Limit

Xintiandi, Shanghai, China

Chen Hongbing bent forward as he entered the room, in that way typical of people whose height is in constant conflict with doorframes and low-hanging ceiling-lights. He was actually extraordinarily tall for a Chinese man. On the other hand, the architect who designed the shikumen could hardly be accused of a lack of consideration for extravagant bodily proportions. The door was a good three metres high, so it hardly required him to hunch his shoulders as he did, or stretch out his chin which, as it approached his breastbone, seemed to linger hesitantly. Despite his size, Chen seemed gaunt and subservient. His gaze had a furtive nature about it, as if he were expecting to be beaten, or worse. Jericho got the impression he had spent his whole life conversing with people who towered over him while he stayed seated.

If indeed this was Chen Hongbing.

The visitor touched the doorframe fleetingly with the tips of his fingers, as if wanting to assure himself of something solid to grasp in case of a sudden collapse. Confused, he looked at the pile of removal boxes, then crossed the threshold with the caution of a tightrope walker. The white midday sun stretched across the room, a sculpture of light, broken into a billion pieces by the whirling dust. In that pale light Chen looked like a ghost narrowing his eyes. He looked younger than Tu Tian had said he was. His skin stretched tautly over his cheekbones, forehead and chin; a face which was deeply carved with lines. Around his eyes, though, a fine macramé pattern branched out, more like cracks than lines. To Jericho, they looked like testimonies to a difficult life.

‘Ta chi le hen duo Ku,’ Tu Tian had said. ‘Hongbing has eaten bitterness, Owen, for many long years. Every morning it comes up, he forces it down again, and one day he will choke on it. Help him, xiongdi.’

Eaten bitterness. Even misery was available for consumption in China.

Jericho looked indecisively at the box in his hands and wondered if he should heave it onto the desk as planned or back onto the pile. Chen’s arrival was ill-timed. He hadn’t expected the man to come this early. Tu Tian had said something about an afternoon visit, and it wasn’t even twelve yet. His stomach was rumbling, and his brow and upper lip glistened with sweat. The more he ran his hands over his face and hair to mix the dust and sweat, the less he looked like someone who was about to move into the expensive, trendy neighbourhood of Xintiandi. Three days without shaving had taken their toll. Encased in a sticky cloth of a T-shirt, which showed the 37 degrees Celsius and what felt like 99.9 per cent air humidity much more than the colour it had once possessed, and having hardly eaten for twenty-four hours, Jericho wanted nothing more than to put the move behind him as quickly as possible. Just one more box, then off to a food stall in Taicang Lu, carry on unpacking, shower, shave.

That had been the plan.

But when he saw Chen standing there in the dusty light, he knew he couldn’t put his visitor off until later. Chen was the kind of person who would stay in your mind if you sent him away, and besides, out of respect to Tu Tian it was completely out of the question. He put the box back on the pile and put on a B-grade smile: warm, but noncommittal.

‘Chen Hongbing, I take it.’

The man standing opposite him nodded and looked bewilderedly at the boxes and piled-up pieces of furniture. He coughed slightly, then took a small step back.

‘I’ve come at a bad time.’

‘Not at all.’

‘It just so happened that I – I was nearby, but if it puts you out I can come back—’

‘It’s no trouble at all.’ Jericho looked around, pulled over a chair and put it in front of the desk. ‘Take a seat, honourable Chen, make yourself at home. I’m just moving in, hence the chaos. Can I get you anything?’

You can’t, he thought, you would have needed to go shopping for that, but you’re a man. When women move house, they make sure they have a full fridge before the first box even leaves the removal van, and if there isn’t a fridge, they buy one and plug it in. Then he remembered the half-full bottle of orange juice. It had been on the lounge windowsill since yesterday morning, which meant it had led a two-day-long existence in the glaring sun and intelligent life might even have developed inside it.

‘Coffee, tea?’ he asked nonetheless.

‘No, thank you, but thank you very much.’ Chen sank down onto the edge of the chair and stared intently at his knees. If he had come into contact with the surface of the seat, it was by an amount barely measurable physically. ‘A few minutes of your time is more than I can expect in these circumstances.’

Awkward pride resonated in his words. Jericho pulled a second chair over, placed it next to Chen’s and hesitated. There were actually two comfortable armchairs which belonged in front of the desk, and both were in sight, but they had mutated into misshapen clumps of bubble wrap wrapped in packing tape.

‘It’s my pleasure to be able to assist you,’ he said, trying to stop his smile from widening. ‘We’ll take as much time as we need.’

Chen slid back on his chair and sank cautiously against the backrest.

‘You’re very friendly.’

‘And you’re not comfortable. Please accept my apologies. Let me find some more comfortable seating. It’s still packed, but—’

Chen lifted his head and squinted up at him. Jericho was confused for a second, then it hit him: essentially, Chen looked good. In his younger years he must have been one of those men women said were beautiful. Until the day when something had ground his well-proportioned features into a mask. Somewhat grotesquely, he now lacked a facial expression, if you didn’t count his occasional nervous blinking.

‘No, I won’t allow you to do that on my account—’

‘It would be my pleasure.’

‘No, I can’t allow you to.’

‘They have to be unpacked anyway.’

‘Of course, but at a time of your choosing.’ Chen shook his head and got up again. His joints clicked. ‘Please, I beg of you! I’m much too early, you’re in the middle of something and I’m sure you were less than enthusiastic about my arrival.’

‘No, that’s not the case! I’m pleased you’ve come to see me.’

‘No, I should come back later.’

‘My dear Mr Chen, no moment could be better than this one. Please, stay.’

‘I couldn’t ask that of you. If I had known—’

And so on and so forth.

Theoretically, the game could carry on for ever. It wasn’t that either of them harboured any doubt about the other’s position. Chen knew only too well that he had caught Jericho at the wrong moment, and no assurances to the contrary would change that. Jericho, in turn, was aware that Chen would have been far more comfortable on a bed of nails than on any of his kitchen chairs. The circumstances were to blame. Chen’s presence was down to a system in which favours chased one another like puppies, and he was ashamed to the core at having messed it up. It was because of one of these favours that he was even here in the first place, then he had foolishly arrived too early and stumbled into the middle of a house move, thereby shaming their mediator and putting Jericho, the mediated, into the unpleasant situation of interrupting his work on his account. Because of course Jericho wouldn’t ask him to come back later. The ritual of pleasantries allowed for an open-ended succession of ‘No, yes, not at all, but of course, it would be an honour, no, I couldn’t, yes, no, yes!’ A game which, if you wanted to master it, took years of training. If you were a peng you, a friend in the sense of a useful go-between, it would be played differently than if you were a xiongdi, a close confidant. Social standing, age and gender, the context of the conversation, all of these were factored into the coordinates of decorum.

Tu Tian, for example, had shortened the game when he had rather bluntly requested the aforementioned favour, just by calling him xiongdi. The diplomatic walk on eggshells could be dispensed with amongst close friends. Perhaps it was because he was really very fond of Chen, but maybe he just didn’t want to interrupt the golf match for such a long-winded process, the outcome of which was already clear either way. In any case, once he had come out with it, the yolk-yellow late afternoon sun broke through the cheerfully dispersing clouds and bathed the surroundings in the tones of an Italian Renaissance landscape painting. Two days of rain came to an end, and Mr Tu, who had begun comme il faut with the words: ‘Owen, I know you’re up to your ears in it with the move, and I wouldn’t normally bother you’ – looked up to the heavens, picked up his Big Bertha club and ended succinctly – ‘but there’s a favour you could do for me – xiongdi.’

Tu Tian on the Tomson Shanghai Pudong golf course, two days before, deep in concentration.

Jericho waited obediently to find out what the favour might be. Tu was temporarily on another planet as he swung into a powerful drive. The rhythmic momentum came from his back, muscles and joints working in automated harmony. Jericho was talented; for two years now he had enjoyed the honour of playing on the best courses in Shanghai, when people like Tu invited him along, and when they didn’t he played in the renowned but affordable Luchao Harbour City Club. The difference between him and Tu Tian was that one of them would never get close to achieving what the other one seemed to have been given genetically. Both of them had decided relatively late to spend time hitting little white balls at over two hundred kilometres per hour in an attempt to guide them into small holes in the ground. But on the day when Tu first walked onto a golf course, he must have felt as if he was coming home. His game was far beyond being described with attributes like accomplished or elegant. From the very beginning, Tu had played the way newborn babies swim. He was the game.

Jericho watched respectfully as his friend sent the ball into a perfect trajectory. Tu paused in the teeing position for a few seconds, then let Big Bertha fall with an expression of pure contentment.

‘You mentioned a favour,’ said Jericho.

‘What?’ Tu wrinkled his forehead. ‘Oh, yes, nothing major. You know.’

He set off, briskly following the journey of his ball. Jericho marched behind him. He didn’t know, but he had a good idea what was coming.

‘What problem does he have?’ he asked, taking a guess. ‘Or she?’

‘He. A friend. His name is Chen Hongbing.’ Tu grinned. ‘But that’s not the problem you need to help him with.’

Jericho was familiar with the caustic element of his remark. The name was a bad joke, and one at which those it poked fun at were least able to laugh. It was likely that Chen had been born at the end of the sixties in the previous century, when the Red Guards had inflicted terror on the country, and when newborns had been given the most preposterous names in honour of the revolution and the Great Leader Mao: it was quite common for someone of the age where they could not yet control their bladder to be called ‘Down with America’, ‘Honour of the Leader’ or ‘Long March.’

It was actually fear that had bestowed those names. An attempt to come to terms with things. Before the People’s Revolutionary Army brought a bloody end to the Red Guards in 1969, there was uncertainty about who would rule China in the future. Three years before, on the Square of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, Mao Zedong had come down to join the mere mortals, as it were, and had a red armband tied around his sleeve, thereby symbolically becoming the leader of the Guards, a million-strong bunch of predominantly pubescent fanatics, absconding from their schools and universities, who sheared their teachers’ heads, beat them and chased them through the streets like donkeys, because anyone who knew the simplest of things and wasn’t a farmer or a worker was regarded as an intellectual, and therefore subversive. The chaos didn’t end until the spring of 1969 – and only then because the so-called Gang of Four were rattling their chains loudly in the background. But the Red Guards walked the same path as their victims and found themselves back in re-education camps, which, in the opinion of many of the Chinese people, made things even worse. Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, raved about cultural operas and warmed up to some of the worst atrocities in China’s history. But the naming of children, at least, slowly normalised.

Chen, Jericho estimated, had come into the world sometime between 1966 and 1969: a time in which his name was about as common as caterpillars in salad. Hong-bing literally meant ‘Red Soldier’.

Tu looked at the sun.

‘Hongbing has a daughter.’ The way he said it implied that this alone was worth telling the story for. His eyes lit up, then he got a grip of himself. ‘She’s very pretty and unfortunately very reckless too. Two days ago, she disappeared without a trace. Generally speaking she trusts me, and I’m tempted to say she trusts me even more than her father. Anyway, it’s not the first time she’s taken off for a while, but before she has always let someone know, so to speak. Him, me or at least one of her friends.’

‘And she forgot this time.’

‘Or she didn’t have a chance. Hongbing is worried out of his mind, and rightly so. Yoyo has a tendency to annoy the wrong people. Or, shall we say, the right ones.’

Tu had outlined the problem in his own way. Jericho pursed his lips. It was clear what was expected of him. Besides that, the name Yoyo had unleashed something inside him.

‘And I’m supposed to look for the girl?’

‘You would be doing me a good turn if you met with Chen Hongbing.’ Cheerfully Tu spotted his ball and began to pace more briskly. ‘Only, of course, if you feel you’re able to.’

‘What exactly has she done?’ asked Jericho. ‘Yoyo, I mean.’

Tu stepped over to the white object in the shortly cut grass, looked Jericho in the eyes and smiled. His look said that he wanted to get back to putting now. Jericho smiled back.

‘Tell your friend it would be an honour.’

Tu nodded as if he had expected nothing less. He called Jericho xiongdi one more time and turned his undivided attention to the putter and ball.

The younger generation in China hardly played the game any more. Their tone of voice had become globalised. If someone wanted something from somebody, they generally came straight to the point without wasting any time. With Chen Hong-bing it was clearly a different matter. Everything about him marked him out as a representative of an older China, one in which there were a thousand ways of losing face. Jericho was indecisive for a moment, then had an idea of how he could salvage the situation for Chen. He leaned over, pulled a carpet knife from the toolbox next to the desk and began to briskly cut the chair free from the bubble wrap.

Chen raised both hands in horror.

‘I beg you! This is so embarrassing for me—’

‘It doesn’t have to be.’ said Jericho cheerfully. ‘To be honest I was hoping for your help. There’s a second knife in the toolbox. What would you say to us joining forces and making this place a little more comfortable?’

It was an ambush. At the same time he was offering Chen a way out of the self-inflicted mess. You help me, I’ll help you, then you’ll be contributing to my move, we’ll both be able to sit more comfortably and you can get the dust off your face. Quid pro quo.

Chen seemed uncertain. He scratched his head, rattled himself to his feet, then fished the knife out of the box and took hold of the other chair. As he began to cut through the sticky-tape, he visibly relaxed.

‘I appreciate your gesture very much, Mr Jericho. Tian unfortunately didn’t have the opportunity to tell me that you were just moving in.’

Which meant the idiot hadn’t mentioned it. Jericho shrugged his shoulders and pulled the cover off his armchair.

‘He didn’t know.’

That was a lie too, but in that way they had both respected Tu and could turn their attention to more important matters. One after the other, they pushed the armchairs in front of the desk.

‘It doesn’t look so bad after all.’ Jericho grinned. ‘Now we just need something to refuel. What do you think? I could fetch us some coffee. There’s a patisserie downstairs, they do—’

‘No, don’t worry,’ Chen interrupted. ‘I’ll fetch them.’

Ah yes. The game.

‘No, I couldn’t let you.’

‘Of course you can.’

‘No, it’s my pleasure. You’re my guest.’

‘And you’re receiving me unexpectedly. As I already said—’

‘It’s the least I can do for you. How do you like your coffee?’

‘How do you like yours?’

‘That’s very kind of you, but—’

‘Would you like nutmeg in yours?’

That was the latest thing: nutmeg in coffee. It had allegedly saved Starbucks from bankruptcy last winter. The whole damn world had started drinking nutmeg coffee and swore that it tasted amazing. It reminded Jericho of the Sichuan Espresso craze which had rolled across the country a few years before, transforming the taste of Italian coffee into an Asian variant of Dante’s Inferno. Jericho had taken a little sip from the rim of a cup once, and even days later had still felt as though he could pull the skin from his lips.

