Snakehead (28 page)

Li watched, too, from the window of his bedroom. He found it hard to wipe from his mind’s eye the blood running red against the white ceramic shower base as streams of comforting hot water washed it from his skin a little over an hour ago. His own blood had long since clotted in his nostrils and around the split in his upper lip. He had lost a tooth from his lower jaw and his face was swollen and bruised. His whole body ached. His mind was numb. Downstairs, forensics officers in hooded white Tivek suits were sifting through the debris of the battlefield. The photographer had already finished his work, staring dead eyes, open mouths, dark shadows on blood-stained carpet, all captured in the brief, dazzling illumination of his flash.

‘Jesus, Li,’ Fuller said. ‘I wouldn’t like to pick a fight with you.’

Li turned and looked at the FBI agent, and then beyond to where Hrycyk stood smoking in the doorway. He had seen them arrive a couple of minutes earlier. ‘Just tell your INS buddy that,’ he said, ‘next time he wants to start getting personal.’

Hrycyk raised a hand of submission. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I don’t have to like you to respect you.’ He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket. ‘Here, have a smoke. You look like you could do with one.’ And he crossed the room to offer him the pack. Li drew one out and took a long, hard look at Hrycyk. Grey hair scraped back from his receding hairline, a face losing its shape, lined, and puffy from lack of sleep. Pale blue eyes with whites yellowed by nicotine. His shirt, stretched and pulled by his belly, in danger of dragging free of his trousers. ‘What?’ Hrycyk demanded. ‘What are you looking at?’

‘Just trying to figure out where the hell you come from,’ Li said.

‘I’ll tell you where I come from,’ Hrycyk said, bristling. ‘I come from a time when people spoke their minds, said what they thought. Before all this political correctness crap. You may not like it, but I tell it like I see it — and, believe me, I seen a lot. I say what I think. And you get what you see.’ He snapped open his lighter and lit Li’s cigarette.

Li dragged on it through swollen lips and sucked the smoke gratefully into his lungs.

‘Yeah, and what you’ll get is kicked out of the agency if you don’t watch your mouth,’ Fuller said. ‘I happen to know there’s a complaint file this thick on you.’ He held up a hand, stretching thumb and forefinger apart to create a four-inch space. ‘I know, ’cos I’ve seen it.’

Hrycyk turned a hostile eye on him. ‘And wouldn’t you people just love to see another INS man bite the dust.’

Fuller grinned. ‘Take the early retirement, Hrycyk. Life could be tough without a pension.’

Hrycyk turned back to Li. ‘See? That’s what you get in this country now, smart-assed kids telling you what to say and what to think. Used to be a man had a right to freedom of speech. Next thing you know we’ll be copying you people, declaring the People’s Republic of America. Big Brother just around the corner. Then we’ll be comrades, you and I.’ He took another pull at his cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling. ‘What the fuck happened down there, Li?’

Li told them, in graphic detail, exactly what had happened, just as he had told the homicide detective in his statement forty minutes earlier. They listened in awed silence, and Hrycyk let his cigarette burn down to the tip without taking another draw on it. ‘Jees,’ he said softly. ‘You’re a lucky man to still be alive.’

Fuller said, ‘And you figure they were after your sister?’

Li nodded. He told them about the
ma zhai
harassing Margaret and Xiao Ling in Houston.

‘Why the hell didn’t you tell us this before?’ Hrycyk wanted to know.

‘I wanted to get her somewhere safe first.’

Hrycyk snorted. ‘Yeah, real safe, wasn’t it?’

‘Why would they want to kill her?’ Fuller persisted.

‘Because she knows something,’ Li said. ‘She must. Something she saw, something she heard…She worked for a few months at the Golden Mountain Club.’

‘High-class whorehouse and gambling den,’ Hrycyk said.

Li said, ‘Apparently all the tong leaders use it, all the top people in Houston’s Chinese underworld.’ He glanced at Hrycyk, reluctant to confess this in his presence. ‘Seems my sister was one of their favourites.’

But Hrycyk was unaware of Li’s discomfort. He was thinking hard. ‘Then they find out she’s your sister,’ he said, ‘and they start getting scared. Because she knows who these people are and they don’t want her telling you.’

‘You talked to her about it?’ Fuller asked.

‘Earlier,’ Li said. ‘Yesterday.’ He shook his head. ‘She wasn’t very forthcoming.’

