Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘No holographic program could compare to you, Naomi.’

‘Tell him that.’ She nodded her head in the direction of Tu’s office. ‘Otherwise he might come up with the idea of replacing me with one.’

‘I would break off all business connections in an instant if he did that. Is he—?’

‘Yes, he’s here. Take care. I’ll put you through.’

Jericho enjoyed their little flirting ritual. Naomi Liu was the conduit for all forms of contact with Tu Tian. Having her on his side could be useful. And Jericho wouldn’t have hesitated for a second in inviting her to his apartment, but she would never have taken him up on the offer. She was happily married and the mother of two children.

The shimmering double T rotated again briefly, then Tu’s huge head appeared on the screen. The little hair he had left was concentrated just above his ears, where it was grey and bristly. Narrow glasses were balanced on his nose. The left arm looked as if it was held together by transparent sticky-tape. Tu had pushed his sleeves up and was shovelling sticky-looking noodles into his mouth, fishing them out of a paper box with clattering chopsticks. The large desk behind him was full of screens and holo-projectors. In between were piles of hard disks, remote controls, brochures, cardboard boxes and the remains of various packaging.

‘No, you’re not interrupting,’ mumbled Tu with his mouth full, as if Jericho had expressed any concern on the matter.

‘I can see that. Have you ever been to your canteen, by the way? They make fresh food there.’

‘So?’

‘Proper food.’

‘This is proper food. I poured boiling water on it and it turned into food.’

‘Do you even know what it’s supposed to be? Does it say anything on the packaging?’

‘It says something or other.’ Tu carried on chewing steadily. His rubbery lips moved around like copulating rubber tubes. ‘People with your anarchic sense of time management wouldn’t understand perhaps, but there are reasons for eating in the office.’

Jericho gave up. As long as he’d known Tu, he’d hardly ever seen him devour a healthy, decent meal. It seemed as though the manager had set himself the task of ruining the Chinese cuisine’s reputation as the best, most varied and freshest in the world. He might be a genial inventor and a gifted golf-player – but when it came to culinary matters, he made Kublai Khan look like the father of all gourmets.

‘So what were you celebrating?’ he asked, with a glance at the chaos in Tu’s office.

‘We were testing something out.’ Tu reached for a bottle of water, washed down the noodles in his mouth and burped audibly. ‘Holo-Cops. A commission from the traffic-control authorities. They function excellently in the dark, but sunlight is still giving them problems. It corrodes them.’ He chortled with laughter. ‘Like vampires.’

‘What does the city want with holographic policemen?’

Tu looked at him in amazement.

‘To regulate the traffic, what else? Another one of the real ones was run over last week, didn’t you read about it? He was standing in the middle of the Siping Lu crossing in Dalian Xilu when one of the furniture transporters raced right into him and distributed him evenly all over the tarmac. It was a huge mess, screaming children, angry letters! No one regulates the traffic voluntarily any more.’

‘Since when did the police care whether things are voluntary?’

‘They don’t, Owen, but it’s a question of economics. They’re losing too many officers. Being a traffic policeman tops the list of most dangerous jobs right now, and most of them would rather be assigned to tracking down and catching mentally disturbed mass-murderers. And, well, there’s the humane aspect too, no one wants dead policemen. It’s no problem at all if a Holo-Cop gets run over, it even still manages to file a report about it. The projection sends a signal to the computer, including the car make and number plate.’

‘Interesting,’ said Jericho. ‘And how are the holographic tour guides coming along?’

‘Ah!’ Tu wiped the corner of his mouth clean with a serviette, one which had clearly had to assist with several other mealtimes too. ‘You had a visitor.’

‘Yes, I had a visitor.’

‘And?’

‘Your friend is terribly sad. What happened to him?’

‘I told you. He ate bitterness.’

‘And beyond that it’s none of my business, I get the picture. So let’s talk about his daughter.’

‘Yoyo!’ Tu stroked his hand over his stomach. ‘Be honest now, isn’t she sensational?’

‘Without a doubt.’

Jericho was intrigued as to whether Tu would talk about the girl on a public phone line. It was true that all telephone conversations were recorded by the authorities, but in reality the observation apparatus rarely followed up on the analysis, even though sophisticated programs pre-selected the recordings. As early as the end of the previous century, within the context of their worldwide Ecelon Program, American Secret Services had introduced software which was able to recognise key words, with the result that you could be arrested just for mentioning the word ice-bomb three times in succession when planning Grandma’s birthday party. Modern programs by contrast were, to a certain extent, perfectly able to understand the meaning of the conversation and create priority lists. But they were still incapable of recognising irony. Humour and double-meanings were alien to them, which forced the spies themselves to listen in, just like in the old times, as soon as words like dissident or Tiananmen massacre came up. As expected, Tu merely said:

‘And now you want a date with the girl, right?’

Jericho grinned cheerlessly. He knew it. There were going to be difficulties.

‘If it can be arranged.’

‘Well, she has such high standards,’ said Tu craftily. ‘Perhaps I should give you a few useful pieces of advice, my dear boy. Will you be in the area in the next few hours at all?’

‘I have things to do in Bund. I should be free later.’

‘Excellent! Take the ferry. The weather’s lovely, let’s meet in Lujiazui Green.’

Lujiazui Green was a picturesque park surrounded by skyscrapers, not far from Jin Mao Tower and the WFC. Tu sat on a bench on the bank of the small lake, basking in the sun. As usual, he was wearing sunglasses over his normal glasses. His crumpled shirt had worked its way almost entirely out of his waistband and was straining at the buttons. Patches of his white belly peeped through the gaps. Jericho sat down next to him and stretched out his legs.

‘Yoyo is a dissident,’ he said.

Tu turned his head round to him lethargically. His eyes couldn’t be seen behind the crooked construction of glasses and sunglasses.

‘I thought you would have picked that up from our conversation on the golf course.’

‘That’s not what I mean. What I mean is that the case is a little different to my normal ones. This time I’m supposed to look for a dissident in order to protect her.’

‘A former dissident.’

‘Her father sees that differently. Why would Yoyo have gone underground, if not out of fear? Unless she’s been arrested. You said yourself that she has a tendency to aggravate the wrong people. Perhaps she crossed someone who was a little too big for her.’

‘And what are you planning to do?’

‘You know exactly what I’m going to do,’ snorted Jericho. ‘I’m going to look for Yoyo of course.’

Tu nodded. ‘That’s very generous of you.’

‘No, it goes without saying. The only snag is that I’ll have to work without the authorities this time. So I need any information there is about Yoyo and her world, and that’s where I’m relying on your help. My impression of Chen Hongbing was that he’s extremely honourable and incredibly private. Perhaps he just turns a blind eye; in any case, getting information from him was like trying to get blood from a stone.’