The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics

by Nury Vittachi

  ‘We’re stuck,’ said Joyce, who had a talent for stating the obvious. ‘For a bit, anyway.’

  Wong, his arms stretched on either side of his head, palms against the elephant’s blanketed flank, thought about the situation. They were neatly balanced at the moment, a classic yin and yang of forces moving in opposite directions. But one side was human and imperfect and transient, so would get tired. On the other was the force of gravity, which was none of those things and would inevitably win the battle. He imagined the thought must have struck all of them, as no one was speaking.

  ‘Wei?’

  He heard a woman’s voice behind him. Half turning his head, he saw the family they had almost run over at the bottom of the hill. Following out of curiosity, they had come to see what was going on.

  The six of them—a typical urban Shanghainese family of five adults and one child—stood as mute observers for a minute. And then more passers-by stopped to have a look. And then another family came along, walking from the other direction.

  Eventually, a small child snuggled in between Wong and Cai and tried to help them push. It was an encouraging note, although she was too tiny to make any difference. Yet her decision to help changed the attitude of the crowd. It was one of those fairytale moments. Another small boy joined the team pushing the platform, and then so did a woman, and then a man. Then the crowd surged around the platform, somehow deciding without discussion that this should be a community effort. The elephant-on-a-trolley needed to get moving again, over this slope, and if it took the strength of twenty-five or thirty people, then that was what would be provided.

  ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’ Joyce said in English, and then she tried it in clumsy Mandarin: ‘She’air, she’air, knee.’

  ‘Sha-ya-nong,’ Wong added in Shanghainese.

  With the crowd pushing and pulling, Nelson’s trolley started moving steadily up the hill.

  ‘Thank God,’ said Linyao.

  Joyce, pushing until the veins stood out red against her temples, was totally breathless. She turned her head to Wong. ‘Why—did—you—tell—us—to—come—this—way? Where—does—it—lead—to?’

  Cai said: ‘This road leads to The Bund—a very busy place. I think no open space here.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Wong, ‘but look what is after it.’

  They reached the top and felt the helping hands evaporating away, leaving the original team of four progressing at a steady pace. The trolley was now moving along the east end of Jining Lu, a narrow road which fed directly into the wide stream of traffic that ran in front of the line of tall, ancient mansions known as The Bund.

  Joyce looked over the elephant into the middle distance and her expression changed as she realised what Wong meant.

  ‘Now—there’s an idea,’ she gasped, her face brightening.

  Ahead of them, on the other side of Zhongshan Dong Lu, the main road that skirted The Bund, was the Huangpu River.

  Dilshat was trying to sound confident but he put so much effort into wringing his damp hands that an observer might have thought there was one of those tiny airline face flannels in them. ‘The US Secret Service people are after ’em. And the People’s Armed Police. I fink we can leave it to them. They ain’t going to get very far.’ He was sitting, hunch-shouldered, on the edge of the sofa, sheltering from the storm in the room. A massively destructive force, in the shape of Jappar Memet’s temper, was careering hurricane-like around the suite, knocking over furniture, and Dilshat now knew that it was only a matter of time before humans—perhaps even him—would be added to the list of items that were seriously damaged or even totalled. Dictionaries tell us that the word mad has two meanings—angry and insane. In reference to Memet, it was a single concept.

  ‘Not bloody good enough,’ the activist leader growled, sweeping a vase off the shelf and watching it shatter on the floor. ‘They’ll just lock ’em up. I want Wong found and killed. No, actually, I wanna do it meself. With me own bare ’ands. No one stuffs up my plans and comes out alive—not that my plans have been stuffed. They’ll just ’ave to be revised, that’s all.’

  Dilshat knew his boss had a pathological hatred of admitting failure in any way. Projects never collapsed. They merely evolved and needed revision.

  The scholar nodded subserviently. ‘You always said you expected that we would ’ave to revise plans as we went along. So in a way, the fact that we ’ave to completely change the plan means that it is goin’ exactly accordin’ to plan, right?’

  ‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy. Who said that?’