‘Well, she’s going to have to start coming forth pretty damn quick,’ Hrycyk growled.

Fuller said, ‘Let’s go talk to her now.’

Li checked Xinxin’s room first. Margaret sat against the headboard, Xinxin curled into her lap, fast asleep. She raised a finger to her lips. She looked tired and pallid, with dark rings beneath her eyes, but Xinxin needed the comfort and reassurance, and so she was prepared to sit with her for as long as it took. As he pulled the door shut, Li realised that Hrycyk had been peering over his shoulder. ‘Cute kid,’ he whispered.

‘Cute Chinese kid,’ Li said.

Hrycyk shrugged. ‘Whatever.’ He appeared to be faintly embarrassed, as if Li had discovered a hairline crack in the enamel of his racist image. ‘Kids are kids. They’re just cute.’

Xiao Ling was curled up on top of her bed, fully dressed, dried tears staining her cheeks. She sat up, alarmed, as the three men came into her room.

‘It’s okay,’ Li said. ‘They’re sort of police officers. We need to talk to you about the Golden Mountain Club.’

She pressed her lips together and gave a tiny shake of her head.

‘Oh, yes we are,’ he insisted. ‘Those men came here tonight to kill you because of something you know. We need to find out what that is, because the chances are they’re going to try again.’

She glared sullenly at the three men. ‘What can I tell you?’

‘Just tell us about the club. What it was like. The people you met. The other girls. Anything you can think of. Who ran it, how it worked.’

She drew her hands down her face, steeling herself to remember things she had buried, things she only ever wanted to forget. Her words came in bursts, as she dredged up the memories, and then spat them out fast to escape the nasty taste that came with them. Li translated as she spoke.

‘The owner of the club was from Hong Kong. He was a small man, in his forties, I think. They called him Jo-Jo. I think his name was Zhou. He liked to touch the girls. You know, he never had sex with any of us. But he loved to sit at the bar and chat, and run his hands over a thigh, down an arm. Occasionally he would brush a breast with the back of a hand. He was a toucher. The other girls said he went off to masturbate in his office.’

Li was shocked at this from his sister, and embarrassed to translate it.

Hrycyk chuckled. ‘Know the type,’ he said.

Xiao Ling said, ‘There were bouncers on the door, and young guys who kept order in the club. You know, sometimes people got drunk, maybe got violent with one of the girls, or there would be a fight. And the boys would throw them out. They were all members of the Silver Dragon gang.’

‘
Ma zhai
,’ Li said.

She darted a look in his direction. ‘Yeah,
ma zhai
.’

‘The ones who followed you in the car yesterday?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘Xiao Ling…’ Li warned.

She lifted one surly shoulder and let it drop again. ‘They looked familiar. Probably from the club. There were about twelve or fifteen of them that you would see regularly. And then there was the
dai lo
…’

‘What the hell’s a
dai lo
?’ Fuller asked.

‘The Big Brother,’ Hrycyk said. ‘The gang leader.’ And both Fuller and Li looked at him, surprised. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I been around this game a long time.’

Xiao Ling said, ‘His nickname was Badger, because he had this strange white stripe running through his hair, on the right as you looked at him. He said it had been like that since he was a kid. I think he was proud of it.’

‘Should be easy enough to find,’ Hrycyk said. ‘Unless he dyes his hair he’s gonna stick out like a sore thumb.’

‘There were lots of ordinary Chinese, and sometimes Vietnamese, who came to the club,’ Xiao Ling went on. ‘Mostly to drink and gamble. Occasionally, if one of them won a lot at cards, he would take one or two of us upstairs. But it was the snakeheads and the uncles, the
shuk foo
, who had the real money to spend. They usually dressed well and had big fat wallets. The girls always preferred a
shetou
or a
shuk foo
because they paid more and tipped well. But a few of them had some pretty unpleasant sexual preferences, and you would try to avoid them. There were some who liked you to hurt them, or wanted to hurt you. Some of them wanted you to piss on them while they jacked off.’ She looked at Li with a sour expression on her face. ‘Men are pretty disgusting, Li Yan,’ she said.

Li’s embarrassment in relaying this to Hrycyk and Fuller was acute. But neither man seemed troubled or surprised by what they were hearing, or aware of his embarrassment.

