Snakehead

I

It was nearly one a.m. when her driver turned into Avenue O to drop her off at the house, the lights of Huntsville twinkling in the valley below. She had left Li, finally, waiting to talk to Xiao Ling. And now, almost overcome by fatigue, all she wanted was to sink into her own bed and shut out the world for a few hours of precious respite. Tomorrow the waking nightmare was set to continue. Nothing in her most terrifying dreams could possibly compete.

But the night was not yet done with her.

As the car turned the corner, she saw half a dozen large cardboard boxes and several bulging suitcases piled out on the sidewalk at the front of the house. A Ford Bronco sat at the curbside, a figure slumped in the driver’s seat.

‘Jesus,’ she whispered under her breath. ‘What now?’ She opened the door and told the driver, ‘Wait here a minute.’

In the moonlight she saw that the boxes were filled with all her personal bits and pieces, clothes swept out of her closet and half stuffed in suitcases taken from under her bed. Since she had been there, she had not spent enough time at the house to accumulate much. Most of the detritus she had acquired on her journey through life was still in Chicago, at her mother’s home. Which was just as well. No doubt if the Huntsville house had not been a furnished rental, all the furniture would have been out on the sidewalk as well.

She stormed angrily over to the Bronco and pulled open the driver’s door. Professor Mendez almost fell out into the street. He awoke with a start, clutching at the steering wheel and blinking in confusion.

‘Felipe!’ Margaret grabbed him to stop him sliding out of the seat. ‘What in heaven’s name are you doing here?’

He seemed disoriented. He squinted out at the headlights of the car that had brought Margaret home. Then he looked at Margaret as if seeing her for the first time. ‘Margaret?’ And suddenly some mist lifted from his mind. ‘Margaret. I was waiting for you to get back. I must have fallen asleep.’

‘Why?’ she asked, somewhat disoriented herself. ‘I mean, why were you waiting for me?’

He said, ‘I knew, when you told me the other night that you would stop by, that you would not.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘So I thought I would be the one to do the stopping by.’ He snorted. ‘But, then, when I got here, there was an appalling man dragging all your things out of the house on to the sidewalk. I asked him where you were, and he said he didn’t know and he didn’t care.’

‘Bastard!’ Margaret hissed.

‘So I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing with all your stuff, and he told me it was none of my goddamned business. He was your landlord, he said, and he was evicting you. When I remonstrated, he gave me a mouthful of abuse and left.’ He paused. ‘Looks to me like he changed the locks.’

‘Oh, no…’ Margaret turned and ran up the path to the door, fishing the keys out of her pocket. Mendez got stiffly out of his Bronco and followed her. By the time he reached the door she was cursing. ‘He has!’ she said. ‘The bastard’s changed the goddamned lock.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Mendez said. ‘So I figured I’d better hang around until you got back — not least to make sure that no one stole your belongings.’ He smiled his apology. ‘Guess I wasn’t much of a guard dog, falling asleep on the job.’

Margaret stood with her hands on her hips, mind reeling, not the faintest idea what she was going to do. She could have wept. ‘I’m going to sue him,’ she said, frustration bubbling to the surface. ‘He had no right.’ And, absurdly, ‘What if it had been raining?’

‘It still might,’ Mendez said. Then quickly added, ‘Look, why don’t we get it all into the back of the Bronco, and you can stay the night at my place. In fact, you can stay as long as it takes you to get things sorted out. As long as you like.’

‘Oh, Felipe,’ she said, and she threw her arms around his neck, almost overcome by gratitude. It was one less decision she had to make. One fewer burden to carry into tomorrow. ‘What on earth would I have done if you hadn’t been here?’

‘Probably have worked your charms on the military man in the car,’ Mendez smiled. ‘In fact, you still could. He can help us load up before he goes.’

II

Li’s chair scraped across the floor as he stood up, the sound of it reverberating dully around the naked white walls. Xiao Ling was led in by a heavy-set Hispanic guard holding her by the arm. He let go of her and said, ‘She’s all yours.’ And he left, closing the door behind him.

Under the glare of the fluorescent light, everything about her looked burned out. She was drowned by her white prison clothes, her face pale and colourless with all its earlier make-up washed away. Her eyes were dull and lifeless. Only her hair appeared to have retained its colour and vitality. Li pulled back the hood of his Tivek suit and removed his visor, in defiance of the regulations. He knew that although she carried the virus, she was neither infected nor infectious. She was his sister, and he was not going to talk to her through a piece of plastic.

