Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘No.’

‘Well, they’re little emperors!’

Little Emperors. Jericho stiffened. What an idiot! It was only a few hours since he’d stopped being tormented by the images of that cellar in Shenzhen, and now Tu was starting on about little emperors.

‘They’re just as wonderful as they are demanding,’ Tu continued. ‘Yoyo too. Anyway, I made it clear to her that her father had a right to his own life, and that the mere occasion of her birth didn’t give her the right to trespass into the secret palaces of his soul, as it were. Children don’t understand that. They think their parents are just there to provide a service, existing only to look after them, useful at first, then dumb and ultimately just embarrassing. She defended herself by saying that Hongbing started all of their arguments, that he was trying to control her life, and in that, unfortunately, she was right. Hongbing should have explained to her what it was that had angered him so much.’

‘But he didn’t. So? Did you?’

‘He would never allow me to speak to Yoyo about that. Nor to anyone else, for that matter! So I tried to build a bridge between them. Let her know that her father had once met with a great injustice, and that no one suffered more from his silence than he himself. I asked her to be patient with him. With time, Yoyo began to respect my view, and she became very thoughtful. From that point on she confided in me regularly, which was an honour, although not one I would have actively sought out.’

‘And Hongbing became jealous.’

Tu laughed softly, a strange, sad laugh.

‘He would never admit it. The bond between him and me goes deep, Owen. But of course he didn’t like it. It was inevitable that it would complicate things. Yoyo decided to intensify her tone on the net, to test the authorities’ sensitivity threshold. But then again, she was only writing about everyday things: the scene, music, films and travel, and she also wrote poems and short stories. I don’t think she was that clear about what she wanted to be: a serious journalist, a dissident or just another Shanghai Baby.’

‘ Shanghai Baby – wasn’t that a book by—’

‘Mian Mian.’ Tu nodded. ‘At the beginning of the millennium that’s what people called young Shanghai writers. The term has gone out of fashion by now. Well, you’ve seen Yoyo. She made a name for herself in artists’ circles, attracted the interest of the intellectuals, so did that make her an author?’ Tu shook his head. ‘She never wrote one good novel. And yet I would trust her to single-handedly get to the bottom of the death of John F. Kennedy. She’s a brilliant researcher, excellent on the offensive. The censors picked up on that a long time ago. And Hongbing knows it too. That’s why he’s so worried, because Yoyo is someone others follow. She has charisma, she’s believable. All dangerous qualities in the eyes of the Party.’

‘When did she first go on their records?’

‘To start with, nothing happened. The authorities bided their time. Yoyo was practically part of the furniture at my company; she showed a strong interest in holography and lent a hand in the development of some really fun programs, and the Party can’t cope with fun. They just don’t know what to make of it. It unsettles them that the Chinese are starting to value fun for the first time in their cultural development.’

‘Aristotle wrote a book about laughter,’ said Jericho. ‘Did you know that?’

‘I know my Confucius better.’

‘No book ever caused more annoyance to the Church than this one did. They said that he who laughs, laughs also about God, the Pope and the entire clerical apparatus of power.’

‘Or the Party. That’s true, there are some parallels. On the other hand, anyone who’s having fun is less angry and less political. For that reason the Party is on board with fun again, and Yoyo really is a fun-loving character. After a while she shifted her energies to singing and started one of these Mando-prog bands that are springing up everywhere. If Yoyo’s not there, there is no party! If you’re out and about in the scene, it’s very difficult to avoid her. Perhaps back then they thought: The more fun the girl has, the less there’ll be to fear from her. I’m sure that, had they left her in peace, it might even have worked.’

Tu pulled a once-white handkerchief from the depths of his trousers and wiped the sweat from his brow.

‘But then suddenly, one morning five years ago, all of her blogs were blocked and all entries of her name erased from the net. She was arrested that same day and taken to a police station, where they left her to stew. They accused her of being a threat to the security of the State and of having goaded the citizens into subversion. She spent a month there before Hongbing even knew where they were holding her. He nearly lost his mind! The whole thing was fatefully reminiscent of the Titanium Mouse case. No charge, no trial, no verdict, nothing. Even Yoyo herself didn’t know what she was supposed to have done. She was banged up in a cell with two junkies and a woman who had stabbed her husband. The policemen were friendly to her. In the end they told her why she was there. She was alleged to have shown her support for some rock musician, a friend of hers who was in prison for some impudence or other. It was laughable. According to the constitution, the State prosecutor has six weeks to decide whether to go to trial or release someone. In the end they dropped the case due to lack of evidence, Yoyo received a warning and they let her go home.’

‘I guess it goes without saying that Hongbing forbade her to make any more critical comments on the net,’ Jericho surmised.

‘And achieved exactly the opposite. Which means she acted as innocent as a lamb at first, wrote a few articles for internet magazines, even for Party organs. After a few weeks she stumbled across a case about the dumping of illegal toxic waste in the West Lake. A chemical company near Hangzhou, at the time still under State ownership, had carted over their waste and buried it in the lake, and as a result local residents lost their hair and even worse. The director of the company—’

‘—was a cousin of the Minister for Employment and Social Security,’ Jericho blurted out. ‘Of course! Yoyo knew that, and that’s why she wrote about it.’

Tu stared at him in amazement.

‘How do you know that?’

‘I’ve finally remembered where I know Yoyo’s name from!’ He relished the moment as his brain lifted the blockade and released the memory. ‘I never saw a picture of her. But I remember the toxic waste scandal. It was all over the net back then, illegal dumping. They told her she was mistaken. Yoyo told them where they could stick it, and was promptly arrested.’

‘Once Yoyo dug her feet in, it was just a matter of hours before all her entries in the net were erased again. The security police turned up at her door that same evening, and she found herself back in the cell. Yet, once again, they couldn’t accuse her of anything. Her mistake was getting herself tangled up in the web of corruption. The State prosecution demanded to know what was going on. After all, they’d already investigated her the year before and found nothing, but they were put under pressure and had to charge her against their will.’

‘I remember. She had to go to prison.’

‘It could have been worse. Hongbing has a few contacts, and I have even better ones. So I found Yoyo a lawyer who managed to negotiate her sentence down to six months.’

‘But what did they actually charge her with?’

‘Passing on State secrets, the same as always.’ Tu shrugged and smiled bitterly. ‘The chemical company had entered into a joint venture with a British company, and Yoyo had gone to persuade one of its employees to collect evidence about the cloak-and-dagger operation. That was enough. But it was also enough to attract the media’s attention to the case. China’s journalists aren’t as easily intimidated now as they were back in 2005, or even 2010. When one of their own is in the stocks, the dogs start to howl, and the Party is divided when it comes to cases of corruption. The story travelled abroad, Reporters Without Borders took up Yoyo’s cause, the British Prime Minister made a few comments in passing during bilateral talks in Beijing. Three months later, Yoyo was released.’