Snakehead (27 page)

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.