She drained her glass. ‘I’ve got to get some sleep.’
He rounded the table as she stood up, taking her by the wrist and turning her into him almost before she knew it, his body hard and strong, pressed against hers, his arms enveloping her. She felt his breath on her face, and smelled the sweet fresh alcohol on it. He kissed her softly, and she looked up into his eyes. She sighed. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea, Li Yan,’ she said. And she felt his hold on her slacken and he moved very slightly away from her.
‘What do you mean?’ She heard both the disappointment and the hurt in his voice.
She struggled to give form to her thoughts. ‘I think maybe we should, you know, keep things between us on a professional basis for a while. When we start getting personal, you and I…’ she gasped, exasperated by her own inability to find the right words, ‘…we only ever seem to generate pain.’
‘I don’t remember there being much pain between us last night.’
And he was right. There had been only pleasure. But how could she tell him that the pleasure never made up for the pain that followed. Seeing Xinxin tonight had brought it all flooding back. She needed time and space to find her perspective again. ‘Things are always just too complicated with us, Li Yan,’ she said feebly. And she wondered if she wasn’t simply taking the coward’s way out. Afraid to confront the contradictions of a cross-cultural relationship in her own country, afraid to face the disapproval of her peers. Or maybe she was just afraid to grasp the thing she wanted most in the world in case it all slipped away from her again.
The telephone shattered the tension between them, its long, single ring spiking the dark like electricity. Li moved catlike across the kitchen to answer it before it woke Xinxin.
‘Wei?’ He spoke automatically in Chinese, then quickly corrected himself. ‘Hello.’
A voice heavy with sleazy innuendo said, ‘Didn’t get you out of your bed, did I?’ It took Li a moment to realise it was Hrycyk.
‘No,’ he said.
‘She’s there, though, huh?’
‘What do you want, Hrycyk?’
‘I want you both on the seven a.m. flight to Houston. My people have set up a series of raids in Chinatown. We’re going to start pulling in as many illegals as we can find. And I want my agents properly protected in case any of them have got the flu. So we need the little lady along.’ He paused. ‘Is she there, or do I need to track her down somewhere else?’
Li said reluctantly, ‘She’s here.’
There was an almost imperceptible chuckle at the other end of the line. ‘Thought so. Sweet dreams, Chinaman.’ And he hung up.
Li stood for a moment, anger and humiliation smouldering inside him. Slowly he replaced the receiver and turned to tell Margaret what Hrycyk had told him.
She listened in silence, and then nodded. ‘We’d better get some sleep then.’
And when he had taken her upstairs and left her in his room to go off and sleep on an unmade bed somewhere else, she stood by the window bathed in the moonlight that slanted in through the trees, and wished she had told him to stay. She was lonely and confused, and then with a sudden sickening start remembered her promise to take Steve the photograph of his little girl tomorrow. Impossible now. Another failure. Her great talent, it seemed, was for inflicting hurt on the people she cared about most.
Chapter Six
I
There were fifteen INS agents, including Hrycyk, in two unmarked white vans parked in the shopping plaza opposite the two-storey Dong’an apartment block. Margaret had spent most of the day securing supplies to ensure that the raiding party was properly equipped. They were all crouched uncomfortably in their white Tivek tear-resistant suits, hoods pulled tightly over their heads. Each wore a flimsy plastic face mask, filtered air blowing down over their faces from portable, battery-powered HEPA filter systems held in the small of their backs by a belt around the waist.
‘Just don’t fart,’ she had warned them, and their laughter had broken the tension in the build-up to the raid. Both she and Li were similarly equipped, and they all knew that they would present a bizarre spectacle as they stormed the building.
Police back-up had been requested to deal with any traffic and crowd control problems that might arise in the street outside. They were going to have to stop the early evening traffic on Bellaire to let the INS vans cross its six lanes and enter the pot-holed parking area alongside the crumbling apartment block. There were two minutes to go.
Outside, the sinking sun was burning the sky red and the heat of the day was starting to fade. It had been a stark contrast to the icy temperatures they had left behind them in Washington. The parking lot was quiet. There were a few cars scattered across its undulating tarmac. In Susie’s nail salon, a group of Chinese women sat in the window waiting for a manicure. In the café next door a couple of old men sat sipping at mugs of green tea and eating hot, sweet dim sum straight from the steamer.
Hrycyk was crouched on Margaret’s left. He leaned in very close. ‘You get a buzz out of it, or something?’ he asked.
She frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’
He lowered his voice. ‘Sleeping with Chinamen.’
If there had been space she would have swung a clenched fist into his face. Her anger boiled inside of her, and she turned to hiss in his face, ‘Yeah, and I’d sleep with every last one of them before I ever slept with you.’
She heard the radio crackle from the front of the van and a voice screamed, ‘Go, go, go!’ They heard a screech of tyres out on the boulevard, and their engines which had been ticking over on low rev suddenly fired up and they lurched forwards, the underside of their vehicle scraping on the road as they bumped down off the sidewalk and slewed across the boulevard into the parking lot. The back doors flew open, and they were spilling out into the fading light, running left and right, securing the exits.
Margaret was last out, just behind Li. They were the only members of the group not carrying a weapon. They followed the main body of agents along the cracked and uneven paving stones that marked the front of the building. Margaret glanced up at rusted wrought-iron balconies on windows with neglected-looking ornamental shutters. In a tree opposite the arched entrance to the main courtyard, a red squirrel sat frozen in terror as these bizarre-looking creatures in white rushed past.
In the courtyard, a metal staircase ran up to a mesh walkway running left and right into open corridors leading to the upper apartments. At the far end, a man carrying a bucket emerged from a cellar door. For just a moment he was like a rabbit caught in the headlamps of a car. Then he dropped his bucket and a foul cocktail of urine and human excrement spilled across the cobbles. He turned and ran, jumping up to try to catch a handhold on the top of the back wall. Two agents caught his legs and pulled him on to the ground, turning him face down in the shit and handcuffing him almost before he could scream. Several other agents clattered up the metal stairs to secure the corridors. The rest funneled through the door from which the man with the bucket had emerged.
At the briefing, they had been given hand-drawn plans of the block, with key areas marked in red. They knew from intelligence previously received from Yu Lin that the illegals were kept in a large cellar area below the main apartments. So far the drawings had been completely accurate.
Nothing, however, had prepared them for what they would find in the basement. The stink of human waste, hot and fetid, rose to meet them as they ran down cold stone steps. Their HEPA filters did not protect them from the foul stench of captive humanity. It was dark, and the walls ran with condensation and dampness. As Margaret stumbled to the foot of the stairs, grabbing Li’s arm to steady herself, someone flicked a light switch, and they found themselves looking down a long, narrow room with a concrete floor, double tiers of rough, wooden bunk beds lining the walls on each side Dozens of pairs of dark, frightened eyes peered at them in the harsh yellow light. Somewhere toward the back of the room a woman screamed, and a child started crying.