“Listen to me. Don’t interrupt and don’t question what I’m going to tell you. There’s going to be an attack on Larry’s. At any moment. You’ve been lured into a trap. Xujiahui is going too. It’s a multiple strike. Get everybody out of there as soon as possible. And I mean everybody. Do it now and do it fast.”
“Joe, man.” Shahpour had started to laugh, but he felt a fear inside him as cold as the condensation on the rim of his glass. “Are you sure about this? Are you sure?”
“Do it, Shahpour. Hit the fire alarm. Do it now.”
At that moment, fifty metres short of the Silver Reel lobby, exhausted by his race to the seventh floor, Joe heard the Paradise City alarm. Yun had done his job. The vast white atrium screamed.
A Chinese guard in a pale blue shirt was standing in front of him. When he heard the piercing siren, his eyebrows wormed with frustration. Another false alarm. Another problem.
“Listen to me,” Joe said. To his despair, he saw only a typical Chinese ambivalence in the guard’s exhausted eyes. He held him at the elbows, as if trying to shake him from a deep sleep. “You have to evacuate the area.” He was speaking in Mandarin. “You have to help me. Will they hear the alarm in the cinemas?”
It was useless. It was like talking to a child. Joe released him and sprinted into the cinema.
In the lobby, lined with posters of Harrison Ford, of Humphrey Bogart and Bruce Willis, staff were staring up at the ceiling, convinced that the alarm was a momentary problem that would soon go away. Customers, covering their ears, continued to queue up at the popcorn concession. Teenagers continued to kiss.
“Get out of here!” Joe shouted, a madman, a laowai. At first nobody seemed to know what to do. One woman actually laughed. Joe screamed at a member of staff to help him as the guard came up behind, raising his voice now, trying to grab Joe and to pin him down.
He shook himself free. The alarm was unrelenting. Up ahead, to Joe’s relief, he saw a bewildered shoal of people apparently filing out of the cinemas, moving in bored slow motion along the darkened corridor. The ticket girl looked confused. Everybody looked confused. Joe went past them, shouting at them to hurry, urging them to get down the stairs and out onto the street. He ran down the multiplex corridor, past the numbers of the screens glowing like lights on a runway. He burst into Four, eyes blacked out by the darkness, his senses adjusting to the deafening noise of the cinema.
“Get out of here!” he screamed in Mandarin. “Everybody, everybody get out!”
He realized that the volume of the film had rendered the alarm inaudible. The audience tutted at him to sit down.
“Isabella!” Joe now tried shouting in English. “Isabella! There’s a bomb in the cinema. It’s a trap. Get out of here! Move! Run!”
51
Two of the four bombs exploded.
Shahpour Moazed’s first reaction to Joe’s warning had been to close his phone and to stand stock still in the entrance of the bar, in what he would later describe as a state of suspended animation. He was just a few feet away from the cloakroom. Shahpour caught the eye of a young British man making his way up the steps from Nanyang Road. He wanted to reach out and grab him, to warn him to stay away, but his courage was lacking. It was 8:47 p.m.
“Christ,” he whispered and, with the resigned deliberation of a man with no choice other than to make a fool of himself, he placed his gin and tonic on a nearby step and walked back into the bar. Alice Cooper was still wailing from the stereo. Standing between two waitresses, Shahpour spoke to the oldest of the four bartenders, a New Zealander wearing an All Blacks T-shirt.
“Turn the music off,” he shouted. He was still trying to find his courage. His voice lacked impact.
“What’s that, mate?”
“You’ve got to turn the music off. Get everybody out of here. There’s a bomb in the bar.”
The Kiwi was shaking his head. Either he couldn’t hear what Shahpour was saying or had written him off as a drunk. Neither of the waitresses, both of whom were Chinese, reacted to what Shahpour was saying. He could see the hi-fi system on a shelf behind the bar, obscured by a pile of napkins.
“I’m serious, man. Turn the fucking music off. We have to get everybody out of here.”
An American woman, paying for a round of drinks, turned towards him and said, “Did you say there was a bomb in here?”
“Yes I did.” At last Shahpour felt as though he was being listened to. He was now committed to what he had to do. Lifting himself onto the bar, he swung his legs over into the service area and killed the power on the sound system. One of the staff grabbed him and shouted: “Hey!” but Shahpour pushed him back and shouted as loudly as he could.
“Listen to me. Everybody. We have a very serious situation. I am not kidding around. Everybody needs to clear this area as quickly as possible.” The Kiwi attempted to restore the sound on the hi-fi and Shahpour swore at him. The American woman later told me that this was the moment when she realized that something was seriously wrong. Shahpour then ran out into the main area of the bar and began physically manhandling customers in what must have looked like an act of lunacy. But the music remained switched off. People began to react. Shahpour heard stools and chairs scraping back, confused, murmured conversations. Several customers on the upper level were staring down at him from the balcony, trying to work out what was going on. Shahpour went from face to face, group to group, saying the same thing to each of them, over and over again.
“I work for the American government. Get out of here. There may be a bomb in the bar. Larry’s has been targeted as a place where Westerners drink. Leave quickly. Leave now.”
Several customers-those of a more credulous and biddable nature-began moving slowly towards the exit. Others-those, for example, who had just bought an expensive round of drinks, or waited patiently for their turn at a game of pool-swore at Shahpour and told him to leave them in peace. One of them said, “Sit down you fucking idiot, this isn’t funny,” but was met with a stare of such intensity that he immediately began encouraging his friends to leave. At the same time, somebody had the presence of mind to hit the fire alarm. As Shahpour ran upstairs, he could hear the Kiwi barman saying: “OK, let’s do this. Everybody leave,” in a steady, level voice. It was now a matter of Shahpour’s personal pride, as much as it was of saving lives, that he should succeed in evacuating the building.
“Didn’t you fucking hear me?” he shouted at a group of bewildered customers huddled at the top of the stairs. They were holding bottles of beer, pool cues, staring at him as if determined to make a point. “Get out of here. There’s a fucking bomb.”
Others were still eating. They had belongings. In all, it took about three minutes to clear the upper level and a further four to search every nook and cranny of the building-including the kitchen, the bathrooms, the office at the back-and to be certain that Larry’s was empty. This was an act of extraordinary bravery on Shahpour’s part because, for all he knew, the bomb could have gone off at any moment. Finally, when he was done, he walked out onto Nanyang Road and saw to his disbelief that most of the customers were standing within ten feet of the entrance. Still fired with adrenalin, he shouted at them to move “at least one hundred meters back down the street.” Staff from a neighbouring Chinese bar received the same instruction in Mandarin when he saw them staring blankly outside through an open door.
“Get inside!” he shouted, a raised voice in China as rare as it was potentially humiliating. “Get to the back of your building! It’s not a fire!” and while three of them joined the crush of bemused local residents and Westerners on the road, two remained rooted to the spot, not prepared to lose face at the hands of a wild-eyed, screaming Arab.
They were two of the eighteen people who suffered minor injuries as a result of the subsequent explosion. Shahpour remembers feeling the eyes of perhaps 200 people boring into him as he began to suffer the awful, humiliating possibility of being wrong. He cursed Joe Lennox, staring at a street of dumb faces. Seconds later he was wrapped in a different kind of silence, his ears howling, his body covered in debris, a hero who had saved at least 150 people from the wreckage of a Shanghai bomb.