Bach finished abruptly, in the middle of a movement, and the public address system burst into life again.
‘Mornin’, luvvies. Most of you must be awake by now,’ Vega said. ‘Stand by for a moment. The Court of Poetic Justice will soon be in session. The first ’earin’ will begin shortly.’ The sound clicked off again and they were left in silence.
‘We need water,’ Tun shouted.
‘Can I have coffee?’ Joyce called out. ‘I think I better have decaf, because I’ve got a really bad headache. I wonder if they have a Starbucks here?’
‘He can’t hear us. Can only see us.’ Wong pointed to small cameras in the ceiling, angled at the cages.
‘I’m hungry,’ whined Bingqing. ‘I couldn’t eat that awful food last night. I hate food that wriggles when you try to eat it.’
‘You can share this,’ said Joyce, patting a paper bag sticking out of the pocket of her coat.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s a vegan wrap.’
‘No, thank you. I don’t like to eat shoe leather.’
Joyce shook her head. ‘It’s not shoes. I didn’t say vegans ate shoe leather. I just said there was no ban against them eating shoe leather.’
‘There should be a ban on them eating shoe leather,’ Tun said. ‘It’s not natural.’
Wong nodded. ‘This explains why they are a bit crazy. All the chemicals in the shoe leather. Makes them ji-seen, you know, crossed wire.’
Joyce gave up trying to explain.
There was a loud bang from the public address system as Vega switched it on again. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Bloody knockoff Chinese sound systems. Next time I’ll bring me own B&O system. Much better than this crap. You want breakfast? Put up your hands if you want somefink to eat or drink.’
Most of the people in the room raised their hands, although some of them were still feeling too queasy from the effects of the gas to even think about food.
‘I just want to go home,’ Bingqing shouted. ‘And have a nice long bath.’
‘So do I,’ said Chen’s wife Fangyin.
‘So do all of us,’ said Park.
Vega chuckled: ‘I could easily bugger off an’ slaughter some INNOCENT chickens and pigs an’ give you eggs and bacon. But I’m gonna teach you a lesson. Yer gonna starve.’
‘You can’t do this,’ Tun shouted. ‘If this is a joke, I don’t think it is very funny. Get me my lawyer. I demand that you get me my lawyer immediately.’
‘But you won’t starve to deaf,’ Vega continued. ‘That would be too kind. Yer all going to be punished, and some of you will DIE—perhaps all of you. But most of you will die in different ways. I fink you’ll all find this to be a learnin’ experience. Unfortunately, you’ll be dead at the end of it, so yer noo knowledge won’t be of any use to yer. ’owever, you will not die in vain. All yer deafs will be recorded on videotape and WIDELY distributed, so that people everywhere will learn from yer fates.’
‘What is he talking about?’ Tun said to the group as a whole. ‘He’s mad.’
‘I don’t like it,’ Bingqing said, bursting into sobs. ‘Talking about killing us and stuff. If this is a joke, this is a horrible joke. Tell him to stop, Feiyu. Tell him to stop all this and take us home. Where’s the car, and the driver, and the bodyguard?’
Vega’s outburst had sent a chill through the room. Several women started crying softly—and the men sat in grim silence. Most of them, by now, remembered the violent scene from the night before, and realised that Vega might be capable of anything—even murder. Where was De Labauve? Had he already been killed?
Joyce was stunned at Vega’s words. This must be some sort of trick, she was sure. No vegan would kill any living being intentionally, and definitely would not commit multiple murders. No, Vega was trying to terrify people. That was the only logical answer. He was trying to scare them into realising the value of life. That was what veganism was all about: appreciating the inherent value of sentience. Perhaps he would tell them that if they signed a promise to be vegans for the rest of their lives, he would let them go. Yes, that must be it. It was some sort of psychological game. Deliberate mental torture. He was putting them in the shoes of the animals they had killed, to teach them a lesson they would never forget.
Wong asked Joyce: ‘Who is this man?’
‘His name is Mee something. His dad owns a supermarket chain. His family comes from China, but they have family members in Canada and London.’
‘Mee Fan Supermarket?’
‘I can’t remember. My head’s like porridge. Linyao knows all about him. She was talking about him last night.’
