Zhao seemed to consider this.
‘Your knowledge for mine,’ he suggested.
‘You begin.’
‘Fine then. Yoyo’s a dissident. She’s put the Party in a fine old tizzy these last few years.’
‘True.’
‘As part of a group calling themselves the Guardians. Criticising the regime, calling for human rights, the odd act of cyber-terrorism. All ideas you can agree with. Until recently, she got away with it.’
‘Also true.’
‘Your turn.’
‘On the night of 25 May, Yoyo left her flat in a hell of a hurry and fled to Quyu.’ Jericho took a swig, put down his bottle and wiped his mouth. ‘I can only speculate as to why, but I should imagine she saw something online that scared her.’
‘All true so far.’
‘She was found out. Or at least that’s what she thinks. With her previous record, she must be more frightened of being exposed than of anything. She was probably expecting a visit from the police or the Secret Services that same night.’
‘Quyu is her fallback position,’ said Zhao. ‘It’s practically free of surveillance, no scanners, no police. Terra incognita.’
‘Her first port of call was the City Demons workshop. It’s just that it’s not safe there for very long. So she came here to the Andromeda, as she has done before.’
‘How did you find out that she was at the Andromeda?’
‘Because she posted a message to her friends from here.’
‘And you read it?’
‘It brought me here.’
Zhao narrowed his eyes mistrustfully.
‘How did you get hold of the message? Usually only the security services can manage something like that.’
‘Take it easy, little Zhao.’ Jericho smiled. ‘Cryptography is part of my job. I’m a cyber-detective; most of my work has to do with industrial espionage and IP infringement.’
‘And how did Yoyo’s father get hold of you?’
‘That’s really none of your concern.’ Jericho tipped cold beer down his throat. ‘You said that Yoyo has disappeared again.’
‘Looks like. She was supposed to be here.’
‘When did she vanish?’
‘Sometime today. Could be that she’s just gone for a walk. Maybe we’re worrying unnecessarily, but she usually says if she’ll be gone for a while.’
Jericho turned the bottle between his finger and thumb once more. He wondered how to proceed. Zhao Bide had confirmed his suspicions. Yoyo had been here, but that wouldn’t be enough to set Chen Hongbing’s mind at ease. The man needed certainty.
‘Maybe we really don’t need to worry,’ he said. ‘The City Demons let her know I was coming. This time Yoyo disappeared because of me.’
‘I understand.’ Zhao pointed his bottle at Jericho’s silver COD, gleaming in the sun in front of the Andromeda. ‘Especially given that you travel fairly ostentatiously, by our standards. CODs don’t come to Quyu often.’
‘Clearly.’
‘Could be that Yoyo was running from the other guy, though.’
Jericho wrinkled his brow. ‘What other guy?’
Zhao swept his hand further to the right. Jericho followed the motion and saw another COD parked at the other end of the factory hall. Startled, he tried to remember whether it had already been there as he arrived. He had been distracted by the surprise of reaching the Andromeda, combined with the realisation that Daxiong had been leading him by the nose. He stood, and put his hand up to shade his eyes. As far as he could see, there was nobody in the other car.
Coincidence?
‘Did somebody follow you?’ asked Zhao.
Jericho shook his head.
‘I blundered around half of Quyu before I got here. There was no COD behind me.’
‘Are you sure?’
Jericho fell quiet. He knew all too well that a person could be followed without his knowledge. Whoever had parked that car could have already been on his tail in Xintiandi.
Zhao got up as well.
‘I’ll check you out, Jericho,’ he said. ‘But my sense for the pure and good tells me that you’re clean. We’re obviously both concerned for Yoyo’s wellbeing, so I suggest that we team up for a while.’ He got out a pen, scribbled something down on a scrap of paper and passed it to Jericho. ‘My phone number. You give me yours. We’ll try to find Yoyo together.’
Jericho nodded. He saved the number and handed over his card in exchange. Zhao was still an unknown quantity, but at the moment his suggestion was the best he had to go on.
‘We should make a plan,’ he said.
