Frank Schätzing - Limit

He thought about Vic Thorn.

They had taken everything into account, everything except the possibility that Thorn might have an accident. The preparation for his mission had been exemplary, everything planned well in advance. Nothing should have gone wrong, but then a tiny speck of space debris had changed everything in a matter of seconds.

Hanna looked out into space.

Thorn was somewhere out there. He had joined the inventory of the cosmos, an asteroid on an unknown path. Many people believed that he must have stayed in the Earth’s gravitational field, which would have meant encountering his body cyclically in orbit. But Thorn had still not been found. It was possible that he would crash into the Sun one day in the far future. Plausible that some day in a few million years’ time he would turn up in the sphere of a planet inhabited by non-human intelligence and cause a great deal of surprise there.

He held up a roll-on deodorant, pulled off the cap, then put it back on and tucked it away.

This time, it would work.

Chen Hongbing bent forward as he entered the room, in that way typical of people whose height is in constant conflict with doorframes and low-hanging ceiling-lights. He was actually extraordinarily tall for a Chinese man. On the other hand, the architect who designed the shikumen could hardly be accused of a lack of consideration for extravagant bodily proportions. The door was a good three metres high, so it hardly required him to hunch his shoulders as he did, or stretch out his chin which, as it approached his breastbone, seemed to linger hesitantly. Despite his size, Chen seemed gaunt and subservient. His gaze had a furtive nature about it, as if he were expecting to be beaten, or worse. Jericho got the impression he had spent his whole life conversing with people who towered over him while he stayed seated.

If indeed this was Chen Hongbing.

The visitor touched the doorframe fleetingly with the tips of his fingers, as if wanting to assure himself of something solid to grasp in case of a sudden collapse. Confused, he looked at the pile of removal boxes, then crossed the threshold with the caution of a tightrope walker. The white midday sun stretched across the room, a sculpture of light, broken into a billion pieces by the whirling dust. In that pale light Chen looked like a ghost narrowing his eyes. He looked younger than Tu Tian had said he was. His skin stretched tautly over his cheekbones, forehead and chin; a face which was deeply carved with lines. Around his eyes, though, a fine macramé pattern branched out, more like cracks than lines. To Jericho, they looked like testimonies to a difficult life.

‘ Ta chi le hen duo Ku ,’ Tu Tian had said. ‘Hongbing has eaten bitterness, Owen, for many long years. Every morning it comes up, he forces it down again, and one day he will choke on it. Help him, xiongdi .’

Eaten bitterness. Even misery was available for consumption in China.

Jericho looked indecisively at the box in his hands and wondered if he should heave it onto the desk as planned or back onto the pile. Chen’s arrival was ill-timed. He hadn’t expected the man to come this early. Tu Tian had said something about an afternoon visit, and it wasn’t even twelve yet. His stomach was rumbling, and his brow and upper lip glistened with sweat. The more he ran his hands over his face and hair to mix the dust and sweat, the less he looked like someone who was about to move into the expensive, trendy neighbourhood of Xintiandi. Three days without shaving had taken their toll. Encased in a sticky cloth of a T-shirt, which showed the 37 degrees Celsius and what felt like 99.9 per cent air humidity much more than the colour it had once possessed, and having hardly eaten for twenty-four hours, Jericho wanted nothing more than to put the move behind him as quickly as possible. Just one more box, then off to a food stall in Taicang Lu, carry on unpacking, shower, shave.

That had been the plan.

But when he saw Chen standing there in the dusty light, he knew he couldn’t put his visitor off until later. Chen was the kind of person who would stay in your mind if you sent him away, and besides, out of respect to Tu Tian it was completely out of the question. He put the box back on the pile and put on a B-grade smile: warm, but noncommittal.

‘Chen Hongbing, I take it.’

The man standing opposite him nodded and looked bewilderedly at the boxes and piled-up pieces of furniture. He coughed slightly, then took a small step back.

‘I’ve come at a bad time.’

‘Not at all.’

‘It just so happened that I – I was nearby, but if it puts you out I can come back—’

‘It’s no trouble at all.’ Jericho looked around, pulled over a chair and put it in front of the desk. ‘Take a seat, honourable Chen, make yourself at home. I’m just moving in, hence the chaos. Can I get you anything?’

You can’t, he thought, you would have needed to go shopping for that, but you’re a man. When women move house, they make sure they have a full fridge before the first box even leaves the removal van, and if there isn’t a fridge, they buy one and plug it in. Then he remembered the half-full bottle of orange juice. It had been on the lounge windowsill since yesterday morning, which meant it had led a two-day-long existence in the glaring sun and intelligent life might even have developed inside it.

‘Coffee, tea?’ he asked nonetheless.

‘No, thank you, but thank you very much.’ Chen sank down onto the edge of the chair and stared intently at his knees. If he had come into contact with the surface of the seat, it was by an amount barely measurable physically. ‘A few minutes of your time is more than I can expect in these circumstances.’

Awkward pride resonated in his words. Jericho pulled a second chair over, placed it next to Chen’s and hesitated. There were actually two comfortable armchairs which belonged in front of the desk, and both were in sight, but they had mutated into misshapen clumps of bubble wrap wrapped in packing tape.

‘It’s my pleasure to be able to assist you,’ he said, trying to stop his smile from widening. ‘We’ll take as much time as we need.’

Chen slid back on his chair and sank cautiously against the backrest.

‘You’re very friendly.’

‘And you’re not comfortable. Please accept my apologies. Let me find some more comfortable seating. It’s still packed, but—’

Chen lifted his head and squinted up at him. Jericho was confused for a second, then it hit him: essentially, Chen looked good. In his younger years he must have been one of those men women said were beautiful. Until the day when something had ground his well-proportioned features into a mask. Somewhat grotesquely, he now lacked a facial expression, if you didn’t count his occasional nervous blinking.

‘No, I won’t allow you to do that on my account—’

‘It would be my pleasure.’

‘No, I can’t allow you to.’

‘They have to be unpacked anyway.’

‘Of course, but at a time of your choosing.’ Chen shook his head and got up again. His joints clicked. ‘Please, I beg of you! I’m much too early, you’re in the middle of something and I’m sure you were less than enthusiastic about my arrival.’

‘No, that’s not the case! I’m pleased you’ve come to see me.’

‘No, I should come back later.’

‘My dear Mr Chen, no moment could be better than this one. Please, stay.’

‘I couldn’t ask that of you. If I had known—’

And so on and so forth.

Theoretically, the game could carry on for ever. It wasn’t that either of them harboured any doubt about the other’s position. Chen knew only too well that he had caught Jericho at the wrong moment, and no assurances to the contrary would change that. Jericho, in turn, was aware that Chen would have been far more comfortable on a bed of nails than on any of his kitchen chairs. The circumstances were to blame. Chen’s presence was down to a system in which favours chased one another like puppies, and he was ashamed to the core at having messed it up. It was because of one of these favours that he was even here in the first place, then he had foolishly arrived too early and stumbled into the middle of a house move, thereby shaming their mediator and putting Jericho, the mediated, into the unpleasant situation of interrupting his work on his account. Because of course Jericho wouldn’t ask him to come back later. The ritual of pleasantries allowed for an open-ended succession of ‘No, yes, not at all, but of course, it would be an honour, no, I couldn’t, yes, no, yes!’ A game which, if you wanted to master it, took years of training. If you were a peng you , a friend in the sense of a useful go-between, it would be played differently than if you were a xiongdi , a close confidant. Social standing, age and gender, the context of the conversation, all of these were factored into the coordinates of decorum.