Shanghai Fools

by Vann Chow

  I sighed. I half-expected that already. "So Zhu Mei Mei is her fake name?"

  "Yes, it seems so."

  "How about her father?"

  "There is no one under his name in the Hukou system. There is no one called Axe as well. They are from another province."

  "Jessie?"

  Brother Fei shook his head.

  "Then who did I marry? Her documents were checked out by the Civic Service Bureau when we got married. They were checked again when we applied for her residency. How could they be fake?"

  "There are a million explanations. — She could have forged all the documents, or she could have stolen the identity of someone who was really called Zhu Mei Mei."

  I rubbed my hands over my face. "Jesus Christ."

  "Do you think she planned this all along?"

  "Well, it's pretty clear, isn't it? The kidnapping is definitely premeditated. My guess is this is a honeypot scheme."

  "Not another one." I should swear off women from now on for the rest of my life, I told myself. I would become a monk and study Kung Fu on Mount Emei for the rest of my life.

  "I think the original intention was probably just to swindle the dowry from you. But when they heard about Marsha Ling's appearance at your wedding banquet, they decided to go big with it. After all, the ransom for Marsha Ling is worth a lot more money than the dowry."

  "No, this can't be it! Paula wouldn't lie to me. I was the one who proposed to Paula, so Paula and Jessie could have a proper home and get Shanghai residencies. She did not ask me to do it. I did!" I retorted. "Besides, Paula said she loved...arrrghhh." Yes, Paula told me she loved me, something that she never did. Thinking back to the selfie Paula took with me, I gasped with painful realization. That was meant to be the last photo of us together.

  "And Jenny was just an accident," little Buddha said, butting in our conversation. "She did at least do some good. Didn't she cut the man called Axe? Couldn't we take some blood samples and check his DNA to find out who he is?"

  Brother Fei squinted at him. "You watch too many movies. We don't even have every citizen's finger prints on file in Shanghai. You think they have a DNA database in Guangyuan?"

  "Well, it was just an idea."

  "We will get some photos off of the security camera footage of the kidnappers and pass them to the different police stations."

  "Thanks, Brother Fei." I said.

  He slapped my back and walked away to take care of things.

  "Mister, do you still want the food from the banquet?" The manager of the hotel restaurant came up to me and asked. "We have lots of food in the back. I know this is probably not the best circumstance to ask questions, but it's really hot out there and they could turn bad very soon if we don't make up our minds whether to eat them or to dispose of them." He bowed to show me his apologies. "Personally, I think that you shouldn't waste the food..."

  "Oh, the banquet...." I had momentarily forgotten about the whole banquet arrangement and was in no mood to deal with it, but the talk of food made me hungry. I hadn't eaten a thing since we disembarked from the cruise in Chongqing this morning. My stomach grumbled.

  "Serve the food." I said to the manager.

  None of the guests were allowed to leave the premise until all of their statements were recorded. It was pretty clear now that none of them were really Paula's friends and families. A family revealed that they were simply here for the prospect of a good meal. Another man said he was an actor for hire. A few of them admitted that they sneaked in just so they could see Marsha Ling. None of them could provide useful information that would allow the police to find the criminals. So they had to stay until the police figured out the next step.

  I beckoned the emcee and the wedding planner of the event and told them about the food. Still on our clock, they got to work pretty quickly and rounded everyone up to tell them about the food.

  So, hudnreds of fake guests went back to their seats at their designated tables once again and ate an extremely sumptous meal in silent to commemorate my marriage with my fake wife, whose real name I did not even know.

  Chapter 40

  "You owe her. You really owe her a lot," my mother said, upset. After a brief visit at the police station to look at the catalogue of criminals at the Guangyuan city police station and not being able to identify any as Axe, I returned to the hotel that Mr. Qi's secretary had booked for us with the others and went to talk to my parents. They had occupied the Honeymoon Suite, since I no longer needed it. "She would never have come were it not your wedding."