‘The plan is that we commit to sharing information. As soon as one of us sees or hears something, we let the other guy know.’
Jericho hesitated. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?’
‘Just as long as you don’t expect me to answer.’
‘What’s your relationship with Yoyo?’
‘She’s got friends here. I’m one of them.’
‘I know that she has friends. What I want to know is what your relationship with Yoyo is. You’re not a City Demon. You know that she’s one of the Guardians, but that doesn’t mean that you’re one yourself.’
Zhao emptied his bottle and belched again.
‘In Quyu, we’re all in it together,’ he said equably.
‘Come on now, Zhao.’ Jericho shook his head. ‘Give me an answer or just drop the thing, but don’t try this romance-of-the-slums business on me.’
Zhao looked at him.
‘Do you know Yoyo in person?’
‘No, just from recordings.’
‘Anybody who’s met her in person has two choices. He falls in love, or puts his feelings on ice. Since she doesn’t want to fall in love with me, I’m working on the second option, but whatever happens, I’ll never leave her in the lurch.’
Jericho nodded and asked no more questions. He glanced across to the second car again.
‘I’m going to have another look round in the Andromeda,’ he said.
‘What for?’
‘Perhaps I’ll find something that might help us.’
‘If you like. If you get into trouble, it wasn’t me who said you could.’ He clapped Jericho on the shoulder and went across the yard to the rusty delivery van. Jericho saw him speaking to one of the roadies, gesticulating. It looked as though they were talking about where the stage lighting should go. Then the two of them heaved another wheeled trunk from the van. Jericho waited a minute and followed them inside. As he entered the main hall, the sound engineer’s desk was just being set up. There was nobody on the balcony. He went up the steel steps, slipped through the grey door, pulled on a pair of disposable surgical gloves and went into Yoyo’s shabby den once more. The first thing he did was put a bug under one of the floorboards. Then he quickly scanned the piles of printouts, magazines and books. Nothing there gave him any clues as to where Yoyo might be. Most of it was about music, fashion, design, hip Shanghai, politics, virtual environments and robotics. Specialist literature that Yoyo probably read to keep up with work at Tu Technologies. He went to the table and sorted through the waste-paper basket underneath: torn packaging, scrunched up and smeared with leftovers. Jericho smoothed them out. Several were from a place called Wong’s World, and bore its rather inept logo, a globe on a dish, covered with sauce and served with what was probably supposed to be vegetables. The globe even had a face, and looked visibly depressed.
Jericho took some photos and left the room.
As he went down the steel steps, Zhao looked up at him briefly and then turned back to the mixing desk. Jericho walked past him without a word and went outside. In the foyer, he spotted a poster for the Pink Asses. Unbelievable. They really did use the tagline Ass Metal, promising that their music went ‘right up your arse’.
He was fairly sure that he didn’t want to hear that.
As he unlocked the COD, he scanned his surroundings. The second car was still parked a little way away. S
omebody had been on his tail, it would be naïve to imagine otherwise. He was probably being watched right at this moment.
A student who had promised to get some information about Yoyo, and fell to his death when his own roller-coaster ran him over. A COD that turned up right after he had arrived at the Andromeda. Yoyo’s renewed disappearance. How many coincidences did you have to shrug off before dry fear began to fur your tongue? Yoyo hadn’t been starting at shadows. She had every reason to hide, and there was still no knowing who was after her. The government, or its representatives the police and the Secret Services, would not shrink from murder if circumstances demanded. But what circumstances could force the Party to go this far? Yoyo might have earned the distinction of being an enemy of the State, but killing her for that wouldn’t have been the style of a regime that locked dissidents up these days, rather than killing them as in Mao’s times.
Or had Yoyo awoken a quite different sort of monster, one that didn’t play by the rules?
It was clear that whoever was hunting her also had Jericho in their sights. Too late to drop the case. He started the COD and dialled a number. It rang three times, and then Zhao’s voice spoke.
‘I’m getting out of here,’ Jericho said. ‘In the meantime, you can make yourself useful in this new partnership of ours.’
