by Peter May
‘We thought you might be able to help us identify someone, Councilman,’ Fuller said.
‘Of course,’ Soong said. ‘Anything I can do to help.’ He looked at Li. ‘You been in fight, Mistah Li?’
‘A minor argument,’ Li said.
‘You not very good in argument, then.’
Hrycyk said, ‘You should see the other guys.’
Fuller said impatiently, ‘We’re looking for an uncle with one of the tongs. A shuk foo.’
‘You know his name?’
Hrycyk said, ‘If we knew that we wouldn’t be asking you. All we got’s a nickname. Guan Gong.’
Soong looked startled. ‘No!’ he said. ‘Guan Gong? But you already know him. He was at meeting the other day. His name Lao Chao. He owns biggest restaurant in old Chinatown, not far from Minute Maid Park. He sit at end of table near window.’
Li tried to picture him and had a hazy memory of a thickset man with glasses and bushy hair swept back from a flat, broad face: an impression of someone who looked not unlike Chinese President, Jiang Zemin
‘But Lao very respectable man,’ Soong said. ‘He no shuk foo.’
‘You know what Guan Gong means?’ Li asked.
‘Sure,’ Soong said.
Hrycyk turned to Li. ‘What does it mean? You never told us it meant anything.’
‘Guan Gong was a general in ancient China. A ferocious warrior. A hero of the Chinese underclass.’ Li looked at Soong. ‘An odd choice of nickname for a respectable citizen, don’t you think?’
‘Guan Gong symbolise values very precious to poor people,’ Soong said indignantly. ‘This is good name for upstanding member of community. Lao Chao, like many others at meeting, give generously to food bank and other charity.’ He looked at Fuller. ‘What you want him for?’
Fuller said, ‘We believe he knows the identity of the ah kung we are looking for.’
Soong gathered his brows in consternation. ‘There are many ah kung in Houston tong,’ he said.
‘Only one of them called Kat,’ Li said, watching Soong closely. He was certain he saw a brief flicker of light in the dark, secret pools of his eyes. And then nothing. Just an outward appearance of surprise. His eyebrows pushed up on his forehead.
‘Tangerine?’ And he laughed. ‘This is ve-ery strange name.’
‘You never heard of him, then?’ Hrycyk asked.
Soong pursed fat lips and shook his head. ‘Sorry. Kat associated with good luck at spring festival. I never heard of anyone with name like this. What he do?’
Fuller said, ‘We believe he’s been funding and organising the trade in illegal Chinese immigrants across the Mexican border. The head of the snake.’
‘And you think Guan Gong know who he is?’
‘We know he knows,’ Li said. ‘And we have a witness who can identify them both.’
The dark, secret pools darted in Li’s direction. ‘Who?’
‘A prostitute,’ Hrycyk said. ‘From the Golden Mountain Club. A gift from one to the other.’
Soong’s gaze never left Li. ‘Your sister,’ he realised.
‘That’s right,’ Li said. ‘Someone tried to kill her last night. To shut her up. But they were too late.’
Soong shook his head and snorted noisily. For a moment, Li thought he was going to spit on the floor. But he had been in America long enough to sublimate the instinct and swallowed instead. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘that such things should happen in our community. You must find this snake and cut off its head.’
Hrycyk said, ‘So where’ll we find Guan Gong?’
‘At his restaurant.’ Soong checked his watch. ‘For sure. He always there in the afternoon.’
Li reached out and caught his wrist. ‘Nice ring,’ he said in Mandarin, turning Soong’s hand over so that a large gold ring on the middle finger was facing up. It was set with a shaped oval of engraved amber.
Soong drew his hand away. ‘It is my prize possession,’ he said. ‘A gift from my father. It once belonged to the Empress Dowager Cixi.’
‘Worth a lot of money, then,’ Li said.
‘Priceless,’ Soong responded. ‘I raised the money for my journey to the United States on the strength of it.’
‘You know,’ Li said, ‘that the smuggling of artifacts out of China is a capital offence.’
Soong smiled. ‘Then it is lucky for me that we are no longer in China.’
Li smiled back. ‘Lucky. Yes.’ He paused. ‘What’s engraved on it?’
