Peter May - Snakehead

‘You bastard,’ she said, almost in a whisper. ‘Do you have any idea what you put me through these last ten months?’

He looked surprised. ‘You knew I was in Washington?’

‘Of course I knew you were there, for Chrissake! It was in all the papers. This isn’t China, Li Yan. It’s not a state secret when someone gets appointed to a new job.’

He appeared crestfallen. Unable to meet her eye. ‘You’re the only reason I took the job,’ he said.

It was both what she wanted and didn’t want to hear. ‘So it took you all this time not to find my phone number?’

Li stood up. He was like a giant in the room, both his size and his presence filling it. But it was in a small voice that he said, ‘I lost my nerve.’

Margaret had no patience with him. ‘Oh, gimme a break! You’re a big boy now, Li Yan.’ And then she remembered the red spots around his eyes earlier in the day. That he had wept over Wang. Big boys weren’t supposed to cry either.

‘It was you who walked out on me, remember,’ Li said.

‘You know why.’

But Li pressed on. ‘We hadn’t spoken in nearly six months. When I was still in China it all seemed like it would be easy. I would come to America, and I would pick up a phone and we would be together again.’

‘So why didn’t you?’

‘Because you were still half a continent away, Margaret. Because I had no idea whether you would want to be with me again.’

‘Oh, Jesus!’ She bit her lip and looked away from him. ‘How could you ever doubt it?’

‘Very easily,’ he said. ‘I loved you, Margaret. But whatever you say, you left me . Got on an airplane and flew back home. I couldn’t know that there was any way back for us. And I got scared to ask in case there was not.’ He held out his hands in front of him, a gesture of despair. ‘When I got here, the job just took over. It is twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Time passes. And it is easier to live in ignorance than with an unpalatable truth.’

But she wasn’t about to forgive him so easily. ‘Is that one of your Chinese proverbs, Li Yan? One of those little pieces of wisdom that just roll so easily off the tongue? Because, you know, there’s been nothing easy for me, any single day in fifteen months. We had no future in China, you know that. But I’ve spent every waking minute since I left wondering if I made a mistake, knowing that I was just as unhappy here on my own.’

She glared at him, hating him for making her love him. Hating herself for being so weak.

‘Margaret…’ Li took a step toward her.

She turned her back on him, moving off toward the window, looking sightlessly out on a semiderelict car lot and the lights of the traffic on South Main. ‘I don’t want to hear it, Li Yan,’ she said. ‘Just go away.’

Li stood helplessly looking at her. It was the rejection he had always feared. They had encountered each other by chance, but he had had to steel himself to come up here, to face her hostility, to try to explain himself. He wasn’t about to turn back now. He stepped up behind her and put a hand lightly on her shoulder. He was not expecting the speed with which she turned around and took her open palm across the side of his face. His cheek stung, and he stood smarting, waiting for the next blow. It came this time from the other side and he turned his face with the slap to take some of the force out of it. But still it hurt. She had strength in her hands and her arms. But now he caught them, and their strength was no match for his.

‘Are you done hurting me now?’ he asked her.

She made a vain attempt to free herself. ‘Not by a long way,’ she whispered. And his mouth was on hers, soft and moist and sweet, and she felt a strange falling sensation that travelled all the way through her to her loins.

He let go of her arms and lifted her in his, as if she weighed nothing at all, carrying her to the bed and dropping her on the bedspread. As she struggled to wriggle out of her jeans and pull off her tee-shirt, she saw the light from the window fall obliquely across his pectorals, his white shirt dropping to the floor. She felt guilty now, that she had been kissing another man only an hour before. Li fell on top of her, his smooth skin seeming to envelop her, his hands running over all her softness. His mouth pressed hard to hers. She had not been aware of him removing his pants, but she felt his nakedness hard against her like a rock. So much, she thought, for ignoring him when she couldn’t avoid him. His mouth slid down to her nipples and pulled them in, each in turn, and she moaned when eventually she felt him slip inside her, and all thoughts of Steve were finally banished.

‘Jesus! Sweet Jesus,’ she whispered. It had never been like this with anyone else.

Margaret stood outside the NASA hangar, still in her gown and apron. The clear evening sky was turning pink as the dipping sun promised a spectacular sunset. Bombers, jets and Second World War fighters had been taking off and landing all day, swooping overhead, to the cheers of the crowds gathered along the edges of the tarmac. Drinks tents and hamburger stalls had kept them fed and watered as they watched displays by Russian Polikarpovs, British Hurricanes and American Wildcats, oblivious to the conveyer belt of bodies being processed in the large white hangar just a few hundred yards away. The car parks were full. The Wings over Houston Airshow had been a great success.

The last of the refrigerated semitrailers was gone, autopsies completed, the bodies now in the hands of the morticians who would prepare them for shipping back to their families in China once identities had been established. As yet, more than two-thirds of them remained John and Jane Does. Fifty-two men and fourteen women. All of them in their twenties. None had carried official papers of any kind, even forgeries. Their clothes were not their own. There had been clues in Wang’s diary as to several of the names, and others had carried personal items — letters, photographs, engraved jewellery — that would eventually identify them. A sad collection of anonymous young men and women whose dreams had turned to death on a hot day in Texas.

‘Going to be another scorcher tomorrow.’ She turned to find Steve standing beside her, almost as if he had read her mind. And she was flooded with a sudden guilt at the memory of what had happened the night before. He deserved better.

‘You look tired,’ she said. There were deep shadows under his eyes, and some of the sparkle had gone out of them.

‘Didn’t sleep too good,’ he said. Margaret glanced instinctively at the plaster on his finger. He caught the look. ‘That,’ he said, ‘among other things.’ And she felt a fresh prickle of guilt.

‘I take it there’s been no word back from Washington on the lab results.’ She knew there hadn’t, but she was desperate to deflect the conversation away from the subject of her and Steve. It was ironic, she thought, that just as she had met, for the first time in years, a man who might have interested her, Li Yan appeared back in her life, as if determined somehow to keep her trapped in her cycle of unhappiness. And then she remembered, with a slight tremor, how it felt when Li made love to her and she thought how she could take any amount of that kind of unhappiness.

‘I figure it’ll be tomorrow at the earliest before we get anything definitive,’ Steve said. ‘By which time,’ he added, ‘I’ll be back in DC.’

‘And I’ll be headed back to Huntsville to try and sort out the mess with my landlord.’

‘What mess is that?’

‘Oh, he’s trying to evict me because I changed the locks.’