Frank Schätzing - Limit

Once night fell, a few people became more talkative. A plump old woman, preparing delicious little dumplings in broth, told Jericho that the compensation from the building authorities wasn’t anywhere near enough to buy a new apartment. Nor was it enough to rent one for any considerable length of time. A second woman who came over said that each of the inhabitants had been offered a much higher sum to start with, but that no one had received the amount they had been promised. A young man was considering making a complaint, but the plump woman dismissed that with a subdued flick of her hand. Her son had already complained four times. Every complaint had been rejected, but on the fourth time they had locked him up in a cell for a week, only showing him the door after they had administered a number of kicks.

Jericho ended up leaving as clueless as he had come. Now he had returned for a third time, and there was no indication that there had ever been anything here but towers with air-conditioning in front of the windows. The blocks were numbered, but in the advancing dusk the numbers blurred against the background. Some idiot had clearly thought it would be chic to paint pastel on pastel – in huge numbers, admittedly – but in poor light they were as hard to make out as snow-white mountain hares in a snowstorm. Jericho didn’t waste time marching up and down the streets. He pulled out his mobile, entered in the number and let the GPS figure out his location. A grid-section of the city from satellite perspective appeared on the screen. Jericho projected the map onto the wall of a nearby house. The beamer was strong enough to generate a brilliantly clear image measuring two by two metres. The street he was standing on ran diagonally over the wall, along with a number of side and parallel streets. He zoomed in. One blinking signal pinpointed his current location down to the nearest metre, another marked out Yoyo’s address.

‘Please walk straight ahead for thirty-two metres,’ said the mobile in a friendly tone. ‘Then turn right—’

He deactivated the voice and set off. He had found out all he needed to know: that Yoyo’s building was just around the corner and easily reached.

Within two minutes he was ringing the doorbell.

It was a surprise visit and therefore an investment of sorts. The relative slimness of the chance he’d find someone at home was cancelled out by the benefits of the surprise attack. The recipient of the visit, if there were one, had no chance to prepare himself, hide things or rehearse lies. According to Jericho’s research, Yoyo’s flatmates had never had a criminal record, nor had they ever attracted the attention of the authorities. One of them, Zhang Li, was studying Economics and English, the other was enrolled in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering. As far as the authorities were concerned he was called Wang Jintao, but called himself Grand Cherokee. That was nothing unusual. In the nineties, young Chinese people had begun to put Western names before their family ones, a practice that wasn’t always carried out that tastefully. It wasn’t uncommon for men, in ignorance of a word’s associations, to name themselves after sanitary towels or dog food, whilst on the women’s side it wasn’t unusual to meet a Pershing Song or White House Liang. Wang, for example, had even selected himself an American four-by-four as a forename.

If Tu was to be believed, neither Wang nor Li was a stay-at-home type, which meant he could have made the journey here in vain. But after he’d rung for the second time, something surprising happened. Without anyone bothering to use the intercom, the buzzer sounded and the door was released. Walking into a bare hallway which stank of cabbage, he took the lift up to the seventh floor and found himself on a whitewashed landing where the neon lighting was flickering nervously. A little further along, a door opened up. A young man came out and looked Jericho up and down coolly.

There was no doubt it was him!

His forehead and cheekbones were adorned with metallic applications, highly fashionable right now. Their arrival had ended the era of piercings and tattoos. Anyone who still dared to have a ring through their eyebrow or silver in their tongue was seen as an embarrassment. Even the hairstyle, smooth and long, fitted in with the trend. It was known as Indian style, as currently worn by the majority of young men around the globe, apart from the Indians themselves of course, who rejected all responsibility for it. A spray-on shirt emphasised Wang’s muscles, his wet-look leather trousers gave the impression that they were on duty both day and night. All things considered, the guy didn’t look bad, but he didn’t look great either. The warlike appearance was lacking about ten centimetres in height, and the edgy quality of his features might be quite pleasing, but they were devoid of any proportional elegance.

‘And you are?’ he asked, suppressing a yawn.

Jericho held his mobile phone out under Wang’s nose and projected a 3D image of his head, along with his police registration number, onto the folded-up display.

‘Owen Jericho, web detective.’

Wang squinted.

‘So I see,’ he said, trying to sound ironic.

‘Could I have a moment of your time?’

‘What’s up?’

‘This is the apartment of Chen Yuyun, is that correct? Yoyo for short.’

‘Wrong.’ The guy seemed to chew the word before spitting it out. ‘This apartment belongs to me and Li, and the little one just dumped her books and clothes here.’

‘I thought she lived here?’

‘Let’s get one thing clear, okay? It’s not her apartment. I let her have the room.’

‘Then you must be Grand Cherokee.’

‘Yeah!’ The mention of his forename made its owner suddenly switch into friendly mode. ‘You’ve heard of me?’

‘Only good things,’ lied Jericho. ‘Would you be able to tell me where I can find Yoyo?’

‘Where you could find—’ Grand Cherokee paused. For some unknown reason the question seemed to take him by surprise. ‘That’s—’ he murmured. ‘That’s really something!’

‘I need to speak to her.’

‘You can’t.’

‘I know Yoyo has disappeared,’ Jericho added. ‘That’s why I’m here. Her father’s looking for her, and he’s very worried. So if you know anything about where she is—’

Grand Cherokee stared at him. Something about the boy, or rather about his attitude, irritated Jericho.

‘As I said,’ he repeated, ‘if you—’

‘Just a moment.’ Grand Cherokee raised his hand. For a few seconds he paused like that, then his features seemed to smooth out.

‘Yoyo.’ He smiled jovially. ‘But of course. Don’t you want to come in?’

Still confused, Jericho entered the narrow hallway, which branched off into a number of other rooms. Grand Cherokee hurried ahead of him, opened the last door and nodded inside with his head.

‘I can show you her room.’

Suddenly, Jericho understood. This much cooperation was bordering on calculation. Slowly, he walked into the room and looked around. It didn’t say much. There was hardly anything to suggest who lived here except for a few posters of popular figures from the Mando-prog scene. One of the pictures was of Yoyo herself, posing on a stage. A note fluttered around on a pinboard above a cheap desk. Jericho walked over to it and studied the few symbols.

‘Dark sesame oil,’ he read. ‘300 grams of chicken breast—’

Grand Cherokee cleared his throat discreetly.

‘Yes?’ Jericho turned round to him.

‘I could give you some clues about where Yoyo is.’

‘Excellent.’

‘Well.’ Grand Cherokee spread his fingers meaningfully. ‘She told me a lot, you know? I mean, the little one likes me. She got quite friendly in the last few days she was here.’