before were always Polaroids. No way to trace them. This time the son of a bitch left us what we need on print. Right on the goddamn print.”
“What was that?”
“What was what?”
I said, “In the hall. Shut up for a minute.”
“Maybe it’s the whores, Art.” Already Chen was turning the boxes upside down, sales slips, prints, cassettes of film spilling onto the counter. “Look for anything with numbers that match the numbers on the girl’s picture. Anything. Sales slip. Other prints. You understand computer stuff?”
“About like DNA.” I was looking through the shelves behind the counter now. There were piles of stuff—pictures, photo albums. Some of it was still on the shelves, some had been tossed on the floor. My guess was someone else wanted what we wanted. Then I heard Jerry Chen explode.
“Shit,” he yelled. “Shit shit shit.”
“What?” I got up from behind the counter. Jerry had his hands full of glossy prints.
“First, I thought to myself, why would anyone risk leaving evidence on the prints? Now I get it. It’s because you can stick these pictures on a computer, you can send them by e-mail. Everything you can do with a big digital camera, you can do with this baby.”
“So?”
“For years the snakeheads—the smugglers—had to circulate lists of names, the illegals that owed money. Now they can ID them with pictures. I bet they use it to lean on the families back home too. Extort them. Squeeze them.”
“How do they earn that kind of dough? You said, what? Thirty, thirty-five grand.” I pulled a box of sales slips off a shelf and sat on the floor and looked through them.
“You saw the way they live, across the hall? The poor fuckers live like that. They work six, seven days, two, three jobs. They don’t spend. They can earn a thousand bucks a week.”
On his knees now, Jerry scrabbled among envelopes of photographs. Then he whistled. One after the other, he opened them, held them upside down and let the pictures fall onto the floor, a stream of glossies, a torrent of tits. He spread them around, turning them face up, one at a time, like a man obsessed with a game of solitaire.
“Jesus fucking Christ.” Chen grabbed at my sleeve. “Look!”
Most of the women in the pictures were naked. Most of them were spread shots. The women simpered and smoldered and struck poses, every lewd pose you could think of, girls alone, girls on girls, with boys, and all of them Chinese.
“You think some of the girls that got snapped with the white Caddy also posed for a little light porn? Is that what we’re talking?”
Chen scooped them up and got up off the floor. “I don’t know. I’m going to find out, though. You know what I think? I don’t think there is any whorehouse. I think this is it. It’s the fucking pictures, man. I think we found our whores.”
It was getting to be a long night and it got longer. I never went back to the club, never called. I knew I’d be out of a job, but I had to keep going. Something was fermenting, brewing, boiling up, something was going to happen before this night was over, I felt it in my bones. We left Ludlow Street. For a while, we cruised the downtown bars—Mercury, Match, Pravda, Bowery—Chen looking more and more hangdog at every stop. The photographs were in his pocket but he wasn’t in any hurry to do a follow up. Instead, he drove around, slumped low in his seat, mired in some kind of obsession that made me keep my mouth shut and play his game. In front of the Odeon on West Broadway, he jammed the brakes on and slapped a police card on the dashboard. We got out.
“You’re not gonna lock your car?”
He laughed. “What for? Anyone steals it, I’ll just shoot them.”
And then Chen’s face lighted up like a kid in a candy store. “She’s here, Art.” He was excited. “She’s here.”
At a round table, a thin black style-guru who even I’d heard of was sitting with a no-tit English model. They were eating steak and mashed potatoes, and, between them, Coco Katz, the designer, held court.
Skinny, imperious and tall, Coco Katz looked up and Chen practically drooled over her. Eyes hopeful, smoothing his hair over and over, Jerry waited.
“I like your clothes,” I said to Coco.
She looked me over briefly like I was bubble-wrap. “Do you?” she said. She turned to Chen. “Let’s get out of here, Jeremy.”
“She lost a big order, she’s upset,” Jerry said, as I made for the door. “You know.”
“Sure, Jer. I know,” I said.
He watched Katz get her coat on. “So, Art, you’ll give Pansy my regards when you see her.”
“Leave it alone.”
“I can’t do that,” he said. “It’s for her own good. I told her that.”
He followed his girlfriend out the door. I went out after them and stood a few feet from Jerry and Coco Katz as they waited for her limo.
“You gonna tell her, Art? You’ll tell Pansy, won’t you?”
“Your friend, Jerry, she uses the sweatshops? She uses them to make her fancy outfits, huh?”
“Fuck you. Just tell her. Tell her she has to talk to me. Tell Pansy Loh, if she isn’t already dead.” Jerry took a picture out of his pocket and flipped it to me.
“You found that at the lab?”
“Nope. This one I already had. This one I been fucking saving to give you, Art.”
It was another picture of Pansy.
