Shanghai Fools

by Vann Chow

"We will capture whoever’s picking up the ransom and get him to tell us where they hid Marvey."

  "With just the two of us?! Are you out of your mind? The Bamboo Sea...the Bamboo Sea National Park is a hundred kilometer squares, at least, covering a wide span of mountains and valleys! Do you think you're Tarzan?!" Brother Fei disappeared into the staff room in anger.

  "I'm sorry. I can't go with you. My dad would kill me..." Kelvin said apologetically. I had known him since forever. He just simply wasn't fit to go on a manhunt like that and we both knew it. Too bad Marvey still thought he was the better fighter between the two of us because of the fact that he learnt Tae Kwon Do. The only reason why his dad mandated him to get Tae Kwon Do lessons was because he was such a weak, sickly child when he was young.

  When Brother Fei came back, he had calmed down. "Sorry I lashed out at you," he said. "I thought about it. We should still bring the money, but in different bags. One of it is the real money. We can use it as bait to get them to relax, and the others not."

  Chapter 43

  The Bamboo Sea was magnificent. If only I had the time to appreciate its beauty.

  Because of traffic, our car only arrived at the cable car station at four thirty. Three junior police officers from Yibin, the closest city nearby, had come along to assist us. One of them was interrogating the cable car operator and the other was trying to review the video tape to see whether there were any suspicious passengers today. The third one stayed inside the car.

  "Let's talk about the game plan one more time," Brother Fei prompted the group.

  "We will slow the cable car for a bit when you arrived. Then I would run it up again, so you could always come downhill," the operator said. He had been briefed properly by the officer.

  "I will drive up there to try to catch you." Another pledged.

  I looked at the third officer, expecting him to hear him volunteer himself to come along with us, but he didn't. "I will stay watch here," he said at last.

  He reminded me that being young did not mean naivity. It was a dangerous mission that we were committing ourselves to. There may be more than one person up there, and he or she might possess weapons. "Here, you can have my electric gun," he offered.

  I grabbed the electric gun from him and tugged it away, feeling, instead of fear, almost electrified. My mind wandered some times, and it was now thinking of some random scenes of Indiana Jones. I had watched a lot of American movies in my life. And having to rescue a damsel in distress, the basic formula of almost every hero-centric action movie, made me feel like the universe, or CCTV, was preparing me for this moment all my life. I was ready.

  We watched cable cars come in and out of the station for some minutes, waiting anxiously for 5PM to arrive. When the last cable car returned to the station, Brother Fei padded me on the back.

  "It's time!"

  I threw him the bag that contained the two hundred thousand dollars, all marked by the bank. Brother Fei placed it on the cart that was numbered 'yi hao' (number one in Chinese), and another bag with fake money on the second, and the last bag with more fake money on the third. We waited a few more carts to pass, then we hopped on a cart ourselves.

  "Good luck, Shanghai He Yuan Zhong!" The officer in the control box yelled and took a snap of me. Hopefully that was not the last picture anyone took of me. I held the handrail of the cable car and duck under the seat with Brother Fei, so we couldn't be spotted.

  "Brother Fei," I said. "You kept me company through thin and thick. Thank you. You're a true brother to me. I couldn't thank you enough."

  He waved me off, "Say that when we get Marvey back."

  A strong wind hit the cable cars. It swung on its hinges violently. When it tipped left and then right, and then back, I was able to look outside over the metal body of the cart. Below us, were kilometers after kilometers of mystical bamboo trees, erected tightly next to each other as if hundreds of thousands of chopsticks had been stuck on the valley below. Hidden between them, were old white houses with clay roof tiles probably dating from couple of hundreds of years back. Fog slowly swam above the vast forest, oblivious to any human activity.

  I took in a deep breath. It cleared by head and made me calmer. Most of the tourist areas in China were highly developed and very commercialized. To be embraced by the serene, untouched nature around us was a surreal experience.

  A poetry about bamboo groves from Wang Wei, a famous poet from the 8th century, entered my head. "Sitting alone in the bamboo groves, I play the lute, and then whistle a long tune. Deep in the woods, no one is visible. Only the bright moon finds me here."

