Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  But all of this – gender, flesh and blood, bits and bytes – all of it lost any meaning next to the singer. Yoyo had combed her hair back tightly and braided it into four ponytails at the nape of her neck, which swung back and forth with each of her sinuous, powerful moves. She was singing a cover version of some ancient Shenggy track. As far as it was possible to deduce from the mobile’s mediocre recording quality, she had a good voice, if not a remarkable one. And even though the bad lighting didn’t put her sufficiently in the limelight, Jericho still saw enough to know she was perhaps the most beautiful woman he had seen in the thirty-eight years of his life. It was just that Yoyo’s particular kind of beauty threw all the theories about what beauty was right out of the window.

  The picture blurred for a moment as Chen tried to zoom in on his daughter. Then Yoyo’s eyes filled the screen – a gaze like velvet, slender eyelids, curtained by lashes which sank and then quickly lifted again. The camera wobbled, Yoyo disappeared from view, then the recording stopped.

  ‘She sings,’ said Chen, as if it were necessary to point that out. Jericho played the next film. It showed Yoyo in a restaurant, sitting opposite Chen, her hair loose. She flicked through a menu, then noticed the camera and smiled.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Well, I hardly ever see you,’ answered Chen’s voice. ‘So this way I’ll at least have you preserved on film.’

  ‘Aha! Bottled Yoyo.’

  She laughed. Two horizontal creases formed under her eyes as she did so, which hadn’t come up in the psychologists’ beauty scenarios, but Jericho found them incredibly exciting.

  ‘And besides, that way I can show you off.’

  Yoyo pulled a face at her father. She started to squint.

  ‘No, don’t,’ said Chen’s voice.

  The recording ended. The third one showed the restaurant again, apparently at a later date. Music blended into the cacophony of noise. In the background, waiters were hurrying between packed tables. Yoyo took a drag of her cigarette and balanced a drink in her right hand. She opened her lips and let a thin plume of smoke escape. For the duration of the entire clip, she didn’t speak a single word. Her gaze rested on her father. It was one of love and noticeable sadness, so much so that Jericho wouldn’t have been surprised to see tears flowing from her eyes. But nothing of the sort happened. Yoyo just lowered her eyelids from time to time, as if wanting to wipe away what she saw with her heavy lashes, sipped at her drink, dragged at her cigarette and blew out smoke.

  ‘I’ll need these recordings,’ said Jericho.

  Chen pushed himself out of his chair, his gaze fixed on the now empty wall as if his daughter were still visible on it. His features seemed more rigid than ever. And yet Jericho knew, without knowing the exact circumstances, that there had been times when this face had been contorted with pain. He had seen such faces in London. Victims. Families of victims. Perpetrators who had become victims themselves. Whatever it was that had hardened Chen, he hoped fervently to be far away if this rigidity ever broke down. There was no way in the world he wanted to see what would happen if it did.

  ‘There are more you can have,’ said Chen tonelessly. ‘Yoyo enjoyed being photographed. But the films are much better. Not these ones though. Yoyo made recordings for Tian as a virtual tour guide. In high resolution, so she told me. And it’s true, when you walk through the Museum of Town Planning or through the eye of the World Financial Center with one of those programs, it’s as though she’s there with you in the flesh. I have some of them at home, but I’m sure Tian can give you better material.’ He faltered. ‘Assuming, of course, that you’re willing to find Yoyo for me.’

  Jericho reached for his cup, stared at the remaining puddle of cold coffee and put it back down. Bright sunlight filled the room. He looked at Chen and knew that his visitor wouldn’t ask a second time.

  ‘I’m going to need more than the films.’

  Jin Mao Tower

  Around the same time, a Japanese waitress was approaching Kenny Xin’s table, carrying a tray of sushi and sashimi in front of her. Xin, who saw her coming out of the corner of his eye, didn’t bother turning round. His gaze was resting on the blue-grey band of the Huangpu three hundred metres below him. The river was busy at this time of day. Chains of barges followed its path like sluggish water-snakes, while heavy cargo-ships headed for the docks to the east of the bend. Ferries, water taxis and excursion boats forced their way between them en route for the Yangpu bridge and the cranes of the unloading bays, past the idyllic Gongqing Park to the estuary, where the oily floods of the Huangpu mixed in a gloomy kaleidoscope with the muddy waters of the Yangtze before dispersing into the East China Sea.