He gave in. ‘A normal cappuccino would be great. The patisserie is just downstairs on the left.’

Chen nodded.

And, suddenly, he was smiling too. The skin on his face stretched taut, making Jericho fear it might tear off, but it was a thoroughly lovely, friendly smile, and one which disappeared only once it reached the cracked wastelands beneath his eyes.

‘Yoyo isn’t her real name,’ explained Chen, as they sat slurping coffee together. By now the air-conditioning was on and had created a reasonably bearable temperature. Chen’s posture suggested he thought the soft leather seat might throw him off at any second, but compared with the man who had skulked through the doorframe a quarter of an hour before, he made an almost normal impression.

‘So what is?’

‘Yuyun.’

‘Cloud of Jade.’ Jericho raised his eyebrows appreciatively. ‘A beautiful choice.’

‘Oh, I gave it a great deal of thought! I wanted it to be a light, fresh name, full of poetry, full of—’ Chen’s gaze clouded over and wandered off into the distance.

‘Harmony,’ completed Jericho.

‘Yes. Harmony.’

‘So why does she call herself Yoyo?’

‘I don’t know.’ Chen sighed. ‘I know far too little about her, that’s the problem. Just because you have named someone, it doesn’t mean you know them. The label doesn’t define the content. And what are names anyway? Just rallying calls for the lost. And yet everyone hopes that their own child will be an exception, it’s like being anaesthetised. As if names could change anything. As if there has ever been any truth in a name!’ He took a noisy gulp of his coffee.

‘And Yoyo – Yuyun has disappeared?’

‘Let’s stick with Yoyo. Apart from me no one calls her Yuyun. Yes, I haven’t seen or spoken to her for two days now. Didn’t Tu Tian tell you about any of it?’

‘Only a little.’

For some unknown reason this seemed to please Chen. Then Jericho realised. The way Tu had said it: I’m tempted to say that she trusts me more than her father. Whatever it was that bound Tu and Chen together, and however close this bond was – Yoyo’s preference came between them. And that’s why Chen had wanted the reassurance that, this time, not even Tu knew anything.

‘Well, we were supposed to meet up,’ he continued. ‘The day before yesterday, for lunch in Lianing Lu. I waited for over an hour, but she didn’t show. At first I thought it was because of an argument we’d had, that perhaps she was still angry, but then—’

‘You had an argument?’

‘We stayed out of each other’s way for a while after she confronted me with her reasons for moving out, ten days ago, out of the blue. She didn’t consider it necessary to seek my advice, nor did she want my help.’

‘You didn’t agree with her decision?’

‘It seemed too hasty to me, and I told her so. Very plainly! That there wasn’t the slightest reason for her to move out. That she was much better off with me than in that robber’s den she’s been hanging around in for years. That she’s not doing herself any favour with those types of people – that it isn’t clever—’ Chen stared at the cup in his hand. They were silent for a while. Whole universes of dust emerged and disappeared in the sunlight. Jericho’s nose was itching, but he repressed the urge to sneeze. Instead, he tried to remember where he had read the name Yoyo Chen.

‘Yoyo has many talents,’ Chen continued softly. ‘Maybe I did hold her back too much. But I didn’t have a choice. She incurred the displeasure of prominent circles, and it was getting increasingly dangerous. They caught up with her five years ago – because she didn’t follow my advice.’

‘What did she do?’

‘Do? She completely ignored my warnings.’

‘Yes, I know. But that’s not a crime. Why was she arrested?’

Chen blinked distrustfully.

‘I didn’t say that in so many words.’

Jericho frowned. He leaned over, put the tips of his fingers together and looked Chen directly in the eyes.

‘Listen to me. I don’t want to push you by any means. But we won’t get anywhere like this. You wouldn’t be here just to say that the Party is giving Yoyo a lifetime achievement award, so let’s speak plainly. What did she do?’

‘She—’ Chen seemed to be looking for a way of formulating it which wouldn’t require definitions like ‘criticism of the regime’.

‘May I voice an assumption?’

Chen hesitated. Then he nodded.

‘Yoyo is a dissident.’ Jericho knew this to be the case. But where on earth had he read her name? ‘She criticises the system, probably on the internet, and has been doing so for years. It drew attention on a number of occasions, but until yesterday she always got off lightly. Now something may have happened. And you’re worried that Yoyo may have been imprisoned.’

‘She said I was the last person who could reproach her for it,’ whispered Chen. ‘But I was only trying to protect her. We argued about it, many, many times, and she shouted at me. She said it was pointless, that I don’t let anyone get close to me, not even my own daughter, and how I of all people— She said I was a total hypocrite.’

Jericho waited. Chen’s expression hardened.

‘But I didn’t mean to bother you with these stories,’ he concluded. ‘The main thing is that there hasn’t been any sign of life from her in two days.’

‘Perhaps it’s less serious than you think. It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s son or daughter has disappeared after an argument. They lie low with friends, play dead for a while, just to teach their parents a lesson.’

Chen shook his head. ‘Not Yoyo. She would never use an argument as cause to do something like that.’

‘You said yourself that you don’t know your daughter well enough—’

‘Well, in this respect I know her very well. We are similar in many ways. Yoyo hates that kind of childish nonsense.’

‘Have you checked with the authorities?’

Chen balled his hands into fists. His knuckles bulged, white, but his face remained expressionless. Jericho knew they were getting closer to the crux of the matter, the real reason why Tu had sent his friend here.

‘You have checked, haven’t you?’

‘No, I haven’t!’ Chen seemed to chew the words before spitting them out. ‘I can’t! I can’t check with the authorities without risking putting them on Yoyo’s trail.’

‘So it’s not certain that Yoyo has been arrested?’

‘Last time I was left in the dark for weeks as to which police station she was in. But the fact that she had been arrested at all, well, I found that out just a few hours after it happened. I should mention that I have managed to build up a few important contacts over the years. There are people who are willing to use their influence for Yoyo and me.’

‘Like Tu Tian.’

‘Yes, and others too. That’s the only reason I knew that Yoyo had been arrested back then. I asked these – friends, but they claimed not to know Yoyo’s location. It wouldn’t surprise me if she has given the authorities new reasons to hunt her down, but perhaps they haven’t even noticed.’

‘You mean that perhaps Yoyo just got scared and decided to lie low for a while?’

Chen kneaded his fingers. To Jericho, he looked like a taut bowstring. Then he sighed.

‘If I go to the police,’ he said, ‘I could end up sowing mistrust into a field of ignorance. Yoyo would become a target again, whether she’s done anything wrong or not. Any reason would be enough for them. Yoyo avoided provoking them for a while, and it seemed to me that she’d learned her lesson and made her peace with the past, but—’ He looked at Jericho with his weary, intensely dark eyes. This time he didn’t blink. ‘You understand my dilemma, Mr Jericho?’

Jericho looked at him in silence. He leaned back and thought. As long as Chen continued circling the issue like a wolf around a fire, they wouldn’t make any progress. So far his guest was only dropping hints. Jericho doubted Chen was even aware he was doing it. He had internalised the sidestepping in such a way that he probably thought he was walking in a straight line.

‘I don’t want to press you too much, Mr Chen – but could it be that you might be the wrong person to contact the authorities when it comes to dissident activities?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I’m just voicing my suspicion that Yoyo isn’t only being hunted down for her own actions.’

‘I understand.’ Chen stared at him. ‘You’re right, not everything in my past is to Yoyo’s advantage. But regardless of that, I’d be doing her a disservice if I went to the police. Can we leave it at that for now?’

Jericho nodded. ‘You know the focus of my work?’ he asked. ‘Did Tu Tian put you in the picture?’

‘Yes.’

‘My hunting ground is the internet. I imagine he recommended me because Yoyo has become active online.’

‘He thinks a great deal of you. He says you’re the best.’

‘I’m honoured. Do you have a photo of Yoyo?’

‘Oh, I have more than that! I have films.’ He reached into his jacket and pulled out a mobile phone. It was an older model, one that wasn’t compatible with 3D projection. Chen turned his attention to it with his now familiar blinking, pressed a few buttons in succession, but nothing happened.

‘May I offer my assistance?’ Jericho suggested.

‘Yoyo gave it to me, but I hardly ever use it.’ A trace of embarrassment crossed Chen’s face. He handed the device to Jericho. ‘I know, it’s laughable. Ask me something about cars. Old cars, vintage. I know all the models, but these things here—’

These things, thought Jericho, are already vintage too, in case you didn’t realise.

‘You’re interested in cars?’ he asked.

‘I’m an expert! Historical Beauty, in Beijing Donglu. Haven’t you been? I manage the Technical Customer Service department. You must do me the honour of a visit; we had a silver Rolls-Royce Corniche in last month, with wood and red leather seats, a splendid specimen. It came from Germany, sold by an old man. Do you like cars?’

‘They have their uses.’

‘May I ask what you drive?’

‘A Toyota.’

‘Hybrid?’

‘Fuel cell.’ Jericho turned the mobile over in his hand and glanced at the connection points. With an adapter he could have projected the contents onto his new holowall, but it wasn’t being delivered until the evening. He clicked through to the folder. ‘May I?’

‘Please. There are only three films on it, all of Yoyo.’

Jericho pointed the device at the wall opposite and activated the integrated beamer. He focused the picture to the size of a standard flat screen so there would be enough clarity despite the penetrating sunlight, and started the first recording.

Tu Tian had been right.

No, he hadn’t done her justice! Yoyo wasn’t just pretty, she was extraordinarily beautiful. During his time in London Jericho had familiarised himself with the most differing of theories about the existence of beauty: facial symmetry, the shaping of particular features like the eyes or lips, proportioning of bone structure, the amount of childlike characteristics. Studies like these were used in the psychological fight against crime, and they were also used as the basis of tracking down people disguising themselves with virtual personalities. Modern studies concluded that perfect feminine beauty was defined by large, round eyes and a high, lightly curved forehead, while the nose had to be slender and the chin small but clearly defined. If you processed women’s faces in a morphing program and added a certain percentage of childlike features, the rate of approval from male viewers soared spontaneously. Full lips trumped narrow ones, eyes which were too close lost against those set at a certain distance. The perfect Venus had high cheekbones, narrow, dark brows, long lashes, glossy hair and an even hairline.

Yoyo was all of this – and yet none of it.

Chen had filmed her during a performance in some badly lit club, flanked by musicians who might or might not have been male. Nowadays, young men cultivated an increasingly androgynous style and wore their hair down to their belts. For anyone who wanted to be someone in the Mando-prog scene, the only other option was to shave their hair off and wear a skull cap. Short hair was out of the question. They could equally have been avatars, leaning over their guitars and bass: holographic simulations, even though that would have been hugely expensive. Only very successful musicians could afford avatars, like the American rapper Eminem who, now over fifty years of age and wanting to relive his heyday, had recently projected numerous versions of himself onto the stage, which played the instruments, danced, and unfortunately displayed much more agility than the master himself.

But all of this – gender, flesh and blood, bits and bytes – all of it lost any meaning next to the singer. Yoyo had combed her hair back tightly and braided it into four ponytails at the nape of her neck, which swung back and forth with each of her sinuous, powerful moves. She was singing a cover version of some ancient Shenggy track. As far as it was possible to deduce from the mobile’s mediocre recording quality, she had a good voice, if not a remarkable one. And even though the bad lighting didn’t put her sufficiently in the limelight, Jericho still saw enough to know she was perhaps the most beautiful woman he had seen in the thirty-eight years of his life. It was just that Yoyo’s particular kind of beauty threw all the theories about what beauty was right out of the window.

The picture blurred for a moment as Chen tried to zoom in on his daughter. Then Yoyo’s eyes filled the screen – a gaze like velvet, slender eyelids, curtained by lashes which sank and then quickly lifted again. The camera wobbled, Yoyo disappeared from view, then the recording stopped.

‘She sings,’ said Chen, as if it were necessary to point that out. Jericho played the next film. It showed Yoyo in a restaurant, sitting opposite Chen, her hair loose. She flicked through a menu, then noticed the camera and smiled.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Well, I hardly ever see you,’ answered Chen’s voice. ‘So this way I’ll at least have you preserved on film.’

‘Aha! Bottled Yoyo.’

She laughed. Two horizontal creases formed under her eyes as she did so, which hadn’t come up in the psychologists’ beauty scenarios, but Jericho found them incredibly exciting.

‘And besides, that way I can show you off.’

Yoyo pulled a face at her father. She started to squint.

‘No, don’t,’ said Chen’s voice.

The recording ended. The third one showed the restaurant again, apparently at a later date. Music blended into the cacophony of noise. In the background, waiters were hurrying between packed tables. Yoyo took a drag of her cigarette and balanced a drink in her right hand. She opened her lips and let a thin plume of smoke escape. For the duration of the entire clip, she didn’t speak a single word. Her gaze rested on her father. It was one of love and noticeable sadness, so much so that Jericho wouldn’t have been surprised to see tears flowing from her eyes. But nothing of the sort happened. Yoyo just lowered her eyelids from time to time, as if wanting to wipe away what she saw with her heavy lashes, sipped at her drink, dragged at her cigarette and blew out smoke.

‘I’ll need these recordings,’ said Jericho.

Chen pushed himself out of his chair, his gaze fixed on the now empty wall as if his daughter were still visible on it. His features seemed more rigid than ever. And yet Jericho knew, without knowing the exact circumstances, that there had been times when this face had been contorted with pain. He had seen such faces in London. Victims. Families of victims. Perpetrators who had become victims themselves. Whatever it was that had hardened Chen, he hoped fervently to be far away if this rigidity ever broke down. There was no way in the world he wanted to see what would happen if it did.

‘There are more you can have,’ said Chen tonelessly. ‘Yoyo enjoyed being photographed. But the films are much better. Not these ones though. Yoyo made recordings for Tian as a virtual tour guide. In high resolution, so she told me. And it’s true, when you walk through the Museum of Town Planning or through the eye of the World Financial Center with one of those programs, it’s as though she’s there with you in the flesh. I have some of them at home, but I’m sure Tian can give you better material.’ He faltered. ‘Assuming, of course, that you’re willing to find Yoyo for me.’

Jericho reached for his cup, stared at the remaining puddle of cold coffee and put it back down. Bright sunlight filled the room. He looked at Chen and knew that his visitor wouldn’t ask a second time.

