They stood, simply staring at each other, for a prodigious amount of time. ‘Hello, Li Yan,’ she said finally.
‘You know each other?’ Fuller asked, amazed. Li had given no indication of it.
‘Yes,’ Li said. And he knew that Fuller was wondering if he had spoken out of turn about her in the car. But he didn’t take his eyes off Margaret for a minute. The icy sensation in his chest was almost painful. How often had he seen her like this? Hidden behind the mask and the goggles, almost every inch of her covered by cotton or plastic. Except for the gap between the tops of her gloves and the short-sleeved gown. And he saw the freckles there on pale skin, the down of soft, fair hair. He wanted to touch her so much it hurt.
The momentary spell was broken by the almost brutal way that Margaret turned over the body on the table. ‘Mr. Li and I met when I assisted the Beijing police during a couple of murder enquiries. He was deputy head of their Serious Crime Squad.’ Her voice was cold and controlled. ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she said. ‘Since none of us read Chinese, maybe you can tell us what it was this man was writing in his diary.’
Li looked at the body in front of him for the first time, and it felt for a moment as if the world had stopped turning. He put a hand on the end of the table to steady himself. ‘Wang,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper.
‘You know this guy?’ Hrycyk asked, incredulous.
‘Wang.’ Li’s voice cracked as he said the name again. ‘Detective Wang Wei Pao. Senior supervisor, class three, Tianjin Municipal Police.’ He paused. ‘I didn’t really know him. I briefed him.’
Margaret saw that Li was affected by this man’s death and immediately regretted her callousness. She had spent her life regretting the things she did and said, and the hurt she inflicted on the people she loved.
‘So what the hell was a Tianjin cop doing on that truck?’ Hrycyk demanded to know, untouched by the moment.
‘He was working undercover,’ Li said, regaining some degree of composure. He saw Fuller and Hrycyk exchange glances. ‘An operation we mounted more than six months ago. He volunteered for the job, and he was ideal for it. He was born in Fujian Province, which is the departure point for most of the illegal immigrants. He spoke the dialect. It was easy for him to make contact with a local snakehead and get the next boat out.’ He remembered Wang’s enthusiasm. He was fed up with the routine in Tianjin, his marriage had broken down and he’d been looking for something else to fill his life. ‘He phoned us whenever he could, under the pretence of phoning home. And he posted several reports, so we were able to follow his progress. But we never knew that it would take so long.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Or that it would end like this.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Fuller said. ‘Are you telling me you people mounted a unilateral operation here, without keeping us informed?’ He looked at Hrycyk. ‘Did the INS know about this?’
‘We sure as hell did not.’ Hrycyk glared at Li as if he was the embodiment of everything he hated about the Chinese.
Fuller’s face was flushed with anger. He turned on Li. ‘So what kind of liaison are you, that sends an undercover Chinese cop on to US soil without telling us?’
Li remained calm. ‘We took a clear policy decision on this. We decided to do nothing that might put the life of our operative at risk.’
‘And keeping American law enforcement in the loop would be putting your man’s life at risk?’ Fuller was incredulous.
‘It is a matter of trust,’ Li said evenly.
‘What, you don’t trust us?’ Hrycyk threw his hands in the air as if it was the most absurd thing he had ever heard.
Li said, ‘The history of cooperation between US and Chinese law enforcement is not exactly an illustrious one. You might remember the goldfish case.’
Fuller sighed his impatience. ‘That’s ancient history!’
Margaret asked, ‘What is the goldfish case?’
Li spoke to her directly for the first time. ‘A gang operating out of Shanghai in the late eighties was filling condoms with heroin and sewing them into the bellies of large goldfish that were then shipped out with live fish to San Francisco. It is normal for a number of fish to die in transit, but officials in San Francisco became suspicious when they saw stitching in the bellies of some of the fish.’
‘This is completely irrelevant,’ Fuller insisted, but he was on the defensive now.
‘Is it?’ Li asked. He said to Margaret, ‘When gang members at the American end of the operation were brought to court, the prosecution here asked the Chinese to release one of the gang members from Shanghai to give evidence in court. The Chinese agreed. It was the first cooperative US — Chinese drug prosecution. But when the guy got on the stand he changed his testimony and claimed political asylum. That was more than ten years ago. He is currently walking around a free man in the United States.’
‘He said he was tortured by the Chinese police. Beaten and blindfolded and stuck with an electric cattle prod,’ Hrycyk said.
Li’s laugh was without humour. ‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? And in a country where people are prepared to believe the worst that anyone wants to claim about the People’s Republic of China, the odds were pretty much stacked in his favour.’
Hrycyk stabbed an accusing finger at Li across the prone form of the dead detective. ‘You telling me stuff like that never happens in China?’
‘No,’ Li said simply, taking the wind out of Hrycyk’s sails. ‘But it’s never happened on my shift. And if you could put your hand on your heart and tell me a prisoner’s never had a confession beaten out of him in the United States, then I’d call you a liar.’
Hrycyk looked as if he might be about to leap across the table and take Li by the throat.
Margaret said caustically, ‘I don’t think Detective Wang gave his life just so that China and America could go to war.’ She brushed past them and lifted a plastic evidence bag containing Wang’s bloodstained notebook from the computer table and held it up to Li. ‘His diary,’ she said.
IV
April 10
The ship that is taking us across the Pacific was waiting in the darkness for our flotilla of small boats several miles off the coast. It is a rusty old Korean freighter with three holds. About one hundred of us are packed into the rear hold. Another sixty or so in the next. The third is stacked with food and water for our trip. There are no windows, and only one fan in the roof. It is freezing cold all the time, and the air in here stinks. We sleep on the floor, cheek by jowl. Our toilet facilities consist of a bucket for the men and a bucket for the women. Hygiene is impossible, and I have picked up some kind of eye infection. My eyes are red and sore, and agony if I rub them, which I do when I sleep and wake up with tears running down my cheeks. To be red-eyed, they say, is to be envious. The people I envy are those who are not aboard this ship.
The food is appalling. Water, rice, peanuts, some vegetables. But they never give us meat, or fish. My wife always nagged me to lose some weight. Now she has her wish.
They let us up on deck once a week to wash in salt water. My hair is crusted with it, my skin white, as if I had rolled in rice flour. There are always ma zhai making sure we do what we are told. Sometimes they beat us, and they know we will not retaliate because there are three Cambodians on board with machine guns. Khmer Rouge mercenaries. We know that such people have no compunction about taking lives, although of course the shetou want us delivered to America in one piece. Our hides are worth sixty thousand dollars apiece, but only if we are alive inside them.