The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics

by Nury Vittachi

  They were in a shabby inner city residential area, rumbling slowly along a mottled, crumbling sidewalk. Staring at the ground as she pushed with both hands, Joyce’s mind idly revisited a problem that had been in the back of it for several days: who chose the colours of the small bricks that made up Shanghai’s sidewalks, and why on earth did he or she think that dull orange and Robin Hood green were a good combination?

  ‘We need to hide. Let them go right past us.’ Cai was talking in Shanghainese to Linyao, but Joyce guessed what they were saying. It was clear to all of them that they had no chance of outrunning a police car.

  She looked around and noticed that the area seemed familiar. They were on Xi Kou Lu, near the junction with East Jining Lu, in an ugly cramped area north of Old Town. The roads were small and narrow and dirty, with European-style buildings from the 1920s and 1930s cheek to jowl with recent factory blocks, warehouses and apartments. She had been here before. Who did she know who lived here?

  ‘This is where Flip lives,’ Joyce said to Linyao. ‘Maybe he can help us. Do you have his number? We could hang out at his place while the police go by—maybe.’

  ‘With this?’

  ‘You never know. Perhaps he’s got a bigger-than-average place? Well, anyone got any better ideas?’

  No one did. ‘I have him on one-touch dial,’ Linyao said, pressing the buttons and handing the phone to Joyce.

  There was an agonising ten-second wait before Flip picked up.

  ‘Yo, Linyao, howzit—’ Flip said, recognising the caller’s number.

  ‘It’s me, Joyce. I’m using Linyao’s phone.’

  ‘Yo, sista. Howditgo las’ night—’

  ‘Flip—we’re having an emergency. We need to stop and hide. I think we’re near where you live. Is there any place we can hide and—’

  ‘Dat’s easy. You can stop at de place of my uncle. He got one of dem ol’ courtyard houses.’

  ‘But the thing is—well, we’ve got to keep moving, because we’ve got to get out of town, and we don’t have much time.’

  ‘Lemme get dis straight. You gotta stop and hide. But also you gotta keep movin’. You gotta do boat of dese tings at once.’

  ‘Yeah, I know it sounds—’

  ‘Dat’s a bit tricky. But head to my uncle’s house firs’. Hide firs’. Den when it’s all clear, run. Where are you ’zackly?’

  ‘Corner of Xi Kou Lu and East Jining Lu, facing south.’

  ‘Gotcha. Go down the street to your right, look for the big magnolia tree on de lef ’.’

  ‘I think I can see the place you mean.’

  ‘Can you see de turd?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘De turd house. Red one.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I see it.

  ‘Dere’s an alley dere. Go down it. I on my way. I meet you dere in two.’

  ‘But—well, the thing is, we are travelling with a big piece of luggage sort of thing.’

  ‘No problem. My uncle’s place is huge.’

  The house was easy to find, although difficult to reach since it was in a relatively narrow lane, and it took all of Cai’s load-managing skill to keep it moving. The edges of the platform scarred several cars and walls as it travelled along the lane.

  Wong, struggling to recapture his breath, felt marginally better to be tucked into the alley. It was a pleasure to get away from that police car, and the danger, noise and pollution of the main thoroughfare.

  But he could still hear the thunder of traffic and the wail of police sirens. The People’s Armed Police were probably not far behind them. And there was another sound too—what was it? Something low and chugging. After a moment’s thought he realised it was the distinctive ripping sound of a big motorbike—had the Special Agents abandoned their cars? The noise sounded as if it was only a few hundred metres behind then.

  ‘They’re coming. Must hide.’ He looked at the house where they were supposed to take shelter. It was an old and ugly longtang—the sort of courtyard that Beijingers called hutongs. These walled settlements were divided by thin back alleys. The one in front of them was a shikumen, a stone gatehouse which had elements of Eastern and Western architectural design. If Flip’s uncle had one to himself, he had more space than most families, who tended to share premises—but it would be unlikely to have any opening which would allow a large piece of cargo in or out. ‘Too small,’ said Wong, looking at the narrow red double-door. ‘We cannot get in with this thing.’