‘Why?’ he asked. A single word, a single question, conveying a whole world of misunderstanding.

She gave an almost imperceptible shrug, and without meeting his eyes said, ‘Can I have one of your cigarettes?’

He nodded and lifted the pack from the table and held it out. She took one and he lit it, watching her closely all the time. She pulled up the chair opposite him and sat down. ‘Why won’t you look at me?’ he said.

‘Why, why, why,’ she said listlessly. ‘Is that all it’s going to be? Questions? Recriminations?’ She blew a jet of smoke into the air, and then turned defiant eyes on him for the first time. ‘I don’t have any answers, except…I don’t know. I don’t know, Li Yan. I don’t know why any of it happened. It did, that’s all. And even if I could tell you why, you probably wouldn’t be happy with the answer.’ She took another desperate pull at her cigarette, and he saw that her hands were shaking. ‘I thought you might have asked me how I was. But maybe you don’t care.’

He stared at her, trying to sort out the cocktail of conflicting emotions in his head. ‘How are you?’ he said, finally.

‘Like shit,’ she said. ‘In my head, in my heart, in my body. Satisfied?’

He sank slowly back into his chair, placed his hands on the table in front of him and looked at them for a long time. His memory of the last time they had been together, at his apartment in Beijing, was still very clear in his head. Pregnant and with Xinxin in tow, she had arrived in the city for an ultrasound scan. If it was a boy, she had told Li, she was going to have it, in defiance of the government’s one-child policy. If it was a girl, she would abort. She had left to go for her scan, and he had never seen her again. When he arrived home that night, he found Xinxin alone in the apartment, crying hysterically; a five-year-old girl left on her own. Her mother had gone, leaving a note saying she was headed south, to the home of a friend in Annhui Province, to have her baby boy. She knew, she had written, that Li would see Xinxin was taken care of.

It had changed Li’s life. The child’s father, a farmer in Sichuan, refused to take her back, saying she was her mother’s responsibility. Li had become, in effect, a surrogate father, and for almost a year Margaret was her surrogate mother. He had never married, never felt the urge to father children, and yet here he was, the sole adult responsible for a young child. His blood. His life. And he loved her with every last part of himself.

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 would 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.

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

Margaret waved a vague hand 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.’

But Mendez didn’t respond to her amusement. He was too intensely focused. ‘The point is, Margaret,’ he said, ‘There is no way to control gene flow in Fusarium, and that’s what makes it such a successful pathogen. If you drench a geographical area with the stuff, which is what we’re doing, you’re not just going to kill the coca plant, you’re going to infect large numbers of people and animals with some pretty horrific diseases.’

‘God.’ Margaret sat up and took a sip of her vodka. ‘And does the government know about this?’

‘They damn well ought to,’ Mendez said. ‘There’s more than enough evidence out there.’

‘What sort of diseases are we talking about?’

‘Well, in humans with normal immune systems, you can expect widespread skin and nail infections, a pretty nasty respiratory disease, and fungal infection of the liver.’ Mendez took a gulp of his Scotch. ‘In people with underdeveloped or ageing immune systems, i.e., the young and the elderly, it’s known to cause an early ageing disease called Kaschin-Beck. It particularly affects children. But it’ll also affect chickens, rats, monkeys…’ He stood up and went to refill his glass. ‘For Christ’s sake, Margaret, it’s tantamount to waging biological warfare on the people of Colombia. Is it any goddamn wonder that others want to do the same to us?’

He took another large gulp of Scotch, forcing himself to take a deep breath, and then smiled. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s late. You’ve got problems enough of your own. And you’re not interested in all this stuff.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘It’s just one of my hobby-horses. When you’ve got time on your hands, sometimes you let things stew a little too much.’ He pointed the remote at the TV and switched it off again. ‘So,’ he said, returning to his seat and nudging Clara aside with his toe, ‘maybe we should change the subject, and you could tell me about you and your Chinese policeman.’

Margaret looked at him cautiously. ‘You tell me what you already know.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I did a little inquiring in the last twenty-four hours…’

She sighed wearily. ‘Don’t tell me you’re another of those who disapproves of cross-cultural relationships?’

There was sympathy in Mendez’s smile. ‘Hardly, my dear. As a Mexican who married a white, Anglo-Saxon American girl, I lived in one for more than thirty years. So I know what it’s like to have to deal with the unspoken disapproval of both your families, to be aware of the whisperings of colleagues.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘It was worse for Catherine, of course. Married to a spic, even one who was now an American citizen. She had to deal with a whole mountain of disapproval.’

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.’