Peter May - Snakehead

To celebrate, he had taken Xiao Ling and Xinxin on a whistlestop tour of the Washington sights. The Vietnam wall, where the name of every American who had died in the Southeast Asian conflict was etched in black marble. A sobering place. Arlington Cemetery and the grave of the assassinated John F. Kennedy, fine words once spoken by him now carved in stone for eternity. The changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The strange, mechanical, strutted ritual had fascinated Xinxin. The Lincoln Memorial. Another assassinated president, towering in white marble, seated in his temple and gazing out across the Reflecting Pool to the Washington Monument and Capitol Hill beyond. He wanted them to see these things, to have these memories to take away with them, because the chances were they would never be back. Tomorrow he would pull some strings to get them on a White House tour. And the day after they would fly to Beijing.

The dying embers of the sun slanted red light into the hall as he opened the door, nearly falling over his bicycle in his rush to get to the phone. He had called Meiping earlier and told her she could have the day off.

‘Wei?’

‘Li Yan?’

He recognised Margaret’s voice immediately, and his heart suddenly filled his chest and restricted his breathing. ‘Margaret.’ He waited a moment, but she said nothing. ‘They told me there was a scare with the flu.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘False alarm.’ More silence, that neither of them knew how to fill. Xiao Ling and Xinxin came in at Li’s back and closed the door and went through, chattering, to the kitchen. Margaret heard the voices and said, ‘How are things with Xinxin and Xiao Ling?’

So he told her. About them making up, about the long talk they had all had. About his decision to return to China with them. About the Embassy granting him interim leave to return to Beijing while they took a final decision about his position. Xiao Ling, he said, would receive the best of care if, or until, the flu struck.

Fifteen hundred miles away in Houston, Texas, his words fell like stones in a desert. An arid wind blew through Margaret’s soul. Everything she had felt just minutes earlier, the hope and the happiness, withered inside her. Only his seed remained there, the one spark of life in a bleak landscape. He talked about their day, and she listened without hearing. For beyond his reserve in breaking the news to her, she sensed his happiness, something she had not felt in him for a long time. If she told him now about their child, it could only throw everything in his life back into confusion. He might resent it. Blame her. She didn’t want to be the one to hurt him again, and neither did she want to be hurt by him.

‘Margaret…? Are you still there…?’

She forced herself to refocus. ‘Yeah, I’m still here.’

He knew there was something wrong. He could feel it reaching out to him over all the miles. ‘Is that all you phoned for?’ he said. ‘To ask about Xiao Ling and Xinxin?’

For several long moments she did not trust herself to speak. ‘Sure,’ she said, finally.

He said, ‘Margaret, is there something wrong?’

‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘So you won’t be coming back to Texas for the Immigration Court?’

‘No.’

Silence.

‘Well…,’ she said, ‘…I guess that’s it, then.’

‘That’s what?’ he asked.

‘Goodbye,’ she said.

And he realised that this might be the last time he would ever speak to her. ‘Margaret…’ But he stopped. He had no idea what to say. Then, finally, he said, ‘I guess it is.’

Silence.

‘Well…Goodbye, then.’

Her voice was so quiet he barely heard her. He had to clear his throat before he could speak. ‘Goodbye,’ he said, and held on to the phone until he heard her replace the receiver at the other end. And a part of him died in that moment.

Margaret’s tears blistered the list of phone numbers on her desk, and she was glad there was no one in the building to hear her cry of anguish.

It was twilight by the time she got to Conroe. The last of the day filtered through the trees, and the lake lay still, like glass, reflecting a sky where the first stars were already appearing in a pale blue shading to dark. The blood had drained out of the western horizon, and the flat Texan landscape stretched away into a shimmering eternity.

Margaret’s Chevy bumped up the long dirt track to the Mendez ranch, raising a cloud of orange dust in its wake. She had nowhere else to go. All her things were here, and she could not face a night alone in a hotel room. She felt safe enough in light of Mendez’s remorse, and whatever uneasiness she had about facing him was nothing compared to the aching hollow space that filled her heart. The Bronco was parked opposite the garage, and as she punched in the access code to open the door to the house, she heard Clara barking on the other side of it, a scrabble of claws on floorboards.

Clara danced around her legs, jumping up, her paws punching into Margaret’s chest. Margaret pushed the dog away and realised she could barely see. The house was in darkness. She caught her knee on the hard edge of the gun rack and cursed as she fumbled to find a light switch. Finally, her fingers stumbled on a panel of switches on the wall. The gun room and kitchen flickered into sharp fluorescence.

Nothing had changed. The kitchen was still piled with unwashed dishes. The smell of stale food and cooking oil hung in the air. Clara’s food bowl was empty, and by her agitation Margaret reckoned she was probably hungry. Her water dish was also empty. Margaret had no idea where Mendez kept the dog food, but she filled the water dish at the sink and put it back on the floor. Clara slurped noisily, one eye on constant alert in case there was food to follow.

Margaret called out, ‘Hello? Felipe, are you at home?’ Her voice was soaked up by the house and there was no response. She went through to the sitting room and turned on the lights there. The ceiling fan stirred hot air. The door to the smoking porch stood open, the air laden with the smell of fresh cigar smoke, but there was nobody in there either. She passed through the dining room and out into the front hall. She switched on the stair lights and called up, ‘Felipe?’ Still no response.

She went back through to the kitchen and into the bar. She was tired and dry, and needed a drink. She took a bottle of tonic from the refrigerator, cut some lemon and put ice into a tall glass. The vodka bottle was already in her hand before she realised that there was somebody else to think about other than herself now. She hesitated for only a second, before pushing the bottle back on the shelf and pouring herself a plain tonic water over ice and lemon. It tasted good, sharp and refreshing.

She carried the glass with her as she went up the stairs to her room. In the hall, she stopped. The door to Mendez’s study stood ajar and she could see the light of a desk lamp burning softly somewhere inside. Previously the door had always been closed. Curious, she pushed it open and walked in. It was a small room, smaller than she had been expecting. The walls were lined with bookshelves, and the shelves were groaning with books piled one on top of the other. The floor was strewn with papers and maps and open books with pages folded to mark the place. A battle-scarred old mahogany desk was pushed up against the wall below a window with its blind pulled down. Layer upon layer of papers drifted across the landscape of its obscured leather top. Haphazard stacks of files rose in columns like cliffs. An old Macintosh computer was half buried in a gorge between them. A captain’s chair was turned toward the door, as if Mendez had left it only moments before. A passport lay across the computer keyboard, pushed back from the front edge of the desk. It was the green-blue colour of a sullen tropical sea, with gold lettering, and an eagle crest. A number was punched, like Braille, along its bottom edge beneath the word PASAPORTE. Margaret picked up the passport, puzzled, and frowned. She opened it and saw a younger Mendez staring back at her, like a still from an old movie. She looked at it for some time, lost in thought and consternation, before dropping the passport back on the desk. She flipped idly through some of the papers strewn across the desktop. Scientific stuff mostly. Notes and articles, several of them in Spanish.