They hurried over.
‘Stinky tofu is bad news for our investigation,’ said Sinha.
‘You can smell it for miles. And it drifts in the wind.’
‘No, it was near here. It was a strong smell. We were almost on top of it. I could hear the man calling out. Something like:
“Jia chang dow-foo, jia chang dow-foo”.’
‘Home-style tofu,’ Linyao translated.
They approached the tofu-seller and Sinha encouraged the maid to look around with her eyes shut. ‘I know it sounds crazy, but I strongly believe that keeping your eyes shut will better help you recreate where you were.’
She did as she was told. She stood in the middle of the street with her face up to heaven and her eyes closed, looking beatific, like a nun high on ecstacy, spiritual or otherwise.
While she concentrated, Sinha’s eyes darted around. One house to the left had an alley along its east wall. And there was a building on the other side, 50 metres up the road which also had a side alley, along which one could speedily push a woman in a blindfold from a back door to the road.
‘It would help if we knew which side of the road you were on,’ he said. ‘Can you tell us that?’
‘I don’t know, sorry.’
‘Vaastu teaches us that the most important thing in life is the sun. If you know where the sun is, everything else follows.’
‘But I couldn’t see anything. And the room we were in had no windows.’
‘The sun does not produce only light. It gives us heat. Were you aware of any warmth?’
Angelita stopped to think. ‘When I was taken out of the room in the morning, we had to wait half a minute until the driver got something—the keys or something. I think they were undoing the locks of the front door. I could feel warm on my arm. There was sunshine and breeze and noises—it made me think they had the window open.’
‘Excellent,’ said Sinha. ‘Now you’ve got the idea. The sun is the origin of all things, but also it is the starting point of all places, the vaastu masters say.’
She closed her eyes as she tried to conjure herself back into the scene. ‘There was heat on my arm, just here.’ She stroked her left forearm. ‘And there might have been a window open, but I’m not sure.’
‘Which direction was the window?’
‘This way. I was facing the door, and the window was this way.’ She pointed to her left.
Linyao stepped in, impatient as ever. ‘But which way? North, east, south, west, that’s what we need to know.’
‘I don’t know, ma’am, I’m sorry.’
Sinha raised one hand. ‘You think you don’t know, but you do. You felt the sun’s warmth on your arm. That’s all we need to know.’ He marched back to the centre of the road, looked at his watch and then up at the sky.
The vaastu master knew a trick which enabled him to use an analogue watch to tell the directions of the compass at any time. First, you locate the sun in the sky. Then you look at the hands on your watch and find the middle point between them and then line up the sun with the middle point of your watch. The numeral 12 on your watch will point due north. Then use any rhyme—Never Eat Shredded Wheat was the one he had been taught in a New Delhi grammar school—to place the other major points of the compass clockwise at the right spots: N, E, S, W. Do a bit of mental extrapolation to find the location of the sun at other times.
‘At eight ten or eight fifteen this morning, the sun would have been about—there,’ he said. He pointed low on the horizon, at a building which seemed to be a school or some sort of government institution.
‘The sun’s heat would come from the east, and—I would think—might hit the top few floors of that building over there, and perhaps that one, and maybe the one next to it. If you could feel the sun’s heat on your arm, it was almost definitely shining directly at you, through the window, which may or may not have been open. That gives us only a few options. It was one of those buildings along there, probably.’ He pointed to the three blocks which were catching the sun on their upper storey. ‘Let’s check each of them in turn.’
Sinha made Angelita enter each foyer, close her eyes and take a deep sniff, and then listen for a while. But she couldn’t differentiate between them. ‘They all smell the same, and sound the same,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’
All three buildings had aged security guards at the bottom. The third one they questioned gave them an interesting lead—after Linyao had slipped him a 100-yuan note. ‘Black people,’ he said in Shanghainese. ‘Fifth floor, back flat.’
‘You mean people in black clothes?’ Linyao asked.
He nodded. ‘Always black. Foreigners.’
Linyao translated for Sinha.
