Shanghai Fools: A Novel

by Vann Chow

  "John, this is not the first time she's been in China. She's going to be fine. Don't you trust my daughter? Or don't you trust my assessment of the situation?" he asked. "Marvey was a boy scout for as long as I remembered. She had more training in venturing than any of the kids in the troop. Plus she speaks Chinese. Don't you worry about her."

  I didn't understand how a girl can join boy scouts in America, but I didn't want to ask the question now. "When Marvey calls again, tell her I'm sorry...and tell her..."

  "You'll have a chance to tell her everything youself," John Senior said to me.

  Chapter 45

  It was an absurd situation. Marvey's message to me was surprisingly lacking in details.

  It bothered me that I was not allowed to tell anyone about it. The only reason why she would say that was because she thought the people around me were not who they appeared to be. That left a very big room for imagination, for it was impossible to guess at the moment from whom she was hiding. Was it Kelvin, the ex-boyfriend? The police? Her boss? My soccer mates? My parents?

  Her safety was of course paramount to me. If John Senior was not concerned, then who was I to question his source of intelligence? He was a veteran after all, and a loving father. Why would he make up a totally absurd story to stop me from trying to locate her daughter After all, he gained nothing by distracting me.

  I decided that I should follow his and Marvey's advice to go back to Shanghai.

  Kelvin was visibly devastated. The three of us had come together and only two returned. Not knowing what happened to Marvey, I could only imagine how much it sucked for him to be sitting next to an empty seat on the plane.

  "Oh man, I need a drink." He waved the air-hostess over and made his order. "You guys can have my food," he said to Little Buddha and Brother Fei and threw them his complimentary sandwich with Norwegian smoked salmon, available only to First Class passengers. They fought for it like hungry wolves over a dead animal carcass, unsatisfied even after consuming their own portions. I rolled my eyes and threw my pack to them as well.

  It wasn't so much that I didn't have appetite. My appetite improved with the news of knowing that both Marvey and Marsha were safe, but I had a riddle at hand to solve.

  Marvey told me to check my Weibo. I had just registered two days ago, finally, under a pseudonym. There had been no new posts and no new message. I had been refreshing over and over again, even when I was on the plane, using the First Class complimentary Wifi, and had found only a welcome message from Weibo. But when I clicked the home button, I saw the picture of Brother Fei and I on the front page again. The first time I saw it on Brother Fei's cell phone, I did not bother to read the description, and only now did I see that the Yibin police station had tagged 'my Weibo', the fan account that everyone thought belonged to me, the same Weibo that Marvey told me to check.

  The account, with mind-boggling number of subscribers, was tagged almost as many times as Marsha Ling's over the last few days. The chart on the right hand side told me that my best friend on Weibo were some internet celebrities with pretty professionally taken pictures including Cristiano Ronaldo and Michael Phelps. I nodded in approval.

  The last posts I made, were from four days ago, in Chongqing. I had basically retweeted Marvey's selfie with me, adding to the description a line of poetry — A friend visiting from afar, a joy beyond explanation.

  There were a lot more posts the account made than I expected. At times, I was writing sentimental notes, at times, I was commenting on breaking news, and at times, I was retweeting sightings of me by fans. The account did not make explicit claim that it belonged to me, but it made no effort in denying it when fans addressed their comments to me, believing that they would reach me. The choice of words used by the account was neutral, quoting from famous persons in most cases, and could not be so easily exposed as works of an imposter. Even people who knew me, such as Caroline, and Marsha, had both thought it belonged to me. A case of internet identity theft, a rather harmless impersonation I didn't pay much attention to until now. It was quite well-done.

  I kept scrolling down the newsfeed, and only when the air-hostess asked me for my third drink did I realize that I had just been sucked into the infinite-scrolling abyss unsuspiciously. Whoever invented infinite-scrolling must have no life at all, I thought to myself.