Soong ran a thumb over the stone. ‘I’ve often wondered,’ he said. ‘Sadly time has all but worn it away.’
‘May I?’ Li held out his hand, and Soong reluctantly offered him his, so that he, too, could run a thumb over the engraving. Soong’s hand was hot and damp. The amber, under Li’s thumb, was cool, the engraver’s work worn away almost to nothing. Li felt Soong’s tension. He said, ‘It is not often one gets to touch history.’ He ran his thumb lightly over it again. ‘Feels like it might have been a Chinese character. It is a pity we’ll never know its meaning.’
Soong smiled and took his hand back. ‘Indeed.’
‘Are you people going to let us in on this conversation or not?’ Hrycyk said, irritation clear in his voice.
‘Just admiring Councilman Soong’s ring,’ Li said, smiling and holding the gaze of the Cantonese. And, then, as if snapping out of a trance, added, ‘We had better go and talk to Lao Chao.’
* * *
Hrycyk drove them west along Elgin, through the black ghetto area of east central Houston. Rotting wooden shacks with crudely patched roofs sat behind lushly overgrown and untended gardens. All manner of flora reached for the sky through cracks in the sidewalk. The road was pitted and potholed, and each junction was punctuated by groups of disenchanted black youths, hands sunk deep in empty pockets, haunted eyes watching traffic. Ancient rusting cars limped across intersections, holed exhausts rasping fumes into the sticky afternoon, rap music belting from open windows. Li gazed thoughtfully from the back of the Santana. He was shocked by the poverty. They might have been in Africa, a shanty town on the edge of some Third-World city, instead of the fourth-largest city of the richest country in the world. He lifted his eyes and saw the gleaming tower blocks of downtown Houston rising above the deprivation, almost taunting, a constant reminder to those who lived in the ghetto that the American Dream came true for some and not for others.
Lightning flashed in a brooding sky, and moments later the air shook with the sound of thunder. And the rain came, suddenly and with such force that it raised a mist off the surface of the road. Worn wipers scraped and smeared their way back and forth across Hrycyk’s windshield.
Li said, ‘I guess the FBI will have a fat file on Councilman Soong.’
Fuller glanced back at him. ‘What’s your interest in Soong?’ he asked noncommittally.
Li shrugged. ‘I’d be interested to see the extent of his business dealings.’
‘That’s a matter of public record,’ Fuller said.
‘Yes, but it’s what’s not on the public record that interests me,’ Li said. ‘You must have some kind of file on him.’
Fuller said, ‘I’ll check.’
Hrycyk laughed. ‘Of course the FBI have got a file on him. They’re just not going to show it to you, that’s all.’ He glanced at Fuller. ‘Hell, they probably wouldn’t even let me see it.’
Fuller said nothing.
They turned off Elgin onto Dowling and headed north under the interstate into the city’s old Chinatown area, block after block of low industrial units peppered with restaurants and the occasional Asian goods store. The Green Dragon Restaurant sat on the corner of Dallas and Polk, an ornately carved Chinese façade of intertwining dragons on an otherwise featureless brick square. Hrycyk bumped the Santana into an empty parking lot and they climbed the front steps to glass double doors flanked by hanging red lanterns. The lobby inside was in darkness except for lights from fish tanks lining one wall. Air bubbled and glooped through murky wa
ters, and strange fish came nosing against the glass to get a look at the newcomers. The restaurant beyond was filled with empty tables set for evening meals. The rattle of pans and the sound of raised voices came from unseen kitchens somewhere in the back. A girl in a gold lamé qipao drifted out of the gloom and looked at them curiously. ‘We are not open yet,’ she said.
Hrycyk showed her his ID. ‘We’re here to see Mr. Lao Chao,’ he said.
‘One moment. I tell him.’ And she crossed to the reception counter and lifted a phone. She dialled and listened, and then hung up. ‘So sorry. He is speaking on telephone right now. You wait, okay?’
They stood around for a couple of minutes, Li and Hrycyk smoking, while the girl pretended to sort menus on the counter. ‘You wanna try again?’ Hrycyk growled at her eventually.
