Free Hot Poppies by Reggie Nadelson Page B

building?”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œLily 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.
    â€œBetter?” she said. “You arrived looking like a guy who just walked away from a plane crash.”
    â€œMuch 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