The 3rd Woman

by Jonathan Freedland

  ‘Which will leave you more time for writing. Come on.’

  As the car nudged through the traffic, the fumes thickening the winter smog, they went over each possible scenario once again, what Charlie should say and, more important, what he should not say. The more they discussed it, the more Maddy’s confidence waned.

  She must have dozed because suddenly they were there, slowing down as they crossed the Vincent Thomas Bridge to Terminal Island and approached the outer perimeter of the base. There was a checkpoint to clear first, the traffic funnelled into a single lane, two LAPD officers on either side of it. One was carrying a scanning device which he aimed at the Audi’s licence plate. The other beckoned Charlie to inch forward, then asked him to wind down his window and present his photo ID.

  ‘How y’all doin’ today?’

  ‘We’re OK,’ Charlie replied, solemnly. Oh no, thought Maddy. This had been her greatest worry about Hughes. That he would start acting. He was playing the part of the concerned doctor, weighed down by the grave news he was about to deliver.

  ‘And who’s this with you, Dr Hughes?’ the officer said, returning the ID.

  ‘This is Nurse Kelly Michaels, who works with me,’ he said, too emphatically, as he handed over the ID card he had requisitioned from the most junior of the three medical assistants he employed. Maddy smiled from behind her smog mask, which she pointedly did not remove.

  The officer took a look at the picture, then back into Maddy’s eyes. His next words made her throat seize up.

  ‘Can you remove your mask for me, ma’am?’

  She did as she was told while, at the same time, holding out her hand. She had not planned it. The move was pure instinct. But as she lowered the mask to reveal her face, habit made him hand back the ID card. When he looked at her, he compared what he saw – blonde, thirty years old, give or take – to his memory of the face he had just seen. It was a classic case of priming, the brain seeing what it expected to see. Without knowing he was doing it, the LAPD officer made the face in front of him comply with that of Kelly Michaels. He decided they were close enough and waved the car through.

  Charlie let his relief show by breaking into a wide smile.

  ‘Not yet, Charlie,’ Maddy hissed, her mask now back on.

  They drove on until they reached the main, sliding metal gates. Now the guards wore a different uniform and a more severe expression. They were soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army. Once again, Charlie wound down the window and handed over the ID cards, both of them this time. As they had agreed he would, he began speaking to the guard in Mandarin.

  He was effusive, talking away as the guard swiped his way through the electronic pages of his tablet, apparently checking their names against a list. Smiling and dipping his head in a show of courtesy, Charlie appeared to be explaining that his nurse was new to the base. She couldn’t be sure: his Mandarin was better than hers. But the doctor’s charm seemed to work.

  They were asked to step out of their vehicle, while two more PLA guards appeared, one carrying a boom with a circular mirror at one end. He proceeded to probe under the car, looking for any explosive devices. The second soldier asked Charlie to open the trunk. Once it was cleared, a third soldier materialized, took Charlie’s key and drove the car away, to a secured and guarded lot. Neat twist on LA valet parking, Maddy thought.

  They were led next into a security hut, the entrance consisting of two airlock-style doors, the second only opening once the first was closed. More guards here, who mimed for them to stretch out their arms to be frisked. A female PLA soldier stepped forward to do Maddy, her face blank, refusing any sisterly eye contact. Meanwhile, Charlie’s medical bag went through the scanner. No beeps. Finally, the guard manning the central desk, a kind of square island with a raised counter on all four sides, asked them to hand over their ID and cellphones.

  Shit. Why had Charlie not mentioned that? Maybe he had and, in her codeined stupor, she had missed it. One look at the contents of that phone would blow her cover in an instant, to say nothing of the light it would shed on her investigation, in which every possible sign now pointed to this place.

  She pretended to search for it, asking to look inside Charlie’s bag. She opened the bag wide and, as deftly as she could, slipped the phone from her pocket inside. While continuing her fake rummaging, she removed the back cover of the device and, using her fingernails, popped out the SIM and micro SD cards. ‘It’s here!’ she said, raising it aloft, showing off its lit screen as requested – thereby proving it was no fake concealing an explosive device – and finally handing in a phone that was safely neutered.