  Dilshat caught the eyes of the other two men in the room. Both looked blank. Scared, but blank. ‘No one said anyfing, boss.’

  ‘No, it’s a quote, morons. Napoleon, I fink. Or what’s that geezer’s name? Churchill.’ He moved swiftly across the room, snatched Dilshat’s binoculars and raised them to his eyes, despite the fact that they were on a leather strap around the scholar’s neck. Yanked upwards by his chin, he rose awkwardly and stood at an angle to accommodate his boss.

  There was nothing relevant to see outside the hotel window, but Memet had a hyperactive need to keep doing something, even while he was just thinking. ‘Right, this is the plan. We’ll let those goons take Wong and ’is partner into custody. Then, after a suitable pause, we find them and wipe ’em out. I’ll fink of a suitably poetic way to dispatch them later. In the meantime, while everyone’s distracted and running around like ’eadless chickens, we’re going to find and kill Px2. We’re gonna have to be a bit creative.’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. We’ll give chase. That’s it.’ He grinned. A classic manic-depressive, Memet was suddenly overjoyed again. All he needed was reassurance that he would eventually get his way. How easy life was when you had enough people, money, imagination and self-delusion to continually revise your goals. Large numbers of well-trained staff, flourishing pacts with like-minded groups, and a generous spattering of yes-men to keep the general feeling of the team positive: those were the assets that megalomaniac-run organisations needed to maintain.

  And, of course, a few spies, so one could track one’s victims down. It wasn’t that difficult when you had contacts high up on the inside of organisations. There were passionate vegetarians everywhere. ‘Present location of Px2?’ he snapped.

  An operative sitting by a computer on the other side of the hotel room rapidly pounded a command which sent a ping to Contact YW-32b—no voice, just an undetectable signal sent from one machine to another.

  The computer showed a GPS-type map with a moving red dot on it. Memet looked at it and nodded. ‘And now I know just where they are. Let’s move it, guys.’

  Wong and Cai were deep in consultation. They needed to pool all their knowledge to get from where they were to the river—even though it was just 100 metres ahead of them. The problem was that Shanghai was a sinking city, which gave rise to a particularly bizarre topology. The Bund was built entirely on an unstable foundation of mud. Its first major architects soon realised that they had to construct buildings with their front doors two metres in the air. By the time the buildings were finished, the front doors would have sunk to ground level. Much of the city on both sides of the water stood on what were originally mudflats. As a result, the Huangpu River ran at a considerably higher level than the ground level of the city around it. Tall walls had to be built and rebuilt to line the water channel—otherwise it would simply flood the space on either side of it.

  From the street level of The Bund, you don’t really see the water itself. You perceive the river by the raised embankment, the lines of tourists taking photographs, the huge gap where there are no skyscrapers, and the occasional masts or funnels of tall ships passing through. People who wanted to see the actual water had to climb staircases that led to raised promenades filled with tourists and tiny green and white stalls with Fujifilm written all over them.

  But how could a group of individuals wheeling a sleeping pac
hyderm get to the water? There was no way they could use the staircases everyone else used.

  ‘Only one way,’ Cai said. ‘We cross the road—there’s a break in the divider fence down there—and then move south. Then we slide into the parking section in front of the shops.’

  ‘There are openings at ground level there, I think,’ Wong said.

  ‘Yes. They lead to the floating restaurants. That way we can get all the way to the river without any steps. I think that’s the only way.’

  ‘Come.’

  Their route agreed, they set off. Although the traffic was congested, there was just enough slack in it for Cai to lead their progress. Fortunately, he was experienced in negotiating with drivers to leave space for heavy loads intruding from side lanes. With some difficulty, they managed to guide Nelson’s trolley across Zhongshan Dong Lu to the waterside. Then they had to find an opening in the fence that marked off the car park and trundle the trolley through the vehicles to the turnstile area. Fortunately, there was a strip which had no barriers and had been left open to accommodate large cargo items. Reaching the water’s edge, it was time for Marker Cai to make complex, harried negotiations to see if any of the boats would take them.

