The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (26 page)

‘Okay, where is it?’

‘Where is what?’

‘This is not funny. Ah warn you, Miss Ling, ah do not have a sense of humour. People like me don’t. We have them surgically removed when we join the US government.’

‘My name’s Linyao. Ms Lu to you.’

‘Where is the elephant, bitch?’

‘Search me.’

He cursed under his breath and reached for the radio. ‘Dooley to SL-One. Dooley to SL-One. Come in.’

‘Cap’n?’

‘This is an emergency, I want you to locate an—’ he paused, momentarily—‘an elephant. Repeat: an elephant. It’s loose somewhere in this building. It’s been—’ another embarrassed pause—‘er, stolen, taken, kidnapped, whatever, from the back stage area.’

‘An elephant? Did you say—’ ‘You heard me.’ Dooley spun around just in time to see the shoulders of a thin young man named Ari Tadwacker moving up and down.

‘Something funny, Tadwacker?’

‘No, sir. Nothing, sir.’

Dooley turned his attention back to Linyao. ‘You’re coming with me.’ He grabbed her violently by the arm and pulled her down the corridor into one of the dressing rooms. When they were alone with the door shut, he yanked her arm again to spin her around to face him.

She squealed and tried to shake herself free. ‘Let go of me.

Who do you think you are?’

‘Who do you think ah am?’

‘You’re a security guard.’

Dooley’s teeth ground themselves together. This was a situation he hated. He wanted to say who he really was—one of the top, top men in the Secret Service, a
legendary
United States institution—but he couldn’t. For the truth of it was that the name of his organisation was oddly, ridiculously, painfully unquotable. As a child, the words ‘Secret Service’ were inestimably glamorous, conjuring up images of clandestine operations involving James Bond-like special agents on missions with cool gadgets and women in bikinis. But from the moment he joined the service at the age of twenty-eight, he had found the name of the organisation just plain embarrassing.

When a girl at a party asked you what you did, you couldn’t reply: ‘I work for the Secret Service and my rank is Special Agent.’ It made people laugh. It made you sound like you were an eleven-year-old boy playing a game. It made you think of Maxwell Smart talking into his shoe. There was no way for an adult man to say it without sounding like he was joking. In off-duty social situations, he preferred to mumble that he worked for the government. Then people would ask for more detail, and he would brush them off in such a way that they would end up impressed. ‘Nothin’, ah’m jest a civil servant.

Ah just do my bit. Cog in the wheel. Don’t really want to say too much about it, know what ah mean? Heh-heh. What do you do?’

That little
heh-heh
said it all. But the truth was that the existence of the Secret Service was not in itself secret. They had ‘Secret Service’ emblazoned on their vehicles and on their badges. Their office address was in the phone book. Hell, they even had a website. When he had transferred from the service’s financial side to the presidential side, his work title became less embarrassing, at least when talking to other government agencies. He and his colleagues referred to their group as the PPD, a nice boring set of initials, or sometimes as ‘the Detail’. This was distinctive and also wonderfully suitable, as checking details—over and over and over again—was a key aspect of what they did. For it was the details that sometimes blew up into major problems, as he was finding out to his cost today.

‘Okay, ah’m gonna ask politely one more time. Where’s the elephant? How did your friend get it out of here? Ah don’t like bombs wandering around in the same building and the same city as my President is wandering around in, got it?’

‘I don’t know. I wasn’t looking. I was with you. She was behind the curtain. I think she used magic. Megiddo’s magic.’

Dooley gritted his teeth. ‘Okay, we are alone, so ah can use unofficial methods of interrogation. Ah warn you, lady, I can make Abu Ghraib look like Sesame Street.’

He grabbed the lapels of Linyao’s jacket and heaved her off her feet. ‘You talking?’ he asked.

She said nothing.

He flung her heavily across the room. She hit a chair, which toppled over, and then fell to ground, knocking against a table. A flurry of coloured acrobat uniforms flopped on top of her. Landing heavily, she slammed her head against the floor and couldn’t resist a yelp of pain.

