In the Land of the Lotus Eaters

By Frank Wolak

Syd Fix is in a fix. He has serious disease which causes him great pain, and he’s a regular visitor at an opium den in New York City’s Chinatown. The opium den is amid a maze of underground tunnels, and is run by a Chinese woman, Linn Phan, who is not what she seems; nor is older brother, Sam Phan, who owns and runs a small herb and ginseng store that is a front for his white sex-slave business. Syd’s beautiful young wife, Alba, works as a part time model and a flight attendant for Alitalia. She and Syd’s rapacious billionaire father, Creighton, are on a junket across Italy. Creighton Fix has a reputation of a man bent on seducing as many women as possible. Syd’s neurologist mother, Faith Adams, MD, is about to be taken hostage by a psychopathic prison inmate. Syd is about to encounter one Veronika “Nika” Trelenko, impersonating one of Sam Phan’s slaves, but who is a top KGB assassin on the hunt for her target. These complex set of characters are about to clash under the streets of Chinatown.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frank Wolak
• Release date: Dec 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9780991235858

Frank Wolak

Mr. Wolak is a reclusive, very strange individual who loves writing and cats.  He is a graduate of Monmouth University where he studied British and American literature.  He is the author of the brilliant first novel, A Magnet for Misfortune, also available on Kindle Select and Nook Books.  This is his first collection of novellas and short stories, and he is rumored to be writing his second novel. 

Book preview

IN THE LAND OF THE LOTUS EATERS

BY FRANK WOLAK

In the dead of night, while walking across the low end of a bridge she took the severed head out of the bag, and dropped it into the river. It sounded like a large stone hitting water: Ploop! She let the empty bag fall into a trash barrel. Her face remained expressionless.

~~*~~

On a dismal, rain-swept, windy day in mid-April, so cold it felt more like November, a shivering man in wet trench coat with its back collar up and a slouch hat whose wide brim covered his febrile eyes, stood still for moment on a corner of teeming Mott Street in Chinatown. As he tilted his head down to find the flask of Cognac in his suit jacket, a sluice of cold rain that gathered in the brim of his hat poured into the littered streaming gutter. The wet sidewalks around him were crowded with Asians, and a few Caucasian tourists who often blocked street traffic to peer from beneath wide umbrellas into the windows of curio shops, or stood out of rain under the beach-sized umbrellas of the street noodle vendors. Foot traffic flowed around the tourists as ceaselessly as the rain-wash coursed around mounds of wet trash in the gutters. Odors of exotic foods cooking issued from several restaurants’ doorways. Umbrellas sprouted like mushroom caps beside a bleak trail in a deep forest. Most of the Asians, like Syd Fix, wore rain parkas or coats, and wide-brimmed weatherproof hats rather than opened umbrellas. He unscrewed the flask cap, and took a quick swig to ward off the damp chill.

Syd replaced his flask, took his cellphone out, pressed a speed-dial number, spoke a few muttered words to Sheila Stein, his vacationing secretary’s replacement, and turned the infernal device off. While he could readily talk to Maya, his regular secretary, and missed her soft deep alto voice, everyone needed a vacation from the Bank. He grimaced as he faced a cold gust of windblown rain, put his head down, and turned the corner.

In the recessed doorway of a small shop, he emptied the refilling brim of his hat onto the sidewalk, took off his trench coat, flapped it to shake it free any residual raindrops before replacing his hat, draping the coat around his shoulders, and entering the herbalist’s shop. Inside, a bell attached to a spring above the door tinkled merrily despite the gloom of the darkened shop. The small space smelled pleasantly of the variety of rich, earthy, fragrant herbs.

Syd bowed at the waist, and spoke a deferential greeting in Cantonese to the very old shop owner, Sam Phan, who returned the greeting from behind the shop’s counter, his white hair, sly wizened face, and glittering eyes couched in pockets of wrinkles smiled with a child’s delight.

Will you take some of ginseng tea with me, Mr. Syd? Or are you in a hurry to visit my sister?

How can I refuse your gracious invitation, Sam Phan? Yes, it would give me great pleasure to share some of your excellent tea in your estimable company.

Very good, Mr. Syd. You honor me by listening to the ramblings of an old fool. Your pain is not so bad today, I trust?

We all suffer some form of pain, Sam Phan. Most of all from fear and ignorance.

Well put, Mr. Syd. You should have been a poet. I will collect some herbs to add flavor to the simmering ginseng tea, to settle your stomach, calm your nerves, and ease your pain. Please, step into my kitchen.