  After that, they were released from the other end of the security hut, where yet another soldier offered to escort them to their destination. Maddy threw Charlie a look: Are we going to be chaperoned every minute we’re here?

  He said nothing, immersing himself instead in his role as the dutiful doctor. He had asked to be taken to the medical facility as soon as possible and he would offer no sign that he was here for any other purpose. Maddy’s job was to walk as fast as she could manage and reveal no hint of the howling pain coursing through her nervous system.

  She looked around. The place was vast. Charlie had told her that it accommodated a brigade of seven battalions plus support units. Those terms meant less to her than a fact she already knew: that with around seven hundred officers and men in each battalion, the PLA presence in Los Angeles amounted to nearly six thousand troops. And yet she had pictured something more compact, certainly not this, a sprawling complex that stretched as far as she could see. There were sheds, storing vehicles and equipment, but also large, empty spaces. They passed through an avenue of trees, flanked by flowerbeds. Now they came to what was either a small farm or an oversized vegetable patch. It was not for show: Maddy could see the winter vestiges of a potato crop.

  The pain was intensifying; this walk seemed to be taking forever. She could see hardly any buildings, let alone the clinic they were looking for. She wondered if they were being led into wasteland.

  Then a shot. And another. Involuntarily, and in a sudden movement, she turned her head over her right shoulder, sending a flash of hurt down that side of her body.

  ‘Firing range,’ said Charlie, quietly. ‘Behind the assault course.’

  It was distant, the view poor thanks to the gauze of smog, but she could make it out, in a field to her right: the hurdles and climbing walls, the curtains of webbing and wide troughs of muddy water, surmounted in succession by khaki-clad men in twos and threes. And then, a short distance later, more noise, this time from an asphalt square that functioned as a parade ground. On it were rows of young Chinese, arranged in perfectly ordered lines, shouting in time with each other as they appeared to engage in unarmed combat with an invisible opponent, throwing neatly choreographed punches into the air. At the end of each sequence, they instantly began running on the spot, the combination of so many fit, trained young feet pounding on the ground at once making a thunderous drumroll. None of the officers caught their eye, even though Charlie and Maddy appeared to be the only outsiders around. The soldiers looked right through them.

  Charlie was tilting his head leftward, urging Maddy to glance over toward the other side of the path. There, perhaps fifty yards away, stood a billboard-size TV screen, lit in the brightest high-definition red. Suddenly a string of Chinese characters appeared in luminous yellow. Charlie made an instant, whispered translation: Patriotism, Innovation, Inclusiveness, Virtue. That familiar slogan dissolved, replaced by another. Charlie told her this one called on the soldiers of the PLA to renounce ‘the four types of decadence: formalism, bureaucratism, hedonism and extravagance.’ Despite everything, Charlie looked like he was enjoying himself, playing the tour guide. He liked knowing something she didn’t.

  As their journey continued, they glimpsed yet more of these electronic hoardings, dotted at intervals around the base. One showed heroic images of the Army in action: columns of men marching to war, tank
s advancing through clouds of smoke. Another seemed dedicated to a dissolving slideshow of archive photographs in black-and-white: past heroes of the regiment, according to Charlie.

  Meanwhile, one parade square had given way to another. This time the men were not shouting or shadow-fighting. They were moving through the fluid, graceful movements of tai-chi, executing them with synchronized perfection. Just like the dancers in Circle Park. Maddy felt a pinching sensation in her heart. She could see her mother and her blank, faraway face. The idea that she was in the same city, at this very moment, seemed absurd. Maddy felt as if she were ten thousand miles away.

  ‘We’re not far now,’ Charlie said.

  At last she could make out buildings that were not for storage or maintenance but for human occupation. As they got nearer, she could see the larger of the two. A column of soldiers was filing in through the double-doors of its main entrance, two-abreast, like children at elementary school. (For a passing instant, Maddy saw Abigail leading her pupils on a trip to the zoo.) From inside came the sound of a mass, communal lunch, a clattering, metallic din. Their uniformed guide ushered them in.