  During this pause, Joyce took the opportunity to get her breath back. She cupped her hands behind her head—and was horrified at the huge wet patches under her armpits. How she must stink. What she would have given for a shower, or a dip in a clean, blue hotel swimming pool! There seemed to be not much chance of such a thing in the immediate future. She tilted her head back, arching her spine forward to get the kinks out. There was a slight breeze coming from the north which refreshed her. She straightened her aching back and gazed at the fast-flowing waters in front of her.

  The Huangpu was a big river. It was wide—easily half a kilometre across, and seemed equally broad for as far as they could see to the south and north. It flowed serenely, majestically in front of them. Across from them was the futuristic half-city of Pudong, an architectural jumble of science-fiction structures, a space city designed by Walt Disney cartoonists. This contrasted dramatically with the architecture on their side, which had the stately splendour of streets lining the Thames or the Seine. When all this was over, she really must come back to this spot with a camera, she decided.

  Next to her, Wong stood on the edge of the dock and inhaled deeply. It wasn’t just the polluted air that he sucked up into his wide, flat nostrils. It was the whole scene. He expanded his bony chest and breathed in the entire river, the cargo boats, the floating restaurants, the distant east Shanghai cityscape, the massive cumulonimbus clouds hanging in the sky, the rotting mooring posts, the rusted chains, the acrid smell of burning oil, the muffled chug of shipboard engines, the squawk of birds, the yelp of an invisible dog, the whine of a pop song coming from a radio on a bench next to a kissing couple half a kilometre away.

  He looked to his right, south down the river. The Huangpu goes through a number of styles (a 1980s interior designer would say ‘colourways’) on its 85-kilometre journey to the East China Sea, and this particular stretch was slightly south of the portion beloved of postcard-makers and guidebook publishers. As one proceeded south, the river started to become more practical and functional and far more characteristic of the Huangpu’s true personality. In the distance, he could see a busy dockyard loading bay. Wong knew that whether they went south or north, they would float past clusters of old-fashioned sampan-dwellings and boatyards where people crawled antlike up and over small beached ships, plastering over cracks in wood and fibreglass. On their left, to the north, was the opening of Suzhou Creek, a not-very-attractive tributary where brown water surged in a solid channel through a gritty area of crumbling buildings. Ahead of him, the main waters of the Huangpu itself were medium crowded, with a steady stream of cargo and pleasure vessels moving in both directions, but it was not log-jammed in the way that the roads were.

  Wong stood with his hands on his hips and took in everything that could be seen and everything that could not be seen. As a feng shui master, he was powerfully aware of the enormous unseen power that moving water has on the human psyche. Rivers exactly like the Huangpu gave birth to every major city in human history. All the great cities of the world are river cities. River cities evolved separately and almost identically in all primitive cultures, on all inhabited continents on earth. Groups of dwellings—first huts, then hamlets, then towns, then cities, then massive urban conurbations—grew outward from the river banks, the source of life, the source of cities, the source of society, the source of the whole phenomenon of the six billion pieces of humanity.

  This was the crime of modern man—the offence that he, Wong, personally had to fix. For man had forgotten that everything he did was in relation to the great river that gave birth to him, that watered him until he grew, that was the life force that ran through society’s veins. It was the job of the few people who remembered—the feng shui masters, the vaastu readers, the few enlightened people among city planners and architects—to remind man to construct his life with due respect for the river at the heart of his city, be it via a tap in his kitchen, a well in his garden or the Huangpu at end of the road. This was a place where the literal Chinese meaning of the term feng shui—living in context with the winds and the waters—became crystal clear.

  ‘This is perfect,’ squealed Joyce. ‘The river. We can take him out of town on the river—look, there’s not much traffic. Well, not compared to the road, anyway. Well done, CF. You’re brilliant.’

  Wong snorted gruffly. Now to work. They had to get their cargo onto some sort of vessel. Fortunately, the ramps to the boats themselves were not too steep.

  Joyce had suddenly recalled that time was running out and had started hopping up and down with anxiety and nervous energy. ‘We need to move fast. Which way do we go?’

  Wong, looking at his compass, pointed to his left. ‘North. That way is quickest to the open sea.’

