Snakehead tct-4

by Peter May

  Fuller’s face was flushed with anger. He turned on Li. ‘So what kind of liaison are you, that sends an undercover Chinese cop on to US soil without telling us?’

  Li remained calm. ‘We took a clear policy decision on this. We decided to do nothing that might put the life of our operative at risk.’

  ‘And keeping American law enforcement in the loop would be putting your man’s life at risk?’ Fuller was incredulous.

  ‘It is a matter of trust,’ Li said evenly.

  ‘What, you don’t trust us?’ Hrycyk threw his hands in the air as if it was the most absurd thing he had ever heard.

  Li said, ‘The history of cooperation between US and Chinese law enforcement is not exactly an illustrious one. You might remember the goldfish case.’

  Fuller sighed his impatience. ‘That’s ancient history!’

  Margaret asked, ‘What is the goldfish case?’

  Li spoke to her directly for the first time. ‘A gang operating out of Shanghai in the late eighties was filling condoms with heroin and sewing them into the bellies of large goldfish that were then shipped out with live fish to San Francisco. It is normal for a number of fish to die in transit, but officials in San Francisco became suspicious when they saw stitching in the bellies of some of the fish.’

  ‘This is completely irrelevant,’ Fuller insisted, but he was on the defensive now.

  ‘Is it?’ Li asked. He said to Margaret, ‘When gang members at the American end of the operation were brought to court, the prosecution here asked the Chinese to release one of the gang members from Shanghai to give evidence in court. The Chinese agreed. It was the first cooperative US — Chinese drug prosecution. But when the guy got on the stand he changed his testimony and claimed political asylum. That was more than ten years ago. He is currently walking around a free man in the United States.’

  ‘He said he was tortured by the Chinese police. Beaten and blindfolded and stuck with an electric cattle prod,’ Hrycyk said.

  Li’s laugh was without humour. ‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? And in a country where people are prepared to believe the worst that anyone wants to claim about the People’s Republic of China, the odds were pretty much stacked in his favour.’

  Hrycyk stabbed an accusing finger at Li across the prone form of the dead detective. ‘You telling me stuff like that never happens in China?’

  ‘No,’ Li said simply, taking the wind out of Hrycyk’s sails. ‘But it’s never happened on my shift. And if you could put your hand on your heart and tell me a prisoner’s never had a confession beaten out of him in the United States, then I’d call you a liar.’

  Hrycyk looked as if he might be about to leap across the table and take Li by the throat.

  Margaret said caustically, ‘I don’t think Detective Wang gave his life just so that China and America could go to war.’ She brushed past them and lifted a plastic evidence bag containing Wang’s bloodstained notebook from the computer table and held it up to Li. ‘His diary,’ she said.

  IV

  Wang’s Diary

  April 10

  The ship that is taking us across the Pacific was waiting in the darkness for our flotilla of small boats several miles off the coast. It is a rusty old Korean freighter with three holds. About one hundred of us are packed into the rear hold. Another sixty or so in the next. The third is stacked with food and water for our trip. There are no windows, and only one fan in the roof. It is freezing cold all the time, and the air in here stinks. We sleep on the floor, cheek by jowl. Our toilet facilities consist of a bucket for the men and a bucket for the women. Hygiene is impossible, and I have picked up some kind of eye infection. My eyes are red and sore, and agony if I rub them, which I do when I sleep and wake up with tears running down my cheeks. To be red-eyed, they say, is to be envious. The people I envy are those who are not aboard this ship.

  The food is appalling. Water, rice, peanuts, some vegetables. But they never give us meat, or fish. My wife always nagged me to lose some weight. Now she has her wish.

  They let us up on deck once a week to wash in salt water. My hair is crusted with it, my skin white, as if I had rolled in rice flour. There are always ma zhai making sure we do what we are told. Sometimes they beat us, and they know we will not retaliate because there are three Cambodians on board with machine guns. Khmer Rouge mercenaries. We know that such people have no compunction about taking lives, although of course the shetou want us delivered to America in one piece. Our hides are worth sixty thousand dollars apiece, but only if we are alive inside them.

