Frank Schätzing - Limit

Xin slid his right hand into his jacket and pulled it back out with a few notes.

‘Could I perhaps take a quick look around her room?’

‘I can’t do that,’ said Grand Cherokee, shocked. ‘She would never—’

‘It would be for her own safety.’ Xin lowered his voice. ‘Between you and me, the police could turn up here. I don’t want them finding anything that could incriminate Yoyo.’

‘Oh, of course. It’s just—’

‘I understand.’ Xin moved to put the notes back in his pocket.

‘No, wait – I—’

‘Yes?’

Grand Cherokee stared at the money and tried to tell Xin something without using words. It was clear what he wanted. The language of greed doesn’t need vocabulary. Xin reached back into his jacket and increased the offer. The boy gnawed on his lower lip, then took the notes and nodded his head towards the corridor.

‘Last door on the right. Should I—’

‘Thanks. I’ll find my way. And as I said – if you should have any clues—’

‘I do!’ Grand Cherokee’s eyes started to glisten. ‘I just need to make a few calls, speak to a few people. Hey, I’ll take you to Yoyo as soon as I’ve got things sorted! Although—’

‘Yes?’

‘I might have to bribe a few people here and there.’

‘Are we talking about an advance?’

‘Something like that.’

Xin saw the lie in Grand Cherokee’s eyes. You don’t know a thing, he thought, but it’s possible that your greed might lead you to find something out. You’ll be in touch sooner or later. You’re too sharp not to cash in on this. He pressed two more notes into his hand and left.

That was yesterday.

So far he had heard nothing from the boy, but Xin wasn’t worried. He reckoned he would receive a call sometime in the course of the afternoon. He turned his attention to his sushi: just tuna, salmon and mackerel, all of the highest quality. The cuisine of the Japanese restaurant on the fifty-sixth floor of the Jin Mao Tower left little to be desired, that is if you ignored the oversights in how the dishes were presented. The restaurant was part of the Jin Mao Grand Hyatt, which occupied the top thirty-five floors of what had once been China’s tallest building. By now, the Jin Mao Tower had been outflanked a dozen times in Shanghai alone – first in 2008 by the neighbouring World Financial Center, which also contained a Hyatt – and yet the aura of excess still clung to its outdated ambience. It reflected a time when China had begun to seek new self-awareness between communism, Confucius and capital, and had found it just as much in reminiscences of the imperial past as in the Art Deco aesthetic of colonialism. Xin liked that, even if he had to admit that staying in the new place was a more stylish experience. He was drawn here by the idea that he could subject his presence to a concept shaped not by emotions but by cold agreement with the principles of order, ultimately the secret formula of perfection. Kenny Xin was born in 1988, and the Jin Mao Tower surrendered itself to the number eight like the human to the genome. Deng Xiaoping had completed the design of the building at eighty-eight years of age, and the inauguration ceremony took place on 28 August 1998. Eighty-eight floors were stacked on top of one another and formed a construction in which every segment was an eighth smaller than the base with its sixteen storeys. The steel joists the tower rested on measured 80 metres. The eight could be seen in everything. By 2015 the building had 79 lifts, a flaw which was remedied by creating a lift just for the staff.

There were, of course, a few small imperfections in the otherwise exemplary conception. For example, the fact that the tower only swung a maximum of 75 cm back and forth in a storm or earthquake. Xin wondered how the constructors could have overlooked that kind of mistake in its mathematical beauty. He was no architect, and perhaps there was no other way, but what were five centimetres against the priority of perfection? Compared with the order of the cosmos, even the Jin Mao Tower looked like a messy child’s bedroom.

With one of his manicured fingers, Xin pushed the sushi tray away from him and a little to the left, then placed the bottle of Tsingtao beer and its accompanying glass behind it at an equal distance. It looked better to him already. He was far from subscribing to the obscene order principles of people who put everything at a right angle. Occasionally he even saw the purest order in the appearance of chaos. What could be more perfect than total homogeneity without imperfections, just as a perfectly empty spirit resembles the cosmic ideal, and every thought is a form of contamination, unless you summon it deliberately and dismiss it again at will. To control the mind is to control the world. Xin smiled as he made a few more corrections, shifting the small bowl for the soy sauce, breaking the chopsticks apart and laying them parallel in front of him. In its own way, wasn’t Shanghai a wonderful chaos too? Or rather a secret plan, an ordering of capriciousness which only revealed itself to the educated observer?

Xin pushed a few clumps of rice a little further apart on the wooden board until their appearance appealed to him.

He began to eat.

When Jericho looked back, his life in China seemed like a confused succession of dangerous risks and escapes, all encircled by soundproofed walls and building sites, in the shadow of which he had striven to improve his financial state with the industriousness of an animal burrowing a hole. In the end, the hard slog had shown results. His bank manager began to seem more like a friend. Dossiers about shares in deep-sea vessels, water treatment plants, shopping centres and skyscrapers were presented to him. The whole world seemed intent on making him aware of all the things he could spend his money on. Clasped against the bosom of better society, respected and overworked, Jericho ended up paralysed by his own achievements, too exhausted to add the final chapter to the story of his nomadic life by moving to the kind of area it would be worth growing old in. The step was long overdue, but the thought of packing up yet again made him go cold. So he gave priority to lying wearily on the sofa in the evenings as floodlights and construction noise leaked through the curtains, watching feature films and murmuring the mantra I-have-toget-out-of-here to himself, then falling asleep in the process.

It was around this time that Jericho began to seriously doubt the point of his existence.

He hadn’t doubted it when Joanna had lured him to Shanghai, only to leave him three months later. He hadn’t doubted it when he’d realised he didn’t have enough money for the flight back, nor to rebuild the life he’d left behind in London. He hadn’t doubted in his first Shanghai digs on the edge of a highway, where he’d lived on damp floors and struggled to squeeze a few litres of brown water from the shower every morning, the windows of the two-storey house rattling lightly from the never-relenting traffic.

He had just told himself it could only get better.

And it had.

To start with, Jericho had offered his services to foreign enterprises that had come out to Shanghai to do business. Many felt insecure within the fragile framework of Chinese copyright protection legislation. They felt spied on and cheated. With time, though, the self-service mentality of the dragon had given way to great remorse. While, at the beginning of the century, China had still happily plagiarised everything hackers unearthed from the depths of the global ideas pool, now even Chinese business people were increasingly despairing about their state’s inability to protect ideas. They too began to be on the receiving end of the words ‘It seemed worthy of imitation to us’, which was a polite way of saying ‘Of course we stole it, but we admire you for having created it.’ For years, the Long-Nose accusations that Chinese companies and institutions had stolen their intellectual property had been indignantly rejected or not even acknowledged, but Jericho found that now it was Chinese companies, above all, who needed web detectives. Native entrepreneurs reacted excitedly to the fact that, during his time with Scotland Yard helping to build up the department for Cyber Crime, he had been fighting against them. In their opinion, it could only be advantageous to have their patents protected by someone who had previously done such an excellent job of clobbering them when they crossed the line.