Snakehead (15 page)

The chill air stung her hot cheeks, and she felt the wind cut through her like a cold steel blade. There was a line of cars sitting at the curbside, engines running. Uniformed drivers sat waiting patiently for their passengers, and it suddenly occurred to Margaret that she was a long way from home with no way of getting back. The rear passenger door of the car second from front opened and Li leaned out. ‘Are you coming?’ he called.

She didn’t need a second invitation. As she slid into the rear seat beside him she said, ‘Where are we going?’

‘Washington,’ he said. ‘The military have laid on transport.’

‘But I’ll not get a flight back to Houston at this time of night.’ Even as she said it, she realised that she had not the faintest idea what time it was. She looked at her watch. ‘Jesus!’ It was nearly one a.m. ‘Are the military going to put us up in a hotel as well?’

‘I was thinking,’ Li said, ‘that you could stay over with me. I live in Washington, remember? Or, more accurately, in Georgetown.’

It came as something of a shock for Margaret to realise that although she was back in America, the country of her birth, she was still on Li’s home patch. ‘Well, that would be cheaper,’ she said, ‘and in keeping with the government budget cuts.’ She smiled. ‘Provided, of course, you have a spare room.’

‘I didn’t think we’d need that,’ Li said. And Margaret was immediately self-conscious. Their conversation was certainly being overheard by their driver. Then she thought of Dr. Ward and his disapproval and immediately felt guilty at her self-consciousness. And guilty about Steve, and the images that flooded her mind of the face behind the glass in the isolation ward telling her how scared he was.

‘Sure,’ she said. And leaning forward, ‘Georgetown, please, driver.’ But when she sat back again, her mind was filled with confusion and uncertainty. Last night it had been so easy making love to Li. Tonight she knew that the world was never going to let it be an easy relationship.

III

There was very little traffic on Wisconsin Avenue. The occasional restaurant or club was tipping its last customers out into the early morning. The odd group of university students on their way home from some party wandered by, engaged in still animated chatter, as if they had not had enough of the night already for talking. Margaret smiled, remembering her own student days. How the most trivial things had been of such crucial importance, how she and her group were going to change the world. She guessed it was the same for each successive generation. What disappointments lay ahead with the realisation that it was they who changed, and not the world.

Li told the driver to let them off on the corner of Wisconsin and O. Peter’s Flower Stand was all closed up. A few forlorn stalks and crushed flowerheads lay scattered across the redbrick sidewalk. Margaret reflected on the strange coincidence that she and Li both rented houses in streets called ‘O’. The shadow of the trees lay darkly along the street in the strong moonlight. The first few leaves of fall were gathered in the gutters, wet and sad after the earlier rain.

As they walked silently along the sidewalk, side by side but not touching, Margaret looked at the two- and three-storey brick townhouses painted green and red and white, the Georgian windows, the wrought ironwork, the expensive cars parked at the kerb. She glanced at Li. ‘How can you afford to live here?’ she asked. The two-bedroomed police apartment he had shared with his uncle in Beijing had been extravagant by Chinese standards, modest by American. But this was millionaire territory. Rich people lived here. She knew that the Kennedys had owned a house somewhere close by, in one of the streets off Wisconsin, while he was a senator. Their last home before his final move to the White House.

‘The embassy pays for it,’ Li said. ‘Before I took the job, I had a long conversation with the man I would replace. Like most of the rest of the staff he had a tiny apartment in the embassy building over on Connecticut. He said you could never escape from the job. When it was night-time here, it was daytime in China, and vice versa. And because he was in the building he was on call twenty-four hours a day. So I made it a condition of accepting the post that they got me an outside apartment.’

‘And they agreed?’ Just like that?’

He shrugged. ‘Apparently they have owned the house here on O Street for many years. I don’t know who used it before, or what for, but I had another very good reason for needing a bigger place.’

‘What was that?’

‘I was not alone.’

Margaret stopped and looked at him with a mixture of consternation and anger. ‘Are you telling me you’ve brought a woman here with you?’

He nodded solemnly. ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you. But somehow the moment just never seemed right.’

Margaret stared at him in disbelief. ‘And do I know her?’ she asked facetiously.