  Marker Cai finished his negotiations with the boat drivers. He had found a boatman who had a small freighter and was willing and able to take a heavy piece of cargo. The boat turned out to be a type of container-shifting lighter, and was moored next to a crane for lifting heavy weights. The dockyard workers were experienced at loading well-laden pallets onto ships, and speedily managed to slip various lines under Nelson’s platform and attach it to the crane. Fortunately, Cai had managed to get a trolley with standard connections, and the technical side of the operation was achieved quickly and efficiently.

  Some of the burly dockside workers (several of whom were women) peered curiously at the shape of the blanket-draped lump they were lifting, but everything was happening so fast that there was no time to ask questions. Where big chunks of easy money were concerned, dockyard workers did the job first and left awkward questions until after they had the money in their hands.

  The platform bearing Nelson was hoisted into the air. The crane made strange and eerie howling noises as the metal strained to take the weight: it appeared that Nelson was heavier than anything it had ever lifted before. Most of the watchers, who were standing on the main deck of the boat, held their breath. But the crane managed to carefully swing Nelson over the central deck space and lowered him down next to two large crates which were already there.

  As the pallet landed, the boat lurched violently away from the dockside and started to drop fast in the water.

  ‘It’s too heavy,’ the boatman shouted in Mandarin. ‘Get it off.’

  ‘It’s too heavy,’ Cai translated for Joyce. ‘We’re sinking.’

  The crane operator, more concerned about his crane than the boat or the people on it, declined to hoist the elephant back up into the air.

  ‘Chuck some stuff out,’ Joyce said, grabbing some boxes and flinging them over the side. Cai also started heaving boxes overboard, until they were all gone. The boat continued to rock frighteningly and still appeared to be sinking. The boatman screamed and shook his fists. ‘Get this thing off.’

&
nbsp; Then Cai picked up CF Wong and threw him overboard.

  ‘Aaaaarrggghhh,’ screamed the feng shui master, who could not swim.

  Joyce put her fist to her mouth. ‘I don’t think that was a—’ ‘Us, too,’ Cai said, grabbing Joyce’s hand and leaping over the side, pulling her with him. Lu Linyao squeezed her nose between finger and thumb and leapt in.

  The four of them were soon splashing in the dirty water— with Wong creating the biggest waves, since he was scrabbling around in a panic, despite the fact that Cai was holding him firmly with one arm and grasping a truck tyre nailed to the side of the river bank with the other.

  ‘Calm down, old man,’ he said. ‘I got you.’

  Several dock staff had also thrown themselves off the side of the boat, and now they all bobbed in the water, looking anxiously at the lurching vessel. Gradually it settled. The sacrifice had been worth it. The boat had not sunk, although it sat extremely heavily in the water, with waves splashing worryingly right across the deck.

  The boatman was throwing an apoplectic fit over the boxes that McQuinnie and Cai had thrown overboard. Apparently the items inside—illegal satellite television decoders—would not have their performance enhanced by being dipped in dirty water.

  The young man managed to calm him down with a few shouted sentences.

  ‘What did you tell him to make him quiet?’

  ‘I told him that your boss was carrying a lot of cash and would pay him handsomely for all his troubles.’

  Wong paused during drowning to screw up his nose to show his disapproval. Joyce sprang nimbly out of the water, and she and Cai dragged the feng shui master out. Wong was steaming and streaming. He shook himself, and then began to count the wads of wet money from his soaked envelope, anxious to retain some of it for himself.

  Linyao climbed out by herself. ‘What do we do now? Look for another boat?’

  Cai shook his head. ‘No. Take too much time. I think we have to stay with this one. Let’s ask the boatman to take off all the other cargo.’ He grabbed the entire wad of money out of Wong’s hands and started counting it into the boatman’s calloused palms. When the pile was high enough, leaving Wong just one or two notes, the old man nodded and waved to his crew to use the crane to unload the other two crates— which Cai said contained stolen BMWs—back onto the dock. The boat lifted itself slightly, and the float line painted on the side bobbed a few centimetres above the water.