Snakehead

I

There was a light on in the downstairs sitting room when she climbed the steps and walked the short path to the front door. A bell sounded somewhere deep inside the house when she pressed the bell-push. After a moment, the light snapped on in the hall, and she saw Li in jeans and tee-shirt shamble barefoot to the door. He had a bottle of beer in one hand. He frowned when he saw through the glass that it was Margaret. Something in the set of his face made her doubt her welcome. She could have stayed over in any number of hotels, and no doubt FEMA would have picked up the tab. But right now she needed human company and comfort. He opened the door and they stood staring at each other for a moment, and she knew immediately from his eyes that the beer in his hand was not his first.

She said simply, ‘Steve’s dead.’

Straight away his expression softened, and without a word he took her in his arms, almost squeezing the breath from her, and they stood in the open doorway for what must have been minutes. She clung to him and let the tears finally fall, silently, staining the front of his tee-shirt before she stepped back, wiping her face dry. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’

He stood aside to let her into the hall and closed the door behind her, and then she followed him through to the kitchen where he prepared a vodka tonic in a tall glass filled with ice. She sat at the table, picking at a shred of skin which had peeled away from a cuticle. He drained his beer, opened another bottle and handed her the vodka. Still they had not spoken. Finally, when she had taken her first drink, he said, ‘Was it bad?’

She nodded. ‘Worse than you can imagine.’

He sat down opposite her. ‘Then that is what waits for Xiao Ling.’

‘Not if she sticks to the diet,’ Margaret said, and for a moment was overwhelmed by the enormity of her ignorance. How could she know that for certain? How could she guarantee it for life? She looked around suddenly. ‘Where is she?’

Li lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. ‘Upstairs. Not speaking to me.’

Margaret frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Because I did not tell her that Xinxin was here. Because I made her face up to something she would probably have done almost anything in the world to avoid.’

Margaret was shocked. In all the angst about Steve, she had forgotten that Xinxin was here, and in her imagination she could picture the moment. ‘What happened?’ she asked.

He described to her the scene in the hall and her heart ached for the little girl. She saw, now that she looked, the red, raised handprint on the side of his face, but could find no sympathy for Xiao Ling, and as she thought about it grew angry at him also for springing the mother on the child without warning.

‘What in God’s name did you think was going to happen?’ she said, then immediately felt sorry for him when his head sank into his chest.

‘What else could I do? If I had told Xiao Ling she would have refused to come. I did not ask for this, Margaret. Not for any of it.’ He pleaded for her understanding and got it. She reached a hand across the table to grasp his. He squeezed it. If ever there was a moment, through their long and turbulent history, that each needed the other, this was it. A moment recognised by both of them.

He stood and led her upstairs to the room at the front where two days previously she had spent the night alone. Her choice. Her mistake. But not tonight. She had no idea where Xiao Ling was, and she didn’t care. They undressed in the dark and fell together between the cool cotton sheets of his bed and found comfort in each other, simply touching and holding and letting time steal them off into sleep.

Li had no idea how long he had been sleeping, or what it was that woke him. But his heart was thumping, and he knew that his subconscious self was telling the barely conscious one that something was wrong. He sat up, listening intently. Margaret was still asleep, lying on one side, her arm flung across his pillow, hair tangled around her face and neck, breathing heavily. He heard nothing else and lay back down, staring up at the ceiling. The red glowing numerals of his digital clock on the bedside table told him it was 4:25. He remembered that Xiao Ling was in his house. And Xinxin. And that there was a threshold of pain still to be crossed. He closed his eyes and tried to shut out the thought. His heart rate was returning to normal. Perhaps it had been a dream.

And then there it was again. He sat bolt upright, aware this time of what he had heard. A loud creak, sharp and penetrating, like a nail being pulled from dense wood. Maybe it was just a floorboard. Xiao Ling or Xinxin or Meiping up to the toilet in the night. But he didn’t think so. As he waited for it to come again, he heard the distant sound of breaking glass, so faint that he would not have heard it had he not been awake and listening. But of one thing he was certain; it had come from somewhere inside the house. Downstairs, he thought. Towards the back. He leapt out of bed and pulled on his jeans, and Margaret rolled over sleepily.

