Snakehead tct-4

by Peter May

  Her mother had just abandoned her. Her own mother! In selfish pursuit of some outmoded superstitious Chinese need for a son. He felt his anger rising again as he thought about it. ‘Why?’ seemed like the most reasonable question in the world. A question he had every right to ask. And then he replayed Xiao Ling’s answer. Even if I could tell you why, you probably wouldn’t be happy with the answer. And he knew that, in truth, it wasn’t an answer he sought. It was an outlet for his anger. A focus for his rage. Two slow-burning years of it.

  And then, when he had seen her in the massage parlour, painted and pouting, a common prostitute, his anger and astonishment had been quickly eclipsed by shame and humiliation. Now they all simmered together in his head and in his heart, and she sat before him defiant and, apparently, quite unrepentant.

  He turned his hands palm down in an attempt to control his feelings. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Never mind the why’s. Just tell me what happened. You owe me that much.’

  She flicked him a look. ‘It’s a long story. I wouldn’t know where to begin.’

  ‘How about the night you abandoned your child.’ He had tried very hard to keep the bitterness out of his voice, but it hung in the air, like the smoke from her cigarette.

  If she was aware of it, she gave no indication. She sat, concentrating on her tube of tobacco, squinting her eyes against the smoke. ‘You probably think it was easy for me,’ she said, ‘leaving my little girl.’ She paused. ‘It was the hardest thing I ever did in my life.’

  The ‘why’ question immediately pushed its way back into Li’s mind, but he forced himself to stay silent. He lit another cigarette.

  Almost as if she had read his mind, she said, ‘When I look back, I don’t really know what drove me. But that’s what I was. Driven. By hormones maybe, or by the weight of five thousand years of Chinese culture. You know that the orphanages in China are full of little girls who’ve been abandoned. I wasn’t the only one, Li Yan.’ There was almost an appeal for understanding in this. Li stayed stony-faced. She stubbed out her cigarette and helped herself to another.

  ‘You remember my friend from school?’ she said. ‘Chen Lan? She gave herself an English name, Christina, and made us all call her by it. She married a man from Annhui Province and went to teach there at a school in a remote hill community. I went to stay with them to have my baby. I told them my husband and my little girl were killed in a road accident in Sichuan. Everyone was very supportive. The chairman of the local committee even arranged to have a car on standby to rush me to the hospital when the time came. The nearest town was almost an hour’s drive away. My contractions started during a rainstorm, and the car skidded off the road on the way to the hospital. No one was badly hurt. But when they finally got me to the maternity unit, my baby was born dead.’

  She relayed her story, with an apparent lack of emotion, as if something more than her baby had died inside her. She had sacrificed everything. Her husband, her child, her brother, only to see the reason for it all washed away in a rainstorm.

  She turned glazed eyes on her brother. ‘I stayed with Christina and her husband for nearly six months after that, but I could not rely on their charity forever. I knew I could not go back home. And I did not have the courage to face you. Or Xinxin. So I went to Fuzhou in Fujian Province. I had heard it was part of the new economic miracle and that there were jobs to be had. I thought maybe if I had a little money I could get to Taiwan and start a new life there.

  ‘Christina gave me the address of a friend so I had somewhere to stay when I arrived. They were a young couple. Very friendly. They took me under their wing. He had several market stalls and gave me a job running one of them. I told them it was my plan to try to get to Taiwan when I had enough money. I worked there for nearly a year.

  ‘Then one day he came to my stall and told me they had a chance to go to America. He had made contact with a snakehead who could arrange it all for a small deposit. He said I could use the money I was saving for Taiwan to pay my deposit, and I could earn enough money in America to pay off the rest when I got there. It was $58,000 dollars.’ Her eyes still shone with awe at the recollection of the figure. ‘It seemed to me like the biggest fortune I could ever imagine. I did not know how I could possibly pay it off. But he said in America you could earn that kind of money very quickly. It was like a dream. In my head I could really see myself in the Beautiful Country. I wanted it to be true. So I said yes.

