Peter May - Snakehead

‘Just don’t fart,’ she had warned them, and their laughter had broken the tension in the build-up to the raid. Both she and Li were similarly equipped, and they all knew that they would present a bizarre spectacle as they stormed the building.

Police back-up had been requested to deal with any traffic and crowd control problems that might arise in the street outside. They were going to have to stop the early evening traffic on Bellaire to let the INS vans cross its six lanes and enter the pot-holed parking area alongside the crumbling apartment block. There were two minutes to go.

Outside, the sinking sun was burning the sky red and the heat of the day was starting to fade. It had been a stark contrast to the icy temperatures they had left behind them in Washington. The parking lot was quiet. There were a few cars scattered across its undulating tarmac. In Susie’s nail salon, a group of Chinese women sat in the window waiting for a manicure. In the café next door a couple of old men sat sipping at mugs of green tea and eating hot, sweet dim sum straight from the steamer.

Hrycyk was crouched on Margaret’s left. He leaned in very close. ‘You get a buzz out of it, or something?’ he asked.

She frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

He lowered his voice. ‘Sleeping with Chinamen.’

If there had been space she would have swung a clenched fist into his face. Her anger boiled inside of her, and she turned to hiss in his face, ‘Yeah, and I’d sleep with every last one of them before I ever slept with you.’

She heard the radio crackle from the front of the van and a voice screamed, ‘Go, go, go!’ They heard a screech of tyres out on the boulevard, and their engines which had been ticking over on low rev suddenly fired up and they lurched forwards, the underside of their vehicle scraping on the road as they bumped down off the sidewalk and slewed across the boulevard into the parking lot. The back doors flew open, and they were spilling out into the fading light, running left and right, securing the exits.

Margaret was last out, just behind Li. They were the only members of the group not carrying a weapon. They followed the main body of agents along the cracked and uneven paving stones that marked the front of the building. Margaret glanced up at rusted wrought-iron balconies on windows with neglected-looking ornamental shutters. In a tree opposite the arched entrance to the main courtyard, a red squirrel sat frozen in terror as these bizarre-looking creatures in white rushed past.

In the courtyard, a metal staircase ran up to a mesh walkway running left and right into open corridors leading to the upper apartments. At the far end, a man carrying a bucket emerged from a cellar door. For just a moment he was like a rabbit caught in the headlamps of a car. Then he dropped his bucket and a foul cocktail of urine and human excrement spilled across the cobbles. He turned and ran, jumping up to try to catch a handhold on the top of the back wall. Two agents caught his legs and pulled him on to the ground, turning him face down in the shit and handcuffing him almost before he could scream. Several other agents clattered up the metal stairs to secure the corridors. The rest funneled through the door from which the man with the bucket had emerged.

At the briefing, they had been given hand-drawn plans of the block, with key areas marked in red. They knew from intelligence previously received from Yu Lin that the illegals were kept in a large cellar area below the main apartments. So far the drawings had been completely accurate.

Nothing, however, had prepared them for what they would find in the basement. The stink of human waste, hot and fetid, rose to meet them as they ran down cold stone steps. Their HEPA filters did not protect them from the foul stench of captive humanity. It was dark, and the walls ran with condensation and dampness. As Margaret stumbled to the foot of the stairs, grabbing Li’s arm to steady herself, someone flicked a light switch, and they found themselves looking down a long, narrow room with a concrete floor, double tiers of rough, wooden bunk beds lining the walls on each side Dozens of pairs of dark, frightened eyes peered at them in the harsh yellow light. Somewhere toward the back of the room a woman screamed, and a child started crying.

‘Jesus,’ Margaret whispered. ‘There are children in here.’ She had not been expecting that.

A young man wearing jeans and a leather jacket tried to make a break for the stairs. A chorus of INS voices called on him to stop, and he found himself staring down the barrels of several guns pointing directly at his head. He stopped, resigned, and raised his hands, a sick smile on his face. Margaret heard Hrycyk’s voice. ‘He’ll be one of the ma zhai . Get him outta here!’ An agent stepped up to pull his arms down and cuff his hands behind his back. ‘Bring the vans in now.’ Hrycyk’s voice again, barking into a handset. He turned to the other agents. ‘Let’s get these people up the stairs before I throw up.’ He turned to Li. ‘Tell them no one’s going to hurt them. If they come peaceful they’ll be fed and watered, and get the chance to clean up.’

Li spoke rapidly in Mandarin to the frightened faces that peered back at him out of the gloom, depressed and resigned, knowing that their dreams of the Golden Mountain were over. Reluctantly they began gathering together what few miserable belongings they had and filing out toward the stairs under the watchful eyes of the men in white.

One woman sat on her bunk, making no effort to move. Silent tears made tracks through the dirt on her face. Li made his way toward her and crouched at her knees. He took her hand. ‘Are you alright?’ he asked her.

She shook her head. ‘My husband died on the journey,’ she said. ‘I lost my baby. I have no family to go back to. Only his family. And they don’t want to know. They wouldn’t pay my snakehead.’

Li said, ‘Anything must be better than this. Surely?’

She looked at him bleakly and said, ‘Death, perhaps.’

Li lifted her pillow. Beneath it were a few items of clothing neatly laid out, a broken wrist watch, a faded colour photograph, the glaze cracked where it had been folded. A couple smiled for the camera, standing erect, arm-in-arm before the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Tiananmen Square. Li realised, with a shock, that it was the woman who sat on the bed. ‘Your husband?’ he asked. She nodded. He slipped the pillow out of its stained and filthy cover to make a bag and put her clothes and her watch and her photograph inside. ‘You can’t stay here,’ he said. He took her arm to help her to her feet, and she flinched away in pain. He looked round and saw Margaret standing there.

‘Let me have a look at her,’ she said, and she leaned over to draw the skimpy cotton dress off the woman’s shoulder. It was striped with dark bruising. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘This woman’s been beaten.’

‘Who beat you?’ Li asked her.

‘The ma zhai ,’ she said simply. ‘Because I couldn’t pay. They said I would have to give massage, and when I said no they beat me. They said, then I have to work in clothing factory to pay my debt, and live here for many years until it is all cleared. They said I have to pay for my husband, too, even though he is dead.’

Li was sickened. Could life possibly have been so bad for these people in China that it was worth enduring this? He knew that virtually none of them was fleeing political persecution. They were what the United Nations would call ‘economic migrants’. The idea that in America they would find the fabled Golden Mountain was an illusion. And yet the myth persisted.

Margaret said, ‘Ask her if she was vaccinated before they brought her across the border.’