‘What is it?’ she asked, barely awake, and then was startled by his hand clamping itself over her mouth. Eyes wide, she stared at him in fright and tried to sit up. But he held her firmly in place and raised a finger to his lips.

‘Intruders,’ he whispered, his voice little more than a breath. And slowly he removed his hand from her mouth. ‘Downstairs.’ He looked around the room, searching for something he could use to defend himself. A weapon. And then he spotted in the corner the baseball bat and glove they had given him at the Embassy. Someone had come up with the bright idea that it would be good for international relations if they put together a baseball team to play in an interembassy league. There had been a few practice games. Li had made it to one of them and acquired the bat and glove in the process. But neither the team nor the league had come to anything. He lifted the bat and felt the comforting weight of it swing from his hand and was thankful for that bright idea. It had found its time.

Margaret had pulled on her tee-shirt and jeans and was slipping her feet into her sneakers. She was wide awake now and breathing rapidly. ‘What about the others?’ she whispered.

He nodded, and indicated that she should follow him. Very gingerly he opened the door and looked out along the upper landing. A night light glowed at the far end, casting deep shadows. But there was no movement, no sound. He moved quickly, cat-like along the landing, Margaret following in his slipstream, past the top of the stairs and along the hall. There were three doors at the far end. One, Margaret knew, was Xinxin’s room, the other Meiping’s. She assumed that Xiao Ling was in the third.

Li drifted past the doors to a window that looked out on to the flat roof of a terraced dining area that had been built out from the back of the house and into the yard years before. Moonlight cast the long shadow of a large lime tree across the bitumen, and Li caught the movement of a figure drifting across it to drop down into the narrow alleyway that ran between this house and its neighbour. He pulled back from the window and turned quickly into the third room. Xiao Ling was sitting up in her bed. She, too, had heard something. ‘Get Xinxin,’ he hissed at her. ‘Take her into Meiping’s room with Margaret.’

She was frightened and confused. ‘What…?’

‘Just do it! Now. There are people in the house.’ And he ran back into the hall where Margaret stood looking pale and scared. ‘Get them all into Meiping’s room,’ he said, and he started back along the hall to the top of the stairs. There he hesitated, glancing back to see Xiao Ling and Margaret together in the hall. Margaret opened the door to Xinxin’s room and hurried inside.

Li took a deep breath and took the bat in both hands, crooking his arms, ready to swing at a split-second’s notice, and started down the stairs, one careful step at a time.

Nothing moved in the downstairs hall. He stiffened at the sound of a creaking floorboard. But it came from up the stairs, the girls moving into Meiping’s room. He crept past his bicycle, laying each bare foot, one after the other, carefully on the polished floor, toes first, then heel, planting them flat and steady. At the end of the hall, the door to the dining terrace lay ajar, and the light of a distantly reflected moon fell silver and insubstantial through the gap. Very slowly, Li pushed the door inwards. He felt cool air on his face, as if from an open window, and saw shards of broken glass lying on the carpet. His breath came to him rapidly in shallow trembling gasps and seemed inordinately loud. He could hear nothing else above it. He backed up along the hall and, leaning across, pushed open the door to the living room. He had a very powerful urge to switch on as many lights as he could reach. But he knew that in order to make the intruders visible to him, he would make himself a very visible target to them. They would be more disoriented by the dark. After all, he knew the house and they didn’t.