  My mother was referring to Marvey. She hadn't said anything about Marvey before and suddenly, she couldn't stop talking about her. "She's a good girl. She tried so hard to speak to us in Mandarin and to keep us companied throughout the cruise trip. I should have asked her to sit with us at the table in the front, then we could protect her from the bad guys..."

  My dad rubbed her shoulders repeatedly to try to calm her down. I shared her guiltiness. If I had kept her close to me, she probably wouldn't have been still standing when Axe ordered everyone to squat, and the bad guys might just not have noticed her.

  Counting one prayer bead after another, my mother pleaded the Gods, "Please be kind to the girl, let us find her soon. Please be kind to the girl, let us find her soon... "

  Just then the phone in the room rang. I thought it would be Axe, or Paula, but it was Brother Fei, who was still down at the station.

  "Any news?"

  "Nothing."

  "Also nothing from my side," he said. "They have dispatched the search and rescue team to follow any leads they got, but so far they have led to nothing."

  "Did they use the dogs?" I asked, because I handed over Marsha's overcoat, one she left on the back of the chair, so that the search and rescue dogs could sniff her out, hopefully.

  "Yes, they went with the dogs. Helicopters from the Search and Rescue team from Chengdu also joined in. They had been looking for suspicious vehicles or establishments all evening and so far came up empty. They had to abandon the search and pick it up again tomorrow morning."

  "Why?!"

  "It's getting dark, Jong, plus they have no idea where to look. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack."

  "Did someone not put the news of Marsha Ling's kidnap on social media? There should be a lot of leads."

  "No, the mayor doesn't want the news to get out. It would look bad for the city and he doesn't want that. I kind of understand him. After all, the bandits are not really from around here, so he felt no qualm about it. Big star like Marsha Ling doesn't come here very often and the one time they do, something happened. Nobody would come here anymore if this gets out."

  "Ridiculous!" I exclaimed. "The bandits had a Sichuan accent! They are from here!"

  "We're getting a language expert to confirm that right now. At the moment, the hotel staff are saying that these men are not from here, but we'll see."

  "By the time they figure it out, Marsha and Marvey would be dead!" But I knew my opinion did not matter. Neither did what I say to Brother Fei. He had no authority in Guangyuan anyway.

  Exhausted, I went into the room that was supposed to be my parent's room after the call, dropped myself on the bed and slept like a stone until the next morning.

  Chapter 41

  "Jong?" It was 7AM. Kelvin knocked on my door and asked me if I wanted to eat something before heading to the police station again with Mr. Qi. "The wedding planner realized this morning that the photographer had taken lots of pictures of the wedding guests. We are going to bring the microSD card over now, so the police can have clearer visuals. It's funny how none of us thought of that yesterday..."

  "How could I not think of this?" I ran back into the room to grab my laptop. "We need to get Paula's phone as soon as possible."

  Paula had taken one last selfie with me using her cell phone. Since she didn't take her phone with her intentionally, she must have had a means of forwarding that picture to another location. If she had forwarded it
to another phone, then we could track her base on the location of that phone.

  When we arrived at the police station together with Mr. Qi in a car he hired, I explained my idea to one of the female officers.

  "The phone is locked," the officer said.

  "Let me try, I might know the password," I said. "If I don't, I can crack it." Under normal circumstances, I would never admit to being able to crack password in front of a police officer, but dire situation required dire measures.

  "Yes, this young man is a computer genius. He can do it," Mr. Qi vouched for me. "Maybe we can find some clues as to where the kidnappers are right now."

  "Oh yes, maybe it would be on their conversation log!" Brother Fei suggested.

  "We can't let you fiddle with the phone.We need to get a certified digital forensic expert to solve the password if we are to look into it."

  "Get this expert then!" Mr. Qi was more anxious than me. "There's not a minute to lose."

  "No, we don't have a team in Guangyuan," she said. "We need to send this phone over to Chengdu."

  "It would end up in a queue and it would be three days later before we know it!" Brother Fei said. "Just let him look into it. C'mon. It's a matter of life and death, my fellow patriot!"

