by Qiu Xiaolong
The air in the small office became thick with cigarette smoke.
“So what do you think we should do?” Chen asked, pushing open the window.
Detective Yu let a few seconds go by, and then asked a question of his own, “Do we have to take the case?”
“Well, that’s a good question.”
“I responded to the call because there was nobody else in the office and I couldn’t find you. But we’re only the special case squad.”
It was true. Nominally their squad did not have to take a case until it was declared “special” by the bureau—sometimes at the request of another province, and sometimes by other squads, but more often than not, for an unstated political reason. To raid a private bookstore selling pirated hard-core CDs, for instance, would not be difficult or special for a cop, but it could get a lot of attention, providing material for newspaper headlines. “Special,” in other words, was applied when the bureau had to adjust its focus to meet political needs. In the case of a nameless female body found in a small remote canal, they would ordinarily turn it over to the sex homicide group, to whom it apparently belonged.
That explained Detective Yu’s lack of interest in the case though he had taken the phone call and examined the crime scene. Chen riffled through the pictures before he picked one up. “Let’s have this picture cropped and enlarged. Someone may be able to recognize her.”
“What if no one comes forward?”
“Well, then we must start canvassing—if we’re going to take the case.”
“Canvassing indeed,” Yu picked a tiny tea leaf from his teeth.
Most detectives disliked this drudgery.
“How many men can we call upon for the job?”
“Not too many, Comrade Chief Inspector,” Yu said. “We’re short. Qing Xiaotong’s on his honeymoon, Li Dong’s just resigned to open a fruit shop, and Liu Longxiang’s in the hospital with a broken arm. In fact, it’s just you and me on the so-called special case squad at the moment.”
Chen was aware of Yu’s acerbic undertone. His accelerated promotion was going to take some living down, not to mention his new apartment. A certain measure of antagonism was hardly surprising, especially from Detective Yu, who had entered the force earlier and had technical training and a police family background. But Chief Inspector Chen was anxious to be judged on what he could achieve in his position, not on the way he had risen to it. So he was tempted to take the case. A real homicide case. From the very beginning. But Detective Yu was right. They were short of men, and with many “special” cases on their hands, they could not afford to take on a case that just happened to come their way. A sexual murder case—with no clue or witness, already a cold case.
“I’ll talk to Party Secretary Li about it, but in the meantime, we will have the picture copied and prints distributed to the branch offices. It’s a necessary routine—whoever is going to take the case.” Chen then added, “I’ll go to the canal if I have some time in the afternoon. When you were there, it must have been quite dark.”
“Well, it’s a poetic scene there,” Yu said, standing up, grinding out his cigarette, and making no attempt to conceal the sarcasm in his tone. “You may come up with a couple of wonderful lines.”
“You never can tell.”
After Yu left, Chen brooded at his desk for a while. He was rather upset with the antagonism shown by his assistant. His casual remark about Chen’s passion for poetry was another jab. However, Yu’s critique was true—to some extent.
Chen had not intended to be a cop—not in his college years. He had been a published poet as well as a top student at Beijing Foreign Language Institute. He had his mind set on literary pursuits. Just one month before graduation, he had applied to an M.A. program in English and American literature, a decision his mother had approved, since Chen’s father had been a well-known professor of the Neo-Confucian school. He was informed, however, that a promising job was waiting for him in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the early eighties, all graduates had their jobs assigned by the authorities, and as he was a student on the president’s honor roll, his file had been requested by the ministry. A diplomatic career was not his own choice, even though such a position was generally considered fantastic for an English major. Then, at the last minute, there was another unexpected change. In the course of the family background check by the authorities, one of his uncles was found to have been a counterrevolutionary executed in the early 1950s. It was an uncle whom he had never seen, but such a family connection was politically unthinkable for an aspirant to a diplomatic position. So his name was removed from the ministry’s list. He was then assigned to a job in the Shanghai Police Bureau, where, for the first few years, his work consisted of translating a police interrogation procedure handbook, which no one wanted to read, and of writing political reports for Party Secretary Li, which Chen himself did not want to write. So it was only in the last couple of years that Chen had actually worked as a cop, first at the entry level, now suddenly as a chief inspector, but responsible only for the “special cases” turned over to him by others. And Yu, like some people in the bureau, had his com- plaints fueled not only by Chen’s rapid rise under Deng’s cadre policy, but also by his continuing literary pursuits, which were conventionally—and conveniently—viewed as a deviation from his professional commitment.
Chen read through the case report for a second time, and then realized that it was lunchtime. As he stepped out, he found a message for him in the large office. It must have been left before his arrival that morning:
Hi, it’s Lu. I’m working at the restaurant. Our restaurant. Moscow Suburb. A gourmet paradise. It’s important I talk to you. Give me a call at 638-0843.
Overseas Chinese Lu talked just like that—excited and ebullient. Chen dialed the number.
“Moscow Suburb.”
“Lu, what’s up?”
“Oh, you. How did it go last night?”
“Fine. We were together, weren’t we?”
“No, I mean what happened after we left—between you and Wang?”