The light from the street lay across the living-room carpet in elongated squares, a distortion of the twelve-paned window. Li preferred the feeling of the carpet between his toes as he advanced into the front room. There was more comfort in it. His gaze fell on a shadow in the kitchen doorway. It was a strange shadow, resembling nothing familiar to him. There was not the slightest movement in it, but Li could tell neither what it was nor how the light had created it. And then suddenly it grew large, expanding toward him, taking shape in the form of a man, hands raised above its head. A white Chinese face briefly caught the light from the window, and Li saw the reflection of polished metal pass quickly through it as a blade cleaved the air. He raised his bat and felt sharp metal slice into dense wood. And in a purely reflex action, he pulled back his leg, folding it into his chest and kicking out hard at the shadow. He felt ribs cracking beneath his heel, and heard a sharp cry of pain as his assailant staggered across the room and crashed into a wall unit laden with books and CDs and Oriental knick-knacks that had come with the house.

His miniature stereo system bizarrely started playing at high volume. Li recognised the music immediately. A CD of opera arias that he had been listening to, trying to accustom his Eastern ear to the strange cadences of Western music. Twin female voices swooped around the room singing Delibes’ Flower Duet from Lakmé. Li wanted to scream at them to shut up, but another shape materialised out of the shadow. Another blade. This time he saw clearly that it was the kind of cleaver used by chefs in Chinese kitchens. A big square blade with a heavy wooden handle. He tried to skip out of the way, and tripped over the leg of his first attacker, landing heavily on his side. His baseball bat, a cleaver still buried in the striking end of the shaft, tumbled from his hand. He rolled over, trying to grasp it again, and found his fingers closing around the handle of the cleaver. He wrenched it free of the bat and rolled again as he heard the swish of a blade parting the air above him. Something flashed past his face, clearing it by no more than an inch, and he struck out blindly, swinging the cleaver in front of him, and felt it slice through something soft. A scream sought to find the pitch of the divas in their Flower Duet. But it failed to get there, making instead a ghastly discord. He realised that his face was wet, something warm, the temperature of blood. Something dark on his hand as he wiped it from his face. A body fell heavily on top of him, and he smelled five spice on its dying breath.

He pushed it aside and scrambled to his feet, the cleaver still in his hand, just in time to be smashed to the floor again by the assault of his first attacker throwing himself across the room. A deep groan of pain escaped the man’s lips and Li knew that he had broken two, perhaps more, of his attacker’s ribs with his initial kick. They fell awkwardly and Li lost his grip on the cleaver, his fingers sticky now and slippery with blood. In spite of his injury, his assailant was still strong, and a fist like balled steel crashed two, three times into Li’s face. He could taste his own blood now filling his mouth. He swung his fist at the man’s chest, connecting again with the damaged ribs. The man screamed and Li pulled himself free, scrabbling across the carpet for the cleaver or the bat. He found the bat, staggered to his feet and turned in time to see the man leaping at him again with grim, defiant determination. Li swung the bat with all his strength and heard the dreadful sound of splintering bone, his arm jarring with the force of the bat as it connected with the side of the man’s skull. He made no other sound, dropping immediately to the floor in a heavy, huddled, lifeless bundle, like a sack of stones.

Li stood gasping for breath, almost paralysed by his own adrenalin. The divas had given way now to a deep, sonorous baritone, a grown man weeping as he sang the definitive aria from Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci. Li swung his head at the sound of a movement behind him, and he saw, clearly caught in the light from the street, a young Chinese dressed entirely in black, levelling a gun at his head. With a great yell of hopeless frustration, Li launched himself across the room in one last desperate adrenalin burn.

Margaret was both confounded and terrified by the sound of opera rising up through the house, like some ghastly funeral dirge accompanying the cries of battle that came from below. All three women were huddled on the floor beneath the window, a terrified and confused Xinxin crushed to Margaret’s breast. And then, above the plaintive cries of Leoncavallo’s baritone, came the sound of a single gun shot. Deadened by the confined space of the living room. A moment later, the mourning of the baritone was cut short, and a silence like death fell on the house.

They listened for a long time in that silence, hardly daring to breathe, before they heard the first creak of a footstep on the stairs. A sound like the whimper of an injured animal came from Xiao Ling’s huddled form. Margaret turned angrily, her finger to her lips. ‘Shhhh!’ She needed her anger to overcome her fear. She let go of Xinxin, who turned to clutch her mother instead, and stood up. She looked out of the window and saw that it was a fifteen- to twenty-foot drop to the back yard. They could jump if they had to. She slid open the lower half of the sash and felt the cold night air raise goosebumps on her arms. That was the escape route, their last resort. But there had to be a first line of defence. She looked around the room, starting to panic, and saw a bedside lamp with a heavy ceramic base.

