Snakehead (32 page)

He wiped the tears from her face with the flat of his hand. He had a great need to talk to someone, but she was too fragile right now to share his burden. So he held his peace and asked her about Xinxin and Xiao Ling.

Margaret shook her head. ‘Xinxin won’t speak to her, won’t even acknowledge that she’s there. And your sister isn’t making much of an effort to change that.’

He heard the disapproval in her voice, and his own despair welled up inside him. He lay down again beside her and dragged the top sheet over them both, and they fell back into silence. After a time he reached for the remote and switched off the TV. Outside, the sound of late night traffic on Main drifted up to the open window. He heard Margaret’s breathing slow and thicken and he turned over on to his side, pulling his legs up in the foetal position. He knew he wouldn’t sleep. There was too much going on in his head. And then he felt Margaret shifting in the bed beside him, and the warmth of her body as she turned to fit herself into the curve of his back, pulling her legs up behind his. An arm slipped through his, and her hand cupped itself around the curve of his chest. He felt her breath hot on his neck. He wished he could lie like this forever.

* * *

Her eyes flickered open and she saw the red glow of the digital bedside clock. It was 2.30 a.m. The sheet was twisted around her waist. She reached over to find the reassuring warmth of Li and found the bed beside her empty and cold. She rolled over, immediately awake, and the shadow of his absence was dense and dark. She sat up and saw the silhouette of a man standing against the net curtain at the window. He seemed to be staring out into the streetlit night. ‘Li Yan?’

The figure turned. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you. I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Come back to bed. I know how to make you sleep.’

She heard his smile. And the regret in his voice. ‘Too much on my mind. Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘You’ve never asked me before.’

‘We’re in America now. I feel self-conscious about it.’

She laughed. ‘Smoke, for God’s sake!’ He lit a cigarette and she said, ‘So what’s on your mind?’

‘Fear.’

‘What are you afraid of?’

‘I’m afraid of what’s going to happen to my sister when the
ah kung
’s little horses get to her. Which they will.’

She pulled her knees up to her chin. ‘She’s under armed police guard, Li Yan.’

She saw the shake of his head. ‘They’ll still get to her. These people never give up.’

‘But why?’

‘Because she can identify the
ah kung
. She has seen him, and he knows it.’

‘How does he know?’

‘Because I told him.’

Margaret stared at him hard in the darkness. She saw the end of his cigarette glow red as he drew on it, and then the shadow of the smoke against the window. She felt herself tensing. ‘You
know
who he is?’

He nodded. ‘I wasn’t certain. Until I made a phone call shortly before you showed up tonight.’

‘Who is he?’

Li snorted in the dark. ‘A man of impeccable reputation. Chairman of the Houston-Hong Kong Bank, board member of the Astros baseball team, elected member of Houston City Council.’

‘Soong?’ Margaret said, incredulous. ‘The guy you met at the stadium yesterday?’ She saw him nod his acknowledgement. ‘How do you know?’

‘Wang’s diary spoke of the
ah kung
’s nickname. Kat. The Cantonese word for “tangerine”, a Chinese symbol of good fortune. Soong wears a ring with the character for “tangerine” engraved in amber — amber the colour of tangerine. It is a very old ring, and the engraving is almost worn away. You can’t see it with the naked eye. When I asked to run my thumb over it, he must have been gambling on my not being able to feel it either. But it was there, and I could read it with my skin as clearly as if I could see it. Kat.’

She watched him smoke in silence, running everything he had told her through her mind. Finally she said, ‘If “tangerine” is a universal Chinese symbol for good fortune, then it could be coincidence. There could be hundreds, maybe thousands, even millions of people wearing jewellery engraved with that character.’

‘That’s what I told myself,’ Li said. ‘Then it occurred to me that it was such a big, ostentatious ring, that no woman he had slept with could have failed to notice it.’ He moved toward the bed to stub his cigarette out in the ashtray and sat down on the edge of the mattress. ‘That’s how Xiao Ling knows him. She was a gift to him while she was working as a hostess at the Golden Mountain Club. When I called her, she remembered the ring quite clearly.’

‘Arrest him,’ Margaret said.

