by Mai Jia
‘What are you talking about, Chief of Staff Wu?’ Gu Xiaomeng shot back.
‘He’s just being nice,’ Section Chief Jin chipped in. ‘He’s complimenting you on your looks.’
Wu Zhiguo saw that Xiaomeng was about to say something, so he shushed her with his hand. ‘Do you know who killed Commander Qian? It was someone from this very estate! This place used to belong to some big gangster – they say he’d laid up enough cash to buy the whole of West Lake and that all of his gold bars are somewhere in this house, or in the grounds at least. That’s why the estate’s changed hands so many times: everyone wants to find the stash, and that included Commander Qian, but nobody’s had any luck – so far.’
Everybody had heard the story before.
Chief of Staff Wu stood up. ‘Go to bed, everyone. There’s nothing more to discuss. If you want to waste your time on pointless speculation, then try and work out where the old gangster hid his cash.’ He laughed. ‘Go to bed, go to bed – see how late it is. Tomorrow, when Commander Zhang arrives, we’ll find out what’s going on.’
Everyone went to their rooms. By that time it was already well past 1 a.m.
3
The following day, just as the sun was rising and before the mists that veiled West Lake had dispersed, Commander Zhang’s black car was already bumping its way along the shoreside road.
Commander Zhang Yiting had been born into an ordinary family in Anhui province, but from a very early age it was clear that he was unusually intelligent. At eighteen he took first place in the provincial examinations for the imperial bureaucracy and seemed destined for a prestigious job in the civil service of the Qing dynasty. But, like a bolt from the blue, the Revolution of 1911 destroyed his dreams, and for many years afterwards nothing went right for him. He was ambitious to serve his country but condemned to remain on the sidelines. Too often he was treated with contempt by others; too often he found himself at the mercy of misfortunes he’d done nothing to deserve. This situation lasted until the Japanese installed their treasured collaborator Wang Jingwei in Nanjing. Only then, when Zhang Yiting was in his fifties, the hair at his temples already turning white, did his future began to look bright. He became Qian Huyi’s deputy: Vice-Commander of the ECCC.
But what kind of future lay in store for him? A year earlier, when he’d returned home to attend his mother’s funeral, one of the villagers had poured a bucket of shit over him. He was so furious that he grabbed a gun off a subordinate and fired at the villager. He didn’t kill him – the man just lost a bit of skin off his leg – but for Zhang Yiting this marked the end of an era. He understood that he would never be able to go home again, and he decided to carry on down the path he’d chosen with redoubled determination. So when his boss Qian Huyi was murdered and the rumours flying around were such that none of his colleagues dared step into the role, he accepted the promotion, exhibiting surprising courage and boldness.
That was almost a year ago now, and he’d never regretted his decision, not least because he had no other choice. Now, as he thought about all that had happened the previous night, and all that was about to happen at the Tan Estate, he had exactly the same feeling: he had no other choice.
The black car skirted the lake, followed the road up to the Tan Estate and after a few blasts on the horn came to a halt at a high wall. Sentries shouldering guns stood to attention outside the main gate and the guards ushered the Commander through. It was 7.30 a.m. – he had indeed come at the earliest possible opportunity.
Before him was a T-shaped grey-brick building with a black-tiled roof, very much in the traditional style, and a pretty but not at all practical grille door that was nowhere near high enough to stop a determined person from climbing over. It was here that the Tan family had quite brazenly installed a brothel. The sign that now hung over the door said it was an officers’ club, which was pretty much the same thing.
The car traced a circle round the large open space in front of the officers’ club and then turned right, in the direction of the rear courtyard. It drove through an area densely planted with phoenix-tail bamboo and on down a narrow road between stands of imperial zhennan trees. Commander Zhang caught a glimpse of the two buildings to the east and west, and then, as the car passed an ornate rockery overgrown with weeds and a wisteria-covered pergola, he saw that Secret-Police Chief Wang Tianxiang was waiting respectfully on the terrace of the western building.
