The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics

by Nury Vittachi

  A minute passed, and she was still staring at the unenticing window display of Foreign Trade Finery.

  ‘It’s quicker on the elephant than in this truck,’ Joyce said.

  The feng shui master nodded.

  The elephant, in seeming agreement, knocked at the walls behind them and trumpeted a moan.

  ‘Plan C,’ Joyce said. ‘Abandon truck and return to riding the elephant.’ She threw open the cabin door and, ignoring the shouts of the driver, jumped out. There was no danger, since all the vehicles around them were stationary.

  The men were initially reluctant to let them go, especially since Wong wanted his money back. The dispute on this point threatened to drag on. But Joyce barked at her boss: ‘Tell them to keep the money. There’s no time for fighting. We’ve got thirty-seven minutes left.’ She raced around to the back to open the door. The elephant was happy to see her—the dark, cramped room had not improved his day. He slowly but gratefully backed out of the van.

  Joyce again closed her eyes and for the third time tried to visualise an answer—and another picture eventually came. She saw herself cantering along on the elephant, riding it as if it was a horse. She saw the two of them galloping down a freeway at high speed, and then reaching a country village where a veterinary surgeon would appear, operate on the elephant, remove the bomb and throw it into an empty field, whereupon the elephant would trumpet its thanks to her and rise to its feet, fully recovered and grateful to her for the rest of its life (elephants never forget, after all).

  But when she opened her eyes, she saw that the beast had closed its eyes, and she began to despair again. The elephant had stopped moving altogether. It was generating a lot of heat. It was covered in sweat—large drops of it. It stank. It looked as if it was on its last legs. There was no way it was going to gallop, canter, or even walk.

  Progress was horribly difficult. Huanghe Lu was what Joyce called a Chinese Road of Death. The pavements were entirely blocked by ranks of parked bicycles and scooters. The roads were entirely filled with traffic. Pedestrians proceeded along such roads walking in the gutters, in imminent fear of being run over.

  ‘Joyce.’ Linyao leapt off a bicycle she had stolen and it clattered to the ground behind her. She ran towards them. ‘The American agents are really upset that you ran off with the elephant. They want to “locate and destroy” it. They’re looking for you. You better hide.’

  ‘Not without Nelly,’ Joyce said. ‘Hang on—is this a boy or a girl elephant?’

  ‘Boy.’

  ‘Not Nelly, then. How about Nelson? Let’s call him Nelson.’

  ‘When is the bomb going to go off?’

  ‘Thirty-six minutes,’ Wong said. ‘Aiyeeaa. You are animal doctor: can you take the bomb out?’ He realised that separating the explosive device and the beast would be the only way that this day would end without the death of the white elephant— and the end of all positive fortune in his life.

  Linyao shook her head. ‘The truth is, I don’t think so. I’ve never done anything like this. Even if I did it in a proper operating theatre. To do it in the street, without the proper tools—it’s impossible.’

  ‘He looks like he’s really suffering,’ Joyce said, her eyes again becoming wet. She patted Nelson’s head and rubbed its trunk affectionately.

  Linyao agreed. ‘The thing in its stomach must be making it feel terrible. Or it might be the pain from the operation. They must have anaesthetised it heavily to cut it open, and given it gallons of painkillers. I’m guessing the stuff is probably wearing off now, so it’s starting to feel the pain again.’

  ‘What can we do?’

  ‘You’ll have to let it rest.’

  ‘But we can’t. We have to keep it moving, get it out of town.’

  ‘It’s not going to move if it’s sick. You’ll need to let it rest.’

  ‘We don’t have any time. Can you give it some painkillers?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Linyao took out a huge syringe from her bag, filled it from a plastic bottle, and stuck it in the elephant’s butt. ‘This will make him feel better.’

  The elephant did not complain as at least a litre of medicine was emptied into its flank.

  Wong was intrigued. Could modern medicine really solve the problem for them? ‘Now will it move fast?’