‘Sure.’ She lifted the phone and redialled and stood for a good half minute. She shrugged, pushing up painted eyebrows and wrinkling her forehead. ‘Now he no answer.’
A single, dull crack sounded from somewhere in the building. The unmistakable report of a gun.
‘Jesus!’ Hrycyk stabbed his cigarette into an ashtray. ‘Where’s his office?’
The girl looked frightened. ‘Upstairs.’
They ran up a double flight of carpeted stairs to a long corridor running over the restaurant. It was dark, and they couldn’t find a light switch. But faint yellow light seeped out from beneath a doorway halfway along its length. Fuller got there first, gun in hand, and threw the door open. Li was at his shoulder as the door swung in to reveal a large office with flock wallpaper and a red patterned carpet which made it impossible to tell if there was blood on it. There was plenty on the big mahogany desk though, pooling around the head of Guan Gong, where he lay slumped across it, a gun in his hand, a hole in his face, and the back of his head blown away where the bullet had made its exit.
III
Margaret had arrived back in Houston a little after one p.m., depression following her like the stormclouds gathering in the western sky. She had not eaten for nearly twenty-four hours but found that everywhere along Holcombe had already finished serving. Even after a year, she could not get used to the Texan habit of lunching before midday. Eventually she had found an all-day eatery in the Crowne Plaza and ordered a grilled chicken salad. It came piled high on the plate and the waitress said, ‘I asked the chef why they build them salads so big, and he says to me, “People eatin’ this late, they gotta be hungry”.’ It was 1:30 p.m., and Margaret marvelled at Texan sophistication.
She had eaten a little less than half the salad before going back to her office to face the mountain of paperwork piling up on her desk. Mail and telephone messages had accumulated in drifts, like snow, and she wished she could just plough them off to one side and let them melt away in the rain. As with her salad, she had no appetite for it, sitting gazing from the window unable to stop memories of Steve crowding her thoughts. And flickering images of Xinxin’s tears as she had left that morning, mother and daughter still unable to come to terms with their unhappy reunion. That, in turn, had forced her back to the paperwork only to find a letter from the lawyer representing her landlord in Huntsville. It was official notification of her eviction — as if it hadn’t already happened. She had thrown it on the pile, and opened an envelope with the official FEMA insignia on the bottom left corner. It was a list of all the contact telephone numbers of members of the task force, her own included, which had brought a bitter smile of irony to her face. Her home number was already out of date.
She had folded the list and slipped it into her purse, wondering what progress, if any, the task force had made. One of its number was dead. Li had only narrowly avoided being murdered by the assassins sent to silence his sister, and they were still no nearer, apparently, to identifying the ah kung. They had arrested hundreds of illegal immigrants all over the country and were already running out of holding facilities. There were thousands more out there, and probably thousands more still coming in, despite the clampdown on the border. And she knew that the task that faced Mendez in trying to identify the protein which triggered the virus was almost impossible. It had been only too clearly visible in the fatigue etched on his face the previous night. Margaret felt daunted and frustrated by her inability to make any significant contribution.
Finally, she had slipped into a light, waterproof coat, and taken a fold-up umbrella from the bottom drawer of her desk. As she swept past Lucy in the outer office she had said, ‘I’ll be gone for the rest of the day,’ and made her exit without giving Lucy a chance to respond.
Now, as she emerged from the car park into the rain on M. D. Anderson Boulevard, the thunder which had been threatening all afternoon cracked overhead, making her duck reflexively. The rain battered on the taut plastic of her tiny umbrella like peas on a drumskin. She splashed along the sidewalk under the dripping trees, past nurses and doctors in green and white surgical pyjamas hurrying between hospital buildings. Beyond the Women’s University, at the very heart of the Texas Medical Center, the distinctive red roof of the Baylor College of Medicine was only just visible through the downpour above tall windows like glass columns. The ink ran on notices pinned to a pergola. Cars for sale, accommodation to let. Paper turning to mush in the rain. Margaret scampered across East Cullen Street and turned left toward the right-angled white facades of the Michael Debakey Center, with its tiered rows of windows cut like slashes in the stone.