‘I’m going to need more than the films.’

Jin Mao Tower

Around the same time, a Japanese waitress was approaching Kenny Xin’s table, carrying a tray of sushi and sashimi in front of her. Xin, who saw her coming out of the corner of his eye, didn’t bother turning round. His gaze was resting on the blue-grey band of the Huangpu three hundred metres below him. The river was busy at this time of day. Chains of barges followed its path like sluggish water-snakes, while heavy cargo-ships headed for the docks to the east of the bend. Ferries, water taxis and excursion boats forced their way between them en route for the Yangpu bridge and the cranes of the unloading bays, past the idyllic Gongqing Park to the estuary, where the oily floods of the Huangpu mixed in a gloomy kaleidoscope with the muddy waters of the Yangtze before dispersing into the East China Sea.

It was thanks to the river’s sharp, almost angular bend to the right that Shanghai’s financial and economic district, Pudong, seemed like a peninsula, offering panoramic views of the coastal road Zhongshan Lu with its colonial banks, clubs and hotels: relicts from the era after the Opium Wars, when the European trade giants had divided up the country between them and erected monuments of their power on the western bank of the river. A hundred years ago, these structures must have towered over everything around them in splendour and size. Now they looked like toys against the stalagmite-like towers of glass, steel and concrete that stretched out behind them, permeated by highways, magnetic rails and sky trains, surrounded by whirling flying machines, insectoid minicopters and cargo-blimps. Even though the weather was unusually clear, the horizon couldn’t be seen. Shanghai went up in smoke, diffused at the edges and became one with the sky. There was nothing to suggest that anything other than yet more development was beyond the development itself.

Xin looked at it all, without granting the woman who was placing the sushi before him the honour of acknowledgement. His concentration was undividable, and right now he was concentrating on the question of where the girl he was looking for might be hiding amidst this twenty-million-strong Moloch. She certainly wasn’t at home, he’d checked there. If that student with the ridiculous name of Grand Cherokee Wang hadn’t been lying, then there was still the possibility of narrowing down her location. He would have to clutch at this straw, even if the kid seemed dodgy to him: one of Yoyo’s two flatmates, clearly in love with the girl and even more so with money, in pursuit of which he made out he had information to offer. And yet he didn’t know a thing.

‘Yoyo hasn’t been living here that long,’ he had said. ‘She’s a real party hen.’

‘And we’re the cocks,’ the other had laughed immediately – showing his swinging uvula – by way of admitting it was a pretty bad joke. Hen was the Chinese term for whore, and the cocks, or cockerels, were the pimps. It seemed he had suddenly pictured what Yoyo might do to him if Xin were to pass on his tasteless little comment.

Could they pass on a message to Yoyo for him?

Xin asked when they had last seen Yoyo.

On the evening of 23 May, they said. The three of them had cooked and knocked back a few bottles of beer together. Afterwards, Yoyo had gone to her room, but then left the house later that same night.

At what time?

Late, Grand Cherokee seemed to remember. Around two or three in the morning. The other guy, Zhang Li, shrugged his shoulders. But since then neither of them had seen her.

Xin thought for a moment.

‘Your flatmate could be in trouble,’ he said. ‘I can’t go into it in more detail right now, but her family are very worried.’

‘Are you a policeman?’ Zhang wanted to know.

‘No. I’m someone who was sent to help Yoyo.’ He gave each of them a meaningful look. ‘And I’ve also been authorised to show my gratitude for any help in an appropriate manner. Please tell Yoyo that she can reach me on this number at any time.’ Xin gave Grand Cherokee a card on which there was nothing but a mobile number. ‘And if either of you has any more thoughts about where I might be able to find her—’

‘No idea,’ said Zhang, clearly uninterested, and disappeared into the next room.

Grand Cherokee watched him go and shuffled from one leg to the other. Xin paused in the doorway to give the boy the chance to take the offensive. Just as he’d expected, he got straight to the point – although in hushed tones – as soon as his pal was out of sight.

‘I could find something out for you,’ he said. ‘For a price, of course.’

‘Of course,’ echoed Xin, smiling a little.

‘Just to cover my costs, you know. I mean… there are a few clues, about where she is, and I could—’

Xin slid his right hand into his jacket and pulled it back out with a few notes.

‘Could I perhaps take a quick look around her room?’

‘I can’t do that,’ said Grand Cherokee, shocked. ‘She would never—’

‘It would be for her own safety.’ Xin lowered his voice. ‘Between you and me, the police could turn up here. I don’t want them finding anything that could incriminate Yoyo.’

‘Oh, of course. It’s just—’

‘I understand.’ Xin moved to put the notes back in his pocket.

‘No, wait – I—’

‘Yes?’

Grand Cherokee stared at the money and tried to tell Xin something without using words. It was clear what he wanted. The language of greed doesn’t need vocabulary. Xin reached back into his jacket and increased the offer. The boy gnawed on his lower lip, then took the notes and nodded his head towards the corridor.

‘Last door on the right. Should I—’

‘Thanks. I’ll find my way. And as I said – if you should have any clues—’

‘I do!’ Grand Cherokee’s eyes started to glisten. ‘I just need to make a few calls, speak to a few people. Hey, I’ll take you to Yoyo as soon as I’ve got things sorted! Although—’

‘Yes?’

‘I might have to bribe a few people here and there.’

‘Are we talking about an advance?’

‘Something like that.’

Xin saw the lie in Grand Cherokee’s eyes. You don’t know a thing, he thought, but it’s possible that your greed might lead you to find something out. You’ll be in touch sooner or later. You’re too sharp not to cash in on this. He pressed two more notes into his hand and left.

That was yesterday.

So far he had heard nothing from the boy, but Xin wasn’t worried. He reckoned he would receive a call sometime in the course of the afternoon. He turned his attention to his sushi: just tuna, salmon and mackerel, all of the highest quality. The cuisine of the Japanese restaurant on the fifty-sixth floor of the Jin Mao Tower left little to be desired, that is if you ignored the oversights in how the dishes were presented. The restaurant was part of the Jin Mao Grand Hyatt, which occupied the top thirty-five floors of what had once been China’s tallest building. By now, the Jin Mao Tower had been outflanked a dozen times in Shanghai alone – first in 2008 by the neighbouring World Financial Center, which also contained a Hyatt – and yet the aura of excess still clung to its outdated ambience. It reflected a time when China had begun to seek new self-awareness between communism, Confucius and capital, and had found it just as much in reminiscences of the imperial past as in the Art Deco aesthetic of colonialism. Xin liked that, even if he had to admit that staying in the new place was a more stylish experience. He was drawn here by the idea that he could subject his presence to a concept shaped not by emotions but by cold agreement with the principles of order, ultimately the secret formula of perfection. Kenny Xin was born in 1988, and the Jin Mao Tower surrendered itself to the number eight like the human to the genome. Deng Xiaoping had completed the design of the building at eighty-eight years of age, and the inauguration ceremony took place on 28 August 1998. Eighty-eight floors were stacked on top of one another and formed a construction in which every segment was an eighth smaller than the base with its sixteen storeys. The steel joists the tower rested on measured 80 metres. The eight could be seen in everything. By 2015 the building had 79 lifts, a flaw which was remedied by creating a lift just for the staff.

There were, of course, a few small imperfections in the otherwise exemplary conception. For example, the fact that the tower only swung a maximum of 75 cm back and forth in a storm or earthquake. Xin wondered how the constructors could have overlooked that kind of mistake in its mathematical beauty. He was no architect, and perhaps there was no other way, but what were five centimetres against the priority of perfection? Compared with the order of the cosmos, even the Jin Mao Tower looked like a messy child’s bedroom.

With one of his manicured fingers, Xin pushed the sushi tray away from him and a little to the left, then placed the bottle of Tsingtao beer and its accompanying glass behind it at an equal distance. It looked better to him already. He was far from subscribing to the obscene order principles of people who put everything at a right angle. Occasionally he even saw the purest order in the appearance of chaos. What could be more perfect than total homogeneity without imperfections, just as a perfectly empty spirit resembles the cosmic ideal, and every thought is a form of contamination, unless you summon it deliberately and dismiss it again at will. To control the mind is to control the world. Xin smiled as he made a few more corrections, shifting the small bowl for the soy sauce, breaking the chopsticks apart and laying them parallel in front of him. In its own way, wasn’t Shanghai a wonderful chaos too? Or rather a secret plan, an ordering of capriciousness which only revealed itself to the educated observer?

Xin pushed a few clumps of rice a little further apart on the wooden board until their appearance appealed to him.

He began to eat.

Xintiandi

When Jericho looked back, his life in China seemed like a confused succession of dangerous risks and escapes, all encircled by soundproofed walls and building sites, in the shadow of which he had striven to improve his financial state with the industriousness of an animal burrowing a hole. In the end, the hard slog had shown results. His bank manager began to seem more like a friend. Dossiers about shares in deep-sea vessels, water treatment plants, shopping centres and skyscrapers were presented to him. The whole world seemed intent on making him aware of all the things he could spend his money on. Clasped against the bosom of better society, respected and overworked, Jericho ended up paralysed by his own achievements, too exhausted to add the final chapter to the story of his nomadic life by moving to the kind of area it would be worth growing old in. The step was long overdue, but the thought of packing up yet again made him go cold. So he gave priority to lying wearily on the sofa in the evenings as floodlights and construction noise leaked through the curtains, watching feature films and murmuring the mantra I-have-toget-out-of-here to himself, then falling asleep in the process.

It was around this time that Jericho began to seriously doubt the point of his existence.

He hadn’t doubted it when Joanna had lured him to Shanghai, only to leave him three months later. He hadn’t doubted it when he’d realised he didn’t have enough money for the flight back, nor to rebuild the life he’d left behind in London. He hadn’t doubted in his first Shanghai digs on the edge of a highway, where he’d lived on damp floors and struggled to squeeze a few litres of brown water from the shower every morning, the windows of the two-storey house rattling lightly from the never-relenting traffic.

He had just told himself it could only get better.

And it had.

To start with, Jericho had offered his services to foreign enterprises that had come out to Shanghai to do business. Many felt insecure within the fragile framework of Chinese copyright protection legislation. They felt spied on and cheated. With time, though, the self-service mentality of the dragon had given way to great remorse. While, at the beginning of the century, China had still happily plagiarised everything hackers unearthed from the depths of the global ideas pool, now even Chinese business people were increasingly despairing about their state’s inability to protect ideas. They too began to be on the receiving end of the words ‘It seemed worthy of imitation to us’, which was a polite way of saying ‘Of course we stole it, but we admire you for having created it.’ For years, the Long-Nose accusations that Chinese companies and institutions had stolen their intellectual property had been indignantly rejected or not even acknowledged, but Jericho found that now it was Chinese companies, above all, who needed web detectives. Native entrepreneurs reacted excitedly to the fact that, during his time with Scotland Yard helping to build up the department for Cyber Crime, he had been fighting against them. In their opinion, it could only be advantageous to have their patents protected by someone who had previously done such an excellent job of clobbering them when they crossed the line.

Because the problem – an undulating, proliferating, all-enveloping, truly uncontrollable monster of a problem – was that China’s creative elite would go on cannibalising itself so long as a nationally and internationally accepted and implementable system for the protection of intellectual property rights remained elusive. It had always been obvious that capitalism, practically reinvented by China, was based upon property rights, and that an economy whose most important asset was knowhow couldn’t exist without the protection of brands, patents and copyright, but it hadn’t really interested anyone – not, that is, until the day when they themselves became victims of the situation. By now, the country suffering the most economic damage at the hands of Chinese espionage was China itself. Everyone was digging around in other people’s front gardens, and with electronic spades wherever possible. The hunting ground was the global net, and Owen Jericho was one of the hunters, commissioned by other hunters as soon as they got the impression that they themselves were the quarry.

Once Jericho became part of that network without which no favours would be done and no trade negotiated in China, his career ascended like a rocket. He moved five times in five years, twice of his own free will, the other times because the houses he was living in at the time were to be pulled down for reasons he could no longer remember. He moved to better areas, wider streets, nicer houses, getting ever closer to realising his dream of moving into one of the rebuilt shikumen houses, with stone gateways and peaceful inner courtyards, located in the pulsating heart of Shanghai. Even though he had to make compromises along the way, he had never doubted it would happen at some point.

One day, his bank manager asked him what he was waiting for. Jericho replied that he wasn’t quite there yet, but would be someday. The bank manager made him aware of his bank balance and said that ‘someday’ was, in fact, now. With the revelation that he’d been working so hard he hadn’t paid attention to the possibilities now open to him, Jericho left the bank and teetered home in a daze.

He hadn’t realised he had come so far.

With the realisation came the doubts. They claimed they’d always been there, but that he had avoided acknowledging them. They whispered: What the devil are you doing here anyway? How did you even get here?

How could this happen to you?

They told him that it had all been for nothing, and that the worst position anyone could ever find themselves in was that of having achieved their goals. Hope blossoms beneath the shelter of provisional arrangements, often for a whole lifetime. Now, suddenly, it had become official. He was to become a Shanghaian, but had he ever wanted that? To settle in a city he would never have moved to without Joanna?

As long as you were on the journey, said the doubts, you didn’t have to think about the destination. Welcome to commitment.

In the end – he lived in a fairly prestigious high-rise in the hinterland of Pudong, the financial district, the only drawback of which was the fact that more skyscrapers were being constructed around it, that and the noise and a fine brown dust which settled in the windowsills and airways – it took a further eviction by the city authorities to shake him from his lethargy. Two smiling men paid him a visit, let him serve them tea and then explained that the house he was living in had to give way to an utterly amazing new-build. If he so wished, they would gladly reserve an apartment in it for him. But a further move for the duration of the coming year would, much to their regret, be unavoidable. To which end, the authorities considered themselves overjoyed to be able to offer him an apartment near Luchao Harbour City, a mere sixty kilometres outside Shanghai – which, for a metropolis lovingly embracing other towns in the course of its expansion, wasn’t really outside at all. Oh, yes, and they wanted to start work in four weeks, so if he could – you know. It wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened, and they said they were very sorry, but they weren’t really.

