by Qiu Xiaolong
“So basically we’re not going to do anything until the criminal strikes again?”
“No, we are not going to close the case as unsolved. What I’m saying is—um, it’s not realistic to expect a quick solution. Eventually, we should be able to find the murderer, but that takes time.”
“How long?” Zhang asked, sitting even more upright.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s an important political case, comrade. That’s something we should all be well aware of.”
“Well—” Yu paused.
There was a lot more Yu wanted to say, but he knew it was not the moment. Chief Inspector Chen had not yet made any comment. As for the commissar’s position, Yu thought he understood it well; this might well be the old man’s last case. So naturally the commissar wanted to make a big deal out of it. Full of political significance. A finishing touch to his life-long career. It was easy for Zhang to talk about politics, of course, since he did not have to attend to the daily work of the squad.
“There may be something in Comrade Yu’s analysis.” Zhang stood up, opening his notebook, and cleared his throat before he began his formal speech. “It is a difficult case. We may spend hours and hours before seeing any real progress. But it’s not an ordinary case, comrades. Guan was a model worker of national renown. She dedicated her life to the cause of communism. Her tragic death has already had a very negative impact. I’m a retired old man, but here I am, working together with you. Why? It’s a special case assigned by the Party. People are watching our work. We cannot fail. So we have to find a new approach.”
Yu enjoyed a reputation as a detail man: patient, meticulous, sometimes even plodding. It was possible to waste time, he knew, on ninety-nine leads and to break the case on the hundredth. That was the way of almost all homicide investigations. He had no objection to that. They just had too many cases on their hands. But there was no “new approach”—as Commissar Zhang called it—except the ones in those mysteries Chief Inspector Chen translated.
“Rely on the people,” Zhang was continuing. “That’s where our strength lies. Chairman Mao told us that long ago. Once we get the people’s help, there’s no difficulty we cannot overcome . . .”
Yu had had it. It was more and more difficult for him to concentrate on the commissar’s lecture filled with such political rhetoric. At the bureau political education sessions, Yu sometimes could choose to sit in the back of the room and let the speaker’s voice lull him while doing meditation exercises. But that morning he could not.
Then Chief Inspector Chen took the floor. “Commissar Zhang’s instruction is very important. And Comrade Yu Guangming’s analysis makes a lot of sense, too. It is tough, especially when we’ve got so many other cases on our hands. Comrade Yu has done a lot of work. Most of it, I would say. If we have so far made little progress, it’s my responsibility. There is one point, however, that has just come to my attention. In fact, Comrade Yu’s analysis is bringing it into focus.
“According to the autopsy report, Guan had a meal between one and two hours before her death. The food she had consumed included, among other things, a small portion of caviar. Caviar. Expensive Russian sturgeon caviar. Now there are only three or four top-class Shanghai restaurants serving caviar. I’ve done some research. It’s hard to believe that she would have chosen to dine at one of those expensive restaurants by herself, with a heavy suitcase at her feet. Think about the timing, too. She left home around ten thirty; she died between one and two. So the meal would have to have been eaten around midnight. Now, according to my investigation, not a single restaurant served caviar to a Chinese customer on that particular night. If this information is accurate, it means she had caviar somewhere else. With somebody who kept caviar at home.”
“That’s something indeed,” Yu said.
“Hold on,” Zhang raised his hand to interrupt Chen. “So you are suggesting the murderer could be somebody Guan knew?”
“Yes, that’s a possible scenario: perhaps the murderer’s no stranger to Guan. After she left home, they met somewhere and had a midnight meal together. Possibly at his home. Afterward they had sex—remember, there were no real bruises on her body. Then he murdered her, moved her body into his car, and dumped it in the canal. The plastic bag would make sense, too, if the crime was committed at the murderer’s home. He was afraid of being seen in the act of moving the body—by his neighbors or other people. Furthermore, that also explains the choice of that far-away canal, where he hoped that the body would never be found, or at least not for a long time. By then no one might be able to recognize her, or remember with whom she was involved.”
“So you don’t think it’s a political case either,” Zhang said, “though you are offering a different theory.”
“Whether it is a political case or not, I cannot say, but I think there are some things worth further investigation.”
Yu was even more surprised than Zhang by Chen’s speech.
The plastic bag was not something new, but the caviar was something they had not discussed. Whether Chen had purposely saved it for the meeting, Yu was not sure. It appeared to be a master stroke, like in those of western mysteries Chen had been translating, perhaps.
Was Chen doing this to impress Commissar Zhang?
Yu did not think so, for Chen did not like the old man either.
It was nonetheless a crucial detail Yu had overlooked, that portion of caviar.
“But according to the information at the department store,” Yu said, “Guan was not seeing anyone at the time of her death.”
“That puzzles me,” Chen said, “but that’s where we should be digging more deeply.”
“Well, do it your way,” Zhang said, standing up to leave. “At least, that’s preferable to waiting for the criminal to act again.”
So Detective Yu was placed in an unfavorable light. A cop too lazy to attend to the important details. Yu could read the negative message in the old man’s knitted brows.