  It was thanks to the river’s sharp, almost angular bend to the right that Shanghai’s financial and economic district, Pudong, seemed like a peninsula, offering panoramic views of the coastal road Zhongshan Lu with its colonial banks, clubs and hotels: relicts from the era after the Opium Wars, when the European trade giants had divided up the country between them and erected monuments of their power on the western bank of the river. A hundred years ago, these structures must have towered over everything around them in splendour and size. Now they looked like toys against the stalagmite-like towers of glass, steel and concrete that stretched out behind them, permeated by highways, magnetic rails and sky trains, surrounded by whirling flying machines, insectoid minicopters and cargo-blimps. Even though the weather was unusually clear, the horizon couldn’t be seen. Shanghai went up in smoke, diffused at the edges and became one with the sky. There was nothing to suggest that anything other than yet more development was beyond the development itself.

  Xin looked at it all, without granting the woman who was placing the sushi before him the honour of acknowledgement. His concentration was undividable, and right now he was concentrating on the question of where the girl he was looking for might be hiding amidst this twenty-million-strong Moloch. She certainly wasn’t at home, he’d checked there. If that student with the ridiculous name of Grand Cherokee Wang hadn’t been lying, then there was still the possibility of narrowing down her location. He would have to clutch at this straw, even if the kid seemed dodgy to him: one of Yoyo’s two flatmates, clearly in love with the girl and even more so with money, in pursuit of which he made out he had information to offer. And yet he didn’t know a thing.

  ‘Yoyo hasn’t been living here that long,’ he had said. ‘She’s a real party hen.’

  ‘And we’re the cocks,’ the other had laughed immediately – showing his swinging uvula – by way of admitting it was a pretty bad joke. Hen was the Chinese term for whore, and the cocks, or cockerels, were the pimps. It seemed he had suddenly pictured what Yoyo might do to him if Xin were to pass on his tasteless little comment.

  Could they pass on a message to Yoyo for him?

  * * *

  Xin asked when they had last seen Yoyo.

  On the evening of 23 May, they said. The three of them had cooked and knocked back a few bottles of beer together. Afterwards, Yoyo had gone to her room, but then left the house later that same night.

  At what time?

  Late, Grand Cherokee seemed to remember. Around two or three in the morning. The other guy, Zhang Li, shrugged his shoulders. But since then neither of them had seen her.

  Xin thought for a moment.

  ‘Your flatmate could be in trouble,’ he said. ‘I can’t go into it in more detail right now, but her family are very worried.’

  ‘Are you a policeman?’ Zhang wanted to know.

  ‘No. I’m someone who was sent to help Yoyo.’ He gave each of them a meaningful look. ‘And I’ve also been authorised to show my gratitude for any help in an appropriate manner. Please tell Yoyo that she can reach me on this number at any time.’ Xin gave Grand Cherokee a card on which there was nothing but a mobile number. ‘And if either of you has any more thoughts about where I might be able to find her—’

  ‘No idea,’ said Zhang, clearly uninterested, and disap
peared into the next room.

  Grand Cherokee watched him go and shuffled from one leg to the other. Xin paused in the doorway to give the boy the chance to take the offensive. Just as he’d expected, he got straight to the point – although in hushed tones – as soon as his pal was out of sight.

  ‘I could find something out for you,’ he said. ‘For a price, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ echoed Xin, smiling a little.

  ‘Just to cover my costs, you know. I mean … there are a few clues, about where she is, and I could—’

  Xin slid his right hand into his jacket and pulled it back out with a few notes.

  ‘Could I perhaps take a quick look around her room?’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ said Grand Cherokee, shocked. ‘She would never—’

  ‘It would be for her own safety.’ Xin lowered his voice. ‘Between you and me, the police could turn up here. I don’t want them finding anything that could incriminate Yoyo.’