Li nodded again. Then he said, ‘She really misses those cold winter days when you used to take her kite-flying in Tiananmen Square.’

Margaret felt like a big, soft gloved hand had swung out of the night and knocked her over. She caught her breath. ‘Xinxin?’ Her incredulity almost robbed her of speech. ‘Xinxin is here in America?’ It had been almost as hard to leave the child as it had been to leave Li.

‘I’ve adopted her now, officially,’ Li said. ‘Her father is having a child with another woman. He did not want her back. And no one has heard anything from my sister since she went south to have her baby boy.’ He shrugged. ‘So I needed a room for her, and another for her nanny.’

The house was set back behind a small garden. It had blue-painted shutters at the windows and was smothered in ivy. Red-tiled steps and a path led through lush green shrubbery to the front door. A security lamp clicked on as they approached it, flooding the garden and the street with a bright, cold light. Li unlocked the door and turned on a sidelamp in a long, narrow hallway. There was a staircase on the right leading steeply up to the second floor. Margaret squeezed in past a bicycle leaning against the wall. Li smiled. ‘I still like to cycle to my work.’

Almost immediately, a young Chinese woman appeared, blinking, at the top of the stairs. She wore a long nightshirt and was in her bare feet. She had short, dark, club-cut hair above a round, flat, almost Mongolian face. She put her hand up to her eyes. ‘Is that you, Mr. Li?’

‘Yes, Meiping. I have a guest with me. Dr. Campbell. She will be staying the night.’ He paused. ‘Is Xinxin sleeping?’

‘Yes, Mr. Li.’

‘We’ll maybe look in on her before we go to bed.’

‘Sure, Mr. Li. Anything you want?’

‘No, it’s alright, Meiping. You can go back to bed.’

‘Thank you, Mr. Li. Goodnight, Mr. Li.’ And she padded off back to her bedroom.

‘She has been a remarkable find,’ Li told Margaret. ‘The Embassy got her for me. Xinxin adores her.’

He took her into a front room that overlooked the street through Georgian windows. The furniture was lacquered Chinese antique, formal and not very comfortable. Li shrugged. ‘It came with the house.’ She followed him into a fitted kitchen with a small, round table at its centre. A pull-down lamp lit the circle of it very brightly, leaving the rest of the room in darkness. Li threw a switch and concealed lights beneath the wall units flickered briefly and lit the perimeter of the room. He opened a tall refrigerator. ‘Drink?’

Margaret said, ‘I’d rather see Xinxin first. I promise I won’t wake her.’

The house was tall and very narrow, but extended a long way back from the street. At the top of the stairs a hallway ran to a room at the front of the house, and another ran crookedly toward the back, down three steps, past a small bathroom, and up another two to where doors led off to the back bedrooms. Meiping’s room was on the left. Li gingerly turned the handle on Xinxin’s door and they crept into the darkness of her room. The reflected light from the hall cast itself faintly across Xinxin’s face where her head lay on the pillow, tilted to one side, her mouth slightly open. The room was filled with the slow, heavy sound of her breathing. Margaret perched herself gently on the edge of the bed and looked at the little face, marvelling both at its familiarity and at the way it had changed in not even a year and a half. It was a long time in the life of a seven-year-old child. Her face had become a little thinner, her features more well defined. Her hair, which Margaret had always tied in pigtails high up on each side of her head, was longer and fanned out across the pillow. A single strand of it fell across her cheek and into her mouth. Very carefully, Margaret drew it away from her lips, and the child’s eyes flickered open. They were bleary and sleepily distant and looked up at Margaret, unblinking, for a very long, silent moment. Then a little hand clutched Margaret’s. ‘You gonna read me story tonight, Magret?’ she asked in a tiny voice thick with sleep.

‘Tomorrow, little one,’ Margaret whispered, and she tried very hard to stop her eyes filling with tears.

‘We gonna make dumplings tomorrow?’

‘Sure we are, sweetheart.’

A little smile flickered across Xinxin’s lips. ‘I love you, Magret.’ And her eyes closed, and the slow heavy sound of her breathing filled the room again.

Margaret stood up quickly, the light from the hall blurring in her eyes, and she hurried out past Li, wiping them quickly dry as he pulled the door shut behind him. It was as if she had never left. But one thing at least had changed. She turned to Li. ‘You know what?’ she said hoarsely. ‘That’s the first time I ever had a conversation with her in English.’