Dooley strode across the room and gave her a sharp kick in the ribs. ‘Usually ah follow Miss Manners’ rules, lady, but ah have one rule which overrides all other rules. And that rule is this: ah perteck the President. And if ah have to break all the other rules to keep that one, ah’m ver’ happy to do it.’ He placed the heel of his boot against her chin. ‘Where’s your friend?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t see.’

There was a knock on the door.

‘What?’ Dooley shouted.

It creaked open and a face appeared. ‘I found the stagehand who operates the moving bits of the stage.’ It was Agent Tadwacker, holding the arm of a man in blue overalls. ‘He says there’s a revolving wall on the left part of the stage which is how they make the elephant disappear.’ The two men who entered the room tried desperately not to look at Linyao crumpled on the ground in the corner, but she kept drawing their eyes.

The stagehand spoke in broken English. ‘Missa Megiddo and his people—they take out elephant with trick. The curtain come down. Go to the left. Elephant go with it. They press button and stage back part turn round. Elephant go backstage. Go in cargo elevator.’

Dooley turned back to Linyao. ‘What’s your girlfriend’s name? And where is she going with the blasted thing?’

She glared at him.

He pulled out his gun and pointed it at her.

‘Her name’s Joyce,’ Linyao said. ‘Joyce McQuinnie. And I have no idea where she’s going. Where do people with exploding elephants go to in Shanghai? This sort of thing doesn’t happen a lot in this country, officer. It may happen in yours.’

Dooley turned to face the stagehand. ‘Where’s the cargo elevator go to?’

‘To loading bay, underground car park.’

‘Let’s go.’ To Linyao: ‘You stay here. I want to talk to you later.’

On the way Dooley made a series of calls on his radio. He put Carloni in charge of rechecking security at the theatre— every damn inch—and Felznik in charge of informing all the other units who needed to know that a breach of security had taken place, and Tadwacker in charge of getting a group of men to fan out to find Joyce and the elephant. He himself took the most unpleasant job of all—telling the President’s men that there had been a possible compromise of the venue and the meeting would have to be cancelled or moved. There was no other choice. There was an explosive device inside or near the building: precise location unknown. POTUS must not approach. The Secret Service was ordering the show to be cancelled.

To do such a thing at the last possible moment meant the highest possible level of pain—a level of corporate, official agony that was almost unbearable. The amount of planning that went into a visit by the US President to anywhere—even the local donut shop—was huge. To change any aspect of the trip (such as an ingredient in the hors d’oeuvres) was a significant deal. To have allowed something to happen that caused the whole thing to be cancelled was a rare occurrence that destroyed careers and made grown men weep—or throw themselves off buildings. The only light at the end of the tunnel would be to (a) make out that any security breach was entirely due to the shortfall of the Chinese partner security agency; and (b) to claim that any creditable action in the matter, such as the discovery of the problem, was entirely due to the American partner.

He called Agent Lasse over. ‘Get me Captain Zhang. We’d better let the Chinese know that we have a problem.’

Commander Zhang Xiumei of the People’s Armed Police already knew that trouble was afoot. She and her team were technically sharing security duties at the Grand Theatre with the American Secret Service. But the Chinese team worked in a more subtle, low-profile way. There appeared to be fewer of them on the ground, but in fact there were more of them: you just didn’t see them. Her men had already told her that the Americans were in a panic over something, and she was waiting for the call when it came.

Her reaction to the news she was given was predictable enough—the same utter disbelief that had been Dooley’s reaction. But her way of expressing it was very different. She lowered the phone and showed no emotion whatsoever, other than a slight tightening of the forehead. She stood in perfect stillness, statue-like, while considering the information she had been given. Could this be some sort of elaborate American joke? She had often pondered the mysteries of American humour, and had several times seen Hollywood comedies which left her cold. Western humour appeared to be largely verbal, and mostly focused on people saying things which meant the precise opposite of what was clearly stated.

