Xin looked at it all, without granting the woman who was placing the sushi before him the honour of acknowledgement. His concentration was undividable, and right now he was concentrating on the question of where the girl he was looking for might be hiding amidst this twenty-million-strong Moloch. She certainly wasn’t at home, he’d checked there. If that student with the ridiculous name of Grand Cherokee Wang hadn’t been lying, then there was still the possibility of narrowing down her location. He would have to clutch at this straw, even if the kid seemed dodgy to him: one of Yoyo’s two flatmates, clearly in love with the girl and even more so with money, in pursuit of which he made out he had information to offer. And yet he didn’t know a thing.
‘Yoyo hasn’t been living here that long,’ he had said. ‘She’s a real party hen.’
‘And we’re the cocks,’ the other had laughed immediately – showing his swinging uvula – by way of admitting it was a pretty bad joke. Hen was the Chinese term for whore, and the cocks, or cockerels, were the pimps. It seemed he had suddenly pictured what Yoyo might do to him if Xin were to pass on his tasteless little comment.
Could they pass on a message to Yoyo for him?
Xin asked when they had last seen Yoyo.
On the evening of 23 May, they said. The three of them had cooked and knocked back a few bottles of beer together. Afterwards, Yoyo had gone to her room, but then left the house later that same night.
At what time?
Late, Grand Cherokee seemed to remember. Around two or three in the morning. The other guy, Zhang Li, shrugged his shoulders. But since then neither of them had seen her.
Xin thought for a moment.
‘Your flatmate could be in trouble,’ he said. ‘I can’t go into it in more detail right now, but her family are very worried.’
‘Are you a policeman?’ Zhang wanted to know.
‘No. I’m someone who was sent to help Yoyo.’ He gave each of them a meaningful look. ‘And I’ve also been authorised to show my gratitude for any help in an appropriate manner. Please tell Yoyo that she can reach me on this number at any time.’ Xin gave Grand Cherokee a card on which there was nothing but a mobile number. ‘And if either of you has any more thoughts about where I might be able to find her—’
‘No idea,’ said Zhang, clearly uninterested, and disappeared into the next room.
Grand Cherokee watched him go and shuffled from one leg to the other. Xin paused in the doorway to give the boy the chance to take the offensive. Just as he’d expected, he got straight to the point – although in hushed tones – as soon as his pal was out of sight.
‘I could find something out for you,’ he said. ‘For a price, of course.’
‘Of course,’ echoed Xin, smiling a little.
‘Just to cover my costs, you know. I mean… there are a few clues, about where she is, and I could—’
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.