  Linyao shook her head. ‘No. In about three minutes’ time, it will fall fast asleep.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Wong, on possibly the only occasion Joyce had heard him make an ironic comment. ‘Thank you very much.’

  11

  Dooley raced up the stairs.

  ‘Where we going?’ puffed Lasse, following three steps behind.

  ‘Roof,’ the Acting Secret Agent in Charge shot out, not willing to expend his breath on more detail—going up the stairs to the top of a tall building needed every cubic centimetre of air in his lungs. In cases of emergency he hated taking elevators. It seemed to him the height of madness to enclose yourself in a small metal box when maximum freedom of movement was your bottom line. Especially with mad bombers lurking who knew where. Those damned terrorists. Now that the security forces were looking out at every juncture for swarthy adult males with beards and Islamic names, the bastards were using animals, white female teenagers and Chinese doctors to smuggle bombs into places. At the top of the stairs he pushed open the door to the roof, only to find himself staring down the barrel of a gun. He raised his arms and barked: ‘Acting Special Agent in Charge Dooley.’

  The officer on guard realised who it was and lowered the weapon. ‘Sorry, sir, I didn’t know you were coming up here. Once the alarm went off we all went on defcon red. I didn’t have any inf—’ Dooley brushed him aside and marched onto the roof proper. There was a squad of snipers, in pairs, fanned out to cover the building from all directions. They turned to stare, feeling the waves of stress emanating from him. ‘Listen, men,’ he shouted. ‘Anyone seen an elephant coming out of the building?’

  Two of the men laughed—not because it was funny, but because everyone was simultaneously bored and tense, an uncomfortable combination which makes you over-react to everything. Further, laughing seemed to be the most obedient reaction, and obedience was what one had to demonstrate in front of Thomas Dooley if one did not want one’s butt kicked. One sniper tried helpfully to make a follow-up crack: ‘I thought Janet Remo had retired.’

  But the sternness of the lines on Dooley’s face—there was not a hint of a smile there—mowed down the first vestiges of polite laughter at their roots.

  Dooley felt he was moving in slow motion as it sank in that this situation was so far out of the box, he would have to cooperate closely with the Chinese—perhaps even do the unthinkable and let them take the lead. A bomb was walking around the same part of town that POTUS was occupying. Commander Zhang Xiumei: it had to be her. She was the only one capable of handling this—more’s the pity. He was already worried that she was far too capable and knowledgeable and smart and well-informed for his liking. And even worse, he almost sorta kinda actually liked her, or would have liked her had he been capable of liking anyone.

  In his position, he had a cast-iron policy not to find pleasure in any relationship, or even to feel indifferent to anyone. Indeed, it was policy to actively hate everyone, if at all possible. But Commander Zhang sparked other emotions in him. Anger, jealousy, and something else; some other emotion he did not want to look at too closely. She was not pretty in the normal sense—and he was immune to that sort of thing, anyway—but she shone with intelligence, drive, animation, courage and loyalty. Her staff jumped to her every order with a level of instant, adoring obedience that he had never achieved with anyone, not even skinny, servile Lasse. She was the perfect government agent. He enjoyed watching her in action, marshalling her troops with barked commands in her staccato language. But he was angry with himself for having nonnegative emotions about her. To have an involuntary reaction to a person was bad enough. To have such an unpredictable response to someone On the O
ther Side—hell’s bells, a kind of madness was overtaking him.

  Two days ago, the last time he had had a meeting with her, they had continued to talk for almost eleven minutes after the formal business was over. He realised that had she been an American officer, he would have been tempted to suggest meeting for a drink ‘after all the craziness is over’. But she was a member of the People’s Armed Police: it was not an option. A slightly elongated and semi-personal chat after a formal exchange of notes was about as far as it could go.