A lab assistant took Margaret up in the elevator and along endless corridors. She was young and bright, with sparkling eyes and conversation that bubbled out of her like water from a spring. Margaret barely heard her. Shown into a tiny cluttered office that overlooked more parking garages to the rear, Margaret sat miserably on the edge of a hard plastic seat clutching her dripping umbrella. Her sneakers and her jeans from the knees down were soaking. After several minutes the door opened and she looked up as Mendez came in, a stained white lab coat hanging open over his shirt, a rumpled tie trailing loose at the neck. His face lit up. ‘My dear, you’re drenched. Can I get you a coffee? Water?’
‘No, no.’ Margaret stood up, embarrassed. ‘I just called in to see if it would be okay for me to stay at the ranch tonight.’
Mendez’s smile was at its most beatific. ‘My dear, you don’t have to ask.’ He took her hands in his. ‘My home is yours, for as long as you like. You know that.’
She shrugged awkwardly. ‘It’s just…I don’t have a key, Felipe,’ she said.
Mendez laughed. ‘But you don’t need one. Just my entry code. I’ll write it down for you.’ He tore a sheet of paper from a pad, scribbled a four-digit number on it and handed it to her. ‘If you want to hang on for half an hour, I’m almost finished here. I could give you a lift.’
‘I’ve got my car,’ Margaret said. ‘Anyway, I’d like to get back and get showered and changed.’
‘Of course.’ He paused. ‘You can spare a minute, though? I have something to show you.’
She followed him into a laboratory at the end of the hall, and slipped on a lab coat. ‘You know why it was called the Spanish flu?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea. It originated here in the United States, didn’t it?’
‘So we believe. But we were still fighting a war then, and news of the pandemic was suppressed in most of the countries involved in World War One. It was first most widely reported in the Spanish press. Hence the Spanish flu.’ He waved her toward a monitor on a bench near the back of the lab, and she watched as he slipped a cassette into the built-in VCR. ‘You’re familiar with viral cytopathic effect?’ he said.
‘Of course.’
The screen came to life in a seething mass of tiny organisms dividing, multiplying and ultimately destroying their host cells. Cell necrosis. She almost recoiled from the monitor. She knew without being told what she was looking at. ‘It’s what killed Steve,’ she said. ‘It’s the Spanish flu.’
‘One stage advanced,’ Mendez said. ‘Another mutation down the
line. It used its time in Dr. Cardiff to morph itself. To the virus, the good doctor was no more than a living laboratory, a human rat with which to experiment. I would suspect that, if anything, this new version of itself could be even more virulent.’
Margaret was repulsed. ‘They recovered the virus at autopsy?’
‘From the lungs, I believe.’ Mendez looked at her sympathetically. ‘I’m sorry, Margaret. You…were fond of Dr. Cardiff.’ It was a statement, not a question.
She nodded mutely. In her head she had a clear, brutal and bloody image of Steve on the autopsy table.
‘But you do understand, such steps must be taken in order to fight this thing.’ She nodded again, and he said, ‘Anatoly Markin once told me about a Russian scientist called Ustinov who accidentally injected himself with Marburg while conducting experiments with guinea pigs. It was part of their biowarfare program. The poor man took three weeks to die, quite horribly. And when they recovered the virus from his organs they found that through the live incubator of a human being it had mutated into something altogether more stable and powerful. So they used the new strain as the basis of their further weapons research and called it “variant U”. Markin told me they thought Ustinov would have been amused by it.’ He shrugged, a tiny sad smile stretching his full lips, and nodded toward the monitor. ‘Perhaps we should call this “variant C”.’
Margaret looked at him coldly. ‘You know what, Felipe? Chances are Steve would probably have have been amused by that, too. He had a pretty bizarre sense of humour. Personally, I just think it’s sick.’ She took a moment to collect herself. ‘I’ll see you back at the house.’ And she swept out leaving Mendez to reflect on an error of judgment.
* * *
By the time she got to the ranch, the storm had passed. The air was hot and damp and hung in shifting strands of mist over the lake. The sky was torn along its western fringes, revealing ragged strips of blood-red sunset behind the cloud. The chestnut mares stood glistening in the meadow, nostrils raised to the sky, sniffing as if they could smell the coming night.