‘I’m not trying to rip anyone off, man!’
‘Then don’t.’
‘Come on! The kind of course I’m on doesn’t pay for itself! I’ll find out whatever you want to know.’
‘Wrong! You have nothing to sell me.’
‘I—’ The student searched for words. ‘Okay, fine. If I tell you something, right here and now, that helps you to make some progress, will you trust me then? That would be my advance, you see?’
‘I’m listening.’
‘So, there’s a biker gang that she hangs out with a lot. She rides a motorcycle too. The City Demons – that’s what it says on their jackets at any rate.’
‘And where can I find them?’
‘That was my advance.’
‘Now you listen to me,’ said Jericho, jabbing a finger at his adversary. ‘Here and now I’m paying you nothing. Because you have nothing. Nothing at all. If you should happen to get hold of some real information, driven by the goodness of your heart – and I mean real information! – then we may be able to do business. Is that clear?’
‘Perfectly.’
‘So when shall I expect your call?’
‘Tomorrow afternoon.’ Grand Cherokee plucked at the tip of his chin. ‘No, earlier. Perhaps.’ He gave Jericho a penetrating look. ‘But then it’s payday, man!’
‘Then it’s payday.’ Jericho smacked him on the shoulder. ‘An appropriate amount. Did you want to say anything else?’
Grand Cherokee shook his head silently.
‘Then I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Then I’ll see you tomorrow—
He stood in the hallway as if he were rooted to the spot, even once the detective was already on his way downstairs. As he heard the lift door rattle lightly in the shaft, his thoughts came thick and fast.
Well, this was incredible!
Deep in thought, he went into the kitchen, fetched a beer from the fridge and raised the bottle to his lips. What was going on here? What had Yoyo done to make everyone so interested in her disappearance? First that smart guy and now the detective. And, even more importantly:
How could he profit from it?
It wouldn’t be easy, that’s for sure. Grand Cherokee was under no illusions: his knowledge of her whereabouts was nonexistent, and the next few hours would do little to change that. On the other hand it would be a real stroke of bad luck if he couldn’t come up with a few juicy lies by the next morning. The kind of lies that no one could prove, along the lines of: my information is first-hand, I don’t know either, clearly Yoyo got wind of something, it was right under our nose, and so on and so forth.
He would have to push the price right up. Play them off against one another! It was a good thing he hadn’t told the detective about Xin’s visit. People could say what they wanted about him, but certainly not that he was dumb.
I’m too on the ball for the two of you, he thought.
He was already counting the notes in his mind.
26 May 2025
THE SATELLITE
Arrival
As if there hadn’t been dozens of pairs of boots marking the surface of the Moon with the imprint of mankind’s heroism since 2018, Eugene Cernan – the commander of Apollo 17 – was still regarded as the last man to have walked on its surface. The years between ’69 and ’72 were monumental in the landscape of American history: a short but magical epoch of manned missions which were strangely counteracted by Nixon bringing the space programme back down to earth with a bump. As a result, Cernan became the last one up there to turn off the light. He was, and remained, the last of his century. The eleventh Apollo astronaut on the Moon, he walked around the Mare Serenitatis and made hundreds of those small steps that Neil Armstrong had declared to be such a giant leap for mankind. His team collected the biggest sample of lunar rocks and completed more moon surface trips than any other before them. The commander himself even managed to cause the first ever automobile accident on a celestial body, smashing up the rear left wing of his Lunar Rover, before – with a talent for improvisation reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe – patching it back together again. Yet none of this was enough to re-enliven the public’s interest. It was the end of an era. Cernan, presented with the opportunity to immortalise himself in encyclopaedias and textbooks with a thunderous obituary, instead offered words of remarkable helplessness:
‘We spent most of the trip home,’ he said, ‘debating the colour of the Moon.’
Incredible. So that was the grand summary of six expensive landings on a rock hundreds of thousands of kilometres away from Earth? That no one even knew what colour it was?
‘It looks kind of yellow to me,’ said Rebecca Hsu, after gazing silently out of the small porthole for a long while. Hardly any of them were venturing over to the row of windows any more. From there, throughout the two days since their launch, they had watched their home planet get smaller and smaller, a ghostly dwindling of familiarity. It was as if they were dividing their loyalty equally at the midway point between the Earth and Moon before fully succumbing to the fascination of the satellite. From 10,000 kilometres away it could still be seen in its entirety, starkly silhouetted against the blackness of outer space around it. And yet this object of romantic contemplation had billowed to become a sphere with menacing presence, a battlefield, scarred by billions of years of celestial bombardment. In complete silence, unbroken by the soundtrack of civilisation, they raced towards this strange, alien world. Only the tinnitus-like hiss of the life-support systems indicated that there was any technological activity on board at all. Beyond that, the silence made their heartbeats thunder like bush drums and the blood swirl in their veins. It roused lively chatter within the body about the state of its chemical processes and pushed their imaginations to the very limit.
Olympiada Rogacheva paddled up, in awe of her weightlessness. They had advanced another thousand kilometres towards the satellite, and could now see only three-quarters of it.
‘It doesn’t look yellow,’ she murmured. ‘To me it seems more mouse-grey.’
‘Metallic grey,’ Rogachev corrected her coldly.
‘I’m not so sure,’ Evelyn Chambers looked over from the next window. ‘Metallic? Really?’
‘Yes, really. Look. Up there to the right, the big, round patch. Dark, like molten iron.’
‘You’ve been in the steel industry for too long, Oleg. You could find something metallic in a chocolate pudding.’
‘Of course he could – the spoon! Woohoo!’ Miranda Winter did a somersault, cheering gleefully. Most of the others had tired of doing zero-gravity acrobatics. But Miranda couldn’t get enough of them and was rapidly getting on the others’ nerves. She was incapable of holding a conversation without rolling through the air, squealing and cackling, thumping people in the ribs or whacking them on the chin as she did. Evelyn, on the receiving end of a kick in the small of her back, snapped: ‘You’re not a merry-go-round, Miranda. Give it a rest, will you!’
‘But I feel like one!’
‘Then close yourself down for repairs or something. It’s too cramped in here for all that.’
‘Hey, Miranda.’ O’Keefe looked up from reading his book: ‘Why don’t you try imagining you’re a blue whale instead?’
‘What? Why?’
‘Blue whales wouldn’t act like that. They’re content to just hang around, more or less motionless, and eat plankton.’
‘They blow water too,’ Heidrun commented. ‘Do you want to see Miranda blow water?’
‘Sure, why not?’