Jericho had stared at the delegates as the wonderful certainty of having just awoken from a coma streamed through him. Suddenly, he could smell the world again, taste it, feel it. He shook hands with the baffled men gratefully, assuring them they had done him a great service. And that they could send whomever they wanted to Luchao Harbour City. Then he had phoned Tu Tian and, in keeping with matters of decorum, had asked whether he might know someone who knew someone who knew whether there was a renovated or newly built shikumen house in a lively corner of Shanghai, vacant and which could be moved into at short notice. Mr Tu, who prided himself on being Jericho’s most satisfied client as well as his good friend, was the first port of call for questions such as these. He managed a mid-size technology company, was on good terms with the city’s powers that be, and happily declared that he would be willing to ‘keep an ear to the ground’.

Fourteen days later, Jericho signed the rental contract for a floor in one of the most beautiful shikumen houses, situated in Xintiandi, one of the most popular areas of Shanghai, and which could be moved into right away. It was a new-build of course. There weren’t any genuine old shikumen houses left, and there hadn’t been for a long time. The last ones had been torn down shortly after the world exhibition of 2010, and yet Xintiandi could still be classified as a stronghold of shikumen architecture just as in similar fashion the old town of Shanghai was anything but old.

Jericho didn’t ask who had had to move out to make it vacant. He hoped the apartment really had been empty, put his signature on the document and didn’t give any more thought to what favour Tu Tian might ask for in return. He knew he owed Tu. So he prepared for his move and waited humbly for what was to come.

And it came sooner than expected. In the form of Chen Hongbing and an unpleasant commission which there was no way of getting out of without insulting Tu.

Shortly after Chen left, Jericho set up his computer terminal. He washed his face, combed his dishevelled hair into some semblance of order and pulled on a fresh T-shirt. Making himself comfortable in front of the screen, he let the system dial the number. Two T’s appeared on the screen, each one melting into the other, the symbol of Tu Technologies. The next moment, an attractive woman in her mid-forties was smiling at him. She was seated in a tastefully decorated room with lounge furniture and floor-to-ceiling windows which offered a glimpse of Pudong’s skyline. She was drinking something from a tiny porcelain cup which Jericho knew to be strawberry tea. Naomi Liu would kill for strawberry tea.

‘Good afternoon, Naomi.’

‘Good afternoon, Owen. How’s the move going?’

‘Fantastically, thank you.’

‘I’m pleased to hear it. Mr Tu told me you’re having one of our big new terminals delivered.’

‘Yes, this evening, I hope.’

‘How exciting.’ She put the cup down on a transparent surface which seemed to sway in thin air, and looked at him from beneath her lowered lashes. ‘Then I’ll soon be able to see you from head to toe.’

‘That’s nothing compared to the excitement of seeing you.’ Jericho leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘Anyone would swear that you’re sitting right here in front of me.’

‘And that’s enough for you?’

‘Of course not.’

‘I’m worried it might be. It will be enough, and you’ll see no reason any more to invite me around personally. I think I’ll have to convince my boss not to deliver the thing to you after all.’

‘No holographic program could compare to you, Naomi.’

‘Tell him that.’ She nodded her head in the direction of Tu’s office. ‘Otherwise he might come up with the idea of replacing me with one.’

‘I would break off all business connections in an instant if he did that. Is he—?’

‘Yes, he’s here. Take care. I’ll put you through.’

Jericho enjoyed their little flirting ritual. Naomi Liu was the conduit for all forms of contact with Tu Tian. Having her on his side could be useful. And Jericho wouldn’t have hesitated for a second in inviting her to his apartment, but she would never have taken him up on the offer. She was happily married and the mother of two children.

The shimmering double T rotated again briefly, then Tu’s huge head appeared on the screen. The little hair he had left was concentrated just above his ears, where it was grey and bristly. Narrow glasses were balanced on his nose. The left arm looked as if it was held together by transparent sticky-tape. Tu had pushed his sleeves up and was shovelling sticky-looking noodles into his mouth, fishing them out of a paper box with clattering chopsticks. The large desk behind him was full of screens and holo-projectors. In between were piles of hard disks, remote controls, brochures, cardboard boxes and the remains of various packaging.

‘No, you’re not interrupting,’ mumbled Tu with his mouth full, as if Jericho had expressed any concern on the matter.

‘I can see that. Have you ever been to your canteen, by the way? They make fresh food there.’

‘So?’

‘Proper food.’

‘This is proper food. I poured boiling water on it and it turned into food.’

‘Do you even know what it’s supposed to be? Does it say anything on the packaging?’

‘It says something or other.’ Tu carried on chewing steadily. His rubbery lips moved around like copulating rubber tubes. ‘People with your anarchic sense of time management wouldn’t understand perhaps, but there are reasons for eating in the office.’

Jericho gave up. As long as he’d known Tu, he’d hardly ever seen him devour a healthy, decent meal. It seemed as though the manager had set himself the task of ruining the Chinese cuisine’s reputation as the best, most varied and freshest in the world. He might be a genial inventor and a gifted golf-player – but when it came to culinary matters, he made Kublai Khan look like the father of all gourmets.

‘So what were you celebrating?’ he asked, with a glance at the chaos in Tu’s office.

‘We were testing something out.’ Tu reached for a bottle of water, washed down the noodles in his mouth and burped audibly. ‘Holo-Cops. A commission from the traffic-control authorities. They function excellently in the dark, but sunlight is still giving them problems. It corrodes them.’ He chortled with laughter. ‘Like vampires.’

‘What does the city want with holographic policemen?’

Tu looked at him in amazement.

‘To regulate the traffic, what else? Another one of the real ones was run over last week, didn’t you read about it? He was standing in the middle of the Siping Lu crossing in Dalian Xilu when one of the furniture transporters raced right into him and distributed him evenly all over the tarmac. It was a huge mess, screaming children, angry letters! No one regulates the traffic voluntarily any more.’

‘Since when did the police care whether things are voluntary?’

‘They don’t, Owen, but it’s a question of economics. They’re losing too many officers. Being a traffic policeman tops the list of most dangerous jobs right now, and most of them would rather be assigned to tracking down and catching mentally disturbed mass-murderers. And, well, there’s the humane aspect too, no one wants dead policemen. It’s no problem at all if a Holo-Cop gets run over, it even still manages to file a report about it. The projection sends a signal to the computer, including the car make and number plate.’

‘Interesting,’ said Jericho. ‘And how are the holographic tour guides coming along?’

‘Ah!’ Tu wiped the corner of his mouth clean with a serviette, one which had clearly had to assist with several other mealtimes too. ‘You had a visitor.’

‘Yes, I had a visitor.’

‘And?’

‘Your friend is terribly sad. What happened to him?’

‘I told you. He ate bitterness.’

‘And beyond that it’s none of my business, I get the picture. So let’s talk about his daughter.’

‘Yoyo!’ Tu stroked his hand over his stomach. ‘Be honest now, isn’t she sensational?’

‘Without a doubt.’

Jericho was intrigued as to whether Tu would talk about the girl on a public phone line. It was true that all telephone conversations were recorded by the authorities, but in reality the observation apparatus rarely followed up on the analysis, even though sophisticated programs pre-selected the recordings. As early as the end of the previous century, within the context of their worldwide Ecelon Program, American Secret Services had introduced software which was able to recognise key words, with the result that you could be arrested just for mentioning the word ice-bomb three times in succession when planning Grandma’s birthday party. Modern programs by contrast were, to a certain extent, perfectly able to understand the meaning of the conversation and create priority lists. But they were still incapable of recognising irony. Humour and double-meanings were alien to them, which forced the spies themselves to listen in, just like in the old times, as soon as words like dissident or Tiananmen massacre came up. As expected, Tu merely said:

‘And now you want a date with the girl, right?’

Jericho grinned cheerlessly. He knew it. There were going to be difficulties.

‘If it can be arranged.’

‘Well, she has such high standards,’ said Tu craftily. ‘Perhaps I should give you a few useful pieces of advice, my dear boy. Will you be in the area in the next few hours at all?’

‘I have things to do in Bund. I should be free later.’

‘Excellent! Take the ferry. The weather’s lovely, let’s meet in Lujiazui Green.’

Pudong

Lujiazui Green was a picturesque park surrounded by skyscrapers, not far from Jin Mao Tower and the WFC. Tu sat on a bench on the bank of the small lake, basking in the sun. As usual, he was wearing sunglasses over his normal glasses. His crumpled shirt had worked its way almost entirely out of his waistband and was straining at the buttons. Patches of his white belly peeped through the gaps. Jericho sat down next to him and stretched out his legs.

‘Yoyo is a dissident,’ he said.

Tu turned his head round to him lethargically. His eyes couldn’t be seen behind the crooked construction of glasses and sunglasses.

‘I thought you would have picked that up from our conversation on the golf course.’

‘That’s not what I mean. What I mean is that the case is a little different to my normal ones. This time I’m supposed to look for a dissident in order to protect her.’

‘A former dissident.’

‘Her father sees that differently. Why would Yoyo have gone underground, if not out of fear? Unless she’s been arrested. You said yourself that she has a tendency to aggravate the wrong people. Perhaps she crossed someone who was a little too big for her.’

‘And what are you planning to do?’

‘You know exactly what I’m going to do,’ snorted Jericho. ‘I’m going to look for Yoyo of course.’

Tu nodded. ‘That’s very generous of you.’

‘No, it goes without saying. The only snag is that I’ll have to work without the authorities this time. So I need any information there is about Yoyo and her world, and that’s where I’m relying on your help. My impression of Chen Hongbing was that he’s extremely honourable and incredibly private. Perhaps he just turns a blind eye; in any case, getting information from him was like trying to get blood from a stone.’

‘What did he tell you?’

‘He gave me Yoyo’s new address. A few films and photos. And dropped a whole load of hints.’

Fumbling, Tu took the sunglasses down from his nose and tried to push the remaining glasses into a reasonably straight position. Jericho noticed that he hadn’t been mistaken: the left arm really was bound with sticky-tape. He wondered, not for the first time, why Tu didn’t get his eyes lasered or switch to photochromic contact lenses. Hardly anyone wore glasses for the purpose of improving their eyesight any more. They were just eking out an existence as fashion items, and fashion was as alien to Tu Tian as the atomic age was to a Neanderthal.

They were silent for a while. Jericho blinked in the sunlight and watched an aeroplane pass by.

‘So’ said Tu. ‘Ask your questions.’

‘There’s nothing to ask. Tell me something about Yoyo that I don’t know yet.’

‘She’s actually called Yuyun—’

‘Chen told me that much.’

‘—and belongs to a group who call themselves Guardians. I bet he didn’t tell you that, right?’

‘Guardians.’ Jericho whistled softly through his teeth.

‘You’ve heard of them?’

‘I sure have. Internet guerrillas. Dedicated to human rights, raising the profile of old stories like Tiananmen, attacks on government and industry networks. They’re really putting the wind up the Party.’

‘And they’re right to be nervous. Guardians are of a completely different calibre to our sweet little Titanium Mouse.’

Liu Di, the woman who called herself Titanium Mouse, was one of the pioneers of internet dissidence. At the start of the millennium she had begun to publish edgy little commentaries online about the political elite, initially under the pseudonym of Stainless Steel Mouse. Realising that it wasn’t as easy to imprison virtual people as it was those of flesh and blood, Beijing’s leadership began to get very nervous. These dissidents showed presence, without being present.

The head of the Beijing secret police remarked that the new threat gave cause for extreme concern and that an enemy without a face was the worst kind, a conclusion that grossly overestimated the first generation of net dissidents – most didn’t even contemplate disguising their identity, and even the ones who did made other mistakes sooner or later.

The Stainless Steel Mouse, for example, had walked right into their trap when she assured the founder of a new democratic party of her support, not knowing it was an official assigned to her case. As a result of which she was dragged off to a police station and imprisoned for a year without trial. After that, however, the Party learned their next lesson: that it may be possible to make people disappear behind walls, but not on the internet. There, Liu Di’s case gained significance, made the rounds in China and attracted the attention of the foreign media. Suddenly, the whole world was aware of this shy, twenty-one-year-old woman, who hadn’t even meant any of it that seriously. And that turned out to be the powerful, faceless enemy the Party had cowered so fearfully from.

After her release, Liu Di upgraded from steel to a stronger metal. Titanium Mouse had learned something. She declared war on an apparatus that Mao couldn’t have thought up in his wildest dreams: Cypol, the Chinese Internet Police. She routed internet forums via servers abroad and created her blogs with the help of programs that filtered out incriminating words as she wrote. Others followed her example, became increasingly sophisticated in their methods, and by then the Party really did have cause to worry. While veterans like Titanium Mouse made no secret of their true identity, Guardians were haunting the net like phantoms. Tracking them down would have required ingenious traps, and although Beijing kept setting them, so far no one had been caught.

‘Even today, the Party still has no idea how many of them there actually are. Sometimes they think they’re dealing with dozens, sometimes just a few. A cancerous ulcer in any case, one which will eat away at our magnificent, happy and healthy People’s Republic from the inside.’ Tu hacked up some phlegm and spat it in front of his feet. ‘Now, we know what comes out of Beijing, predominantly rumours and very little of anything that makes sense, so how big do you think the organisation really is?’

Jericho thought about it. He couldn’t remember ever having heard of a Guardian being imprisoned.

‘Oh sure, now and then they arrest someone and claim that person is one of them!’ said Tu, as if he had read Jericho’s thoughts. ‘But I happen to know for certain that they haven’t made one successful arrest yet. Unbelievable, isn’t it? I mean, they’re hunting an army, so you’d think there’d be prisoners of war.’

‘They’re hunting something that looks like an army,’ said Jericho.

‘You’re getting close.’

‘But the army doesn’t exist. There are only a few of them, but they know how to keep slipping through the investigators’ nets. So the Party exaggerates them. Makes them seem more dangerous and intelligent than they really are, to distract from the fact that the State still hasn’t managed to pull a handful of hackers out of the online traffic.’

‘And what do you conclude from that?’

‘That for one of Beijing’s honourable servants you know a suspicious amount about a bunch of internet dissidents.’ Jericho looked at Tu, frowning. ‘Is it just my imagination, or are you playing some part in the game too?’

‘Why don’t you just come out and ask if I’m one of them?’

‘I just did.’

‘The answer is no. But I can tell you that the entire group consists of six people. There were never more than that.’

‘And Yoyo is one of them?’

‘Well.’ Tu rubbed his neck. ‘Yes and no.’

‘Which means?’

‘She’s the brains behind it. Yoyo brought the Guardians to life.’

