by Qiu Xiaolong
“Yes, we can do that,” Chen said. “And we’ll use some of our special case group funds for the reward. We have left no stone unturned, haven’t we?”
Detective Yu shrugged his shoulders before leaving the cubicle.
Except one, Chief Inspector Chen thought. Guan Hongying’s mother. He had refrained from discussing this with Yu, who did not get along well with the commissar.
The old lady had been visited by Commissar Zhang, who had gotten nothing from her. A late-stage Alzheimer’s patient, she was totally deranged, unable to provide any information. It was not the commissar’s fault. But an Alzheimer’s patient might not be deranged all the time. There were days when the light could miraculously break through the clouds of her mind.
Chen decided to try his luck.
After lunch, he dialed Wang Feng. She was not in the office, so he left a message expressing his thanks to her. Then he left. On his way to the bus stop he bought several copies of the Wenhui Daily at the post office on Sichuan Road. Somehow he liked the editor’s note even more than the poem itself. He had not told many of his friends about his promotion to chief inspectorship, so the newspaper would do the job for him. Among those friends he wanted to mail the newspaper to, there was one in Beijing. He felt that he had to say something about his being in this position, an explanation to a dear friend who had not envisioned such a career for him. He thought for a moment, but he ended up scribbling only a sentence underneath the poem. Somewhat ironically self-defensive, and ambiguous, too. It could be about the poem as well as about his work: If you work hard enough at something, it begins to make itself part of you, even though you do not really like it and know that part isn’t real.
He cut out the section of the newspaper, put it into an envelope, addressed it, and dropped it into a mailbox.
Then he took a bus to Ankang, the nursing home on Huashan Road.
The nursing home arrangement was not common. It was not culturally correct to keep one’s aged parent in such an institution. Not even in the nineties. Besides, with only two or three nursing homes in Shanghai, few could have managed to move in there, especially in the case of an Alzheimer’s patient. Undoubtedly her mother’s admission had been due to Guan’s social and Party status.
He introduced himself at the front desk of the nursing home, A young nurse told him to wait in the reception room. To be a bad news bearer was anything but pleasant, he reflected, as he waited. The only cold comfort he could find was that Guan’s mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s, might be spared the shock of her daughter’s violent death. The old woman’s life had been a tough one, as he had learned from the file. An arranged marriage in her childhood, and then for years her husband had worked as a high-school teacher in Chengdu, while she was a worker in Shanghai Number 6 Textile Mill. The distance between the two required more than two days’ travel by train. Once a year was all he could have afforded to visit her. In the fifties, job relocation was out of the question for either of them. Jobs, like everything else, were assigned once and for all by the local authorities. So all those years she had been a “single mother,” taking care of Guan Hongying in the dorm of Number 6 Textile Mill. Her husband passed away before his retirement. When her daughter got her job and her Party membership, the old woman broke down. Shortly afterward she had been admitted to the nursing home.
At last, the old woman appeared, shuffling, with a striking array of pins in her gray hair. She was thin, sullen-faced, perhaps in her early sixties. Her felt slippers made a strange sound on the floor.
“What do you want?”
Chen exchanged glances with the nurse standing beside the old woman.
“She is not clear here,” the nurse said, pointing at her own head.
“Your daughter wants me to say hi to you,” Chen said.
“I have no daughter. No room for a daughter. My husband lives in the dorm in Chengdu.”
“You have one, aunt. She works in Shanghai First Department Store.”
“First Department Store. Oh yes, I bought a couple of pins there early this morning. Aren’t they beautiful?”
Clearly the old woman was living in another world. She had nothing in her hand, but she was making a gesture of showing something to him.
Whatever might happen, she did not have to accept the disasters of this world. Or was she merely such a scared woman, anticipating such dreadful news, that she had shut herself up?
“Yes, they are beautiful,” he said.