  Brother Fei smiled at me. "I thought you're a computer geek, but you are exceptionally calm in face of danger. I'm surprised."

  "Being a geek and being brave are not mutually exclusive," I grunted.

  "I guess so," he said thoughtfully. "But don't be too enthusiastic. This is real, this is not like in the video games. You don't get to reset if you're injured or killed. So stick with me and don't do anything rash. Most importantly, if we can't make an arrest, we leave immediately. We don't want to get trapped in the forest all night."

  I nodded obediently.

  The cable car started to slow as we approached the station at the top of the mountain. Since this was the last of the carts for the night, usually the cable car operator would check every cart to make sure there are no passenger being left behind. Instead of the cable car operator, we saw two men in dark-color clothing and baseball caps checking the carts. On the hand of one man was a long rifle.

  "Shit! There's two of them."

  "We're lucky there's only two of them. I will handle the one with the rifle. And you the other one."

  We popped out heads slightly above the metal casing of our cart, and saw that the man I was assigned to was picking up the first bag of money. He unzipped the bag and found it filled with genuine, Amreican dollar bills. They were elated, easy money delivered right into their hands like salmon sashimi on sushi belt. But then the second cart slid in front of them and there was another bag, then another bag.

  "Amazing. They kept coming." The man pulled them out and put it in front of their feet.

  "Something's not right." The man with the rifle stepped back and tried to scan for any anomaly. A big, dark bird flew by the entrance of the cable car station and made loud, high pitch whistles.

  KAPOW!

  Brother Fei kicked the rifle off the man's hand. It was so fast he did not had time to react. The rifle was shot off in a projectile. It flipped a couple of times in the air and was lost in the sea of bamboos.

  "Arrghhh!" The man lunged forward with a deadly look on his face towards Brother Fei.

  TZZZKKK!

  Without thinking, I sapped the man with my stun gun and he danced uncontrollably at the threshold of the cable car like a zombie high on drugs before he finally collapsed. His body was dragged a few feet by the moving cable car. Brother Fei immediately cuffed his hands and pulled him inside the cable car.

  The other man grabbed the bags on the floor and started running away. Not far from the station, a car was parked with its passenger's door opened, waiting for him to climb in. Axe was sitting at the driver's seat.

  I couldn't keep up with the man. The man was running with two hundred thousand dollars, or more, he thought, in his hands. And if I were him, I would run like I was Usain Bolt in the Olympics as well.

  But it did not matter how fast he ran, really, because I had a secret weapon. I pulled out my phone and swiped it to the app I needed.

  Another TZZSKKKK, and some more zombie-like dance moves. The guy dropped to the ground as if soul reaper had brushed him with his gentle fingers.

  "What was that?!" I heard Brother Fei asked behind me.

  "Oh, it's nothing," I said. "It's just a toy. I wired some copper wires on the handle of the bag that connects to a a circuit board and a bunch of batteries." In a moment of creativity, I decided that filling the bag with batteries was a lot more fun than a bag full of stones.
"When I lowered the resistance with the app on my phone, electric current ran and, well, you can see the result. He basically got zapped, big time."

  I didn't really need the taser gun, to be honest, but just in case, I took it anyway, I explained further.

  "Genius!" Brother Fei commented and put another pair of cuffs on the man on the ground.

  Frustrated, Axe came out of the car and started shooting at us. "I told you to give me the money and I'll let your girlfriend go! Why do you have to make me mad?!!" Brother Fei fired back, but he soon ran out of bullets, and we started ducking. Since there was no way to know which way the bullets were heading, we dived erratically as Axe kept on with his shooting.

  Just then, I noticed something. It was amazing how Axe did not need to break to reload his handgun, just like in the movies.

  "10, 11, 12, 13, 14...15..16" I counted the number of bullets he fired.

  I stood up straight and rushed towards him. "Come back, Jong! He has a gun!" Brother Fei screamed after me.