She reached over and ripped it from its socket, and darted across the room to stand on the far side of the door. She tore away the shade and raised the base of the lamp to shoulder level, clutching it with both hands, ready to swing and do as much damage as she could.

There was another creak from the top of the stairs, and they heard someone moving slowly down the hall, carpet over old floorboards creaking like footsteps in dry snow. The steps faltered, as if there had been a stumble. And then for a moment complete quiet. Only Li would know that it was this room they were in. An intruder would have a fifty-fifty choice between Meiping’s room and Xinxin’s.

The door swung open, and Margaret braced herself, ready to swing the base of the lamp. Then Xinxin’s shrill shriek pierced the dark and she tore herself free from her mother and ran across the room to throw her arms around Li’s legs. Margaret almost buckled at the knees, and stepped out from the shadow of the door to switch on the light. This time it was Xiao Ling who screamed as the figure of her brother stood swaying in the doorway, blood matting his hair. Shockingly red in the sudden light, it was spattered across his face, smeared on his chest and crusting on the fingers of his right hand like a pathologist’s glove.

II

The night air was filled with the crackle of police radios and intermittent blue and red flashing lights. O Street was choked with police vehicles, ambulances, forensics, an unmarked truck from the morgue. Wealthy residents, wakened from their sleep, stood at windows wrapped in silk gowns watching with a mix of fear and curiosity as three covered bodies strapped to litters were carried out to the vehicle from the morgue. It was nearly 6 a.m. Too late to go back to bed. Too early to go to work. All that any of them could do was watch.

Li watched, too, from the window of his bedroom. He found it hard to wipe from his mind’s eye the blood running red against the white ceramic shower base as streams of comforting hot water washed it from his skin a little over an hour ago. His own blood had long since clotted in his nostrils and around the split in his upper lip. He had lost a tooth from his lower jaw and his face was swollen and bruised. His whole body ached. His mind was numb. Downstairs, forensics officers in hooded white Tivek suits were sifting through the debris of the battlefield. The photographer had already finished his work, staring dead eyes, open mouths, dark shadows on blood-stained carpet, all captured in the brief, dazzling illumination of his flash.

‘Jesus, Li,’ Fuller said. ‘I wouldn’t like to pick a fight with you.’

Li turned and looked at the FBI agent, and then beyond to where Hrycyk stood smoking in the doorway. He had seen them arrive a couple of minutes earlier. ‘Just tell your INS buddy that,’ he said, ‘next time he wants to start getting personal.’

Hrycyk raised a hand of submission. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I don’t have to like you to respect you.’ He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket. ‘Here, have a smoke. You look like you could do with one.’ And he crossed the room to offer him the pack. Li drew one out and took a long, hard look at Hrycyk. Grey hair scraped back from his receding hairline, a face losing its shape, lined, and puffy from lack of sleep. Pale blue eyes with whites yellowed by nicotine. His shirt, stretched and pulled by his belly, in danger of dragging free of his trousers. ‘What?’ Hrycyk demanded. ‘What are you looking at?’

‘Just trying to figure out where the hell you come from,’ Li said.

‘I’ll tell you where I come from,’ Hrycyk said, bristling. ‘I come from a time when people spoke their minds, said what they thought. Before all this political correctness crap. You may not like it, but I tell it like I see it — and, believe me, I seen a lot. I say what I think. And you get what you see.’ He snapped open his lighter and lit Li’s cigarette.

Li dragged on it through swollen lips and sucked the smoke gratefully into his lungs.

‘Yeah, and what you’ll get is kicked out of the agency if you don’t watch your mouth,’ Fuller said. ‘I happen to know there’s a complaint file this thick on you.’ He held up a hand, stretching thumb and forefinger apart to create a four-inch space. ‘I know, ’cos I’ve seen it.’