She might have been attractive in her day. Now everything about her was shrunken. Motionless, she sat there, staring vacantly ahead, waiting for him to go. The look of apathy was not unmixed, he reflected, with a touch of apprehension. There was no point trying to gather any information from the old woman.
A worm safe and secure inside its cocoon.
He insisted on helping her back to her room. The room, holding a dozen iron beds, appeared congested. The aisle between them was so narrow that one could only stand sideways. There was a rattan rocker at the foot of her bed, a radio on the nightstand. No air conditioning, though a single ceiling fan for the whole room was working. The last thing he noticed was a dried bun, partly chewed, shriveled, on the windowsill above her bed. A period to a life story. One of the ordinary Chinese people, working hard, getting little, not complaining, and suffering a lot.
What influence could such a life have exerted on Guan?
The daughter had taken a different road.
There was something about the case, Chief Inspector Chen felt vaguely, something mystifying him, challenging him, and drawing him in an unknown direction. He decided to walk home. Sometimes he thought better while walking.
He stopped at a traditional Chinese pharmacy and bought a box of Jinsheng pills. A halfhearted believer in Chinese herbal medicine, he assumed that frustration had somehow eroded the balance of his essence. And he needed something extra to bolster his whole system. Chewing at a bitter Jinsheng pill, he thought that a possible alternative approach to the case would be to find out how Guan had become a national model worker. In the literary criticism he had studied, it would be termed the biographical approach. Only its result might not be so reliable, either. Who could have expected that he would have become a chief inspector of police?
It was almost seven when he reached home. He turned on the TV and watched for a while. Several Beijing opera players were doing a series of somersaults, flourishing sabers and swords in the dark. The Cross Road, a traditional Beijing opera, he recollected, about fighting at night without knowing who’s who.
He dialed Commissar Zhang. A formality, since Chen did not have anything to report.
“Believe in the people. Our strength comes from our close connection to them,” Commissar Zhang concluded their conversation. It was inevitable: Commissar Zhang had to give such an instruction.
Chen got up and went into the kitchen. There was half a pot of steamed rice left in the refrigerator. He took the rice out, added some water, and put it on the gas stove. The kitchen wall no longer appeared immaculately white. It would not take too many weeks to turn it into an oil-and-smoke-stained map. An exhaust fan could solve the problem, but he could not afford one. He looked for some leftovers. There were none. Finally, he dug out a tiny plastic bag of dried mustard, a present from his aunt in Ningbo. He put a few pieces on the rice, and swallowed the watery meal trying not to taste too much of it.
“Chef Kang’s Instant Noodles.” A TV commercial flashed through his mind as he stood by the gas stove. The plastic-bowl- contained-noodles might be a solution, he reflected, putting the dried mustard back. Again, the problem was his tight budget. After the loan to Overseas Chinese Lu, Chief Inspector Chen had to live like Comrade Lei Feng in the early sixties.
At the level of a chief inspector, his monthly pay was 560 Yuan, plus all his bonuses under various titles, which added up to 250 more. His rent was fairly inexpensive. Together with utilities, it was less than 100 Yuan, but he had to spend half of his income on food. As a bachel
or, he did not cook much at home; he ate at the bureau canteen.
A great help in the last few years had been the advances he earned from his translations, but at this moment he was not working on anything. He had not had the time, nor the energy— nor even the interest—since he had taken over the Guan case. The case did not make sense, not the sense he found in the mysteries he had been translating. Still, getting another advance was possible. He could promise the editor that he would complete the job by October. He needed such a deadline for himself, too.
Instead he started to summarize on a piece of paper beside the bowl what he had learned so far about the case. All the odds and ends of information he had been collecting and storing during the week, without having them sorted out and pieced together to consider where they could possibly lead, filled a sheet of paper. In the end, however, he tore up the paper in frustration. Perhaps Detective Yu was right. Possibly it was just one of those “insoluble” sexual murder cases. The bureau had had enough of them.