  ‘Oh, of course. It’s just—’

  ‘I understand.’ Xin moved to put the notes back in his pocket.

  ‘No, wait – I—’

  ‘Yes?’

  Grand Cherokee stared at the money and tried to tell Xin something without using words. It was clear what he wanted. The language of greed doesn’t need vocabulary. Xin reached back into his jacket and increased the offer. The boy gnawed on his lower lip, then took the notes and nodded his head towards the corridor.

  ‘Last door on the right. Should I—’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll find my way. And as I said – if you should have any clues—’

  ‘I do!’ Grand Cherokee’s eyes started to glisten. ‘I just need to make a few calls, speak to a few people. Hey, I’ll take you to Yoyo as soon as I’ve got things sorted! Although—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I might have to bribe a few people here and there.’

  ‘Are we talking about an advance?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Xin saw the lie in Grand Cherokee’s eyes. You don’t know a thing, he thought, but it’s possible that your greed might lead you to find something out. You’ll be in touch sooner or later. You’re too sharp not to cash in on this. He pressed two more notes into his hand and left.

  * * *

  That was yesterday.

  So far he had heard nothing from the boy, but Xin wasn’t worried. He reckoned he would receive a call sometime in the course of the afternoon. He turned his attention to his sushi: just tuna, salmon and mackerel, all of the highest quality. The cuisine of the Japanese restaurant on the fifty-sixth floor of the Jin Mao Tower left little to be desired, that is if you ignored the oversights in how the dishes were presented. The restaurant was part of the Jin Mao Grand Hyatt, which occupied the top thirty-five floors of what had once been China’s tallest building. By now, the Jin Mao Tower had been outflanked a dozen times in Shanghai alone – first in 2008 by the neighbouring World Financial Center, which also contained a Hyatt – and yet the aura of excess still clung to its outdated ambience. It reflected a time when China had begun to seek new self-awareness between communism, Confucius and capital, and had found it just as much in reminiscences of the imperial past as in the Art Deco aesthetic of colonialism. Xin liked that, even if he had to admit that staying in the new place was a more stylish experience. He was drawn here by the idea that he could subject his presence to a concept shaped not by emotions but by cold agreement with the principles of order, ultimately the secret formula of perfection. Kenny Xin was born in 1988, and the Jin Mao Tower surrendered itself to the number eight like the human to the genome. Deng Xiaoping had completed the design of the building at eighty-eight years of age, and the inauguration ceremony took place on 28 August 1998. Eighty-eight floors were stacked on top of one another and formed a construction in which every segment was an eighth smaller than the base with its sixteen storeys. The steel joists the tower rested on measured 80 metres. The eight could be seen in everything. By 2015 the building had 79 lifts, a flaw which was remedied by creating a lift just for the staff.

  There were, of course, a few small imperfections in the otherwise exemplary conception. For example, the fact that the tower only swung a maximum of 75 cm back and forth in a storm or earthquake. Xin wondered how the constructors could have overlooked that kind of mistake in its mathematical beauty. He was no architect, and perhaps there was no other way, but what were five centimetres against the priority of perfection? Compared with the order of the cosmos, even the Jin Mao Tower looked like a messy child’s bedroom.

  With one of his manicured fingers, Xin pushed the sushi tray away from him and a little to the left, then placed the bottle of Tsingtao beer and its accompanying glass behind it at an equal distance. It looked better to him already. He was far from subscribing to the obscene order principles of people who put everything at a right angle. Occasionally he even saw the purest order in the appearance of chaos. What could be more perfect than total homogeneity without imperfections, just as a perfectly empty spirit resembles the cosmic ideal, and every thought is a form of contamination, unless you summon it deliberately and dismiss it again at will. To control the mind is to control the world. Xin smiled as he made a few more corrections, shifting the small bowl for the soy sauce, breaking the chopsticks apart and laying them parallel in front of him. In its own way, wasn’t Shanghai a wonderful chaos too? Or rather a secret plan, an ordering of capriciousness which only revealed itself to the educated observer?