  An electronic, amplified voice could be heard in the distance, getting louder.

  ‘Is the police!’ Wong said.

  ‘Nah, it’s Flip,’ Joyce said as her friend appeared.

  He was gliding down the alley on his skateboard, a baggy-clothed Silver Surfer come to rescue them. He was using his rap-megaphone to announce his arrival. ‘Hey, guyz, I gotcha back.’ Flip didn’t know what it meant, but his friends in New York said it regularly when they wanted to assure each other that they would cover for them. ‘Be happy, dudes, I gotcha back.’

  ‘We need to get this hidden somewhere,’ Wong told him.

  ‘Relax, mun. I getchoo in. And your luggage.’

  He rapped on the door and a small window opened to their left. There followed a conversation in Shanghainese.

  ‘Okay,’ Flip said. ‘He’s cool. Round d’back.’

  Led by Cai, they trundled their platform over to the left of the house. Flip, though flabby, was surprisingly strong, and they quickly managed to reach a small wooden side door, painted green. Cai took off his shirt and used it to wipe his brow. His body was tightly muscled from long days of physical labour. Joyce wanted to run her eyes over his gorgeous torso but could feel her face reddening, so she turned away.

  ‘This door even smaller than front door,’ Wong complained.

  ‘’ave patience, Wong-sheng,’ Flip said. He banged twice on the wall.

  They heard an answering shout from inside, then the sound of chains rattling over cogs. The noise grew and was followed by the unmistakable clink of gears and pulleys. An entire section of wall—door and all—started moving to one side and tucked itself away, classic moving infrastructure à la James Bond.

  There wasn’t time to give this miracle the round of applause it deserved, or even to gape and be amazed by it. Instead they quickly pushed the platform inside. Once they were all in the courtyard, the hidden machinery was operated in reverse, and the wall pulled itself shut behind them. They found themselves in an open space lined with boxes and packing cases. It was a small factory of some sort. There were pallets piled high with crates stamped in several languages, and the words ‘Goods for export’.

  ‘Dis my uncle.’

  A smiling old man with no teeth and a large moustache nodded a greeting to them.

  Through a door behind him, they could hear the click and whirr of a number of machines, plus the electronic shushing noise of massed banks of electronic equipment with their built-in fans.

  ‘What do you do here?’ Joyce asked, strolling through the doorway and peering closely at a machine. She could see disks popping out of a hole onto a conveyor belt. ‘Oh. You make DVDs or something?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Flip. ‘Six hundred a day. Dey plannin’ to get new machine put de total number up over a tousan’ a day.’

  ‘Cheese. Is this where all the Chinese pirate DVDs get made? All those Hollywood movies that you can buy on the street for a dollar?’

  Flip looked affronted. ‘Dey am not pirate Hollywood DVDs,’ he said.

  ‘Oops, sorry. Didn’t mean to insult you. It was just—you know, the secret wall and all that. And this doesn’t look like a factory. It just looks like, well, a house sort of thing.’

  Flip flipped his scowl into a smile. ‘Don’t worry. What I mean is dey am not pirate Hollywood DVDs sold on the street in China. Dey pirated Hong Kong DVDs sold on the street in the United States. Dey love the kung fu stuff over dere.’

  Over the next two minutes, the squeal of the sirens became louder, and th
en louder still—clearly, a number of vehicles were combing the back alleys where the longtangs were. But after another minute, the sound diminished in strength. They had found nothing and were travelling further east.

  Wong and the team held their breath until the sound disappeared—then gave a silent cheer, punching the air and doing little dances. Joyce kissed Flip, who blushed.

  ‘No time to waste,’ said the feng shui master. ‘Only twenty-six minutes left before the—you know.’ The crew prepared to move again. ‘Must go.’

  Flip’s uncle gave a signal to his staff to slide the wall open. The young man pointed Wong in a direction away from the main road. ‘Go to de lef ’. You keep out of de way of trouble.’