He knew he could not fall asleep. Often insomnia was the effect of little things coming together. A poem rejected without a rejection slip, a crazy woman cursing in a crowded bus, or a new shirt missing from the wardrobe. This night, something about the Guan case vanquished sleep.
The night was long.
What might have crowded into Guan’s mind during such a long night? He thought of a poem by the mid–Tang dynasty poet Wang Changling:
Boudoir-sheltered, the young lady knows no worries,
Fashionably dressed, she looks out of the window in spring.
What a view of green willow shoots—all of a sudden:
She regrets having sent her love away fighting for fame.
So after the flashlight along the corridor, after the shadows shifting on the sleepless wall, after the cold sweat in the dark, solitary dorm room, Guan, too, could have been thinking of the price paid for fame.
What’s the difference?
In the Tang dynasty, more than a thousand years earlier, the girl had been unable to console herself because she had sent her lover far away in pursuit of fame, and in the nineties, Guan couldn’t because she had kept herself too busy pursuing fame.
What about Chief Inspector Chen himself?
There was a bitter taste in his mouth.
Sometime after two, when he had slid into that floating area between sleep and waking, he felt hungry again. The image of the dried bun on the window came back to his mind.
And another image with it.
Caviar.
Only once had he tasted caviar. It was years earlier, at the International Friendship Club in Beijing, where at the time only foreign visitors were admitted and served. He was there with a drunken English professor who insisted on treating him to caviar. Chen had read about it in Russian novels. Actually he did not like it too much, though afterward the fact he had tasted caviar took Overseas Chinese Lu down a peg or two.
Things had been changing. Nowadays anybody could go to the International Friendship Club. A few new luxurious hotels also served caviar. Guan could have had it in one of those hotels, though not too many people could have afforded to order it—on that particular night.
It would not be difficult to find out.
Caviar—he jotted the word on the back of a matchbox.
Then he felt ready to fall asleep.
Chapter 10
It was a humid Friday morning for May.
Detective Yu had slept fitfully, tossing and turning half of the night. As a result, he was feeling more tired than the night before, with patches of partially forgotten dreams hovering in his mind.
Peiqin was concerned. She made a bowl of sticky rice dumplings, a favorite breakfast for him, and sat with him at the table. Yu finished the dumplings in silence.
Finally, as he was ready to leave for the bureau, she said, “You’re burning yourself out, Guangming.”
“No, it’s just I’ve not slept well,” he said. “Don’t worry about me.”
When Yu stepped into the bureau meeting room, the restless feeling surged up again. The topic of the meeting, which had been requested by Commissar Zhang, was the progress of the investigation.
A week had passed since the special case group had taken the case. The team, formed with such a fanfare of political jargon, had made little progress. Detective Yu had been working long hours, making numerous phone calls, interviewing a number of people, discussing all the possible scenarios with Chief Inspector Chen, and making quite a few reports to Commissar Zhang, too. Yet there was no breakthrough in sight. In routine police work when a case went beyond a week without a solid lead, it might as well be thrown into the “open” file. Yu had learned from experience. In other words, it was the time to close the case as unsolved.
It was not the first time in the bureau’s history that this had happened, nor would it be the last.
Yu sat beside the window, smoking a cigarette. The streets of Shanghai were spread out beneath his gaze, gray and black roofs with curls of peaceful white smoke undulating into the distance. Yet he seemed to smell crime smoldering in the heart of the city. Skimming a copy of the bureau newsletter, he read of several robberies, each bigger than the other, and seven reports of rape in the last night alone. And then new cases of prostitution, even in the upper area of the city.
As the other divisions were so short of manpower, a number of cases had been designated as “special” and pushed over to their squad, but they were in no better shape. Qing Xiaotong had come back from his honeymoon, but with that dreamy look in his eyes, not really back to work, and Liu Longxiang was still recovering from his injury. With Chief Inspector Chen’s increasingly busy schedule of meetings and other activities, Detective Yu had to take on the main responsibility for the squad.