Sam Phan spryly hurried over to the door, flipped the sign in his door window from Open to Closed, and locked his shop’s door. While Syd waited, his friend snapped into a pair of latex gloves, stopped among the shelves measured by eye a sampling of herbs from their hand-labeled Mason jars, and mixed them in a plastic container. They passed behind a heavy black curtain separating the shop from Sam Phan’s little kitchen. Sam shed his gloves, hung Syd’s hat and coat from wall hooks where a kitchen apron hung, stirred the mixed amounts of different herbs into the teapot he kept steaming atop tiny flames on one of his stove range back burners. Before sitting at the small round wood table across from Syd, Sam called upstairs to one of his many daughters in one of the eight bedrooms there. A young blonde woman in her late twenties, named Nika, came barefoot down the stairs, and entered the kitchen. She wore a provocative pair of sleeveless black satin pajamas, and a pair of black latex gloves. Sam Phan spoke to her in a language familiar to Syd. He realized it was Russian.

Sam sat and the two men picked up their discussion of the meaning of the Tao almost precisely where they left off. Nika moved with quick cat-like grace placing ceramic mugs before Syd and her father. She tied her thick, glossy hair back, put on oven mitts, opened the lid of the cast-iron teapot to inhale the teas’ odd odor, and served each of the men. Since Syd was the guest, she served him first. When Syd sipped at his hot tea, he noticed the subtle nut-like flavor of opium mixed into the tea’s unappetizing taste. Meanwhile Nika eyed him the way a hungry cat fixates on a fat pigeon, until Sam spoke to her sharply. She bowed her head submissively during her father’s brief, but vehement, verbal assault. Her blonde hair, though tied back, still allowed some wayward long strands to mask her eyes. Yet Syd already noticed an unusual quality around Nika’s mysterious lake-blue eyes and cheekbone structure. It was as if she bore a war in her blood, a wolfish Tatar edginess battling her hot Russian temper for dominance over her soul. Syd figured that one of her parents must be Chechen.

Syd made it a habit not to interfere with the way Sam Phan disciplined his daughters, but seeing tears trickle from Nika’s beautiful eyes, he begged Sam to go easy on the young woman. But her tears, he saw as he spoke and she glanced sharply over at him, were neither contrite nor ashamed. They were tears of bitter, impotent rage.

Ah, Mr. Syd, you do not know Veronika. She is headstrong and disobedient to her elders. I sent her to learn the art of massage from her aunt Mai Phan, who sent her back to me as incorrigible, and she does her best to live up to that. She learns nothing but confusion from computers, wasting her time on boys and running the streets, dragging any family honor I possess through the gutter.

At a dismissive motion from Sam, Nika obediently left and returned with twin tall thick candles in gold candlesticks. She set them on the table and lit each with a single wood match from a box atop the fridge where Sam kept his supply of fresh Chinese ginseng roots. The candles wavering light did little to alleviate the pervasive gloom of the rear of the shop, deliberately kept dark since bright light hurt Sam Phan’s sensitive eyes.

Sam Phan claimed he bought the gold candlesticks at auction, but Syd figured they were likely stolen and traded to him in place of money as part of a debt repayment.

They spoke for some time, while Nika did her best to blend into the background, ready to obey her father’s commands. Syd’s eyes began twitching nervously. No matter how he hard he tried to control his eyes, they jittered and bounced around the room in all directions.

Sam left off his discourse and smiled. I see, Mr. Syd, that your mind is no longer concerned with the meaning of the Tao. It is a difficult subject to sustain a Westerner’s interest. You are ready now to see my sister, I think, yes?

Yes. I apologize for my condition. Your views are most enlightening. But pain often obstructs my ability to think clearly.

Say no more, dear Mr. Syd. I shall alert my sister to expect you. He pressed, Syd knew, a small electric doorbell under the kitchen table. Similar devices rigged every room in the shop. Two short rings meant client on the way down; one long ring signified grave danger.

I thank you, Sam Phan, for your hospitality and your wonderful tea.

The pleasure is mine, Mr. Syd. Do come again soon. I shall prepare a small packet of tea for you to use at home. Nika will bring it down. I find the stairs easy going down, but exhausting coming up. You will remember the way. Enjoy your visit with my sister.

After Syd collected his hat and coat, Sam Phan led the way toward the cellar door, but stopped at a concealed panel in the side of the staircase leading to the eight upstairs bedrooms. Intricately carved into the wood panel was a voluptuous, naked, Asian goddess languidly exhaled a cloud of smoke from a long pipe. Behind the panel, flights of steep rickety wood stairs zigzagged down into a series of brick-lined tunnels underneath Mott Street. The tunnels often twisted and turned as sharply as a maze. Linn Phan once explained to Syd that in the 1930’s the first owner of an illegal gambling den excavated the tunnels as an escape route for his clients in case of a police raid. Since every purveyor of any form of vice in Chinatown paid for police protection, or, at the very least, for a tip-off to every potential police raid, the Mott Street tunnels, lit at long intervals by caged light bulbs, were still ready in case the Chinatown Police Department felt pressured into putting on a show for One Police Plaza. Linn Phan’s opium den, in business over many years, had yet to be surprised, especially with the advent of closed circuit security cameras, strategically placed along the route.