13
Queens, as a borough, is a lot like hell: it bleeds at the edges and becomes Long Island, but, after I left Chen in front of the Odeon, I went to Queens because of the sales slip I found in the lab on Ludlow Street. The numbers of the slip matched the numbers encoded on the back o
f Rose’s photograph. There was an address in Flushing. It wasn’t much. But I didn’t have much. Also, I’d called Lily three times; she must be out with Leung. What were they talking about? Babies?
Like everywhere else, the streets in Flushing were dead. White and dead. Small neat houses, strip malls, all of them hunkered down, inanimate, frozen.
I stood in the middle of the suburban street and looked around. Where was I? I got out the map of the city which I always carry—a lot of times it’s better than a gun—and tried to figure out where in the hell I was.
When I did, I walked a couple blocks and found the address. It was a vacant lot. A vacant lot full of broken bottles and piles of dirty snow. A brick wall ran along the back of the lot and I went to see what was on the other side when the thing fell on me. It grabbed my hair and clawed the dry cold skin on my face, but the adrenalin shot into my system and even my legs pumped as I threw it off, whatever it was. Without looking back, I ran like a bat out of hell. After a block I stopped and put my hands on my knees and tried to get my breath. I looked back. The street was empty and I realized what had jumped me in the vacant lot was a huge, fat, feral cat. The skin on my face was lacerated; the thing had missed my eye, but when I put my hand on my cheek it came away wet with blood.
Shivering on the corner in Flushing, I tried to orient myself and get to a subway. I was wondering if New York cats were ever rabid, when a gypsy cab stopped for the light and I leaped into the street and banged on the door.
“Going home, bub,” said the driver.
“Where’s home?” I said. He said Brooklyn and I got in. For thirty bucks, he dropped me off near the bridge; the bastard wouldn’t even cross the bridge to Manhattan, so I set off, hands jammed in my pockets, face burned raw with scratches and fatigue.
I didn’t know what to make of Jerry Chen. He blew hot and cold. He was a smart cop but a tortured angry man, and he was in thrall to Coco Katz. I pitied him for that; it happens to all of us, one time or another.
A wind tugged a cloud cover back over the sky, and the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge soared against the whitening sky. On the wooden walkway of the bridge, a man passed, a miner’s light fixed to his forehead. By the time I got to the other side, I was half frozen.
“Hey, pal, you need a lift?” The driver looked down from the cab of the garbage truck that resembled a tank in the dark. “Come on. We’ll take you home.” He stretched out an arm and pulled me up.
I let him and his partner know I’d been a cop and they shared some lukewarm beer and took me home, tooting out the garbage-truck fugue. Listening to the wise-ass on the radio, we had a few yuks. More snow was coming. Lotta overtime, said the garbage men, and passed me a bag of pretzels.
From the imperial heights of the garbage truck, I looked back and saw City Hall and the courts and the building where Sonny Lippert works. The truck skirted Chinatown and then I was home.
Upstairs, I stood in front of the window while the truck ate some garbage. I waved at the guy who gave me a ride.
The three windows on the street are eight feet high; I felt like a man in a fishbowl and it wasn’t the first time I’d had the sensation. For years I thought about getting some shades, but the windows are big and the shades are expensive and besides, I love the south light, especially in the winter.
Next summer, I always say to myself. I’ll get some blinds when summer hits; but I never do. It’s like airport security. I only think about the bad stuff after a crash.
Exhausted, I took a shower, stuck some bandaids on the cuts on my face and climbed into bed.
But I was hungry. I rummaged in the fridge. Somewhere, a clock I couldn’t find was ticking. It was driving me nuts. I called for take-out and I didn’t even consider the irony of it until I buzzed the delivery guy in, looked through the peephole on my door and saw the boy carrying the brown bag with my ginger chicken in it had a big red quiff. He raised his arm, winding up like a pitcher, and, in his hand, I saw the five-pronged spike.
I woke up. I had been dreaming.
The clock kept on ticking like an alarm clock you can’t find in the middle of the night. You run around, you look under the bed, dive in the dirty clothes. I stared at the ceiling. It was after four a.m. I was wide awake. The blankets were a mess.
“I don’t want trouble with the Chinese,” I heard Hillel Abramsky say. It was what he said Monday morning when he called me, when he found Rose dead on his floor. Hillel said the family sold the shop in Flushing because the Chinese came in. The Flushing shop.
I got out of bed again, pulled on some jeans, got a beer, slammed on more heat. I ransacked the bottom drawer of my desk for old address books. Yes! I thought. Yes. The address on the sales slip, the address of the vacant lot was the same as the defunct Abramsky shop. A shop where Hillel’s brother, Sherman, once worked. A shop where Sherm stole and Hillel fired him.
