Snakehead (9 page)

Someone else shouted, ‘And bring the medical examiner with you. It’s not fair keeping her all to yourself.’

Steve grinned, embarrassed. ‘I’m having an early night, guys.’ There was a low murmur of suggestive ‘ooohs’. ‘And you should, too,’ he added. ‘Heavy day tomorrow.’

‘Yes,
sir
,’ someone else hollered, and they all saluted.

‘Down boys,’ Steve shouted. ‘Or I’ll set my eyebrows on you.’

They could still hear the laughter as the doors of the elevator slid shut, and then the silence between them was broken only by the hum of the motor.

‘I enjoyed tonight,’ Margaret said.

‘Me, too. We must do it again sometime.’ Steve paused for just a moment. ‘Like tomorrow.’

‘Before you leave, you mean?’ She didn’t really intend it, but there was a slight sting in her tone.

He looked at her seriously. ‘I get out of the Air Force in six months, Margaret. That was the deal. They pay me through med school, I give them three years of my life. I was doing great working out of the ME’s office in San Diego when they called in my contract. But I’m a free man in April.’

‘A lot can happen in six months.’ She knew it was way too early to make any kind of commitment.

‘A lot can happen in twenty-four hours,’ he said. ‘Live for the moment. We could be dead tomorrow.’

‘Yeah, or still alive and full of regrets.’

They got out on the fifth floor and started down the long hallway, walking slowly so as to delay the moment when they would stop at Margaret’s door. When eventually they got there, they stood for a long time not knowing what to say. Finally Margaret reached up and kissed him lightly on the cheek. ‘See you tomorrow, then.’

‘Margaret…’

But she put a finger up to his lips to stop him. ‘We can’t run before we can walk, Steve. And I’m still learning how to walk again.’

He nodded solemnly. ‘I could lend you a bicycle.’

Which made her smile, and she kissed him again. On the lips this time. Then, ‘Good night,’ she said firmly, and she unlocked her door and stepped into the darkness of her room.

She knew immediately he was there. She could feel his presence almost as clearly as if she could see him. But her eyes had not yet adjusted, and all she could see, through net curtains, were the illuminated twin peaks of St Luke’s Medical Tower across the road in Medicine City. She fumbled for the light switch without finding it, and then the bedside lamp flickered on, and she saw Li perched on the edge of her bed, the strain of apprehension etched clearly on his face.

‘You bastard,’ she said, almost in a whisper. ‘Do you have any idea what you put me through these last ten months?’

He looked surprised. ‘You knew I was in Washington?’

‘Of course I knew you were there, for Chrissake! It was in all the papers. This isn’t China, Li Yan. It’s not a state secret when someone gets appointed to a new job.’

He appeared crestfallen. Unable to meet her eye. ‘You’re the only reason I took the job,’ he said.

It was both what she wanted and didn’t want to hear. ‘So it took you all this time not to find my phone number?’

Li stood up. He was like a giant in the room, both his size and his presence filling it. But it was in a small voice that he said, ‘I lost my nerve.’

Margaret had no patience with him. ‘Oh, gimme a break! You’re a big boy now, Li Yan.’ And then she remembered the red spots around his eyes earlier in the day. That he had wept over Wang. Big boys weren’t supposed to cry either.

‘It was you who walked out on me, remember,’ Li said.

‘You
know
why.’

But Li pressed on. ‘We hadn’t spoken in nearly six months. When I was still in China it all seemed like it would be easy. I would come to America, and I would pick up a phone and we would be together again.’

‘So why didn’t you?’

‘Because you were still half a continent away, Margaret. Because I had no idea whether you would want to be with me again.’

‘Oh, Jesus!’ She bit her lip and looked away from him. ‘How could you ever doubt it?’

‘Very easily,’ he said. ‘I loved you, Margaret. But whatever you say,
you
left
me
. Got on an airplane and flew back home. I couldn’t know that there was any way back for us. And I got scared to ask in case there was not.’ He held out his hands in front of him, a gesture of despair. ‘When I got here, the job just took over. It is twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Time passes. And it is easier to live in ignorance than with an unpalatable truth.’