Syd followed the intricate windings of cellar staircase until he reached the tunnels. The setting always reminded Syd of the descriptions of castle dungeons, but these smelled more like dank sewers left idle for many years. Though the route to his destination became tortuous and elusive, he knew the way so well he thought he might find the door to Linn Phan’s opium den blindfolded. After making one last abrupt right-angled turn, he faced a dead end with three steel doors. Two were false, the one on the right, and the one at the end of the cul de sac. If you touched either one, you received a jolting electric shock. The left door led to a cavernous room with walls lined with old brown bricks, and the ceiling decorated with age-yellowed stucco. Syd pressed a button that opened the steel door to a small antechamber equipped with a security camera. He knocked twice on the slim wood slot in a second steel door. Inside, the locked door unbolted, and swung open.

DEN OF INIQUITY

The reek of sizzling opium pervaded the air, pungent as roasting chestnuts and almonds, provocative as a spicy soporific perfume, a layer of the piquant smoke as thick as a graveyard fog bisected the room’s air. Three globe lights fifteen feet apart hung from the ceiling. The opaque glass globes emitted an almost milky, dim light giving the overall effect of night under a bright full moon. One visit, after three pipes, Syd stared at a globe above his head watching it slowly assume the shape of an opium poppy recently scored. The light became as soft as droplets of white opium milk before it dried into a gummy black tar; each droplet came together to harden into the sticky tar that bound Syd pleasantly fast to his cot, inhaling the aromatic smoke that intoxicates so sublimely.

Linn Phan materialized next to Syd Fix. He paid a special monthly rate for her personal attention. Taking his arm, she led him to his private place, one long soft pillow atop a low dark-wood frame behind a folding screen decorated with wintry scenes of a mountainous area of northeast China. In the valleys, fields of opium poppies grew, as they had for centuries. Syd Fix sat down on the pillow; soon he would recline on his left side after smoking his first pipe.

It is always a pleasure to see you again, Linn Phan, he said, with a weak smile.

My pleasure is to serve such a good friend, Mr. Syd, at any time of the day or the night. She smiled broadly, the contours of her face crinkling into innumerable tiny cracks, furrows, and wrinkles. In spite of this, her face appeared younger, as does an actor’s in her thirties wearing prosthetics and heavy makeup to appear older. Syd had noticed too that she seemed flexible and nimble, not at all as frail as her elderly brother. Always wearing black latex gloves, she knelt on a soft rug in her comfortable silk pajamas, opened a flat drawer in the frame, and carefully removed a tray bearing a rectangular box fixed to one end. A glass bottle of opium capped with a top bearing a hole in the center occupied one side of the box. In the center was a freestanding spirit lamp that Linn Phan lit with a wood match from a box of Lucifer matches depicting the bearded, horned, florid-faced, Fallen Angel. A flat, felt pad held two long needles with round heads, one slightly shorter than the other, and two opium pipes, one very old, its long stem carved from bamboo with miniature obscure Chinese characters branded onto each segment, the other a smooth cylinder of mahogany. Both had a discolored ivory mouthpiece on one end, and, three inches from their long opposite ends, ample brass pipe bowls decorated by mosaic chips of tiles.

Syd’s mouth was very dry. Though he knew alcohol would worsen the problem, he nervously removed the flat silver flask containing expensive Cognac, unscrewed the cap, and swallowed a long soothing drink. As he recapped and replaced the flask, Linn Phan quickly pulled out a deeper drawer in which sat a second smaller tray bearing ice water and a glass. She poured a glass of water and handed it to Syd.

Please do not drink this too quickly, Mr. Syd, she said. How is your pain today?

Bad, Linn Phan, he said, his voice cracking with emotion, Very bad.

Then I shall prepare your pipe at once. April is the cruelest month, don’t you agree? She removed the rectangular glass vial, its contents almost tar-black in color and consistency, from its slot. As Linn brought it nearer the light of the spirit lamp, Syd saw the tar was shot through with deep red, the color of arterial blood. We have a new source for our product, Mr. Syd. This is one of the very first vials I’ve tapped. Observe how the lamplight reveals the dark red tint in it.

Yes, so I see. It looks almost like human blood. Is it good?

You shall judge for yourself, Syd Fix. Linn Phan picked up a needle and sunk it deeply into the opium through the cap’s top. Twisting the now opium-laden needle carefully in the spirit lamp flame, Linn Phan’s bright, ageless eyes glowed as the opium cooked and formed a large beautiful golden bubble at the needle’s end. She plucked off the bulb, lovingly kneaded and stretched it to become elastic and supple enough for her to press over the pipe bowl’s center hole. She handed the loaded pipe to Syd and applied the spirit lamp’s flame to the bowl. As the opium sizzled, Syd sucked greedily on the mouthpiece. His parched lungs filled with smoke as smooth as silk. Before he exhaled, he stretched out along the full-length pillow. Immediately, vitality replaced lassitude, an illusion of strength where weakness prevailed; every ache, pain, worry, and care dissolved, peace of mind replaced anguish, and reflexes as agile as a cat’s superseded the crippled clumsiness of illness. Healthy color suffused Syd’s unusually pale complexion. He felt his age of thirty-two again instead of a frail ninety-two. It was a pleasant illusion.