‘Were they foreigners?’ asked Sinha. ‘The voices on the phone were not Chinese?’
Linyao said: ‘I think it must be foreigners and Chinese working together. Anyway, to the older generation in Shanghai, people from outside the city are called foreigners, or outsiders: waidiren. Whether they come from London or Fujian or Beijing or the moon, they are all just outsiders.’
‘Waidiren,’ the old man repeated in a grumble.
Linyao, her face set, headed for the staircase.
‘Stop,’ Sinha called, reaching for her arm. ‘We need to—’
‘I am not stopping. I need to find my child.’
‘I know, I know, you want to see your daughter as soon as possible. But they may be armed. It may be dangerous. At this stage, I strongly recommend that we get professional help from the law enforcement authorities. It is vital to—’ But Linyao wasn’t listening. She raced up the stairs. The vaastu master and the domestic helper looked at each other— and were soon puffing up the stairs after her. ‘I tried,’ Sinha said to the domestic helper. ‘You’re my witness. Did you hear me? I did try to dissuade her, didn’t I? This could get nasty. I advise you to keep your distance. No heroics, please. Heroics make me nervous. They are very unspiritual. Neither vaastu nor feng shui can protect one against heroics, which are a very bad thing.’
Outside the door of the flat at the back of the fifth floor, they noticed three discarded Pizza Shack boxes. Sinha whispered to Angelita: ‘There they are. One for you and Jia Lin, two for the kidnappers. That suggests there are only three or four of them.’
Linyao picked up one of the boxes and rang the bell.
‘Who?’ said a female voice in Mandarin.
Linyao replied in the same language. ‘Pizza Shack. You ordered three pizzas last night. You win a special prize. Free pizza.’
‘Don’t want it. Go away.’
‘What? Can’t hear you.’
‘Go away.’
‘Can’t hear you. Open the door. Get your free pizza.’ She rang the doorbell again.
The door opened a crack. It was chained so that it could not swing wider than seven or eight centimetres.
‘Here is your free pizza,’ Linyao said, holding up one of the boxes as if it was still full. ‘Open the door, please.’
The door closed, a chain was removed, and the catch was released again.
Instantly Linyao slammed the door with her shoulder, knocking over the woman on the other side, who fell backwards, yelling curses.
The furious mother stormed into the room, with Sinha and Angelita behind her.
The young woman in black clothes rose to her feet and pulled out a gun. Linyao batted it out of her hands with the pizza box. ‘Where’s my child, you bitch,’ she yelled, falling heavily on top of her. Never mind scorned women: there is no fury like a mother parted from her child. Angelita picked up the gun from the floor and held it lightly with her fingertips as if it were a dirty nappy. She decided that the safest thing to do was to get rid of it, so she threw it out of the window.
Sinha said disapprovingly: ‘If you ever find yourself in a repeat of this situation in Singapore, I would strongly advise you not to throw guns out of windows. They don’t like that sort of thing over there.’
Angelita, trying to be helpful, fell h
eavily onto the woman with whom her employer was struggling, landing on her stomach and causing her to groan. While the two women grappled with the kidnapper—who appeared to be alone in the flat—Sinha scanned the apartment for a windowless room. He knew that a room with no window would almost definitely be a maid’s room, and would likely be reached through the kitchen. So he raced past a two-ring cooker and entered a utility area containing a washing machine and an ironing board.
Beyond that, he saw the door of a maid’s bedroom, bolted from the outside. He slipped the catch and slowly swung it open. Inside, a small girl was watching television. She looked up at him briefly, registered no interest, and turned straight back to the screen.
‘Come, Jia Lin. I’m a friend of your mother’s. We’ve come to take you home.’
‘After this,’ she said.
‘I’m sure your mother will buy you a DVD of this movie for your very own.’
Seconds later, Linyao and Angelita both appeared behind Sinha. ‘Jia Lin,’ they shouted, simultaneously.
‘Hi,’ the little girl said, her face lighting up with happiness. Jia Lin jumped off the bed, and ran past Sinha and her mother, burying her face in the domestic helper’s legs.
