Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  Jericho had seen enough. He would have to catch the bastard unprepared, but was Ma unprepared? Was he ever?

  He quickly slipped his phone into his jacket, got out of the car and walked the few minutes back to the factory building as he came up with a battle plan. Perhaps he would have been better off calling the local authorities for support, but they would want to consult further before doing anything. If they obstructed his investigations, he might as well drive back to Shanghai, and Jericho was firmly resolved to get to the bottom of the mystery of the back room. His gun, an ultra-flat Glock, was safely stowed over his heart. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it. He had too many years drenched in sweat and blood behind him, too much active work at the front, in the course of which he, his adversaries or both had needed emergency medical treatment. The cheekbone on the cobblestones, the taste of dirt and haemoglobin in the mouth – all in the past. Jericho didn’t want to fight again. He no longer valued the bony grin of his old partner from the hereafter, who up till now had been involved in every shoot-out, who had stormed every house with him, entered every snake-pit with him, without being on anyone’s side; who always just reaped the harvest. One last time, in the Paradise of the Little Emperors, he would bring Death into the equation, in the hope of winning him as an ally in spite of his unreliability.

  He stepped into the factory courtyard, resolutely crossed it and climbed the steps. As might have been expected, the shop sign said Closed. Jericho rang the bell, long and insistently, excited to see whether Ma would force himself out of the toilet or play dead. In fact he parted the bead curtain after the third ring. Limping elegantly, Ma circled the hideous counter, opened the door and fastened his vision-corrected eyes on the unwelcome guest.

  ‘My mistake, I’m sure,’ he said in a pinched voice. ‘I thought I said six o’clock, but probably—’

  ‘You did,’ Jericho assured him. ‘I’m sorry, but I now need the earrings sooner than we agreed. Please forgive my obstinacy. Women.’ He spread his arms in a gesture of impotence. ‘You understand.’

  Ma forced a smile, stepped aside and let him in.

  ‘I’ll show you what I’ve found,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you had to wait so long, but—’

  ‘I’m the one who should apologise.’

  ‘No, not at all. My mistake. I was in the toilet. Now, let’s have a look.’

  Toilet? Jericho registered with amazement that Ma had just given him the password.

  ‘This is very awkward,’ he stammered. ‘But—’

  Ma stared at him.

  ‘Could I use it?’

  ‘Use it?’

  ‘Your toilet?’ Jericho added.

  The man’s hands developed a crawling life of their own, pushed earrings around on the threadbare velvet of the pad. A cough crept up his throat, followed by another. Small, slimy, startled animals. Suddenly Jericho had the horrific vision of a bag in the shape of a humanoid, filled with swarming, chitinous, glittering vermin, stirring Ma Liping’s husk from within and imitating humanoid gestures.

  Animal Ma.

  ‘Of course. Come with me.‘

  He held the bead curtain open, and Jericho stepped into the back room. The second camera fastened its dark eye on him.

  ‘But I must—’ Ma paused. ‘I’m not equipped for this, you know. If you wait a second, I just want to sort out a fresh towel.’ He directed Jericho to the desk, and opened the toilet door behind him.

  Jericho grabbed the handle and pulled it open.

  As if in a flash he took in the scene. A bathroom, sure enough, tall and narrow. The outlines of dead insects in the frosted glass of the ceiling light. The tiles cracked in certain places, mildewed grouting, the mirror stained and tarnished, a rust-yellow back to the wash-basin, the toilet itself little more than a hole in the floor. A wardrobe on the back wall, if you could call it a wall, because it was half open, a disguised door that Ma had neglected to close in his haste to serve Jericho.

  And in all this Animal Ma Liping, who seemed at that moment to consist only of his magnified eyes and the sole of a shoe darting out and colliding painfully with Jericho’s sternum.

  Something cracked. All the air was driven out of his lungs. The kick sent him to the floor. He saw the Chinese man, teeth bared, appear in the doorframe, drew the Glock from its holster and took aim. Ma darted back and turned round. Jericho leapt to his feet, but not quickly enough to prevent his opponent from escaping into the darkness beyond the secret opening. The back wall swung back and forth. Without pausing, he charged through it, stopped at the top of a flight of stairs and hesitated. A curious smell struck him, a mixture of mould and sweetness. Ma’s footsteps rang out down below, then everything fell silent.