Jericho smirked. In the distorting mirror of the internet, anything was possible. The Guardians’ presence suggested they were a larger group, potentially capable of spying on government secrets. Their actions were well thought out, the background research always exemplary. It all created the illusion of being an extensive network, but in actual fact that was thanks to their multitude of sympathisers, who were neither affiliated to the group nor possessed knowledge about their structure. On closer inspection the Guardians’ entire activism boiled down to a small, conspiring hacker community. And yet—

‘—they have to be constantly up to date,’ murmured Jericho.

Tu jabbed his elbow into his ribs. ‘Are you talking to me?’

‘What? No. I mean, yes. How old is Yoyo again?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘No twenty-five-year-old girl is cunning enough to outmanoeuvre the State Security in the long term.’

‘Yoyo is extraordinarily intelligent.’

‘That’s not what I mean. The State may be limping behind the hackers, but they’re not completely stupid. You can’t get past the Diamond Shield using conventional methods, so sooner or later you’ll have the Internet Police knocking at your door. Yoyo must have access to programs which enable her to always be a step ahead of them.’

Tu shrugged his shoulders.

‘Which means that she knows how to use them.’ Jericho spun the web further. ‘Who are the other members?’

‘Some guys. Students like Yoyo.’

‘And how do you know all this?’

‘Yoyo told me.’

‘She told you.’ Jericho paused. ‘But she didn’t tell Chen?’

‘Well, she tried. It’s just that Chen won’t hear any of it. He doesn’t listen to her, so she comes to me.’

‘Why you?’

‘Owen, you don’t have to know everything—’

‘But I want to understand.’

Tu sighed and stroked his bald head.

‘Let’s just say I help Yoyo to understand her father. Or, that’s what she hopes to get from me in any case.’ He raised a finger. ‘And don’t ask what there is to understand. That has nothing whatsoever to do with you!’

‘You speak in puzzles just as much as Chen does,’ boomed Jericho, aggravated.

‘On the contrary. I’m showing you an excessive amount of trust.’

‘Then trust me more. If I’m going to find Yoyo, I need to know the names of the other Guardians. I have to find them, question them.’

‘Just assume the others have gone underground too.’

‘Or were arrested.’

‘Hardly. Years ago I had the opportunity to get a close look at the cogs of the State welfare services, the places where they look inside your head and declare you to be infested with all kinds of insanity. I know those types. If they had arrested the Guardians, they would have been boasting about it at the tops of their voices for a while now. It’s one thing to make people disappear, but if someone’s running rings around you, making you look like a fool in public, then you put their head on a spear as soon as you catch them. Yoyo has caused the Party a great deal of grief. They won’t stand for it.’

‘How did Yoyo even get into all this?’

‘The way young people always get into things like this. She identified with zi you, with freedom.’ Tu poked around between his shirt buttons and scratched his belly. ‘You’ve been living here for a good while, Owen, and I think you understand my people pretty well by now. Or, let’s put it this way, you understand what you see. But a few things are still closed off from you. Everything that takes place in the Middle Kingdom today is the logical consequence of developments and breakthroughs throughout our history. I know, that sounds like something from a travel guide. Europeans always think this whole yin and yang business, this insistence on tradition, is just folklorist nonsense intended to disguise the fact that we’re just a band of greedy imitators who want to make their stamp on the world, continually damage human rights and who, since Mao, have no more ideals. But for two thousand years, Europe was like a pot which continually had new things thrown into it; it was a patchwork of clashing identities. You’ve all overrun each other, made your neighbours’ customs and ways your own, even while you were still fighting them. Huge empires came and went as if in time-lapse. For a while it was the Romans having their say, then the French, then the Germans and the Brits. You talk of a united Europe, and yet you speak in more languages than you can possibly understand, and as if that weren’t enough, you import Asia, America and the Balkans too. You’re incapable of understanding how a nation that for the most part was entirely self-sufficient and self-contained – because it felt the Middle Kingdom didn’t need to know what was outside its borders – finds it hard to accept the new, especially when it’s brought in from the outside.’

‘You guys certainly know how to brush that one under the carpet,’ snorted Jericho. ‘You drive German, French and Korean cars, wear Italian shoes, watch American films; I can’t think of any other nationality that has turned more to the outside in recent years than yours.’

‘Turned to the outside?’ Tu laughed drily. ‘Nicely put, Owen. And what comes to light when you turn to the outside? Whatever’s inside. But what is it that you see? What exactly are we turning towards the outside? Only what you recognise. You wanted us to open up? We did that, in the eighties under Deng Xiaoping. You wanted to do business with us? You’re doing it. Everything that Chinese emperors didn’t want from you over the centuries, we’ve bought from you in a matter of a few years, and you sold it to us willingly. Now we’re selling it back to you, and you buy it! And on top of all that you have a fancy for a good portion of authentic China. And you get that too, but you don’t like it. You get all worked up about us walking all over human rights, but in essence you just don’t understand how anyone can be imprisoned for his opinion in a land that drinks Coca-Cola. That doesn’t compute to you. Your ethnologists lament the disappearance of the last cannibals and plead for the preservation of their living space, but woe betide them if they start to do business and wear ties. If they did, you’d want them to downgrade back to chicken and vegetables in the blink of an eye.’

‘Tian, with the best will in the world, I don’t know—’

‘Do you realise that the term zi you was only exported to China in the middle of the nineteenth century?’ Tu continued obstinately. ‘Five thousand years of Chinese history weren’t enough to create it, nor were they enough for min zhu, democracy, or ren quan, human rights. But what does zi you mean? To stay true to yourself. To make you and your point of view the starting point for everything you do, not the dogma of how the masses think and feel. You might argue that the demonisation of the individual is a Maoist invention, but you’d be wrong. Mao Zedong was merely a dreadful variant on our age-old fear of being ourselves. Perhaps a just punishment, because we had cooled off in our conviction that all the people outside China were barbarians. When China was forced to open itself up to the Western powers, we were completely ignorant of what every other people with experience of colonialism knew intuitively. We wrongly believed we were the hosts, whereas in reality the guests had long since become the owners. Mao wanted to change that, but he didn’t just try to turn back the wheels of history, as the Ayatollahs went on to do in Iran. His efforts were focused on undoing history and isolating China on the summit of his ignorance. That just won’t work with a people who think, feel and criticise. That only works with robots. Pu Yi wasn’t our last Emperor; Mao was, if you see what I mean. He was the most horrific of them all: he stole everything from us, our language, our culture, our identity. He betrayed every ideal we had and all he left behind was a pile of rubble.’

Tu Tian paused, his fleshy lips twitching. Sweat shimmered on his bald head.

‘You asked how Yoyo could have become a dissident? I’ll tell you, Owen. Because she doesn’t want to live with the trauma that my generation and my parents’ generation will never be able to come to terms with. But if she wants to help an entire people find their identity, she can’t quote the spirit of the French revolution, nor the foundation of Spanish democracy, nor the end of Mussolini or Hitler, the fall of Napoleon or of the Roman Empire. History may have equipped Europe with the inconceivable eloquence it needs to formulate its demands, but we have long lacked even the simplest words to do so. Oh, sure, China sparkles! China is rich and beautiful and Shanghai is the centre of the world, where everything is permitted and nothing is impossible. We’ve drawn even with the United States, two economic giants neck to neck, and we’re on our way to becoming number one. But amidst all this shine our lives are impoverished on the inside, and we’re aware of this poverty. We’re not turning to the outside, Owen, it just seems like that. If we did turn to the outside, you would see the emptiness, like a transparent squid. We look to abroad for examples to follow, because the last Chinese example we had betrayed us. Yoyo suffers from being a child of this hollowed-out age more than the self-satisfied critics of globalisation and human rights infringements in Europe and America could ever imagine. You only see our transgressions, not the steps we’re taking. Not what we’ve already achieved. Not the unimaginable toil necessary to stand up for ideals, to even formulate them, without any moral legacy!’

Jericho blinked in the glistening sunlight. He wanted to ask when Chen Hongbing’s heart had been torn out, but he didn’t say a word. Tu wheezed and swept his hand over his bald head nervously.

‘That’s what makes people like Yoyo bitter. If someone in England takes to the streets and demands freedom, the most that will happen is that someone might ask them what for. In China we’ve been labouring under the illusion that our crazy economic upturn would automatically bring freedom along with it, but we had no idea what freedom actually is.

‘For over twenty years now, everything in our country has revolved around this word, everyone sings the joys of the individual way of life, but in the end all it means is the freedom to conform. People don’t like talking about the other freedom because it questions by implication whether a Communist Party which is no longer communist has any right to absolute rule. The left-wing tyranny has become a right-wing one, Owen, and that in turn has become one without any substance. We live in a consumers’ dictatorship, and woe betide anyone who comes and complains that there’re still the issues of the farmers and the migrant workers and the executions and the economic support of pariah states and so on.’

Jericho rubbed his chin.

‘I consider myself very lucky that you would honour me with all these explanations,’ he said. ‘But I’d be much happier if you could get back to Yoyo.’

‘Forgive an old man, Owen.’ Tu looked at him, his face furrowed. ‘But I’ve been talking about Yoyo the whole time.’

‘Yes, but without telling me about her personal background.’

‘Owen, as I already said—’

‘I know,’ sighed Jericho. His gaze wandered over the glass and steel panels of the Jin Mao Tower. ‘It’s none of my business.’

Jin Mao Tower

Behind one of the panels, Xin stood staring out at the stifling sauna of the Shanghai afternoon. He had retreated to his spacious Art Deco suite on the seventy-third floor. It had floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides, but even from this exposed viewpoint there was nothing to see but architecture. The higher up one was, the more identical the individual blocks of apartments and offices looked, as if thousands upon thousands of termite tribes had taken up quarters alongside one another.

He dialled a tap-proof number on his mobile.

Someone answered. The screen stayed black.

‘What have you found out about the girl?’ asked Xin, without wasting any time on pleasantries.

‘Very little,’ answered the voice in his ear, the time lag barely noticeable. ‘Only confirmation of what we already feared. She’s an activist.’

‘Well known?’

‘Yes and no. Some of her files suggest we’re dealing with a member of a group of internet dissidents who call themselves Guardians. A faction who are becoming a real nuisance to the Party with their demands for democracy.’

‘You mean that Yoyo didn’t intentionally seek us out?’

‘We can probably rule that out. Pure coincidence. We scanned her hard drives faster than she could switch them off, which suggests the attack surprised her. We didn’t manage to destroy her computer though. She must have a highly efficient security system, and unfortunately that doesn’t bode well. We’re now convinced that fragments – at least – of our transfer data are now in Yuyun – er, Yoyo’s computer.’

‘She won’t be able to do much with it,’ said Xin contemptuously. ‘The encoding went through the strictest of tests.’

‘In any other circumstances I would agree with you. But the way Yoyo’s protection is set up means she could have decoding programs which are much more advanced than the norm. We wouldn’t have asked you to come to Shanghai if we weren’t seriously concerned about this.’

‘I’m as worried as you are. But what concerns me most is how sketchy your information is, if I may be so honest.’

‘And what have you found out?’ asked the voice, without responding to Xin’s comment.

‘I went to her apartment. Two flatmates. One knows nothing, and the other says he could take me to her. He wants money of course.’

‘Do you trust him?’

‘Are you crazy? I have no choice but to follow every lead. He’ll be in touch, but I’ve no idea what will come of it.’

‘Did she not mention any relatives to either of the flatmates?’

‘Yoyo doesn’t exactly seem that communicative. They were having some drinks together on the night of 23 May, then she disappeared sometime between two and three in the morning.’

A short pause followed.

‘That could fit,’ said the voice thoughtfully. ‘The contact materialised just before two, Chinese time.’

‘And then she immediately takes off.’ Xin smiled thinly. ‘Clever kid.’

‘Where else have you been?’

‘In her room. Nothing. No computer. She did a great job of clearing everything up before she disappeared. There’s no trace of her at the university either, and it wasn’t possible to see her file. I could arrange to do so, but I’d prefer it if you took care of that. I’m sure you can get into the university’s database.’

‘Which university?’

‘Shanghai University, Shangda Lu, in the Bao Shan District.’

‘Kenny, I don’t need to remind you how explosive this thing is. So step up the pace! We need this girl’s computer. Without fail!’

‘You’ll get it, and the girl,’ said Xin, ending the call.

He stared back out into the urban desert.

The computer. He had no doubt that Yoyo had it with her. Xin wondered what the reasons for her overhasty departure had been. She must have realised that someone had not only noticed her hacking and started a counter-attack on her system, but that they had also downloaded her data, and therefore knew her identity. That was reason enough for concern, but not to flee in panic. Quite a few networks protected themselves by launching a lightning attack to deactivate the computers which had intentionally or unintentionally hacked into theirs and, if possible, they transferred the hacker’s data right away. That alone wasn’t enough. There must have been something else to make Yoyo think she wasn’t safe any more.

There was only one possible explanation.

Yoyo had read something she wasn’t supposed to have read.

Which meant the encoding had temporarily failed. An error in the system. A hole had unexpectedly opened up and provided her access. If that was the case, the consequences really could be terrible! The question was how quickly the hole had closed up again. Not quickly enough, that much was clear; just that brief glimpse had been enough to make the girl take flight.

But how much did she really know?

He needed more than the computer. He had to find Yoyo before she had the chance to pass on what she knew. The only hope so far was Grand Cherokee Wang. Quite a poor hope, admittedly. But when had hope ever been more than certainty’s pitiful sister? In any case, the guy would sell Yoyo, and her computer included, the second she so much as set foot back in the apartment.

Xin frowned. Something in the way he was standing displeased him. He took a step backwards until he was positioned exactly between two joists, the tips of his shoes at equal distance from where the floor bordered the window.

There, that was better.

Pudong

‘I’ve known Yoyo since the day she was born,’ said Tu. ‘She was just like any normal teenager while she was growing up, her brain full of romantic ideas. Then she experienced something that changed her. Nothing spectacular, but I think it was one of those crossroads in life when you decide who you’re going to be. Have you heard of Mian Mian?’

‘The author?’

‘Yes, that’s the one.’

Jericho thought for a moment. ‘It must be an eternity since I read one of her books. She was a figurehead of the scene, right? Quite popular in Europe. I remember being amazed that she made it past the censorship.’