7
The atmosphere in the underground theatre was tense and feverish. Silence, broken only by the sound of people weeping or trying to comfort each other, had followed Vega’s exit. Murmuring noises then broke out as the religious among them started beseeching various deities to effect their release from this nightmare. Even to the only nominally religious, these seemed to be a good idea, and a steady drone of mumbled prayers to the Almighty or mantras to the collective will started to hum through the echoing chamber.
A few people wept openly, and one man curled himself into a foetal position and started calling for his mother, which, if the truth be told, made most of the others feel like doing the same. God or mum? Now there’s a choice. The Catholic route of combining the two with a Holy Mother seemed to make excellent sense to several people for the first time. For the entirely non-religious, a great truism became clear to them: if religion is a delusion, it is a useful, even necessary one, and people too intelligent or self-possessed to delude themselves are greatly to be pitied.
As time passed, the misery level fell. The very texture of the air in a room containing people condemned to death is somehow changed: it is filled with life and light as the inhabitants start to feel grateful for the most mundane realities. Thank you for dirty floors. Thank you for stale air. Thank you for this minute of breath and thank you in anticipation of the next. The notion that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone is wrong. People who have been given a glimpse of the end of the road don’t have the luxury of waiting until life has gone to miss it. To lose the confidence that the sun will rise on another day is a type of death in itself.
This mental barrier of despair was broken through in silence, without pain or panic. The room felt like the cabin of an aircraft falling slowly out of the sky. People sat quietly and thought about their families, their parents, their children. If the purpose of the Children of Vega had been to make animal-abusing diners feel guilty for their crimes against four- or eight-legged friends, the exercise was proving a dismal failure. Not a soul was feeling remorseful about having eaten large numbers of innocent, fun-loving lobsters. The few who were not praying but having coherent thoughts about the situation were thinking only about how they had fallen into the hands of madmen, and whether there was the slightest chance of fighting or arguing their way out.
‘We nominated curling oysters for the meal,’ businessman Chen Shaiming suddenly said. ‘There’s nothing cruel about eating oysters. We shouldn’t be here. They should let us go.’ He raised his voice, in the hope that someone outside would hear him. ‘Are you listening? You should let us go.’
His corpulent wife Fangyin chimed in, a whiny nasal echo of her husband: ‘Yes, everyone eats oysters. Can you tell them, please?’ She turned to look at Joyce, who was assumed to be the in-house expert on the ways of killer vegans.
Joyce pursed her lips. Traumatised by what she had seen, she was curled up motionless at the back of the cage. It seemed so unfair, especially since she had last year become a vegetarian herself. She decided that she might as well talk—it would take her mind off the horror that kept replaying itself on the screen in her mind. ‘Well, maybe a vegan might think that eating oysters is cruel. I mean, you eat them alive, right?’
‘Yes, but not in a cruel way,’ Fangyin objected, feigning surprise at any such implication. ‘I think they rather like it.
Much better than just rotting there on the ocean floor for years and years. Dying of old age is a slow, nasty death.’
‘But how do you actually do it?’
‘You pick up the oyster in the shell,’ her husband explained. ‘Then you squeeze lemon onto it. If it sort of squeezes itself up, that means it’s fresh. That’s why we call them curling oysters. Then you add a bit of chilli sauce—that usually makes it curl again—and then you pop it in your mouth. You chew it quickly and then you swallow it. That’s all there is to it. No cruelty at all. A quick, painless death.’
Joyce spoke carefully, thinking about each word: ‘But, if you—if the thing winces when you put lemon on it, maybe the lemon, like, hurts it?’
‘But you have to put lemon on it,’ Fangyin said. ‘And you have to see it wince. Otherwise it is not fresh, and you can’t eat it. If you eat an oyster that doesn’t curl, you can suffer a fate worse than death—you can have an upset stomach.’
‘That’s not a fate worse than death.’
‘It is to me.’
If anyone was upset by Fangyin’s crassness in the face of the killing they had just seen, they didn’t say anything. But several closed their eyes when she used the word death.