“I overlooked the caviar,” Yu said to Chen.
“It just occurred to me last night. So I have not had time to discuss it with you.”
“Caviar. Honestly, I have no idea what it is.”
Afterward he made a phone call to Peiqin. “Do you know what caviar is?”
“Yes, I’ve read about it in nineteenth-century Russian novels,” she said, “but I have never tasted it.”
“Has your restaurant ever served caviar?”
“You’re kidding, Guangming. Ours is such a shabby place. Only five-star hotels like the Jinjiang might have it.”
“Is it very expensive?”
“A tiny dish would cost you several hundred Yuan, I think,”
she added. “Why your sudden interest?”
“Oh, just something about the case.”
Chapter 11
Chief Inspector Chen woke with a slight suggestion of headache. A shower did not help much. It would be difficult to shake off the feeling during the day. And it happened to be a day in which he had so much work cut out for him.
He was no workaholic, not in the way some of his colleagues claimed. It was true, however, that often it was only after he had successfully forced himself into working like a devil, that he felt the most energetic.
He had just received a rare collection of Yan Shu’s poems—a hand-bound rice paper edition, in a deep blue cloth case. An unexpected present from Beijing, in return for the copy of the Wenhui Daily he had sent.
There was a short note inside the cloth case.
Chief Inspector Chen:
Thanks for your poem. I like it very much. Sorry I cannot send you anything of my own in return. I alighted on a collection of Yan Shu’s poems in Liulichang Antique Fair a couple of weeks ago, and I thought you would like it. Also, congratulations on your promotion.
Ling
Of course he liked it. He recalled his days of wandering around in the Liulichang Antique Fair, then a poor student from Beijing Foreign Language Institute, examining ol
d books without being able to buy any of them. He had seen something like it only once—in the rare book section of the Beijing Library where Ling had compared his ecstatic sampling to that of the silverfish lost in the pages of the ancient volumes. Such a hand-bound collection could be very expensive, but it was worth it. The feel of the white rice paper was exquisite. It almost conveyed a message from antiquity. Like his, Ling’s note did not say much. The choice of such a book spoke for itself. Ling had not changed. She was still fond of poetry—or of his poetry.
He should have told Ling about the seminar in October, but he did not want her to think that he had thrown himself into politics. For the moment, however, he did not have to think too much about it. There was nothing like spending a late May morning wandering about in the green ivy-covered world of the celebrated Song dynasty poet.
He flipped through the pages.
Helpless the flowers fall,
The swallows return, seemingly no strangers.
A brilliant couplet. Often people see something for the first time, but with the feeling of having seen it before, of déjà vu. Such a phenomenon had been attributed to the effects of half-remembered dreams or else to misfiring neurons in the brain. Whatever the interpretation, Chen, too, had a feeling—both strange and familiar—like the swallows in Yan’s lines, of having visited Guan’s world. As he held the book in his hand, the feeling was mixed with the elusive memories of his college years in Beijing. . . .
It was disturbing. Guan no longer represented an esoteric character. The case had somehow become a personal challenge. People had seen Guan as a national model worker, ever politically correct, an embodiment of the Party’s much propagandized myth. But he did not. There must have been something else, something different in her. Just what it was, he could not say yet, but until he was able to explain it to himself, he would continue to be oppressed by an indefinable uneasiness.
It was not just because of the caviar.
He had talked to a lot of people who seemed to have thought well of her. Politically, of course. Personally, they knew practically nothing. It seemed that she had so committed herself to her political role that she could play no other part, personal or otherwise. A point Detective Yu had made.
She had no time, perhaps. Eight hours a day, six days a week, she had to be busy living up to what was expected of her. She had to attend numerous meetings and to make all the presentations at Party conferences, in addition to the long working hours she put in at the store. Everything was possible, of course, according to Communist Party propaganda. Comrade Lei Feng had represented just such a selfless miracle. There was no mention at all of his personal life in The Diary of Comrade Lei Feng, which had sold millions of copies. It was revealed in the late eighties, however, that the diary was a pure fabrication by a professional writing team commissioned by the Central Party Committee.
Political correctness was a shell. It should not, could not, spell an absence of personal life. And that could have been said of himself as well, Chief Inspector Chen thought.
He suspected he needed a respite from the case, at least for a short while. And at once it came to him that what he wanted most—one of his first thoughts on awakening—was to be with Wang Feng. He put his hand on the phone, but he hesitated. It might not be the right time. Then he remembered her call earlier in the week. A ready excuse. A breakfast invitation would commit him to no more than a pleasant morning. A hard-working chief inspector was entitled to the company of a reporter who had written about him.
“How are you this morning, Wang?”
“I’m fine. But it’s early, not even seven o’clock.”
“Well, I woke up thinking of you.”
“Thank you for telling me this. So you could have called earlier— three o’clock if you happened to roll out of your bed then.”
“I’ve just come up with an idea. The Peach Blossom Restaurant is serving morning tea again. It’s quite close to your home. What about having a cup of tea with me?”