  The scary thing was that they had talked almost entirely about non-official things, as if they were two normal human beings, capable of normal social activity, which they decidedly were not. They had swapped details about their families— what their parents and relatives did. Yet even that basic Dale Carnegie conversation had been full of minefields. He had told her that his parents lived in Kentucky where Kentucky Fried Chicken came from. This had meant nothing to her, but the term ‘KFC’ elicited a nod of recognition. They had those in Shanghai. He asked her where her folks lived. She replied Nanning City, which meant nothing to him. ‘That’s nice,’ he said. ‘Uh. Where is that? Near Beijing?’

  ‘Guangxi,’ she had replied—another name that meant nothing to him.

  ‘Sorry, ah don’t know where that is, either. Is it north or south?’

  ‘South, near the border with Vietnam.’

  He then asked what seemed like the most obvious, banal question of all: ‘And do you have any brothers and sisters?’

  ‘No,’ she replied, quietly.

  And then he felt mortified when he recalled that in China, most people weren’t allowed to have siblings, not in the urban areas, anyway. Goddam.

  He racked his brain for a quick change of topic. The standard subject of social conversation between agents cooperating on behalf of different countries (as he had experienced in presidential protective assignments in London and Rome) was a comparison of pay and conditions. It seemed a safe enough topic.

  ‘Enjoy your job? Good pay—ah mean, compared to other jobs?’

  She nodded. ‘To be paid is good,’ she said, which was not quite the response he had expected. Then: ‘How much do you get paid?’

  This had thrown him momentarily. He blurted out: ‘Well, an agent’s pay is pretty good, about the same as a middle manager in business or a bit higher, that sort of thing. But we work hard for it—as ah’m sure you do.’

  ‘Yes, but how much do you get paid? In United States dollars?’

  Dooley had stopped. The information was not classified. But it might be embarrassing. What the heck—he could open up a little bit. It might even inspire her to defect from China and become an American. That thought gave him a smile, which he kept deep inside. What a shame a woman like this was stuck in such a godawful job in a godawful country.

  ‘Weel, you start off pretty low, on the pay scale, ah mean. But then it climbs up at a reasonable speed. After an average of five years in the field, a special agent can get assigned to a protective detail, which lasts four to five years. We start at what we call the GS-5, GS-7 or GS-9 pay levels, depending on qualifications, and so on. And then, after a few years, we climb up through GS-11, GS-12 until we get to GS-13, which is what is called the Journeyman Grade. But we get good extras, too. We get twenty-five per cent of base salary in addition as LEAP money—that stands for Law Enforcement Availability Pay. ’cause we’re never off duty sort of thing, always on standby. Then there’s SOT, which is scheduled overtime.’

  ‘Yes, but how much do you get in dollars?’

  There was no escaping it. ‘Weel, the average new agent can expect to pull down maybe fifty-five to sixty-five thousand, and then it climbs up to GS-13, Journeyman Grade, at something over a hundred thousand per year. Oh, and there’s one really good perk. Agents in the field also get G-Rides. These are government vehicles. Uh, cars.’

  She thought about this. ‘One hundred thousand US dollars a year. That’s a lot of money. That’s almost a million yuan. That’s more than our President gets. And a free car.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s not really a free car. We can only use it on government business and to go to work and to come home and other stuff.’ Hell, what was he saying, it was a free car. ‘And it’s different for you. The cost of living here is like nothing. Ah mean, nothing compared to what we have to pay.

  Ah mean, a cup of coffee at Starbucks at home is like four dollars.’

  ‘A cup of coffee at a fashionable restaurant here is five dollars. Officers of the People’s Armed Police get two thousand yuan a month. That’s two hundred and forty US dollars. A day’s pay works out as one and a half cappuccinos. Rank and file military men get meals plus an allowance of three hundred yuan a month. That’s about one dollar a day.’

  He hadn’t known what to say to that. ‘Gee, ah’m so sorry, that stinks,’ he said—and then decided that that was the wrong response. ‘Come and join my lot—ah’ll see to it that you get a pay rise.’ He had meant it mainly as a joke, but he saw alarm in her eyes. That was also the wrong thing to say.

