by Qiu Xiaolong
‘It will surely be a successful project, Your Honor, that collection of Xuanji’s poems. And Yang is a capable assistant for your worthy literary project, I totally agree,’ Nameless said, changing the subject readily, nodding, and producing two candles out of his enormous sleeves. ‘By the way, I’m bringing a pair of large candles for you. Pilgrims make a point of donating candles to the Buddha images in the temple. The weightier the candles, the more devout the pilgrims. These are two-catty ones. You can read as many poems as you like in the evening, but don’t stay up too late, Your Honor.’
‘Don’t stay up too late again, Master,’ Yang said aside, echoing as he turned to step out of the room, leaving in the company of Nameless.
Left alone in the room, Judge Dee was listening to the rain pattering against the window, picking up the cup of tea, when he became aware of a black bat flitting over the courtyard, hovering around, hissing portentously, as if anxious to break in through the white paper of the window. It appeared to be another ominous sign. Making an effort to laugh himself out of his apprehensive mood, he tried to assure himself that his nerves had been overwrought for the last couple of days.
So he turned to spread out on the table the paper with the poem on it. From time to time, poetry could soothe the tension, he knew from past experience. It was Xuanji’s elegant handwriting, which he recognized at once.
‘The Fading Peony.’ He was murmuring to himself the title of the poem, stroking his gray beard, when he was thunderstruck by something in it.
It was too much of a political taboo for Xuanji to write about the topic of a peony under the reign of Empress Wu. The thought flashed through his mind. Even more so given Xuanji’s singular treatment in those lines.
So much so, it could have served as an unquestionable evidence of the so-called thoughtcrime. Another characteristic of the Tang Empire. A word or a phrase, let alone a poem, interpreted as possibly against the interest of the supreme ruler could put the offender in prison. Xuanji should have known better than to make such a blunder.
Was it possible that she had composed the poem purposely for someone capable of appreciating it because of its political incorrectness?
Studying ‘The Fading Peony’ under the candlelight for the third or fourth time, he had a feeling that some of the dots accumulated at random during the last few days were beginning to scramble for connection in his mind – the knife note in the hostel, the signs from the Book of Changes, the unexpected request for help from the powerful Minister Wu, the intensified apparition of the black fox spirit in the neighborhood of the nunnery, the discussion with the publisher Mo about the unheard-of edition of only two copies, the murder of Wei in broad daylight, the yellow silk underrobe embroidered with dragons wrapped around his waist inside the gown, and Mayor Pei’s complaining about somebody high above relentlessly pushing for the investigation to get to the very bottom …
But his train of thought was interrupted by loud, agitated knocks on the door.
Again it was Yang, who must have come running back, pushing open the door without waiting for Judge Dee to say ‘Come in.’
‘She’s dead, Master.’
‘Who are you talking about?’
‘The flower girl surnamed Zhang. She’s dead.’
‘Wasn’t she just at the temple a while ago, delivering that poem written by Xuanji?’
‘Yes, that’s her, but what the devil – two deaths in a single day,’ Yang said, still speaking incoherently, as he moved over from the doorway. Taking another deep breath, he managed to regain some composure and started narrating about the second death he had just encountered ‘in a single day.’
As it turned out, Yang could not help feeling curious about the flower girl’s surprise visit to the temple, carrying Xuanji’s poem, though he knew better than to discuss its implication in the company of Nameless when he delivered the letter from the flower girl.
After parting with Nameless, Yang walked out alone. It was quite dark outside the temple. There was no sign of the flower girl. Unfamiliar with the neighborhood, he had no idea about which direction she could have turned. The road appeared quite deserted. He remained standing under the night sky, looking left and right, with nothing but several will-o’-the-wisps floating eerily by the roadside.
His glance sweeping around the vicinity of the temple one more time, he was ready to head back when he heard a dog beginning to bark violently in the distance, even though it somehow seemed not to be too far away.
He lost no time turning in that direction. The barking remained audible, off and on, echoing into the somber sky as Yang fumbled along in the dark. The road soon forked into a shaded trail. And then the sound abruptly stopped.
It took him less than the time it took to burn incense to come striding into view of something lying on the turn of the trail, where rainwater seemed to be shimmering under the faint starlight. To his horror, it turned out to be the flower girl’s body in pools of blood. Her clothing was badly torn, revealing her bare breasts and thighs. It appeared to be pointing to a sex crime, though she had been stabbed multiple times, as if the attacker had intended to kill.
One stab at her head, cutting deep into the right temple. Two more in her chest, with a forceful one close to the heart, leaving scarlet rivulets on the trail beside her. And the final one, viciously into her lower abdomen.
He put his right hand above her lips. He was unable to detect a breath in her. The blood smearing her face seemed to be still sticky to his finger. It had happened just a short while ago. Possibly at the moment the dog started barking.
He came to the realization that she was beyond help. There was no point dragging her body back to the temple, where the monks could do nothing about the dead flower girl. Besides, it was not a good idea to bring a female visitor to the temple, as he had just learned from Nameless – not to mention the possible scandal of moving a dead, half-naked girl into it.
