Hold Your Breath, China

by Qiu Xiaolong

  Chen said nothing, aware of a wave of abated whispers sweeping the room. People knew how complicated things could have been at the top.

  She too said nothing for a minute, still waiting, but she appeared to be casting a glance in his direction. His was a new face in the meeting room. It would be natural for people to pay attention to a stranger there, even though it might have been nothing too uncommon for a new representative of a partner company to come sit at a preview.

  With his beret pulled low, he prayed no one would recognize him. Some of the Big Bucks there might also have met him before.

  People started talking about the documentary, and about things related to it. But more than anything else, about how much could prove to be too much. It made sense for them to carefully weigh the consequences. For those well-established businessmen, their businesses still had to go on as before – in the last analysis – under the leadership of the ‘great, glorious and correct Chinese Communist Party’.

  Judging from their discussion, Chen understood that the project was pretty much done. He was in no position to comment like some others who had been involved from the beginning. So he kept making notes, his head hung low, like a dutiful representative.

  Shanshan resumed, taking a small sip from a water bottle on the lectern.

  ‘There’re a lot of factors contributing to the oppressive smog hanging over all our heads, a long list of them indeed, but only some of them are covered in the documentary.

  ‘But I also want to ask a specific question here. Why are all of these factors coming up together in today’s China? Again, a list of answers could be long – very long indeed. But one in particular, as a friend once discussed with me by Tai Lake, is the ideological crisis for the Chinese society. After the ending of the Cultural Revolution, after the exposing of numerous corruption scandals in the Party system, there seems to be nothing left for people to believe in – except what they believe they could grasp in their own hands, for which they will do anything at whatever expense, including the environmental expense.

  ‘So it is not just about the contamination of the water, air, food, but also about the contamination of the mind.

  ‘But that friend of mine also mentioned to me about his adherence to a Confucian principle: “There are things a man can do, and things a man cannot do.” So he has no choice but to do things at risks to himself. His talk has been so inspiring to me during the making of the documentary. If each of us tries to do something we believe we can and should do …’

  He could not help looking up. She was talking about him, who had once cited that Confucian maxim to her by the lake, though perhaps more in a reference to his cop job. She still remembered …

  Had she recognized him?

  She was looking at another audience member who was raising his hand and responding in excitement, ‘Yes, after watching the documentary, people may no longer remain silent, and they will try to do something about the air pollution in whatever way they can.’

  ‘Then, hopefully, a difference can be made.’

  Several men in the audience started applauding.

  ‘One more thing,’ Shanshan was concluding. ‘My husband’s computer has recently been hacked. Some of his business plans mysteriously came out in a web forum. Luckily, no serious damage.’

  ‘Why the revelation of his business plans?’ A middle-aged man in a black wool suit raised the question, still clapping his hands. ‘Is that web forum run by someone in competition with his business?’

  ‘That I don’t know.’

  ‘So it could have come as a warning?’

  ‘I don’t know that either. But we all have to be careful.’

  ‘Yes, we cannot be too careful. You’re right about it,’ the man in the black wool suit said, nodding, rising with several others, ready to leave.

  It was almost three in the afternoon when Chen walked out of the club.

  Once outside, he started looking around. He hastened over to the vine-draped veranda of a Greek restaurant, where he placed himself behind an imitation marble column, though still in view of the club entrance.

  There was a new black Mercedes waiting on the club driveway, and shortly afterward, Shanshan was seen emerging with the maroon trench coat draped on her arm heading toward the car.

  In the value system of today’s China, he was supposed to feel happy for her – her success and wealth. The luxurious car waiting for her appeared to make a perfect match with her elevated status.

  Whether it was something she really wanted, however, he could not tell.

  It was ironic that he had seen her the last time in Wuxi, in a similar way, with her moving toward a car, and with him standing hidden behind a tree, unseen.

  It appeared as if the current scene was conjuring up just another apparition of déjà vu all over again.

  Still, there’s no stepping twice into the same river, not for her, not for him.

  There she was, with her chauffeur hurrying to hold the door for her, looking like a grin shining in the afternoon light.

  Only she was no longer the Shanshan he had known in Wuxi, but Yuan Jing in Shanghai, an acclaimed environmental activist and an influential Internet celebrity, determined to make a difference in today’s China.

  As for him, he was still not able to come out into the open, to say hi to her, not even with any knowledge that he would be able to do anything for her, or for himself, an inspector being investigated by others in secret.

  The present, when you are thinking

  of it, is already slipping

  into the past …

  But it was not a moment for him to let the present slip away into the past again, and he hastened to pull himself together.

  The Mercedes was rolling down the driveway, with her reaching a hand out of the car window, waving to others, but not to him, who was nowhere to be seen near the club entrance.

  Soon, the spring is departing again.

  How much more of the wind and rain

  can it endure? The cobweb alone

  seems to care, trying to catch

  a wisp of fading memories.

  Why is the door always shut,

  covered in the dust of doubts?

  A dog is barking in the cell

  in the distance.

  Who is the one walking beside you?

