Peter May - Snakehead

The light from the street lay across the living-room carpet in elongated squares, a distortion of the twelve-paned window. Li preferred the feeling of the carpet between his toes as he advanced into the front room. There was more comfort in it. His gaze fell on a shadow in the kitchen doorway. It was a strange shadow, resembling nothing familiar to him. There was not the slightest movement in it, but Li could tell neither what it was nor how the light had created it. And then suddenly it grew large, expanding toward him, taking shape in the form of a man, hands raised above its head. A white Chinese face briefly caught the light from the window, and Li saw the reflection of polished metal pass quickly through it as a blade cleaved the air. He raised his bat and felt sharp metal slice into dense wood. And in a purely reflex action, he pulled back his leg, folding it into his chest and kicking out hard at the shadow. He felt ribs cracking beneath his heel, and heard a sharp cry of pain as his assailant staggered across the room and crashed into a wall unit laden with books and CDs and Oriental knick-knacks that had come with the house.

His miniature stereo system bizarrely started playing at high volume. Li recognised the music immediately. A CD of opera arias that he had been listening to, trying to accustom his Eastern ear to the strange cadences of Western music. Twin female voices swooped around the room singing Delibes’ Flower Duet from Lakmé. Li wanted to scream at them to shut up, but another shape materialised out of the shadow. Another blade. This time he saw clearly that it was the kind of cleaver used by chefs in Chinese kitchens. A big square blade with a heavy wooden handle. He tried to skip out of the way, and tripped over the leg of his first attacker, landing heavily on his side. His baseball bat, a cleaver still buried in the striking end of the shaft, tumbled from his hand. He rolled over, trying to grasp it again, and found his fingers closing around the handle of the cleaver. He wrenched it free of the bat and rolled again as he heard the swish of a blade parting the air above him. Something flashed past his face, clearing it by no more than an inch, and he struck out blindly, swinging the cleaver in front of him, and felt it slice through something soft. A scream sought to find the pitch of the divas in their Flower Duet . But it failed to get there, making instead a ghastly discord. He realised that his face was wet, something warm, the temperature of blood. Something dark on his hand as he wiped it from his face. A body fell heavily on top of him, and he smelled five spice on its dying breath.

He pushed it aside and scrambled to his feet, the cleaver still in his hand, just in time to be smashed to the floor again by the assault of his first attacker throwing himself across the room. A deep groan of pain escaped the man’s lips and Li knew that he had broken two, perhaps more, of his attacker’s ribs with his initial kick. They fell awkwardly and Li lost his grip on the cleaver, his fingers sticky now and slippery with blood. In spite of his injury, his assailant was still strong, and a fist like balled steel crashed two, three times into Li’s face. He could taste his own blood now filling his mouth. He swung his fist at the man’s chest, connecting again with the damaged ribs. The man screamed and Li pulled himself free, scrabbling across the carpet for the cleaver or the bat. He found the bat, staggered to his feet and turned in time to see the man leaping at him again with grim, defiant determination. Li swung the bat with all his strength and heard the dreadful sound of splintering bone, his arm jarring with the force of the bat as it connected with the side of the man’s skull. He made no other sound, dropping immediately to the floor in a heavy, huddled, lifeless bundle, like a sack of stones.

Li stood gasping for breath, almost paralysed by his own adrenalin. The divas had given way now to a deep, sonorous baritone, a grown man weeping as he sang the definitive aria from Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci . Li swung his head at the sound of a movement behind him, and he saw, clearly caught in the light from the street, a young Chinese dressed entirely in black, levelling a gun at his head. With a great yell of hopeless frustration, Li launched himself across the room in one last desperate adrenalin burn.

Margaret was both confounded and terrified by the sound of opera rising up through the house, like some ghastly funeral dirge accompanying the cries of battle that came from below. All three women were huddled on the floor beneath the window, a terrified and confused Xinxin crushed to Margaret’s breast. And then, above the plaintive cries of Leoncavallo’s baritone, came the sound of a single gun shot. Deadened by the confined space of the living room. A moment later, the mourning of the baritone was cut short, and a silence like death fell on the house.

They listened for a long time in that silence, hardly daring to breathe, before they heard the first creak of a footstep on the stairs. A sound like the whimper of an injured animal came from Xiao Ling’s huddled form. Margaret turned angrily, her finger to her lips. ‘Shhhh!’ She needed her anger to overcome her fear. She let go of Xinxin, who turned to clutch her mother instead, and stood up. She looked out of the window and saw that it was a fifteen- to twenty-foot drop to the back yard. They could jump if they had to. She slid open the lower half of the sash and felt the cold night air raise goosebumps on her arms. That was the escape route, their last resort. But there had to be a first line of defence. She looked around the room, starting to panic, and saw a bedside lamp with a heavy ceramic base.

She reached over and ripped it from its socket, and darted across the room to stand on the far side of the door. She tore away the shade and raised the base of the lamp to shoulder level, clutching it with both hands, ready to swing and do as much damage as she could.

There was another creak from the top of the stairs, and they heard someone moving slowly down the hall, carpet over old floorboards creaking like footsteps in dry snow. The steps faltered, as if there had been a stumble. And then for a moment complete quiet. Only Li would know that it was this room they were in. An intruder would have a fifty-fifty choice between Meiping’s room and Xinxin’s.

The door swung open, and Margaret braced herself, ready to swing the base of the lamp. Then Xinxin’s shrill shriek pierced the dark and she tore herself free from her mother and ran across the room to throw her arms around Li’s legs. Margaret almost buckled at the knees, and stepped out from the shadow of the door to switch on the light. This time it was Xiao Ling who screamed as the figure of her brother stood swaying in the doorway, blood matting his hair. Shockingly red in the sudden light, it was spattered across his face, smeared on his chest and crusting on the fingers of his right hand like a pathologist’s glove.

The night air was filled with the crackle of police radios and intermittent blue and red flashing lights. O Street was choked with police vehicles, ambulances, forensics, an unmarked truck from the morgue. Wealthy residents, wakened from their sleep, stood at windows wrapped in silk gowns watching with a mix of fear and curiosity as three covered bodies strapped to litters were carried out to the vehicle from the morgue. It was nearly 6 a.m. Too late to go back to bed. Too early to go to work. All that any of them could do was watch.

Li watched, too, from the window of his bedroom. He found it hard to wipe from his mind’s eye the blood running red against the white ceramic shower base as streams of comforting hot water washed it from his skin a little over an hour ago. His own blood had long since clotted in his nostrils and around the split in his upper lip. He had lost a tooth from his lower jaw and his face was swollen and bruised. His whole body ached. His mind was numb. Downstairs, forensics officers in hooded white Tivek suits were sifting through the debris of the battlefield. The photographer had already finished his work, staring dead eyes, open mouths, dark shadows on blood-stained carpet, all captured in the brief, dazzling illumination of his flash.