Shanghai Fools

by Vann Chow

  "You're an honest man, John."

  "In my opinion, he's an absolute fool!" Vikram interjected.

  Both of them laughed as I waved them goodbye, with the new cheque in my pocket.

  Chapter 50

  "How dare you walk in and out here like this is your home?" Mr. Henriksen growled at me as I walked into the Pearl Room.

  Despite the facade of hostility he put up, there was a twinkle of relief in his eyes. He must have thought I came back here to make a repentance of my crime.

  It was late in the day, the members of the board were exhausted from the long day of emergency meeting. My appearance jolted them out of their jetlags. The meeting room once again stirred with excitement and confusion.

  "I'm Wang Fan from Wang Fan Solicitor and I am here to represent my client, Mr. He Yuan Zhong, also known as John He to you, in the matters related to ThriftyEP." Mr. Fan stepped out behind me and pronounced to the group in a professional, to-the-point manner. He was one of Kelvin's father's many attorneys, which meant, he was one of the best in this country.

  "You've brought a lawyer along?!" Henriksen exclaimed in disbelief. His body language showed unease.

  "Not only a lawyer, but also a cheque, and an explanation. I'm sure when I finish, you will have all the answers to your problems."

  "Wait a minute, let me record everything," Mr. Larsen pulled out his cell phone and started tapping.

  And so I explained the whole story to the board how ThriftyEP was developed and how Mr. Qi sold it to Mr. Seymour, the middleman. "And here's a cheque for the company, by Yakshit bank of India, one of the clients that bought the software through Mr. Seymour. They are very pleased with the product. The bank made seven million dollars for its customers in the last few days because of ThriftyEP."

  Mr. Fan helped me pass the check to Mr. Larsen, the auditor.

  He gasped when he saw the cheque from Yakshit. "It's a cheque for six hundred thousand Yuan, made to us, for the sale of ThriftyEP as a white-label software."

  "How did you find a bank that make money, when twelve others didn't?!" Mr. Henriksen wanted to know.

  "They didn't buy our mutual funds, plain and simple."

  Mr. Fan elaborated on what I said. "A user manual was included in the sale of the software in question to the said Mr. Seymour. It included all the required warning and instruction to its users, including updates to all input parameters and the addition of any appropriate terms and conditions applicable in the country the client is operating."

  "A user manual, a-ha," Mr. Henriksen was a clever guy. The terms had sparked understanding in him just like they did on me.

  Mr. Fan carried on. "Mr. Seymour should in principle transfer the total package Mr. John He prepared, which included the user manual, to all of his clients. Should Mr. Seymour fail to do so, Bilious is not liable to any loss incurred to his clients that bought the software from him. Should the manual be included but these banks failed to follow the instructions clearly written on the manual, Bilious Norwegian Bank is not in any way liable as well."

  "Did you record that part?" Mr. Henriksen turned around to ask Mr. Larsen in excitement.

  "Yes, of course!" He replied. "My phone is a Nokia."

  "Send the recording as quickly as possible to our lawyers in Norway and have them verified what Mr. Fan said. If this is true, then these banks have no case at all!"

  The meeting room exploded once again in a babble of Norwegian interspersed with English.

  Seeing that the crisis at Bilious might resolve very soon, I padded Mr. Fan on the shoulder.

  "Thanks, once again," I said, given how this was the second time Mr. Fan helped me. He was one of the consultants Kelvin linked me up to on the case versus Li Kun.

  "Well, I should thank you. I get paid every time." He smiled warmingly at my misfortune that consistently gave him good business.

  At ten PM in the evening, six hours later, as I was consuming the bland tuna salad sandwich on wheat bread that was apparently the staple food at the Norwegian office for dinner together with all the board members who were anxiously waiting for news from the legal team in Norway, Mr. Henriksen announced to the board that all but one bank have been contacted and explained the situation. Eleven of the lawsuits were dropped, leaving one to be confirmed tomorrow morning when the responsible person at that bank in India returned to work and gave his final word.