  ‘We met with the shetou one night and handed over our money. He told us to be ready to go at a moment’s notice. But it was a month before we had word to meet the next night outside a fishing village north of Xiamen. There were nearly twenty of us. They gave us false papers and put us on a fishing boat that took us across the Straits of Taiwan. We landed somewhere near Tainan. Then they took us in vans to Taipei, and we stayed there in an apartment for about three weeks before they put us on a flight to Bangkok. We stayed there in a filthy place for another ten days, and then I was split up from my friends. I pleaded with the local shetou to let us stay together, but she said it was not possible. I was put on an airplane with some other people I did not know, and we flew to Panama City. We were given new papers there, and they put us on a farm where the ma zhai came every night for sex. If you refused they beat you and forced themselves on you anyway.’

  Still there was no emotion. The words came from her mechanically, as if it were someone else’s story. Oddly, it made it all the more vivid for Li. He felt the skin on his face prickle with shock and anger. This was his sister that these ma zhai had beaten and raped. He remembered her as a child, forever laughing, full of mischief, a pretty little girl for whom his friends had always had a fancy. Days of innocence. Innocence long since gone. To be replaced by a hard, unrelenting cynicism, reflected in the granite set of her features.

  ‘Eventually they took us north in the backs of trucks,’ she said. ‘Twelve, fifteen hours at a time. Through countries I can hardly remember. Nicaragua, Costa Rica, San Salvador, Guatemala…Finally into Mexico. So close now. You could smell the Golden Mountain, see it gleaming in the sunshine across the border. If you closed your eyes you could imagine touching it.’ She curled her mouth, and blew out the last of her smoke in disgust. ‘Only there was no Golden Mountain. Just a filthy basement in Houston, and more ma zhai telling me I owed the shetou, and that if I didn’t pay they would beat me until I did.’

  Li stood up and walked across the windowless room, trying to contain his anger and frustration. It was almost more than he could bear to hear. The story was so familiar to him, he could tell her what would happen next.

  ‘They wanted me to work in a massage parlour. They said it was the only way I could make enough money to pay off the shetou. At first I refused.’ She shrugged listlessly. ‘But you can only resist for so long. There comes a time when you must accept the inevitable. In a way I was lucky. One of the boys thought I was pretty. Too good for massage, he said. So I started work at a club in Chinatown. The Golden Mountain Club.’ A jet of air escaped her lips and she shook her head. The irony was still not lost on her. ‘They called me a “hostess”, which meant that anyone with enough money could have sex with me. All the big shetou came to the Golden Mountain Club, and the shuk foo from the tongs. There were gambling rooms in back, and private rooms upstairs where they took the girls for sex. The other girls said I was lucky because I was prettier than them, and all the really important people wanted to sleep with me — the ones who paid the most money. I didn’t care. They were all the same to me. But sometimes they would give me five hundred dollars, more if they had won at the card table. And I was able to start paying off my debt.’

  She shook her head, lost in some world of her own. And in a small voice she said, ‘I don’t know what happened. Maybe I offended someone, maybe the other girls were jealous and had it in for me. I don’t know. But one day my ma zhai told me I was fired from the Golden Mountain Club. He said he’d got me another job in a massage parlour, with an apartment up the stairs. I w
ould only have to share with two other girls.’ She screwed up her face in disgust at some memory she was not about to share. ‘It was the worst thing ever,’ she said. ‘Even worse than the beatings. I’d been there for a month when you came with the INS.’

  Her story ended as bluntly as it had begun. Li stood with his back to her, trying to make his mind as blank as the wall he was staring at. And when he could stand the silence no longer he turned and saw big wet tears streaming silently down her face.

  She said, ‘When I saw you there, Li Yan, none of it mattered any more. Losing the baby, the beatings, the sex in squalid little rooms. All I felt was shame. That my own brother should know me for what I had become. And I could see myself through your eyes and know it, too.’ Her sobs came in short, rapid explosions from her chest, uncontrolled, uncontrollable. She buried her face in her hands, doubling over and letting her grief for the person she had once been completely overcome her. A long, deep, low moan escaped her lips, and Li felt it like a blade in his heart. He moved around the table and took her by the shoulders, lifting her to her feet, and drawing her into his chest, holding her tightly there to smother her sobs and never let her go again.

