Your Heart Belongs to Me

other occasions and was now, with thought denied him, the only thing he knew how to say.
    “You knew,” she insisted.
    “I swear I didn’t.” More litany. “I swear I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. I couldn’t have done this if I’d known.”
    “Dr. Hobb brings patients from around the world. Over the years, a hundred sixty of Dr. Hobb’s patients have been matched in a month or less. Dr. Hobb knows.”
    “Maybe he does, I can’t speak for him, I can’t defend him. But I didn’t know. ”
    “They say so many have been harvested that where their bodies are buried, the ground grows red bamboo. Groves of red bamboo.”
    “I didn’t know.”
    She lowered the muzzle from his face, and the sound-suppressor on the pistol allowed only a soft and surprisingly biological sound when she shot him in the left foot.
     

 
    FIFTY-FIVE

    T error could not anesthetize against a bullet wound, at least not entirely, and it could not staunch the blood. But the wound proved less debilitating than Ryan would have imagined, producing not violent and thrilling throes of pain, not agony, but suffering of a kind that cleared his fogged thinking, that broke him out instantly in a head-to-foot sweat even as a chill settled through his stomach and his bowels, racking him with shudders that rattled his teeth.
    He didn’t scream because he didn’t have the wind for it, but the woman said, “If you scream, I’ll make you stop the hard way, and then what follows will be even worse for you than it would have been.”
    The sounds he made were sometimes low and choked-off, sometimes thin and tremulous and pathetic, but they would not carry beyond the walls of the house.
    Instead of sliding to the floor, he withdrew into the commodious recliner, holding in his right hand the soft shoe that encased his wounded foot, because he found that gentle pressure eased the pain.
    “After losing my Lily, I lived to find you.”
    With that singular languid restlessness, Violet circled the room again, like some black bird that had flown in through an open door, a winged messenger of merciless intent, seeking now a permanent roost.
    “I needed ten months to escape China. Three of us defected on a mission. Then two more months to get to this country, to study you and plan.”
    Behind the brightness of his pain, a dark incoming tide washed through Ryan’s mind, rising above all the sea walls of his defenses, and from beneath his fear of death welled a worse fear that until now he had neither experienced nor imagined to exist.
    “Hobb knew,” she said as she roamed.
    And now all that Ryan could say was, “He didn’t tell me.”
    “Of course he didn’t say, ‘Let’s go to Shanghai and tear open a perfectly healthy girl for you.’”
    “If he didn’t tell me, how could I have known?” he pleaded, but the plea sounded weak to him. “How could I have known?”
    “By what he implied.”
    To this he could say nothing.
    She would not relent: “And by what you inferred.”
    The dark tide breaching his long-defended sea walls was a tide of truth.
    She said, “By the implicit meaning of an international donor’s list, by the implicit meaning of only a one-month wait for a match, by the implicit meaning of the astronomical cost, by the implicit meaning of an emergency flight to Shanghai, by the implicit meaning of the thousand winks and nods you must have witnessed.”
    The word shuddered from him: “Subtext.”
    Actions had consequences. Having always understood this, he had largely lived by the rules in business and in his personal relationships.
    The new and most devastating fear welling in him, which he had never known before in thirty-five years, was the fear that actions also had consequences beyond this life.
    Her anger having given way to a calm determination to have justice, the woman approached him, with a grave and stern decorum.
    “I was groomed to pass for American. To come here one day and form a secret cell.”
    A note of profound resignation informed her voice, her green eyes seeming to be dreaming.
    “ My secret plan was to bring Lily, disappear into new identities and truly become Americans. Now this country is ruined for me. And China. And I have nowhere.”
    She stared at him along the barrel of the gun.
    Thick blood oozed slowly from the bullet hole in Ryan’s shoe, his broken left hand curled into a claw, his head ached as if it were held together by tightly pulled barbed wire, but none of his pains squeezed the