by Dion Leonard
I wasn’t so sure. Part of me didn’t believe him because I couldn’t imagine anyone would go to such lengths for just a few thousand pounds. Then there was a part of me that didn’t believe him because I just didn’t want to. I couldn’t stand the thought that Richard might be right and that Gobi’s survival depended on whether some idiot thought he could get enough money out of us to make it worthwhile. What if Gobi’s captor changed his mind? What if he got cold feet? Would he return her carefully to Nurali, or would he treat her like any other failed business experiment and dispose of her as quickly as possible?
My phone buzzed with a message from Lu Xin.
Look at this photo. Gobi?
I wasn’t convinced. The quality of the image was poor, but what I could see of the eyes didn’t look right at all. Plus, there was a deep scar on the dog’s head that Gobi didn’t have during the race.
I sent a quick reply saying that it wasn’t Gobi, but Richard wasn’t so sure.
“Don’t you think we should go and have a look?” he said.
I was tired and tried to brush him off. “Mate, we’ve had almost thirty of these, and they’re always the same. It’ll take an hour and a half to get up there, see the dog, have a chat, and then get back. It’s getting late, and we’ve got to be up early tomorrow.”
Richard looked at the photo again. “Looks a bit like Gobi to me.”
Lu Xin sent another message thirty minutes later. This time it was a better-quality image, and someone had enlarged the eyes and pasted them next to the photo of Gobi from the reward poster. Maybe she and Richard did have a point.
Richard was convinced when I slid the phone over to him. “We’ve got to go,” he said.
We drove into the gated community and parked in between a shiny Lexus and a couple of BMWs. A whole bunch of the cars had foot-long red ribbons tied to one of their wing mirrors—a sign that the cars hadn’t long left the dealership. The neatly tended gardens and wide apartments themselves spoke of wealth. This was clearly one part of Urumqi that I’d not seen.
As we followed Lu Xin, I told Richard that we were wasting our time. And as the front door of the residence opened to reveal every single person in the search team, plus another ten or more strangers I’d never laid eyes on, I couldn’t help but sigh. Any hope I had of being out of here quickly and back to bed was blown out of the water.
Because of the crowd of people, I couldn’t see much, and the noise was intense too. I couldn’t even tell where this Gobi lookalike was at first, but as I pushed a little deeper into the room, a knot of people at the back stepped aside and a streak of sandy brown shot across the room and jumped up at my knees.
“It’s her!” I shouted, picking her up and thinking for a moment that I’d slipped into a dream. She soon started making that same excited, whimpering, yapping sound she’d made whenever I’d been reunited with her at the end of a day apart on the run. “This is Gobi! It’s her!”
I sat on the couch and took a good look at Gobi. Her head didn’t look like I remembered it. There was a big scar across it, a mark as wide as my finger running from near her right eye back behind her left ear. I knew she didn’t know her name, but whenever we’d been on the run or in the camp, all I had to do was make a little clicking sound, and she’d come straightaway. So I put her down on the ground, took a step to the other side of the room, and clicked.
She was by my side like a shot. It was her all right. There was no doubt in my mind. No doubt at all.
The noise levels in the room exploded. People were shouting and calling out her name, but I wanted to check Gobi over and make sure that she was okay. I found a couch and looked again, running my hands up and down her back and legs to check. She winced when I touched her right hip, obviously in pain. She was okay to stand and could put some weight on it, but between the hip and her scar, I knew she was lucky to be alive. Whatever had happened to her, it had been quite the adventure.
Gobi was burrowing into my lap like a newborn puppy, and the others crowded around for photos. I understood their excitement, and I was so grateful to them for their help, but it was a moment that I really would have enjoyed being alone. Well, just Gobi and me.
The doctor got a little overexcited and wanted a selfie with Gobi. She picked her up and must have touched her hip, because Gobi let out a loud squeal of pain and jumped out of her arms and back into mine. After that, I didn’t let anyone else get too close. Gobi needed some protecting, even from the people who loved her.
