For them it was hell.
Owen Jericho hesitated. He knew he shouldn’t have followed Animal Ma this far. He saw him, his eyes widened by archaically fat spectacle lenses into an expression of constant astonishment, crossing the square, elliptically swaying his bottom and hips. He owed this duck-like walk to a hip condition which created the false impression that he was easy prey. But Ma Liping, to give him his real name, hadn’t been given his nickname by accident. He was considered aggressive and dangerous. In fact he pretended to have been given the name Animal at birth, a bizarre act of showingoff, not least because he also pretended it embarrassed him. Ma was cunning too. He must have been, or else he wouldn’t have been able to lull the authorities into the sleepy conviction that he had forsworn paedophilia. As walking proof of the successful reintegration experiment, he worked for the police in the battle against the growing plague of child pornography in China, he provided instructions for the catching of small fry and apparently did everything he could to escape social ostracism.
Five years in jail as a child abuser, he used to say, is like five hundred years in a torture chamber.
This infectiously flourishing suburb of the urban network of Shenzhen in south China, with its boringly functional architecture, had allowed Ma, who was originally from Beijing, the chance to start again. No one knew him here, the local authorities didn’t even have a file on him. In the capital they knew where he was living, but the connection had become attenuated, since the paedophile scene was in a state of constant flux, and Ma could credibly suggest that he had lost contact with its inner circle. No one paid him any attention now; there were other things that needed doing. Fresh depths granted nauseating glimpses of worlds of unbelievable human wretchedness.
Worlds like the Paradise of the Little Emperors.
Lost in a morass of mental overload as they tried to protect, check and defraud 1.4 billion individuals all at the same time, the Chinese authorities increasingly resorted to private investigators to give them support. In hock to digitalisation, they relied on cyber-detectives, specialists in all kinds of criminality and dark online practices, and Owen Jericho had the reputation of being extraordinarily gifted in the field. His portfolio was impeccable when it came to cracking web espionage, phishing, cyber-terrorism and so on. He penetrated illegal communities, infiltrated blogs, chat-rooms and virtual worlds, tracked down missing people using their digital fingerprints and advised companies on how to protect themselves against electronic attacks, Trojans and malicious software. In England, he had dealt with several cases of child pornography so, when the hell of the ‘little emperors’ was revealed to a team of shocked investigators, he had been asked for support by Patrice Ho, a high-ranking officer in the Shanghai Police and a friend of his. As a result of this request he was now standing here, watching Animal Ma on his way into the old, abandoned bicycle factory.
He shivered in spite of the heat. Accepting the commission had meant paying a visit to the Paradise of the Little Emperors. An experience that would leave traces in his cerebral cortex for the rest of time, even though he had had a fundamentally clear idea what he was letting himself in for. ‘Little emperors’ was what the Chinese, with an almost Italian besottedness, called their children. But there had been no way of avoiding the journey to Paradise, he had to log in and put on the hologoggles to understand just whom he was looking for.
Animal Ma stepped through the factory door.
After the city planners had, unusually, revealed no inclination to tear down the collection of mouldy brick buildings, artists and freelancers had moved in, including a gay couple who repaired antiquated electrical devices, an ethno-metal band who vied with one another to see who could make the most noise and shake a deserted fitness studio to its foundations, and Ma Liping, with his shop buying and selling all kinds of goods, from cheap imitations of Ming vases to moulting songbirds in portable bamboo cages. The investigator from Shenzhen who was working with Jericho had started observing Ma on 20 May, and had not let the man out of sight for two days. He had followed him from his home to the old factory and back, he had taken photographs, followed every one of his limping steps and drawn up a list of his customers’ comings and goings. According to this list, during that time a grand total of four people had wandered into the shop, one of them Ma’s wife, an ordinary-looking southern Chinese woman of indeterminable age. What made the small number of customers more surprising was the fact that Ma and his wife lived in a six-storey house, big and nicely presented by local standards, which Ma couldn’t possibly have afforded on the small income that he got from the shop. His wife, as far as anyone knew, didn’t do anything at all except cross the street to the shop several times a day and stay there for some time, perhaps to do office stuff or serve customers who never came.
Apart from two men.
For a whole series of reasons Jericho had reached the conviction that Ma, if he wasn’t alone, was at least the driving force behind the Paradise of Little Emperors. Once he’d managed to narrow the circle of suspects down to a handful of child abusers who were currently rampaging on the net or had attracted attention there some time before, he had homed in on Animal Ma Liping. It was here, however, that his ideas and those of the authorities parted company. While Jericho saw a storm-cloud of clues over Shenzhen, in the opinion of the police it was a man from the smoggy hell of Lanzhou who was attracting the most suspicion, and a raid was being organised there at that very minute. In Jericho’s view there was no doubt that the police would find much of interest in Lanzhou, just not the thing they were looking for. In the Paradise the beast reigned, the snake, Animal Ma, he was sure of it, but he had been instructed to take no further steps for the time being.
An instruction that he basically intended to ignore.
Because apart from the fact that the case bore Ma’s trademark, the fact that he was married gave Jericho food for thought. He had nothing against reformation and change, but Ma was clearly homosexual; he was a gay paedophile. It was also striking that the men who came to the shop only reappeared several hours later. Thirdly, the shop didn’t seem to have anything remotely like fixed opening times, and last of all no one could have wished for a better place to carry out dark practices than the abandoned bicycle factory. All the other occupants used side-buildings with direct access to the street, leaving Ma as the only one with premises off the internal courtyard and the only one who ever set foot in it, apart from a few children who trickled in and out.
From Shanghai Jericho had instructed the investigator to pay a visit to the shop, take a look around and buy something unimportant, if possible something that Ma stocked in his storeroom. This meant that Jericho was already familiar with the shop by the time he followed Ma across the square that morning. He waited for a few minutes in the shadow of the factory wall, passed through the gate, crossed the dusty area of the courtyard, climbed a short flight of stairs and stepped inside the crammed shop, which was filled with shelves and tables. Behind the counter the shop’s owner was busy with jewellery. A bead curtain separated the sales area from an adjacent room, and a video camera was fixed above the doorway.