Peter May: Snakehead

‘Found it lying on the chest of one of the bodies,’ the investigator said. ‘Pencil was still in his hand.’

‘What is it?’ Hrycyk called from below, craning to see what she was holding. He was clearly frustrated not to be closer to the action.

‘It’s a notebook.’

‘Anything in it?’

‘Sure.’

‘Well, what? What does it say?’ His patience was wearing thin.

‘I don’t know about you,’ Margaret said caustically, ‘but my Chinese isn’t that good.’

Hrycyk cursed. ‘Well, at least the Chinese guy they’re gonna send from Washington might come in useful for something, then.’

‘What Chinese guy?’ Margaret asked, a sudden thickening in her throat.

‘The criminal justice liaison at the Chinese Embassy. This whole thing’s already going political.’

She turned away, anxious that Hrycyk should have no sense of her distress. To him the criminal justice liaison at the Chinese Embassy in Washington was just another Chinese. She knew him better as Li Yan, Deputy Section Chief, Section One of the Criminal Investigation Department of Beijing Municipal Police. A man whose intimate touch she knew only too well. A touch that pained her now to remember. She moved into the back of the truck, more ready to face the horrors it contained than the feelings she had spent a year trying to sublimate, feelings of love and betrayal turning slowly to anger and maybe more. ‘Where’s the body you took this from?’ she asked the investigator brittlely.

They picked their way through two dozen corpses, men and women who had clawed in despair at the walls of the container, even at their own clothing. It was a pitiful sight. A man in jeans and sneakers was half propped against the left side wall. He had shreds of thinning hair brushed back from an unusually dark face, a sparse moustache barely covering his upper lip. Margaret noticed the nicotine stains on the fingers that still held the pencil with which he had scrawled his last desperate words.

I first saw Cheng that night in Fujian when they took us offshore in the small boat to board the cargo ship waiting in international waters. She sat at the back of the boat clutching a brown bag, looking very small and vulnerable. She made me feel like such a fraud. This was real for her. This was her life. Full of danger and uncertainty. I know that many of these people make this journey not for themselves, but for their families, for the money they can send home from the Mountain of Gold. I thought of her, even then, as my yazi , my little duck. I know it is the term they use for illegal immigrants, and never did it seem more appropriate than when I thought of poor little Cheng. I decided, then, that I would do my best to protect her on this long, hard trip. If I had known how powerless I would be to save her from the rapes and the beatings I would have taken her off the boat that night and sacrificed this whole venture. All I have been able to offer her since is comfort. I do not know if she knows that I have fallen in love with her. She does not, I think, love me. I am twice her age. She likes and trusts me, perhaps like a daughter trusts a father. I know that when we reach Meiguo I will lose her. I wish I had never made this journey.

Li Yan freewheeled down the hill past dark stone mansions lurking in dappled shadow behind gnarled old trees. They had strange, Scottish-sounding names like Dumbarton House and Anderson House, painted placards on wrought-iron gates. He left Georgetown’s grid of tree-lined narrow streets behind him and swung his bicycle toward the bridge over Rock Creek. Sheridan Circle was thick with traffic, and he turned uphill into a maze of residental streets that took him over the rise and down again toward Connecticut Avenue.

The Embassy had taken over the old Windsor Hotel, two seven-storey blocks set at right angles, backing onto another loop in the erratic meanderings of the slick that was Rock Creek, almost due north from where its mean little mouth oozed into the slow-moving body of the Potomac. Only a ten-minute cycle from the White House.

They had offered him a car, and he had declined it. He had spent all his adult life cycling between the offices of Section One in the Dongzhimen district of Beijing and the police apartment he had shared with his uncle in the old embassy quarter, not far from Tiananmen. An hour’s cycle. By comparison, the twenty minutes from his townhouse in Georgetown was easy, although it had taken him time to get used to the gradients. Besides, he knew he needed that regular daily exercise to get the blood flowing through his veins, carrying oxygen to his brain, sharpening his senses — and to counter the effects of the thirty cigarettes a day he had been smoking until very recently.

His neighbours had got used to seeing him this past year, pedal-pushing up O Street in all weathers, turning north and disappearing toward the cemeteries at the top of the hill, sweat streaming in rivulets down his strong-boned face in the summer heat, dragon breath billowing about his head in the winter frost. Today, as he drifted down to Connecticut off Kalorama Heights, he was in shirt sleeves and slacks, the warm fall air flowing past his cheeks like soft silk, gently raking the fine, square-cut bristle of black hair that covered his scalp. There was the threat of rain in a changing sky, and he carried a waterproof cape in his satchel. It had been, nominally, his day off, and he had made plans for that afternoon. Until the call on his cellphone, and the crisp summons to the Embassy. A matter not to be discussed on the telephone.

He took long, loping strides across the red-carpeted expanse of what had once been the lobby of the Windsor, and climbed the staircase two at a time. The first secretary was waiting for him in a spacious office on the second floor, windows opening out on to the small circle of tree-shaded green below. He dropped an airline ticket on his desk, slanting sunlight burning out across its polished surface, and said, ‘You haven’t been to Houston before, have you, Li?’

Li felt a stab of apprehension. ‘No, First Secretary.’

‘Your flight is first thing tomorrow. The ambassador himself will brief you this evening.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Nearly one hundred renshe found dead in the back of a truck by the local police. Given all our promises to try to stamp out the flow of illegals from China, Beijing is acutely embarrassed. A severe loss of mianzi . Yours will be an exercise in damage limitation.’

For a moment, all that Li could think of was that there was a chance he might have to face Margaret. And he had a distinct sense of foreboding.

From the stand-alone redbrick block of the Joseph A. Jachimczyk Forensic Center for Harris County, on the corner of William C. Harvin Boulevard and Old Spanish Trail, Margaret gazed out of her office window toward Medicine City and tried to push thoughts of Li from her mind. She focused instead on the spectacular skyline of shining glass tower blocks and skyscrapers in the heart of Houston, a city within a city. The Texas Medical Center. Forty-two medical institutions serving five million patients a year in a hundred buildings spread over seven hundred acres and twelve miles of road. With an annual operating budget of more than four billion dollars and research grants of more than two billion, medicine city employed fifty thousand people, attracted ten thousand volunteers and one hundred thousand students. Like everything else in Texas, it had ambitions to be the biggest and the best. And probably was. Although not quite big enough to displace Li entirely from her mind.

Margaret’s little empire was on the southern fringes of this medical metropolis, in parking lot territory. On quiet days she could gaze from her window at the shuttle buses that took employees back into the heart of the city from the acres of parking lot that surrounded her building. But this was not a quiet day. And it was not about to get any quieter. Lucy buzzed through from the outer office. ‘That’s them now, Dr. Campbell.’