‘Oh, her books were banned for a long time! But by now she can do whatever she wants. When Shanghai declared itself to be the nightlife and party capital, she represented the area of conflict between glamour and the gutter, because she knew and could speak convincingly about both. Today, she’s a kind of patron saint of the local art scene. In her mid-fifties, established, even the Party uses her as a figurehead. In the summer of 2016 she gave a reading from her new novel, in Guan Di in Fuxing Park shortly before it was torn down, and Yoyo went along. Afterwards, she had the chance to speak with Mian Mian, and they ended up doing a crawl around the clubs and galleries which lasted many hours. After that, it was like she was intoxicated. You have to appreciate the symbolic coincidence, you see. Mian Mian started writing when she was sixteen, as an immediate consequence of her best friend committing suicide, and Yoyo had just turned sixteen.’

‘So she decided to become a writer.’

‘She decided to change the world. To some extent, it was romantically motivated, but she also had an admirably clear take on reality. At around that time my own star was beginning to rise. I knew Chen Hongbing from the nineties and liked him a great deal. He entrusted his daughter to me because he believed she could learn from me. Yoyo had always been very fond of the virtual world; she practically lived on the internet. She was particularly interested in the vanishing dividing lines between the actual world and the artificial one. In 2018 I was elected onto the board of Dao IT, and Yoyo was just getting to grips with her studies at the time. Chen supported her as much as he could, but she placed a lot of importance on earning her own money. When she heard I was taking over the department for Virtual Environments, she pestered me to find a job for her there.’

‘What did she study anyway?’

‘Journalism, politics and psychology. The first to learn how to write, the second to know what to write about, and psychology—’

‘To understand her father.’

‘She wouldn’t put it quite like that. The way she sees it, China is like a patient in constant danger of succumbing to insanity. So she looks for diagnoses for our diseased society. And that, of course, is where Chen Hongbing comes into the picture.’

‘She got her tools from you,’ ruminated Jericho.

‘Tools?’

‘Of course. When did you found Tu Technologies?’

‘2020.’

‘And Yoyo was there from the start?’

‘Of course.’ Tu’s expression seemed to clear. ‘Ah, I see.’

‘She’s been looking over your shoulder for years. You develop programs for everything under the sun.’

‘I already know what role we play in the Guardians, unintentionally of course! But beyond that I can assure you that none of my people would ever dream of technologically arming a dissident.’

‘Chen mentioned that she had already been arrested several times.’

‘It was actually only during her studies that she realised the true extent to which the authorities censor the internet. For someone who views the net as their natural habitat, closed doors can be incredibly frustrating.’

‘So she encountered the Diamond Shield.’

Anyone who tried to accelerate on the Chinese data highway soon found themselves up against virtual roadblocks. At the beginning of the millennium, fearing that the new medium could illuminate explosive topics, the Party had developed a highly armed defence program for net censorship, the Golden Shield, followed in 2020 by the Diamond Shield. With its help, an Internet Police force of over 150,000 rummaged their way though chat-rooms, blogs and forums. While the Golden Shield had been like a tracker dog, snuffling through the most far-flung corners of the web for terms like Tiananmen Massacre, Tibet, student revolts, freedom and human rights, the Diamond Shield was also able to recognise, to a certain extent, contextual meaning in the texts. This was the Party’s reaction to the so-called Bodyguard Programs. Titanium Mouse, for example, had figured out after her release how to put critical texts on the net which didn’t contain a single word that could be pounced on by the Golden Shield. To do this, she made use of a Bodyguard Program which rapped her on the knuckles, so to speak, while she was typing – if she used any incriminating terms, the Bodyguard would delete them, thus protecting her from herself. As a result the Diamond Shield paid less attention to keywords and instead assessed whole texts, connecting sayings and observations, inspecting the entries for double meanings and coding, and then raised the alarm if subversion was suspected.

Ironically, it was thanks to this very Cerberus that epoch-making advances were made in the hacker scene, enabling dissidents to unleash the maximum criticism with the minimum of risk. Of course, the Diamond Shield also blocked search engines and websites of foreign news agencies. The whole world had experienced the assassination of Kim Jong Un and the collapse of North Korea, but in the Chinese net none of it had ever happened. The bloody uprising against the junta in Burma might have taken place on Planet Earth, but not on Planet China. Anyone who tried to bring up the sites of Reuters or CNN could be sure of reprisal. To the same extent that the Wall of China was crumbling, the wall the Diamond Shield had erected around the country became stronger by the day, and yet so did the authorities’ fear. It wasn’t just the community of Chinese hackers who seemed to have sworn a solemn oath to shatter the Diamond Wall into a thousand pieces, but activists all around the world were working away on it too, some in the offices of European, Indian and American companies, Secret Services and government bases. The world was caught up in a cyber war, and, as the foremost aggressor, China was the key target for attack.

‘Compared with what was going on with hackers,’ explained Tu, ‘inside China and outside, Yoyo’s first steps in the net were kids’ stuff. With her big, indignantly wide eyes, she hit out at censorship and signed her name underneath in bold. She pleaded for freedom of opinion and demanded access to the inventories of information provided by Google, Alta Vista and so on. She entered into dialogue with like-minded people who thought chat-rooms could be barricaded against unwanted intruders just as easily as broom cupboards.’

‘Was she really that naïve?’

‘To start with, yes. It’s obvious that she wanted to impress Hongbing. In all seriousness, she really thought she was acting in accordance with his wishes. That he would be proud of his little dissident. But Hongbing was horrified.’

‘He tried to stop her from doing it.’

‘Yoyo was completely dumbfounded. She just couldn’t understand it. Chen became stubborn, and I tell you, he can be as stubborn as a mule! The more Yoyo pushed him to justify his negative reaction, the more he dug his heels in. She argued. She screamed. She cried. But he still wouldn’t talk to her. She realised he was worried for her of course, but it wasn’t like she’d called for the government to be overthrown, she’d just grumbled a bit.’

‘And so she confided in you.’

‘She said she thought her father was just a coward. I certainly didn’t let her get away with that one easily. I explained that I understood Hongbing’s motivations better than she did, which made her bitter at first. Naturally, she wanted to know why Hongbing didn’t trust his own daughter. I told her that his silence had nothing to do with lack of trust, but was related to something private. Do you have children, Owen?’

‘No.’

‘Well, they’re little emperors!’

Little Emperors. Jericho stiffened. What an idiot! It was only a few hours since he’d stopped being tormented by the images of that cellar in Shenzhen, and now Tu was starting on about little emperors.

‘They’re just as wonderful as they are demanding,’ Tu continued. ‘Yoyo too. Anyway, I made it clear to her that her father had a right to his own life, and that the mere occasion of her birth didn’t give her the right to trespass into the secret palaces of his soul, as it were. Children don’t understand that. They think their parents are just there to provide a service, existing only to look after them, useful at first, then dumb and ultimately just embarrassing. She defended herself by saying that Hongbing started all of their arguments, that he was trying to control her life, and in that, unfortunately, she was right. Hongbing should have explained to her what it was that had angered him so much.’

‘But he didn’t. So? Did you?’

‘He would never allow me to speak to Yoyo about that. Nor to anyone else, for that matter! So I tried to build a bridge between them. Let her know that her father had once met with a great injustice, and that no one suffered more from his silence than he himself. I asked her to be patient with him. With time, Yoyo began to respect my view, and she became very thoughtful. From that point on she confided in me regularly, which was an honour, although not one I would have actively sought out.’

‘And Hongbing became jealous.’

Tu laughed softly, a strange, sad laugh.

‘He would never admit it. The bond between him and me goes deep, Owen. But of course he didn’t like it. It was inevitable that it would complicate things. Yoyo decided to intensify her tone on the net, to test the authorities’ sensitivity threshold. But then again, she was only writing about everyday things: the scene, music, films and travel, and she also wrote poems and short stories. I don’t think she was that clear about what she wanted to be: a serious journalist, a dissident or just another Shanghai Baby.’

‘Shanghai Baby – wasn’t that a book by—’

‘Mian Mian.’ Tu nodded. ‘At the beginning of the millennium that’s what people called young Shanghai writers. The term has gone out of fashion by now. Well, you’ve seen Yoyo. She made a name for herself in artists’ circles, attracted the interest of the intellectuals, so did that make her an author?’ Tu shook his head. ‘She never wrote one good novel. And yet I would trust her to single-handedly get to the bottom of the death of John F. Kennedy. She’s a brilliant researcher, excellent on the offensive. The censors picked up on that a long time ago. And Hongbing knows it too. That’s why he’s so worried, because Yoyo is someone others follow. She has charisma, she’s believable. All dangerous qualities in the eyes of the Party.’

‘When did she first go on their records?’

‘To start with, nothing happened. The authorities bided their time. Yoyo was practically part of the furniture at my company; she showed a strong interest in holography and lent a hand in the development of some really fun programs, and the Party can’t cope with fun. They just don’t know what to make of it. It unsettles them that the Chinese are starting to value fun for the first time in their cultural development.’

‘Aristotle wrote a book about laughter,’ said Jericho. ‘Did you know that?’

‘I know my Confucius better.’

‘No book ever caused more annoyance to the Church than this one did. They said that he who laughs, laughs also about God, the Pope and the entire clerical apparatus of power.’

‘Or the Party. That’s true, there are some parallels. On the other hand, anyone who’s having fun is less angry and less political. For that reason the Party is on board with fun again, and Yoyo really is a fun-loving character. After a while she shifted her energies to singing and started one of these Mando-prog bands that are springing up everywhere. If Yoyo’s not there, there is no party! If you’re out and about in the scene, it’s very difficult to avoid her. Perhaps back then they thought: The more fun the girl has, the less there’ll be to fear from her. I’m sure that, had they left her in peace, it might even have worked.’

Tu pulled a once-white handkerchief from the depths of his trousers and wiped the sweat from his brow.

‘But then suddenly, one morning five years ago, all of her blogs were blocked and all entries of her name erased from the net. She was arrested that same day and taken to a police station, where they left her to stew. They accused her of being a threat to the security of the State and of having goaded the citizens into subversion. She spent a month there before Hongbing even knew where they were holding her. He nearly lost his mind! The whole thing was fatefully reminiscent of the Titanium Mouse case. No charge, no trial, no verdict, nothing. Even Yoyo herself didn’t know what she was supposed to have done. She was banged up in a cell with two junkies and a woman who had stabbed her husband. The policemen were friendly to her. In the end they told her why she was there. She was alleged to have shown her support for some rock musician, a friend of hers who was in prison for some impudence or other. It was laughable. According to the constitution, the State prosecutor has six weeks to decide whether to go to trial or release someone. In the end they dropped the case due to lack of evidence, Yoyo received a warning and they let her go home.’

‘I guess it goes without saying that Hongbing forbade her to make any more critical comments on the net,’ Jericho surmised.

‘And achieved exactly the opposite. Which means she acted as innocent as a lamb at first, wrote a few articles for internet magazines, even for Party organs. After a few weeks she stumbled across a case about the dumping of illegal toxic waste in the West Lake. A chemical company near Hangzhou, at the time still under State ownership, had carted over their waste and buried it in the lake, and as a result local residents lost their hair and even worse. The director of the company—’

‘—was a cousin of the Minister for Employment and Social Security,’ Jericho blurted out. ‘Of course! Yoyo knew that, and that’s why she wrote about it.’

Tu stared at him in amazement.

‘How do you know that?’

‘I’ve finally remembered where I know Yoyo’s name from!’ He relished the moment as his brain lifted the blockade and released the memory. ‘I never saw a picture of her. But I remember the toxic waste scandal. It was all over the net back then, illegal dumping. They told her she was mistaken. Yoyo told them where they could stick it, and was promptly arrested.’

‘Once Yoyo dug her feet in, it was just a matter of hours before all her entries in the net were erased again. The security police turned up at her door that same evening, and she found herself back in the cell. Yet, once again, they couldn’t accuse her of anything. Her mistake was getting herself tangled up in the web of corruption. The State prosecution demanded to know what was going on. After all, they’d already investigated her the year before and found nothing, but they were put under pressure and had to charge her against their will.’

‘I remember. She had to go to prison.’

‘It could have been worse. Hongbing has a few contacts, and I have even better ones. So I found Yoyo a lawyer who managed to negotiate her sentence down to six months.’

‘But what did they actually charge her with?’

‘Passing on State secrets, the same as always.’ Tu shrugged and smiled bitterly. ‘The chemical company had entered into a joint venture with a British company, and Yoyo had gone to persuade one of its employees to collect evidence about the cloak-and-dagger operation. That was enough. But it was also enough to attract the media’s attention to the case. China’s journalists aren’t as easily intimidated now as they were back in 2005, or even 2010. When one of their own is in the stocks, the dogs start to howl, and the Party is divided when it comes to cases of corruption. The story travelled abroad, Reporters Without Borders took up Yoyo’s cause, the British Prime Minister made a few comments in passing during bilateral talks in Beijing. Three months later, Yoyo was released.’

‘And the company director went swimming in the lake, right? I heard he killed himself.’

‘It was probably more like a case of euthanasia,’ smirked Tu. ‘The authorities hadn’t reckoned with being put under so much public pressure. They were forced to call an investigation. I imagine a lot of names came under question, but after the villain went swimming in his own sewage they could hardly ask him, so to be on the safe side the acting director and plant manager were dismissed and the investigations dropped. In 2022, Yoyo resumed her studies. Have you read her name anywhere since then?’

Jericho thought for a moment. ‘Not that I know of.’

‘Exactly. She really started to behave herself, at least when her own name was under the texts. She wrote articles on travel and cultural events, tried to spread the new Chinese culture of “fun”. On the side, though, she acquired a bunch of pseudonyms and started to adopt different styles. She communicated via foreign servers, kicked the system up the backside whenever she could. She was like’ – Tu laughed, spread his arms out and made flapping motions – ‘Batgirl! A scene girl on the outside, but secretly embarking on a revenge mission against torture, corruption, the death penalty, legalised crime, environmental sins, the whole shebang. She demanded democracy, but a Chinese form of democracy! Yoyo didn’t want to follow the Western path; she wanted the hollow, rotting tooth that called itself the Party to be pulled from the country so real values would have a chance. So we wouldn’t be seen as just an economic giant, but also as the representatives of a new humanity.’

‘God protect us from missionaries,’ murmured Jericho.

‘She isn’t a missionary,’ said Tu. ‘She’s searching for identity.’

‘Something her father can’t give her.’

‘It’s possible that Hongbing is the main motivation, yes. Perhaps all we’re dealing with is a child who wants to be picked up and given a hug. But she’s not naïve. Not any more! When she called the Guardians into existence, she knew exactly what she wanted. A phantom army. She wanted to be a power in the net which put the fear of God into the Party, and for that she had to uncover their machinations and damage their image in order to save China’s. She needed a good year to build up the Guardians technologically.’