But she wasn’t about to forgive him so easily. ‘Is that one of your Chinese proverbs, Li Yan? One of those little pieces of wisdom that just roll so easily off the tongue? Because, you know, there’s been nothing easy for me, any single day in fifteen months. We had no future in China, you know that. But I’ve spent every waking minute since I left wondering if I made a mistake, knowing that I was just as unhappy here on my own.’

She glared at him, hating him for making her love him. Hating herself for being so weak.

‘Margaret…’ Li took a step toward her.

She turned her back on him, moving off toward the window, looking sightlessly out on a semiderelict car lot and the lights of the traffic on South Main. ‘I don’t want to hear it, Li Yan,’ she said. ‘Just go away.’

Li stood helplessly looking at her. It was the rejection he had always feared. They had encountered each other by chance, but he had had to steel himself to come up here, to face her hostility, to try to explain himself. He wasn’t about to turn back now. He stepped up behind her and put a hand lightly on her shoulder. He was not expecting the speed with which she turned around and took her open palm across the side of his face. His cheek stung, and he stood smarting, waiting for the next blow. It came this time from the other side and he turned his face with the slap to take some of the force out of it. But still it hurt. She had strength in her hands and her arms. But now he caught them, and their strength was no match for his.

‘Are you done hurting me now?’ he asked her.

She made a vain attempt to free herself. ‘Not by a long way,’ she whispered. And his mouth was on hers, soft and moist and sweet, and she felt a strange falling sensation that travelled all the way through her to her loins.

He let go of her arms and lifted her in his, as if she weighed nothing at all, carrying her to the bed and dropping her on the bedspread. As she struggled to wriggle out of her jeans and pull off her tee-shirt, she saw the light from the window fall obliquely across his pectorals, his white shirt dropping to the floor. She felt guilty now, that she had been kissing another man only an hour before. Li fell on top of her, his smooth skin seeming to envelop her, his hands running over all her softness. His mouth pressed hard to hers. She had not been aware of him removing his pants, but she felt his nakedness hard against her like a rock. So much, she thought, for ignoring him when she couldn’t avoid him. His mouth slid down to her nipples and pulled them in, each in turn, and she moaned when eventually she felt him slip inside her, and all thoughts of Steve were finally banished.

‘Jesus! Sweet Jesus,’ she whispered. It had never been like this with anyone else.

Chapter Four

I

Margaret stood outside the NASA hangar, still in her gown and apron. The clear evening sky was turning pink as the dipping sun promised a spectacular sunset. Bombers, jets and Second World War fighters had been taking off and landing all day, swooping overhead, to the cheers of the crowds gathered along the edges of the tarmac. Drinks tents and hamburger stalls had kept them fed and watered as they watched displays by Russian Polikarpovs, British Hurricanes and American Wildcats, oblivious to the conveyer belt of bodies being processed in the large white hangar just a few hundred yards away. The car parks were full. The Wings over Houston Airshow had been a great success.

The last of the refrigerated semitrailers was gone, autopsies completed, the bodies now in the hands of the morticians who would prepare them for shipping back to their families in China once identities had been established. As yet, more than two-thirds of them remained John and Jane Does. Fifty-two men and fourteen women. All of them in their twenties. None had carried official papers of any kind, even forgeries. Their clothes were not their own. There had been clues in Wang’s diary as to several of the names, and others had carried personal items — letters, photographs, engraved jewellery — that would eventually identify them. A sad collection of anonymous young men and women whose dreams had turned to death on a hot day in Texas.

‘Going to be another scorcher tomorrow.’ She turned to find Steve standing beside her, almost as if he had read her mind. And she was flooded with a sudden guilt at the memory of what had happened the night before. He deserved better.

‘You look tired,’ she said. There were deep shadows under his eyes, and some of the sparkle had gone out of them.

‘Didn’t sleep too good,’ he said. Margaret glanced instinctively at the plaster on his finger. He caught the look. ‘That,’ he said, ‘among other things.’ And she felt a fresh prickle of guilt.

‘I take it there’s been no word back from Washington on the lab results.’ She knew there hadn’t, but she was desperate to deflect the conversation away from the subject of her and Steve. It was ironic, she thought, that just as she had met, for the first time in years, a man who might have interested her, Li Yan appeared back in her life, as if determined somehow to keep her trapped in her cycle of unhappiness. And then she remembered, with a slight tremor, how it felt when Li made love to her and she thought how she could take any amount of that kind of unhappiness.