‘What should I do?’ asked Zhao.
‘Keep an eye on the second COD.’
‘Right you are. I’ll be in touch.’
* * *
Kenny Xin watched him drive away.
Fate was a fickle mistress. It had led him here, from the lofty eyrie atop the World Financial Center to the black crud that accumulated under the fingernails of the world’s economic superpower. This was always happening to him. No sooner did he think he had escaped the clutches of that syphilitic whore called humankind, thought that he no longer owed her a glance, would never have to endure her stinking breath again, than she dragged him back to her filthy lair. He’d had to endure the revolting sight of her back in Africa, let her touch him until he feared he was infected all over his body, that he would dissolve into a pool of ichorous pus. Now he had ended up in Quyu, and again the hideous mask of her visage was grinning at him and he couldn’t turn away. He felt dizzy, as always when overcome by this disgust. The world seemed to hang skew-whiff, so that he was amazed not to see the houses tumbling down and the people lose their footing.
He pressed finger and thumb against the bridge of his nose until he could think clearly again.
The detective had disappeared. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to bug his COD, but Xin had no doubt that Jericho had left Quyu for the time being and would return the car to the grid soon. He didn’t need to follow it. Jericho couldn’t get away from him. His gaze wandered over the yard, and he got rid of the disgust he felt by shedding waves of it to every side. How he hated the people in Quyu! How he had hated the underfed, chronically ill, dispirited creatures in Africa! Not that he had anything against them personally. They were anonymous, mere demographic statistics. He hated them because they were poor. Xin hated their poverty so much that it hurt him to see them alive.
High time to get out of here.
Jericho
He was just steering up the slipway onto the high-speed track when he got a call. The display stayed dark.
‘The guy who’s following you has left the complex,’ Zhao told him.
Automatically, Jericho glanced into the mirror. Silly idea. There were only CODs up here on the tracks, all the same shape and the same colour.
‘I haven’t seen anyone so far,’ he said. ‘At least he can’t have followed me directly.’
‘No, he waited a while.’
‘Can you describe him?’
‘Chinese.’
‘I see.’
‘About my height. Well dressed, elegant. Somebody who pretty clearly didn’t belong in Xuyu.’ Zhao paused. ‘Even you were less out of place.’
Jericho thought that he heard a grin in his voice. The COD accelerated.
‘I went through Yoyo’s waste-paper basket,’ he said, without responding to Zhao’s jab. ‘She seems to pick up her food in a place called Wong’s World. Heard of it?’
‘Maybe. Fast food joint?’
‘Could be. Might be a supermarket as well.’
‘I’ll find out. Can I reach you this evening?’
‘You can reach me any time.’
‘Thought so. You don’t look like a guy who has someone waiting at home.’
‘Hey, wait a moment!’ Jericho yelped. ‘What do you mean by—’
‘Talk later.’
Idiot!
Jericho stared ahead into a red cloud of rage, but it soon dissipated. In its place came a feeling of impotence, vulnerability. The worst of it was that Zhao was right. He had nobody waiting for him, not for years now. The man might be a roughneck, but he was right. This, even though Jericho’s type was much in demand. He was trim and blond and his eyes were light blue; he was generally taken for a Scandinavian, who were well-liked by Chinese women. He was also well aware that he hardly ever paid attention to the man who looked back at him from the mirror. His clothes were functional, but otherwise nondescript. He groomed himself just enough not to look unkempt. He shaved chin and cheeks every three days, went to the hairdressers every three months to clear the topgrowth, as he liked to say, he bought T-shirts by the dozen without wondering whether they suited him. Fundamentally, even Tu Tian, fat and bald though he was, took more pains in his artlessly messy way.
When the high-speed track spat him out again at Xintiandi, his anger had given way to a brackish sort of defeatism. He tried to visualise his new home, but found no comfort there. Xintiandi seemed further away than ever, a good-time town where he didn’t belong, because it wasn’t in his nature to have a good time, and others didn’t have a good time with him around.
There it was again, the old stigma.