  BAMMMM!

  He fired his 17th bullet at me.

  TZSSKS !

  BAM! BAM! BAMMM.

  TZZZZSSSSSZ!

  TZZZZZZK!

  As luck would have it, the 17th shot was his last bullet. My guess was correct. His semi-automatic handgun was with a 17-round catridge. It was not the maximum one could buy but one rarely saw anything larger than that, without paying a lot of money for it. I gathered that a regular bandit like him probably won't ever expect to need more than 17.

  I zapped him three times as he tried to fire his empty guns at me in close range. The first one hurt quite a bit, knocking my head backward with a powerful blast of hot air. But the dry fire had damaged his gun. The second and the third one kind of just whizzled out like hot air from a boiling water kettle.

  Brother Fei had no handcuffs left. As we were pondering what to do, the Yibin police officer arrived just on time before Axe regained consciousness. The officer cuffed him and dragged him into the back of his police car.

  "I'll go down with him, just in case they do anything funny in the car," Brother Fei explained as he dragged the two others over to the parking lot. He was meticulous as always. Thinking of everything and left nothing to chance.

  "Sure, I will take the cable car to get down myself."

  Just then, Axe screamed at me. "You're never going to find the girls," Axe laughed as he taunted.

  "Where did you hide them?!" Brother Fei kicked him in the nuts, he kneeled on the ground in agony.

  "If I tell you so easily, the game is not fun."

  "Get in the car!" Brother Fei pulled him by his collar and threw him inside the police car, together with the three bags of money that were now evidence.

  Chapter 44

  "Your fellow criminals went unscathed with three million dollars, and you," the police paused for a dramatic effect, "the head of the gang, was captured by a civilian."

  "I underestimated Jong."

  I watched over the one-sided glass as Axe sat in the interrogation room at Yibin the police station talking to an officer. He was to be sent to Guangyuan police station the next day.

  On the phone, Kelvin told me what transpired on the other side. "Marsha Ling was being rescued at the moment. She called Mr. Qi from a hotpot place in the middle of Chengdu after he paid the ransom. The police is picking her up now. She sounded fine on the phone."

  "What about Marvey?"

  "No, she said they were kept in separate places by two different groups. She didn't see her from the beginning."

  I banged my fist on the glass pane in frustration. Axe and the officer stopped talking for a second, despite not being able to see what was the cause of the noise.

  "You're captured. If you tell us where the American girl is, the court will take it into consideration when they meet out your punishment."

  "Well, then you better record this properly — I don't have her."

  "What do you mean you don't have her?"

  "The girl escaped. I don't have her. I don't know where she is."

  "How do we know you're telling the truth?" The officer questioned his testimonial.

  "You'll just have to trust me on it," he said with a smirk on his face.

  It actually made sense, since why would Axe, the head of the gang, came along to a trade that was much smaller in scale. It was definitely a lot more comfortable to be in the city than in the middle of nowhere. The only sensible reason was that this was in fact the trickier trade. If Marvey had escaped yesterday and had made contact with us, then his men might be going into a trap. That was why he showed up personally, right behind his men to see the drop-off through.

  "Jong, you're on the news once again!" Brother Fei showed me the screen of his cell phone. It was streaming live news from the Sichuan news channel. As Marsha was found and Axe captured, the police in Guangyuan decided to release the news of the kidnapping to the public. The media found a Weibo posted by the police department of Yibin with my picture on it — no doubt that the Yibin station couldn't wait to claim the glory of having assisted in the catch of the criminals.

  "A civilian, He Yuan Zhong, together with a police officer from Shanghai, were shown in this picture captured minutes before they went up the Shunan Bamboo Sea National Park and subdued all three kidnappers, including the head of the gang. The picture was retweeted fourty thousand times since it was posted," the news anchor said enthusiastically.

  I couldn't believe it. The whole world behaved as if the case was over. Marvey was still missing. She was alone, in the countryside.

  "Jong? Jong? Are you still on the line?" I had forgotten that I was talking to Kelvin on the phone.