  April 25

  Three ma zhai came down into our hold last night. They had been drinking, and they did not care who they damaged. They dragged three of the young women away, and none of us did anything to stop them. Although I know that standing up to them is futile, I still feel guilty about doing nothing. I wish that I had my gun and my badge, and that I could just arrest these scum and have them thrown in prison.

  When they brought them back the women’s faces were streaked with tears and they hid their eyes. No one said anything. We all knew what had happened. And I know that my yazi, my little duck in the next hold, must be going through the same thing. It makes me sick and angry to think about it, but there is nothing to be done. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  Li read through the account of Wang’s appalling journey with an increasing sense of bleakness. He sat in a small office on a gantry overlooking the interior of the hangar below. Twelve pathologists cutting open the dead flesh of his countrymen. Wang, and men and women just like him. People who, for whatever reason, had submitted themselves to the pain and indignity and humiliation of an endless journey to the promised land, in the hands of ruthless individuals who raped and beat them for pleasure and dollars. Only to end up here. Laid out on a succession of stainless steel tables. The tears that blurred the pages in front of him were their tears.

  June 15

  It has been five weeks since we set sail. It seems like five years. Nine thousand miles of Pacific Ocean and, mercifully, the weather has been kind. Until last night. We encountered a terrible storm. The freighter rolled from side to side for fifteen hours, tipping into giant waves, water pouring into the holds. We felt certain we were going to die. Many people were sick and today the air is sour because they will not let us clean up down here. One man, I think, died. He had a wife and young child. He had not been well for several days, and after the storm he was unconscious for many hours. They came this afternoon and took him away. His wife begged them to let her go with him, but the ma zhai refused. Someone said they had thrown him overboard.

  June 17

  Disaster. Last night we reached the coast of Guatemala. The weather was poor, and the freighter could not come in close to shore. They made us stand in the dark on a shallow reef, up to our thighs in water, half a mile offshore, waiting for the small boats to come and get us. Seven boats came in the end, with Taiwanese on board, to take us ashore. Then they made us walk through fields in the dark for hours until we reached a road where there were vans waiting. Only half of us had been brought ashore, and we were crammed in those vans all day in the suffocating heat, waiting until tonight, when they were to get the rest. But just half an hour ago, a man came running up to the vans to tell us that this time the police were waiting and the others had all been arrested. He said that some peasants had seen us come ashore last night and tipped off the police. Now, someone told me, they are taking us to Guatemala City.

  August 2

  We have been here for six weeks now, on the ranch of a Taiwanese not far from Guatemala City. We sleep in barns and outbuildings. It is cramped and uncomfortable. But at least it is warm and dry. The food, as always, is terrible. They say we must wait until it is safe to move. The Guatemalan police, they say, are still trying to find us.

  We have been shocked to see how the Guatemalan peasants live. Whatever reason people may have for leaving China, they have better lives than this. The poverty is desperate, medical facili
ties are almost nonexistent. And yet we also see big cars, and houses owned by wealthy people. The Taiwanese who owns this ranch is rich. Wealth accumulated, no doubt, from the trade in illegal immigrants like us.

  Cheng sleeps curled into my back most nights, with her arms around me. She is pale and lovely and very fragile. She has been raped and abused, but her spirit is still strong. Stronger than mine, Sometimes I think it is only Cheng that has kept me going.

  It is strange. I no longer think of myself as Detective Wang, of the Tianjin Municipal Police. I am one of these people now. An illegal immigrant. Homeless and helpless and desperate to reach America. The Beautiful Country, the Mountain of Gold. After all this, you have to believe it is true.

  Li read, with an increasingly heavy heart, of the detective’s growing relationship with Cheng, and of the further moves to which they had then been subjected. Several trucks had arrived at the Taiwanese ranch. Wang and his companions had had to crawl into a narrow space beneath false floors in the back of the trucks, which had then been loaded with grapefruit and driven north into Mexico. Forty hours without food or water or the chance to move. They had had to soil themselves where they lay, squeezed together like sardines, lying in their own filth.

