Peter May - Snakehead

June 17

Disaster. Last night we reached the coast of Guatemala. The weather was poor, and the freighter could not come in close to shore. They made us stand in the dark on a shallow reef, up to our thighs in water, half a mile offshore, waiting for the small boats to come and get us. Seven boats came in the end, with Taiwanese on board, to take us ashore. Then they made us walk through fields in the dark for hours until we reached a road where there were vans waiting. Only half of us had been brought ashore, and we were crammed in those vans all day in the suffocating heat, waiting until tonight, when they were to get the rest. But just half an hour ago, a man came running up to the vans to tell us that this time the police were waiting and the others had all been arrested. He said that some peasants had seen us come ashore last night and tipped off the police. Now, someone told me, they are taking us to Guatemala City.

August 2

We have been here for six weeks now, on the ranch of a Taiwanese not far from Guatemala City. We sleep in barns and outbuildings. It is cramped and uncomfortable. But at least it is warm and dry. The food, as always, is terrible. They say we must wait until it is safe to move. The Guatemalan police, they say, are still trying to find us.

We have been shocked to see how the Guatemalan peasants live. Whatever reason people may have for leaving China, they have better lives than this. The poverty is desperate, medical facilities are almost nonexistent. And yet we also see big cars, and houses owned by wealthy people. The Taiwanese who owns this ranch is rich. Wealth accumulated, no doubt, from the trade in illegal immigrants like us.

Cheng sleeps curled into my back most nights, with her arms around me. She is pale and lovely and very fragile. She has been raped and abused, but her spirit is still strong. Stronger than mine, Sometimes I think it is only Cheng that has kept me going.

It is strange. I no longer think of myself as Detective Wang, of the Tianjin Municipal Police. I am one of these people now. An illegal immigrant. Homeless and helpless and desperate to reach America. The Beautiful Country, the Mountain of Gold. After all this, you have to believe it is true.

Li read, with an increasingly heavy heart, of the detective’s growing relationship with Cheng, and of the further moves to which they had then been subjected. Several trucks had arrived at the Taiwanese ranch. Wang and his companions had had to crawl into a narrow space beneath false floors in the back of the trucks, which had then been loaded with grapefruit and driven north into Mexico. Forty hours without food or water or the chance to move. They had had to soil themselves where they lay, squeezed together like sardines, lying in their own filth.

In a forest, they had been released from the trucks and taken to a collection of huts in a clearing where they joined more Chinese awaiting passage into the United States. There they had stayed for several more weeks, and then been moved twice more on foot, at night, walking long hours through rough, uncompromising country.

October 10

Tonight we will cross into the United States. Someone told me that the border is only a few hours from this place. At last, at long last, the prospect of freedom from this hell. We are on some kind of ranch in open scrub country. They keep cattle here. We have been given fresh clothes. It does not matter that they do not fit. I have been able to wash properly for the first time in weeks. It feels like heaven.

One of the coyotes came and handed out cigarettes. They are the ones who are arranging the final leg of our journey. Mexicans, I think. Someone said they were drug smugglers who have turned to smuggling people because it is safer and there is more money. I tried to speak with one of them, but the language was impossible. His English was even worse than mine. So I must rely on what I hear from others. The cigarettes are good. It is so long since I had a smoke.

A short time ago a man came to the ranch-house. He wore a suit and carried a black bag. One of the ma zhai said he was a doctor, and that we must be vaccinated against something called West Nile encephalitis. He said it was everywhere in the southern states of America, and that we must be protected against it. The ah kung had ordered it. I asked him who this grandfather was, and he told me it was none of my business. No one knew who Kat was. But if he wanted it done, it would be done. It seemed a strange nickname to me. Kat. The Cantonese word for ‘tangerine’, a symbol of good luck. I felt anything but lucky.

When it was my turn to go into the room, the doctor told me to drop my pants and bend over a chair. He wore rubber gloves and a white mask. He kneeled down behind me and stuck a needle in my ass, nearly into my balls. It hurt like hell.

Now we are fit to be American citizens.

A very large refrigerated truck has arrived in the yard. They say we will cross the border in the back of it, hidden behind boxes of fruit and vegetables. Tomorrow, they say, we will be in Houston, Texas. We will be in America.

Li could barely bring himself to read Wang’s final erratic scrawl in the blood-smeared book. Tell my little girl that she was my last thought. Tell her —And there was a line running down to the foot of the page, as if he had not had the strength to hold pencil to paper any longer.

Li would carry the message himself to Wang’s daughter if he could. It was the very least he could do. She would know always that her father had loved her. And yet, how could he tell her that her father had not died in vain? That he had not been sent on a fool’s errand? Wang’s real job would not even have begun until after his arrival. The journey had been simply to establish his credentials, to raise him above suspicion in order that he might insinuate himself into the very heart of the people-smuggling operation and maybe, just maybe, get himself a glimpse of the dragon’s lair — and within touching distance of the ah kung they now knew was called Kat.

And Li stood accused, in his own eyes, of being the fool who sent him on that errand. Guilty as charged. Guilty for life. Just plain guilty.

He buried his face in his hands and wept.

Margaret looked up as Steve sauntered into her station. She was on her second autopsy, nerves stretched by the ordeal of performing a post-mortem examination of Detective Wang, concentration shattered by the arrival of Li. Fuller and Hrycyk had been in a huddle at the computer desk for a long time now, each making several lengthy calls on their cellphones. So she was relieved to see Steve’s friendly smile.

‘Hi,’ he said. He had pulled down his face mask. He nodded toward the body on the table, a young woman in her early twenties, chest gaping, ribs exposed like a carcass in a butcher’s shop. ‘Your second?’

‘Yes.’ She heard the strain in her own voice.

‘Notice anything you might say they both had in common?’ His question was so casually asked, it made her stop and look at him very directly for a moment.

‘Are we talking injection sites in the buttock here?’ she asked.

‘Hey,’ he smiled, ‘nothing gets past you, does it?’

She pulled a face. ‘I take it they’re not unique.’

‘One hundred percent to date. That’s more than twenty. I got one of my investigators checking the rest of the bodies out in the trailers.’

‘It’s a strange place to choose to inject anything.’

‘Certainly is. And it would take a professional to do it.’

‘So what do you think they were injected with?’

‘I have no idea. But I’m wondering if maybe we shouldn’t be taking extra precautions here. We don’t know what these people might be carrying, or why someone felt the need to inject them at all.’ He paused, still the smile playing around his lips. ‘I did a little reading up on illegal immigrants before I came down. Apparently 34 percent of illegal Chinese taken into custody have been found to be chronic carriers of Hepatitis B.’