  He mustn’t go down there. Whatever lay hidden in that cellar, the secret of the toilet was solved. Ma was in a trap. It was better to call the police, let them take care of whatever horrors lay down there and allow himself a drink.

  And what if Ma wasn’t in a trap?

  How many entrances and exits did the cellar have?

  Jericho thought of the Paradise. Scattered across the organism of the World Wide Web, the paedophiles’ pages were suppurating wounds that sickened society irremediably. The perfidiousness with which the ‘goods’ were offered was unparallelled, he thought, and just then something from the vaults rose up towards him, ghostly and thin. A whimpering that stopped abruptly. Then nothing more.

  He made his mind up.

  Gun at the ready, he stepped slowly down. Strangely, with every step, the silence seemed to coagulate; he was moving through a medium enriched with rot and decay, a sound-swallowing ether. The stench grew more intense. The stairs wound round in a curve, led further downwards and opened out into a gloomy vault supported by brick pillars, some connected by wooden slats, crates that had been cobbled together. What they contained was impossible to make out from the foot of the stairs, but at the end of the chamber he glimpsed something that captured his attention.

  A film set.

  Yes, that was exactly what it was. The more his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, the clearer it became to him that films were being made there. Phalanxes of unlit floodlights, perched on stands and hanging from the ceiling, peeled from the darkness; folding chairs, a camera on a tripod. The set seemed to be divided into parts, some furnished with equipment, others bare, possibly something like a green-screen so that virtual backgrounds could be added later. Checking in all directions as he walked on, he made out little beds, furniture, toys, an artificial landscape with a children’s house, meadows and trees, a dissecting table from a pathology lab. Something on the floor looked unsettlingly like a chainsaw. Cages hung from the ceiling, surrounded by various utensils and something that might have been a small electric chair; tools were mounted on the wall – no, not tools: knives, pincers and hooks – a torture chamber.

  Somewhere in all that madness Ma was hiding.

  Jericho walked on, heart thumping, putting one foot in front of the other as if crossing ice that might crack at any moment. He reached the crates. Turned his head.

  A boy looked at him.

  He was naked and dirty, perhaps five years old. His fingers clutched the wire mesh between the slats, but his eyes looked apathetic, almost lifeless, the sort of eyes familiar in people who had withdrawn deep inside themselves. Jericho turned his head in the other direction and saw two girls in the cage opposite, barely clothed. One of them, very small, lay on the ground, clearly sleeping, the other, older, leaned with her back against the wall, hugging a cuddly toy. She lethargically turned a swollen face, and fastened sad eyes upon him. Then she seemed to understand that he was not one of the people who normally came here.

  She opened her mouth.

  Jericho shook his head and put his finger to his lips. The girl nodded. Holding the gun rigidly out ahead of him, he peered in all directions, checked again and again and ventured further into the hell of the little emperors. Still more children. Only a few who saw him. He gestured to them, the ones
who raised their heads, to be silent. From cage to cage it got worse and worse: dirt and degradation, apathy, fear. A baby lay on a grimy blanket. Something dark rattled against a bar and yapped at him, so that he instinctively flinched, turned round and held his breath. The sickly stench seemed to have its source right in front of him. He heard the buzzing of flies, saw something darting across the floor—

  His eyes widened and he felt nauseous.

  That brief moment of inattention cost him his control. Dragging footsteps echoed, a draught brushed the back of his neck, then someone jumped at him, pulled him back, laid into him, screamed incomprehensible words.

  A woman!

  Jericho tensed his muscles and jabbed his elbows back again and again. His attacker wailed. As they whirled around he recognised her – Ma’s wife or whatever role she might have played in that nightmare – grabbed her, pressed her against one of the columns and held the barrel of the Glock to her temple. How did she get here? He had seen her leave, but he hadn’t seen her come back. Was there another entrance to the cellar? Could Ma finally have escaped him?