Back in the kitchen, she sat watching as Li poured her a vodka tonic in a glass filled with ice and fresh cut lemon. He remembered how to make it just the way she liked it. The fizz of the bubbles tickled her lip and nose as she took a long pull at the drink, and she felt the alcohol hit her bloodstream almost immediately. With it came a wave of fatigue, and she remembered it was a long time since she had slept — there had been precious little of it the night before.

Li sat astride a chair opposite her, leaning into the ring of light with a bottle of cold beer in his hand. He had pulled on a tee-shirt and kicked off his shoes, moving barefoot around the cold kitchen tiles. Now, as he took a long suck at the neck of his bottle, she looked at his fine, strong arm, and saw the contours of his muscles below the stretch of his tee-shirt. She felt that same falling sensation inside again. She took another drink of her vodka and forced her mind to focus on other things. And as she did, the events of the day flooded back into it, along with a big wedge of depression. She thought about the bodies she had autopsied, the injection sites in the the semi-lunar fold of the buttock, the revelations about the Spanish flu, and the box of horrors that the vile Anatoly Markin had opened up at Fort Detrick. And she thought about poor Steve through the glass in the isolation ward there and wondered how many more poor souls were lying sleeping tonight with the virus nested away in their DNA, awaiting some unknown trigger to unleash it upon an unsuspecting world.

She said, ‘I don’t understand why they want me on this task force. They have the entire resources of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at their disposal.’

Li said, ‘You are the medical examiner in Houston. That is where the investigation will be focused. It is essential that you are on board.’

She looked at him. ‘And you?’

‘I am a political inclusion,’ he said, his voice laden with irony. ‘But my people want me involved, too. They want an end to this just as much as the Americans. Contacts have already been set up between FEMA and my Embassy.’

‘FEMA,’ Margaret said, and she remembered the three unexplained FEMA representatives who had sat at the table at Fort Detrick. ‘I know I should probably know, but what the hell is FEMA?’

‘The Federal Emergency Management Agency,’ Li said. ‘Since this is a multiagency task force, FEMA will finance and administer it.’

She looked at him in wonder. ‘How do you know all this, Li Yan?’

He smiled. ‘It is my job, Margaret. I have spent ten months in Washington familiarising myself with every law-enforcement agency they’re prepared to tell me about, and some they aren’t.’ He shook his head. ‘There has been a great deal of empire building here over a great many years, and now a huge number of vested interests are jealously guarding their budgets and their turf. US law enforcement is the most labyrinthine and arcane field of study I have ever undertaken. I was never quite sure if there was any real point to it, until now.’

She drained her glass. ‘I’ve got to get some sleep.’

He rounded the table as she stood up, taking her by the wrist and turning her into him almost before she knew it, his body hard and strong, pressed against hers, his arms enveloping her. She felt his breath on her face, and smelled the sweet fresh alcohol on it. He kissed her softly, and she looked up into his eyes. She sighed. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea, Li Yan,’ she said. And she felt his hold on her slacken and he moved very slightly away from her.

‘What do you mean?’ She heard both the disappointment and the hurt in his voice.

She struggled to give form to her thoughts. ‘I think maybe we should, you know, keep things between us on a professional basis for a while. When we start getting personal, you and I…’ she gasped, exasperated by her own inability to find the right words, ‘…we only ever seem to generate pain.’

‘I don’t remember there being much pain between us last night.’

And he was right. There had been only pleasure. But how could she tell him that the pleasure never made up for the pain that followed. Seeing Xinxin tonight had brought it all flooding back. She needed time and space to find her perspective again. ‘Things are always just too complicated with us, Li Yan,’ she said feebly. And she wondered if she wasn’t simply taking the coward’s way out. Afraid to confront the contradictions of a cross-cultural relationship in her own country, afraid to face the disapproval of her peers. Or maybe she was just afraid to grasp the thing she wanted most in the world in case it all slipped away from her again.

The telephone shattered the tension between them, its long, single ring spiking the dark like electricity. Li moved catlike across the kitchen to answer it before it woke Xinxin.