Standing to attention behind the Police Chief was a sentry with a Mauser pistol at his hip, and behind the sentry was a wooden signboard, newly erected, which read: ‘Military Area. No Admittance for Unauthorized Personnel.’ There was also a freshly painted white line demarcating the area. This had all been put in place by Police Chief Wang during the night.
Since everyone had gone to bed very late the night before and hadn’t expected Commander Zhang to arrive so early, the five ECCC officers had all got up late. Indeed, Gu Xiaomeng was still in bed when he turned up. To have the Commander arrive at such an early hour was kind of flattering, but it brought home the seriousness of their mission. Even more so when they came out of the house to go to breakfast and saw the sentries standing to attention and the white line encircling the building.
The dining room was in the officers’ club in the front courtyard. Police Chief Wang appeared to have been waiting for them and he escorted them the whole way. Although he hadn’t slept at all the night before, he was evidently fully alert and seemed very pleased with himself. He was acting as if they were a group of VIPs who’d travelled extremely long distances and this too made everyone feel like they were engaged in something significant, because ordinarily he never behaved like that.
Once everyone had vacated the west building, two people dressed in plain clothes and carrying toolboxes slipped across from the east building. The fat little Staff Officer Jiang led the way. They looked over the whole house inside and out, from the loft to the cellars, as if they were inspecting the wiring. Commander Zhang had already had his breakfast, so he joined the workmen in their search of the house.
4
It was a classic little Western-style house: two storeys and an attic. The attic, however, had already been sealed off.
There were four bedrooms upstairs, but one of them was locked, leaving three. Section Chief Jin Shenghuo had been given the small room at the end of the corridor, and the two women, Gu Xiaomeng and Li Ningyu, had been allocated the next room along, which was arranged like a normal guest bedroom with two single beds, a pair of wickerwork chairs and a desk. This had previously been Commander Qian Huyi’s study; the rack for drying calligraphy brushes still hung outside the window. Opposite that was another guest room, currently locked. Beyond the stairwell was the main bedroom, given over to Chief of Staff Wu Zhiguo, which stretched the width of the building. It was very luxurious, with a little balcony at the front, and a huge terrace at the back complete with marble pillars and a grapevine growing up the trellis.
A few years earlier, Commander Zhang had accompanied his then boss, Qian Huyi, on a visit here and the place had been in a real mess, with the floorboards taken up, the furniture all topsy-turvy, cracks in the walls and holes in the ceiling. It was a house that had been through the wars. Even so, he’d been shocked by the extravagance of the place: the floorboards were made of sandalwood, the furniture of mahogany, there was a European-style sofa and chaise longue, chandeliers of crystal, glazed floor tiles, a flush toilet… Everything was of top quality and really expensive. Qian Huyi had it all repaired and it really was lovely, even better than the general’s suite at the officers’ club. After Qian Huyi’s death, people kept urging Commander Zhang to move in there, and he did seriously consider it. But there were reasons to hesitate and in the end he decided against it.
A few months ago, he’d sent some people to remove as many of the expensive fixtures and fittings as they could, after which the two buildings were turned over to the officers’ club. They were told to outfit the rooms for guests and to start using them.
There were two reasons why Commander Zhang had made these arrangements. One was that he thought it a shame to leave the buildings empty. The other was that he was very unhappy about the disgusting goings-on at the officers’ club in the front courtyard. Unlike Qian Huyi, Commander Zhang was a well-educated man and he simply couldn’t condone such activities. He was worried that someone else might find it equally abhorrent and make a formal complaint to his superiors, in which case he would lose his job. But he was also worried that if he closed the club down, he would annoy some other bigwig in the Imperial Japanese Army, which would result in him losing his job anyway.