  The woman sighed and went over to talk to her boss. When she came back, she got a piece of paper his boss signed. "Okay, my boss agreed to enlist your help officially as a temporary digital forensic expert for this case. Sign here, then you can work on it."

  I obliged immediately and put my signature on the line at the bottom. "Thank you so much!" I said.

  "Don't break the phone!"

  I got to work immediately. The few guesses I had for passcode to her phone were incorrect. So as a last resort, I had to use my illegal password cracker right inside the police station. I hoped that they do not have a policy on pirated software for their employees just yet in Guangyuan, since they didn't even have a digital forensic team yet.

  I connected the phone to my laptop and ran the software. It automatically ran in the background a series of checks that were not visible to the eyes. After a few minutes, I had a match.

  "What was her password?" Kelvin asked.

  "Some gibberish," I replied. "She was more careful than I thought." I entered the password and it was accepted. There was a slight smile of hope on Mr. Qi's face. The woman who let me hack into the phone raised her eyebrows in curiosity.

  "Are there any suspicious conversation history in her phone? Like WeChat or QQ?"

  I pulled up all the chatting apps, but there was no data left. She had wiped it clean before she left. The gallery did not have a single picture it in.

  "Damnit! She premeditated the whole thing!" Brother Fei thought we had run into a dead end, but not yet, I reassured him.

  There was a folder in my laptop with a bunch of hacker tools. One of them was called Ghostool. It could recover some of the files deleted, depending on how and how much was deleted, I explained.

  I let Ghostool ran for while, and after about ten minutes, I got something. "Ta-da. Awesome." Thank God I was into hacking. Skills like this come in handy sometimes.

  "What are these files?" Brother Fei asked. There were more than a thousand files I could rescue from the digital abyss. "Which one of them is the chat history?"

  I clicked open some of the files, and realized that they were all encrypted. With anther tool, I was able to decrypt them. There were a few files that were particularly huge, which I supposed were videos or photos. I clicked open one of them and found the last photo I took with Paula popping up in front of my eyes.

  Mr. Qi made a grunt when he saw Paula's face. "So this is how your wife looks like. Oh, well, I mean this Zhu Mei Mei (Paula's Chinese name)."

  "Zhu Mei Mei might not even be her real name," Brother Fei said.

  "Let's move on, Jong." Kelvin urged me. I closed the picture, feeling a bit melancholic as I did it.

  Paula looked really beautiful in that picture. Instead of feeling cheated, I felt sorry for her. Somehow I trusted her, and I trusted my instinct that she was a trustworthy person. She only did this to me because she had no choice.

  She had no choice. I heard her said that before, two times. If only I had pressed her to tell me more about it, we might not be in this situation right now.

  From the myraids of files, I found the conversation history. It was long, and dated back way before we met. It showed that she hadn't approached me purposefully. The thought made me calmer.

  But unfortunately, Paula didn't forward the photo to anyone.

  "Forward all the chat files to me. I will have it scanned for clues. Maybe they talked about the plans and the location of where they will hide after the kidnappings. Also, don't forget to send me the contact list, if you find it in this mess." Brother Fei offered and got to work as soon as he got them.

  The contact list was not hard to locate.

  Then suddenly, an idea hit me. Files can be automatically backed up to a virtual storage. If only I could locate where she stored all her files and as soon as she log on, I would be able to see the last logged on location.

  Just then, both Mr. Qi and my cell phone rang at the same time. I saw that mine came from an unknown number.

  "It's them!" We shouted at each other.

  "Bastards!" Brother Fei said. "They are calling at the same time to divert us." He pulled a wire connected to a computer and plugged it into the speaker jack of Mr. Qi's phone. I understood his decision. Marsha Ling was the international big star and Marvey...Marvey was a nobody.

  I ran into an empty interrogation room, closed the door and picked up the call. Outside, I heard muffled voices of the conversation going on between Mr. Qi and the kidnappers.