“Nothing. We danced a few more dances, and then she left.”
“What a shame, old pal,” Lu said. “You’re a chief inspector for nothing. You cannot detect even the most obvious signal.”
“What signal?”
“When we left, she agreed to stay on—alone with you. She really meant for the night. An absolutely unmistakable signal. She’s crazy about you.”
“Well, I’m not so sure,” Chen said. “Let’s talk about something else. How are things with you.”
“Yes, Ruru wants me to thank you again. You’re our lucky star. Everything is in good shape. All the documents are signed. I’ve already moved in. Our own restaurant. I just need to change its sign. A big neon sign in both Chinese and English.”
“Hold on—Chinese and Russian, right?”
“Who speaks Russian nowadays? But in addition to our food, we will have something else genuinely Russian, I tell you, and you can eat them, too.” Lu chuckled mysteriously. “With your generous loan, we’ll celebrate the grand opening next Monday. A booming success.”
“You’re so sure about it.”
“Well, I have a trump card. Everybody will be amazed.”
“What is it?”
“Come and see for yourself. And eat to your heart’s content.”
“Sure. I won’t miss your Russian cabbage soup for anything, Overseas Chinese.”
“So you’re a gourmet too. See you.”
Other than that, however, they did not have too much in common, Chief Inspector Chen reflected with a smile, putting down the phone. It was in their high-school years that Lu had gotten his nickname. Not just because Lu wore a Western-style jacket during the Cultural Revolution. More because Lu’s father had owned a fur store before 1949, and was thus a capitalist. That had made Lu a “black kid.” In the late sixties, “Overseas Chinese” was by no means a positive term, for it could be used to depict somebody as politically unreliable
, connected with the Western world, or associated with an extravagant bourgeois life style. But Lu took an obstinate pride in cultivating his “decadent” image—brewing coffee, baking apple pie, tossing fruit salad, and of course, wearing a Western-style suit at the dinner table. Lu befriended Chen, whose father was a “bourgeois professor,” another “black kid.” Birds of a feather, comforting each other. Lu made a habit of treating Chen whenever he made a successful cooking experiment at home. After graduating from high school, as an educated youth Lu had been sent to the countryside and spent ten years being reformed by the poor and lower-middle-class peasants. He only returned to Shanghai in the early eighties. When Chen, too, moved back from Beijing, they met with the realization that they were different, and yet all those years they had stayed friends, and they came to appreciate each other’s differences while sharing their common delight in gourmet food.
Twenty years has passed like a dream.
It is a wonder that we are still here, together.
Two lines from Chen Yuyi, a Song dynasty poet, came to Chief Inspector Chen, but he was not sure whether he had omitted one or two words.
Chapter 4
After a nongourmet lunch in the bureau canteen, Chen went out to buy a collection of poems by Chen Yuyi.
Several new privately run bookstores had just appeared on Fuzhou Road, fairly close to the bureau. Small stores, but with excellent service. Around the corner of Shandong Road, Chen saw a tall apartment building, seemingly the first finished in a series of the new developments. On the other side of the street there was still a rambling cluster of low houses, remnants of the early twenties, showing no signs of change to come in the near future. It was there, in the mixture of the old and the new, that he stepped into a family bookstore. The shop was tiny but impressively stacked with old and new books. He heard a baby’s babble just behind a bamboo-bead curtain at the back. His search for Chen Yuyi was not successful. In the section of classical Chinese literature, there was an impressive array of martial arts novels by Hong Kong and Taiwan authors, but practically nothing else. When he was about to leave, he lighted on a copy of his late father’s collection of Neo-Confucian studies, half hidden under a bikini-clad girlie poster marked “For Sale.” He took the book to the counter.
“You have an eye for books,” the owner said, holding a bowl of rice covered with green cabbage. “It’s a hundred and twenty Yuan.”
“What?” he gasped.
“It was once criticized as a rightist attack against the Party, out of print even in the fifties.”
“Look,” he said, grasping the book. “My father wrote this book, and the original price was less than two Yuan.”
“Really,” the owner studied him for a moment. “All right, fifty Yuan, with the poster free, for you.”
Chen took the book without accepting the additional offer. There was a tiny scar on the poster girl’s bare shoulder, which somehow reminded him of the picture of the dead girl pulled out of the plastic bag. There were one or two pictures of her in the mortuary, even less covered than the bikini-girl. He remembered having seen a scar somewhere on her body.
Or somebody else’s. He was momentarily confused.
He started leafing through his father’s book on his way back to the bureau, a reading habit his father had disapproved of, but the subject of the book made it difficult for him not to.
Back in the office, Chen tried to make himself a cup of Gongfu tea, another gourmet practice he had learned from Overseas Chinese Lu, so that he could read with more enhanced concentration. He had just put a pinch of tea leaves into a tiny cup when the phone started ringing.