  Inspector Chen finally came out from behind the column, walking around like a tourist who was enjoying himself in the brave New World, instead of leaving for home.

  What he had just learned in the club meeting he had to digest in concentration.

  One or two minutes later, however, he came to an abrupt stop at the sight of La Maison, a French restaurant located north of the club, with the club entrance still in view.

  Outside the restaurant a colorful poster showed a splendidly lit stage with a bevy of half-clad French girls dancing in the evening. For the moment, it appeared to be a fairly quiet place, with none of the tables occupied outside. Glancing in through the half-open door, Chen saw hardly any customers inside, either.

  He took a table outside, sitting under the poster, like a tourist with nothing better to do than to wait for the performance at night.

  A young French waitress moved toward him with a large menu. He ordered just a cup of coffee.

  After placing the coffee on the table and giving him the Wi-Fi password on a slip of paper, she withdrew. He typed in the password for his phone. It was a perhaps common scene in the age of Weibo and Weixin.

  He decided to do some research and to sort out the latest information. In the meantime, sitting there in front of La Maison, he would be able to keep the club entrance in sight, though he wondered whether there would be anything happening there now the meeting was over.

  In spite of his determined attempt at research, his thoughts kept wandering away.

  Shanshan had done a thorough job with the documentary. But for his job and reporting about it to Zhao, he did not even know how to start yet. Nor did he have the slightest mood fo
r it at this moment. More research was needed; he once again tried to rationalize his procrastination.

  He started by double-checking some of the data covered in the movie, all of which proved to be quite accurate. In addition, he ferreted out relevant articles and posts about the cancer village in question, about the increasing PM 2.5 rate in a year-by-year study, as well as other related topics, none of which showed any inaccuracy in Shanshan’s presentation. It did not take long for him to be convinced that the documentary was a truly well-researched one, of which he should be able to tell Zhao.

  After finishing the cup of coffee, he shifted his focus to some of the topics covered in the discussion after the preview. It was then that the ‘extraordinary interview’ with Kang jumped to his attention. Chen took out the mini recorder and pressed the play button.

  The documentary contained only part of the interview, so its full version could be much longer. Digging into the web archive of Zhonghua Petroleum Company, Chen tried to locate that particular interview but to no avail.

  It was possible that the company did not keep the newsletter it appeared in for such a long time. But after typing a combination of key search words, he succeeded in unearthing the full interview in a seemingly unrelated website.

  He read the statement by Kang closely, which proved to be in accordance with the official propaganda at the time. Put in the context of the current air pollution, however, Kang’s argument would have enraged a large number of audiences.

  What’s worse, with Yong’s trouble within the Forbidden City, Kang was left in a very vulnerable position, and the release of the documentary could deliver a fatal blow to him and to the ‘petroleum gang’ too.

  But how could people like Kang have known nothing about the documentary project? It was conceivable for a half-retired Party leader like Zhao to have only vague ideas about it, but Kang should have learned much more, and earlier too, considering his close tie to the powerful Yong in charge of Internal Security.

  Chen tapped his fingers on the table gloomily, when he found his thoughts shifting all of a sudden to what Shanshan had said toward the end of the meeting.

  Her remark about her husband’s computer having been hacked.

  Her husband was just a businessman. On the contrary, she would have been a far more likely target for hacking because of her environmental activities.

  Was it possible that they were hacking her as well as the people related to her?

  That might have been the reason why she had brought up the subject in the club. A necessary reminder to the others involved in the project, though she had refrained from being too specific.

  However, no one else there seemed to have been aware of anything unusual when it came to their computers. Perhaps they were not that closely related to her.

  The inspector was still not in a position to put the pieces together in a comprehensive way, he supposed, since he was far from having collected all the background information about them.

  Where else could he try to find the missing pieces?

  But Inspector Chen was unable to concentrate long enough on any of the pieces, as Detective Yu called into his special phone.

  ‘What’s up, Yu?’

  ‘Peiqin has just sent some Zongzi to Lianping, and she would like me to bring some to you as well. Dragon Festival is drawing nearer.’

  ‘That’s mouth-watering,’ he said, thinking it’s much more than mouth-watering. Peiqin had already had Zongzi delivered to him. The mention of Lianping’s name could be a hint about something too much to talk about on the phone.

  For a sensitive investigation, it would be too difficult for partners to discuss cases on the phone or through text messages.

  ‘So where are you, Chief?’

  ‘At a café in the New World. How about having a cup of coffee with me? It’s a French café called La Maison, with a poster outside sporting French girls dancing a bong bong dance at night. You won’t miss it.’

  ‘You really have the leisure time for a cup of coffee …’ But Yu too was quick to catch the cue. ‘I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

  Raising his hand, Inspector Chen signaled to the French waitress for another cup of coffee. This time she carried over a pot of black coffee and, after adding some into his cup, left the pot on the table.

  Sipping, he thought that some snacks might help to calm his upset stomach after too much coffee. Turning around, he glanced toward the glass counter containing a variety of French bakery products near the door.