And he had thought he was over it. If there was one thing that Joanna had taught him, it was that he was no longer the kid from his schooldays, the boy who still looked about fifteen when he was eighteen years old. The boy who had never had a girlfriend because every last girl at school was after some other boy. Even that wasn’t quite true. They had certainly appreciated having him as an understanding male friend, which he reckoned was just an underhanded way of saying a punchbag. They came to him in floods of tears, torturing him with details of their relationships, in endless therapy sessions which they always concluded by telling Jericho that they loved him like a brother, that he was, thank God, the only boy on Earth who didn’t want anything from them.
Broken-hearted, he patched up their tattered souls and only ever once tried anything more, with a snub-nosed brunette who had just been dumped by her older boyfriend, a notorious love cheat. More precisely, he had invited her for a meal and tried to flirt with her a bit. It worked like a dream for two hours, although only because the girl hadn’t realised what he was doing. Even when he put his hand on hers, she just thought that he was being funny. It was only then that she realised that punchbags had feelings too, and she left the restaurant without a word. Owen Jericho had to turn twenty before a Welsh pub landlord’s daughter took pity, and took his virginity. She hadn’t been pretty, but she had been through the same sort of hell as he had, and this, along with a few pints of lager, was enough for him.
After that it had gone a little better, or even quite well, and he had his revenge on the pathetic wet blanket who had so stubbornly claimed to be Owen Jericho. With Joanna’s help he had buried that boy, although it had been a stupid idea to bury him alive, not suspecting that it would be Joanna too who would bring him back from the grave. The zombie had come back here in Shanghai, where the world was reinventing itself, and taken revenge in turn. The zombie was the boy in his eyes who frightened off the women. He scared them. He scared himself.
In a foul mood, he steered his car to the nearest COD point and hooked it back up to the grid. The computer cal
culated what he had to pay and deducted the amount as he held his phone against the interface. Jericho got out. He had to find out why Grand Cherokee had had to die. He stopped in the middle of the street and called Tu Tian. He only spoke a few words to Naomi Liu. She obviously picked up that he was in a bad mood, smiled encouragingly and put him through.
‘I found the girl,’ he said without preamble.
Tu raised his eyebrows. ‘That was fast.’ There was even something like awe in his voice. Then he noticed Jericho’s sour look. ‘And what’s the problem? If there is just one problem.’
‘She slipped through my fingers.’
‘Ah.’ Tu tutted. ‘Well then. You’ll have done your best, little Owen.’
‘I don’t particularly want to talk over the details on the phone. Should we fix up a meeting with Chen Hongbing, or would you like to hear about it first?’
‘She is his daughter,’ Tu said diplomatically.
‘I know. I’ll say it straight. I’d rather speak to you first.’
Tu looked reassured, as though that was what he had been hoping for. ‘I think we’ll do that, though it doesn’t mean we won’t do the other,’ he said magnanimously. ‘But it would certainly be wise to let me know what’s on your mind. When can you be here?’
‘In a quarter of an hour, if the roads aren’t jammed. Something else, Tian. The fellow who fell from your roof this morning—’
‘Yes, a bad business.’
‘What do you know about it?’
‘The circumstances of his death are somewhat curious, to say the least.’ Tu’s eyes gleamed. He seemed less distraught than fascinated. ‘The guy went for a walk along the tracks, five hundred metres up! I ask you, is that normal behaviour for a student who was just looking to earn a few yuan on the side? What was he doing there?’
‘I hear there’s a video.’
‘An eyewitness video, that’s right. It was on the news.’
‘Have they released it?’
‘Yes, but you can’t see very much. Just this what’s-his-name, Grand Chevrolet, climbing about like a monkey up there and then trying to jump over the carriages.’
‘Grand Cherokee. His name’s Grand Cherokee Wang.’ Jericho massaged the bridge of his nose. ‘Tian, I have to ask you for a favour. In the news it said that the surveillance cameras on the top floor of the World Financial Center showed Wang with a man. Obviously they had an argument. I’d like to have a look at the footage, and—’ Jericho hesitated – ‘at Wang as well, if possible.’