Li laughed. ‘And charge him with what? Wearing a ring? Your law enforcement people would laugh me out of the country.’

‘At least you know where to start looking.’

He gasped his frustration. ‘Margaret, a man like that will have been meticulous in covering his tracks. It could take months of investigation, and we might still find nothing. Meantime, all he has to do is get rid of my sister and we won’t even have someone to say they heard him called Kat.’

‘He’s bound to make a mistake, Li Yan. Sometime. Somewhere.’

Li waggled his head. ‘People like Soong don’t make mistakes, Margaret. That’s why they don’t get caught.’

‘Everyone makes mistakes,’ Margaret said. ‘Otherwise you and I would be out of a job.’

The long single ring of the telephone startled them. Li looked at the phone and it rang again, but he made no attempt to answer it.

‘It’s not for me,’ Margaret said. ‘No one knows I’m here.’

Li picked it up on the third ring. Soong’s voice was barely a whisper, scratchy and tight with tension. His Mandarin, despite his previous protestations, was fluent. ‘You know who this is?’

Li said, ‘Yuh.’

‘I know who the
ah kung
is,’ he said.

Li heard the blood rushing in his ears. ‘Who?’

‘I can’t tell you on the phone. And the minute I do we’ll both be in danger.’

‘What do you suggest?’

‘A meeting.’

‘When?’

‘Now.’

Li glanced at Margaret. Her face reflected the pale light from the window. She was frowning. ‘Where?’ he said.

‘My suite at the stadium. I’ll leave the side door unlocked. Come straight up. And in the name of the sky, don’t tell anyone.’

A click sounded in Li’s ear and the line went dead. Slowly he replaced the receiver and sat lost in thought for more than a minute.

‘Li Yan?’ Margaret put a hand on his shoulder.

He turned. ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘He just made a mistake.’

He relayed the conversation to her and she said, ‘But you’re not actually going?’

‘Of course.’

‘For God’s sake, Li Yan, it’s a trap. Surely you must see that? It would be madness to go on your own.’

He said, ‘So I get the full weight of the task force behind me and we storm the stadium. Then what? There’s still no proof against him. No evidence of anything. He’s so careful, he didn’t even say his name on the phone.’ He stood up. ‘The only way I’m going to get him is to let him play his hand. Compound the mistake.’

In a sullen silence, Margaret watched him dress. She knew there was no point in trying to make him change his mind. She had known him long enough to know what an exercise in futility that would be. When he stooped to brush her cheek with his lips, she whispered, ‘Be careful.’ And the moment he was out of the door, she snatched her purse and retrieved the list of telephone numbers sent to her by FEMA. She switched on the bedside light and ran her fingers down the names until she found the number of Fuller’s cellphone. She snatched the phone and punched it in.

II

There was nothing moving along Texas when Li got there. The grounds of the Annunciation Catholic Church lay brooding in silent darkness on the south side of Minute Maid Park. East on Texas, the lights of an occasional vehicle on the freeway raked across the flyover. On Crawford nothing stirred. No sound, no light, no movement. Houston was a city without a heart. No one lived at its centre. When the shops and offices closed for the day, and the last fan had left the stadium, it was a dead place. Empty. Even of muggers, for there was no one to mug.

Still, Li felt conspicuous as he drifted quickly under bleaching street lights, wondering if hidden eyes were watching his approach. The core of him was stiff with tension, but he forced his body to relax so that he could move freely. He hurried past the metered parking slots below the towering south wall of the stadium, under the ornamental canopies over the windows of the official Astros shop, to the double glass doors that opened on to the wide sweep of stairs that led from club level up to the private suites. He pushed each in turn. The left door opened and he slipped inside.

