The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (28 page)

The other bad thing that cars had introduced was the destruction of relationships between travellers. When Westerners designed cars, they built them with a one-word vocabulary:
Honk
, which was autospeak for ‘Get out of my way’. What a tragedy that this decision had been made by some Westerner one hundred years ago. What a shame that cars were not given a bigger vocabulary, or, if it had to be just one word, at least a more expressive word. Had cars been invented in the East, they would surely have been given a more subtle, versatile, pleasingly ambiguous word.

In Chinese, positive notions were often expressed negatively, because this added a delicate layer of civility to them. For example, the Mandarin phrase for ‘You’re welcome’ was
bukeqi
, which literally meant ‘No need to be so polite’. In Cantonese ‘thank you’ was
mm-goi
, two characters which literally meant ‘not required’. The thought it contained was ‘I gratefully acknowledge that you have done a service for me despite the fact that we both know that you were not required to do so’. What a better world it would have been if the motor car’s one-word vocabulary was
Honk
meaning:
Mm-goi.

In front of them, the cars sat immobile as mountains. There were Santana 2000s and Santana 3000s—it looked as if all the cars in Shanghai were a single brand: the locally produced models that the German Volkswagen company manufactured on the outskirts of the city. The vehicles may have had fancy German high-performance engineering inside them, but if there was nowhere to drive, there was nowhere to drive. There were said to be 40 000 taxis in Shanghai, and it looked as if every single one was stationary in front of them.

‘
Aiyeeaa
,’ Wong said, as another minute passed.

Next to him Joyce stared at the names of the buildings they were failing to pass. Prominent on Huanghe Lu was a boutique called Foreign Trade Finery. She couldn’t imagine a funky clothes shop in Sydney or London or New York with a name like that. People just seemed to think differently here. The stuff was all frilly and silly and brightly coloured. There was not one garment in the window that she would have worn, dead or alive. Shanghai had created its own fashion sense, taking bits from all over the world. Women in their twenties liked to wear denim hot-pants, as if they were in Arizona cop shows. Older women sometimes had a remarkable (to Joyce) ignorance of the horror of VPLs—visible panty lines. Just the previous day she had seen a woman in layers of transparent chiffon through which her underpants—large, ugly briefs that would have looked awful even on a man—were showing. And the men: when the sun came out, the men would roll up their shirts or T-shirts to get some cool air on their pot-bellies. Nothing could have been less attractive.

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 Other 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.’