  III

  The still waters of Lake Conroe shimmered in the moonlight, caught in glimpses between the trees as Mendez drove them east on Lakeside. Exclusive residences sat darkly behind trees and hedges and high security gates. Mendez took a right, and they turned into a long dirt track that headed away from the water toward where a big old ranch house had its red-tile roof peppered with the shadow of a great oak tree shading the front porch. The house had been extended several times over the years, at the side and back, and rooms had been built up in the roof. To their left a couple of chestnut mares grazed in the moonlight behind a white painted fence, paying scant attention to the arrival of the Bronco.

  Their headlights swept across the front of the house and Margaret saw the freshly painted pillars that supported the roof over the stoop, a red door set in the blue-painted clapboard siding. Bay windows overlooked the porch from the main front rooms. Fleshy shrubs grew in strategically placed pots. An old wooden rocking chair sat looking out over the pasture toward the lake. For some reason Margaret thought it looked as if it had been a long time since anybody had sat in it.

  Mendez swung his recreational vehicle into a dusty parking area opposite a double garage built on to the side of the house. A security light came on, and Margaret saw that the garage was open to the elements, the door retracted into the roof. It was filled with all manner of junk accumulated over many years. Shelves piled with tools and offcuts of wood, extension ladders, stepladders, an old exercise bike, a lawnmower, the bench seat out of an old Chevy, a shopping cart.

  She followed Mendez into the garage. ‘Sorry about the mess,’ he said. ‘Always meant to clean this out some day. Just never got around to it.’ A dog started barking somewhere in the house. He punched an entry code into a numeric pad on the wall beside an interior door and it swung open into a small bootroom. A rack of shotguns stood against the back wall, an antique gun cabinet with glass-fronted drawers filled with cartridges. The barking got louder. ‘Don’t mind Clara,’ Mendez said. ‘She can be a bit excitable. But she’s a great pointer.’ And as he opened the door into the kitchen, a large, shiny-coated red setter danced all around him in excitement, oblivious to Margaret. Mendez made a great fuss of her. He flicked on a batch of light switches and said to Margaret, ‘Go on through to the sitting room. Put your feet up. I’ll feed the dog and fix us a nightcap.’

  Margaret wandered through a big square kitchen with dark wood cabinets and a large central island with a built-in hob and an extractor overhead. Dirty dishes, caked with the leftovers of solitary meals were piled on every available surface. A short panelled corridor led past a well stocked bar into an extensive sitting room with a wood-burning stove and the kind of huge television screen you find in bars where sports fans congregate to watch matches. Tall windows gave out onto a glassed-in porch at the rear filled with soft furniture and another TV.

  She kicked off her shoes, sinking into the deep-piled carpet, and let herself drop into a big soft leather recliner to stare up at a fan turning lazily in the ceiling. For a moment, she closed her eyes and just drifted, wishing that sleep would take her and keep her until she could wake up when all this was over. Was it really only twenty-four hours since the briefing at USAMRIID? And she remembered again, with a start, that she hadn’t been able to get any of the things that Steve had asked her for. The books. His personal stereo, the photograph of his little girl. She remembered her hand and Steve’s separated by the glass of the isolation unit, and how she had felt his fear pass right through it. She felt guilty that she had barely given him a second thought all day.

  ‘Scotch?’

  She opened her eyes, heart pounding, and realised that she had drifted off to sleep, although it could only have been for a few seconds. She swivelled in the chair and saw Mendez through the large hatch between the bar and the sitting room. ‘Vodka tonic, if you have it. With ice and lemon.’

  ‘No problem.’ He lifted a remote control from the counter and pointed it at the TV. The red standby light turned green, the receiver issued a brief, high-pitched whine, and the giant screen flickered to life. The CNN news desk came into sharp focus. Twenty-four-hour news. Margaret recalled many lonely nights in hotel rooms in China with only CNN for company, a tenuous link with home. ‘I’m a news junkie,’ Mendez said. ‘Only time this thing’s not on is when I’m out or sleeping. And sometimes even then I forget to turn it off.’