It was much more exhausting for him to be a commander, a puppet of the Japanese, than it had been for Qian Huyi, and this was all thanks to his past as a young intellectual in the imperial era. It was like a burden permanently strapped to his back: the weight of history continually grinding him down. But he couldn’t bear to give up the power and wealth he’d acquired under the new regime, so he had to put up with the problems that came with it. He either had to close his eyes to the things he found unacceptable, or, if they represented a real threat to his present advantages, he had to try and resolve them, talk people round to his way of thinking.
He had the two buildings redecorated with a view to moving the brothel, and the foul activities associated with it, to the rear part of the estate. This would get it out of plain sight without getting rid of it altogether; surely no bigwig was going to object to that! It seemed to be the best of both worlds.
It was a good idea, but it failed. The prostitutes who’d been working in the front part of the estate when the murders happened were scared witless; they were familiar with the rear courtyard and had seen for themselves the scene of the crime. But the girls who’d arrived after the murders were even more scared: they had to listen to the others talking about it, and that was truly horrifying. Fear is catching, and like a malignant growth, each teller made the story worse. It got to the point where nobody dared so much as go for a walk in the rear courtyard, not even in broad daylight. It had happened right there, and not so long ago either, and the ghosts of the dead were still wandering through the bamboo forests, unappeased. The girls weren’t taking any chances. No way were they moving – they would rather quit than move!
Commander Zhang decided to get rid of that group of girls and bring in some new ones, but that turned out to be harder than recruiting an entire division of troops. In the end, his plans came to naught. The buildings were left empty and he was left out of pocket. This made him so angry, he would have happily pulled them down brick by brick.
Yesterday evening, when he’d discovered what was afoot and realized he’d have to find somewhere to accommodate his five ECCC employees, he’d immediately thought of the Tan Estate. Finally, he could put the place to good use! And now that he was on site, he was even more delighted with his arrangements.
There were two buildings and two groups of people, each doing their own completely separate thing – yes, very nice. But why had Police Chief Wang arranged the rooms the way he had? Since there were four bedrooms upstairs, he’d assumed each person would have their own room. He didn’t know why one room was locked, obliging Gu Xiaomeng and Li Ningyu to share.
Secretary Bai had been given one of the two smaller downstairs rooms and the sentries had the other. The third, bigger downstairs room had been arranged as a conference room by pushing some tables together; it looked very nice, but, again, Commander Zhang wondered why the Police Chief had gone to so much effort when the sitting room, on the other side of the house, would have made a perfectly good meeting room, with its cane chairs and coffee tables. He didn’t understand what Wang Tianxiang was up to, but he was impressed nonetheless. Actually, this was very much the Commander’s everyday approach to the man; he usually tried to think well of the Police Chief and avoided quarrelling with him.
He sat down at the head of the conference table, pulled some papers out of his briefcase and began to flick through them, ready for the coming meeting. A sarcastic smile flitted across his face. There was a hint of contempt in there too.
5
Police Chief Wang Tianxiang presided over the meeting, but Commander Zhang was the principal speaker. He opened with some platitudes about their present campaign against Communist insurgents. He stressed that there were new trends in the insurgency and that the attacks by the Communist underground were more numerous, more violent and more difficult to deal with than the situation with the Nationalists, which was at least open warfare.
The Communists and the Nationalists were also fighting among themselves – to the amusement of the puppet government. The repercussions from the Wannan Incident had not yet died down: even now, several months later, the sound of gunfire and the smell of blood seemed to hang in the air. In the Wannan Incident, a crack division of anti-Japanese troops consisting of nine thousand Communists had been turned by the Nationalists into several thousand corpses and more than two thousand stragglers in the space of just a couple of days. Some Communist soldiers had escaped, however, infiltrating Japanese-held areas around Hangzhou and making contact with the underground there; others had gone their own way, launching guerrilla-style attacks and spreading the scope of resistance activities.