  Suddenly there was a pop-up on the screen. The account I was viewing had posted an update, it alerted me. Clicking on the notification brought me back to the top of the newsfeed. The new post contained a picture of a generic mountain-and-water landscape that could be anywhere in China. Its description had only one line, a very popular quote from one of the 21st century greatest entrepreneur, Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba — "Today is cruel. Tomorrow is crueler. The day after tomorrow is beautiful. But majority of us gives up by the end of tomorrow."

  It was a brilliant quote, no doubt about it. But was this Marvey's message for me?

  Chapter 46

  As soon as I got off the plane, one of my team's junior engineers ran towards me.

  "We're in trouble. The board of directors wants to see you. They flew in from Norway. All of them!" The young man whose English name was Draco, because he loved Harry Potter so much — or hated him, depending on your perspective — grabbed my suitcase and started walking towards the kiss-and-ride area to his car.

  "Norway?!" I waved Kelvin and the crew goodbye, and got on the car that Draco borrowed from the company. Only management had permission to ride in company cars. This was when I realized he probably wasn't joking. Someone wanted to see me very urgently. "Give me a briefing of what this is all about," I demanded.

  "I don't have much background info as well," he replied. "The only thing I know is a team of internal auditors took all the computers of the Project Dragon One team and restricted our accesses to the company's network this morning."

  "Does Mr. Qi know?" I pulled out my phone and was about to give him a call.

  "Well, he resigned yesterday. The announcement was sent to everyone in the company. I saw it before I came to work and I just thought with everything that happened to his girlfriend lately, he probably wants to take a break and spend some time with her, travel the world or what not, you know? Do all the things that rich people do when they get philosophical about life. But now I have a feeling that there's something fishy here."

  I tapped Mr. Qi's phone number on my recent contact list, but the call was immediately forwarded to his voice mail. The next number in the recent list was conveniently his driver. The call rang on for a whole minute before it was cut off.

  "How about Mr. Qi's secretary? Anyone asked her anything?"

  "I haven't seen her all week. She was busy organizing your wedding cruise and what not, wasn't she?" Draco said, with a hint of jealousy that he didn't receive an invitation.

  When we got into the office on the 72nd floor of Bilious' Shanghai Pudong office, Draco pushed me into the largest boardroom, the Pearl Room, the only one that had a panoramic view of the Bund on the opposite side.

  The bank's Chairman, Mr. Theo Henriksen — I recognized him because his face was perpetually annoying me on the front page of our internal company website — told me to sit down at once, while he himself stood up. Next to him on both sides were board members, all of them Europeans, who just flew in from the Oslo headquarter. At the end of the tables were the local executives from different departments of the Asian branch.

  What the hell was going on? I searched in vain for a hint of compassion from the people in front of me, and I wasn't sure whether it was because I was not used to deciphering emotional cues from the perfectly symmetrical facial features of the permanently haughty-looking Arjan race that Hilter admired so much, or there were genuinely no compassion for me whatsoever.

  I scanned nervously at the triangle nameplate in front of each of them, and realized that reading them did not help my nerves — I felt like I was sitting in a tribunal by the Council of Elrond, and they were about to ask me 'Where is the r
ing?', because they all had names that looked like those belonging to characters from Lord of the Rings.

  I took a sip of the tea, cold and stale — probably a Lipton English Blend that included all the low quality tea leaves without a commercialized name — in front of me.

  A woman, likely an office assistant, also European, put a nameplate in front of me. It said 'John, He'.

  "John," Mr. Henriksen started speaking to me. "we know everything. We have spent the whole morning with experts from Norway and we now know everything. What do you have to say for yourself?"

  Baffled, I ventured an answer, in my best English, my Chinese accent softened as much as possible by hours and hours of practice at the Toastmaster meetings, "I'm glad you have figured it all out, Mr. Henriksen, because I don't know what you're talking about."

