Several groups of people with small children were strolling home through the park and a number of times Linyao’s heart jumped as she saw someone who she initially thought was Jia Lin—but on each occasion, just as she became sure enough to leap to her feet, the child would turn and she would see that it was not her.
Finally, finally—the pop song burst out of the phone and Linyao started so much that it almost slid to the ground. She snatched it as it fell. Her trembling fingers found it hard to find the talk button.
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she said. ‘I’m here.’
A female voice started talking rapidly in Mandarin: ‘Good evening, honoured client. This is a short, recorded message from Unicorn Delight Trading to give you the exciting news that you can cut your telecoms bill by fifty per cent—yes, a full fifty per cent—by switching your accounts to us with no transfer charge. All you have to do—’ ‘Die, die, die, die, die, scum,’ she screeched into the phone. She slammed the red button with her fist so hard that the phone flew out of her hand and fell to the ground. The back cover snapped off and the battery fell out.
Oh no, no, no. Not now, not now. Feverishly, she picked up the pieces and reassembled it, cursing continuously. Within seconds of her sliding the back cover into place, the music started playing again.
‘Yes, yes, yes? I’m at the park.’
‘I know. You’re here early. Which is why I’m calling a few minutes early. Did you bring the pass?’ The voice had lost some of its tranquillity and betrayed signs of excitement. It was the voice of an Englishwoman.
‘I did.’
‘We can see you. Can you hold it up?’
The news that she was being watched sent a fresh tremor through her system. She held up the small photo-card as if she was examining it. Then her eyes scanned the park again. Who was it? Where were they? The park was still busy. There were some families playing in the distance, there was an elderly couple near a hedge, there were two young lovers on a bench, there was a park keeper and a gardener chatting by a tree, there were several idle old men walking and smoking, and some dirty-looking migrant workers were camped under a tree.
‘Where’s my daughter?’
‘Look over to your left. Far left. See those trees?’
‘Which trees?’
‘See those thick trees near the bench?’
‘Yes.’
‘Look at the third tree, counting from your left.’
As she stared, a figure stepped out from behind the tree. It was impossible to tell whether it was male or female in the evening gloom, but Linyao’s heart leapt when the figure pulled a child out from behind the tree. It was Jia Lin; it had to be: she recognised the distinctive floppy hat and the satchel.
Linyao leapt to her feet and started running towards the tree.
‘Stop,’ said the voice on the phone.
At the same time, the figure by the tree held up one hand in a keep-away gesture.
Linyao slowed down but did not stop.
‘Stop. Go back to the bench where you were sitting, and put the card down on it. And then walk slowly towards the tree.’
The child and the adult disappeared from view. Linyao stopped and reluctantly turned around. She quickly marched back to the bench and carefully placed the card on the seat. Then she turned around and walked as fast as she could in the direction of the tree.
She was dimly aware of someone behind her, walking briskly to the place where she had been sitting, but she didn’t turn round. Who cared about the blasted card? Anyone who wanted could have every card she owned. She wanted nothing but her baby back. She strode as quickly as she could towards the tree and broke into a run as she reached it. ‘Jia Lin,’ she called out. ‘Jia Lin!’
The child stepped out from behind the tree and Linyao reached out to grab her. But then she saw her face and recoiled. It was not Jia Lin but a child she’d never seen before, wearing Jia Lin’s hat and carrying her school bag. There was no one else behind the tree.
Linyao burst into tears.
In the first century, a desert bandit and his gang came to the cave home of the wise man Luo near the Plain of Jars.
The bandit said: ‘Give us your money or we will kill you.’
Luo said: ‘I have nothing to give you except my wisdom.’
The bandit said: ‘Then we will take your life.’
Luo said: ‘But my wisdom is valuable. I can show you a mountain where diamonds grow on trees.’
He led the bandit chief on a journey of many li to Cold Mountain. They camped at night close to the summit.
At first light they emerged from their tents. The trees and hedges were glittering with jewels on every leaf. Even the cobwebs were hung with diamonds.
