Snakehead (20 page)

Margaret nodded. ‘Yes, the man’s always a lucky dog, the woman a whore.’

‘Ouch,’ Mendez said. ‘I detect some pain in there.’

‘A little bruising, that’s all,’ Margaret said. ‘Li and I…well, let’s just say there was always some impediment to our having a settled relationship.’ She smiled a little bitterly. ‘Usually me.’ And she drained her glass. ‘I met him when I first went to China after Michael…well, after Michael’s death.’

‘I know how Michael died,’ Mendez said quietly after a pause. He was staring into his glass, and then his eyes flickered up to meet hers. ‘I made a point of finding out after we spoke yesterday. I was shocked. Couldn’t believe it at first. It just didn’t seem like the Michael I knew.’

‘I lived with him for seven years,’ Margaret said. ‘Thought I knew everything about him. When I obviously knew nothing about him at all. It makes you feel like such a complete idiot.’

Mendez said, ‘That’s really why I came to see you tonight, my dear. To tell you how sorry I was. About Michael. You must have gone through hell.’

Margaret nodded sadly, memories flooding back, her defences against them always so easily breached. ‘It’s why I went to China in the first place,’ she said. ‘A kind of escape. And Li Yan was just so…different from anything or anyone I’d known before. He helped me get a perspective, rebuild my life.’ She gave a small, despairing shake of her head.

Mendez did not miss it. ‘What?’ he asked quickly.

She said, ‘He needs me right now, probably more than I ever needed him, and there’s not a damned thing I can do to help him.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s a long story, Felipe.’

Mendez grinned ruefully. ‘I’m awake now,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘Me, too.’ Her eyes were gritty, and her limbs felt like lead, but that overwhelming sense of sleep that had threatened to engulf her when they first got in had somehow passed. So she told him about Li and his sister. The whole sad tale of Xinxin, and how fate had somehow contrived to bring Li Yan and Xiao Ling together again in the most bizarre of circumstances — Xiao Ling, an illegal immigrant, paying off her debt by working as a prostitute, infected by the virus. ‘She’ll be detained with all the rest,’ Margaret said. ‘Locked up for God knows how long. I don’t know how Li Yan’s going to deal with that.’

‘She can apply for bail at the immigration court,’ Mendez said.

‘She’s infected, Felipe! They’re not going to let her, or anyone else, back into circulation. They’re going to be kept in isolation. Quarantined. We don’t know what triggers the flu yet. I mean, you know that better than anyone.’

‘It’s true,’ Mendez nodded solemnly. ‘We don’t know what triggers it. But we’re already building up extensive intelligence about what doesn’t.’

‘How do you mean?’

He said, ‘Department of Health and INS interviewers have been instructed to question people already taken into custody on what they’ve been eating and drinking since they arrived in America. That way we should be able to establish very quickly a list of “safe” foods. A diet that we know will not trigger the virus.’ And Margaret remembered her almost prophetic words to Steve.
If Chinese food triggered the virus it would have happened by now
. Of course, it made sense. Mendez went on, ‘Under proper supervision, there’s no reason why someone like Xiao Ling couldn’t be released into the protective custody of her brother. And I don’t see any reason why she shouldn’t be able to claim political asylum either. On the basis of what you’ve told me, she could easily argue that she was persecuted in China under the one-child policy.’

He stood up. ‘I know a very good lawyer in Houston,’ he said. ‘Owes me a favour or two. I’ll call him.’

‘What? Now?’ Margaret had been caught by surprise at how quickly this had all turned around.

‘Sure.’

‘Felipe, it’s the middle of the night!’

Mendez grinned. ‘If I’m not in my bed, I don’t see why anyone else should be.’

Chapter Eight

I

They drove past dilapidated wooden huts and old trailers set back among the trees on University Avenue. Battered pick-up trucks looked abandoned in dirt drives cluttered with rusted car wrecks and accumulations of trash. The occasional shiny new satellite dish stood pointing incongruously toward a leaden sky, the first red light of dawn creeping into it from the east.

As they went up the hill toward Main, they passed, on the left, the unimpressive offices of the District Attorney. Across the street the old county jailhouse was now home to a law firm.

