by Qiu Xiaolong
“For a second, you were walking to me out of a Tang poem.”
“Oh, here you go again with your quotations and interpretations. Am I seeing a poetry critic or a police officer this morning?”
“Well, it is not we who make the interpretation,” Chen said, “but the interpretation makes us—a critic or a cop.”
“Let me see,” she said, breaking into a smile. “It’s just like Tuishou practice, isn’t it? It’s not that we push Tuishou, but the practice pushes us.”
“You’re no stranger to deconstruction.”
“And you’re good at spouting poetically deconstructive nonsense.”
That was just another reason her company was always so enjoyable. She was not bookish, but she had read across a wide range of subjects, even the latest ones.
“Well, I used to be quite good at Taiji. At Tuishou too.”
“No kidding?”
“It’s years ago. I may have forgotten some techniques, but try me.”
Tuishou—or push-hand sparring exercise—was a special form of Taiji. Two people standing opposite each other, palms to palms, pushing and being pushed in a slow, spontaneous flow of rhythmic harmony. There were several people doing that near the Taiji group.
“It’s easy. Just keep your arms in constant contact,” she said, taking up his hands, pedantically, “and make sure that you push neither too little nor too much. Harmonious, natural, spontaneous. Tuishou values dissolving an oncoming force before striking a blow.”
She was a good instructor, but it did not take her long to find out that he was actually the more experienced. He could have pushed her off balance in the first few rounds, but he found this experience, with his palms pressed against hers, their bodies moving together in an effortless effort, too intimate to bring to a quick stop.
And it was really intimate—her face, her arms, her body, her gestures, the way she moved and was moved, her eyes shining into his eyes.
He did not want to push her too hard. But she was getting impatient, throwing more force into it. He rotated his left forearm to ward off her attack by turning his body slightly to the side. With a subtle technique of neutralizing her force, he drew in his chest, shifting his weight onto his right leg and pressing her left arm downward. She leaned forward too much.
He took the opportunity of pushing her back. She lost her balance, staggering forward. He reached out to take her in his arms.
She was blushing deeply, trying to disengage herself.
Since their first meeting, he had been resisting the temptation to hold her in his arms again—this time not by accident. Initially he was not sure what she might think of him. Perhaps he had a touch of an inferiority complex. What reason was there for him to believe that a pretty, promising reporter, almost ten years younger, would be interested in an entry-level cop? Then he learned that she had been married, a fact he had since been trying to overlook, for she had been married—he had kept telling himself—only nominally. Two or three months before their first meeting, her boyfriend, Yang Kejia, was about to leave for an approved study program in Japan. His father, lying in the hospital, gasped out his last wish to the two young people: that they would go to the city hall for a marriage license, even though the wedding could be postponed until after Yang’s return from Japan. It was a matter of Confucian significance that he leave this world with the satisfaction of seeing his only son married. Wang did not have the heart to say no, so she agreed. In a couple of weeks her father-in-law passed away, and then her husband defected in Japan, refusing to return to China. That was a terrible blow to her. As a wife, she was supposed to know everything about Yang’s movements, but she was totally in the dark. Chen believed the defector would not have discussed it with her in long-distance calls which could be tapped. But some Internal Security officers did not credit this, and she was questioned several times.
According to a colleague of hers, it would serve Yang right if, having left her in such a situation, she divorced him. But Chen had not discussed this with her. There was no hurry. He knew he liked her, but he had not made up his mind yet. In the meantime, he was happy to be with her whenever he could find the time.
“You know how to push,” she said, her hand still in his.
“No, I’ll never push you. It’s just the natural flow. But on second thought,” he said, gazing at her flushed face, “I do want to push you a little. What about a cup of coffee in the Riverside Café?”
“In full view of the Wenhui Building?”
“What’s wrong with that?” He could sense her hesitation. There was the possibility of their being seen together by her colleagues passing along the Bund. He himself had heard of gossip about them in the bureau. “Come on, this is the nineties.”
“You don’t have to push for that,” she said.
The Riverside Café consisted of several chairs and tables on a large cedar deck jutting out above the river. They climbed a silver-gray wrought-iron spiral staircase and chose a white plastic table under a large flowered umbrella that offered a wonderful view of the river and the colorful vessels coming and going slowly along its eastern bank. A waitress brought them coffee, juice, and a glass bowl of assorted fruit.
The coffee smelled fresh. So did the juice. She picked up the bottle and raised it to her mouth. Loosening the kerchief that secured her hair, she looked relaxed, her foot hooked over the horizontal bar of the chair.
He could not help wondering at the change in her face in the sunlight. Every time he met her, he would seem to perceive something different in her. One moment she appeared to be a bluestocking, nibbling at the top of a fountain pen, mature and pensive, with the weight of fast-developing world news on her shoulders; the next moment she would come to him, a young girl in wooden sandals, scampering down the corridor. But on this May morning, she appeared to be a typical Shanghai girl, soft, casual, at ease in the company of the man she liked.