The desert bandit chief ’s jeweller looked at the gems through a magnifying glass. He said: ‘These have amazing designs, the finest work I have ever seen. Each is cut into intricate six-sided patterns, and no two are alike.’
The bandits let Luo go. They filled chests with the jewels and took them home. But when they reached the desert, their treasure boxes contained nothing but water.
Blade of Grass, to the dweller in the desert, there is no gem more magical than the frost. To the dweller in the frost, there is no gem more magical than the sun. The foolish man labours hard to create wealth. The wise man merely recognises it.
From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong.
It was the ache in his bony hips that brought him back to consciousness. He had been dimly aware that every time he turned over in his sleep, there was a bruising pain at the points where his hip bones stuck out. It was almost as if someone had replaced his mattress with a slab of concrete. And it was cold. Where was his blanket?
Wong, his eyes still tightly shut, moved one hand along what should have been the surface of his bed, groping for his blanket—and what he found made him open his eyes with a start. This wasn’t a bed. He was sleeping on the floor: a frozen, unyielding slab of concrete. His head ached. His bones were stiff. His muscles weren’t responding. And he was groggy. He felt as if he had been hit on the back of the head with a plank.
It gradually came back to him: they had all been gassed at the restaurant. So where were they now? Not at the Jin Jiang Tower Plaza Hotel. That had been thickly carpeted with the finest double-thick tai ping. He was in a totally dark room. But although there was no light, there was sound. He could dimly hear other people breathing, occasional stirring noises, dormitory sounds. Quite a few people were here—perhaps everyone from the restaurant. And there was something about the quality of the sound that suggested they were in a big space: a hall, a factory, a godown of some sort.
He pulled himself into a sitting position with some difficulty. His joints hurt as much as his head—not just from having spent an unspecified amount of time sleeping on a hard floor, but from the gas, too. It must have been very powerful stuff to knock him out so quickly, he reckoned.
Now his eyes were functioning, he closed them again, to make them more sensitive to the light, and then opened them as wide as he could and stared about him. There was a slightly greyer quality to the light ahead of him: there must be a window or door or something in that direction, emitting light through a crack. But nothing else was visible. He put one hand out blindly in front of him and felt something: hard, metallic, upright, tubular. Prison bars. He was in a cage or cell of some sort. Behind him, he heard slow breathing. There was someone else unconscious close by. He guessed it would be Joyce. Reaching out his hand, he felt a hideous, shaggy scarf and realised he was right.
But where were they? Had they been kidnapped by that mad young man for whom Joyce had made dinner? And what were they going to do with them? What did they want? The man had talked about ‘the slaughter of the innocent’. What did he mean?
A spotlight flashed on, burning his eyes. He covered them with his hand. It was a tightly focused beam, illuminating only him and leaving the rest of the room in darkness. He squinted below his fingers
to look around, but could only dimly gain confirmation that he and Joyce appeared to be in a cage of some sort.
A voice seeped out of a set of speakers set into the ceiling of the room—a large, echoing space. ‘Good mornin’, Mr Wong,’ Vega said. ‘I trust you slept well. Better than most of the animals waiting to be eaten in the cages of yer bloody restaurant.’ That London accent again: well was pronounced wair-oo, and animals was animoos.
‘It’s not my restaurant,’ Wong replied. ‘It belong—’
‘Don’t bovver speakin’. I can’t hear you, mate. I can just see yer mouf flapping. I’ve gotta closed circuit TV camera focused on where you are, but I didn’t trouble with microphones. I decided I’d be better off not being able to hear you. I’m a famously soft-hearted man and may be driven to feeling a bit of sympathy by yer pathetic cries. But that won’t ’appen if I can’t hear you. So this conversation is going to be one-way only, awright?’
‘Who are you? What do you want?’ Wong shouted. Realising that he probably could not be heard, he spread his hands out, palms to the ceiling, in a questioning gesture.
