The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (17 page)

Linyao slumped into silence, fascinated to realise that this man was actually getting some significant information out of the maid.

‘A little while? How long do you mean by that phrase?’ he asked.

‘After the traffic jam, we moved for a minute, maybe two, very fast. And then we stopped at some lights.’

‘Did you hear crossing sounds?’

‘Crossing sounds?’

‘You know, b-b-b-b-b-b-beep. That sort of thing.’

‘Yes. I think so. I don’t know.’

Sinha took the map and studied it carefully. ‘They dropped you at this point here. So if you turned this way and then that way, and before that through a traffic light junction, and before that in a straight line, but in a stop-start fashion, that means you probably came from around here—or around there—or up here somewhere. Or perhaps somewhere around here, if your time estimates are poor.’

Linyao leaned over to look at the map. She shook her head and sighed. ‘But those are really big areas you are looking at. How are we going to find one room in one apartment in one building?’

‘We’ve only just begun,’ Sinha said. ‘Awareness of the unseen. That’s the key. Now let’s talk about sounds and smells. Did you hear anything, smell anything, anything at all?’

‘Yes. There was a coffee smell outside, before they took us into the building.’

‘Excellent.’ He pulled open his briefcase and extracted a packet of ground coffee beans. ‘As it happens, I am partial to a good espresso and like to carry my own supply. Was it like this?’ He ripped open the packet and held it under her nose.

‘Yes, a bit like that. Bitter. Strong.’

‘Okay,’ said Sinha. ‘Probably a real coffee shop, as opposed to a local noodle eatery with weak instant muck. We need to locate all the coffee shops in the designated area.’

They studied the map and drove around a network of roads, but there was not a single coffee shop on any of the streets Sinha had marked on his map.

‘Close your eyes, Angelita. Does any of this seem familiar?’

‘No, sir, sorry, sir.’

‘Any smells, sounds, anything at all?’

‘No, sir. Nothing, sir.’

They drove around for another ten minutes, but Angelita continued to recognise nothing. She kept apologising: ‘I don’t know anything, sir. Can’t recognise any place, sorry.’

‘Don’t apologise. It’s helpful that we can eliminate these roads from our search. Besides, it’s not you who has got it wrong. It’s me. There are no coffee shops here. We must be in the wrong place. Let’s try this street.’

They turned into a small road in the Yangpu area, but it contained nothing except nondescript apartment blocks.

‘Damn, damn, damn, damn,’ said Sinha. ‘This is bad news. We have seriously slipped up somewhere, but I can’t think where.’

Linyao said: ‘Maybe there wasn’t a coffee shop. Maybe someone was just making a cup of coffee in their home and she smelt it through a window.’

Sinha shook his head. ‘Unlikely. Sales of coffee-bean grinders for home use are not exactly widespread in this country—not yet, anyway, and certainly not in Yangpu. It’s more likely we’ve made a serious mistake somewhere. Let’s try going a couple of streets to the west. Can we turn left at the end of this road?’

Linyao looked at the street guide. ‘No. I think it’s a one-way road. We have to go right to go left. Turn right, go down for two blocks, and then turn left.’

‘This place is like Alice in Wonderland Land,’ said Sinha. ‘You have to turn right to turn left. You have to go away from your destination to get to it. You have to—hang on.’ He slammed his foot on the brake and the car stopped, throwing its occupants forwards. ‘I’ve got it. Give me that map.’

‘What do you mean?’

Sinha showed her the page. ‘Look here. We believe that the kidnappers turned left from their base to take Angelita to the station. Because she leaned to the right “for a long time”. So we’ve been assuming that the kidnappers came from over here—from here it would take a left turn to get onto the main road heading this way, to the station.’

‘Ye-es?’ Linyao said.

‘But—’ ‘But there are situations where you have to turn left to go right. You have to do that in three places: in the land of Alice in Wonderland, on expressways, and on roundabouts. Remember Angelita said she leaned over to the right for a long time? We assumed that indicated the car was turning left. But what if she ended up leaning over to the right for a long time because the car was going right round, or almost right round a roundabout and turning right?’

‘Could be.’

He stabbed a major junction on the map with his thick, blunt finger. ‘And if my thinking is right, then this may be the junction. Let’s go and see if there’s a roundabout there—and a smelly coffee shop here, on this road.’