Mendez chuckled. ‘Most folks would say that all lawyers should be put in the local jailhouse.’ Which was ironic, because they were on their way to meet the lawyer they hoped was going to get Xiao Ling freed from custody. He and Margaret had driven straight up to the Holliday Unit, while it was still dark, to collect Li. Li had spent a sleepless night there wrestling with the conflicting options that confronted him. Margaret’s phone call had come like a bright light shining into a very dark place. Now she sat up front, beside Mendez. Li sat in the back staring gloomily from the window. His initial hopes had since faded with news that the INS was almost certain to oppose Xiao Ling’s release.

They passed a mural on a side wall depicting the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, at which Sam Houston had led his Texan army to victory over Santa Anna and freedom from Mexico. They took a right into Main and drove past the impressive square of the Walker County Courthouse dominating the centre of Huntsville, then left into Sam Houston, drawing in beside a colourful display of birds of paradise set behind a low brick wall. The morning air was still cold as they stepped out on to the sidewalk, and laced with the smell of fresh coffee drifting down from the Café Texan. They walked past Scottie’s antique store, a window cluttered with bits of pottery and old furniture, shelves piled high with cheap bric-a-brac the owner liked to call ‘memorabilia’. The nonsmoking section of the café was empty. A sign in the window read NORMA’S SKIN AND NAILS UPSTAIRS. Margaret had seen the sign often and always wondered where the rest of Norma was kept.

The Café Texan was an old-fashioned Southern breakfast-diner. Low stools lined up along a red counter. Pots of Kona coffee sat on hotplates behind it. A large-breasted girl in hotpants served eggs over easy and grits and pancakes with maple syrup, to customers in Wranglers and Stetsons. Country music played over the sound system. On execution days and for several days beforehand, the Café Texan played host to the country’s media whose reporters would cram the place in the early hours speculating on whether or not there would be a last-minute reprieve. In recent years, those had been few and far between, and they were drawn now only by the crowds of protesters that gathered outside the Walls Unit in the run-up to controversial executions.

Li attracted some curious looks as an older woman with steel grey hair came up to them and said, ‘How y’all doin?’ and took them to a table at the back where a pasty-faced middle-aged man in a crumpled suit stood up to greet them. He had cut himself shaving, and his thinning grey hair was a little dishevelled. ‘Jesus, Felipe,’ he said. ‘You any idea what time I had to get outta my bed to get here?’

Felipe grinned and shook his hand. ‘No rest for the wicked, Dan.’ He turned and introduced Margaret and Li, then told them, ‘This is Daniel L. Stern, attorney at law, smartest lawyer this side of the Mississippi, and just as crooked.’

‘You only ever gotta be as crooked as the law itself,’ Stern said, grinning back at Mendez. He sat down again. ‘Damn, this is good grub. What you folks having?’

But none of them was hungry. Li and Margaret ordered coffee, and Mendez an iced tea. They watched Stern devour a double helping of grits smothered in maple syrup.

‘Don’t get a chance to eat like this too often,’ he said. ‘Wife says I gotta watch my waistline.’ And almost without pausing to draw breath, he added, ‘So this is some case you’re throwing at me, Felipe. Scary stuff. Jesus, if this ever gets out, there’ll be rioting in the streets.’ He looked at Li. ‘And you people had better run for cover.’

‘Then you know how important it is to keep this under your hat,’ Mendez said.

‘Hey,’ Stern chided him. ‘I think I know a little bit about client confidentiality, Felipe.’ A serving of French toast arrived, and he poured on more maple syrup. ‘So the way I see it, we have here a young woman who was forced to leave home in order to have her baby. Could the authorities have forced her to have an abortion?’ He raised a hand to preempt any reply. ‘Never mind, we’ll say they could.’

Margaret studied Stern with distaste as he shovelled French toast into his face. He was a fast-mouthed conveyer of ersatz justice, delivered on tap to the man with the most dollars in his hand. She glanced at Li and knew that he did not like him any better than she did. But with his sister’s freedom at stake, he was keeping his feelings to himself.

