‘I’ll find out. Can I reach you this evening?’
‘You can reach me any time.’
‘Thought so. You don’t look like a guy who has someone waiting at home.’
‘Hey, wait a moment!’ Jericho yelped. ‘What do you mean by—’
‘Talk later.’
Idiot!
Jericho stared ahead into a red cloud of rage, but it soon dissipated. In its place came a feeling of impotence, vulnerability. The worst of it was that Zhao was right. He had nobody waiting for him, not for years now. The man might be a roughneck, but he was right. This, even though Jericho’s type was much in demand. He was trim and blond and his eyes were light blue; he was generally taken for a Scandinavian, who were well-liked by Chinese women. He was also well aware that he hardly ever paid attention to the man who looked back at him from the mirror. His clothes were functional, but otherwise nondescript. He groomed himself just enough not to look unkempt. He shaved chin and cheeks every three days, went to the hairdressers every three months to clear the topgrowth, as he liked to say, he bought T-shirts by the dozen without wondering whether they suited him. Fundamentally, even Tu Tian, fat and bald though he was, took more pains in his artlessly messy way.
When the high-speed track spat him out again at Xintiandi, his anger had given way to a brackish sort of defeatism. He tried to visualise his new home, but found no comfort there. Xintiandi seemed further away than ever, a good-time town where he didn’t belong, because it wasn’t in his nature to have a good time, and others didn’t have a good time with him around.
There it was again, the old stigma.
And he had thought he was over it. If there was one thing that Joanna had taught him, it was that he was no longer the kid from his schooldays, the boy who still looked about fifteen when he was eighteen years old. The boy who had never had a girlfriend because every last girl at school was after some other boy. Even that wasn’t quite true. They had certainly appreciated having him as an understanding male friend, which he reckoned was just an underhanded way of saying a punchbag. They came to him in floods of tears, torturing him with details of their relationships, in endless therapy sessions which they always concluded by telling Jericho that they loved him like a brother, that he was, thank God, the only boy on Earth who didn’t want anything from them.
Broken-hearted, he patched up their tattered souls and only ever once tried anything more, with a snub-nosed brunette who had just been dumped by her older boyfriend, a notorious love cheat. More precisely, he had invited her for a meal and tried to flirt with her a bit. It worked like a dream for two hours, although only because the girl hadn’t realised what he was doing. Even when he put his hand on hers, she just thought that he was being funny. It was only then that she realised that punchbags had feelings too, and she left the restaurant without a word. Owen Jericho had to turn twenty before a Welsh pub landlord’s daughter took pity, and took his virginity. She hadn’t been pretty, but she had been through the same sort of hell as he had, and this, along with a few pints of lager, was enough for him.
After that it had gone a little better, or even quite well, and he had his revenge on the pathetic wet blanket who had so stubbornly claimed to be Owen Jericho. With Joanna’s help he had buried that boy, although it had been a stupid idea to bury him alive, not suspecting that it would be Joanna too who would bring him back from the grave. The zombie had come back here in Shanghai, where the world was reinventing itself, and taken revenge in turn. The zombie was the boy in his eyes who frightened off the women. He scared them. He scared himself.
In a foul mood, he steered his car to the nearest COD point and hooked it back up to the grid. The computer calculated what he had to pay and deducted the amount as he held his phone against the interface. Jericho got out. He had to find out why Grand Cherokee had had to die. He stopped in the middle of the street and called Tu Tian. He only spoke a few words to Naomi Liu. She obviously picked up that he was in a bad mood, smiled encouragingly and put him through.
‘I found the girl,’ he said without preamble.
Tu raised his eyebrows. ‘That was fast.’ There was even something like awe in his voice. Then he noticed Jericho’s sour look. ‘And what’s the problem? If there is just one problem.’
‘She slipped through my fingers.’
‘Ah.’ Tu tutted. ‘Well then. You’ll have done your best, little Owen.’
‘I don’t particularly want to talk over the details on the phone. Should we fix up a meeting with Chen Hongbing, or would you like to hear about it first?’
‘She is his daughter,’ Tu said diplomatically.
‘I know. I’ll say it straight. I’d rather speak to you first.’
Tu looked reassured, as though that was what he had been hoping for. ‘I think we’ll do that, though it doesn’t mean we won’t do the other,’ he said magnanimously. ‘But it would certainly be wise to let me know what’s on your mind. When can you be here?’
‘In a quarter of an hour, if the roads aren’t jammed. Something else, Tian. The fellow who fell from your roof this morning—’
‘Yes, a bad business.’
‘What do you know about it?’
‘The circumstances of his death are somewhat curious, to say the least.’ Tu’s eyes gleamed. He seemed less distraught than fascinated. ‘The guy went for a walk along the tracks, five hundred metres up! I ask you, is that normal behaviour for a student who was just looking to earn a few yuan on the side? What was he doing there?’
‘I hear there’s a video.’
‘An eyewitness video, that’s right. It was on the news.’
‘Have they released it?’
‘Yes, but you can’t see very much. Just this what’s-his-name, Grand Chevrolet, climbing about like a monkey up there and then trying to jump over the carriages.’
‘Grand Cherokee. His name’s Grand Cherokee Wang.’ Jericho massaged the bridge of his nose. ‘Tian, I have to ask you for a favour. In the news it said that the surveillance cameras on the top floor of the World Financial Center showed Wang with a man. Obviously they had an argument. I’d like to have a look at the footage, and—’ Jericho hesitated – ‘at Wang as well, if possible.’
Tu stared at him. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Well, more specifically—’
‘What are you thinking here, Owen? Have you lost your wits? Should I just call up the morgue and say, hey, how are things, could you just take Mr Wang from the drawer, a friend of mine’s got a thing for splatted corpses?’
‘I want to see his effects, Tian. Whatever he had in his pockets. His phone for instance.’
‘How am I supposed to get hold of his phone?’
‘You know half of Shanghai.’
‘But nobody in the morgue!’ Tu snorted and shoved his shabby glasses back up; they had worked their way down the bridge of his nose as they talked. His jowls quivered. ‘And as for what the surveillance tapes show, don’t get your hopes up.’
‘Why not? The footage must be on the system hard drive.’
‘I’m not authorised to look at it though. I’m just a tenant here, not the owner. Besides, once the police get involved, that footage will be evidence. You’re the one with contacts to the police.’
‘In this case it might not be very wise to bother them.’
‘Why not?’
‘Tell you later.’
‘I don’t know if I can help you.’
‘Yes or no?’
‘Unbelievable!’ Tu snapped. ‘Is that any way to talk to a Chinaman? We don’t do “yes or no”. We Chinese hate to commit ourselves to anything, you must have learned that by now, Longnose.’