She shook her head, lost in some world of her own. And in a small voice she said, ‘I don’t know what happened. Maybe I offended someone, maybe the other girls were jealous and had it in for me. I don’t know. But one day my ma zhai told me I was fired from the Golden Mountain Club. He said he’d got me another job in a massage parlour, with an apartment up the stairs. I would only have to share with two other girls.’ She screwed up her face in disgust at some memory she was not about to share. ‘It was the worst thing ever,’ she said. ‘Even worse than the beatings. I’d been there for a month when you came with the INS.’
Her story ended as bluntly as it had begun. Li stood with his back to her, trying to make his mind as blank as the wall he was staring at. And when he could stand the silence no longer he turned and saw big wet tears streaming silently down her face.
She said, ‘When I saw you there, Li Yan, none of it mattered any more. Losing the baby, the beatings, the sex in squalid little rooms. All I felt was shame. That my own brother should know me for what I had become. And I could see myself through your eyes and know it, too.’ Her sobs came in short, rapid explosions from her chest, uncontrolled, uncontrollable. She buried her face in her hands, doubling over and letting her grief for the person she had once been completely overcome her. A long, deep, low moan escaped her lips, and Li felt it like a blade in his heart. He moved around the table and took her by the shoulders, lifting her to her feet, and drawing her into his chest, holding her tightly there to smother her sobs and never let her go again.
III
The still waters of Lake Conroe shimmered in the moonlight, caught in glimpses between the trees as Mendez drove them east on Lakeside. Exclusive residences sat darkly behind trees and hedges and high security gates. Mendez took a right, and they turned into a long dirt track that headed away from the water toward where a big old ranch house had its red-tile roof peppered with the shadow of a great oak tree shading the front porch. The house had been extended several times over the years, at the side and back, and rooms had been built up in the roof. To their left a couple of chestnut mares grazed in the moonlight behind a white painted fence, paying scant attention to the arrival of the Bronco.
Their headlights swept across the front of the house and Margaret saw the freshly painted pillars that supported the roof over the stoop, a red door set in the blue-painted clapboard siding. Bay windows overlooked the porch from the main front rooms. Fleshy shrubs grew in strategically placed pots. An old wooden rocking chair sat looking out over the pasture toward the lake. For some reason Margaret thought it looked as if it had been a long time since anybody had sat in it.
Mendez swung his recreational vehicle into a dusty parking area opposite a double garage built on to the side of the house. A security light came on, and Margaret saw that the garage was open to the elements, the door retracted into the roof. It was filled with all manner of junk accumulated over many years. Shelves piled with tools and offcuts of wood, extension ladders, stepladders, an old exercise bike, a lawnmower, the bench seat out of an old Chevy, a shopping cart.
She followed Mendez into the garage. ‘Sorry about the mess,’ he said. ‘Always meant to clean this out some day. Just never got around to it.’ A dog started barking somewhere in the house. He punched an entry code into a numeric pad on the wall beside an interior door and it swung open into a small bootroom. A rack of shotguns stood against the back wall, an antique gun cabinet with glass-fronted drawers filled with cartridges. The barking got louder. ‘Don’t mind Clara,’ Mendez said. ‘She can be a bit excitable. But she’s a great pointer.’ And as he opened the door into the kitchen, a large, shiny-coated red setter danced all around him in excitement, oblivious to Margaret. Mendez made a great fuss of her. He flicked on a batch of light switches and said to Margaret, ‘Go on through to the sitting room. Put your feet up. I’ll feed the dog and fix us a nightcap.’
Margaret wandered through a big square kitchen with dark wood cabinets and a large central island with a built-in hob and an extractor overhead. Dirty dishes, caked with the leftovers of solitary meals were piled on every available surface. A short panelled corridor led past a well stocked bar into an extensive sitting room with a wood-burning stove and the kind of huge television screen you find in bars where sports fans congregate to watch matches. Tall windows gave out onto a glassed-in porch at the rear filled with soft furniture and another TV.
She kicked off her shoes, sinking into the deep-piled carpet, and let herself drop into a big soft leather recliner to stare up at a fan turning lazily in the ceiling. For a moment, she closed her eyes and just drifted, wishing that sleep would take her and keep her until she could wake up when all this was over. Was it really only twenty-four hours since the briefing at USAMRIID? And she remembered again, with a start, that she hadn’t been able to get any of the things that Steve had asked her for. The books. His personal stereo, the photograph of his little girl. She remembered her hand and Steve’s separated by the glass of the isolation unit, and how she had felt his fear pass right through it. She felt guilty that she had barely given him a second thought all day.
‘Scotch?’
She opened her eyes, heart pounding, and realised that she had drifted off to sleep, although it could only have been for a few seconds. She swivelled in the chair and saw Mendez through the large hatch between the bar and the sitting room. ‘Vodka tonic, if you have it. With ice and lemon.’
‘No problem.’ He lifted a remote control from the counter and pointed it at the TV. The red standby light turned green, the receiver issued a brief, high-pitched whine, and the giant screen flickered to life. The CNN news desk came into sharp focus. Twenty-four-hour news. Margaret recalled many lonely nights in hotel rooms in China with only CNN for company, a tenuous link with home. ‘I’m a news junkie,’ Mendez said. ‘Only time this thing’s not on is when I’m out or sleeping. And sometimes even then I forget to turn it off.’
‘Well, you won’t miss much with a screen that size,’ Margaret said.
Mendez grinned. ‘Like it? I got it for the World Series. That’s my other vice. Sports. That and smoking.’ His grin turned sheepish. ‘Cigars.’ He nodded toward the back porch. ‘That’s my smoking room out there. Catherine wouldn’t let me smoke in the house. Hated the smell of it. Said it clung to the carpets and the furniture. Nearly five years since she died, and I still can’t bring myself to smoke in the house.’
He came out with their drinks, handed Margaret her vodka, and sank into the settee with a large Scotch on the rocks, and Clara trotting after him to settle at his feet. He lifted his glass. ‘Here’s to unexpected reunions,’ he said.