  "Hi, Jong." It was Axe. He had chosen to speak to me, instead of Mr. Qi. "Did you get a goodnight sleep?"

  "Where's Marvey? Where's Marsha?"

  "I'll tell you soon enough." He let me hear them screamed in the background. It broke my heart.

  "Tell me your conditions." I hissed. "Don't waste my time."

  "Six hundred thousand dollars. American dollars."

  "Why six hundred thousand dollars?" I said. "I'm a poor man. You and I both know I don't have six hundred thousand dollars! Go ask Paula if I have six hundred thousand dollars!" It was a crazy demand. How could I afford to pay the ransom? How could I even ask anyone else to help me pay the ransom? The number was exorbitant.

  "Drop your act. I got wind that you just finished a big transaction. And the amount was six hundred thousand dollars, isn't it?"

  I was speechless. How did he know about the deal between us and Mr. Seymour?

  "Put it in a bag and leave it on the first cart of the last cable car going up the Bamboo Sea at 5PM."

  "Are they at the Bamboo Sea?!"

  "Do you think I'm stupid?" He scowled. "Of course not. But you've my word, I will return the white girl to you, after we're done with her."

  "What're you going to do with her? Hey!"

  The only reply I got was the dial tone.

  Chapter 42

  The kidnapper asked Mr. Qi to drop his ransom, a whopping three million dollar in Chengdu's Bamboo Sea, which was not an actual sea but a forest covered with bamboo trees, and Chengdu were at the opposite end of the province and 4 hours by car apart.

  There were not enough manpower to support both the search and rescue and the two ransom drop-offs. The police Guangyuan Chief explained to us.

  "We'll have to make a choice, unfortunately. And we have decided to follow Mr. Qi, since the stake is much higher there."

  "Kidnapping of an American citizen is also pretty serious!" I argued.

  "I'll go with you," Brother Fei said.

  "Then that's decided." The police Chief turned around and walked away from me. From a few meters away, Mr. Qi was busy making phone calls, no doubt trying to figure out from where he would get so much money to pay the ransom.

  "Axe asked me for six hundred thousand." I said to Mr. Qi, ignoring the
fact that he was on the phone.

  He covered his mouthpiece and said, "Sorry, Jong. I can't help you. I need every dime for Marsha."

  "No, Mr. Qi. You didn't hear me correctly." I said. "Axe asked exactly for six hundred thousand dollars for Marvey. American dollars. He knew about our ThriftyEP sale."

  Mr. Qi looked at me for a second, disturbed.

  "Could Mr. Seymour be in any way connected to the bandits?"

  "That's not possible. I've worked with him many times before. It's just a coincidence." He looked annoyed. "Sorry, please leave me alone. Go do what you have to do, and let me do what I have to do to get Marsha back." He pled, and returned to his conversation. It appeared that he was talking to her agent, who might be able to help with his financial problem at the moment. "We need to get her out. She has money with your company, we need every damn dime of it, do you understand?! No. No! Listen to me, do you want her back alive or do you want to lose your cash cow all together?!"

  "Jong, my dad said he could only help with two hundred thousand American dollars." Kelvin said, himself just got off the phone with his dad. "I can't believe he only give me two hundred! I told him the police could get it all back for him but he hung up on me." He punched the wall beside him in anger.

  Two hundred thousand American dollars. I couldn't believe that there was a day in my life when two hundred thousand Amrican dollars was not enough to get back something I wanted.

  "We can't just give him two hundred when he wanted six!" Brother Fei said. "Do you know another way? Think."

  "My other way is Mr. Qi," I shook my head and said. "But he couldn't even save himself at the moment."

  "We need to go soon, the trip to Bamboo Sea is seven hours. We have to go." Kelvin just checked for the distance on the maps with his phone.

  "Okay, then we'll just have to make do. There is no other choice." I decided. "We fill a bag with fake money and we go."

  "You're crazy!" Brother Fei said. "What do you want to achieve with that?"