Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘She sings,’ said Chen, as if it were necessary to point that out. Jericho played the next film. It showed Yoyo in a restaurant, sitting opposite Chen, her hair loose. She flicked through a menu, then noticed the camera and smiled.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Well, I hardly ever see you,’ answered Chen’s voice. ‘So this way I’ll at least have you preserved on film.’

‘Aha! Bottled Yoyo.’

She laughed. Two horizontal creases formed under her eyes as she did so, which hadn’t come up in the psychologists’ beauty scenarios, but Jericho found them incredibly exciting.

‘And besides, that way I can show you off.’

Yoyo pulled a face at her father. She started to squint.

‘No, don’t,’ said Chen’s voice.

The recording ended. The third one showed the restaurant again, apparently at a later date. Music blended into the cacophony of noise. In the background, waiters were hurrying between packed tables. Yoyo took a drag of her cigarette and balanced a drink in her right hand. She opened her lips and let a thin plume of smoke escape. For the duration of the entire clip, she didn’t speak a single word. Her gaze rested on her father. It was one of love and noticeable sadness, so much so that Jericho wouldn’t have been surprised to see tears flowing from her eyes. But nothing of the sort happened. Yoyo just lowered her eyelids from time to time, as if wanting to wipe away what she saw with her heavy lashes, sipped at her drink, dragged at her cigarette and blew out smoke.

‘I’ll need these recordings,’ said Jericho.

Chen pushed himself out of his chair, his gaze fixed on the now empty wall as if his daughter were still visible on it. His features seemed more rigid than ever. And yet Jericho knew, without knowing the exact circumstances, that there had been times when this face had been contorted with pain. He had seen such faces in London. Victims. Families of victims. Perpetrators who had become victims themselves. Whatever it was that had hardened Chen, he hoped fervently to be far away if this rigidity ever broke down. There was no way in the world he wanted to see what would happen if it did.

‘There are more you can have,’ said Chen tonelessly. ‘Yoyo enjoyed being photographed. But the films are much better. Not these ones though. Yoyo made recordings for Tian as a virtual tour guide. In high resolution, so she told me. And it’s true, when you walk through the Museum of Town Planning or through the eye of the World Financial Center with one of those programs, it’s as though she’s there with you in the flesh. I have some of them at home, but I’m sure Tian can give you better material.’ He faltered. ‘Assuming, of course, that you’re willing to find Yoyo for me.’

Jericho reached for his cup, stared at the remaining puddle of cold coffee and put it back down. Bright sunlight filled the room. He looked at Chen and knew that his visitor wouldn’t ask a second time.

‘I’m going to need more than the films.’

Around the same time, a Japanese waitress was approaching Kenny Xin’s table, carrying a tray of sushi and sashimi in front of her. Xin, who saw her coming out of the corner of his eye, didn’t bother turning round. His gaze was resting on the blue-grey band of the Huangpu three hundred metres below him. The river was busy at this time of day. Chains of barges followed its path like sluggish water-snakes, while heavy cargo-ships headed for the docks to the east of the bend. Ferries, water taxis and excursion boats forced their way between them en route for the Yangpu bridge and the cranes of the unloading bays, past the idyllic Gongqing Park to the estuary, where the oily floods of the Huangpu mixed in a gloomy kaleidoscope with the muddy waters of the Yangtze before dispersing into the East China Sea.

It was thanks to the river’s sharp, almost angular bend to the right that Shanghai’s financial and economic district, Pudong, seemed like a peninsula, offering panoramic views of the coastal road Zhongshan Lu with its colonial banks, clubs and hotels: relicts from the era after the Opium Wars, when the European trade giants had divided up the country between them and erected monuments of their power on the western bank of the river. A hundred years ago, these structures must have towered over everything around them in splendour and size. Now they looked like toys against the stalagmite-like towers of glass, steel and concrete that stretched out behind them, permeated by highways, magnetic rails and sky trains, surrounded by whirling flying machines, insectoid minicopters and cargo-blimps. Even though the weather was unusually clear, the horizon couldn’t be seen. Shanghai went up in smoke, diffused at the edges and became one with the sky. There was nothing to suggest that anything other than yet more development was beyond the development itself.

Xin looked at it all, without granting the woman who was placing the sushi before him the honour of acknowledgement. His concentration was undividable, and right now he was concentrating on the question of where the girl he was looking for might be hiding amidst this twenty-million-strong Moloch. She certainly wasn’t at home, he’d checked there. If that student with the ridiculous name of Grand Cherokee Wang hadn’t been lying, then there was still the possibility of narrowing down her location. He would have to clutch at this straw, even if the kid seemed dodgy to him: one of Yoyo’s two flatmates, clearly in love with the girl and even more so with money, in pursuit of which he made out he had information to offer. And yet he didn’t know a thing.

‘Yoyo hasn’t been living here that long,’ he had said. ‘She’s a real party hen.’

‘And we’re the cocks,’ the other had laughed immediately – showing his swinging uvula – by way of admitting it was a pretty bad joke. Hen was the Chinese term for whore, and the cocks, or cockerels, were the pimps. It seemed he had suddenly pictured what Yoyo might do to him if Xin were to pass on his tasteless little comment.

Could they pass on a message to Yoyo for him?

Xin asked when they had last seen Yoyo.

On the evening of 23 May, they said. The three of them had cooked and knocked back a few bottles of beer together. Afterwards, Yoyo had gone to her room, but then left the house later that same night.

At what time?

Late, Grand Cherokee seemed to remember. Around two or three in the morning. The other guy, Zhang Li, shrugged his shoulders. But since then neither of them had seen her.

Xin thought for a moment.

‘Your flatmate could be in trouble,’ he said. ‘I can’t go into it in more detail right now, but her family are very worried.’

‘Are you a policeman?’ Zhang wanted to know.

‘No. I’m someone who was sent to help Yoyo.’ He gave each of them a meaningful look. ‘And I’ve also been authorised to show my gratitude for any help in an appropriate manner. Please tell Yoyo that she can reach me on this number at any time.’ Xin gave Grand Cherokee a card on which there was nothing but a mobile number. ‘And if either of you has any more thoughts about where I might be able to find her—’

‘No idea,’ said Zhang, clearly uninterested, and disappeared into the next room.

Grand Cherokee watched him go and shuffled from one leg to the other. Xin paused in the doorway to give the boy the chance to take the offensive. Just as he’d expected, he got straight to the point – although in hushed tones – as soon as his pal was out of sight.

‘I could find something out for you,’ he said. ‘For a price, of course.’

‘Of course,’ echoed Xin, smiling a little.

‘Just to cover my costs, you know. I mean… there are a few clues, about where she is, and I could—’