Frank Schätzing - Limit

Jericho had seen enough. He would have to catch the bastard unprepared, but was Ma unprepared? Was he ever?

He quickly slipped his phone into his jacket, got out of the car and walked the few minutes back to the factory building as he came up with a battle plan. Perhaps he would have been better off calling the local authorities for support, but they would want to consult further before doing anything. If they obstructed his investigations, he might as well drive back to Shanghai, and Jericho was firmly resolved to get to the bottom of the mystery of the back room. His gun, an ultra-flat Glock, was safely stowed over his heart. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it. He had too many years drenched in sweat and blood behind him, too much active work at the front, in the course of which he, his adversaries or both had needed emergency medical treatment. The cheekbone on the cobblestones, the taste of dirt and haemoglobin in the mouth – all in the past. Jericho didn’t want to fight again. He no longer valued the bony grin of his old partner from the hereafter, who up till now had been involved in every shoot-out, who had stormed every house with him, entered every snake-pit with him, without being on anyone’s side; who always just reaped the harvest. One last time, in the Paradise of the Little Emperors, he would bring Death into the equation, in the hope of winning him as an ally in spite of his unreliability.

He stepped into the factory courtyard, resolutely crossed it and climbed the steps. As might have been expected, the shop sign said Closed. Jericho rang the bell, long and insistently, excited to see whether Ma would force himself out of the toilet or play dead. In fact he parted the bead curtain after the third ring. Limping elegantly, Ma circled the hideous counter, opened the door and fastened his vision-corrected eyes on the unwelcome guest.

‘My mistake, I’m sure,’ he said in a pinched voice. ‘I thought I said six o’clock, but probably—’

‘You did,’ Jericho assured him. ‘I’m sorry, but I now need the earrings sooner than we agreed. Please forgive my obstinacy. Women.’ He spread his arms in a gesture of impotence. ‘You understand.’

Ma forced a smile, stepped aside and let him in.

‘I’ll show you what I’ve found,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you had to wait so long, but—’

‘I’m the one who should apologise.’

‘No, not at all. My mistake. I was in the toilet. Now, let’s have a look.’

Toilet? Jericho registered with amazement that Ma had just given him the password.

‘This is very awkward,’ he stammered. ‘But—’

Ma stared at him.

‘Could I use it?’

‘Use it?’

‘Your toilet?’ Jericho added.

The man’s hands developed a crawling life of their own, pushed earrings around on the threadbare velvet of the pad. A cough crept up his throat, followed by another. Small, slimy, startled animals. Suddenly Jericho had the horrific vision of a bag in the shape of a humanoid, filled with swarming, chitinous, glittering vermin, stirring Ma Liping’s husk from within and imitating humanoid gestures.

Animal Ma.

‘Of course. Come with me.‘

He held the bead curtain open, and Jericho stepped into the back room. The second camera fastened its dark eye on him.

‘But I must—’ Ma paused. ‘I’m not equipped for this, you know. If you wait a second, I just want to sort out a fresh towel.’ He directed Jericho to the desk, and opened the toilet door behind him.

Jericho grabbed the handle and pulled it open.

As if in a flash he took in the scene. A bathroom, sure enough, tall and narrow. The outlines of dead insects in the frosted glass of the ceiling light. The tiles cracked in certain places, mildewed grouting, the mirror stained and tarnished, a rust-yellow back to the wash-basin, the toilet itself little more than a hole in the floor. A wardrobe on the back wall, if you could call it a wall, because it was half open, a disguised door that Ma had neglected to close in his haste to serve Jericho.

And in all this Animal Ma Liping, who seemed at that moment to consist only of his magnified eyes and the sole of a shoe darting out and colliding painfully with Jericho’s sternum.

Something cracked. All the air was driven out of his lungs. The kick sent him to the floor. He saw the Chinese man, teeth bared, appear in the doorframe, drew the Glock from its holster and took aim. Ma darted back and turned round. Jericho leapt to his feet, but not quickly enough to prevent his opponent from escaping into the darkness beyond the secret opening. The back wall swung back and forth. Without pausing, he charged through it, stopped at the top of a flight of stairs and hesitated. A curious smell struck him, a mixture of mould and sweetness. Ma’s footsteps rang out down below, then everything fell silent.

He mustn’t go down there. Whatever lay hidden in that cellar, the secret of the toilet was solved. Ma was in a trap. It was better to call the police, let them take care of whatever horrors lay down there and allow himself a drink.

And what if Ma wasn’t in a trap?

How many entrances and exits did the cellar have?

Jericho thought of the Paradise. Scattered across the organism of the World Wide Web, the paedophiles’ pages were suppurating wounds that sickened society irremediably. The perfidiousness with which the ‘goods’ were offered was unparallelled, he thought, and just then something from the vaults rose up towards him, ghostly and thin. A whimpering that stopped abruptly. Then nothing more.

He made his mind up.

Gun at the ready, he stepped slowly down. Strangely, with every step, the silence seemed to coagulate; he was moving through a medium enriched with rot and decay, a sound-swallowing ether. The stench grew more intense. The stairs wound round in a curve, led further downwards and opened out into a gloomy vault supported by brick pillars, some connected by wooden slats, crates that had been cobbled together. What they contained was impossible to make out from the foot of the stairs, but at the end of the chamber he glimpsed something that captured his attention.

A film set.

Yes, that was exactly what it was. The more his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, the clearer it became to him that films were being made there. Phalanxes of unlit floodlights, perched on stands and hanging from the ceiling, peeled from the darkness; folding chairs, a camera on a tripod. The set seemed to be divided into parts, some furnished with equipment, others bare, possibly something like a green-screen so that virtual backgrounds could be added later. Checking in all directions as he walked on, he made out little beds, furniture, toys, an artificial landscape with a children’s house, meadows and trees, a dissecting table from a pathology lab. Something on the floor looked unsettlingly like a chainsaw. Cages hung from the ceiling, surrounded by various utensils and something that might have been a small electric chair; tools were mounted on the wall – no, not tools: knives, pincers and hooks – a torture chamber.

Somewhere in all that madness Ma was hiding.

Jericho walked on, heart thumping, putting one foot in front of the other as if crossing ice that might crack at any moment. He reached the crates. Turned his head.

A boy looked at him.

He was naked and dirty, perhaps five years old. His fingers clutched the wire mesh between the slats, but his eyes looked apathetic, almost lifeless, the sort of eyes familiar in people who had withdrawn deep inside themselves. Jericho turned his head in the other direction and saw two girls in the cage opposite, barely clothed. One of them, very small, lay on the ground, clearly sleeping, the other, older, leaned with her back against the wall, hugging a cuddly toy. She lethargically turned a swollen face, and fastened sad eyes upon him. Then she seemed to understand that he was not one of the people who normally came here.