  Xin pushed a few clumps of rice a little further apart on the wooden board until their appearance appealed to him.

  He began to eat.

  Xintiandi

  When Jericho looked back, his life in China seemed like a confused succession of dangerous risks and escapes, all encircled by soundproofed walls and building sites, in the shadow of which he had striven to improve his financial state with the industriousness of an animal burrowing a hole. In the end, the hard slog had shown results. His bank manager began to seem more like a friend. Dossiers about shares in deep-sea vessels, water treatment plants, shopping centres and skyscrapers were presented to him. The whole world seemed intent on making him aware of all the things he could spend his money on. Clasped against the bosom of better society, respected and overworked, Jericho ended up paralysed by his own achievements, too exhausted to add the final chapter to the story of his nomadic life by moving to the kind of area it would be worth growing old in. The step was long overdue, but the thought of packing up yet again made him go cold. So he gave priority to lying wearily on the sofa in the evenings as floodlights and construction noise leaked through the curtains, watching feature films and murmuring the mantra I-have-toget-out-of-here to himself, then falling asleep in the process.

  It was around this time that Jericho began to seriously doubt the point of his existence.

  He hadn’t doubted it when Joanna had lured him to Shanghai, only to leave him three months later. He hadn’t doubted it when he’d realised he didn’t have enough money for the flight back, nor to rebuild the life he’d left behind in London. He hadn’t doubted in his first Shanghai digs on the edge of a highway, where he’d lived on damp floors and struggled to squeeze a few litres of brown water from the shower every morning, the windows of the two-storey house rattling lightly from the never-relenting traffic.

  He had just told himself it could only get better.

  And it had.

  To start with, Jericho had offered his services to foreign enterprises that had come out to Shanghai to do business. Many felt insecure within the fragile framework of Chinese copyright protection legislation. They felt spied on and cheated. With time, though, the self-service mentality of the dragon had given way to great remorse. While, at the beginning of the century, China had still happily plagiarised everything hackers unearthed from the depths of the global ideas pool, now even Chinese business people were increasingly despairing about their state’s inability to protect ideas. They too began to be on the receiving end of t
he words ‘It seemed worthy of imitation to us’, which was a polite way of saying ‘Of course we stole it, but we admire you for having created it.’ For years, the Long-Nose accusations that Chinese companies and institutions had stolen their intellectual property had been indignantly rejected or not even acknowledged, but Jericho found that now it was Chinese companies, above all, who needed web detectives. Native entrepreneurs reacted excitedly to the fact that, during his time with Scotland Yard helping to build up the department for Cyber Crime, he had been fighting against them. In their opinion, it could only be advantageous to have their patents protected by someone who had previously done such an excellent job of clobbering them when they crossed the line.

  Because the problem – an undulating, proliferating, all-enveloping, truly uncontrollable monster of a problem – was that China’s creative elite would go on cannibalising itself so long as a nationally and internationally accepted and implementable system for the protection of intellectual property rights remained elusive. It had always been obvious that capitalism, practically reinvented by China, was based upon property rights, and that an economy whose most important asset was knowhow couldn’t exist without the protection of brands, patents and copyright, but it hadn’t really interested anyone – not, that is, until the day when they themselves became victims of the situation. By now, the country suffering the most economic damage at the hands of Chinese espionage was China itself. Everyone was digging around in other people’s front gardens, and with electronic spades wherever possible. The hunting ground was the global net, and Owen Jericho was one of the hunters, commissioned by other hunters as soon as they got the impression that they themselves were the quarry.

  Once Jericho became part of that network without which no favours would be done and no trade negotiated in China, his career ascended like a rocket. He moved five times in five years, twice of his own free will, the other times because the houses he was living in at the time were to be pulled down for reasons he could no longer remember. He moved to better areas, wider streets, nicer houses, getting ever closer to realising his dream of moving into one of the rebuilt shikumen houses, with stone gateways and peaceful inner courtyards, located in the pulsating heart of Shanghai. Even though he had to make compromises along the way, he had never doubted it would happen at some point.