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the truck, more ready to face the horrors it contained than the feelings she had spent a year trying to sublimate, feelings of love and betrayal turning slowly to anger and maybe more. ‘Where’s the body you took this from?’ she asked the investigator brittlely.
    They picked their way through two dozen corpses, men and women who had clawed in despair at the walls of the container, even at their own clothing. It was a pitiful sight. A man in jeans and sneakers was half propped against the left side wall. He had shreds of thinning hair brushed back from an unusually dark face, a sparse moustache barely covering his upper lip. Margaret noticed the nicotine stains on the fingers that still held the pencil with which he had scrawled his last desperate words.
    V
    Wang’s Diary
    I first saw Cheng that night in Fujian when they took us offshore in the small boat to board the cargo ship waiting in international waters. She sat at the back of the boat clutching a brown bag, looking very small and vulnerable. She made me feel like such a fraud. This was real for her. This was her life. Full of danger and uncertainty. I know that many of these people make this journey not for themselves, but for their families, for the money they can send home from the Mountain of Gold. I thought of her, even then, as my yazi, my little duck. I know it is the term they use for illegal immigrants, and never did it seem more appropriate than when I thought of poor little Cheng. I decided, then, that I would do my best to protect her on this long, hard trip. If I had known how powerless I would be to save her from the rapes and the beatings I would have taken her off the boat that night and sacrificed this whole venture. All I have been able to offer her since is comfort. I do not know if she knows that I have fallen in love with her. She does not, I think, love me. I am twice her age. She likes and trusts me, perhaps like a daughter trusts a father. I know that when we reach Meiguo I will lose her. I wish I had never made this journey.
    VI
    Li Yan freewheeled down the hill past dark stone mansions lurking in dappled shadow behind gnarled old trees. They had strange, Scottish-sounding names like Dumbarton House and Anderson House, painted placards on wrought-iron gates. He left Georgetown’s grid of tree-lined narrow streets behind him and swung his bicycle toward the bridge over Rock Creek. Sheridan Circle was thick with traffic, and he turned uphill into a maze of residental streets that took him over the rise and down again toward Connecticut Avenue.
    The Embassy had taken over the old Windsor Hotel, two seven-storey blocks set at right angles, backing onto another loop in the erratic meanderings of the slick that was Rock Creek, almost due north from where its mean little mouth oozed into the slow-moving body of the Potomac. Only a ten-minute cycle from the White House.
    They had offered him a car, and he had declined it. He had spent all his adult life cycling between the offices of Section One in the Dongzhimen district of Beijing and the police apartment he had shared with his uncle in the old embassy quarter, not far from Tiananmen. An hour’s cycle. By comparison, the twenty minutes from his townhouse in Georgetown was easy, although it had taken him time to get used to the gradients. Besides, he knew he needed that regular daily exercise to get the blood flowing through his veins, carrying oxygen to his brain, sharpening his senses — and to counter the effects of the thirty cigarettes a day he had been smoking until very recently.
    His neighbours had got used to seeing him this past year, pedal-pushing up O Street in all weathers, turning north and disappearing toward the cemeteries at the top of the hill, sweat streaming in rivulets down his strong-boned face in the summer heat, dragon breath billowing about his head in the winter frost. Today, as he drifted down to Connecticut off Kalorama Heights, he was in shirt sleeves and slacks,