After searching through the scene another time, Yang headed back to the temple, empty-handed.
It took quite a while for Yang to finish his account about the murder of the flower girl. Judge Dee made no interruption during Yang’s narration. Then he said simply, ‘Two victims in a day.’
‘Yes, both of them related to Xuanji. But we have to leave in a day or two, Master.’
‘But you have really done so much today. It’s quite late, Yang. Time for you to go to bed. And I won’t stay up for too long, either.’
With Yang’s figure retreating out of the room, Judge Dee found himself overwhelmed in the entangling swirls of the old and new scenarios.
Indeed, it was quite late. He touched the buttonhole of his long gown, where he had inserted the jasmine bud earlier in the day. It was empty.
Judge Dee had to hold himself responsible – at least partially – for the flower girl’s death, though no one could have foretold that her delivering the poem to the temple would have brought her young life to such a tragic end. In the final analysis, however, had he not paid the visit to her on the pretext of the poetry collection, she would not have come over to the temple at night – to her untimely end.
But in an increasingly probable scenario, like the murder of Wei, the murder of the flower girl appeared, more likely than not, to have been related to Xuanji’s murder case.
If so, she had been forever silenced for the same reason as in Wei’s case. For that matter, anyone close to Xuanji had to be eliminated lest they speak out about her relationship with the man in the yellow underrobe.
The one who had given the order for the killing of Wei, and then of the flower girl, must have been resourceful – maneuvering, planning, and waiting in the dark. Her visit to the temple at night had finally provided the opportunity they had been waiting for.
Instead of attacking her on the way to the temple, the attacker must have waited to find out first where she was going, but on her way back home, he struck out.
In that scenario, it would probably not take long for the people crouching
in the dark to find out that Judge Dee was staying in the temple that night, the receiver of whatever information the flower girl had to deliver. The connection made, Judge Dee could be next on the killer’s list …
He could not rule out the possibility, but it was more likely he had been panic-stricken like an arrow-wounded bird flustering at the furtive sound of a twang in the night woods.
With an abrupt sparkle, the large candle sputtered out, and he came to find himself lost in an overwhelming darkness.
FOUR
It took longer than expected for Judge Dee to reach Mayor Pei’s official residence, but it was still early in the morning. He got down from the carriage, taking in a deep breath of the fresh air. Here and there, birds were heard twittering amid the fallen petals after a night of rain.
Mayor Pei came out in a hurry to meet them at the vermillion-painted gate.
‘Sorry for the unannounced visit this morning, Mayor Pei,’ Judge Dee said with a bow.
‘It’s such an honor for you to make the visit to my humble abode, Your Honor. Welcome. Please come in.’
Mayor Pei must have scrambled out for the surprise visit, wearing a sapphire-blue gown not yet properly buttoned up, and a black silk cap decorated with a green jade. He was a tall man with a neatly trimmed beard, which somehow added a touch of bookishness to his square face.
‘Mayor Pei, this is my assistant, Yang. He is going to have the carriage horses fed outside. So don’t worry about him. We’ll have a good talk, just the two of us. Indeed, it’s long time no see.’
In the midst of the pleasantries, Mayor Pei appeared to be both excited and nervous. He led Judge Dee into a spacious room, which looked like a comfortable combination of a library and a home office.
Apparently, Mayor Pei had also made it something of a cozy retreat for himself. Its mahogany-framed lattice windows showed elegant designs against the white walls, which were lined with well-stocked dark wood bookshelves, decorated here and there with choice antique bowls and vases. The long ebony desk was topped with black-streaked white marble, on which stood a large porcelain vase sporting a bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums, two or three days old, thinner, but still attractive.
The two of them seated themselves in the red damask-cushioned chairs with a tall tea stand between them.
‘In accordance with our yellow lunar calendar, Your Honor, today is a day marked as an auspicious one. For me, a lot of things have been going badly of late. I hope your visit may miraculously turn the luck for me.’
Mayor Pei was a sharp one in spite of his bookish appearance, who immediately came to the realization that Judge Dee would not have come all the way over for a long-time-no-see chit-chat early in the morning.
‘In this red-dust world of ours, eight or nine times out of ten, things do not go the way we expect,’ Judge Dee said, quoting an ancient saying in the Han dynasty. ‘There is no smooth sailing all the time.’
‘So please tell me, Your Honor, what favorable wind has brought you over to my place today?’
‘To open the door to the mountains, Your Excellency, I have to admit that it is the wind of the Xuanji case. It has become such a sensational one.’
‘Yes, an extremely sensational case indeed.’
‘I was about to leave the capital for another post, as you may have learned, when Internal Minister Wu asked me to take a look into the murder case before setting out for the trip. So I’m just taking a quick look for him. It’s not in any official capacity, needless to say.’
‘Internal Minister Wu! But that’s little wonder. He admires your talent so much as the most capable judge of the Great Tang Empire. For the murder investigation, your help will be like the long-expected rain during a summer drought. Not just for the minister, but for me, too. It may truly turn the luck for me. So please go ahead with any questions you have about the murder case. And any suggestions and directions from you will be very much appreciated.’