It was Party Secretary Li Guohua. Li was not only the number-one Party official in the bureau, but also Chen’s mentor. Li had introduced Chen to the Party, spared no pains showing him the ropes, and advanced him to his present position. Everybody in the bureau knew Li’s legendary talent for political infighting— an almost infallible instinct for picking the winner in inner-Party conflicts all those years. A young officer at the entrance level in the early fifties, Li had stepped his way through the debris of numerous political movements, rising finally to the top of the bureau. So most people saw it as another master stroke that Li had hand-picked Chen as his potential successor, though some called it a risky investment. Superintendent Zhao, for one, had recommended another candidate for the position of chief inspector.
“Is everything okay with your new apartment, Comrade Chief Inspector?”
“Thank you, Comrade Party Secretary Li. Everything’s fine.”
“That’s good. And the work in the office?”
“Detective Yu got a case yesterday. A female body in a canal in Qingpu County. We’re short of men, so I’m wondering if we should take it.”
“Turn over the case to other people. Yours is a special case squad.”
“But it was Detective Yu who went to examine the scene. We would like to handle a case from the beginning.”
“You may have no time for it. There’s some news I want to tell you. You’re going to attend the seminar sponsored by the Central Party Institute in October.”
“The seminar of the Central Party Institute!”
“Yes, it is a great opportunity, isn’t it? I put your name on the recommendation list last month. A long shot, I thought, but today they informed us of their decision. I’ll make a copy of the official admission letter for you. You have come a long way, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen.”
“You have done so much for me, Party Secretary Li. How can I ever thank you enough?” He added after a pause, “Maybe that’s another reason for us to take the case. I cannot be a chief inspector without solving some cases on my own.”
“Well, it’s up to you,” Li said. “But you have to be prepared for the seminar. How much the seminar can mean for your future career, you don’t need me to tell you. More important work is waiting for you, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen.”
The talk with Party Secretary Li actually prompted Chen to do some investigation before making any decision about the case. He went down to the bureau’s vehicle service group, took out a motorcycle, and borrowed a county map from the bureau library.
It was hot outside. The cicadas, napping in the languid trees, turned silent. Even the mailbox by the curb appeared drowsy. Chen took off his uniform and rode out in his short-sleeved T-shirt.
The trip to Baili Canal turned out to be rather difficult. Once past the Hongqiao Industrial Area, there were few road signs. He had to ask for directions at a ramshackle gas station, but the only worker there was taking a midday nap, his saliva dribbling onto the counter. Then the scenery became more rustic, with lines of hills visible here and there in the distance, and a solitary curl of white smoke rising like a string of notes from an invisible roof somewhere. According to the map, the canal should not be too far away. At a turn of the road, there appeared a winding path, like an entrance into a village, and he saw a girl selling big bowls of tea on a wooden bench. No more than thirteen or fourteen, she sat quietly on a low stool, wearing her ponytail tied with a girlish bow, reading a book. There were no customers. He wondered if there would be any all day. Only a few coins glittered in a cracked tin cup beside a bulging satchel at her feet. Apparently not a peddler, not one out there for profit, just a kid from the village, still small and innocent, reading against the idyllic background— perhaps a poetry collection in her hand, providing a convenience to thirsty travelers who might pass by.
Little things, but all of them seemed to be adding up into something like an image he had once come across in Tang and Song dynasty writings:
Slender, supple, she’s just thirteen or so,
The tip of a cardamom bud, in early March.
“Excuse me,” he said, pulling up his motorcycle by the roadside. “Do you know where Baili Canal is?”
“Baili Canal, oh yes, straight ahead, about five or six miles.”
“Thank you.”
He also asked for a big bowl of tea.
&n
bsp; “Three cents,” the girl said, without looking up from her book.
“What are you reading?”
“Visual Basics.”
The answer did not fit the picture in his mind. But it should not be surprising, he thought. He, too, had been taking an evening class on Windows applications. It was the age of the information highway.
“Oh, computer programming,” he said. “Very interesting.”
“Do you also study it?”
“Just a little.”
“Need some CDs?”
“What?”
“Dirt cheap. A lot of advanced software on it. Chinese Star, TwinBridge, Dragon Dictionary, and all kinds of fonts, traditional and simplified . . .”
“No, thank you,” he said, taking out a one-Yuan bill.
The CDs she offered might be incredibly cheap. He had heard people talking about pirated products, but he did not want to have anything to do with them, not as a chief inspector.
“I’m afraid I don’t have enough change for you.”
“Just give me all you have.”
The little girl scooped out the coins to give him, and put the one Yuan bill in her purse, instead of into the tin cup at her feet. A cautious teenage profit-maker in her way. She then resumed her readings in cyberspace, the bow on her ponytail fluttering like a butterfly in a breath of air.
But his earlier mood was gone.
What irony. The wistful thoughts about the innocent tip of a cardamom bud, a solitary curl of white smoke, an unlost innocence in a rural background, a poetry collection . . . And a lapse in his professional perspective. Not until he had ridden another two or three miles did he realize that he should have done something about the CD business—as a chief inspector. Perhaps he had been too absent minded, in a “poetic trance,” and then too surprised by the realities of the world. The episode came to him like an echo of his colleagues’ criticism: Chief Inspector Chen was too “poetic” to be a cop.
It was past two o’clock when he reached the canal.