  No, it was his fault! He had been sloppy on the way from the car to the factory. He had neglected to keep an eye on his computer. At some point during that time she must have come back here, to—

  The pain!

  Her heel had driven itself into his foot. Jericho reached out and slapped her in the face with the back of his hand. The woman struggled like a mad thing in his clutches. He gripped her throat and pushed her harder against the pillar. She kicked out at him and then, surprisingly, she abandoned all resistance and stared at him with hatred.

  In her eyes he saw what she saw.

  Alarmed, he let go of her and spun round to see Ma sailing through the air in a grotesque posture, coming straight at him, his arm outstretched, swinging a huge knife. He wouldn’t have time to shoot him, to run away, he would just have time to—

  Jericho ducked.

  The knife came down, sliced whistling through the air and through Mrs Ma’s throat, from which a cascade of blood sprayed. Ma staggered, thrown off balance by his own momentum, stared through blood-sprinkled glasses at his collapsing wife and flailed his arms. Jericho hammered the Glock against his wrist and the knife clattered to the floor. He kicked it away, kicked Ma in the belly and again in the shoulder, at which the child-abuser toppled forwards. The man groaned, collapsed on all fours. His glasses slipped from his nose. He felt around, half blind, struggled to his feet, both hands raised, palms outwards.

  ‘I’m unarmed,’ he gurgled. ‘I’m defenceless.’

  ‘I see a few defenceless people here,’ Jericho panted, the Glock aimed at Ma. ‘So? Did that help them at all?’

  ‘I have my rights.’

  ‘So do the children.’

  ‘That’s different. It’s something you can’t understand.’

  ‘I don’t want to understand!’

  ‘You can’t do anything to me.’ Ma shook his head. ‘I’m sick, a sick man. You can’t shoot a sick man.’

  For a moment Jericho was too flabbergasted to reply. He kept Ma in check with the gun and saw the man’s lips curling.

  ‘You won’t shoot,’ said Ma, with a flash of confidence.

  Jericho said nothing.

  ‘And you know why not?’ His lips pulled into a grin. ‘Because you feel it. You feel it too. The fascination. The beauty. If you could feel what I feel, you wouldn’t point a gun at me.’

  ‘You kill children,’ Jericho said hoarsely.

  ‘The society you represent is so dishonest. You are dishonest. Pitifully so. You poor little policeman in your wretched little world. Do you actually realise that you envy people like me? We’ve attained a degree of freedom of which you can only dream.’

  ‘You swine.’

  ‘We’re so far ahead!’

  Jericho raised the gun. Ma reacted immediately. Shocked, he threw both hands in the air and shook his head again.

  ‘No, you can’t do that. I’m sick. Very sick.’

  ‘Yes, but you shouldn’t have made that attempt to escape.’

  ‘What attempt?’

  ‘This one.’

  Ma blinked. ‘But I’m not escaping.’

  ‘Yes, you’re escaping, Ma. You’re trying to get away. This very second. So I find myself forced—’

  Jericho fired at his left kneecap. Ma screamed, doubled up, rolled on the floor and screeched blue murder. Jericho lowered the Glock and crouched down exhaustedly. He felt miserable. He wanted to throw up. He was dog-tired, and at the same time he had a sense that he would never be able to sleep again.

  ‘You can’t do that!’ Ma wailed.

  ‘You shouldn’t have tried to get away,’ Jericho murmured. ‘Asshole.’

  * * *

  It took the police a full twenty minutes to find their way to the factory, and when they did they treated him as if he were in cahoots with the child-abuser. He was far too exhausted to get worked up about it, and just told the officers that it would be in the interest of their professional advancement to call a particular number. The duty inspector pulled a sulky face, came back as a different man and handed him the phone with almost childlike timidity.

  ‘Someone would like to speak to you, Mr Jericho.’

  It was Patrice Ho, his high-ranking policeman friend from Shanghai. In return for the information that the raid in Lanzhou had thrown up a paedophile ring, although it hadn’t been possible to prove a connection with the Paradise of the Little Emperors, Jericho improved his evening with the news that Paradise had been found and the snake defeated.

  ‘What snake?’ his friend asked, puzzled.

