Peter May - Snakehead

‘Mr. Li is here.’

Margaret was at the door even before Lucy had time to hang up. The afternoon had felt interminable. She had been unable to concentrate on the mountain of paperwork which had piled up in her in-tray during the last few days. There were two bodies in the morgue awaiting autopsy — a murder and a suspect road accident — and she had spent an hour phoning the hospitals trying to enlist pathologists to do post-mortems out of hours. She held the door open for Li and waited until he was in and she could close it behind her before she threw her arms around him and pressed her face into his chest. ‘My God, Li Yan, where have you been? Why are you never there when I need you?’

She felt his initial surprise, and then he held her at arm’s length, concerned. ‘Where’s Xiao Ling?’ he asked.

‘I had them set up a cot bed for her in an office downstairs. She’s sleeping.’

‘What’s wrong?’

And she felt her fear returning, and her hands started shaking as she took him step by step through the nightmare of their drive down from Huntsville. His face was carved from stone. Grim and thoughtful. ‘What did they want, Li Yan?’ she asked when she had finished. ‘One of them had a gun, I’m sure. Only, when I tried to confront them they just drove away. Xiao Ling looked liked she’d seen a ghost. Like she knew them. She called them something…’ She searched her memory for the words Xiao Ling had whispered. ‘ Ma ja …something like that.’

‘ Ma zhai? ’ Li said.

‘That’s it. What does it mean?’

Li frowned. ‘It means “little horses”. It’s what they call members of the Chinese street gangs here. We picked up a couple when we raided that cellar in Chinatown. They’re the enforcers, the ones who beat and intimidate the illegal immigrants into coming up with the money for the snakeheads. And usually they are the ones sent to collect protection money from the shops and restaurants on the gang’s turf.’ He paused. ‘Are you sure Xiao Ling recognised them?’

‘She must have. How else would she have known what they were?’

He nodded.

‘So what did they want?’

Li said, ‘If they had wanted to hurt you, they would have.’ He took a moment or two to think about it. ‘So they must have wanted to scare you. Because that is what they did.’

‘Yeah, and they were pretty good at it, too.’ Her attempt at a smile fell short of its objective. Li drew her to him, brushing the hair from her face and softly kissing her forehead. She looked up into his face. ‘But why would they want to scare me?’

Li’s face coloured slightly. ‘Not you, Margaret,’ he said. ‘Xiao Ling.’ And he remembered Hrycyk’s words as they left Minute Maid Park just half an hour ago. I’m betting a good few of them have seen enough to incriminate more than one of the uncles in there in a whole range of illegal activities . She had worked in the Golden Mountain Club. She had been favoured by the bosses, she’d said. She must have seen things, heard things that someone was very anxious she did not convey to Li. ‘She must know something,’ he said, and he told Margaret about the club. ‘I’m going to take her to Washington tonight. She’s not safe here.’

Margaret felt a depression wash over her at the thought of Li going. Everything in her life seemed to be in a state of flux. And the residue of fear from the encounter with the ma zhai was still powerful enough to leave her feeling vulnerable, even raw.

‘When will you be back?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. My first responsibility is to Xiao Ling. Once she is safe in Georgetown with Meiping to look after her, then I will consider what my options are.’ But he knew they were limited. He could either throw himself on the mercy of his Embassy and ask to be allowed to take her back to China with him, or he could let her take her chances through the American court system while he continued to play an active part in the investigation. Neither option left much room for Margaret. He knew she was afraid. He looked at her. Fear made her seem smaller, more defenceless. It was only the power of her personality that ever made her seem bigger, stronger than she really was. But then he hardened his mind to her. It was only two nights ago that she had told him she thought they should keep things between them on a professional basis. ‘I must book a flight,’ he said. ‘Can I use your phone?’

She nodded, but before he could lift the receiver, it rang. Margaret answered it, and he saw immediately that something was wrong. The colour drained from her face leaving it chalk white, and her eyes were a pale, bloodless blue.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and hung up. He could see her hand trembling. She looked at him and he saw the cold, gold sunset reflected in her moist eyes. ‘Looks like I’ll be on that flight with you,’ she said, almost in a whisper. ‘That was a pathologist from AFIP. Steve’s virus has gone active.’

The Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner sat up off the freeway in a low, anonymous brick building opposite a Best Western Hotel. It was surrounded by neatly trimmed lawns, and clusters of shrubs and trees circled by carefully tended flower beds. The pathologists there still called it the Gillette building, even though it was some years since Gillette had been forced by animal rights protesters to abandon it. The laboratories where the company had tested its products had been perfect for the purposes of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner, and the smoked, plexiglass windows and sophisticated electronic entry system had made it ideally secure.

It was dark when Margaret arrived. One of the pathologists from the team which had carried out the autopsies at Ellington Field led her up stairs to the second level and along anonymous hushed corridors to Steve’s office. Overhead fluorescents flickered on and threw a man’s life into sharp relief. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ the pathologist said. ‘Anything you need, holler. I’m just down the hall.’

Margaret stood blinking in the harsh light, depressed and alone. This was Steve’s space, where he spent so much of his life, and he was in every corner of it. But his physical absence was haunting.

Water sprinkled across a tiny arrangement of rocks on a desk pushed against the far wall, a soothing, peaceful sound in the stillness. Good feng shui , Margaret thought. Beside it, a favourite microscope, and a twelve-inch plastic model of the human body, torso and head, with removable internal organs brightly coloured. There were miniature cardboard drawers built one on the other, each carefully labelled. Tiny glass sample slides and piles of transparencies. On a shelf above, all his plaques and medals and framed certificates, a lemonade bottle with a DNA label on it. On the wall there was a painting of the astronauts who had achieved the first successful moon landing, smiling out stoically from their bulky NASA space suits. A bed pan in use as a flower pot made her smile. There were, she saw, a number of pot plants around the office, breathing fresh oxygen into the still air.

Above a cluttered bookshelf, a large sheet pinned to the wall was mounted with half a dozen photographs of Plasticine heads that Steve had moulded from the skulls of Jane and John Does in an attempt to identify them. A hobby, he had told her. Pinned to the drawer of a metal filing cabinet were photographs of his little girl, Danni, taken on a beach somewhere. Just three years old. Plump and smiling in her little red bathing costume, she was grinning at the camera and splashing the cold sea water. Margaret could almost hear her screams of delight. And then, in the corner, Steve’s computer, Danni’s smile saving his screen from burnout. Her soft, brown hair was tied up in a ribbon and her mouth half-open in a smile breaking into laughter. Margaret reached out and touched the face, but felt only the cold glass of the screen. Tears formed in her eyes and she blinked furiously to stop them. And through the blur, she hunted around in the drawers of his desk until she found his personal stereo and headset, and looked up to see the rows of audio tapes on the bookshelf above.