Jericho sucked on his cheek. He knew that the discussion had come to an end. Tu wouldn’t give away any more than that.

‘I need any records of Yoyo you can give me,’ he said.

‘There are some here.’ Tu reached down next to him, opened a battered leather case and took a pair of hologoggles and a holostick from it. The stick was smaller than the current models, the glasses elegantly designed. ‘These are prototypes. All the programs for which we used Yoyo as a virtual tour guide are saved on it. You can wander through the clubs with her if you like, visit the Jin Mao Tower and the World Financial Center, roam through the Yu Gardens or go to the MOCA Shanghai.’ He grinned. ‘You’ll have a good time with her. She wrote the texts herself. The stick also contains her personal files, recordings of conversations, photos and films. That’s everything I have.’

‘Nice.’ Jericho rolled the stick between his fingers and looked at the glasses. ‘I’ve got some hologoggles already.’

‘Not like these you haven’t. We were convinced the usual suspects would spy on that product development. But you seem to have scared them off with your last mission. Dao IT is still nursing its bruises.’

Jericho smirked. Dao IT, Tu’s former employer, had been less than pleased to lose its chief development officer for Virtual Environments when he had decided to set up independently. Since then the company had broken into Tu Technologies’ systems multiple times to download trade secrets. Each time, the hackers had hidden their tracks so skilfully that Jericho had had to use all the tricks of his trade to convict them. Tu had presented the evidence to the courts, and Dao IT had had to pay millions in fines.

‘By the way, they made me an offer,’ he said casually.

‘Who?’ Tu sat bolt upright. ‘Dao?’

‘Yes, well, they were impressed. They said if I had managed to track them down, it would be good to have me on their side.’

The manager pushed his construction of glasses up. He smacked his lips together noisily and cleared his throat.

‘I guess they’ve got no shame.’

‘I said no of course,’ said Jericho slowly. Loyalty was a valuable thing. ‘I just thought you might be interested to know.’

‘Of course I would.’ Tu grinned. Then he laughed and slapped Jericho on the shoulder. ‘Get to work then, xiongdi.’

World Financial Center

Grand Cherokee Wang moved his body to an inaudible beat. His head nodded with every step, as if confirming his own coolness. Bouncing at the knees, playing imaginary instruments, he skipped along the glass corridor, clicking his tongue loudly, allowing himself the hint of a swing at the hips and baring his teeth. Oh, how he loved himself! Grand Cherokee Wang, the King of the World. He liked it best up here at night, when he could see his reflection in the glass surface that looked out over the sea of light that was Shanghai: it was as if he were towering out of it in the flesh, a giant! There wasn’t a single shop window on Nanjing Donglu he forgot to pay homage to himself in: his beautifully structured face with the gold applications on his forehead and cheekbones, his shoulder-length blue-black hair, the white PVC jacket, although it was actually too warm for it at this time of year, but never mind. Wang and reflective surfaces were a match made in heaven.

He was right at the top.

At least, he worked right at the top, on the ninety-seventh floor of the World Financial Center, because Wang’s parents had made their financing of his studies dependent on his willingness to contribute to it with earnings of his own. And so that’s what he did. With such dedication that his father began to seriously wonder whether his otherwise less than delightful offspring actually loved working. In reality, though, it was thanks to the nature of this job in particular that Grand Cherokee Wang was now spending more time in the World Financial Center than in the lecture theatre, where his presence was more mandatory. On the other hand, it was clear that for a budding electrical and mechanical engineer, there could hardly be a better field trip than to the ninety-seventh floor of the World Financial Center.

Wang had tried to describe it to his grandmother, who had gone blind at the beginning of the millennium before the building had been completed.

‘Can you remember the Jin Mao Tower?’

‘Of course I can, I’m not stupid. I may be blind, but my memory still works!’

‘Then imagine the bottle opener right behind it. You know, don’t you, that people call it the bottle opener because—’

‘I know they call it that.’

‘But do you know why?’

‘No. But I doubt I’ll be able to stop you from telling me.’

Wang’s grandmother often said that going blind had brought with it a series of advantages, the most pleasing of which was no longer having to see the members of her family.

‘So, listen, it’s a narrow building, with beautifully winding façades. Completely smooth, nothing jutting out, just glass. The sky’s reflected in it, all around the building, like with the Jin Mao Tower. Unbelievable! Almost five hundred metres high, a hundred and one floors. How can I describe the shape? It’s a quadratic structure at ground level, like a completely normal tower, but as you go higher the two sides level out so it gets narrower and narrower at the top, and the roof is a long ledge.’

‘I don’t know if I want to know this much detail.’

‘You do! You have to be able to picture what they’ve managed to construct up there. Originally they planned for a circular opening under the ledge, fifty metres in diameter, but then the Party said it was a no go because of the symbolism. If it was round, it would look like Japan’s Rising Sun—’

‘The Japanese devil!’

‘Exactly, so they built a square opening, fifty by fifty metres. A hole in the heavens. With the angular opening, the whole tower looks like a huge, upright bottle opener, and once it was finished in 2008, everyone called it that; there was nothing they could do about it. The lower section of the hole is a viewing platform with a glass pathway leading up above it. And where it cuts off above, there’s a glass deck, with a glass floor too.’

‘I’ll never go up there!’

‘Listen, this is where it really gets good: in 2020 someone came up with the absolutely crazy idea of building the highest roller-coaster in the world in the opening, the Silver Dragon. Have you heard of it?’

‘No. Yes. I don’t know.’

‘The hole was too small for a complete roller-coaster of course. I mean, it’s huge, but they had something bigger in mind, so they built the roller-coaster station in the opening and laid the track around the building. You climb into the car from the glass corridor, and off it goes, out ten metres beyond the edge of the building, then in a wide arc around the left side column round to the back of the tower. You hang there in the air above Pudong, half a kilometre up in the sky!’

‘That’s crazy!’

‘It’s awesome! At the back, the track climbs steeply towards the roof, circles round the right column and then flows into a long horizontal section which goes up onto the roof edge. Isn’t that wild? Going for a ride on the roof of the World Financial Center!’

‘I’d be dead by the time I got to that bit.’

‘That’s true, most people end up pissing their pants in the first few metres, but that’s nothing yet. On the other side of the edge it suddenly rushes upwards. Into a steep curve! Now the car is really racing! And you know what? It races straight into the hole, into this huge hole, through under the roof axis, then up again, up, up, up, because you’re in the goddamn looping section, high out over the roof, then steeply back down again, into the hole, around the right column and back upright and into the station, and three rounds of that. Oh man!’

Every time Grand Cherokee talked about it, he went hot and cold with excitement.

‘Shouldn’t you be studying?’

Should he be? In the glass corridor, hips swinging, watching the queue as it pushed its way forward at the barrier, faces turned towards him – some derailed between anticipation and the rushing onset of panic, some frozen in shock, others transfigured with the look of addiction – Grand Cherokee felt at an irreconcilable distance from the depressive depths of his studies. The university lay half a kilometre below him. He was far too special for an existence spent in lecture halls. Only the knowledge that all the cramming would ultimately enable him to create something even greater than the Silver Dragon kept him at it. He pushed his way through the queue of people to the glass door which separated the corridor from the platform, opened it and grinned around at them.

‘I had to go and pee,’ he said jovially.

Some of them pushed their way forward. Others took a step back, as if he had just summoned them for execution. He closed the door behind him, walked into the neighbouring glass-panelled room which housed the computer console, and awoke the dragon. Screens rekindled and lights flickered as the system loaded up. A number of monitors showed the individual sections of the track. The Silver Dragon was easy to operate, idiot-proof to be precise, but the people waiting outside didn’t know that. For them, he was the magician in his crystal chamber. He was the Silver Dragon! Without Grand Cherokee, there was no ride.

He made the conjoined wagons roll back a little to the only section of the track that was surrounded by bars. They shimmered alluringly in the sun, barely more than silver surf boards on rails. The passengers were safely and securely buckled into their seats, but the ride was designed to be open-plan. No railing to give the illusion that there was anything to hold on to during the loop-the-loop. Nothing to distract you from looking down into the depths. The dragon knew no mercy.

He opened the glass door. Most held their mobile phones or e-tickets in front of the scanner, others had bought a ticket in the foyer. Once two dozen adrenalinjunkies had crossed through to the platform, he closed the door again. A chrome-plated barrier pushed down and opened the way into the dragon. Grand Cherokee helped the passengers into the seats, tested the supports and sent looks of reassurance into each pair of eyes. A female tourist, Scandinavian in appearance, smiled at him shyly.

‘Scared?’ he asked, in English.

‘Excited,’ she whispered.

Oh, she was scared all right! How wonderful! Grand Cherokee leaned over to her.

‘When the ride’s over, I’ll show you the control room,’ he said. ‘Would you like to see the control room?’

‘Oh, that would be – that would be great.’

‘But only if you’re brave.’ He grinned, giving her a captivating smile. The blonde woman exhaled and smiled at him gratefully.

‘I will be. I promise.’

Grand Cherokee Wang! The King of the Dragon.

Pacing quickly, he was back in the chamber again. His fingers whizzed over the computer table. Rail security on, start train. It was that easy. That’s how quickly you could send people on an unforgettable ride between heaven and hell. The dragon left its barred cage and pushed out over the platform edge, speeding up and disappearing from view. Grand Cherokee turned round. Through the glass corridor he could see the powerful side columns, positioned far apart from one another, segmented into penthouse-size floors, and above him the glass-floored observatory which rose to dizzying heights. Visitors were moving about in it as if they were on black ice, looking down to the corridor fifty metres below with its roller-coaster station, where the next group of daredevils was already starting to gather. And everyone was staring at the left tower, from behind which the train was now pushing its way slowly forwards, to climb to the top of the slope, up to the roof, then disappear from view once more.

Grand Cherokee glanced at the monitor.

The wagons were getting closer to the edge of the roof. Beyond it, the track plummeted. He waited. It was the moment he enjoyed the most whenever he had the opportunity to ride along. The first time was the best. The sensation that the rails just suddenly went into the void. To plunge over the edge without anything to grip on to. Thinking the unthinkable, just before the dragon tipped and your gaze rushed ahead into the steep downward curve, before the boiling adrenalin washed every rational thought out of the convolutions of your brain and your lungs expanded into a scream. Tumbling head over heels towards the station, being thrown upside down, finding yourself weightless above the roof and, immediately afterwards, in the racing climb back up to the top.

The cars came back into view.

Fascinated, Grand Cherokee looked up. Time seemed to stand still.

Then the Silver Dragon plunged into the somersault.

He heard the screams even through the glass.

What a moment! What a demonstration of its power over body and spirit, and, in turn, what a triumph to ride the dragon, to control it! A feeling of invulnerability overcame Grand Cherokee. He tried to grab a seat on the ride at least once a day, because he was fearless, free from fear of heights, just as he was free of self-doubt, free of shame and scruples, free of the cantankerous voice of reason.

Free of caution.

While two dozen Dragon riders were experiencing their neuro-chemical inferno above him, he pulled his mobile out and dialled a number.

‘I’ve got something,’ he said, trying to stretch the words out so he sounded bored.

‘You know where the girl is?’

‘I think so.’

‘Wonderful! That’s really wonderful!’ The man’s voice sounded relieved and grateful. Grand Cherokee curled the corner of his mouth. The guy could try as hard as he liked to play the dear uncle, but it was obvious he wasn’t looking for Yoyo so he could take care of her. He was probably Secret Service, or the police. It didn’t matter. The fact was, he had money, and he was prepared to part with some of it. For that the guy would get information that Grand Cherokee didn’t even have, because in actual fact he didn’t have the faintest idea where she was, nor where she might be. Nor did he know who or what had caused the girl to go into hiding, or even whether she really had gone into hiding at all or perhaps had just taken off on holiday without telling anyone. His stock of knowledge on the matter was as empty as his bank account.

On the other hand, he wondered what it would sound like if he told the truth:

‘Yoyo works in the World Financial Center with Tu Technologies downstairs. I’m in charge of the roller-coaster station at the top, for everyone who wants to piss their pants up here in zero gravity. That’s how I met her. She turned up here because she wanted to ride the Dragon. So I let her have a ride and then afterwards I showed her how you steer the Dragon, and she thought it was – well—’

The truth, Grand Cherokee, the truth!

‘—she thought it was a damn sight cooler than I was, even though that usually does the trick, I mean, letting them ride for free, then a trip with me, then a drink afterwards, see? She was crazy about the Dragon, and was looking for a place to crash because she wasn’t getting on well with her old man or something, and Li and I happened to have a room free. Although – Li wasn’t too happy about it. He says girls disrupt the chemistry, especially when they look like Yoyo, because if they do you end up thinking with your cock instead of your brain and then friendships fall apart, but I insisted, and Yoyo moved in. That was only two weeks ago.’

End of story. Or, perhaps just a little more:

‘I thought that if Yoyo stayed with us I’d manage to get her into bed, but no such luck. She’s a party girl; she sings and likes everything, which I like about her, even though it’s incomprehensible.’

And then:

‘Sometimes I saw her hanging around with guys from the real down-and-out neighbourhoods. Biker types. Could be a gang. They have these stickers on their jackets: City Demons, I think. Yeah, City Demons.’

This was the only thing that was worthy of being called information.

But he’d be lucky to get any money for that. So it was time to make something up.

‘So where is she now?’ the voice on the phone wanted to know.

Cherokee hesitated. ‘We shouldn’t discuss that on the—’

‘Where are you? I can come right away.’

‘No, no, I can’t right now. Not today. Let’s say first thing tomorrow. Around eleven.’

‘Eleven isn’t first thing.’ The other man paused. ‘If I understood you correctly, you want to earn some money, right?’

‘You did understand me correctly! And you want something from me, don’t you? So who makes the rules?’

‘You, my friend.’ Was it his imagination, or could he hear the man laughing softly? ‘But how about ten regardless?’

Grand Cherokee thought for a moment. He had to tend to the roller-coaster at ten; it opened at half past. But on the other hand, perhaps it was a good idea to speak to Mister Big Money alone. If notes were going to change hands, the fewer onlookers there were the better, and at ten they would be completely alone: him, the man and the dragon.

‘That’s fine.’ Besides, by then he would have thought of something. ‘I’ll let you know where you need to come.’

‘Good.’

‘And bring a nice bulging wallet with you.’