It took an hour for the hysteria to calm down and the full story to emerge. Richard translated while Mr Ma, the house owner, explained how he had found her.
He’d been in a restaurant with his son earlier in the evening. His son had been telling him about this girl he’d seen that afternoon—the newest member of the search team, Malan. She had been putting up posters that she’d added handwritten messages pleading with people not to throw away the posters because it was sad that the dog was missing and a man had come all the way from the UK to find her. Mr Ma’s son had thought that was a kind thing for her to do.
As they walked home from their meal, they saw a dog, looking hungry and tired, curled up at the side of the road.
“That’s the same dog, Dad,” he said. “I’m sure of it.” He made his father wait while he ran back a couple of streets to where they’d passed some of the posters.
When they called out to Gobi, she followed them the short walk home, where they then phoned the number on the poster and sent the photo to Lu Xin. When she relayed my message that I didn’t think it was a match, it was Mr Ma’s son who scanned the poster, took a better-quality photo, and made it clear how similar the eyes were. He was convinced even if I wasn’t.
“So what do we do next? We take her back to the hotel, right?”
Richard translated. Then both he and Lu Xin shook their heads.
“They won’t let you. No hotels in the city will ever allow a dog in.”
“Really?” I was shocked. “But after all this? After all she’s been through?”
“They’re right,” said Richard. “Maybe you can try and talk to the manager and see if he’ll let you, but I doubt it. I stay in hotels all over, and I’ve never seen a dog in one.”
It was past eleven o’clock, and I was too tired to argue, either with my friends or with a hotel receptionist.
“We should ask Mr Ma to keep her here tonight,” said Lu Xin. “Then you can buy all the things you need for her, like a lead and collar, food, bowls, and a bed, and then collect her tomorrow.”
Lu Xin had a point. I’d been thinking so long about Gobi being lost that I’d never come up with a plan for what we should do when we finally found her. I was totally ill equipped and felt bad at the thought of saying goodbye to Gobi and heading back to the hotel. But the others were right; it was the only sensible option.
I looked at Gobi, curled up beside me on the couch. She was going through that same twitch and snore routine that she had on the first night she slept beside me in the tent.
“I’m sorry, girl,” I said. “I’ve got a lot to learn about being your dad, haven’t I?”
On our way back to the hotel, I rang Lucja. “We bloody well found her!” I said the moment she picked up. Both of us didn’t say much for a while. We were too busy crying.
PART 5
17
The hotel manager was a strange guy.
I had spent enough time driving around the city to know that the hotel was one of the very best in Urumqi. He’d let us use one of the meeting rooms downstairs to carry out numerous interviews, and the story was all over national TV. So I was convinced that if I asked nicely, he’d do us a favour. I thought he’d bend a couple of rules, if he had to, and let Gobi stay in the hotel. Surely the guy would understand how an opportunity like this would be good for business.
“No,” he said.
His English was better than that of most people I’d met, but I tried repeating the request, a little slower this time.
“Can the dog stay in my room? She’s only little. It’ll be good publicity for you.”
“No,” he said again. He understood perfectly what I was asking. “We don’t ever let dogs stay in the hotel.” He paused a moment, then spoke again, his voice lowered. “But I would be willing to help.”
I did some internal high fives. Even if it cost me a few hundred pounds, I knew it would be worth it to keep Gobi safe.
“Perhaps the dog could stay in one of the rooms that we use for staff training.”
It didn’t sound ideal, but I didn’t have many other options. “Can I see it?”
“Of course,” he said. “This way, please, Mr Leonard.” Instead of taking me deeper into the hotel, he led me out of the revolving front door, past the security guard with the standard-issue bulletproof vest and rifle, across a busy car park, and through a set of doors that didn’t appear to have any locks at all on them and swung in the breeze, like saloon doors from an old-time western.