Light from the street fell in through tall windows on each level and lay in rectangles across the green-carpeted stairway. Li went up the steps two at a time to the suite level. On the landing he stopped and listened, straining to hear anything above the rasp of his own breath and the hammering of his heart. Three openings down, he saw a crack of light under the door to Soong’s suite. There was no sound. He looked along the dark, carpeted curve of the concourse and decided to make his approach from another angle. He slipped past Soong’s suite and fell into a long, loping jog through the food hall, past the Whistle Stop bar, which sold libations to the wealthy, past the panorama of windows that looked out on to the night-cloaked field. There was very little light out there. The sky had cleared, though it was studded with stars, for there was no moon. Through a swing door at the end, he found himself on the concrete staircase that Soong had brought them up the previous day. Arched windows on the landing threw light from the street across the stairs as he hurried down to ground level. Hanging signs pointed along the colonnaded walkway beneath the train to sections 100–104. Li plunged into its darkness and ran past the arched openings, beyond the Home Run Pump — a mock Conoco gas pump that lit up when the Astros struck gold — to the far concourse beneath giant billboards advertising Coca-Cola, Miller Lite, UPS. Behind floor-to-ceiling glass, the tables of Ruggles restaurant were pooled in darkness.

Li stopped and looked back across the field, and saw the solitary light shining in Soong’s suite, like one gold tooth in a mouth of blackened stumps. Its light tumbled feebly across the seats below and lay in a faint slab on the grass. A light above the elevators at the far side of the concourse told him that they were still powered. He rode up to the next level and made his way beneath the giant scoreboard to the seating at the far side of the stadium. He jumped up and caught the rail dividing the suite level from the one below and swung himself upwards, hooking a leg over the top rail and pulling himself up behind it. He was on a level again with the light from Soong’s suite but still had the length of the stadium to traverse. He broke into a jog again, following the concrete behind the seats and then vaulting the dividing rails that split the east side into sections at regular intervals.

Now just two suites away from the light spilling out into darkness, he stopped to catch his breath and listen again, his face shining with sweat. He caught the faint sound of a voice through glass, and very carefully approached the windows of Soong’s suite. Below he could see, in the palest of lights, the geometry of the baseball field, the pitcher’s mound like a moon orbiting the batter’s circle, the grass diamond delineated by red blaize that looked from here as black as tar. He listened hard. There was not even the faintest echo of bat on ball or of chanting fans. The stadium was only a handful of seasons old. If there were ghosts here, they would be the ghosts of trains, of porters and passengers, drivers and linemen. But there was nothing. Just the muffled sound of Soong’s voice. Li manoeuvred himself into a position that let him see in without being seen himself. Soong was talking animatedly on the telephone, but Li couldn’t make out what he was saying. Soong hung up and lit a cigarette. The ashtray on the table was full to overflowing. The room was thick with smoke, like smog. Soong began pacing, and then suddenly he stopped and looked right at Li. Li froze, and for a moment felt trapped in the gaze of the
ah kung
. Then he realised that from the inside all Soong could see was a reflection of himself. He was looking at himself in the glass. Gone were the jeans and the baseball jacket. He wore a sombre blue suit, starched white shirt and red tie. This was serious business. Li wondered if he was impressed by what he saw. As Soong raised his cigarette to his mouth with his left hand, he saw his ring reflected in the window, and he paused, with his hand at his face, to run the fingers of his right hand over the faded etching in the fossilised resin that was the amber stone. A small vanity had betrayed a larger vice.

Li stepped forward and slid the door open, taking some pleasure from the fear that blanched Soong’s face and made him turn, startled, with a small cry.

Smoke swept past Li, drawn out by the chill night and sucked into the void. He raised his eyebrows in an expression of surprise. ‘I thought you were expecting me.’

Soong recovered his composure quickly. ‘Of course.’ He smiled. ‘But not by the tradesman’s entrance.’ It was a quick-thinking put-down, designed to re-establish his position of power. He turned to the table and lifted a black rectangular box about the size of a TV remote. It had a loop of chrome at one end, and looked like the kind of wand security men employ at airports to detect metal. ‘You don’t mind if I check you for wires.’ It wasn’t a question.

Li shrugged, and Soong quickly ran the wand over him from head to foot, front to back. Satisfied that he was clean, Soong dropped it back on the table and said, ‘Smart man. Maybe we can get down to business now.’

Li said, ‘You were going to tell me who the
ah kung
is. The one they call Kat.’

Soong smiled. ‘I don’t
really
need to do that, Mr. Li, do I?’ Li canted his head and shrugged his eyebrows and Soong added, ‘But, you know, I’m not the monster you think I am.’