The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (35 page)

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.

‘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.