‘After the Tiananmen Square massacre in eighty-nine, the one-child policy became grounds on which lots of Chinese were granted asylum in American courts.’ Stern winked at Felipe. ‘See? I didn’t really go back to bed after your call. Been doing my homework.’ And he turned back to Li and Margaret. ‘But after the
Golden Venture
went aground off of New York, the US reversed its policy on that, until President Clinton announced in ’97 that the one-child policy should be considered political persecution. So your sister,’ he said to Li, ‘was driven from her home but lost her baby and knew the only way she was gonna have the freedom to fulfill her human right to have children was by escaping the country of her birth.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s irresistible stuff. No judge in an American court’s gonna send her back.’ He stabbed a finger at Li. ‘And you’ll testify if needs be? How she’s been separated from her daughter for two years? And how you’ve had the sole responsibility of looking after the child in her absence?’

Li had no idea what kind of trouble this might get him in with his embassy, but he nodded. It was all true. ‘Sure,’ he said.

‘Good.’ Stern seemed very pleased with himself. ‘And if Professor Mendez and Dr. Campbell approve a diet that you promise to see she sticks to, then I figure we’re home free.’ He finished off his French toast, drained a mug of coffee and wiped his face with a paper napkin. ‘Okay,’ he said, and stood up. ‘Let’s go get her outta there.’

* * *

Armed correctional officers of the TDCJ controlled the front and rear entries to the College of Criminal Justice at the top of the hill. There was also a substantial police presence cordoning off the college from the rest of the campus.

The prisoners had been brought over from the Holliday Unit on two buses an hour earlier and were being held in the Eliasberg Room, a brick-walled conference room at the back of the court. Its conference table had been removed and replaced by rows of plastic chairs. Judge McKinley, a laconic black man in his forties, who presided over the immigration court at Goree, had been given chambers in a library room through the wall from the prisoners.

The officers handling the prisoners were still wearing their Tivek suits and HEPA face masks, but the judge, on assurances from Department of Health officials that none of the prisoners was infectious, had refused to take any precautions and entered the court as usual wearing his black gown over a charcoal grey suit. On a bench, flanked by the Stars and Stripes on one side and the Lone Star of Texas on the other and set high above the court officer and a Chinese translator, he looked out over the rising tiers of an almost empty courtroom. There were three tables set out front, one in the middle for the prisoner and one on either side. The INS lawyer, a young, anxious-looking woman in her early thirties, sat at one of them the other was for representatives of the accused. But of the sixty-seven people due to appear before the court that day, only Xiao Ling had any legal representation.

Stern sat looking bored, leaning back chewing reflectively on the end of his pencil as the first immigrants were brought before the judge. Margaret sat at the back of the courtroom watching proceedings with a detached sense of horrified curiosity. Illegal immigrants had few, if any, rights. The court was required to allow them to make contact with their consulates, and they had the right to legal representation. But virtually none of them had access to a lawyer, never mind the means to pay for one. An anonymous Chinese in a crisp, dark suit sat very erect about three seats away from Margaret, watching proceedings and scribbling occasionally in a notebook on his knee. Margaret guessed he was from the Chinese consulate. Li had gone earlier to speak with his sister, and was now waiting outside the court until she was called. Margaret wondered if he was trying to avoid the consular official.

The court was sitting, Margaret knew, on a constitutional knife edge. The media would not normally be interested in the proceedings of an immigration court in Huntsville but would have rights of access if they so desired. She was certain that it would not be long before some local newshound would figure out that there was something a little out of the ordinary going on up at the college and put in an appearance. She had no idea how the authorities would deal with that. She was just glad that it was not her responsibility.

A procession of pathetic figures in white prison uniform was brought before the judge by a burly sergeant wearing a face mask and gloves. Virtually none of them spoke English, and Judge McKinley had to resort to using the interpreter, a process with which he was clearly quite familiar. They all faced the same questions. Name. Nationality. Did they understand the charge against them? Why should the court not deport them back to China? Would they like time to prepare a defence and seek representation? Case continued for seven days. Each took five minutes or less to process.

They were about seven or eight cases in when Margaret turned to see Agent Fuller entering the court. He made his way quietly down the steps and sat several rows from the front, watching the proceedings impassively.

It was nearly an hour before Xiao Ling was brought in. Margaret guessed her case was imminent when Agent Hrycyk wandered into the back of the court, gave her a wink, and sauntered past Fuller, down to the front where he took a seat on the public benches behind the INS lawyer. He was pale-faced and puffy-eyed, and looked as if he had had about as much sleep as Margaret. A few moments later, Mendez slipped into the back of the courtroom. He saw Margaret and waved a slip of paper at her, smiling, before taking an aisle seat.