‘I told you before,’ Xiao Ling said, ‘that I was a favourite. All the important ones had me at one time or another. All the
shuk foo
, I think, and others. Guests. I would be given as a present, to show respect, or as a mark of subordination. Once to a man they called the
ah kung
, which I think is Cantonese for “grandfather”.’

There was an immediate tension shared by all three men, but none of them wanted to interrupt her flow, or inhibit her by conveying this as significant. ‘What was he like?’ Li asked casually.

‘The grandfather?’ Xiao Ling pursed her lips and blew a jet of air through them to demonstrate her contempt. ‘Like all the rest. Short and fat, with a big belly and bad breath. They get on top of you and hump for a couple of minutes and then they’re all spent. It’s hard to tell who you’re with.’

‘Anything else?’ Li prompted. ‘Anything else about him you can think of?’

She shook her head. ‘The
shuk foo
who gave me to him as a gift told me that it was an honour for me to be taken by the
ah kung
. He said no one else knew that’s who he was. And I was to tell no one or I would be in serious trouble. Then, when he introduced us, he called him something strange. A nickname. I remember thinking it was unusual. And the
ah kung
nearly struck him. He was very angry and told him never to call him that again.’ She thought back for a moment, shuddering at some unpleasant recollection, and then she said, ‘Yeah, that’s right. He called him Kat. I asked one of the other girls what it meant, and she said it was Cantonese for “tangerine”. You know, like for luck. I thought it was weird.’

‘Who was the
shuk foo
?’ Li asked.

Xiao Ling shook her head. ‘I don’t know his name. But he was always around the club. ‘You’d need to ask the
dai lo
. He was Badger’s uncle.’

Chapter Eleven

I

The Golden Mountain Club sat in a corner of Ximen Plaza, flanked on either side by rows of shops. Mona’s Skin Care, Mountain Optical, Old China Fast Food. A billboard tacked to the exterior advertised, in Chinese characters, John P. Wu, Dentist—
Dentista
. Immediately next door was a Vietnamese restaurant boasting dancing and karaoke. The entrance to the Golden Mountain Club itself sat back in the shade of a covered walkway. A couple of felony notices in English and Spanish were pasted to the smoked glass of the door. A sign read: SMOKING PERMITTED WITHIN. Which brought a smile to Li’s face. The idea of a non-smoking Chinese club was risible.

They had been watching the club from Hrycyk’s beat-up old Santana on the far side of the plaza for nearly three hours. It had opened shortly after midday, and a steady flow of customers had followed the first staff — a dozen or so young to middle-aged men wearing suits and ties beneath overcoats that were superfluous in the midday heat of a Texas fall, several girls with short skirts and painted faces, miscellaneous youths in jeans and sneakers. You could tell the staff from the customers. The staff all had dead eyes and a reluctant gait. The customers had an air of anticipation about them, a sense of optimism.

Reluctantly, Li had left Xiao Ling at the house in Georgetown, protected by two armed police officers. She had refused to accompany them to the morgue where Margaret had made a positive identification of one of Li’s attackers — the one who had made the slit-throat sign to her from the passenger seat of the white Chevy. He was the one Li had wrestled the gun from the previous night, blowing away one half of his face in the ensuing struggle.

Now he, Fuller and Hrycyk were going after the
dai lo
known as Badger. It was a straight line of connection from
dai lo
to
shuk foo
to
ah kung
. The problem, they knew, would be in persuading Badger to squeal. There were codes of honour and loyalty here that law enforcement officers had been unable to break in thousands of years.

It was nearly three when they saw the unmistakable white stripe through the dark hair of a young Chinese wearing a black leather jacket. He was walking across the plaza with the swagger of someone in possession of absolute self-confidence. His hands were pushed into the pockets of tight designer jeans, and he wore soft green suede shoes. His white tee-shirt was emblazoned with the logo of some American heavy metal band. The ubiquitous cigarette dangled from his lips. He swung open the door of the Golden Mountain Club and waltzed in like he owned the place.

Fuller was set to move there and then, but Hrycyk stopped him. The old immigration hand had been here many times before. ‘Give him time to settle,’ he said. ‘Time to have a beer or two. Time to relax. We’re not so likely to lose him that way. We go in now, he’s still buzzing. Physically, mentally alert. And let me tell you, Agent Fuller, I’ve had it with chasing people up alleys. I’m too old for that kinda shit.’