  In a forest, they had been released from the trucks and taken to a collection of huts in a clearing where they joined more Chinese awaiting passage into the United States. There they had stayed for several more weeks, and then been moved twice more on foot, at night, walking long hours through rough, uncompromising country.

  October 10

  Tonight we will cross into the United States. Someone told me that the border is only a few hours from this place. At last, at long last, the prospect of freedom from this hell. We are on some kind of ranch in open scrub country. They keep cattle here. We have been given fresh clothes. It does not matter that they do not fit. I have been able to wash properly for the first time in weeks. It feels like heaven.

  One of the coyotes came and handed out cigarettes. They are the ones who are arranging the final leg of our journey. Mexicans, I think. Someone said they were drug smugglers who have turned to smuggling people because it is safer and there is more money. I tried to speak with one of them, but the language was impossible. His English was even worse than mine. So I must rely on what I hear from others. The cigarettes are good. It is so long since I had a smoke.

  A short time ago a man came to the ranch-house. He wore a suit and carried a black bag. One of the ma zhai said he was a doctor, and that we must be vaccinated against something called West Nile encephalitis. He said it was everywhere in the southern states of America, and that we must be protected against it. The ah kung had ordered it. I asked him who this grandfather was, and he told me it was none of my business. No one knew who Kat was. But if he wanted it done, it would be done. It seemed a strange nickname to me. Kat. The Cantonese word for ‘tangerine’, a symbol of good luck. I felt anything but lucky.

  When it was my turn to go into the room, the doctor told me to drop my pants and bend over a chair. He wore rubber gloves and a white mask. He kneeled down behind me and stuck a needle in my ass, nearly into my balls. It hurt like hell.

  Now we are fit to be American citizens.

  A very large refrigerated truck has arrived in the yard. They say we will cross the border in the back of it, hidden behind boxes of fruit and vegetables. Tomorrow, they say, we will be in Houston, Texas. We will be in America.

  Li could barely bring himself to read Wang’s final erratic scrawl in the blood-smeared book. Tell my little girl that she was my last thought. Tell her—And there was a line running down to the foot of the page, as if he had not had the strength to hold pencil to paper any longer.

  Li would carry the message himself to Wang’s daughter if he could. It was the very least he could do. She would know always that her father had loved her. And yet, how could he tell her that her father had not died in vain? That he had not been sent on a fool’s errand? Wang’s real job would not even have begun until after his arrival. The journey had been simply to establish his credentials, to raise him above suspicion in order that he might insinuate himself into the very heart of the people-smuggling operation and maybe, just maybe, get himself a glimpse of the dragon’s lair — and within touching distance of the ah kung they now knew was called Kat.

  And Li stood accused, in his own eyes, of being the fool who sent him on that errand. Guilty as charged. Guilty for life. Just plain guilty.

  He buried his face in his hands and wept.

  V

  Margaret looked up as Steve sauntered into her station. She was on her second autopsy, nerves stretched by the ordeal of performing a post-mortem examination of Detective Wang, concentration shattered by the arrival of Li. Fuller and Hrycyk had been in a huddle at the computer desk for a long time now, each making several lengthy calls on their cellphones. So she was relieved to see Steve’s friendly smile.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. He had pulled down his face mask. He nodded toward the body on the table, a young woman in her early twenties, chest gaping, ribs exposed like a carcass in a butcher’s shop. ‘Your second?’

  ‘Yes.’ She heard the strain in her own voice.

  ‘Notice anything you might say they both had in common?’ His question was so casually asked, it made her stop and look at him very directly for a moment.

  ‘Are we talking injection sites in the buttock here?’ she asked.

  ‘Hey,’ he smiled, ‘nothing gets past you, does it?’

  She pulled a face. ‘I take it they’re not unique.’