  Following his glance, the waitress seated herself at a table outside, lit a cigarette, and blew out a smoke ring – likely in expectation of his making the new order. She could turn out to be one of the girls performing on the stage in three or four hours. Possibly the very glamorous one in the poster, in which she looked so unbelievably sexy. For the moment, however, she appeared a little sleepy, quite slipshod, barefoot in the discolored slippers, her golden hair disheveled though not without a suggestion of exotic charm.

  It was just not her moment yet – perhaps just like an investigator finding himself clueless, still at quite a distance from the conclusion.

  Then he saw another lone customer inside the café who was moving out to a wooden shelf close to the door, picking up a copy of a magazine and perching himself on a table beside, perhaps another customer waiting for the performance in the evening. Instead of opening the magazine, he was holding up a cellphone. But that cellphone holder was not talking or typing, not even reading or surfing, with his glance over the phone stealthily following the French waitress, who remained sitting there, humming to herself, her shoulder-length hair lighting up the somber wall behind, her bare toes tapping on the gray concrete ground.

  It dawned on Chen. The only other customer in La Maison was taking pictures or shooting a video of the French girl in secret. Possibly a hapless lover, but more likely a third-or-fourth class paparazzi planning to sell the video of a French dancer offstage – juxtaposed with those images of her onstage – for some small amount of money.

  Or perhaps not a small sum. Just about a month earlier, he had read about the scandal of a Sichuan city mayor falling out of office because of his intimate pictures with a naked girl posted online – the pictures for which his political rival paid quite a sum to a private investigator.

  Was the French waitress aware of it?

  Chen was not sure. For those pictures, she might not have to worry about a political scandal. On the contrary, she could be enjoying the moment of being filmed by someone’s camera – not merely enamored with her glamorous role in the limelight, but with her less glamorous moment as a tired waitress in the café.

  It was none of his business, though. Chen found himself almost being the one too many there, but there seemed to be something vaguely fascinating yet at the same time disturbing about the scene, bugging illusively at the back of his mind.

  Stirring the black coffee with a silver spoon, he had another thought rippling far away in his mind. Those pictures of Shanshan that Detective Huang had shown him in the Wuxi hotel.

  And it was another previously missing piece that threw him into panic. All of a sudden, he began sweating profusely. It was not that an implausible scenario, which made sense in the context of other pieces.

  He forgot about his stomach upset and took another large gulp from the mug.

  Detective Yu was not exactly surprised at the sight of Inspector Chen enjoying a cup of coffee in the New World. Nothing could be too surprising when it came to the inspector.

  ‘Anything new?’ Chen said as soon as Yu took a seat opposite him at the outside table.

  Yu went into a fairly detailed account of what he had thought and done about the mask, took a sip at the bitter coffee, before he went on with a question.

  ‘What’s the point of planting the masks at the scene? However reckless or desperate, the criminal knew it would be easier for others to trace a mask in that particular color.’

  ‘There must have been an irresistible u
rge for him to leave that signature at the crime scene, an urge to make a statement, which is of supreme importance, at least to himself, and that overwhelms the safety consideration.’

  ‘But even with such a mask as a potential clue, we still haven’t got the faintest idea pointing at the possible identity of the murderer. In Lianping’s latest text to Peiqin, Zhou’s already been announced as a suspect inside the newspaper.’

  ‘Peiqin and Lianping have really been texting each other a lot.’

  ‘Since their meeting in the Longhua Temple service, Peiqin has been talking about her from time to time, saying that she owes Lianping a big one for her presence at the temple. And the two like each other. Lianping truly goes out of her way to help when Peiqin asks her for it.’

  There was no immediate response from the chief inspector, and Yu changed the topic.

  ‘But back to the case, we don’t have much time left for us. The murderer will strike out again before the week is over.’

  ‘That’s true. This Friday. One victim a week. With Internal Security and Qin focusing on Zhou, we may not have the recourse to forestall such a move, even with the mask as a clue.’

  ‘What’s wrong, Chief? You are looking so pale.’

  ‘Too much coffee, I think. Coffee sickness. Yes. You’ve just mentioned the Buddhist service at the temple, where Lianping and Peiqin met for the first time. You wondered at the time, I still remember, what’s the point having the service, and now what’s the point planting the mask at the crime scene. For some, the point is surely there, though not visible or understandable to others. Peiqin went to the temple service because of the expectations from her relatives; I went there, to be honest, in return for her help over all these years; and Lianping went there because of the article she had to write about me – perhaps a little more than that, for all I could tell. In short, people all have a reason or point for what they believe they have to do. An absolute logic for it whether conscious or subconscious. Like the beginning of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.’

  Chen now looked ghastly pale, quite possibly more ‘coffee sick’ than he realized, but it was also possible he was carried away for some reason beyond Yu. When Chen went on in such a rambling, almost incomprehensible way, Yu knew from experience that ideas might have been jostling and juggling in the head of the enigmatic inspector. A monologue like that could have masked his desperate attempt to sort something out. Yu thought better of interrupting the train of his partner’s thought, but he could not help stopping Chen’s hand reaching out to add more coffee to his mug.