There was a noisy interruption from the cage next to the one Wong and McQuinnie shared. ‘That’s the same with me. I nominated Korean spiced baby octopus for my dish,’ said Park Hae-jin. ‘You put chilli and garlic sauce on it, and then you eat it. It’s not cruel to animals or anything. They like the chilli sauce. They do a little dance.’
Joyce’s brow furrowed. ‘But if you put lemon or chilli on a creature and it writhes about, it probably means that it doesn’t like it. It probably hurts.’
There was a loud snort from another cage. ‘Of course it hurts,’ said Tun. ‘Haven’t you ever accidentally wiped your eye or something when you’ve touched a chilli? It hurts like crazy. Lemon, too. Ever squirted a bit of lemon into your eye by mistake? You’re idiots, pretending that it doesn’t hurt.’
Joyce nodded, her face suddenly very disapproving. ‘Yeah, he’s right, I’m sure. When you stick stuff on those creatures, you’re really hurting them. It’s ever so cruel. That’s why you’re here.’
There was silence as the Chens took in this unwanted information.
‘But what will our punishment be?’ Fangyin asked. ‘Will they sprinkle a little lemon into our hair? I think that would be a fair punishment. I don’t mind even if they squeeze a whole lemon into my hair. It would spoil my hairdo but I am prepared to accept that as a punishment, if I have to accept something as a punishment. Can you tell the man?’
Joyce was exasperated. ‘He can’t hear me or any of us, so no one can tell him anything, okay?’
Park, the octopus eater, looked depressed. ‘But I’m sure it’s a happy dance. I know the difference between a happy dance and an unhappy dance. They like the chilli sauce.’
‘Shut up, you idiot.’ This comment came from Tun, who clearly had a volcanic temper. ‘Chilli sauce contains capsaicin, an extremely harmful and painful chemical compound. Those baby octopuses are writhing in their death agonies, not dancing. And besides, you crunch them up in your mouth while they are still alive. Are you going to tell us that they enjoy that as well? Would you enjoy that—being doused with burning chemicals and then being eaten alive?’
Joyce said nothing, but a vile thought ran through
her head: Perhaps he will find out. She blocked the thought immediately and stared around to distract herself.
Park opened his mouth to defend himself, but shut it again without saying anything. He took his jacket off and shaped it into a pillow before lying down on it. ‘My head still aches,’ he said.
A rather handsome if chubby youngish man sat in the back corner of the room, in a cage with a short dark-skinned woman dressed in bright colours. ‘The thing we nominated was not cruel, I’m sure of that.’ His accent, similar to but not exactly like that of a Hispanic American, gave him away as Filipino.
‘What was it?’ Joyce asked.
‘Balut,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Eggs. Just eggs, that’s all. Even vegetarians eat eggs, don’t they?’
‘Well, some do. Vegans don’t.’
‘There’s no cruelty in eating eggs.’
His wife nodded furiously. ‘We only nominated eggs, which even vegetarians eat,’ she repeated, to make sure everyone had got the point.
Park was not standing for this. ‘Tonyboy, don’t you pretend your dish is cruelty-free while the rest of us are guilty.’
‘What? Eggs are eggs.’
‘Not if they are balut.’ Park turned to direct his comments at Joyce. ‘May I introduce Tonyboy Villanueva and his wife Girlie. What they have neglected to tell you is that balut refers to fertilised duck eggs.’
‘Oh,’ said Joyce, as if she knew what he was getting at.
‘They are fertilised,’ Park repeated. ‘Think about it. They have little bird foetuses growing inside. The creatures are alive. They have tiny wings and tiny bones and tiny feathers.’
Tonyboy shot back: ‘But it’s not cruel. We cook them, sometimes.’
‘And sometimes you eat them raw,’ Park said. ‘Even if you cook them, what are you doing? You are throwing some poor live baby bird into a pot of boiling water. I suppose you are going to tell us that they like it—that it’s like going to a swimming pool for them?’
The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics Page 13