‘To begin with, the murder case has not yet been concluded in spite of Xuanji’s confession, Mayor Pei?’
‘No, not yet. Under normal circumstances, after a murder suspect such as Xuanji pleads guilty, it’s just a matter of time for the approval of execution to come from the higher authorities. But you may have heard of the way she pleaded guilty, and then of the outcries about it from a group of men of letters – some of them quite well known and influential – declaring that she was tortured into the confession. So it’s understandable for Minister Wu to seek your help. After all, the case should not drag on like this for such a long time.’
‘That’s true.’ Judge Dee took a sip of the tea, waiting for Pei to go on.
Without beating around the bush, Pei began by defending the way he had conducted the recent trial.
‘Let me say something first, Your Honor. When Xuanji was initially brought into the courtroom, she was so defiant, so uncooperative. She kept declaring she did not know anything about the death of her maidservant Ning. There was no accepting her statement just like that, as you understand. You have done quite a number of trials yourself. In the courtroom, I had to subject her to a beating, as is conventional. Obviously, most of the Tang officials are not that qualified as judges, not as experienced, resourceful as you. But that’s as much as I could possibly do to fulfill my judicial responsibility. People may have all sorts of speculations about the trial, but they’re not true.’
‘No, I’m not that experienced or resourceful as a judge. The civil service examination requires nothing but our studies of the Confucian classics. There’s not a single book about the judicial system requested in school. I have been trying to maneuver the best I could in the gray area all these years.’
‘You are just so extraordinary. No one will argue about it, Judge Dee. But back to people’s speculations about the case – there’s something I have to say. Months before the murder case, I had tried to invite Xuanji to one of my parties. It’s because Zi’an’s wife is a distant cousin of mine, and I had heard about her harshness toward Xuanji. So I merely wanted to do something for her – by way of compensation. For a courtesan like Xuanji, the larger her network, the better. She might have met some interesting, influential people at the party at my place. But she responded with a flat no, which I could understand. She is a proud woman in her way, and I bore her no grudge. Period.
‘But because of it, others may have seen me as a man going after her, and even as one rejected by her in the light of her refusal of my party invitation. That led to the false assumption that the trial was done in an unfair way, even a matter of retaliation by torturing her into confession in prison.’
‘I understand, Mayor Pei. With a suspect refusing to own up, I would have done the same thing in the courtroom. Indeed, how could she have claimed that she savagely beat the maidservant to death and buried her in the backyard in a drunken stupor without knowing anything about it?’
‘Exactly. It did not make any sense, did it?’
‘No, it did not. But she then made a modified statement in prison, didn’t she?’
‘But what do you think of the second statement, Your Honor?’
‘There’re quite a number of holes in her second statement, too. To begin with, it’s possible for her to get blind drunk, but to kill someone without a conscious motive or reason is simply too incredible.’
‘You can say that again,’ Mayor Pei said, nodding vigorously. ‘With the far-from-admissible “confession” made by her in prison, with the men of letters clamoring that she simply gave in to the horrible torture in the prison cell, and at the same time, with people high above pressing for a speedy yet acceptable conclusion, I’m really at my wits’ end.’
‘What is an acceptable conclusion? Indeed, it’s such a tough case for you. As it seems to me, Mayor Pei, the crux of the matter for you is how to get a truthful, convincing confession from her. In that event, those men of letters would clamor no more, and the people above, whoever they might be, would no longer have the pretext to push. Things would then b
ecome acceptable to the people concerned.’
‘But how, my celebrated Judge Dee? She will not say anything more, and I cannot give her another beating in the courtroom, nor in the prison cell. Already so many protests and complaints have popped up like crazy cicadas screeching non-stop in the summer.’ Pei added after a short pause, ‘Has Minister Wu discussed the case with you?’
‘He sent me a brief case report, but it sheds little light on the complexities of the case. There’re a lot of unanswered questions in it.’
‘Last night, I restudied her second statement. It’s practically as unconvincing as the first one. Furthermore, whatever changes were made in that statement, it makes no difference for the conclusion of the case. It still spells the death sentence for her.’
‘Perhaps she cannot bear it in the prison cell any longer. She, too, wants a quick conclusion – death sentence or not. She came up with what she considered a more convincing confession, so you would have the case closed.’
‘That may be true.’
‘Alternatively, she could have tried to cover up something or somebody with such a conclusion of the murder case.’
‘Have something or somebody covered up?’ Mayor Pei repeated the question. ‘Now you mention it, some people above did talk to me about the urgency of getting to the very bottom of it, and bringing the people involved to justice, whatever their position or status. That’s what was said to me, I remember – something to that effect, at least.’
It was the third time that Pei mentioned ‘some people above,’ who must have an undisclosed reason to bring pressure to bear upon the mayor like that.
A shudder ran down through Judge Dee’s spine. It confirmed the scenario he had contemplated the previous night, the more so in the light of the peony poem written by Xuanji. And it was the very poem delivered by the flower girl the night before.