  She had never seen a dining hall so huge, filled by three tables as long as a running track. Each soldier faced an identical steel tray-like plate, divided into compartments for each item of food, along with a separate steel bowl, containing soup or rice, Maddy couldn’t quite tell. A group at the end of the table were talking animatedly, until they noticed the two Americans close by. They stopped, their eyes falling on her. She hardly believed it, given how rough she felt and the ridiculous nurse’s uniform she was wearing, but she recognized the gaze: they were checking her out. Their tentative smiles suggested they liked what they saw. So this was what it was like to be blonde.

  Their escort was beckoning them to follow him, down this endless refectory, with its echoing clang of steel cutlery. They did as they were told, Maddy avoiding the eyes she felt on her, until, halfway down, he guided them to an exit door. They were into one corridor, lined with posters depicting more regimental heroes from the 1940s, then another until finally she saw a symbol that assured her they had arrived at the garrison clinic. ‘He took a short cut,’ Charlie whispered. They had been walking for nearly twenty agonizing minutes.

  Mercifully, the clinic opened up to them easily. The staff there recognized Charlie and greeted him properly, if not warmly. A minute or two later, someone Maddy guessed was the senior medic on duty appeared and shook them both by the hand. In his fifties, with thinning dark hair and eyes that suggested curiosity, he introduced himself as Dr Lei and showed them to his office where, at last, Maddy could sit down. His English was fluent, spoken in a strangely hybrid, trans-Pacific accent.

  ‘What seems to be the trouble, Charlie?’

  Charlie did what Maddy hoped he would not do, shooting a nervous glance in her direction, like an actor hoping for a prompt. She dipped her head, as if to remind him that he, not she, was in charge.

  ‘I came here right away,’ he began, ‘because I think we may have a problem.’

  ‘What kind of problem, Dr Hughes? I’m afraid I’ve been out of the country for the last month, I’m not up to speed.’

  He sighed. It was nerves but, thankfully, it came over as doctorly anxiety at the scale of the trouble he had unearthed. ‘I’ve seen some alarming data, relating to several patients of mine. Patients here, I mean. In the garrison.’

  ‘What kind of data?’

  ‘Test results. Which suggest a presence of strychnine in the blood. I saw it in one man last week and was going to recall the patient for further—’

  ‘Strychnine? How on earth would that get there?’

  ‘Precisely the question I asked myself, Dr Lei. There is almost no history of that element being found in patients on the continental United States. In fact it rarely arises anywhere. The only case I could find was in the People’s Republic. In Beijing.’

  ‘I think you have something you’re not saying, Dr Hughes.’

  ‘The only time strychnine has been found in humans – the only case I can see anyway – was in Beijing. It came through a tainted batch of heroin. The “three” variety. I have now found three young men who exhibit a trace of that same element. Three men from here. The only conclusion I can come to is that they have been using—’

  ‘Can I see those results, please?’

  ‘I didn’t bring them with me, Dr Lei. I decided they were too … sensitive.’

  ‘You could have anonymized them.’

  ‘With respect, I don’t think it’s the individual names that are sensitive. People know I treat patients here. They could put two and two—’

  ‘I understand.’ The military doctor rubbed his forehead. ‘And what is it you propose to do?’

  ‘Well, Dr Lei,’ Charlie began, before an involuntary gulp swallowed the sound. His nerves were jangling, Maddy could see that. Especially because he knew he was coming to the key line. ‘The money shot’, he had called it on the way over here. ‘We’re both thinking of the safety of the men and women on this base. That’s our number one priority, as it should—’

  ‘What do you propose to do, Dr Hughes?’

  ‘I think you need to think very hard, and very honestly, and draw up a list of the people on this base you believe might be users of this drug. I know that’s going to be tough. And awkward. But I think we both know the drug is expensive. That only a very limited group of people would be likely to have access to such—’

  ‘Wuh tsow,’ Dr Lei said suddenly, more to himself than to anyone else. ‘Wuh tsow.’ Even Maddy knew what those words meant. They did not yet threaten ‘fuck’ in English, but in California they had entered the language as a handy alternative.