  "Well done, Theo," the older man, Mr. Karlsson complimented his ability to handle the crisis. "Let's give him a round of applause."

  I sat there and watched the idiot get all the credit for doing nothing. I supposed there was still a lot to learn for me in the corporate world.

  Chapter 51

  "The lawsuits against us have been dropped, but this is by no means the end of it," Mr. Henriksen said. "As long as Qi is missing, we can't be sure that John here is not lying and tries to put all the blame on him."

  "Mr. Henriksen," I said. "I don't know if you realized. One of your employees is still missing."

  "Who?"

  "The Project Manager of Project Dragon One, Marvey Simons, an intern from America."

  Mr. Henriksen leafed through the pile of papers in front of him. He found records that were signed off by Marvey.

  "The Project Manager is an intern?" He glared at the Executive Manager of Human Resource sitting at the end of the table. She nodded embarrassingly.

  "Mr. Qi was responsible for hiring for his team ultimately," she defended.

  I continued, "She signed off a bunch of expenses for marketing a few days ago didn't she? It totaled over two million dollars. Do you know what kind of marketing for a project that is still years away from being launched needs?"

  Mr. Henriksen eyed another Executive Manager, this time Mr. Luo from Marketing, looked wild-eyed back at him. "We never asked for that much," Mr Luo said.

  Mr. Henriksen threw the folders with all of Marvey's expense reports at him. The papers danced in the air for a second before they landed haphazardly across the table in front of him. He picked up one of the reports.

  "Can you tell everyone who is the biller?" I prompted him.

  He squinted his eyes and searched for the name of the biller. Eventually, he found it. "Lexia...Entertainment...Group," he said.

  "What's Lexia Entertainment Group?" Mr. Henriksen asked.

  "Marsha Ling's agency," I showed everyone the website of Lexia Entertainment on my laptop. On its banner was a head shot of Marsha, their number one talent.

  The poor Executive of Marketing dived into the wad of paper in panic and read off the name of the biller from each of the other reports.

  "Lexia...Lexia...Lexia," he said exasperatedly. "Another Lexia?!"

  "What does this mean?!" Mr. Henriksen asked me.

  "John, tell us what you know," Mr. Olaf asked.

  "Mr. Qi told the two of us right before we took our holidays that you," I swept my finger at every board member in the room, "had agreed to a 40 million Euro internal funding for Project Dragon One, so that we could deploy IntellEX, one of the many Project Dragon One applications in China and test it out. To supplement the launch, we obviously need some marketing."

  "But no such thing happened! I never approve no 40 million Euro funding for nothing!" I didn't realize that Norwegians spoke in multiple negatives too when they get agitated.

  "You know it, but Marvey Simons didn't." I paused to take a sip of water, then continued again. "When Mr. Qi told Marvey Simons to sign off 5% of the 40 million funding for marketing, what would a 21-year-old university student do? She obliged. What's more interesting was that she thought her time had arrived. She felt like the king of the world, with so much money under her control. She probably felt good about it — like all of us did at the beginning of our careers — until she found out that she made a mistake. A huge mistake. That's why she is still missing."

  "She got kidnapped, together with Marsha Ling," Mr. Fan chimed in. "Although Marsha was found, but Marvey is still missing."

  "Sh
e ran away. The criminals did not pursue her. They let her go within twenty minutes of kidnapping her according to the data from the Guangyuan police. There was only one reason for it. The criminals were not really going after her. They were after Marsha, not Marvey."

  "It was unfortunate that one of our employees was kidnapped, but, not to be cold, what has the kidnapping do with our bank?" Mr. Henriksen asked.

  "It has everything to do with it! All of our bank's money is now in the hands of the kidnappers. Mr. Qi paid Marsha's ransom to the criminals with the bank's money. Our money! The money from selling ThriftyEP, the marketing money for IntellEX, and probably countless other tricks he pulled over the years. The kidnapping was all an act, to make the money disappear into thin air."

  "Ransom is paid in cash!" Mr. Olaf burst out. "Cash could not be traced. There is no ledger of transaction, and there is no identifier of ownership!"