It is exquisite opium, Linn Phan. She prepared the second pipe … or was it the third … or the fourth?

THE DREAMS

Lost in a timeless paradise of thought and sensations, Syd forgot the depressing environment he was actually in. As his eyes wove spirals of vivid colors, his mind wandered lost in gardens of surreal, fantastic animals and exotic flowering plants of brilliant multi-colors. His mind and body effortlessly navigated journeys through space and time. In a moment, he left the gardens and became a boy gazing out of window of his father’s top floor apartment on Victoria Street in Hong Kong. He heard the arguing of his mother and father above the tumult of the street traffic. Simultaneously, his body could hover high above them over Stanley Market on Tai Tam Bay, where the junks sail through the water as easily as he did through the roof of time’s skies, all the way out to the frigid black depths of space, or he could will himself to twirl around the curved sides of the Hong Kong Hilton Hotel. His light, pale body was in the room listening, the quiet child of unhappy parents whose sharp words darted to wound each other, but those words never harmed him. He was safe within his impenetrable shell of sublime indifference in Chinatown.

If you don’t give that whore up, I’ll leave you, Creighton. I’ll not be the laughing stock of the hospital and this whole island. Don’t you think I hear the whisperings behind my back at every party we attend? Do you think I’m stupid or that I can’t smell the bitch on you every time you spend an afternoon with her? How do you think that makes me feel, that you go elsewhere to pay for what my love can give you, has given you for twelve years?

Faith, please forgive me, I’m sorry—

"And it will never happen again, right, Creighton? How many times have I heard that before? And what about the danger from your gun collection? When Sydney was born, you swore you’d happily give them up, too. And where are those guns? Still here, in a glass case Syd could open with a paper clip. You lie worse than a kid with his hand caught in a cookie jar. Sydney could make up a better story—"

I don’t make up stories, Mother, and I never lie, the boy said abruptly.

Of course not, my darling. Dearest Sydney, it makes me so angry that you must hear this bickering. But this is between your father and me. Why don’t you go to your room and practice your math?

"Because then you and Creighton will start fighting over me. Don’t I get a say about where I will go?"

You’re too young for that, darling.

That’s not fair. I’m old enough to tell the difference between Boston and Hong Kong. Mr. Fong says my mind is older than his, the boy said referring to their neighbor who lived with his daughter on the floor below them. With Creighton Fix’s permission, he kept a garden on the roof. Mr. Fong let Syd help. They were friends.

Fong is an old fool. Besides, Sydney, in five years the Chinese will take back Hong Kong. American boys won’t be welcome. Don’t you want to see the places where the American Revolution began, darling, and grow up among American boys and girls?

He’s goes to a fine school, here, don’t you, buddy? And didn’t I teach you not to mess with the guns, too?

"When I leave you, Creighton and I will—you’ll never give that woman up, she’s like an evil addiction—Sydney comes with me. That’s final."

"You didn’t want to come here in the first place, Faith. I admit I wasn’t happy living in New York. Once I decided to come to Hong Kong to run this overseas branch of the Bank I own, I fell in love with the island, and the way they do business here. You knew we would be living here, yet you never gave it a chance. All you wanted was to stay in your ivory tower at your hospital in Boston, acting as the bigshot head of neurosurgery. You’re like a cold-water fish, Faith, and, let’s face it, you did little more than tolerate our lovemaking."

"I won’t have Sydney hear this. I won’t let you raise him listening to your filthy stories. You’ve poisoned our love, but you will not poison my son’s mind against me."

I know you’ll win a long, expensive, and bitter custody fight in court, Faith. Why don’t we let Syd decide where he wants to grow up?

"He’s a child, Creighton, and he’ll come live with his mother."

"Try to set aside your skyscraper-sized ego, Doctor Faith Adams, and do what’s best for Syd. Fong is right. In many ways Syd is older than both of us put together. What’re makes you so afraid, Faith? Tell her, Syd. I’ll abide by whatever he says. Will you?"

He’s ten years old!

"The same aged mentality you display when you throw these tantrums. Give the kid a chance, Faith. C’mon, buddy, give us sign. Want to live here or in Boston?"

Syd held out his fist. He waited a moment to let the suspense build, and pointed straight down with his thumb. The scene’s color began to fade, and the air turned sharply close, humid, and smelled of