Bingqing said: ‘But why is he saying these awful things? Is he really going to kill people? I can’t stand it.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Joyce. ‘I hope not. I hope it’s just some sort of horrible joke. Vegetarians don’t kill anyone. Not real ones. They are nice people. They are the nicest people. Like Paul McCartney?’
Wong looked blank.
‘You know…“Eleanor Rigby” and all that?’
‘Eleanor who?’
‘Never mind.’ Thoughts were running at high speed through her mind as she worked hard to convince herself that the threats of killing could not be genuine. It was clear that Vega was rich, powerful and crazy—a dangerous combination of traits—but no one, surely, would go from freeing caged animals to killing humans? On the other hand, Linyao said that they had killed a security guard on one of their previous missions. She decided to keep that piece of knowledge to herself to avoid panicking people.
The lights went on to illuminate the other side of the room. They could see now that the old theatre in which they were being held had been roughly refashioned, with the prisoners in cages where the seats had been, and the area on the stage made into a kind of court room, with a raised table for a judge and a dock for a prisoner.
There was the click of a key being turned in a lock, and all eyes swivelled to the stage. The door opened at the back of the raised area, and Vega walked in, this time wearing the curly haired wig of a traditional British judge over his masked face. He was holding a machine gun of some sort in his right hand.
‘’ullo, lads and laddesses,’ he said. ‘PLEASE be upstanding for the entry of the judge.’
No one moved.
He raised his gun and shouted: ‘Stand UP or I’ll bloody well kill the lot of you and good bloody riddance.’
The prisoners wearily rose to their feet.
‘Awright. That’s better.’
Two more masked individuals entered—they were small, slightly built and dressed in shapeless black clothes: probably women. They stepped off the stage and walked towards the cages. They stopped at the one containing the small, wizened middle-aged woman whom Wong could not remember having seen before. One pointed a gun at her while the other undid the cage door and let her out.
Vega sat at the judge’s bench and hammered on it with a mallet. ‘The Court of Poetic Justice is open for business— I mean, in session. Okay, wot ’ave we ’ere, the first case, methinks? Put the prisoner in the dock.’
The woman’s hands were cuffed behind her back and she was manhandled into a space behind a wooden divider on the right side of the court.
Vega picked up a piece of A4 paper and read from it. ‘Your name is—bloody ’ell, ’ow do I pronounce that? Xin Pei Yi, aged fifty-one. You are accused of locking up bears in coffin-sized cages and keeping them alive in a state of intense suffering for years on end. ’ow do you plead?’
The woman, who clearly did not understand a word of English, replied in a stream of furious Mandarin.
‘Translation,’ Vega barked.
One of the female guards turned the accused’s words into English: ‘She says you are a pig and a dog and should let her go before her sons come and—the rest is obscene, sir.’
‘Given the bloody great PILE of evidence in front of me, namely the reports by operatives codenamed Rescuer, Lockbreaker and ’ero, I find the plaintiff guil
ty as charged.’
‘Accused,’ Joyce called out.
‘Wot?’ Vega looked around.
‘That’s the accused. The person who makes the complaint is the plaintiff. You got them muddled up.’
‘SILENCE. I will not have this court brought into disrepute by outbursts from the public gallery. One more word and I’ll charge you wiv contempt of court. The PUNISHMENT for contempt of court is deaf, awright?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Joyce said, and then realised that this would count as two more words. So she added: ‘I mean:’ and changed her reply to a servile nod.
Vega looked back at the papers in front of him. ‘Where was I before I was so rudely interrupted? Oh yes, Mrs Xin, aged fifty-one, the bear bile woman, the bear TORTURER. On the evidence I ’ave before me, I find Mrs Xin to be guilty as charged on all counts.’ He slammed the hammer onto the table. ‘The Court of Poetic Justice sentences her to a taste of ’er own medicine.’
The door opened and two more of the Children of Vega walked in, trundling a narrow, coffin-like metal cage on a trolley. It was about 80 centimetres high and one metre deep. The bars were rusted and on one side there were dark brown stains which looked like blood.
‘We have a genuine bear-bile farm cage for you, transported at great expense from Sichuan province,’ Vega explained. ‘I ’ope you’ll find it very comfortable. ’ome from ’ome, so to speak.’
