Li nodded again. Then he said, ‘She really misses those cold winter days when you used to take her kite-flying in Tiananmen Square.’
Margaret felt like a big, soft gloved hand had swung out of the night and knocked her over. She caught her breath. ‘Xinxin?’ Her incredulity almost robbed her of speech. ‘Xinxin is here in America?’ It had been almost as hard to leave the child as it had been to leave Li.
‘I’ve adopted her now, officially,’ Li said. ‘Her father is having a child with another woman. He did not want her back. And no one has heard anything from my sister since she went south to have her baby boy.’ He shrugged. ‘So I needed a room for her, and another for her nanny.’
The house was set back behind a small garden. It had blue-painted shutters at the windows and was smothered in ivy. Red-tiled steps and a path led through lush green shrubbery to the front door. A security lamp clicked on as they approached it, flooding the garden and the street with a bright, cold light. Li unlocked the door and turned on a sidelamp in a long, narrow hallway. There was a staircase on the right leading steeply up to the second floor. Margaret squeezed in past a bicycle leaning against the wall. Li smiled. ‘I still like to cycle to my work.’
Almost immediately, a young Chinese woman appeared, blinking, at the top of the stairs. She wore a long nightshirt and was in her bare feet. She had short, dark, club-cut hair above a round, flat, almost Mongolian face. She put her hand up to her eyes. ‘Is that you, Mr. Li?’
‘Yes, Meiping. I have a guest with me. Dr. Campbell. She will be staying the night.’ He paused. ‘Is Xinxin sleeping?’
‘Yes, Mr. Li.’
‘We’ll maybe look in on her before we go to bed.’
‘Sure, Mr. Li. Anything you want?’
‘No, it’s alright, Meiping. You can go back to bed.’
‘Thank you, Mr. Li. Goodnight, Mr. Li.’ And she padded off back to her bedroom.
‘She has been a remarkable find,’ Li told Margaret. ‘The Embassy got her for me. Xinxin adores her.’
He took her into a front room that overlooked the street through Georgian windows. The furniture was lacquered Chinese antique, formal and not very comfortable. Li shrugged. ‘It came with the house.’ She followed him into a fitted kitchen with a small, round table at its centre. A pull-down lamp lit the circle of it very brightly, leaving the rest of the room in darkness. Li threw a switch and concealed lights beneath the wall units flickered briefly and lit the perimeter of the room. He opened a tall refrigerator. ‘Drink?’
Margaret said, ‘I’d rather see Xinxin first. I promise I won’t wake her.’
The house was tall and very narrow, but extended a long way back from the street. At the top of the stairs a hallway ran to a room at the front of the house, and another ran crookedly toward the back, down three steps, past a small bathroom, and up another two to where doors led off to the back bedrooms. Meiping’s room was on the left. Li gingerly turned the handle on Xinxin’s door and they crept into the darkness of her room. The reflected light from the hall cast itself faintly across Xinxin’s face where her head lay on the pillow, tilted to one side, her mouth slightly open. The room was filled with the slow, heavy sound of her breathing. Margaret perched herself gently on the edge of the bed and looked at the little face, marvelling both at its familiarity and at the way it had changed in not even a year and a half. It was a long time in the life of a seven-year-old child. Her face had become a little thinner, her features more well defined. Her hair, which Margaret had always tied in pigtails high up on each side of her head, was longer and fanned out across the pillow. A single strand of it fell across her cheek and into her mouth. Very carefully, Margaret drew it away from her lips, and the child’s eyes flickered open. They were bleary and sleepily distant and looked up at Margaret, unblinking, for a very long, silent moment. Then a little hand clutched Margaret’s. ‘You gonna read me story tonight, Magret?’ she asked in a tiny voice thick with sleep.
‘Tomorrow, little one,’ Margaret whispered, and she tried very hard to stop her eyes filling with tears.
‘We gonna make dumplings tomorrow?’
‘Sure we are, sweetheart.’
A little smile flickered across Xinxin’s lips. ‘I love you, Magret.’ And her eyes closed, and the slow heavy sound of her breathing filled the room again.
Margaret stood up quickly, the light from the hall blurring in her eyes, and she hurried out past Li, wiping them quickly dry as he pulled the door shut behind him. It was as if she had never left. But one thing at least had changed. She turned to Li. ‘You know what?’ she said hoarsely. ‘That’s the first time I ever had a conversation with her in English.’
Back in the kitchen, she sat watching as Li poured her a vodka tonic in a glass filled with ice and fresh cut lemon. He remembered how to make it just the way she liked it. The fizz of the bubbles tickled her lip and nose as she took a long pull at the drink, and she felt the alcohol hit her bloodstream almost immediately. With it came a wave of fatigue, and she remembered it was a long time since she had slept — there had been precious little of it the night before.
Li sat astride a chair opposite her, leaning into the ring of light with a bottle of cold beer in his hand. He had pulled on a tee-shirt and kicked off his shoes, moving barefoot around the cold kitchen tiles. Now, as he took a long suck at the neck of his bottle, she looked at his fine, strong arm, and saw the contours of his muscles below the stretch of his tee-shirt. She felt that same falling sensation inside again. She took another drink of her vodka and forced her mind to focus on other things. And as she did, the events of the day flooded back into it, along with a big wedge of depression. She thought about the bodies she had autopsied, the injection sites in the the semi-lunar fold of the buttock, the revelations about the Spanish flu, and the box of horrors that the vile Anatoly Markin had opened up at Fort Detrick. And she thought about poor Steve through the glass in the isolation ward there and wondered how many more poor souls were lying sleeping tonight with the virus nested away in their DNA, awaiting some unknown trigger to unleash it upon an unsuspecting world.
She said, ‘I don’t understand why they want me on this task force. They have the entire resources of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at their disposal.’
Li said, ‘You are the medical examiner in Houston. That is where the investigation will be focused. It is essential that you are on board.’
She looked at him. ‘And you?’
‘I am a political inclusion,’ he said, his voice laden with irony. ‘But my people want me involved, too. They want an end to this just as much as the Americans. Contacts have already been set up between FEMA and my Embassy.’
‘FEMA,’ Margaret said, and she remembered the three unexplained FEMA representatives who had sat at the table at Fort Detrick. ‘I know I should probably know, but what the hell is FEMA?’
‘The Federal Emergency Management Agency,’ Li said. ‘Since this is a multiagency task force, FEMA will finance and administer it.’
She looked at him in wonder. ‘How do you know all this, Li Yan?’
He smiled. ‘It is my job, Margaret. I have spent ten months in Washington familiarising myself with every law-enforcement agency they’re prepared to tell me about, and some they aren’t.’ He shook his head. ‘There has been a great deal of empire building here over a great many years, and now a huge number of vested interests are jealously guarding their budgets and their turf. US law enforcement is the most labyrinthine and arcane field of study I have ever undertaken. I was never quite sure if there was any real point to it, until now.’