  "Jesus Christ! Qi took it unlawfully from the bank, Larsen, can we do something about it?" Mr. Henriksen asked.

  "I just checked, the 2 million have already been written off from our accounts," Mr. Larsen said to the dismay of the CEO and everyone around the table. "It was done with proper paperwork. We can't recall the money. Our insurance won't cover it."

  "It's one bad news after another today somehow." Mr. Henriksen rubbed his face with his hand in exasperation. "There are some serious flaws in the way we work in here..."

  "We need to find Qi immediately!" Mr. Olaf said. "We will worry about the money later. We can't let him get away."

  "Don't worry, I'm have been trying to track him down in the last couple of hours..." I mumbled through a mouthful of dry, disgusting wheat bread sandwich. "Look." I gestured towards the map on my laptop.

  There on my screen was an application I wrote some time ago which could translate GPS coordinates onto a map. "The red dot is Mr. Qi." Everyone gathered behind my back to take a look at my ingenious contraption.

  I had hacked into the smart coffee machine on Mr. Qi's yacht, had it exported its GPS coordinates every five seconds and streamed it to the application.

  "Why's the dot moving so fast?" Mr. Olaf bent down to look into my screen. He was a very tall man.

  "He's on his yacht," I answered. "And he's running away, fast."

  The dot was moving eastward at an incredible speed and was now in the East China Sea, heading towards Japan.

  "We have to stop him before he goes out of Chinese jurisdiction! Otherwise, we have to contact Interpol to get him and this will get really complicated," Mr. Fan suggested. "We might never catch him again."

  "Contact the law enforcement, the water police or whatever they are called in here at once!" Mr. Henriksen ordered his assistant.

  "How did you manage to track him?" Booming with curiosity, Mr. Olaf sat down on the empty swivel chair next to me as people dispersed around me to do whatever that was that they had to do. "Did you bug him?"

  "Kind of," I said smugly."But not illegally," I added, since I was talking in the presence of a lawyer.

  I proceeded to explain to Mr. Olaf that some time ago, I wrote an application for a company I used to work for, for the Kissa Coffee machine. The regular machine didn't have a GPS module, but the Limited Edition did. It was added to the Limited Edition because to suit the taste of the rich and famous, its encasing was made out of 97% gold. And for obvious reason, the Limited Edition Kissa Coffee machines were quite prone to theft. The Anti-theft GPS module allowed each owner, and whoever had access to its the GPS module, to track the location of the device anywhere in the world.

  "How'd you think of using that to find Qi?" Mr. Olaf asked me.

  "I didn't," I smiled, staring at my Weibo.

  Chapter 52

  Qinghai, a province named after the famed Qinghai lake, was located in western China on the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau. Not accustomed to flying and having never traveled so far into my own vast country, I brought my passport. The airport check-in officer looked at the passport I tried to pass to her and laughed.

  "Where do you think you're going, sir?"

  I embarrassingly stowed my passport away and sulked about my pitiful attempt to collect travel stamps on it. Since it was issued, I had only gotten a single stamp at the Boston border. One stamp was hardly a collection, I know.

  Xining, where Qinghai University was located was a city of human wonders. For a place on the endless Tibetan plateau covered with grass grazing animals hugged by rolling mountains, it was hard to imagine how Xining could be filled with so many modern amenities that betrayed nothing of its past life as a key gateway along the Silk Road, where trains of caravans filled with exotic goods would pile into the city to trade. Xining, unlike many other cities in China, has an overabundance of exuberant colors decorations everywhere. The people of Xining, often of mixed ethnicity and religious affiliations, were seen by association as more diverse and cheerful.

  I took a moment to enjoy the breeze standing outside of the airport as I waited for Professor Clement, the kind Professor that had offered Marvey a place at the campus temporarily, to pick me up. The temperature in Qinghai was slightly milder than Shanghai despite its closeness to the Gobi dessert, being higher in altitude.

  Because the Professor was late, I bought a lamb kebab at a small stall in front of the station and sat down to one side on the curb, like many others were doing, and enjoyed the very first kebab in my life.