  He slammed his palm angrily on the table. "Your team worked on a product called ThirftyEP, didn't you? All records indicated that it is part of Project Dragon One and your team had spent a month working on it, at least. Why have I not seen any demo of it nor progress report about it? None of us here, in fact, have even heard of ThriftyEP until today."

  "There are seventy-eight active product ideas under Project Dragon One, Mr. Henriksen."

  "Just call me Theo," he said. "Go on."

  "Well, I just wanted to explain that there are a lot of product ideas and not every one of them are worth pursuing. Many of them are given up within the first few days after their conceptions. This is a typical innovation process for the tech industry. I..."

  "So you're saying that it's normal that I don't know anything when one of our products from Project Dragon One ends up in a dozen of regional banks in India and Africa, and wrecked up billions of dollars of business losses because of bugs in its programming?"

  "India? Africa?" I was lost. Were we still talking about work? Or a worldwide version of the board game Ticket To Ride? "I was just working under Mr. Qi's order. I apologize for my team if ThriftyEP is a little bit buggy. We were rushed to deliver it in a week, without any testing."

  "Who rushed you?"

  Now this was the part of the plot when the total destruction of human civilization would be blamed on one person, and I was the messenger to provide the name. Yes, I knew precisely what they said about the messenger. I felt like fainting. "The supervisor of this project is Mr. Qi, sir. I was only just following his instructions. All of us in the development team were." I curled my fingers together under the table and prayed that I could live to my thirty-fifth birthday.

  "Do you know he sold company's property to other banks?"

  "Well, he talked about it..." I was trying to be as honest as possible without getting myself in trouble. "He also said he wanted to turn the Department of Innovation into a viable standalone business by creating a line of white-label products to be customized for other clients. I believe ThirftyEP is one of the pilot products, and that was why we worked so hard on it to rush it for him, before my wedding and everything."

  "My, oh my!" Mr. Henriksen shook his head dramatically. "And the thief even made up a noble-sounding excuse for his crime."

  "Who are you calling a thief?!" Selling company intellectual property would not only make me lose my job, but I would easily be charged an exorbitant amount for damages, as well as jail time for committing white-collar crimes. If I knew I would get into this much trouble by condoling Mr. Qi's sale of ThriftyEP, I would have reported him right away.

  "You accepted forty thousand Yuan from Mr. Qi," the auditor with the last name Larsen informed the CEO, leafing through some records that might just be my bank account ledger.

  "It was a personal gift from Mr. Qi," I retorted, "a wedding gift."

  The audience started speaking among themselves, like jurors confronted with indisputable evidence.

  "ThriftyEP was sold without our permissions to a dozen of banks in India and Africa right before your wedding. They bought it believing that they were working directly with us, a credible banking institution from Norway with thirty years of impeccable track record in the business, thinking that we would have thoroughly tested it before the sale." Mr Henriksen took a sip of his coffee, then continued. "As luck would have it, the software illegally took money from the accounts of their clients whenever they made a transaction over an absurdly low arbitrary limit and invested it into our mutual funds. Do know what happened to our funds since this happened? It lost 20% of value because of the freaking Breixt and Bilious is now being sued by twelve banks around the world for fraud and a damage of 71 billion Euros!"

  "That's three times the total asset value of our bank," the guy called Larsen with a penchant for numbers added. "Not only you're screwed, we are all screwed."

  An uproar broke out in the Pearl Room. The board members were arguing with each other what to do with me, with Mr. Qi and what to do next in general.

  "This would bankrupt us!" A Mrs. Olsen who looked nowhere as cute as any one of the Olsen twins said.

  "How can a single incident cause us such losses?!" Mr. Munch had clasped his hand over his cheeks and yelped helplessly.

  "Do we not have any security mechanism to prevent this from happening?" Mr. Olaf with a disproportionately large orange nose, red from anger for the bank's inefficiency, asked.

  "We need to think of a contingency plan to recover the money illegally invested in our mutual funds." A hundred-year-old-looking man who could have jumped out of Jonas Jonasson's book titled 'The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared' called Mr. Karlsson questioned. He looked like he had a lot of life experience.