  ‘I can’t join your service. I am from mainland China.’

  She was dead right, of course. That was the end of that conversation.

  A movement to his right brought him back to the present. A tall individual using a long-range weapon to cover the west side of the building gestured with his hand. ‘Sir? An elephant, you said? Yeah, there was a girl and an elephant came out a few minutes ago. I thought it was pretty strange, but then I remembered there was a show tonight—magicians and circus-type things. Was the elephant part of the show?’

  Dooley ignored the question. ‘Where is it now?’

  The man pointed along Nanjing Xi Lu. ‘Down there somewhere. Ah—it went in that direction. A big crowd gathered around it, made it hard to move. I saw it cross the road, head up there, past the Marriott Hotel. I think it’s over there somewhere, maybe near the park.’

  The three of them peered over the edge of the parapet but could not see the beast.

  Lasse said: ‘Do you think we should go down there and have a look, boss?’

  But Dooley was already heading to the staircase.

  Commander Zhang had dispatched an English-speaking lieutenant to get more information on the emergency: a young man named Wan. He reported back within minutes with the same information that she had been given: someone had put a bomb in an elephant. They were, apparently, talking about a real elephant. And then someone—a foreign woman working with a local woman, apparently—had escaped with the beast. At this moment, no one knew where the girl or the elephant had gone, but they could not have gone far, and the Americans requested the People’s Armed Police and any other public security body to provide immediate help in tracking them down as soon as possible.

  Zhang phoned Dooley. ‘You told Wan about this elephant business. With the bomb inside, yes?’

  ‘Yeah, Zhang, we may need your help in sorting this one out. We’ve found the elephant. They’re about a half-mile or so up the road, due north of the Grand Theatre. They’re heading north or east. We haven’t exactly got a plan about what to do when we catch up with them. We’ve told the President’s people—uh, both Presidents—that the show is off. They are being diverted to a secret location outside the city.’

  ‘You are talking about a real elephant, a real bomb.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘This is not a sexual thing?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This elephant and bomb, it’s not an advanced English colloquialism for a, ah, sexual thing?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Never mind. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what you can do that might be real useful.

  Find me some sort of location—perhaps a warehouse or something—where we can explode the bomb safely.’

  ‘Can you disarm the bomb?’

  ‘Negative. We don’t have the expertise to get to it. Nor do we have time now. We’re going to have to
blow the thing.’

  ‘I’ll start looking for a suitable location. Where is the elephant?’

  ‘On the main road behind the park—waddyacallit, Nanjing Xi Lu, is it? Or just off it somewhere.’ There was the sound of a map being crinkled. ‘They may be on this road called, er, Huanghe Lu. We’re chasing them.’

  ‘Understand.’

  ‘And, uh, Commander?’

  ‘Yes, Special Agent Dooley?’

  ‘We might need a bit of local advice. We’re not that great at getting around here—especially not with this traffic and this demo and stuff.’

  ‘Understand. I will send Officer Wan to help you.’

  ‘Thanks. I appreciate that.’ Dooley rang off.

  Zhang slowly lowered her handset and turned to Wan. ‘The Americans are up to some sort of trick. And the President of China may be the target. What else can it be? This is exactly what we expected from them. Remember I warned you? We need to pretend to play along with them. Call the rest of the team.’

  As Wan got on to the radio phones, Zhang wondered what exactly she should say to her chiefs: they would be in a state of panic. This was a highly significant development. And which chiefs? Her superior at the People’s Armed Police needed to know, but so did the Politburo, the Communist Party leaders, and the Central Military Affairs Commission. She thought it would be wise to get an urgent message to her senior-most contact at the main leadership compound of Zhongnanhai in Beijing.

  Zhang had a three-minute conference with her squad of twelve key officers, then outlined the plan. ‘Wan, you will cooperate with the Americans and pretend to help them. But don’t help them too much, you know what I mean? You will really be gathering information for us.