  "Are you waiting for someone?" An old man with hunchback tugged my sleeve and asked me. He spotted a pair of wire-framed glasses. On his head, he wore a white kufi cap. A long white beard sprouted from along his jawline. I had never met a Muslim man in my life and I found my curiosity stirred inside me as my eyes rested upon his age-withered facial features. They were distinctively oriental, yet his clothing and demeanor felt foreign.

  "Yes, I am," I replied, while consciously processing the environment for hint of foul play. Major transportation hubs were hotbeds for all kinds of thefts and scams after all. "I have a friend who works here, at the Qinghai University. He's on his way."

  "You could wait forever," the old man said. I chased him for a reason. "There had been an earthquake yesterday in Xining."

  "An earthquake?"

  "It was bad. I could feel it in my sleep. My goats awoke from their sleep, and they woke me. The people who worked at the airport told me the road between here and Xining has been damaged and they had to come to work by borrowing their family race horses." The old man chuckled, as if the fun of seeing race horses used as transportation exceeded any inconvenience that was brought about by the tragic damage to his city's infrastructure.

  My brow furrowed at the scarcely credible story he told me, but then a young boy in bright purple clothes and a white cap about Jessie's age came towards him with a herding staff and greeted his grandfather. Behind the boy, seven or eight goats followed and huddled together patiently.

  I looked out to the vast open plain in front of the airport. A woman in middle-age appeared at the horizon, mumbling words in local language that probably meant, 'you should have waited for me', to the boy.

  Marveling at how modern architecture and old communities coexisted so beautifully together right in front of my eyes, I quickly pulled out my cellphone to look up any relevant news on the internet, and realized that the reception of my subscribed network was particularly poor in the area. The old man sat down next to me and looked curiously at the gadget in my hand.

  "It's an Apple iPhone," I explained to him.

  He nodded and pulled out his battered old black-and-white cell phone from pre-Apple era and offered, "Young man, if yours is not working, I could call someone for you."

  Neither Professor Clement nor the university's student office picked up our calls. The old man, who told me his name was Zayd, offered me tea in his house until his calls were returned.

  "I have to see my friend," I explained desperately. "She's from very far away, and she needs me. Do you know any way to get to Xining?"

  "Oh, I though
t Professor Clement is a man," the old man chuckled to himself. I did not correct him. "I could borrow a horse from a friend for you."

  "I don't ride horses," I said regrettably. To be honest, I hadn't known anyone who knew how to ride horses in Shanghai. "Is it hard?"

  The old man doubled over and laughed. "Where are you from, young man?"

  "Shanghai city," I answered right away.

  "Go fetch Uncle's horse from the back!" Zayd urged the boy as soon as he heard my answer. It appeared that the boy was more comfortable with the idea of working with horses than I did.

  "I can't ride the horse, sorry," I said. "Thanks for your hospitality, I can wait..."

  "Can you wait?" Zayd questioned me, but seeing the desperation in my eyes, he comforted me that his grandson would ride with me on one horse to guide me, and it won't hurt a bit, except maybe the first couple of days.

  Chapter 53

  "It's the universal truth, that rich people become loving couple." I recited Jack Ma's quote to Marvey, who was standing right in front of me by the bronze statue in the middle of the campus of Qinghai University. The earthquake had damaged the road from the airport to the city, but the campus was left untouched by nature, to my relief. Once I saw Marvey, I thanked the boy who took me up to Xining and saw to it that he returned immediately to his family, on horseback.

  "Hey girl," I said, as I re-read the quote one more time in a half-chuckle. "What are you trying to tell me, from million of miles away? Are you trying to reject me?" I asked, because God knew, I was a poor man.

  "You haven't figured it out yet?" Marvey furrowed her forehead, slightly disappointed.

  That was a clever quote from Jack Ma. A word play on the old Chinese saying that originally made a simple observation. 'It's the universal truth that people in love become loving couple'. The new twist to an old saying was, of course, a hundred times more interesting and quote-worthy. Jack would undoubtedly make a very good Toastie, I thought to myself.