‘Don’t worry. I won’t give you cause to complain.’

That sounded good.

Did it sound good? The cars rushed in and braked to a halt. The ride was over. Grand Cherokee looked over at the twenty-four pairs of trembling knees. He mentally prepared himself to provide support to the weakest ones.

Yes, it sounded good all right!

Jericho

Yoyo’s shared flat was on Tibet Lu in a neighbourhood of identical-looking concrete towers. Just a few years ago there had been a night market here. Crouched gabled houses had thronged alongside one another in the shadow of the skyscrapers, an island of poverty and decay on just four square kilometres, with insufficient water supply and continual blackouts. Traders used to spread their wares out on the pavements, opening shops and doors so their living space took on the function of a stockroom and salesroom in one, or simply transforming their entire house into a street kitchen. Practically everything was for sale: household goods, medicinal herbs, roots to strengthen the libido, extracts to combat evil spirits, and souvenirs for tourists who had stumbled across the market accidentally and couldn’t tell the difference between plastic and antique Buddhas. Pots steamed in every corner, a smell of fried fat and broth filled the narrow passageways. In no way unpleasant, as Jericho remembered from having strolled through there shortly after his arrival. Some of the things which had changed hands in exchange for a few coins had tasted incredibly good.

And yet a life was considered wretched if the people living it were forced to share a chronically blocked-up toilet between ten, assuming, that is, that their building even offered the luxury of a toilet. Logically then, when the real estate companies and representatives of the town planning department rushed in with their offers, one might have expected collective joy. There was talk of light and airy apartments, of electronic hobs and showers. But none of the residents’ eyes had reflected the sparkle of sanitary promise. There was neither excitement nor resistance. They just signed the contracts, looked at one another and knew that their time had come. This life would come to an end, but it had still been a life nonetheless. The simple houses had seen better times, back before China’s economy had started to accelerate in the early nineties. They were run-down, without a doubt, but with some good will they could still be called home.

Months later, Jericho had gone back there. At first he thought there must have been a bomb attack. A troupe of workers had been busy razing the entire quarter to the ground. His initial surprise had turned into disbelief when it dawned on him that a good half of the inhabitants were still living there, going about their usual business as wrecking balls swung all around, walls collapsed and dumper trucks transported off tonnes of rubble.

He had asked what would happen to the people once the whole quarter had disappeared.

‘They’ll move,’ one of the builders enlightened him.

‘And where to?’

The man’s answer never came. Jericho, filled with consternation, had wandered around as darkness crept in and the stage was set for an amputated night market, its protagonists seeming to stubbornly deny the destruction taking place around them. Whenever he asked someone about it, they simply assured him, calmly and politely, that it was just the way it was. After a while Jericho became convinced that it couldn’t solely be down to the broad Shanghai dialect that he only ever understood that one sentence, and that it must actually be the standardised reaction to every kind of catastrophe and injustice. Mei you banfa: There’s nothing one can do.

Once night fell, a few people became more talkative. A plump old woman, preparing delicious little dumplings in broth, told Jericho that the compensation from the building authorities wasn’t anywhere near enough to buy a new apartment. Nor was it enough to rent one for any considerable length of time. A second woman who came over said that each of the inhabitants had been offered a much higher sum to start with, but that no one had received the amount they had been promised. A young man was considering making a complaint, but the plump woman dismissed that with a subdued flick of her hand. Her son had already complained four times. Every complaint had been rejected, but on the fourth time they had locked him up in a cell for a week, only showing him the door after they had administered a number of kicks.

Jericho ended up leaving as clueless as he had come. Now he had returned for a third time, and there was no indication that there had ever been anything here but towers with air-conditioning in front of the windows. The blocks were numbered, but in the advancing dusk the numbers blurred against the background. Some idiot had clearly thought it would be chic to paint pastel on pastel – in huge numbers, admittedly – but in poor light they were as hard to make out as snow-white mountain hares in a snowstorm. Jericho didn’t waste time marching up and down the streets. He pulled out his mobile, entered in the number and let the GPS figure out his location. A grid-section of the city from satellite perspective appeared on the screen. Jericho projected the map onto the wall of a nearby house. The beamer was strong enough to generate a brilliantly clear image measuring two by two metres. The street he was standing on ran diagonally over the wall, along with a number of side and parallel streets. He zoomed in. One blinking signal pinpointed his current location down to the nearest metre, another marked out Yoyo’s address.

‘Please walk straight ahead for thirty-two metres,’ said the mobile in a friendly tone. ‘Then turn right—’

He deactivated the voice and set off. He had found out all he needed to know: that Yoyo’s building was just around the corner and easily reached.

Within two minutes he was ringing the doorbell.

It was a surprise visit and therefore an investment of sorts. The relative slimness of the chance he’d find someone at home was cancelled out by the benefits of the surprise attack. The recipient of the visit, if there were one, had no chance to prepare himself, hide things or rehearse lies. According to Jericho’s research, Yoyo’s flatmates had never had a criminal record, nor had they ever attracted the attention of the authorities. One of them, Zhang Li, was studying Economics and English, the other was enrolled in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering. As far as the authorities were concerned he was called Wang Jintao, but called himself Grand Cherokee. That was nothing unusual. In the nineties, young Chinese people had begun to put Western names before their family ones, a practice that wasn’t always carried out that tastefully. It wasn’t uncommon for men, in ignorance of a word’s associations, to name themselves after sanitary towels or dog food, whilst on the women’s side it wasn’t unusual to meet a Pershing Song or White House Liang. Wang, for example, had even selected himself an American four-by-four as a forename.

If Tu was to be believed, neither Wang nor Li was a stay-at-home type, which meant he could have made the journey here in vain. But after he’d rung for the second time, something surprising happened. Without anyone bothering to use the intercom, the buzzer sounded and the door was released. Walking into a bare hallway which stank of cabbage, he took the lift up to the seventh floor and found himself on a whitewashed landing where the neon lighting was flickering nervously. A little further along, a door opened up. A young man came out and looked Jericho up and down coolly.

There was no doubt it was him!

His forehead and cheekbones were adorned with metallic applications, highly fashionable right now. Their arrival had ended the era of piercings and tattoos. Anyone who still dared to have a ring through their eyebrow or silver in their tongue was seen as an embarrassment. Even the hairstyle, smooth and long, fitted in with the trend. It was known as Indian style, as currently worn by the majority of young men around the globe, apart from the Indians themselves of course, who rejected all responsibility for it. A spray-on shirt emphasised Wang’s muscles, his wet-look leather trousers gave the impression that they were on duty both day and night. All things considered, the guy didn’t look bad, but he didn’t look great either. The warlike appearance was lacking about ten centimetres in height, and the edgy quality of his features might be quite pleasing, but they were devoid of any proportional elegance.

‘And you are?’ he asked, suppressing a yawn.

Jericho held his mobile phone out under Wang’s nose and projected a 3D image of his head, along with his police registration number, onto the folded-up display.

‘Owen Jericho, web detective.’

Wang squinted.

‘So I see,’ he said, trying to sound ironic.

‘Could I have a moment of your time?’

‘What’s up?’

‘This is the apartment of Chen Yuyun, is that correct? Yoyo for short.’

‘Wrong.’ The guy seemed to chew the word before spitting it out. ‘This apartment belongs to me and Li, and the little one just dumped her books and clothes here.’

‘I thought she lived here?’

‘Let’s get one thing clear, okay? It’s not her apartment. I let her have the room.’

‘Then you must be Grand Cherokee.’

‘Yeah!’ The mention of his forename made its owner suddenly switch into friendly mode. ‘You’ve heard of me?’

‘Only good things,’ lied Jericho. ‘Would you be able to tell me where I can find Yoyo?’

‘Where you could find—’ Grand Cherokee paused. For some unknown reason the question seemed to take him by surprise. ‘That’s—’ he murmured. ‘That’s really something!’

‘I need to speak to her.’

‘You can’t.’

‘I know Yoyo has disappeared,’ Jericho added. ‘That’s why I’m here. Her father’s looking for her, and he’s very worried. So if you know anything about where she is—’

Grand Cherokee stared at him. Something about the boy, or rather about his attitude, irritated Jericho.

‘As I said,’ he repeated, ‘if you—’

‘Just a moment.’ Grand Cherokee raised his hand. For a few seconds he paused like that, then his features seemed to smooth out.

‘Yoyo.’ He smiled jovially. ‘But of course. Don’t you want to come in?’

Still confused, Jericho entered the narrow hallway, which branched off into a number of other rooms. Grand Cherokee hurried ahead of him, opened the last door and nodded inside with his head.

‘I can show you her room.’

Suddenly, Jericho understood. This much cooperation was bordering on calculation. Slowly, he walked into the room and looked around. It didn’t say much. There was hardly anything to suggest who lived here except for a few posters of popular figures from the Mando-prog scene. One of the pictures was of Yoyo herself, posing on a stage. A note fluttered around on a pinboard above a cheap desk. Jericho walked over to it and studied the few symbols.

‘Dark sesame oil,’ he read. ‘300 grams of chicken breast—’

Grand Cherokee cleared his throat discreetly.

‘Yes?’ Jericho turned round to him.

‘I could give you some clues about where Yoyo is.’

‘Excellent.’

‘Well.’ Grand Cherokee spread his fingers meaningfully. ‘She told me a lot, you know? I mean, the little one likes me. She got quite friendly in the last few days she was here.’

‘Were you friendly too?’

‘Let’s just say I had the opportunity to be.’

‘And?’

‘Well, come on, that’s confidential, man!’ Grand Cherokee was clearly making a great effort to look outraged. ‘I mean, of course we can discuss everything, but—’

‘No, it’s fine. If it’s confidential.’ Jericho turned away and left him standing there. A wise guy, just as he’d feared. One after another, he pulled open the drawers of the desk. Then he went over to the narrow wall cabinet next to the door and opened it. Jeans, a pullover, and a pair of trainers which had seen better days. Two cans of disposable clothing spray. Jericho shook it. Half full. Clearly Yoyo had packed the majority of her things in a great hurry and left the flat in a rush.

‘When was the last time you saw your flatmate?’

‘The last time?’ echoed Grand Cherokee.

‘The last time.’ Jericho looked at him. ‘That’s the time after which you didn’t see Yoyo any more, so when was that?’

‘Ah, yes, er—’ Grand Cherokee seemed as though he was just emerging from deep water. ‘On the evening of 23 May. We had a little party. Li went off to bed at some point, and Yoyo hung around with me for a while. We chatted and had some drinks, and then she went off to her room. A little later I heard her crashing around and opening drawers. Shortly after that the house door slammed in the lock.’

‘When exactly?’

‘Between two and three, I guess.’

‘You guess?’

‘It was before three for sure.’

Given that Grand Cherokee seemed to be making no effort to stop him from doing so, Jericho carried on searching through Yoyo’s room. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the student skulking around hesitantly. Jericho’s lack of interest in him seemed to be confusing him.

‘I could tell you more,’ he said after a while. ‘If you’re interested.’

‘Out with it.’

‘Tomorrow maybe.’

‘Why not now?’

‘Because I need to make a few calls to— I mean, I already know where Yoyo hangs out, but before that—’ He stretched out his arms and turned his palms to face upwards. ‘Let’s just say, everything has its price.’

That was clear enough.

Jericho finished his search and walked back into the hall.

‘As long as it’s worth its price,’ he said. ‘By the way, where’s your flatmate?’

‘Li? No idea. He doesn’t know anything anyway.’

‘Is it just my imagination, or do you not know anything either?’

‘Me? Yes, I do.’

‘But?’

‘No but. I just thought perhaps you might think of how someone might be able to release trapped knowledge?’ Grand Cherokee grinned up at him.

‘I see.’ Jericho smiled back. ‘You’d like to negotiate an advance.’

‘Let’s call it a contribution towards expenses.’

‘And for what, Grand Cherokee, or whatever you’re called? So that you can mess me about with your garbled imagination? You don’t know shit!’

He turned round to go. Grand Cherokee seemed filled with consternation. Obviously he had seen the conversation as going a little differently. He held Jericho back by the shoulder and shook his head.

‘I’m not trying to rip anyone off, man!’

‘Then don’t.’

‘Come on! The kind of course I’m on doesn’t pay for itself! I’ll find out whatever you want to know.’

‘Wrong! You have nothing to sell me.’

‘I—’ The student searched for words. ‘Okay, fine. If I tell you something, right here and now, that helps you to make some progress, will you trust me then? That would be my advance, you see?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘So, there’s a biker gang that she hangs out with a lot. She rides a motorcycle too. The City Demons – that’s what it says on their jackets at any rate.’

‘And where can I find them?’

‘That was my advance.’

‘Now you listen to me,’ said Jericho, jabbing a finger at his adversary. ‘Here and now I’m paying you nothing. Because you have nothing. Nothing at all. If you should happen to get hold of some real information, driven by the goodness of your heart – and I mean real information! – then we may be able to do business. Is that clear?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘So when shall I expect your call?’

‘Tomorrow afternoon.’ Grand Cherokee plucked at the tip of his chin. ‘No, earlier. Perhaps.’ He gave Jericho a penetrating look. ‘But then it’s payday, man!’

‘Then it’s payday.’ Jericho smacked him on the shoulder. ‘An appropriate amount. Did you want to say anything else?’

Grand Cherokee shook his head silently.

‘Then I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Then I’ll see you tomorrow—

He stood in the hallway as if he were rooted to the spot, even once the detective was already on his way downstairs. As he heard the lift door rattle lightly in the shaft, his thoughts came thick and fast.

Well, this was incredible!

Deep in thought, he went into the kitchen, fetched a beer from the fridge and raised the bottle to his lips. What was going on here? What had Yoyo done to make everyone so interested in her disappearance? First that smart guy and now the detective. And, even more importantly:

How could he profit from it?

It wouldn’t be easy, that’s for sure. Grand Cherokee was under no illusions: his knowledge of her whereabouts was nonexistent, and the next few hours would do little to change that. On the other hand it would be a real stroke of bad luck if he couldn’t come up with a few juicy lies by the next morning. The kind of lies that no one could prove, along the lines of: my information is first-hand, I don’t know either, clearly Yoyo got wind of something, it was right under our nose, and so on and so forth.

He would have to push the price right up. Play them off against one another! It was a good thing he hadn’t told the detective about Xin’s visit. People could say what they wanted about him, but certainly not that he was dumb.

I’m too on the ball for the two of you, he thought.

He was already counting the notes in his mind.