Peter May - Snakehead

‘He was working undercover,’ Li said, regaining some degree of composure. He saw Fuller and Hrycyk exchange glances. ‘An operation we mounted more than six months ago. He volunteered for the job, and he was ideal for it. He was born in Fujian Province, which is the departure point for most of the illegal immigrants. He spoke the dialect. It was easy for him to make contact with a local snakehead and get the next boat out.’ He remembered Wang’s enthusiasm. He was fed up with the routine in Tianjin, his marriage had broken down and he’d been looking for something else to fill his life. ‘He phoned us whenever he could, under the pretence of phoning home. And he posted several reports, so we were able to follow his progress. But we never knew that it would take so long.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Or that it would end like this.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Fuller said. ‘Are you telling me you people mounted a unilateral operation here, without keeping us informed?’ He looked at Hrycyk. ‘Did the INS know about this?’

‘We sure as hell did not.’ Hrycyk glared at Li as if he was the embodiment of everything he hated about the Chinese.

Fuller’s face was flushed with anger. He turned on Li. ‘So what kind of liaison are you, that sends an undercover Chinese cop on to US soil without telling us?’

Li remained calm. ‘We took a clear policy decision on this. We decided to do nothing that might put the life of our operative at risk.’

‘And keeping American law enforcement in the loop would be putting your man’s life at risk?’ Fuller was incredulous.

‘It is a matter of trust,’ Li said evenly.

‘What, you don’t trust us ?’ Hrycyk threw his hands in the air as if it was the most absurd thing he had ever heard.

Li said, ‘The history of cooperation between US and Chinese law enforcement is not exactly an illustrious one. You might remember the goldfish case.’

Fuller sighed his impatience. ‘That’s ancient history!’

Margaret asked, ‘What is the goldfish case?’

Li spoke to her directly for the first time. ‘A gang operating out of Shanghai in the late eighties was filling condoms with heroin and sewing them into the bellies of large goldfish that were then shipped out with live fish to San Francisco. It is normal for a number of fish to die in transit, but officials in San Francisco became suspicious when they saw stitching in the bellies of some of the fish.’

‘This is completely irrelevant,’ Fuller insisted, but he was on the defensive now.

‘Is it?’ Li asked. He said to Margaret, ‘When gang members at the American end of the operation were brought to court, the prosecution here asked the Chinese to release one of the gang members from Shanghai to give evidence in court. The Chinese agreed. It was the first cooperative US — Chinese drug prosecution. But when the guy got on the stand he changed his testimony and claimed political asylum. That was more than ten years ago. He is currently walking around a free man in the United States.’

‘He said he was tortured by the Chinese police. Beaten and blindfolded and stuck with an electric cattle prod,’ Hrycyk said.

Li’s laugh was without humour. ‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? And in a country where people are prepared to believe the worst that anyone wants to claim about the People’s Republic of China, the odds were pretty much stacked in his favour.’

Hrycyk stabbed an accusing finger at Li across the prone form of the dead detective. ‘You telling me stuff like that never happens in China?’

‘No,’ Li said simply, taking the wind out of Hrycyk’s sails. ‘But it’s never happened on my shift. And if you could put your hand on your heart and tell me a prisoner’s never had a confession beaten out of him in the United States, then I’d call you a liar.’

Hrycyk looked as if he might be about to leap across the table and take Li by the throat.

Margaret said caustically, ‘I don’t think Detective Wang gave his life just so that China and America could go to war.’ She brushed past them and lifted a plastic evidence bag containing Wang’s bloodstained notebook from the computer table and held it up to Li. ‘His diary,’ she said.

April 10

The ship that is taking us across the Pacific was waiting in the darkness for our flotilla of small boats several miles off the coast. It is a rusty old Korean freighter with three holds. About one hundred of us are packed into the rear hold. Another sixty or so in the next. The third is stacked with food and water for our trip. There are no windows, and only one fan in the roof. It is freezing cold all the time, and the air in here stinks. We sleep on the floor, cheek by jowl. Our toilet facilities consist of a bucket for the men and a bucket for the women. Hygiene is impossible, and I have picked up some kind of eye infection. My eyes are red and sore, and agony if I rub them, which I do when I sleep and wake up with tears running down my cheeks. To be red-eyed, they say, is to be envious. The people I envy are those who are not aboard this ship.

The food is appalling. Water, rice, peanuts, some vegetables. But they never give us meat, or fish. My wife always nagged me to lose some weight. Now she has her wish.

They let us up on deck once a week to wash in salt water. My hair is crusted with it, my skin white, as if I had rolled in rice flour. There are always ma zhai making sure we do what we are told. Sometimes they beat us, and they know we will not retaliate because there are three Cambodians on board with machine guns. Khmer Rouge mercenaries. We know that such people have no compunction about taking lives, although of course the shetou want us delivered to America in one piece. Our hides are worth sixty thousand dollars apiece, but only if we are alive inside them.

April 25

Three ma zhai came down into our hold last night. They had been drinking, and they did not care who they damaged. They dragged three of the young women away, and none of us did anything to stop them. Although I know that standing up to them is futile, I still feel guilty about doing nothing. I wish that I had my gun and my badge, and that I could just arrest these scum and have them thrown in prison.

When they brought them back the women’s faces were streaked with tears and they hid their eyes. No one said anything. We all knew what had happened. And I know that my yazi , my little duck in the next hold, must be going through the same thing. It makes me sick and angry to think about it, but there is nothing to be done. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Li read through the account of Wang’s appalling journey with an increasing sense of bleakness. He sat in a small office on a gantry overlooking the interior of the hangar below. Twelve pathologists cutting open the dead flesh of his countrymen. Wang, and men and women just like him. People who, for whatever reason, had submitted themselves to the pain and indignity and humiliation of an endless journey to the promised land, in the hands of ruthless individuals who raped and beat them for pleasure and dollars. Only to end up here. Laid out on a succession of stainless steel tables. The tears that blurred the pages in front of him were their tears.

June 15

It has been five weeks since we set sail. It seems like five years. Nine thousand miles of Pacific Ocean and, mercifully, the weather has been kind. Until last night. We encountered a terrible storm. The freighter rolled from side to side for fifteen hours, tipping into giant waves, water pouring into the holds. We felt certain we were going to die. Many people were sick and today the air is sour because they will not let us clean up down here. One man, I think, died. He had a wife and young child. He had not been well for several days, and after the storm he was unconscious for many hours. They came this afternoon and took him away. His wife begged them to let her go with him, but the ma zhai refused. Someone said they had thrown him overboard.