Reamde

She went through several huge emotional swings in her assessment of the level of difficulty. A thousand meters simply wasn’t that great a distance. Ten football pitches. And so, viewed from a comfortable remove, the job hadn’t seemed that difficult. During her first couple of weeks of wearing out shoe leather in downtown Xiamen, though, she became inordinately depressed about her chances of making any headway. The population of the square kilometer in question was probably between twenty and thirty thousand. The number of buildings ran to several hundred. She felt overwhelmed, wandering around all day getting lost in the district’s tortuous, crowded streets and then lying half awake all night in her Gulangyu apartment, retracing the steps she’d taken during the day and having hallucinatory dreams about all that she’d seen.

The apartment, at least, was nice. Gulangyu Island was small, steep, green, largely vehicle-free, and covered with sinuous, narrow roads that switchbacked through its little enclaves. A finer mesh of alleys and stone staircases webbed its parks and courtyards together. It was where Westerners had built their villas and their consulates in the post–Opium War period, when Xiamen had been known by its Fujianese name of Amoy. Though that era had long passed, the buildings remained.

Just barely. To look around Gulangyu Island was to be reminded that Fujian had been a tropical jungle and wanted, in the worst way, to be a tropical jungle again. If humans ever walked away from it, or stopped fighting it back with pruning shears and bucksaws, the creepers and lianas, the root systems, runners, spores, and seed pods would, in the space of a few years, overrun everything they had ever built. She did not know the detailed history of the place, but it was obvious that something like this must have happened to Gulangyu during the time of Mao, and that post-Mao real estate developers had gotten to the island just in the nick of time. From place to place you could still see an old Western-style building that was being torn to pieces in slow motion by foliage, rendering it so structurally unsound that only rats and wood-munching bugs could live there. But quite a few of the old buildings had been rescued—Olivia imagined a D-day-style invasion of the island, gardeners with saws and shovels parachuting out of the sky and storming the beaches—and were being liberated from the thorny or flowery embrace of climbing vines, deratted, reroofed, fixed up, and condoized. Her apartment was small but nicely located on the top floor of what had once been a French merchant’s villa and now served as home to a couple dozen young professionals like Meng Anlan. Her bed looked out onto a small balcony with a view across the water to the brilliant downtown lights of Xiamen, and during those nights when sleep eluded her, she would sit up and hug her knees and stare across the water, wondering which of those scintillae was the screen of Abdallah Jones’s laptop.

But as weeks went by and she got the square kilometer sorted out in her head, it began to seem doable. Ninety percent of the buildings could simply be ruled out. They were commercial properties or private residences. Unless Jones had some sort of an arrangement with a shop owner or a prosperous family, which seemed most unlikely, he had to be living in an apartment building, and not just any, but one that catered to transients and economic migrants. There were only a few of those in the search zone, and by various means she was able to cross several of them off the list. So those first few weeks of confusion and misery culminated, suddenly, with a short list of plausible Jones hideouts.

On rational grounds, she could not make a choice from among these, but her gut feeling was strongly in favor of a large, locally notorious dump of a place, five stories high, enmeshed in the finely reticulated streets of an old neighborhood but close enough to its edge that it was probably fated for demolition and skyscraperization. It had been a proud building during the era that the city was called Amoy and rich Europeans maintained wine cellars on Gulangyu. A hotel, perhaps. But long since repurposed into a workers’ apartment building.