‘Jesus,’ Margaret whispered. ‘There are children in here.’ She had not been expecting that.
A young man wearing jeans and a leather jacket tried to make a break for the stairs. A chorus of INS voices called on him to stop, and he found himself staring down the barrels of several guns pointing directly at his head. He stopped, resigned, and raised his hands, a sick smile on his face. Margaret heard Hrycyk’s voice. ‘He’ll be one of the ma zhai. Get him outta here!’ An agent stepped up to pull his arms down and cuff his hands behind his back. ‘Bring the vans in now.’ Hrycyk’s voice again, barking into a handset. He turned to the other agents. ‘Let’s get these people up the stairs before I throw up.’ He turned to Li. ‘Tell them no one’s going to hurt them. If they come peaceful they’ll be fed and watered, and get the chance to clean up.’
Li spoke rapidly in Mandarin to the frightened faces that peered back at him out of the gloom, depressed and resigned, knowing that their dreams of the Golden Mountain were over. Reluctantly they began gathering together what few miserable belongings they had and filing out toward the stairs under the watchful eyes of the men in white.
One woman sat on her bunk, making no effort to move. Silent tears made tracks through the dirt on her face. Li made his way toward her and crouched at her knees. He took her hand. ‘Are you alright?’ he asked her.
She shook her head. ‘My husband died on the journey,’ she said. ‘I lost my baby. I have no family to go back to. Only his family. And they don’t want to know. They wouldn’t pay my snakehead.’
Li said, ‘Anything must be better than this. Surely?’
She looked at him bleakly and said, ‘Death, perhaps.’
Li lifted her pillow. Beneath it were a few items of clothing neatly laid out, a broken wrist watch, a faded colour photograph, the glaze cracked where it had been folded. A couple smiled for the camera, standing erect, arm-in-arm before the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Tiananmen Square. Li realised, with a shock, that it was the woman who sat on the bed. ‘Your husband?’ he asked. She nodded. He slipped the pillow out of its stained and filthy cover to make a bag and put her clothes and her watch and her photograph inside. ‘You can’t stay here,’ he said. He took her arm to help her to her feet, and she flinched away in pain. He looked round and saw Margaret standing there.
‘Let me have a look at her,’ she said, and she leaned over to draw the skimpy cotton dress off the woman’s shoulder. It was striped with dark bruising. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘This woman’s been beaten.’
‘Who beat you?’ Li asked her.
‘The ma zhai,’ she said simply. ‘Because I couldn’t pay. They said I would have to give massage, and when I said no they beat me. They said, then I have to work in clothing factory to pay my debt, and live here for many years until it is all cleared. They said I have to pay for my husband, too, even though he is dead.’
Li was sickened. Could life possibly have been so bad for these people in China that it was worth enduring this? He knew that virtually none of them was fleeing political persecution. They were what the United Nations would call ‘economic migrants’. The idea that in America they would find the fabled Golden Mountain was an illusion. And yet the myth persisted.
Margaret said, ‘Ask her if she was vaccinated before they brought her across the border.’
The woman nodded to confirm that she was.
‘How long ago was that?’ Li asked.
She shrugged. ‘Five weeks, maybe six.’
Li told Margaret, and they were silent for a moment. The implications were not lost on them. At the briefing, Hrycyk had told them that the INS estimated around eight thousand illegals crossed the border into the US every month. If these people were being injected with the flu virus as long as six weeks ago, then already there could be up to ten thousand carriers in the country. It was a terrifying prospect, and raised the scale of the whole thing beyond anything any of them might have imagined.
Margaret said, ‘I’m calling in the Department of Health. We can’t just lock these people up. They’re going to have to be held in isolation and individually examined.’
Hrycyk came hurrying down the narrow passage between the rows of bunk beds. ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ he said. ‘There’s no toilets or running water in this place. They’ve been shitting all over the floor.’ He paused and looked at Margaret. She could see his concern through his visor. ‘There’s another room through the back there,’ he said. ‘And there’s a guy sneezing and coughing his lungs up. I think he might have the flu.’
Margaret pushed past him to hurry back toward the other room. Hrycyk grabbed her arm. ‘This mask’s gonna protect me, right? I’m not gonna get the flu as long as I got this on?’
‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ she said. ‘You’ve already caught something a whole lot worse.’
She saw the alarm on his face. ‘What do you mean? What have I got?’
‘It’s a nasty disease of the intellect called racism,’ she said. ‘And I’m not sure if there’s any cure for it.’
He let go of her and sneered, ‘Yeah, very fucking funny.’ Then, ‘Hey,’ he called after her as she headed down the aisle. ‘Better not stick around for the next port of call. Little whorehouse down the road. You might get squeamish about picking up your own kind.’
Li came at him out of left field, catching him totally unawares. The two men crashed backwards, demolishing one of the flimsy beds and tumbling to the floor. Hrycyk was overweight and seriously unfit. He was no match for Li who grabbed a handful of Tivek at the American’s neck and raised a fist to smash down into Hrycyk’s face.
‘Yeah, go on, do it!’ the INS agent urged him. ‘Fucking do it, and your feet won’t touch the ground till you hit Tiananmen.’
Li felt Margaret pulling his arm. ‘For Christ’s sake, Li Yan, grow up! Didn’t your uncle ever tell you that violence was the first resort of the moron? Don’t get down there in the gutter with animals like him.’
Li shook his arm free of her and stood up. Hrycyk scrambled to his feet, trying to recover at least a little of his dignity. He stabbed a finger through the air toward Li. ‘Gonna have you, Chinaman,’ he said, spluttering all over the inside of his visor. ‘Gonna fucking have you.’
II
Hrycyk’s Santana cruised slowly across the parking lot before drawing gently to a stop, engine ticking over quietly. The row of shops below the green-tiled roof at the far side looked innocuous enough. There was a video store, a grocery shop, a hairdresser’s, a restaurant. Yellow light fell in slabs across the tarmac, loud music playing somewhere nearby drifted across the warm night air. If it wasn’t for the Chinese characters on the shopfronts, you could have mistaken this for any suburban shopping plaza in America.
The raid on the Dong’an apartments had netted more than fifty men, women and children. None of them had papers. They were all, almost certainly, illegal. Margaret had determined that the man Hrycyk feared might have the flu was suffering from a bad head cold. They had also picked up half a dozen ma zhai, and were holding them in company with the same people they had once held prisoner themselves. Under Department of Health supervision, the INS had already dispatched the immigrants on buses north to Huntsville, where FEMA had rented an entire unit from the state prison to keep them in secure isolation until they could be brought in front of the immigration court.