The woman screamed in a different Chinese dialect as the guards manhandled her into it. She struggled hard, and it was obvious to anyone watching that both victim and guards were acquiring a significant number of bruises during the operation. Eventually they padlocked it shut with three chains. She yelled and kicked and rattled the bars.
‘Oh dear,’ Vega said. ‘Oh dear, dear, dear. She’s ’appy enough to put uvvers in the cage, but she don’t like the SAME treatment for ’erself. Well, that’s not very fair, is it, luv? We have to be fair, don’t we?’
The woman continued to shriek, her screech becoming increasingly loud as she began to panic.
‘I sentence you to—’ow long shall we give her? Lemme see, the reports say that you keep bears ALIVE in the cages for many years at a time. I’m gonna be really kind-’earted and sentence you to just two years in that cage. Of course, you probably won’t be in there for that long. I imagine you’ll die of loneliness, bad food and bedsores LONG before yer sentence is up, so that will be nice, won’t it?’
The screaming redoubled in volume, and then stopped and turned into a wail of misery.
‘I can’t STAND this bloody noise,’ Vega said, campily smoothing his hair off his shoulders before putting his fingers in his ears. ‘Get ’er out of ’ere.’
Mrs Xin the bear-bile farmer was wheeled away through the double doors to suffer her punishment alone.
‘Next,’ the judge barked.
The guards went to a cage next to Tun and dragged a small, sleeping fat man out of it. It was Chef Tomori.
‘Aha! It’s time for the first execution,’ Vega said with a look of glee. ‘That is, if we don’t count Monsieur De Labauve, ’oo was standin’ TOO CLOSE to the gas last night and didn’t make it.’
‘This is not funny,’ Park shouted out.
‘And the first person to die today will be Chef Tomori! Let’s give him a BIG round of applause.’
The chef was woken up and manhandled into the dock. Vega picked up a sheet of paper and scanned it. ‘Wotcher, Tomori-san. Lemme see. You are accused of murdering an ’uge succession of sentient bein’s in a variety of ways, in a killin’ spree that ’as literally lasted decades. You are pretty much the Jack the Ripper of the animal kingdom, ain’t you? But today’s sample charge will be the DELIBERATE murder of thirty-six live scorpions yesterday. They were killed by being dropped alive into somefink you call Old Turtle Broth. I would ’ope that the old in that sentence refers to the age of the soup, but sad to say, I expect that it refers to the age of the turtles, since nothing touches your stony ’eart—sentient bein’s ’oo are old, young or just babies—you eat them all, and organise the most PAINFUL deafs for ’em, don’t yer?’
Tomori was in a state of terror. ‘Please,’ he said. It was one of the few English words he knew. ‘Please. Please-please-please-please.’
The double doors on the other side of the court room— really the side wings of the old theatre—swung open. Four men in black clothes gingerly wheeled out a massive glass cauldron of steaming liquid of some kind. It was more than two metres high.
The men moved over to the chef and tied him into a harness which was hanging from the ceiling.
‘Ooh, goodie-goodie, I like a bit of theatricality,’ chuckled Vega.
The men strapped Chef Tomori’s arms and legs together, and held him, writhing and screaming. He was hoisted up until he dangled three metres off the floor.
‘Now ’ow does Chef Tomori like to treat animals?’ said Vega. ‘Oh yes, he likes to drop ’em ALIVE into a vat a boilin’ water.’
Vega gave a signal with his hand, and the harness rose up, lifting Tomori into the air, and swinging to hold him over the bubbling vat. He began thrashing wildly to get away, making the rope holding him jerk and bounce.
‘’aving read all the evidence, I PRONOUNCE the prisoner guilty,’ said Vega, ‘and sentence him to poetic justice.’ He clumped the table once with his hammer.
The harness fell and there was an ear-piercing shriek, cut off abruptly by a splash.
The caged audience screamed as loudly as Tomori did and almost all of them looked away. For those who remained watching—and we are talking about Vega and one of his assistants only—there was the unpleasant sight of Tomori’s head bobbing up once above the water—his skin was already crimson—and he gasped and screamed again briefly before disappearing under the surface. His limbs thrashed for a few seconds and then became still as his heart stopped from massive shock. He drifted for a moment—and then with one last convulsion, died.
