Frank Schätzing - Limit

Jericho took some photos and left the room.

As he went down the steel steps, Zhao looked up at him briefly and then turned back to the mixing desk. Jericho walked past him without a word and went outside. In the foyer, he spotted a poster for the Pink Asses. Unbelievable. They really did use the tagline Ass Metal, promising that their music went ‘right up your arse’.

He was fairly sure that he didn’t want to hear that.

As he unlocked the COD, he scanned his surroundings. The second car was still parked a little way away. Somebody had been on his tail, it would be naïve to imagine otherwise. He was probably being watched right at this moment.

A student who had promised to get some information about Yoyo, and fell to his death when his own roller-coaster ran him over. A COD that turned up right after he had arrived at the Andromeda. Yoyo’s renewed disappearance. How many coincidences did you have to shrug off before dry fear began to fur your tongue? Yoyo hadn’t been starting at shadows. She had every reason to hide, and there was still no knowing who was after her. The government, or its representatives the police and the Secret Services, would not shrink from murder if circumstances demanded. But what circumstances could force the Party to go this far? Yoyo might have earned the distinction of being an enemy of the State, but killing her for that wouldn’t have been the style of a regime that locked dissidents up these days, rather than killing them as in Mao’s times.

Or had Yoyo awoken a quite different sort of monster, one that didn’t play by the rules?

It was clear that whoever was hunting her also had Jericho in their sights. Too late to drop the case. He started the COD and dialled a number. It rang three times, and then Zhao’s voice spoke.

‘I’m getting out of here,’ Jericho said. ‘In the meantime, you can make yourself useful in this new partnership of ours.’

‘What should I do?’ asked Zhao.

‘Keep an eye on the second COD.’

‘Right you are. I’ll be in touch.’

Kenny Xin watched him drive away.

Fate was a fickle mistress. It had led him here, from the lofty eyrie atop the World Financial Center to the black crud that accumulated under the fingernails of the world’s economic superpower. This was always happening to him. No sooner did he think he had escaped the clutches of that syphilitic whore called humankind, thought that he no longer owed her a glance, would never have to endure her stinking breath again, than she dragged him back to her filthy lair. He’d had to endure the revolting sight of her back in Africa, let her touch him until he feared he was infected all over his body, that he would dissolve into a pool of ichorous pus. Now he had ended up in Quyu, and again the hideous mask of her visage was grinning at him and he couldn’t turn away. He felt dizzy, as always when overcome by this disgust. The world seemed to hang skew-whiff, so that he was amazed not to see the houses tumbling down and the people lose their footing.

He pressed finger and thumb against the bridge of his nose until he could think clearly again.

The detective had disappeared. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to bug his COD, but Xin had no doubt that Jericho had left Quyu for the time being and would return the car to the grid soon. He didn’t need to follow it. Jericho couldn’t get away from him. His gaze wandered over the yard, and he got rid of the disgust he felt by shedding waves of it to every side. How he hated the people in Quyu! How he had hated the underfed, chronically ill, dispirited creatures in Africa! Not that he had anything against them personally. They were anonymous, mere demographic statistics. He hated them because they were poor. Xin hated their poverty so much that it hurt him to see them alive.

High time to get out of here.

He was just steering up the slipway onto the high-speed track when he got a call. The display stayed dark.

‘The guy who’s following you has left the complex,’ Zhao told him.

Automatically, Jericho glanced into the mirror. Silly idea. There were only CODs up here on the tracks, all the same shape and the same colour.

‘I haven’t seen anyone so far,’ he said. ‘At least he can’t have followed me directly.’

‘No, he waited a while.’

‘Can you describe him?’

‘Chinese.’

‘I see.’

‘About my height. Well dressed, elegant. Somebody who pretty clearly didn’t belong in Xuyu.’ Zhao paused. ‘Even you were less out of place.’

Jericho thought that he heard a grin in his voice. The COD accelerated.

‘I went through Yoyo’s waste-paper basket,’ he said, without responding to Zhao’s jab. ‘She seems to pick up her food in a place called Wong’s World. Heard of it?’

‘Maybe. Fast food joint?’

‘Could be. Might be a supermarket as well.’

‘I’ll find out. Can I reach you this evening?’

‘You can reach me any time.’

‘Thought so. You don’t look like a guy who has someone waiting at home.’

‘Hey, wait a moment!’ Jericho yelped. ‘What do you mean by—’

‘Talk later.’

Idiot!

Jericho stared ahead into a red cloud of rage, but it soon dissipated. In its place came a feeling of impotence, vulnerability. The worst of it was that Zhao was right. He had nobody waiting for him, not for years now. The man might be a roughneck, but he was right. This, even though Jericho’s type was much in demand. He was trim and blond and his eyes were light blue; he was generally taken for a Scandinavian, who were well-liked by Chinese women. He was also well aware that he hardly ever paid attention to the man who looked back at him from the mirror. His clothes were functional, but otherwise nondescript. He groomed himself just enough not to look unkempt. He shaved chin and cheeks every three days, went to the hairdressers every three months to clear the topgrowth, as he liked to say, he bought T-shirts by the dozen without wondering whether they suited him. Fundamentally, even Tu Tian, fat and bald though he was, took more pains in his artlessly messy way.

When the high-speed track spat him out again at Xintiandi, his anger had given way to a brackish sort of defeatism. He tried to visualise his new home, but found no comfort there. Xintiandi seemed further away than ever, a good-time town where he didn’t belong, because it wasn’t in his nature to have a good time, and others didn’t have a good time with him around.

There it was again, the old stigma.

And he had thought he was over it. If there was one thing that Joanna had taught him, it was that he was no longer the kid from his schooldays, the boy who still looked about fifteen when he was eighteen years old. The boy who had never had a girlfriend because every last girl at school was after some other boy. Even that wasn’t quite true. They had certainly appreciated having him as an understanding male friend, which he reckoned was just an underhanded way of saying a punchbag. They came to him in floods of tears, torturing him with details of their relationships, in endless therapy sessions which they always concluded by telling Jericho that they loved him like a brother, that he was, thank God, the only boy on Earth who didn’t want anything from them.

Broken-hearted, he patched up their tattered souls and only ever once tried anything more, with a snub-nosed brunette who had just been dumped by her older boyfriend, a notorious love cheat. More precisely, he had invited her for a meal and tried to flirt with her a bit. It worked like a dream for two hours, although only because the girl hadn’t realised what he was doing. Even when he put his hand on hers, she just thought that he was being funny. It was only then that she realised that punchbags had feelings too, and she left the restaurant without a word. Owen Jericho had to turn twenty before a Welsh pub landlord’s daughter took pity, and took his virginity. She hadn’t been pretty, but she had been through the same sort of hell as he had, and this, along with a few pints of lager, was enough for him.