‘Yes, of course you ’ave questions. I guess you wanna know what’s going down. Well, I shall make a presentation about that when the rest of yer mates ’ave woken up. Me drugs expert told me that it would be between nine and twelve hours for most of yer. You’ve woken up after only eight, so I imagine you’ll be feeling pretty dizzy. Tell you what, Mr Wong, I don’t want anyone to miss the fun, and I don’t feel like explaining myself individually for each one of yer who wakes up early, so I suggest you ’ave a little nap and then I’ll wake you all up in two or free ’ours’ time. Does that sarned like a good idea to you? Cheerio and goodnight.’
Wong decided he had no choice. Sleep would be good: his head was swimming. He stole Joyce’s scarf, folded it into a pillow for himself, and then almost immediately felt himself dropping back into a state of deep unconsciousness, his last thought being that he hoped he would wake with this awful headache gone.
The next thing he knew, the room was glaringly bright, there were shouts and calls and someone was crying. He blinked his eyes and wiped some dribble from his chin. He guessed that he had been asleep for another hour or two. He recognised the voice of the man shouting. It was Tun.
‘Let me out. How dare you put me in a cage like a common criminal. Let me out,’ he shrieked in Mandarin.
There was no response. As Wong’s eyes got used to the light, he realised that they were all in cages, each with one or two people in them, in a large, warehouse-type space. Each cell had its own spotlight beaming down on it. As people woke up, the lights were being switched on remotely to illuminate their cells.
Behind him, Joyce snored on. The gas must have hit her hard.
Tun turned around and saw Wong awake. ‘What’s going on, feng shui man? What idiot has dared to cage us? Is this some sort of hostage situation?’
‘Sorry,’ Wong said. ‘I do not know. I think we have been kidnapped, all of us. By the people with the masks who came into the restaurant last night.’
Tun shook his head in disbelief. ‘It can’t be. Who would dare to do such a thing? I mean, do they know who I am?’
‘Maybe they took you because they know who you are.’
This grimly uttered reply silenced Tun, who was clearly having visions of kidnappers demanding a portion of his large fortune.
‘But maybe not,’ Wong continued, to comfort him. ‘Maybe they kidnap you because you are rich, but maybe not. They kidnap me too, and I am not famous and rich. I am a poor man only.’ As he spoke, he scanned the room and realised that there were more than a dozen other prisoners. Were they all individuals from the restaurant? He thought he could see people whom he did not recognise from that meal. By this time, there were eight cages visible, and people were stirring, or sitting in a stupor, looking at Wong and Tun, the only two alert enough to have a conversation.
‘But who has done this? Who are these people?’
Wong shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I know nothing about them. But my assistant Joyce—she knows them. She made dinner for him, she said.’
‘Who made dinner for them?’
‘Here,’ said Wong, indicating the sleeping figure behind him. ‘My assistant. But now she is a victim, too.’
Tun shook the bars of his cage. ‘Let me out,’ he shouted, ‘or you will regret it. You will pay for this with your lives.’
There was a loud echoing click—the sound of a public address system being switched on.
‘Good mornin’,’ said the preternaturally calm voice of Vega. ‘I ’ope you slept well, Mr Tun. Or actually, to be honest, I don’t. I ’ope you slept really, really badly. And I hope you have a bloody terrible stinker of an ’eadache.’
Tun switched to English: ‘Who are you? Get me out of here. Now. Right now.’
‘I can see your lips moving, but I can’t hear what you are saying so you might as well shut yer mouf. How about some music to wake everyone else up? It’s really time for all the ’appy campers to rise and shine. Wakey-wakey.’
Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto began to pump through the speakers at loud volume. Over the next twenty minutes, most people woke up. As an increasing number of lights went on, the room began to reveal itself as an abandoned theatre. The ceiling was high, and the remnants of old stage lighting systems and pulleys were visible overhead.
As each cageful of individuals woke up, Wong and Tun did their best to brief them with what little information they had.
‘So we’ve been kidnapped by some lunatic gang?’ Park Hae-jin said, rubbing his eyes with his palms. ‘Are they Iraqis or neo-Nazis or what?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Tun. ‘Probably terrorists who want to hold us for ransom. My guess is that they are some sort of extreme fundamental Muslim insurgents. What do you think, Wong? From Iraq?’