Sherman Abramsky. When Sherm was supplying hookers to a Hasidic brothel in Brighton Beach, Hillel had called me. I had only met him a couple of times, but it was plenty. Sherm the Sperm, they used to call him. Hard to believe him and Hil are brothers. But Sherm was a dirtbag, not a killer. He was also in Israel, last I heard, last time Hillel mentioned it. Fixing up his life, that’s what Hillel had said.
I called an old number I had for Sherm on Essex Street. No one answered. I called Hillel’s house. A machine picked up. Ash growing on my cigarette, I sent a fax to Haifa to a guy I went to college with who’s a cop now. Then I called him at home.
“Adam’s on his way to work,” his wife said in Hebrew. I left a message. Then I waited and I must have dozed in the chair. I had dreams where Lily posed with a white Cadillac like the dead women. Like them, she wore a pink jacket; unlike them, she held a Chinese baby that was fat like a sumo wrestler and cried relentlessly. I took the baby to comfort it, but I didn’t hold it right and it slipped out of my hand and cracked its head open on the floor.
I got back into bed and, in the groggy period before I slept, an Abramsky family wedding came into focus. Sherm had left the hall, then come back, zipping his fly, so’s everyone would think he’d been upstairs with some woman. Then he started taking pictures. Hillel says, “No, no, you can’t take pictures here. I don’t want pictures you take of my family lying around,” he says, like Sherm would steal their souls.
I don’t know what time it was, but the fucking clock was ringing again. I threw the covers off and groped on the night table, knocked my gun onto the floor, crawled under the bed where all I found were a couple of rubber bands Lily uses to keep her hair out of her eyes. I couldn’t breathe. I was losing my fucking mind. But it wasn’t a clock that was ringing at all. It was the phone. Expecting Adam’s call from Haifa, I fell on it.
“This is Pansy.”
“Where are you?”
“On the corner,” she said. “Canal near Mott. There’s a telephone booth.”
“Do you want to come to my place?”
“No.”
“I’ll be there.”
It was dumb, what I did. I got on my boots and some ski stuff and I ran.
When I got to Canal Street, Pansy was leaning against the payphone, plastic shopping bag over her arm. She was wearing the red hat, two down vests, sweatpants and purple high tops.
“I’ve been looking for you.”
“I want you to stop. Stop leaving messages for me,” she said. “Please.”
“Is someone bothering you?”
She glanced up and down the street and hesitated and bit her fingernail.
“Shall I show you something? Do you want to see?”
“Show me.”
We crossed Canal Street. A few trucks rumbled towards the bridge. Some of the ice had melted under the heat of traffic and in the gutters were rivers of slush. The frozen ooze poured over Pansy’s thin canvas sneakers as she turned into Eldridge Street. A ball of crumpled newspaper tumbled along the curb in the breeze, but nothing else moved.
Pansy walked into the middle of the street a
nd looked at an empty parking lot. “This is where they unloaded us,” she said.
“Unloaded who?”
“Are you cold?” she stalled. I shook my head and she started to talk. “I was lucky. There was a boat that was only ninety per cent full. That’s how they do it: ‘Let’s put a few more on,’ they say. They count the bodies. So many bodies, so many dollars. I received a stolen passport with my picture and name already in it. We traveled to Thailand first. Something was wrong with the ship, and a few of us were put on an airplane to Canada. Winnipeg, Canada. On the plane we flushed our papers down the toilet, so that we could claim asylum if we got lucky. The Indians took us over the border.”
“Indians?”
“The reservations straddle the border. The Indians make their own laws. They’re very poor. Then we got in the fruit truck.” She walked towards the parking lot. She remembered.
“It was summer and you could smell the spoiled fruit. The truck pulled up before dawn. They said, ‘You over there, you on this side.’ There were three men who had quite a lot of guns. Several more arrived soon after in a large black car. It was very hot.”
Walking slowly around the lot, Pansy conjured up the summer morning, humidity like primal ooze, a squad of men in Raybans with guns. The fruit trucks. The women climbing out of them, arriving in New York weeks, maybe months after they left China, faces glazed with incomprehension and fear. They climbed out of the stinking fruit trucks with only a small bag and a little silk pouch that contained a souvenir from home. A hundred women were divided into lines by men with guns and lists of names.
“ ‘You over there,’ they would say,” Pansy recalled. “ ‘You there.’ It depended on who had paid the smugglers in full and could be delivered to relatives or friends, who had a deal with another smuggling gang and would be bussed to Brooklyn or Flushing. Others with no connections. Like me,” she said. “A phone was passed. For fifty dollars, you could buy two telephone calls, one home, one to a friend or relative here. I didn’t need the phone. I have no family.” She paused. “Did you know you can order illegals? Two dishwashers, one cook.”
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