Carslake, he was called. Stone had told him to meet up with Ying Ning, and finally he’d found her. She’d brought him back to her place. Stone had never met Carslake in person, but he’d met men like him. He’d suggested Carslake grab a flight to China to be on the spot when he discovered the location of the Machine. He knew the American wouldn’t pass up chance to find a real UFO. Carslake might look like a nutjob — a madcap UFO blogger — but Stone knew people like Carslake can be useful.
Big, clumsy, slightly dirty looking: everything about Carslake said lazy. He took long loping strides, and somehow still dragged his boots on the ground. He spoke with a slow drawl, as if he couldn’t be bothered to speak any faster. The unkempt stubble on his face was because he couldn’t be bothered shaving rather than any fashion statement. And that black leather jacket — well, Stone liked the jacket. It was a cool jacket. Heavy, old, very good quality. But in the sauna of Chengdu? And Carslake wore it all the time. As in all the time. Probably wore it bed.
‘Being in China is kinda like camping,’ said Carslake, conspiratorially to Stone. ‘You never get properly clean. You take a shower, but as soon as you put your clothes on, you feel dirty again.’
Coming from him, it made Stone smile. Ying Ning merely took another drag on her cigarette and shook her head. ‘Yang guizi make excuse to be dirty,’ she said, paying Carslake’s casual racism back in kind.
Carslake helped himself to another of her cigarettes and lit up using her red star Chairman Mao cigarette lighter. ‘I don’t know how you smoke this Chinese shit,’ he said, examining the characters on the carton. ‘You ain’t got any American smokes? What the hell brand is it anyway?’
Ying Ning had brought Carslake back into a house she was using on the outskirts of the sprawling city. It was one of a few hundred small houses built by a main highway, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. No streets had been laid, however. They walked from the roaring four-track highway through clouds of dust, or through mud if the rain had just fallen. It being Sichuan, trees and weeds were rapidly gaining a hold in the brown, rutted mud of the “streets”.
How did Ying find these places? The house was small, with two tiny bedrooms. It was newly built, unpainted and unfurnished. But clean. Stone had returned there from Virginia Carlisle’s place to find their old friends Bao An and Lin Xiaohong infesting the place. Then Ying Ning arrived with the tall American. Stone had been feeding tidbits of information to his blog, and finally, Carslake had been interested enough to get off his sofa in LA and fly to Chengdu. Which was good, because Stone had asked him to bring something very useful with him.
This guy was more than a courier though. Despite appearances, Carslake’s type can be very useful. Because although people like Carslake might look lazy, it was often because they were obsessional and independent-minded. They focused on one thing, and the rest of life could go hang. That was Carslake. Stone had seen his blog — UFOWatch. Crazy, perhaps delusional, but Carslake had obviously done very little for the past few weeks but research the private life of Steven Semyonov. Carslake’s earlier blogs made out that Semyonov was an alien. Now he seemed to have gone back that on that opinion. Or maybe he was just embarrassed to come out with it face to face in front of Stone. Whatever. It made no difference since the guy was dead.
When it came to personal skills, however, Carslake might struggle. He had lived his life on the Net, and the transition to real life was proving a challenge. It was easy to state wild opinions, and come out with wild theories and sexist insults online. But he wasn’t on the Net anymore, and Carslake’s casual contempt for both women and the Chinese was experiencing a rude awakening in the face of Ying Ning’s scathing wit and derision. Bao An and Lin Xiaohong did little other than snigger when Carslake was around, with Ying Ning feeding them with a succession of one-liners in Chinese. They laughed at him at odd moments. He must have felt like an overgrown circus freak within twenty-four hours of arriving.
There was something fascinating in the dynamic with Carslake and Ying Ning. True to type, Carslake was too thick skinned to be bothered by them busting on him in Chinese. He ignored Bao An altogether, and with Ying Ning he adopted a new policy of appearing intelligent, while cranking up the slow-witted, derogatory comments in her direction.
Stone wondered if Carslake “liked her”. Good luck with that. If Carslake ever came on to Ying Ning, she’d eat him alive.
‘I’m talking about research, Miss Ying-Tong-Bing-Bong,’ Carslake would say. ‘Which is more than any of you motherfuckers has done.’ He claimed he had researched Semyonov’s background, and that the man was human after all, although he didn’t elaborate. Stone parked that one. If Carslake knew about Semyonov’s background, Stone would find a way of making him talk about it. A bottle of Chinese vodka would probably do the trick. Or even a carton of Marlboro.
‘Anyhow, Cutie Pie, are you going to tell us how we’re gonna find Semyonov’s Machine? I gotta get home for the basketball playoffs.’
Cutie Pie? Cutie Pie? Carslake was trying too hard now. But what the hell? It was free entertainment while it lasted. And he wasn’t a bad man. For all his front, and lazy arrogance, Carslake had had the presence of mind to list an even more incorrect location for the Machine on that blog of his. With any luck, Virginia Carlisle and her cohorts from GNN would be scouring barren forests in the wrong end of Sichuan by now.
The chance to quiz Carslake about Semyonov arose in the evening. Carslake suggested he and Stone should “grab a beer”. His bottle of whiskey bought on the plane was finished and maybe the energy he needed to carry on insulting Ying Ning was flagging. The two of them left the house, and Stone started out towards the bus stop.
Carslake looked round as they tramped across the dirt in the darkness towards the streaming lights on the highway. ‘Fuck these Chinese chicks, man,’ he said. It made Stone smile. He wondered if Carslake ever got out enough to do that in the US, let alone here. Then he saw what Carslake had seen. Ying Ning shooting pool at a table, under a tree outside yet another cell phone store. She was surrounded by a cluster of lads, all smoking and wearing factory uniforms with the logo “YunDong Shoe Co”, laughing and joshing with her. A typical Chinese scene. For all China’s Olympics prowess, the only sport you saw in China was pool — snooker and pool everywhere. By the roadside, on the grass — on shagged-out tables in every town and tiny village.
And there was Ying Ning in the half-light, downing another pool ball, cigarette in mouth. Stone had asked himself a few times what Ying Ning was thinking. About him, about Carslake, about the Machine. Ying Ning gave him nothing, nothing of herself. He could only guess how she was thinking from her actions. Why was she hanging out with Stone? Why was she happy to hang out with Carslake? Stone might as well ask a tree. He only knew that she tolerated them, from the fact that she was still there. She tolerated them because she too wanted to find the Machine, and find out what they’d all been up to. Semyonov, the Communist Party, the “billionaire clique” Ying Ning always talked about — she wanted to find them out in some appalling conspiracy. And as soon as Stone or Carslake ceased to be useful, she’d be gone. She’d evaporate into thin air.
Ying Ning played on as a couple of local girls came past — single, factory girls too by the look of them, wearing shorts and flip-flops and carrying pails of washing. The lads at the pool table concentrated on Ying Ning. Didn’t even glance at the other girls.
The tall American shook his head as if in despair and made for the four track highway. He loped out in front of the headlights, yelling for a taxi in English, and waving both his arms around like a demented windmill.
‘And fuck these Chinese buses. I’m gonna get us a cab into town,’ said Carslake. ‘We got to go to the Fedex office en route, my friend.’
Which was good news. Stone had enticed Carslake to Sichuan with a promise of a look at a UFO site. But his main purpose in luring Carslake there was to get hold of a device and bring it with him to China. A device which was going to show Stone exactly what was under that mountain in Western Sichuan.