That wasn’t the worst part. The room itself was a disaster.
It wasn’t so much a training facility as a dumping ground. The place was full of cleaning bottles and broken furniture. The door itself didn’t appear to be closable. The manager saw me looking at it and tried to shoulder it shut as well as he could, but there was still a Gobi-sized gap at the bottom where she could easily crawl out.
“I can’t keep her in here,” I said. “She’d run off.”
“So?” he said, turning away and walking back out into the car park.
Like I said, he was a strange guy.
Richard and I had already been out first thing and bought a selection of Gobi essentials in the sprawling market beyond the hotel car park. There wasn’t much choice, but we managed to buy a lead and collar, a couple of bowls, and some food. And as we walked, we hatched a plan for what we’d do if the hotel manager turned us down. And it looked like we’d have to resort to Plan B.
Back at Mr Ma’s, Gobi was just as excited to see me that morning as she had been the night before. I was relieved about that and to see also that Mr Ma obviously had looked after her well. In all the chaos of the night before, I’d not forgotten that Richard suspected there was some foul play at work. But the more I talked to Mr Ma and saw that he was a regular guy who dressed as if he were going to head to the gym but not actually do any work, the more I trusted him. And when I found out he was a jade dealer, that did it for me. He obviously didn’t need the money. There was no “shakedown” going on here.
I told Mr Ma that I wanted to give him his reward at a special dinner we were going to hold for the search team the following night. He agreed to come along but insisted he didn’t want the reward money. Just as Richard, Lu Xin, Gobi, and I were about to leave, another man—wearing what looked to me like a fake smile—entered the house. I’d not met him before, but he did look familiar.
“I am Nurali’s husband,” he said, as he shook my hand with what felt like an iron grip. I knew he meant business.
I remembered where I’d seen him. He was one of the drivers at the race. Gobi was down on the ground, and he knelt to pick her up.
“Yes,” he said, turning her around in front of him as if she were an antique vase that he was considering buying. “This is Gobi all right.”
He handed her back to me. “We tried our best to keep her safe for you, but she escaped. She’s going to need a good fence when you get her home.”
Our plan for getting Gobi back into the hotel was simple. We were going to put her in a bag and carry her in. The trouble was, like all hotels and public buildings in Urumqi, there was more to security than a guy with a bulletproof vest and an AK-47. There was an X-ray machine and a walk-through metal detector to negotiate.
It was up to me to play the fool and create a diversion. I had an unzipped bag full of posters and snacks that I dropped on the floor near the scanner. I made a big fuss and apologized profusely as I crawled around the floor picking them up. Meanwhile, Richard—with Gobi sitting silently in a bag made of denim that looked a little like a coat—walked right through the metal detector, hoping he’d remembered to remove anything that would set off the alarm.
Back in my room, it was finally time to check out Gobi. The scar on the top of her head told the story of a nasty wound, and I wondered whether it had been inflicted by another dog or a human. It was thick, but the scab was well formed, and I didn’t think I needed to worry about it too much.
Her hip, though, was a problem. She clearly had been in pain when the doctor had picked her up awkwardly the night before, and even when I put the lightest pressure on it, she twitched away. But it was when I put her down to walk that the problem was the most obvious. She could barely sustain any pressure on it at all.
Again I was left wondering what had happened to her.
I’d spoken to Kiki that morning about what needed to happen next. We knew Nurali hadn’t made a start with any of the medical requirements that Gobi needed in order to fly, so the first priority was getting her to a vet. After that, it would be a question of waiting for the paperwork to be completed and the travel to Beijing to be authorized.
“How long will that take?” I asked.
“Maybe one week, maybe one month.”
I felt a little of yesterday’s depression return. “Are you sure we have to fly? Why don’t we drive?”
“It’s a thirty-hour drive, and no hotel will let you take her inside with you. Would you really want to leave her in the car?”
