Snakehead (3 page)

‘I always turn off the cellphone when I’m lecturing, Lucy. You know that,’ Margaret said. ‘Why didn’t you try the college?’

‘I did. And missed you.’ She heard Lucy sigh at the other end. ‘Dr. Campbell, we got a call from the sheriff’s office in Walker County up there. They need your help out at a Tex-Mex eatery on Highway 45. Seems they got a truck full of ninety-some dead people.’

‘Jesus,’ Margaret said, and she could almost feel Lucy’s disapproval all the way down the line from Houston. ‘I’m on my way.’ She hung up and pushed past McKinley into the house. She always kept an emergency flight case at home packed with all the tools and accoutrements of her profession.

‘I mean it,’ McKinley shouted after her. ‘I want you outta here.’

‘Tell it to my lawyer,’ Margaret said and shut the door in his face.

IV

Margaret drove northwest on Interstate 45, past the Wynne and Holliday Units of the Huntsville prison complex, the tiny municipal airport that sat up on the right, the spur that took off west to Harper Cemetery. She passed several billboards advertising positions as correctional officers for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. In Huntsville you either worked for the prison or the university. The warm October sun bleached all colour out of the sky and she could see the cluster of blue and red flashing lights in the distance identifying where the truck had been found. Strictly speaking, this was out of Margaret’s jurisdiction. But the Walker County Coroner simply wasn’t equipped to cope with something like this. Which was why the sheriff had called her office.

She turned on to the 190 and took a left on the access road to the Mexican diner. Three crows stood on a white picket fence gazing curiously across the scrub toward the parking lot where police officers moved, antlike, around its taped-off perimeter. More than a dozen vehicles choked the entrance to the lot and Margaret recognised a Pontiac driven by one of her investigators and a couple of white forensics trucks. The centre of all the activity was a huge refrigerated container, the door on the driver’s side of its tractor unit still lying open, just as Jayjay had found it. The Walker County sheriff crossed the crumbling asphalt to greet her. He was a big man in his late fifties, with a grey suit and a white Stetson. His badge was pinned to a breast pocket from which poked a red and yellow re-election flyer. His big hand enveloped hers and crushed it.

‘Ma’am, thanks for coming,’ he said, and Margaret remembered her cruel words to her young student. The sheriff looked grim. ‘We got a shitload of trouble here.’

Another man had followed him over. A year or two younger, perhaps. In his middle fifties. He had grey receding hair, neatly cut and thinning on top, and a world-weary face. He was medium height and chunkily built, spreading at the waist. ‘Thank you, Sheriff,’ he said. Clearly a dismissal. ‘You guys are doing a great job here.’ The sheriff nodded to Margaret and moved away, and the other man turned to her. ‘You the ME?’

Margaret held out her hand and said coolly, ‘Dr. Margaret Campbell.’

‘Agent Michael Hrycyk.’ He pronounced it
Rychick
. His palm was clammy hot. He flipped open a leather wallet to reveal his badge. ‘INS.’

Margaret frowned. ‘What interest does Immigration have in this?’

‘You mean apart from the fact there’s ninety-eight dead Chinese in there?’ He flicked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the truck.

Margaret’s stomach flipped over. ‘Chinese?’

‘Well, Asian. But probably Chinese. Almost certainly illegal. Which’ll make ’em ours.’

‘It won’t make them anybody’s, except mine, if they’re dead.’

‘You know what I mean.’ He took out a pack of cigarettes.

‘Don’t light that here,’ Margaret said. ‘This is a crime scene.’

‘I doubt it,’ he said.

In the distance Margaret saw the first of the TV trucks arriving. It hadn’t taken long. Ninety-eight dead Chinese in the back of a truck — the local stations would make a killing selling it to the networks. ‘Why?’ she asked.

He took her arm and started walking her toward the truck. ‘There are anything up to a hundred thousand Chinese EWIs arriving in the States every year,’ he said. ‘Most of them nowadays coming across the border from Mexico.’

‘EWI?’ She removed her arm from his grip.

‘Entry without Inspection. An EWI’s what we call an illegal immigrant. And in this case, an OTM as well.’ He grinned a humourless grin. ‘That’s Other Than Mexican.’

‘You have some interesting terminology,’ Margaret observed dryly.