  ‘Well, you won’t miss much with a screen that size,’ Margaret said.

  Mendez grinned. ‘Like it? I got it for the World Series. That’s my other vice. Sports. That and smoking.’ His grin turned sheepish. ‘Cigars.’ He nodded toward the back porch. ‘That’s my smoking room out there. Catherine wouldn’t let me smoke in the house. Hated the smell of it. Said it clung to the carpets and the furniture. Nearly five years since she died, and I still can’t bring myself to smoke in the house.’

  He came out with their drinks, handed Margaret her vodka, and sank into the settee with a large Scotch on the rocks, and Clara trotting after him to settle at his feet. He lifted his glass. ‘Here’s to unexpected reunions,’ he said.

  Margaret raised her glass. ‘I’ll drink to that. You saved my life tonight, Felipe.’ She took a long drink and felt the bubbles carry the alcohol into her bloodstream, and she sank deeper into the recliner. She closed her eyes and felt as if she were falling backwards through space. She opened them again quickly, afraid she would fall asleep and spill her drink.

  ‘Goddamn!’ she heard Mendez say. ‘They’re still at it.’

  She looked at him, surprised, and saw that he was watching the TV. She glanced toward the screen and saw pictures of soldiers on the ground, carrying M16 automatic rifles. They were looking up as a US Army helicopter passed overhead, the downdraught from its rotors making waves through a tall green crop growing on the hillside. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘CNN are running a feature on this crop-spraying the US Army’s got involved in down in Colombia.’ He fumbled with the remote to turn up the volume.

  A spokesman for the Colombian government said it had always been his country’s policy to cooperate with the United States in the war against drugs, but that the spraying of coca crops in the north of the country with the biological agent Fusarium oxysporum did not come within the terms of joint operations agreed by the two countries.

  Political rhetoric on both sides of this controversial debate seems more designed to obscure than to clarify. For the Colombian government to admit that the United States has been taking unilateral action would be to play into the hands of its political enemies who claim that they are no more than puppets of the Americans.

  ‘It’s absolutely intolerable,’ Mendez said. He reduced the volume and turned to Margaret. ‘Do you know anything about this?’

  Margaret waved a vague ha
nd in the air. ‘I think maybe I saw something about it in Time magazine a few weeks ago. I didn’t read it, though. What’s the deal?’

  ‘The US government’s been spraying this Fusarium oxysporum all over parts of Colombia which have been identified as coca growing areas. The idea is to kill the plants where they grow and cut off the cocaine trade at source. It’s pretty much been recognised that we’ve been taking unilateral action without the active consent of the Colombian government. But the Colombians are scared to admit it, because it would mean admitting that they’d effectively lost control of their own country to a foreign power — no matter how friendly.’

  Margaret shrugged. It didn’t seem like something she could get worked up about. ‘But if it’s killing off the coca crop, isn’t that a good thing?’

  ‘If that’s all it was doing, perhaps.’ Mendez took a stiff drink of his Scotch and sat forward, his face a mask of intensity. ‘But the fact is, not only are we spraying this stuff over another sovereign state, we’re doing it without any regard to what this phytopathogenic fungus is doing to the people who live in those areas. It’s insane!’

  Margaret repeated the name of the fungus thoughtfully. ‘Fusarium oxysporum. I don’t think I know anything about it, Felipe.’

  Mendez shook his head, wrestling to constrain his anger. ‘The government claims that its advisers were told by the scientists that they could develop a safe strain of Fusarium, resistant to mutation and sexual gene exchange. Crap! Fusarium oxysporum is well known to have very active genetic recombination. It is highly susceptible to mutation and chromosome rearrangement, with horizontal gene flow contributing to its variability.’

  Margaret laughed. ‘Felipe. I’m not a student of genetics. I have no idea what you’re talking about.’