‘I figure it’ll be tomorrow at the earliest before we get anything definitive,’ Steve said. ‘By which time,’ he added, ‘I’ll be back in DC.’

‘And I’ll be headed back to Huntsville to try and sort out the mess with my landlord.’

‘What mess is that?’

‘Oh, he’s trying to evict me because I changed the locks.’

‘Why d’you do that?’

‘Because the guy’s a real sleazeball. He’s been harassing me with suggestive comments ever since I signed a lease on the place. And then I caught him sneaking in and going through my underwear.’

‘So why don’t you just find somewhere else?’

‘Oh, because there’s still six months of the lease to run, and I paid up front. And I didn’t want to be bothered right now with trying to find a new place.’

He looked at her for a long time. Then finally he said, ‘Why do I get the feeling, Margaret, that you’re happy to talk about anything but us?’

‘Because there is no us!’ she snapped, angry that he was forcing her to confront this. And she turned and walked briskly back into the hangar, feeling like she had just inflicted hurt on some poor vulnerable animal who had trusted her. She pulled off her apron and gown, hopping briefly at her table to rip off plastic shoe covers, and headed for the row of sinks at the far end.

She scrubbed her hands and forearms vigorously with anti-bacterial soap as if she thought there might be blood on them, and that it might not come off. After a few moments she turned and saw Steve at the next sink calmly washing his hands.

‘Does this mean I don’t get to take you out to dinner tonight?’ he asked with a wry, resigned smile on his face.

‘Sir!’ The urgency in the call made both of them turn. One of the AFIP investigators was running down the hangar toward them. ‘Sir.’ He stopped in front of them, slightly breathless. ‘We’re outta here.’

Steve frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Just got called back to Washington, sir. Urgent. There’s a flight from Hobby in just under an hour.’

Steve turned to Margaret. ‘Guess that answers my question.’

‘Your presence is required, too, ma’am,’ the investigator said.

Margaret was taken aback. ‘Me? Why?’

‘No idea, ma’am. Guess it’s a need-to-know basis.’

Steve turned to her again, grinning this time. ‘Hey, I know this great little place in Washington…’

II

Li stood in the car park of the Houston District Office of the Immigration and Naturalisation Service of the United States watching groups of immigrants, mainly Hispanics, gathered under the trees outside the door of the two-storey building on the corner of Greenspoint and Northpoint. Traffic on the Interstate, a couple of blocks away, was a distant rumble. A black uniformed officer approached him.

‘Sir, do you speak English?’ Li nodded. ‘Sir, you cannot hang around this area. Either get in line or move out to the street.’

Li sighed and took out his ID. ‘I’m waiting for Agent Hrycyk,’ he said.

The officer examined his plastic photocard with its US and PRC emblems. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said, tipping his hat, ‘thought you was an immigrant.’ And he moved off, embarrassed, toward the groups by the door.

Li glanced up at the verdigrised miniature of the Statue of Liberty that stood on a plinth overlooking the car park. Many of the original immigrants who had come to populate this vast country had had to pass beneath the eagle eye of this lady on their approach to Ellis Island. More than two hundred years later, in Texas, they were still having to do the same thing.

Hrycyk came hurrying through the crowds of would-be Americans at the main entrance and flicked Li a look. ‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ he said. ‘You are an observer here. You are not an active participant. If and when I want your help, I will ask.’ And he carried on across the car park to his battered old Volkswagen Santana. He had the driver’s door open before he realised that Li had not followed him. ‘Are you coming or not?’ he called. ‘’Cos if not, I’m quite happy to leave you here.’

Li sighed and walked over to the car and got in the passenger side. Hrycyk started the motor and lit up a cigarette. Li lowered the window on his side.

‘Did I tell you you could open the window?’ Hrycyk growled. ‘I did not tell you you could open the window. It fucks with the air-con. Please close it.’

‘I will if you put out your cigarette,’ Li said evenly.

Hrycyk glared at him, and then stubbed out his cigarette viciously in an overflowing ashtray. ‘I don’t know what gives you people the idea you can come over here and start telling us what to do, but if you think you’re gonna have me dancing to your tune, you got another think coming.’ He jammed the shift into drive, and they lurched forward at speed toward the exit, where an irritated Hrycyk then had to stand on the brakes and wait until there was a gap in the traffic.