  ‘We can do this discreetly,’ Charlie continued. ‘But we need to start with the probable heroin users. Those likely to be paying for an imported cut. We need to test them. Because if they are carrying this element in their system, they need to be treated—’

  ‘I know, I know. And we can test them here?’

  They had planned for this. ‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Then there’ll be a record of the test on your system. Your nurses will have to be informed. I’m trying to minimise the risk of … embarrassment. For the garrison. I suggest we keep the circle of knowledge pretty tight.’

  ‘So how then?’

  ‘Back at my office. We can make appointments for all the men involved. Nurse Michaels here will do it. Quickly, with minimal fuss. I’ll process the results and then you and I can decide what our next move should be. If those earlier numbers were wrong, then good. No problem. But if those results are positive a second time …’ He let the sentence trail off, knowing the danger he had conjured would linger.

  Lei now had his elbow on his knee, the better for rubbing his forehead more intensely. ‘I should inform the Political Commissar,’ he said quietly.

  ‘You could,’ said Charlie, now ad-libbing, since this had not been in their script. ‘But, you know.’ He made a ring of his fingers. ‘The circle of knowledge. Tight.’

  Dr Lei nodded and it required all of Maddy’s energy not to empty her lungs of air in relief.

  It took forty-five minutes for the doctor to assemble this gathering. De Lei had had to call in junior officers from across the base, several of whom had pulled up in just the last few minutes in buggies that resembled golf-carts more than Jeeps. They were meeting in their accommodation block.

  En route, Maddy had seen the difference. The regular blocks, for the regular conscripts, were spartan, functional buildings, three or four storeys high, with few concessions to comfort. The dormitories themselves were long and free of decoration, filled only by steel-framed bunk beds. Each one was identical: the bedding folded and squared away, no personal touches or mementoes to separate one from another.

  Superficially, the junior officers’ quarters looked similar. But the beds were single rather than bunks, the bedding fuller and thicker, each equipped with a bedside table and smal
l closet rather than the single locker allocated to the other recruits. The bathroom was still communal, but was more generously appointed with proper light fittings rather than the exposed bulbs she had spotted in the main blocks. If the conscripts’ barracks resembled a low-security prison, these reminded Maddy of the freshman dorm of an under-resourced college.

  She waited along with Charlie while Dr Lei used his phone to co-ordinate the ingathering operation. To her relief, he had asked her nothing, all but ignoring her. She was just the nurse and he wanted to talk, doctor to doctor, only to Charlie. The longer she could remain exactly like this, silent and all but invisible, the safer she would be.

  Twice though she had stepped forward to murmur something to Charlie, when he threatened to deviate dangerously off script. She noticed his hands were clammy.

  Steadily, the young officers began to arrive, in two groups as far as she could work out. One had been pulled out of a lecture and were dressed in uniforms that were neatly pressed, the creases sharp as blades. The other came in out of breath and wearing khaki, their faces filmed with sweat. She guessed this group had been out supervising the men on the assault courses she had seen. After a few minutes, there were fourteen of them, all standing by their beds.

  Her gaze moved from one face to another, studying each as carefully as she could without appearing to stare. She wondered what she should feel. It was one of them, all the evidence said that. These were the men suspected of having ready access to heroin and specifically the #3 batch which had been found a matter of hours earlier by the dead body of the woman now confirmed as Mary Doherty, trainee chef at the Cinematheque, a restaurant and movie theatre that was a favoured haunt of the Princeling set, not least because it showed first-run Chinese movies. Given everything else she knew, the probability was great that the killer was here, in this room. She looked from face to face. But all she could see was a kind of languid complacency, a fearlessness common to all of them. They were standing, but it was hardly to attention. It was in deference to the fact that Dr Lei was a captain and technically their superior, but their posture emphasized that it was only technically. They were recognizably the group she had seen at the Mail Room and elsewhere around Los Angeles: the spoiled sons of the Chinese elite whose default expression was boredom.