  "I'm going to strangle the guys responsible!" A Mr. Breivik proclaimed, ignoring all the others as he brandish his plastic folder in the air like a weapon.

  In front of me, chaos had consumed the board. Mr. Henriksen himself was lost in an argument with Mr. Larsen about something I did not understand. I took the moment to slip out of the Pearl Room.

  "What happened in there?" I crashed into Draco and a few other colleagues who were standing right outside the conference room doors eavesdropping. I did not have time to answer them.

  "Don't let him get away!!" Mr. Olaf shouted at Draco when he noticed that I sneaked out. Being given a direct order from one of his bosses, Draco worked up his bodily machine of ass-kissing and tried to stop me from running away.

  I pushed his left shoulder back and shoved him forward with my palm at his nape. As he fell forward, I grabbed his right arm to kept him from falling, and subdued him with another arm on the back of his neck.

  "Let me go and we'll all still have jobs in a week!"I hissed. "Sorry, and thank you!" Then I released him, bolted out of the main door, and climbed down the stairs of the fire escape as fast as I could.

  Chapter 47

  Marvey's rental apartment was located at Xujin East, next to the National Exhibition and Convention Center. I had imagined that it would be a tiny apartment divided into five rooms that housed foreign students who could not afford to pay their rents for a place with reasonably good Metro connection to anywhere in the city. Turned out, she only shared it with one other person, a girl, as I found out when she opened the door for me after my insistent bell-ringing. Her name was Bolormaa, with two A's.

  "How'd you communicate with Marvey?" I asked in English. Bolormaa, obviously from Mongolia, did not speak any Mandarin.

  "It forces me to speak English to her," she answered, "I think my English improved a lot since we lived together."

  After sorting out this unimportant matter piquing my curiosity, I explained the situation to her, adding a proof that I was really Misa's friend, not an impostor who wanted to break into their home. "I can show you our pictures together," I proposed.

  "No, it's okay — you're the guy who dated Li Kun's daughter. Everybody knows you," she said. "Besides, I saw you on television, I knew what happened. Is Marvey's still missing?" She was the first Mongolian I spoke with, and I couldn't help but noticed that her accent was very interesting. There was a lot of tong
ue curling and short bursts of sound. "Well, I guess it must be so, since she hasn't come home yet..." Her expression showed genuine concern. "Can I help? Are you here for something?"

  I nodded. To be very honest, I didn't really know exactly what I was looking for. Yet I had a strong feeling that Marvey might have left some clues for me here, apart from the mystical messages on my Weibo that might or might not be what she wanted to tell me.

  "Did she contact you recently?"

  "No, not really."

  "Did you get any mysterious mails or emails recently? Anything you found to be suspicious in the last couple of days?"

  She turned around to look at the apartment to help her think. When she was done, she said, "No, I can't think of anything."

  "Do you know if Marvey uses Weibo a lot?" I asked. "Do you think she has a second account?"

  "I don't know. I'm sorry," Bolormaa said apologetically. "She's always out and about. All I know is she has an account and she posts quite often, but whether she has a second account, I can't say for sure."

  "Okay." Turned out Marvey and Bolormaa were not that close. I supposed not all roommates were going to be best buddies with each other like on it was on Friends. "How about her friends, do you know whether she has any friends in the Southwest of China? Sichuan or Chongqing?"

  "Daaaa...." Bolormaa gave it a thought. "Do I count?"

  "You're not from Mongolia?" My face reddened. Did I just mistake someone as Mongolian totally just because of her name? I prayed I haven't say anything strange or offensive so far. There had been a lot of ethnic feuds these days because of misunderstanding in this melting-pot country. Although, ethnic feuds had always been the catalyst for the founding of great empires. If the Tartars, the Jurchen and the Uighur did not get on the wrong side of Genghis Khan, China might not have been unified, or at least not on this scale.