  "Did the police manage to trace Marvey's last location based on cell phone signals?"

  "No, it is turned off. Her last position was twenty kilometers outside of the hotel."

  I stormed into the interrogation room, my intrusion jolting the police officer sitting there with Axe. "You can't come in here!" he hissed.

  "Where was the last place you saw Marvey?" I grabbed Axe by the collar. He was much bigger than I had remembered in close quarter. His physique showed that he exercised a lot, and was extremely fit for his age. "Tell me, or I'll kill you!" I threatened.

  "She ran away in Guangyuan," he said. "Whether she is alive or dead has nothing to do with me!"

  Provoked, I punched him hard on the face.

  "You can't do this in here." Brother Fei grabbed me on the waist to pull me back. "Just let the police handle this."

  How can I find her? How can I find her?

  "I'll send this new information to the Guangyuan police immediately," Brother Fei suggested. "She's alone and has no money. She can't go very far."

  I spent the rest of the day sitting in an internet cafe two blocks away from the Yibin police station checking all the Weibo tweets for any clue or reports of sighting of a foreign woman in that area. I had asked the Yibin police to post a photograph of Marvey on the social network and seek help from hundreds of thousands of netizens living there to help with information on this case of a missing person.

  Outside, despite the hours, the sound of children playing on the streets could be heard. These children spoke the Sichuan dialect with each other, and I felt like I could understood every word, but not when the word were strung together. It gave me a forlorn feeling of being alone in a strange land. I could only imagine how Marvey would feel.

  Yibin was more than 2000 kilometers away from Shanghai, but that was nothing compared to the distance from here to Alexandria.

  It was time, I decided, to tell Marvey's parents. I dialed the number John Senior entered into my cell phone before I left their house in the summer of last year and called.

  "Hi, Mr. Simons."

  "Hey, John! How're you?" He recognized my voice immediately. I guessed my Chinese accent was unmistakable.

  "Mmm...I'm not doing so well. Mr. Simons..."

  "Just call me John, kid. I love the fact that we share a name," he re
iterated his opinion about it.

  "John, I have lost contact with your daughter. She was here for my, uh, party, as one of the guests..." I did not know how to continue the ridiculous story of how Marvey was kidnapped. I paused for a moment to take a deep breath, then said eventually, "I'm so sorry."

  "John, it's okay, Marvey told me everything."

  "Marvey told you everything?"

  "Yeah, about what happened at your banquet. It sounded really horrendous."

  "When did she call?"

  "Well, I don't know, like 9 PM Chinese time yesterday? I'm not very good with this time zone conversion. Heather is much better with it."

  "9 PM!" I was elated. It sounded like Marvey really did ran off soon after the bandit crashed the wedding. She couldn't be very far from Guangyuan at that point. "But that's great. That's great to hear that she's fine and she talked to you. Where's she now? And what did she say?"

  "Well, it sounded like she was fine. She had a place to stay for the night — a friend from school, she said. And she told us not to worry about her."

  I frowned. Marvey had a friend in the middle of the country? Who could that be? And if she had managed to contact her friend and her parents, why hadn't she contacted me?

  "She has a message for you."

  "What message?"

  "Let me get it and read it to you," John fiddled with a piece of paper on which he had written down her message for me and said, "DO NOT let anyone know where I am. Not even the people closest to you. Don't try to contact me. And be sure to check your Weibo."

  "That's it?"

  "Yes, that's it." Then John corrected himself, "And she said you've to go back to Shanghai."

  "I'm not going back without her!"

  "Ha. She thought you'd say that." John laughed, almost too relaxed for someone whose daughter just got kidnapped in China to be sane.

  "But she's doesn't have any money on her." And I proceeded to try to impress on him the dangers of being alone in my motherland as a foreign person, cracking my brain for all kinds of possible dangers — unfamiliar landscape, difficulty in communication, insufficient food and water, rampant scams — however, it did nothing to get John into panic mode. If only my parents had this kind of hands-off attitude towards me when I was growing up, maybe I would be a different person.