As the Commander spoke, everyone could see that he was in an unusually good mood: even though he could hardly be pleased about his subject matter (which must have been a huge headache for him), there was a smile on his face and his tone of voice was cheerful. ‘As you all know,’ he continued, ‘yesterday afternoon our bosses in Nanjing sent us a top-secret message informing us that a senior Communist known as “K” has set out from Xi’an and will arrive in Hangzhou within the next few days. We know he’s coming here to plot against us. We’ve seen a lot of Communist Party conspiracies, so that in itself is no surprise, but this time they’re up to something big and they’re being very careful to keep it all secret, so we have to take this very seriously indeed.’
The Commander paused to emphasize his point. The group were to be left in no doubt about the gravity of the situation and the importance of their mission, whatever that turned out to be.
‘K has been dispatched by Zhou Enlai himself to preside as his representative over a meeting of all the leaders of the Communist underground here in Zhejiang province. That meeting is to be held at 11 p.m. on the 29th of this month at the Agate Belvedere Inn on Mount Fenghuang. Just four days from now.’ He straightened his back and raised his voice slightly. ‘Let us be clear: four days from now, the Communists are going to hold a meeting with the express aim of coordinating their resistance activities. If this meeting goes ahead, they’ll be able to band together, those scattered guerrillas will become a unified force, and instead of the minor inconveniences we’ve had to deal with so far, we’ll be up against a powerful army. Quashing this insurgency will become a lot more difficult. So we’re lucky indeed to have got this intelligence.’
He looked around at his ECCC officers. ‘As the saying goes, good luck comes in twos, and yesterday was my lucky day – and a lucky day for all of you sitting round this table. In the afternoon we received the all-important telegram from Nanjing. Then in the evening—’ here, he pointed at Wang Tianxiang ‘—Police Chief Wang brought me another present. And what was that…?’
He picked up a fat dictionary and showed it to the assembled company.
‘It’s right here.’
The book was filthy, as if it had been dragged through the mud.
‘What is this? It’s the recently published Comprehensive Dictionary of the Chinese Language – maybe you have a copy yourselves at home. You may well be thinking, what sort of present is that? I thought the same to begin with. But then Police Chief Wang explained that this was no ordinary dictionary and that a huge secret was concealed within it. Which was why an unlucky Communist agent threw it out of the window just moments before he was arrested, hoping to destroy the evidence.’
He turned to Wang Tianxiang. ‘That
’s right, is it not, Police Chief Wang?’
Wang Tianxiang nodded, and picked up the story. ‘This Communist agent was living in one of the staff apartments at Qingchun Middle School. His rooms were up on the second floor and had a window at the back, so I posted a guard outside in case he tried to escape that way. In the end he didn’t get away, there wasn’t time, but he threw this book out. All he cared about was getting rid of this dictionary, so I knew there was something important here.’
‘Yes, I thought exactly the same,’ Commander Zhang interjected. ‘So I examined the dictionary really carefully. I checked every single page, read it through until my head was spinning, but I didn’t find a thing. There was nothing written anywhere, nothing out of the ordinary.’
He flicked through the fat dictionary with a theatrical flourish, brandishing it in front of the bemused ECCC officers.
‘Eventually, I went out for a walk, setting down the cup of tea I’d been holding before I left. I didn’t even notice that I’d put the cup down on the dictionary, but when I came back, a miracle had occurred – some blurred writing had appeared on the flyleaf! The heat of the teacup had revealed a series of Arabic numerals in a little circle, like a stamp. That really was a stroke of luck. I immediately understood that with the application of more heat, more would appear. So I fetched a hot-water bottle and look what happened!’
He held the dictionary open at the flypaper. Its coarse yellowish paper was covered with white Arabic numerals, arranged as if in a telegram, in row after row. Although the numbers weren’t very clear, they could still be read:
120 3201 009 2117 477 1461…
741 8816 187 5661 273 4215…
There were dozens of lines like that.
Commander Zhang jabbed his finger at the group and asked, ‘What is this?’