Why should they spend so much time on one case?
Political priority, of course—Yu knew the answer. To hell with politics. It’s a homicide case.
But others did not think so. Commissar Zhang, for one, sitting straight at the head of the table, wearing the neat but nondescript Mao suit, high buttoned as always, holding a pen in his hand, and leafing through a leather notebook. The commissar had never discussed anything with him, as far as Yu could remember, except politics. What could possibly be up that grizzled, skinny commissar’s sleeve, Yu wondered.
Looking at Chief Inspector Chen, who nodded at him, Detective Yu was the first to take the floor, “We have already put a lot of hours into the investigation. For my part, I’ve talked to the general manager of the First Department Store as well as Guan’s colleagues. In addition, I have checked with the Shanghai Taxi Bureau and a number of travel agencies. I’d like to sum up some important aspects of my work.
“A national model worker, Guan lived a model life, too, dedicated to the Communist cause, way too busy with all her Party activities for anything else. She seemed never to have dated anyone, nor was she involved with anyone at the time of her death. Needless to say, she did an excellent job at the store. With her position there, she might have been the envy of some people, but there’s no reason to suspect that this made her a murderer’s target.
“As for her activities on the day she was murdered, according to her colleagues, there was nothing unusual about her during that day. All routine work. Lunch at the canteen around twelve o’clock, and a Party meeting in the afternoon. She mentioned to a colleague that she was going to take some vacation time, but did not say where. Not too far away, not for long, it was assumed. Otherwise she should have submitted a written request to the general manager. She didn’t. The last time she was seen in the store was around seven ten, after her shift, which was not unusual for her. She went back to the dorm, where she was last seen at about ten thirty or a bit later, carrying a suitcase, alone, presumably leaving for her vacation.
“Now comes the difficult part. Where was she going? There are so many tourist groups nowadays. I’ve checked all of the local travel agencies, but Guan’s name was not registered with any of them. Of
course, she could have chosen to travel by herself. To travel by air would have been out of the question. Guan’s name was not registered with any of the airlines. She might have gone to the railway station. In her neighborhood, no bus goes directly to the station. She might have walked to Xizhuang Road for Bus Number Sixty-four. The last scheduled bus arrives there at eleven thirty-five; after that there’s one every hour. Again it’s rather unusual for a young woman alone to carry a heavy suitcase along the street, when she might easily miss the last bus.
“So whether she was going to travel with a group or by herself, there’s reason to assume that she got into a taxi after leaving the dorm. But she did not finish the trip. Somewhere along the way, she was attacked and murdered by someone, who could be no one other than the driver. That also explains how her body came to be found in the canal. A taxi driver would have the means of transporting the body to dump it into a distant canal. That’s my hypothesis, and that’s why I have been conducting my investigation at the taxi bureau.
“My original plan was to check copies of all drivers’ receipts for the night to focus on those who failed to show any transaction during those few hours of the night. But according to the bureau, taxi drivers do not always give receipts, so there is no way to account for their activities. In fact, a considerable number of the drivers showed no business for the whole night—for tax avoidance reasons.”
“Hold on, Comrade Detective Yu,” Commissar Zhang interrupted. “Have you done any investigation into the political aspects of the case?”
“Well, as for the political aspects, I don’t think I have seen any. The murderer would have been a stranger to her. For her part, there would have been no reason for her to reveal her identity to a taxi driver. So it’s possible that he might not know her identity yet.”
“So what’s your suggestion for the next stage of the investigation?” Zhang continued, without changing his position in the chair, or the expression on his face.
“At present, with no evidence, and no witness,” Yu said, “there’s not much we can do. Let the case run its natural course. A rapist is a repeater, so sooner or later he will strike again. In the meantime, we will keep in close touch with the taxi bureau and travel agencies; hopefully, some new information will turn up. In fact, the taxi bureau has promised to give me a list of possible suspects, those drivers with something suspicious in their history. I have not gotten it yet.”