I wouldn’t. We agreed that driving would be the back-up plan.
“Besides,” she added, “I have a contact at an airline who says she might be able to get Gobi on the flight without any trace of Gobi being on it.”
For the rest of the day, I did the only thing I could and looked after Gobi. I fed her when she was hungry, let her wrestle with my socks when she was bored, and snuck her down in the lift to the basement car park when she needed to do her business. She was the dream dog; she didn’t bark in the room, and she didn’t mind going back in the bag when I took her out of the room.
In a strange way the experience reminded me of the one time in my teenage years when I felt close to my mum. I was ill and needed taking care of, and for a while all that was toxic between us evaporated.
The illness flared up when I was thirteen, lying on the carpet at home, waiting for the biggest TV event of my lifetime to happen. The cute girl and cool boy in a popular Aussie soap opera called Neighbors were about to get married. It was all everyone could talk about—bigger even than Cliff Young’s winning the Sydney to Melbourne run. I was in love with Charlene, the cute girl, and took my front-row space on the carpet as the opening music started. “Neighbors, everybody needs good neighbors …”
Just as Scott and Charlene were about to say “I do,” I blacked out. That’s all I remember.
When I woke up, I was in a hospital. I felt terrible, like everything inside me had been rearranged the wrong way. The doctors were using words I didn’t understand, and I couldn’t hold on to a single thought properly. A terrible feeling of nausea raged within me. For hours I felt as though I was about to explode, until I finally fell asleep and woke up twelve hours later.
I had had an epileptic fit, and Mum had to explain epilepsy to me.
I had seizures a few more times, and each one was followed by a period of a day or two when I’d feel terrible. I had to stay out of school, visit specialists, and deal with the prospect that this unexpected visitor to my life could return at any time, bringing chaos with it.
And then, less than a year after that first attack, I began to realize that months had passed since my last attack. The doctor appointments became less and less frequent, and life returned to normal.
The funny thing was, I almost missed having epilepsy. Not the attacks themselves but the way in which they turned the clock back on things with my mum. With each attack came a softening in her, a new kind of warmth. The harsh words disappeared, she cooked my favourite meals, and she even g
ave me cuddles. Having lost Garry the way she had, seeing me in the middle of an epileptic seizure must have been hard for her, but all I received from her was love and care. Those were precious times. Finally, I had my mum back. Sadly, that didn’t last.
I tried to care for Gobi the way I remembered my mum caring for me. I tried to let go of the stress of the previous few weeks and just enjoy spending time with her. It helped that we were both exhausted, too, and spent a lot of that day dozing together.
The next morning I had a problem. Gobi had all the food she needed right there in the room, but I wanted something other than dog biscuits and tinned meat for breakfast. Because Gobi was sleeping, I decided to creep out and head down to the ground floor for a quick bite.
I pulled the door shut as silently as I could, hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the handle, and crept down the corridor to the lift. As I watched the doors shut in front of me, I wondered whether I would hear a dog bark.
I was back upstairs on my floor in less than fifteen minutes. Striding out of the lift, I passed a cleaning trolley, turned the corner, and saw immediately that the door to my room was open. I ran in. There was no sign of Gobi at all, not under the bed, in the closet, or behind the curtains.
“Gobi!” I was calling, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.
My brain searched through possible scenarios. The hotel manager must have arranged for her to be taken. I ran to the main door and was about to head back to the lifts when I noticed that my bathroom door was shut. I opened it, and there she was, sitting in the tub, head cocked inquisitively to one side, watching the housekeeper wipe down the counter. Gobi looked at me briefly, a kind of “Hey, Dad, what’s up?” kind of look.
The housekeeper didn’t seem too worried and said a few words as she continued working. I did the only thing I could think of and pulled out my wallet and handed her a 100-yuan note—about ten pounds. I mimed not saying anything about Gobi. She nodded, pocketed the money, and went back to cleaning.