‘But you have such lovely fetlocks.’ He stooped to crook an arm behind her knees and lift her off her feet. She put her arms around his neck.
‘As long as you don’t feel the need to take a horsewhip to my hind quarters.’
He smiled. ‘Some women quite like that.’ He paused. ‘I’m told.’
‘Not by me. I’d be inclined to think it might spoil the ride.’
‘Or spur you on to greater things.’ He laid her on the bed and leaned over her, so that his breath brushed her face.
She grinned and slipped a hand inside his boxers. ‘That’s all the spur I need.’ And she closed her eyes and let a huge wave of sexual escape break over her. For a few minutes of exquisite pleasure she could be free of a life that was falling apart yet again. She felt his hands on her skin, his lips on her face, her breasts, and as he entered her, she flung her legs around his back and pulled him to her so tightly that she squeezed all of the air out of his lungs.
Afterwards, they lay for a long time in silence. The light of the television flickered in the darkness of the room, the canned laughter of a nonexistent studio audience modulating in time to the regulation thirty-second gags of some mediocre sitcom. Eventually, Li raised himself on an elbow and saw that Margaret’s face was wet with tears. He sat upright. ‘What’s wrong?’
She reached up and ran her fingers over his split lip, the bruising high on his cheek and around his left eye. ‘It’s just me,’ she said smiling sadly. ‘And life. I never seem to get the two things running in harmony.’ And she told him about Mendez. His abortive sexual advances. A sad and lonely only man, she said. And she told him how she was homeless now and unable to concentrate on her work, or on anything very much. She told him about the virus they had taken from Steve during autopsy. How it had used him to grow stronger, smarter. And she told him about her despair that there would ever be a way out of any of it.
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?’