  ‘One hundred percent to date. That’s more than twenty. I got one of my investigators checking the rest of the bodies out in the trailers.’

  ‘It’s a strange place to choose to inject anything.’

  ‘Certainly is. And it would take a professional to do it.’

  ‘So what do you think they were injected with?’

  ‘I have no idea. But I’m wondering if maybe we shouldn’t be taking extra precautions here. We don’t know what these people might be carrying, or why someone felt the need to inject them at all.’ He paused, still the smile playing around his lips. ‘I did a little reading up on illegal immigrants before I came down. Apparently 34 percent of illegal Chinese taken into custody have been found to be chronic carriers of Hepatitis B.’

  ‘Wow,’ Margaret said. ‘That’s a high percentage.’ Then she shrugged. ‘But we have perfectly adequate protection against hep B, or any other nasties in the blood. As long as we’re careful.’ She paused again, looking at him very carefully. ‘What makes you think we might need extra protection?’

  For the first time, Margaret saw his mobile brows furrow in a frown. ‘I don’t know, Margaret. I get kinda spooked sometimes, you know, when I don’t know what I’m dealing with. I was paranoid about my first AIDS case. I even wore boots with steel toe-caps in case I dropped a knife or something…’ He laughed uneasily at his own vulnerability. ‘It’s just strange, that’s all.’

  ‘What’s strange?’ Fuller, with Hrycyk in tow, had come back into Margaret’s station.

  ‘Injection sites on the underside of the buttock,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s not a place you would normally choose to stick a needle.’

  ‘You mean there’s more than one of them?’ Hrycyk asked.

  ‘It looks like they might all have been injected,’ Steve said.

  Fuller scratched his head. ‘So why would someone pick the underside of the buttock?’

  Margaret shrugged and glanced at Steve. ‘Maybe so it wouldn’t be spotted on a cursory examination. I mean, I don’t figure anyone expected them to be laid out on an autopsy table being subjected to this kind of scrutiny.’

  ‘So do you have any idea what they were injected with?’ Fuller persisted.

  ‘A vaccine against West Nile encephalitis.’ Li’s voice startled them, and they turned to find him standing in the entrance to the autopsy station.

  ‘How do you know that?’ Margaret asked, and she sa
w immediately that he had been crying. There were telltale red dots around the corners of his eyes that she had seen before. And in that moment she wanted just to hold him, and would have forgiven him anything. But she gave no outward sign of it. Not even the hint of a crack in her cold façade.

  Li said simply, ‘Wang’s diary.’ Whatever demons he had had to wrestle with had been banished for the moment. ‘Wang describes how a doctor came and vaccinated them all the night before they crossed the border.’ He dropped the diary, back in its evidence bag, on to the table and peeled off his gloves. ‘They were told it was against West Nile encephalitis.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ Hrycyk said. ‘Snakeheads aren’t going to spend money vaccinating illegals against anything.’

  ‘Well, not against West Nile encephalitis, anyway,’ Margaret added. ‘The only cases of West Nile I’ve heard about in the last six months involved a couple of crows.’ She looked to Steve for confirmation.

  He shrugged. ‘It’s not a serious problem. I mean, I doubt if any of us round this table have been vaccinated against West Nile. And it’s not a requirement for visitors to the US.’

  Li frowned. ‘So what were they injected with? Is it possible they were murdered?’

  Hrycyk was scathing. ‘Of course they weren’t murdered. Why would anyone murder them? These people were worth six million bucks — alive.’

  VI

  A line of stainless steel sinks had been set up at one end of the hangar, supplied with hot and cold running water and dispensers of antibacterial liquid soap to allow the pathologists to scrub down at the end of the day. They had each completed four autopsies and were now halfway through the task of examining all ninety-eight bodies. Conversation along the line of sinks was animated, revolving around important questions like where they were going to get a drink that night, and the best place to get something to eat. Everyone had been booked into the Holiday Inn on West Holcombe Boulevard on the edge of Medicine City, including Margaret.