“Only a cup of tea?”
“You know it’s more than that—dimson or Guangdong-style morning tea, along with a wide variety of delicacies.”
“There’s a deadline I’ve got to meet today. I’ll feel drowsy after a full meal, even at ten o’clock in the morning. But you can meet me on the Bund, close to Number Seven dock, opposite the Peace Hotel. I’ll be practicing Taiji.”
“The Bund, Number Seven dock. I know where it is,” he said. “Can you make it there in fifteen minutes?”
“I’m still in bed. You really want me to come running to you barefoot?”
“Why not? See you in half an hour then.” He put down the phone.
It was an intimate allusion between them. Arising from their first meeting. He was pleased with the way she had said it over the phone.
He had met Wang about a year earlier. On a Friday afternoon, Party Secretary Li told him to go to the office of the Wenhui Daily, saying that a reporter named Wang Feng would like to interview him there. Why a Wenhui reporter should be interested in seeing a junior police officer, Chen could not figure out.
The Wenhui building was a twelve-story sandstone edifice located on Tiantong Road, commanding a magnificent view over the Bund. Chen arrived there about two hours late, having been delayed with a traffic violation case. At the entrance, there was an old man sitting at something like a front desk. When Chen handed over his name card, he was told Wang was not in her office. The doorman was positive, however, that she was somewhere in the building. So Chen took a seat in the lobby, waited, and started to read a paperback mystery, The Fallen Curtain. It was not much of a lobby, just a small space for a couple of chairs in front of an old-fashioned elevator. There were not too many people coming and going at the moment. Soon he was lost in Ruth Rendell’s world until a clatter of footsteps caught his attention.
A tall, slender girl was walking out of the elevator with a pink plastic pail over her bare arm. Wenhui must have a shower room for its staff, he thought. She was in her early twenties, wearing a low-cut T-shirt and shorts. Her wet hair was tied up with a sky-blue kerchief. Her wooden slippers clapped crisply against the floor. Probably a college student doing an internship, he thought. She certainly scampered like one. And then she stumbled, pitching forward.
Throwing away the book, he jumped up and caught her in his arms.
Standing on one slipper, her hand on his shoulder for balance, she reached one bare foot out to the other slipper which had been flung into the corner. She blushed, disengaging herself from his embrace. It took her only a second to regain her balance, but she remained deeply embarrassed.
She did not have to be, Chen thought with a wry humor, feeling her wet hair brushing against his face, her body smelling of some pleasant soap.
In traditional Chinese society, however, such physical contact would have been enough to result in a wedding contract. “Once in a man’s arms, always in his arms.”
“Wang Feng,” the doorman said. “The police officer has been waiting for you.”
She was the reporter who had summoned him there. And the interview afterward led to something he had not expected.
Afterward, he had joked about her coming barefoot to him. “Coming barefoot” was an allusion to a story in classical Chinese literature. In 800 B.C., the Duke of Zhou, anxious to meet a wise man who would help him unify the county, ran barefoot out of the hall to greet him. The phrase was later used to exaggerate one’s eagerness to meet a guest.
It did not apply to them. She had happened to fall, walking out of the bathroom, and he had happened to be there, catching her in his arms. That was all. Now a year later, he was walking toward her again. At the intersection of the Bund and Nanjing road, the top of the Wenhui office building shimmered behind the Peace Hotel.
The morning’s in the arms of the Bund, her hair dew-sparkled . . .
The Bund was alive with people, sitting on the concrete benches, standing by the bank, watching the dark yellow tide rolling in, singing
snatches of Beijing operas along with the birds in the cages hung on the trees. A light haze of May heat trembled over the colored-stone walk. A long line of tourists stretched out, leading to the cruise ticket offices, near the Bridge Park. At the Lujiazhui ferry, he saw a swarthy sailor coiling the hawsers as a small group of students looked on curiously. The boat appeared crowded, as always, and as the bell rang urgently, men and women hurried to their destination, and then to new destinations. A tunnel project was said to be under construction beneath the river, so people would soon have alternative ways to get across the water. Several petrels glided over the waves, their wings glistening white in the sunlight, as if flying out of a calendar illustration. The river, though still polluted, showed some signs of improvement.
Exhilaration quickened his steps.
There were groups of people doing Taiji along the Bund, and he saw Wang in one of them.
History does not repeat itself.
One of the first things he noticed was the long green skirt covering her feet. She was striking a sequence of Taiji poses: a white crane flashing its wings, a master strumming the lute, a wild horse shaking its mane, a hunter grasping a bird’s tail. All the poses were in imitation of nature—the essence of Taiji.
A mixed feeling came over him as he stood gazing at her. Nothing was wrong with Taiji itself. It was an ancient cultural heritage following the Taoist philosophy of subduing the hard by being soft, the yin-yang principle. As a means to keep fit, Chen himself had practiced it, but he was troubled by the fact that she was the only young woman in the group, her black hair held back by a blue cotton scarf.
“Hi,” he greeted her.
“What are you staring at?” Wang said, walking toward him. She was wearing white casual shoes.