Hrycyk turned a hostile eye on him. ‘And wouldn’t you people just love to see another INS man bite the dust.’

Fuller grinned. ‘Take the early retirement, Hrycyk. Life could be tough without a pension.’

Hrycyk turned back to Li. ‘See? That’s what you get in this country now, smart-assed kids telling you what to say and what to think. Used to be a man had a right to freedom of speech. Next thing you know we’ll be copying you people, declaring the People’s Republic of America. Big Brother just around the corner. Then we’ll be comrades, you and I.’ He took another pull at his cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling. ‘What the fuck happened down there, Li?’

Li told them, in graphic detail, exactly what had happened, just as he had told the homicide detective in his statement forty minutes earlier. They listened in awed silence, and Hrycyk let his cigarette burn down to the tip without taking another draw on it. ‘Jees,’ he said softly. ‘You’re a lucky man to still be alive.’

Fuller said, ‘And you figure they were after your sister?’

Li nodded. He told them about the ma zhai harassing Margaret and Xiao Ling in Houston.

‘Why the hell didn’t you tell us this before?’ Hrycyk wanted to know.

‘I wanted to get her somewhere safe first.’

Hrycyk snorted. ‘Yeah, real safe, wasn’t it?’

‘Why would they want to kill her?’ Fuller persisted.

‘Because she knows something,’ Li said. ‘She must. Something she saw, something she heard…She worked for a few months at the Golden Mountain Club.’

‘High-class whorehouse and gambling den,’ Hrycyk said.

Li said, ‘Apparently all the tong leaders use it, all the top people in Houston’s Chinese underworld.’ He glanced at Hrycyk, reluctant to confess this in his presence. ‘Seems my sister was one of their favourites.’

But Hrycyk was unaware of Li’s discomfort. He was thinking hard. ‘Then they find out she’s your sister,’ he said, ‘and they start getting scared. Because she knows who these people are and they don’t want her telling you.’

‘You talked to her about it?’ Fuller asked.

‘Earlier,’ Li said. ‘Yesterday.’ He shook his head. ‘She wasn’t very forthcoming.’

‘Well, she’s going to have to start coming forth pretty damn quick,’ Hrycyk growled.

Fuller said, ‘Let’s go talk to her now.’

Li checked Xinxin’s room first. Margaret sat against the headboard, Xinxin curled into her lap, fast asleep. She raised a finger to her lips. She looked tired and pallid, with dark rings beneath her eyes, but Xinxin needed the comfort and reassurance, and so she was prepared to sit with her for as long as it took. As he pulled the door shut, Li realised that Hrycyk had been peering over his shoulder. ‘Cute kid,’ he whispered.

‘Cute Chinese kid,’ Li said.

Hrycyk shrugged. ‘Whatever.’ He appeared to be faintly embarrassed, as if Li had discovered a hairline crack in the enamel of his racist image. ‘Kids are kids. They’re just cute.’

Xiao Ling was curled up on top of her bed, fully dressed, dried tears staining her cheeks. She sat up, alarmed, as the three men came into her room.

‘It’s okay,’ Li said. ‘They’re sort of police officers. We need to talk to you about the Golden Mountain Club.’

She pressed her lips together and gave a tiny shake of her head.

‘Oh, yes we are,’ he insisted. ‘Those men came here tonight to kill you because of something you know. We need to find out what that is, because the chances are they’re going to try again.’

She glared sullenly at the three men. ‘What can I tell you?’

‘Just tell us about the club. What it was like. The people you met. The other girls. Anything you can think of. Who ran it, how it worked.’

She drew her hands down her face, steeling herself to remember things she had buried, things she only ever wanted to forget. Her words came in bursts, as she dredged up the memories, and then spat them out fast to escape the nasty taste that came with them. Li translated as she spoke.