  ‘But it’s blocked,’ said Wong, looking at a narrow alley piled high with boxes, rubbish bins and other debris.

  ‘He can clear it,’ said Flip.

  The old man banged a gong and the boxes and bins were automatically retracted into the garages they had apparently spilled out of. They were all on strings and pulleys, like a theatre set.

  ‘We have dis special route for makin’ sure we can get the CDs and DVDs out efficiently,’ said Flip. ‘But government people in big vans who come lookin’ for us have difficulty reachin’ us.’

  ‘Majorly cool,’ said Joyce.

  They started pushing the trolley down the alley.

  Jappar Memet snatched up the phone. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Number fourteen calling for number one—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, wot is it? What’s goin’ on? Spit it out. Yer already on scramble.’ He had been standing by with growing concern as his spies travelling with the Chinese and American Presidents had reported that the two targets had failed to leave the Shanghai Government Building and head to the Grand Theatre on schedule. And a team member who had a vantage point in Renmin Square reported that American and Chinese guards at the theatre were using their walkie-talkies a lot and running back and forth. Something was afoot.

  ‘We been rumbled,’ number fourteen whispered. ‘The alarms have gone off. Everyone’s going crazy. I’m trying to find out exactly—’

  ‘It couldn’t be our bloody operation. It must be somefing else. There’s no bloody way they could have found out—’

  ‘They have. I think they have. I heard someone say something about an elephant. They must have—’

  Memet winced. ‘Shite. No, no, nooo.’ He gave a low, guttural moan. Everyone else in the room shivered and moved away. It was the sound he made when he was about to commit an act of violence: it might be against a sofa, a human being, a cat—you could never tell. If something serious had gone wrong with Operation Px2, he would be furious beyond imagining. They had spent a year meticulously planning this caper and thought they had covered every base.

  Memet pulled himself together and put the handset back to his ear. ‘Wot’s ’appenin’?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything. The alarms all went off and then everyone started running around like crazy. My unit has been ordered to recheck lists A to C of the venue security checklist. But one of the guys said it was useless, because the thing has already been called off and Px2 has been diverted. But I heard someone in the corridor of Unit J-7 talk about an elephant. That’s what he said—something about finding the elephant. The girl has run off with the elephant and they can’t find them. They’ve got to have—that can only mean—’ ‘Who? What girl?’

  ‘I don’t know how it happened. Some girl came in here and told them about it. She was young, maybe twenty or so, wearing a yin-yang necklace. She looked like a hippie.’

  ‘Wong’s assistant,’ Memet growled. ‘The feng shui people from the restaurant.’ But how on earth could they have thought of looking inside a performing animal? ‘They must’ve found it. Shit. Call C-6 when you have any more information.’

  He turned to Dilshat. ‘They’ve rumbled us. How, how, how?’ The wineglass in his hand shattered. He flung the pieces down onto the floor. The wine stain on the carpet was joined by drops of blood from his palm. ‘Somebody leaked. Somebody talked. Somebody stole my bloody elephant.’

  Dilshat asked: ‘Where are the targets?’

  ‘Diverted. Don’t matter. I’m gonna find ’em and kill ’em. But I’m addin’ someone else to the list.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. We’re gonna to find those feng shui people and kill them, too, as slowly and painfully as we bloody can, awright?’

  14

  In 56 BC, Emperor Xuan of Han and Warlord Gao were due to send their champions to battle with each other. The two fighters were evenly matched.

  During the training sessions, Emperor Xuan constantly criticised his champion, saying: ‘You cannot win. You are soft as water, yielding as mud. I have no hope.’ The fighter knew this was not true, but could not answer back. He learned the skills of patience and forbearance.

  Warlord Gao praised his champion day and night and expressed confidence he would win. The man became proud and haughty.

  On the day of the fight, the two champions prepared for the battle.

  This time Emperor Xuan sneered at his opponent’s man.

  ‘He cannot win. His mother was a goat and his father a stick.’