‘Ew,’ said Vega. ‘Gross. It’s enough to put me off me LUNCH.’
There was silence in the room except for gasping, sobbing and wailing from the now-traumatised prisoners.
‘Right,’ said the judge. ‘Now you get the idea of wot the Court of Poetic Justice is all about. People who murder animals get their comeuppance in the SAME WAY that they committed their crimes. ’oo’s going to be next?’
He stood up. ‘I’ll tell you ’oo it will be in a minute. But for now, it’s time for me to go and have a NICE cuppa tea. Don’t worry. I’ll get around to all of you eventually.’
6
At 8.42 am, the kidnappers dropped Angelita Consolacion Balangatan (known to her friends as Peachie), blindfolded and hooded, out of a car crawling along the edge of Hengfeng Lu in north Shanghai, near the railway station. The maid found help from a tourist, who loaned her a mobile phone.
‘Ma’am,’ she wept into the phone, ‘I’ve been released. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’
‘How’s Jia Lin? Where is Jia Lin?’ croaked Linyao, who had been up all night, and had trouble using her voice.
The maid sobbed for a while before she could speak again. ‘I don’t know. I mean, she’s still there. They only let me go. I don’t know what they’re—they separated us this morning and took me in a car and pushed me out. I tried to tell them that I needed to stay with her, I begged them not to separate us, but they wouldn’t listen. I’m so sorry.’
By the time Sinha had arrived at Linyao’s Hongqiao apartment—where she had waited the entire night by the phone, helped by her mother, cousin Milly and a pint of black coffee—Angelita had been back home for an hour and had been questioned in detail numerous times about the experience.
Linyao reported her findings to Sinha before he had even sat down: ‘They kept her blindfolded the whole journey there. She has no idea where they took her. Then they kept the two of them in a room with no windows, and pushed food through a flap in the door. They gave them a pizza between them.’
‘I told them she only li
kes plain with extra cheese,’ the maid wailed. ‘But they wouldn’t listen. I had to take all the pepperoni bits off myself and eat them.’
‘How is the girl?’
‘She’s okay,’ the two women said together.
Linyao continued: ‘I mean, considering. She wasn’t as upset as Angelita was, she said. There was a colour television in the room and a big pile of DVDs. They watched Friends episodes until nine thirty and then Angelita put her to bed.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,’ the domestic servant said.
Sinha smiled at her. ‘Don’t worry. There’s absolutely nothing for you to be sorry about. None of this was your fault. You did very well in keeping Jia Lin fed and unworried and ensuring that she got enough sleep. You did absolutely the right things.’
Linyao continued: ‘My daughter apparently slept through the night. Angelita stayed up all night trying various ways to break out of the room. She dismantled her watch to try to use the edges of it to unscrew the door hinges. But she got nowhere. The kidnappers fed them at about seven in the morning, and then took Angelita out of the room. There were three or four of them, all masked, some Chinese, some lao wai. Before she could get a look at anything, they put a blindfold and a hood on her head and took her out of the apartment.’
‘I begged them not to separate us,’ sobbed Angelita. ‘But they wouldn’t listen.’
‘How did Jia Lin react?’
‘She didn’t say anything. Not while I was being taken away. But I could hear her asking the kidnappers something as they took me out of the door.’
‘What did she ask?’
‘She asked if there were any more Friends DVDs.’ The maid looked up at him. ‘Are you a policeman?’
Sinha shook his head. ‘No. I am a master of vaastu.’
‘I don’t know what that is.’
‘No matter. I shall explain it to you—on the journey.’
‘Journey?’
He stood up. ‘Come on. Both of you. We’re going for a drive.’
Shortly afterwards, they were in Sinha’s car, a Renault Megane he had hired from the Avis office at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport, on his arrival the previous afternoon. He drove slowly, speaking in his languid drawl. ‘Interesting driving techniques they use here. Rather like India. But slightly less use of the horn. You know they say that in India people use the horn in place of the brake? Whereas here they sort of nestle up against each other and use their size to intimidate other users to give them space. Still, it’s more like India than Singapore. I must switch my brain over to Indian Driving Mode, which will give us a better chance of survival.’
The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics Page 11