  ‘Forget it,’ Jericho said. ‘Christian stuff. Could you make sure that I don’t have to put down roots here?’

  ‘We owe you a favour.’

  ‘Fuck the favour. Just get me out of here.’

  There was nothing he yearned for so much as the chance to leave the factory and Shenzhen as quickly as possible. He was suddenly enjoying the deference normally reserved for folk heroes and very popular criminals, but he wasn’t allowed to leave until eight. He dropped the hire car off at the airport, took the next plane for Shanghai, a Mach 1 flying wing, and checked his messages in the air.

  Tu Tian had been trying to contact him.

  He called back.

  ‘Oh, nothing in particular,’ said Tu. ‘I just wanted to tell you your surveillance was successful. The hostile competitors admitted to data theft. We had a talk.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Jericho without any particular enthusiasm. ‘And what came out of the talk?’

  ‘They promised to stop it.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘That’s a lot. I had to promise to stop it too.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Jericho thought he had misheard. Tu Tian, whose company had proved to have fallen victim to Trojans, had been absolutely furious. He had spared no expense to get his hands on the, as he put it, pack of miserable blowflies and cockroaches so presumptuous as to spy on his company secrets. ‘You yourself wanted to—’

  ‘I didn’t know who they were.’

  ‘And excuse me, but what difference does that make?’

  ‘You’re right, absolutely none at all.’ Tu laughed, in great humour now. ‘Are you coming to the golf course the day after tomorrow? You can be my guest.’

  ‘Very kind of you, Tian, but—’ Jericho rubbed his eyes. ‘Could I decide later?’

  ‘What’s up? Bad mood?’

  Shanghai Chinese were different. More direct, more open. Practically Italian, and Tu Tian was possibly the most Italian of all them. He could have performed a convincing version of ‘Nessun dorma’.

  ‘Quite honestly,’ Jericho said, ‘I’m wiped out.’

  ‘You sound it,’ Tu agreed. ‘Like a wet rag. A rag-man. We’ll have to hang you out to dry. What’s up?’

  And because fat Tu, for all his egocentricity, was one of the few people who granted Jericho an insight into his own inner state, he told him every
thing.

  ‘Young man, young man,’ Tu said, amazed, after a few seconds of respectful silence. ‘How did you do it?’

  ‘I just told you.’

  ‘No, I mean, how did you get wise to him? How did you know it was him?’

  ‘I didn’t. It was just that everything pointed in that direction. Ma is vain, you know. The website was more than a catalogue of ready-produced horrors, with men forcing themselves on babies and women forcing little boys to have sex with them before laying into them with a hatchet. There were the usual films and photographs, but you could also put on your hologoggles and be there in 3D, and at various things happening live as well, which gives these guys a special kick.’

  ‘Revolting.’

  ‘But most importantly there was a chat-room, a fan forum where these people swapped information and boasted to each other. Even a second-life sector where you could assume a virtual identity. Ma appeared there as a water spirit. I suspect most paedos aren’t familiar with that kind of thing. They tend to be made of more conventional stuff, and they don’t much like talking into microphones, even with voice-changer software. They’d rather type out all their bullshit on the keyboard in the old-fashioned way, and of course Ma joined in and there he was. So I got the idea of adding my own contributions.’

  ‘You must have felt like chucking!’

  ‘I’ve got a switch in the back of my head and another in my belly. I usually manage to turn off at least one of them.’

  ‘And back in the cellar?’

  ‘Tian.’ Jericho sighed. ‘If I’d managed that, I wouldn’t have told you all this crap.’

  ‘I understand. Go on.’

  ‘So, every imaginable visitor to the page is online, and of course Ma, the vain swine, is on there too. He disguises himself as a visitor, but you notice that he knows too much, and he has this huge need to communicate, so that I start suspecting that this guy is at least one of the originators, and after a while I’m convinced that it’s him. A little while ago, I subjected his contributions to a semantic analysis – peculiarities of expression, preferred idioms, grammar – and the computer narrows the field, but there are still about a hundred known internet paedophiles who are possible suspects in this one. So I have the guy analysed while he’s online and writing, and his typing rhythms give him away. Just about every time. That leaves four.’