The feng shui master shook his head. ‘No. I think they are vegetarians.’
Park blinked. ‘Vegetarians? What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Wong. ‘But my assistant seems to know them. And she is a vegetarian. So maybe they are, too.’
‘I thought vegetarians were Buddhists,’ Tun said. ‘Those people did not seem like Buddhists.’
Wong shrugged. ‘Other people are vegetarians, too. Joyce says that rock stars are all vegetarians.’
‘Maybe these people are rock stars. The guy with the gun—he had long hair. Greasy, dirty long hair. That Geldof guy, maybe.’ Tun evidently felt they were on to something.
‘But why would rock stars kidnap us?’ This was Tun’s partner, a thin Chinese starlet named Bingqing, who was checking her make-up in a compact mirror.
Tun said: ‘In the past, vegetarianism in Shanghai was associated with gangsters. Triad gangs. But these people—they are foreigners, no? You must wake up your assistant. See if she can tell us the answer.’
‘Yes, good idea.’ Wong kicked Joyce’s left leg repeatedly until she woke.
‘Ow!’ she squealed. ‘My leg. Ow. My head.’
‘You must wake up,’ her boss said unsympathetically.
‘Cheese. I’ve got a stinker of a headache. Where are we?’ Joyce’s eyes were puffy and her hair was a jungle. ‘This is like ten hangovers rolled into one. And I didn’t even have anything to drink last night.’
‘Who are those people?’ Wong barked at her, worried that this whole ghastly mistake might even be Joyce’s fault—and thus, by association, his fault. What if he had to pay compensation to all these rich people or something? It would mean bankruptcy. He needed to disassociate himself from her. ‘They are friends of yours, Ms McQuinnie?’
‘Are they Iraqi insurgents?’ Tun asked.
Joyce looked around. ‘Dear God. Where are we?’
‘Captured by those mad people who came to the restaurant last night,’ Tun explained. ‘They seem to have kidnapped the lot of us, can you believe it, young woman? Are they friends of yours? You had dinner with them or something, Wong said. Are
they insurgents from one of the Muslim countries? I bet this is all to do with George W Bush. All the problems in the world these days seem to stem from him.’
Joyce shook her aching head. ‘No. They’re vegans. There’s this guy called Vega—’
‘I told you,’ Park said. ‘Vegans are Muslims.’
‘No, they’re not,’ Bingqing said. ‘I thought Vegans were like aliens. From Star Trek or something. The first Star Trek movie, remember, “The Curse of Vega” or something?’
‘Where do they come from, these vegans?’ Wong asked.
‘What? Oh, I don’t know. But there’s a group from London, and they’ve hooked up with some local groups here. He sounds like a Londoner. The guy with the gun?’ said Joyce, rubbing her temples. ‘Oooo, my poor head.’
‘But what sort of group are they?’ Tun asked, getting exasperated. ‘Are they like triads or mafia or something?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Joyce. ‘They’re vegetarians. Vegans are a type of vegetarian.’
Wong looked smugly in Tun’s direction. ‘I said, already.’
‘Vegans are people who don’t eat leather shoes, I think,’ Bingqing said. ‘I’ve heard of them. Is that right?’
‘They don’t wear leather shoes, usually,’ Joyce replied. ‘I’m not sure about eating them. I never heard of a specific ban on eating shoes. They don’t eat meat, eggs or dairy products.’
‘Clearly some sort of weird cult,’ Park said. ‘Eating shoes, not wearing leather, not eating meat—they sound like strange and dangerous people.’
Joyce opened her mouth to explain that vegans were not strange and dangerous people, but then shut it again. The Children of Vega definitely did seem to be strange and dangerous people. Look what they did to that poor French restaurant guy yesterday, throwing him onto the griddle thing. Where was he? He didn’t seem to be here.
Someone stirred to Wong’s left and a spotlight went on, illuminating a middle-aged Chinese woman he had not seen before. She sat up in her cage, rubbing her head and groaning.
‘Look,’ Wong said to Tun, ‘it’s not just people from the restaurant. There are other people here, too.’
The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics Page 10