‘Oh, it gets a whole lot more interesting than that, Doc. We used to call the Mexicans
wetbacks
’cos they always came dripping out the Rio Grande. But that ain’t politically correct no more. Except it’s what the Mexicans call themselves.
Mojados
. And I don’t see no reason to call them anything they don’t call themselves. Except maybe
spics
.’

Margaret glanced at him with dislike. ‘And your point is?’

Hrycyk didn’t like her tone and bristled. ‘My point is, Dr. Campbell, these illegal Chinese are worth big money. Up to sixty grand a head these days. Which by my crude reckoning means that there’s nearly six million dollars worth of dead meat in that container. And no one in their right mind is going to waste six million bucks.’

At the back of the truck a bunch of police officers was standing about watching two forensic investigators moving around inside the container. The investigators were wearing protective white, zippered, Tivek suits with built-in booties and hoods. Their faces were covered with surgical masks and they wore latex gloves. A photographer, similarly clad, was photographing the horror with a business-like detachment, alternating between video and stills. His lights illuminated a ghastly scene, and as the heat increased so the smell grew riper.

Hrycyk was unaffected. He said, ‘Way I see it? The truck probably came up the 77 from Brownsville, or maybe the 281, or even the 59 from Laredo. They’re the standard routes.’

‘Headed where?’

‘Houston.’

Margaret frowned. ‘But we’re sixty miles north of Houston here.’

Hrycyk shrugged. ‘So they took a detour to avoid spot checks on the highway. But Houston’s where they were headed.’

‘Why? What is there in Houston for illegal Chinese immigrants?’

‘A population of three hundred thousand Chinese for a start. The fourth biggest Chinatown in the country.’

‘I had no idea,’ Margaret said.

‘Most people don’t. The Chinese like to keep to themselves. They built a new Chinatown down in the southwest of the city and hardly ever leave it.’ He began to take out his cigarettes again, then caught Margaret’s eye and slipped them back in his pocket. ‘Houston also has the third largest community of consuls in the US. Seventy at the last count. And that means papers — proof of identity, country of origin. You got papers you’re halfway to becoming a legal resident. There’s big business in papers.’ He scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Course, most of ’em don’t stay. New York’s the final destination. The
Jinshan
, the Mountain of Gold they’re all looking for. But in the meantime, they’ll hide out in safe houses and work sixteen, seventeen hours a day in sweatshops and restaurants and whorehouses to pay off the money they owe the
shetou
.’

‘Shir-toe?’ Margaret repeated the Mandarin word with the familiarity of someone who has spent time in Beijing.

‘Snakeheads. People smugglers. The fixers who arrange everything: transport, safe houses, papers. Usually Chinese. Mean bastards.’

‘So if these people in the truck really are illegal immigrants they would still have owed their smuggling fees to their snakeheads?’

‘Hey, now you’re catching on, Doc.’ Hrycyk’s smile was patronising. ‘Their families back home in China will have paid a small deposit. Once they’re here, they have to pay off the rest themselves. A precious cargo. So there ain’t no motive for killing ’em.’ He flicked his head toward the truck. ‘Way I see it? Someone shut the air vent in the refrigerated unit by accident, or maybe forgot to open it. The driver stops here in the middle of the night to let them out for a piss and finds them all dead. Suffocated. He panics, takes off.’ He chuckled. ‘Saving the INS a whole lot of trouble in the process.’

‘I’m sure their families will be gratified to hear that,’ Margaret said coldly. The prospect of having to process ninety-eight bodies was bad enough without having to deal with a racist immigration officer as well.

Hrycyk bridled. ‘Hey! Don’t go feeling sorry for these little runts. They bring a lot of crime into this country. Carry in drugs to help pay off their fees, get involved in illegal gambling and prostitution. When they get caught they claim political asylum, get given C-8 immigration cards so they can be legally employed, then disappear again when the court throws out their case.’ He stopped for just a moment to draw breath. ‘Far as I’m concerned, the only good Chinese is a dead Chinese.’

‘Well, as far as I am concerned, Agent Hrycyk,’ Margaret said firmly, ‘these poor people are entitled, like anyone else, to my full and undivided professional attention in determining how and why they died — regardless of race, creed, colour or nationality.’