‘The owner of the club was from Hong Kong. He was a small man, in his forties, I think. They called him Jo-Jo. I think his name was Zhou. He liked to touch the girls. You know, he never had sex with any of us. But he loved to sit at the bar and chat, and run his hands over a thigh, down an arm. Occasionally he would brush a breast with the back of a hand. He was a toucher. The other girls said he went off to masturbate in his office.’

Li was shocked at this from his sister, and embarrassed to translate it.

Hrycyk chuckled. ‘Know the type,’ he said.

Xiao Ling said, ‘There were bouncers on the door, and young guys who kept order in the club. You know, sometimes people got drunk, maybe got violent with one of the girls, or there would be a fight. And the boys would throw them out. They were all members of the Silver Dragon gang.’

‘Ma zhai,’ Li said.

She darted a look in his direction. ‘Yeah, ma zhai.’

‘The ones who followed you in the car yesterday?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘Xiao Ling…’ Li warned.

She lifted one surly shoulder and let it drop again. ‘They looked familiar. Probably from the club. There were about twelve or fifteen of them that you would see regularly. And then there was the dai lo…’

‘What the hell’s a dai lo?’ Fuller asked.

‘The Big Brother,’ Hrycyk said. ‘The gang leader.’ And both Fuller and Li looked at him, surprised. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I been around this game a long time.’

Xiao Ling said, ‘His nickname was Badger, because he had this strange white stripe running through his hair, on the right as you looked at him. He said it had been like that since he was a kid. I think he was proud of it.’

‘Should be easy enough to find,’ Hrycyk said. ‘Unless he dyes his hair he’s gonna stick out like a sore thumb.’

‘There were lots of ordinary Chinese, and sometimes Vietnamese, who came to the club,’ Xiao Ling went on. ‘Mostly to drink and gamble. Occasionally, if one of them won a lot at cards, he would take one or two of us upstairs. But it was the snakeheads and the uncles, the shuk foo, who had the real money to spend. They usually dressed well and had big fat wallets. The girls always preferred a shetou or a shuk foo because they paid more and tipped well. But a few of them had some pretty unpleasant sexual preferences, and you would try to avoid them. There were some who liked you to hurt them, or wanted to hurt you. Some of them wanted you to piss on them while they jacked off.’ She looked at Li with a sour expression on her face. ‘Men are pretty disgusting, Li Yan,’ she said.

Li’s embarrassment in relaying this to Hrycyk and Fuller was acute. But neither man seemed troubled or surprised by what they were hearing, or aware of his embarrassment.

‘I told you before,’ Xiao Ling said, ‘that I was a favourite. All the important ones had me at one time or another. All the shuk foo, I think, and others. Guests. I would be given as a present, to show respect, or as a mark of subordination. Once to a man they called the ah kung, which I think is Cantonese for “grandfather”.’

There was an immediate tension shared by all three men, but none of them wanted to interrupt her flow, or inhibit her by conveying this as significant. ‘What was he like?’ Li asked casually.

‘The grandfather?’ Xiao Ling pursed her lips and blew a jet of air through them to demonstrate her contempt. ‘Like all the rest. Short and fat, with a big belly and bad breath. They get on top of you and hump for a couple of minutes and then they’re all spent. It’s hard to tell who you’re with.’

‘Anything else?’ Li prompted. ‘Anything else about him you can think of?’

She shook her head. ‘The shuk foo who gave me to him as a gift told me that it was an honour for me to be taken by the ah kung. He said no one else knew that’s who he was. And I was to tell no one or I would be in serious trouble. Then, when he introduced us, he called him something strange. A nickname. I remember thinking it was unusual. And the ah kung nearly struck him. He was very angry and told him never to call him that again.’ She thought back for a moment, shuddering at some unpleasant recollection, and then she said, ‘Yeah, that’s right. He called him Kat. I asked one of the other girls what it meant, and she said it was Cantonese for “tangerine”. You know, like for luck. I thought it was weird.’

‘Who was the shuk foo?’ Li asked.

Xiao Ling shook her head. ‘I don’t know his name. But he was always around the club. ‘You’d need to ask the dai lo. He was Badger’s uncle.’