‘There’s a bomb in the elephant.’ She replayed the line in her head. She knew all the words in the sentence, but had no idea what it meant. The whole was not greater than the sum of the parts. In fact, while the parts each meant something, the whole meant nothing. She knew what a bomb was, and she knew what an elephant was. But why say there was a bomb inside an elephant, when such a thing could not be?

Her fundamental attitude towards Westerners was wariness and distrust. This had been triggered by an experience she had had twelve years ago, when she had first had a conversation in English with a group of British soldiers who were in China on some sort of information exchange visit. The words of the discussion had been entirely straightforward—indeed, they could have been lifted out of her English language school textbook. Yet the reaction to the conversation was bizarre, and revealed to her the enormous wealth of hidden associations behind the simplest Western phrases.

‘Like yer uniform, Miss.’

‘Thank you for the compliment.’

‘It’s real then?’

‘Yes. It is a People’s Armed Police issue uniform.’

‘Not a pirate copy from Shenzhen?’

‘No. It is authentic, from the quartermaster stores. Miniature replicas on dolls are available, if you would like to purchase one.’

‘I heard Chinese military uniforms came in two sizes: too big and too small.’

‘No, they come in four sizes: small, medium, large and extra large.’

Why this straightforward conversation should have left the British troops doubled up with helpless laughter left her baffled, even after she had looked up several of the words in the Chinese–English dictionary. She had tried the largest dictionaries she could find, in case there were alternative meanings or associations which were not initially clear to her. Later, she had phoned her English language tutor and recited the entire conversation for him. The teacher—a fifty-year-old Shanghainese named Wu Jian Min—had been as baffled as she was.

‘There’s a bomb in the elephant,’ she repeated to herself. ‘We should cancel the opening show because there is a bomb in the elephant.’ The English language appeared to have an infinite number of metaphorical phrases, most of which had no obvious connection with the thought they expressed. Heavy raindrops were cats and dogs. A superlative item was the knees of the bumble bee. Clouds had silver linings. Babies were born with silver spoons in their mouths. What was the metaphorical meaning of ‘a bomb in an elephant’? It surely couldn’t refer to a real bomb in a real elephant. Nor could it refer to really cancelling the actual pre-summit show. Both would be ridiculous. She phoned Teacher Wu.

‘What does it mean, there’s a bomb in the elephant?’

‘What?’

‘The English idiom: there’s a bomb in my elephant. What does it mean?’

‘Where did you see it? What are you reading?’

‘I am not reading anything. One of the Americans called me and said it. I want to know what it means. It sounded important.’

‘I’m not sure. Wait.’

She could hear the sound of pages being flicked in a specialist dictionary of English idioms.

‘Bomb can mean to perform badly on stage. “The comedian’s act was poor so he bombed.” That’s negative. Or it can be positive: “It goes like a bomb”, meaning performs really well—typical English. Two meanings, each of which is the opposite of the other. No logic in the language.’

‘But what about
There is a bomb in my elephant
?’

More flicking noises. ‘Nothing. Not listed under bomb or elephant.’

‘Old dictionary?’

‘Not so old. About twelve years.’

‘So what’s the answer? Must be recent coinage. Can you guess?’

‘Let me ask Tu Feng Rong. He was in Europe last month. I’ll call you back.’

Zhang lowered the phone. Typical of the Americans to be so wily and unpredictable—and at the last possible moment, with the two Presidents due to arrive in a few minutes. Americans could never be trusted. The elephant, she vaguely recalled, was the symbol of one of the main US political parties, the Democrats or the Republicans. That must be something to do with it. And the single biggest US–China issue over the past few months, in the run-up to this summit, was the One China Policy which covered relations between China and the renegade province of Taiwan. The Democrats— or was it the Republicans?—were opposed to it—or were they in favour of it?