Minutes later, his face brightened. There was indeed a roundabout at the junction he had identified. And the road that led off it had two coffee shops on it. Another road, which splintered off the first at a slight angle, also had a café on it.

The brief period of despair had passed and they were once again energised. They got out and walked rapidly up and down the streets, identifying several places where they could detect a specifically coffee-ish smell.

Angelita was becoming excited. ‘Yes, maybe it was here. The smell was like this. This coffee. There was another smell. A cooking smell.’

‘Also from the coffee shop?’

‘No. When I came out of the building, I smelled coffee. And then they walked me along for a little while—maybe two minutes. And then I could smell a strong cooking smell. Chinese food.’

Linyao asked: ‘How can they walk her along the road with a hood over her head? It must have looked weird.’

Sinha shook his head. ‘You’re right. It would have looked too strange to risk. I suspect the walk she made would have been down a back alley, and then perhaps down into an underground car park or something. Somewhere hidden away from the main road.’ He thought for a while. ‘Tell me more about this cooking smell. And let’s walk around as we talk about it.’

They marched along in a grid pattern across a collection of streets while Angelita used her ears and nose to see if she could detect anything familiar. On the third corner, she stopped them. ‘That’s it. That’s the smell.’ She widened her nostrils and took a deep breath. ‘It came from there.’ She pointed to a vendor of fried stinky tofu. Although he was about 200 metres away, the smell was sharp and noxious.

They hurried over.

‘Stinky tofu is bad news for our investigation,’ said Sinha.

‘You can smell it for miles. And it drifts in the wind.’

‘No, it was near here. It was a strong smell. We were almost on top of it. I could hear the man calling out. Something like:

“
Jia chang dow-foo, jia chang dow-foo
”.’

‘Home-style tofu,’ Linyao translated.

They approached the tofu-seller and Sinha encouraged the maid to look around with her eyes shut. ‘I know it sounds crazy, but I strongly believe that keeping your eyes shut will better help you recreate where you were.’

She did as she was told. She stood in the middle of the street with her face up to heaven and her eyes closed, looking beatific, like a nun high on ecstacy, spiritual or otherwise.

While she concentrated, Sinha’s eyes darted around. One house to the left had an alley along its east wall. And there was a building on the other side, 50 metres up the road which also had a side alley, along which one could speedily push a woman in a blindfold from a back door to the road.

‘It would help if we knew which side of the road you were on,’ he said. ‘Can you tell us that?’

‘I don’t know, sorry.’

‘
Vaastu
teaches us that the most important thing in life is the sun. If you know where the sun is, everything else follows.’

‘But I couldn’t see anything. And the room we were in had no windows.’

‘The sun does not produce only light. It gives us heat. Were you aware of any warmth?’

Angelita stopped to think. ‘When I was taken out of the room in the morning, we had to wait half a minute until the driver got something—the keys or something. I think they were undoing the locks of the front door. I could feel warm on my arm. There was sunshine and breeze and noises—it made me think they had the window open.’

‘Excellent,’ said Sinha. ‘Now you’ve got the idea. The sun is the origin of all things, but also it is the starting point of all places, the
vaastu
masters say.’

She closed her eyes as she tried to conjure herself back into the scene. ‘There was heat on my arm, just here.’ She stroked her left forearm. ‘And there might have been a window open, but I’m not sure.’

‘Which direction was the window?’

‘This way. I was facing the door, and the window was this way.’ She pointed to her left.

Linyao stepped in, impatient as ever. ‘But which way? North, east, south, west, that’s what we need to know.’

‘I don’t know, ma’am, I’m sorry.’

Sinha raised one hand. ‘You think you don’t know, but you do. You felt the sun’s warmth on your arm. That’s all we need to know.’ He marched back to the centre of the road, looked at his watch and then up at the sky.

The
vaastu
master knew a trick which enabled him to use an analogue watch to tell the directions of the compass at any time. First, you locate the sun in the sky. Then you look at the hands on your watch and find the middle point between them and then line up the sun with the middle point of your watch. The numeral 12 on your watch will point due north. Then use any rhyme—Never Eat Shredded Wheat was the one he had been taught in a New Delhi grammar school—to place the other major points of the compass clockwise at the right spots: N, E, S, W. Do a bit of mental extrapolation to find the location of the sun at other times.