There were now three TV trucks queuing up on the 190 at the end of the access road, and at least half a dozen other press vehicles drawn in behind. A group of journalists was standing debating rights of access with two of the sheriff’s men where the crows had earlier sat on the white picket fence. The crows were gone. The vultures had arrived.

‘Margaret…’ One of the forensic investigators was standing in the doorway of the container. ‘Stuff up here you might want to take a look at.’

‘Give me two minutes,’ Margaret said. She ran back to her car, opened the trunk, slipped off her jacket and shoes and pulled on a Tivek body suit, zipping it up and dragging the hood over her head before snapping on her face mask and gloves. Then she walked back to the truck, clumsy in her booties, carrying a small bag of tools. The investigator gave her a hand up and she stood unsteadily for a moment surveying the scene in front of her. A monstrous heap of arms and legs and bleak, dead faces crammed into the front half of the container. There was something infinitely sad in those pale, frail Chinese figures whose American dream had come to such an abrupt end. The investigator handed her what looked like a small notebook in a plastic evidence bag. Margaret took it out and thumbed carefully through it. Its pages were covered with a frantic scrawl of indecipherable Chinese characters.

‘Found it lying on the chest of one of the bodies,’ the investigator said. ‘Pencil was still in his hand.’

‘What is it?’ Hrycyk called from below, craning to see what she was holding. He was clearly frustrated not to be closer to the action.

‘It’s a notebook.’

‘Anything in it?’

‘Sure.’

‘Well, what? What does it say?’ His patience was wearing thin.

‘I don’t know about you,’ Margaret said caustically, ‘but my Chinese isn’t that good.’

Hrycyk cursed. ‘Well, at least the Chinese guy they’re gonna send from Washington might come in useful for something, then.’

‘What Chinese guy?’ Margaret asked, a sudden thickening in her throat.

‘The criminal justice liaison at the Chinese Embassy. This whole thing’s already going political.’

She turned away, anxious that Hrycyk should have no sense of her distress. To him the criminal justice liaison at the Chinese Embassy in Washington was just another Chinese. She knew him better as Li Yan, Deputy Section Chief, Section One of the Criminal Investigation Department of Beijing Municipal Police. A man whose intimate touch she knew only too well. A touch that pained her now to remember. She moved into the back of the truck, more ready to face the horrors it contained than the feelings she had spent a year trying to sublimate, feelings of love and betrayal turning slowly to anger and maybe more. ‘Where’s the body you took this from?’ she asked the investigator brittlely.

They picked their way through two dozen corpses, men and women who had clawed in despair at the walls of the container, even at their own clothing. It was a pitiful sight. A man in jeans and sneakers was half propped against the left side wall. He had shreds of thinning hair brushed back from an unusually dark face, a sparse moustache barely covering his upper lip. Margaret noticed the nicotine stains on the fingers that still held the pencil with which he had scrawled his last desperate words.

V

Wang’s Diary

I first saw Cheng that night in Fujian when they took us offshore in the small boat to board the cargo ship waiting in international waters. She sat at the back of the boat clutching a brown bag, looking very small and vulnerable. She made me feel like such a fraud. This was real for her. This was her life. Full of danger and uncertainty. I know that many of these people make this journey not for themselves, but for their families, for the money they can send home from the Mountain of Gold. I thought of her, even then, as my yazi, my little duck. I know it is the term they use for illegal immigrants, and never did it seem more appropriate than when I thought of poor little Cheng. I decided, then, that I would do my best to protect her on this long, hard trip. If I had known how powerless I would be to save her from the rapes and the beatings I would have taken her off the boat that night and sacrificed this whole venture. All I have been able to offer her since is comfort. I do not know if she knows that I have fallen in love with her. She does not, I think, love me. I am twice her age. She likes and trusts me, perhaps like a daughter trusts a father. I know that when we reach Meiguo I will lose her. I wish I had never made this journey.

VI

Li Yan freewheeled down the hill past dark stone mansions lurking in dappled shadow behind gnarled old trees. They had strange, Scottish-sounding names like Dumbarton House and Anderson House, painted placards on wrought-iron gates. He left Georgetown’s grid of tree-lined narrow streets behind him and swung his bicycle toward the bridge over Rock Creek. Sheridan Circle was thick with traffic, and he turned uphill into a maze of residental streets that took him over the rise and down again toward Connecticut Avenue.