  The opponent, who was used only to praise, became red in the face and shook with fury.

  In turn, Warlord Gao was rude to the Emperor’s champion. ‘Your mother was a monkey and your father a stone.’

  But the Emperor’s man, patient as an ox, shrugged it off.

  When the battle started, the enraged opponent attacked in a fury, leaping into action with sword and fists flying. But Emperor Xuan’s champion used strength, strategy, wisdom and calm, and won an easy victory.

  Blade of Grass, anger is a sword with a blade for a handle. It damages the user before the victim. Do nothing in anger. If you need to show righteous indignation, wait until the anger is gone, and replace it with dissembled anger, which you can control.

  Hear the words of Mo Zhou: ‘With the right attitude, the servant can gain something from a harsh master he cannot get from a kind one.’

  From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’

  by CF Wong.

  The roads south of Nanjing Dong Lu were narrow but considerably less traffic-choked than the main thoroughfares. Yet there were plenty of obstacles to surmount. Desperately looking over their shoulders, they trundled their rattling, juddering load past endless roadworks in which teams of men shovelled hot, steaming tar into wide holes as if they were feeding hungry dragons.

  Wong shouted to the team to turn left. He had pulled out his lo pan and was looking at the compass needle. ‘East, we need to go due east.’

  They turned into another road—and then found themselves on a gentle downward slope. It was a relief to have gravity on their side to start with, but they soon found Nelson and the trolley threatening to run away from them.

  ‘Whoa!’ said Joyce, who was jogging ahead. She had borrowed Flip’s megaphone to warn people to move out of their path. The trolley started to speed forward and was nipping at her heels; she had to jump out of the way. She turned and used the megaphone to warn her team mates: ‘We’re going seriously downhill. This could be bad news.’

  ‘Hold tight,’ Marker Cai warned. ‘Try to slow it down.’

  They tried from both sides to arrest the platform’s acceleration but it was no use. Its wheels roaring, the trolley raced down the slope increasingly quickly. Joyce couldn’t keep up. She fell onto the path and scraped her legs. Cai leapt up onto the platform and rode it down the hill as if it were a giant skateboard.

  It reached the bottom of the slope, narrowly missing a family having a picnic supper on a bench, and started up the slope on the other side. When it was halfway up it ran out of momentum and slowed down. Cai jumped off and caught hold of it as it came to a halt. Joyce, breathless, reached him and started to help. Between the two of them, they managed to stop it sliding back down the hill, but they did not have the strength to push it up—not one
millimetre. It was a gentle slope, perhaps only a few degrees off the level, but it was a slope none the less. Their chances of holding it steady seemed low—and the probability that they could shift it forward was zero.

  ‘Now what?’ said Cai.

  ‘Uh. I don’t know. Let’s just hold it here for a while,’ Joyce suggested. Since there was nothing else they could do, that became The Plan.

  After barely ten seconds, her muscles ached so much it seemed as if her arms were on fire. She felt each separate muscle group burning in her upper body—the trapezius, the deltoids, the triceps and biceps ached, throbbed and started to tremble. But she didn’t want to show weakness in front of Marker so she gritted her teeth and rearranged her feet to improve her position. It had little effect. She felt her side of Nelson’s platform start to slip backwards—first just a centimetre, then two, then three.

  ‘Hold on, Joy-Si,’ her companion said, smiling at her. ‘Try to hold on.’

  The warm gaze from his boy-band face with its straight, floppy hair gave her added strength, but it was a hopeless task. ‘I don’t know…I don’t know how long I can hold it.’ The platform began to creep back downwards, pushing the two young people with it. They heard footsteps behind them as their older companions caught up with them.

  Linyao arrived first. She wedged herself between them and helped take the strain. And then Wong arrived. He was skinny but wiry. Between the four of them, they managed to stop it moving back down the slope—but they still didn’t have the strength to inch it forward.

  An unspoken state of stalemate was declared. Four human beings pushed one way. The force of gravity pulled the other way. Force met resistance and each balanced the other.