‘At eight ten or eight fifteen this morning, the sun would have been about—there,’ he said. He pointed low on the horizon, at a building which seemed to be a school or some sort of government institution.

‘The sun’s heat would come from the east, and—I would think—might hit the top few floors of that building over there, and perhaps that one, and maybe the one next to it. If you could feel the sun’s heat on your arm, it was almost definitely shining directly at you, through the window, which may or may not have been open. That gives us only a few options. It was one of those buildings along there, probably.’ He pointed to the three blocks which were catching the sun on their upper storey. ‘Let’s check each of them in turn.’

Sinha made Angelita enter each foyer, close her eyes and take a deep sniff, and then listen for a while. But she couldn’t differentiate between them. ‘They all smell the same, and sound the same,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

All three buildings had aged security guards at the bottom. The third one they questioned gave them an interesting lead—after Linyao had slipped him a 100-yuan note. ‘Black people,’ he said in Shanghainese. ‘Fifth floor, back flat.’

‘You mean people in black clothes?’ Linyao asked.

He nodded. ‘Always black. Foreigners.’

Linyao translated for Sinha.

‘Were they foreigners?’ asked Sinha. ‘The voices on the phone were not Chinese?’

Linyao said: ‘I think it must be foreigners and Chinese working together. Anyway, to the older generation in Shanghai, people from outside the city are called foreigners, or outsiders:
waidiren
. Whether they come from London or Fujian or Beijing or the moon, they are all just outsiders.’

‘
Waidiren
,’ the old man repeated in a grumble.

Linyao, her face set, headed for the staircase.

‘Stop,’ Sinha called, reaching for her arm. ‘We need to—’

‘I am not stopping. I need to find my child.’

‘I know, I know, you want to see your daughter as soon as possible. But they may be armed. It may be dangerous. At this stage, I strongly recommend that we get professional help from the law enforcement authorities. It is vital to—’ But Linyao wasn’t listening. She raced up the stairs. The
vaastu
master and the domestic helper looked at each other— and were soon puffing up the stairs after her. ‘I tried,’ Sinha said to the domestic helper. ‘You’re my witness. Did you hear me? I did try to dissuade her, didn’t I? This could get nasty. I advise you to keep your distance. No heroics, please. Heroics make me nervous. They are very unspiritual. Neither
vaastu
nor feng shui can protect one against heroics, which are a very bad thing.’

Outside the door of the flat at the back of the fifth floor, they noticed three discarded Pizza Shack boxes. Sinha whispered to Angelita: ‘There they are. One for you and Jia Lin, two for the kidnappers. That suggests there are only three or four of them.’

Linyao picked up one of the boxes and rang the bell.

‘Who?’ said a female voice in Mandarin.

Linyao replied in the same language. ‘Pizza Shack. You ordered three pizzas last night. You win a special prize. Free pizza.’

‘Don’t want it. Go away.’

‘What? Can’t hear you.’

‘Go away.’

‘Can’t hear you. Open the door. Get your free pizza.’ She rang the doorbell again.

The door opened a crack. It was chained so that it could not swing wider than seven or eight centimetres.

‘Here is your free pizza,’ Linyao said, holding up one of the boxes as if it was still full. ‘Open the door, please.’

The door closed, a chain was removed, and the catch was released again.

Instantly Linyao slammed the door with her shoulder, knocking over the woman on the other side, who fell backwards, yelling curses.

The furious mother stormed into the room, with Sinha and Angelita behind her.

The young woman in black clothes rose to her feet and pulled out a gun. Linyao batted it out of her hands with the pizza box. ‘Where’s my child, you bitch,’ she yelled, falling heavily on top of her. Never mind scorned women: there is no fury like a mother parted from her child. Angelita picked up the gun from the floor and held it lightly with her fingertips as if it were a dirty nappy. She decided that the safest thing to do was to get rid of it, so she threw it out of the window.

Sinha said disapprovingly: ‘If you ever find yourself in a repeat of this situation in Singapore, I would strongly advise you not to throw guns out of windows. They don’t like that sort of thing over there.’