There was even a light green jade charm dangling on a thin red string over her bosom. Like most Shanghai girls, she, too, wore those small, superstitious trinkets. Then she began chewing a stick of gum, her head leaned back, blowing a bubble into the sunlight.
He did not feel the need to speak at the moment. Her breath, only inches away, was cool from the minty gum. He had intended to take her hand across the table, but instead, he tapped his finger on the paper napkin in front of her.
A sense of being up and above the Bund filled him.
“What’re you thinking about?” he said.
“What mask are you wearing at this moment—policeman or poet?”
“You’ve asked that for the second time. Are the two so contradictory?”
“Or a prosperous businessman from abroad?” she said, giggling. “You’re certainly dressed like one.”
He was wearing his dark suit, a white shirt, and one of his few ties that looked exotic, a gift from a former schoolmate, an owner of several high-tech companies in Toronto who had told him that the design on the tie represented a romantic scene in a modern Canadian play. There was no point in sitting with her in his police uniform.
“Or just a lover,” he said impulsively, “head over heels.” He met her gaze, guessing he had made himself as transparent as water. Not the water in the Huangpu River.
“You’re being impossible,” she said, smiling, “even in the middle of your murder investigation.”
It did slightly disturb him that he could be so sensitive to her attractiveness when he should have been concentrating on solving the case. When she was alive, Guan Hongying might have been as attractive. Especially in those pictures in the cloud-wrapped mountains, Guan posing in a variety of elegant attire, young, lively, vivacious. All in such a sharp contrast to that naked, swollen body pulled out of a black plastic garbage bag.
They sat at the table, not speaking for a couple of minutes, watching an antique-looking sampan swaying in the tide. A wave shook the sampan near the parrot wall, bringing down a cloth diaper from a clothesline stretched across the d
eck.
“A family sampan, the couple working down in the cabin,” he said, “and living there too.”
“A torn sail married to a broken oar,” she said, still chewing the gum.
A bubble of metaphor iridescent in the sun.
A half-naked baby was crawling out of the cabin under the tarpaulin, as if to satisfy their expectation, grinning at them like a Wuxi earthen doll.
For the moment, they felt they had the river to themselves.
Not the river, but the moment it starts rippling in your eyes . . .
He was on the track of a poem.
“Your mind is on the case again?”
“No, but now that you mention it,” he said, “there is something puzzling about it.”
“I’m no investigator,” she said, “but talking about it may help.“
Chief Inspector Chen had learned that verbalizing a case to an attentive listener was helpful. Even if the listener did not offer any constructive suggestions, sometimes questions alone from an untrained—or simply a new—perspective could open fresh paths of inquiry. So he started talking about the case. He was not worried about sharing information with her, even though she was a Wenhui reporter. She listened intently, her cheek lightly resting on her hand, then leaned forward across the table, gazing at him, the morning light of the city in her eyes.
“So here we are,” Chen said, having recapitulated the points he had discussed in the special group meeting the previous day, “with a number of unanswered questions. And the only fact we have established is that Guan left the dorm for a vacation around ten thirty on May tenth. As for what happened to her afterward, we have discovered nothing—except the caviar.”
“Nothing else suspicious?”
“Well, there is something else. Not really suspicious, but it just does not make sense to me. She was going somewhere on vacation, but no one knew where. People are usually so excited about their vacation that they will talk a lot about it.”
“That’s true,” she said, “but in her case, couldn’t her reserve result from a need for privacy?”
“That’s what we suspect, but the whole thing seemed to be just too secretive. Detective Yu has checked with all the travel agencies, and there’s no record with her name registered either.”
“Well, she might have traveled by herself.”
“That’s possible, but I doubt that a single young woman would travel all by herself. Unless she had some other people, or one man as her companion, I think it unlikely. That’s my hypothesis, and the caviar fits. What’s more, last October she had made another trip. We know where she went that time—the Yellow Mountains. But whether she went there by herself, with some- one, or with a group, we don’t know. Yu has researched that, too, but we have no leads.”
“That’s strange,” she said, her eyes half closing in thought. “No train goes there. You have to change to a bus in Wuhu, and to get from the bus terminal to the mountains, you have to walk quite a distance. And then to find a hotel for yourself in the mountains can be a headache. It saves you a lot of money, and energy, too, to go with a tourist group. I’ve been there, I know.”
“Yes, and another thing. According to the records at the department store, her vacation in the mountains lasted about ten days, from the end of September through the first week in October. Detective Yu has contacted all the hotels there. But her name did not appear on any of their records.”
“Are you sure that she went there?”
“Positive. She showed her colleagues some pictures from the mountains. In fact, I’ve seen quite a few in her album.”
“She must have a lot of pictures.”
“For a young pretty woman, not too many,” he said, “but some are really good.”
Indeed, some of the pictures appeared highly professional. Still vivid in his mind, for instance, was the one of Guan leaning against the famous mountain pine, with white clouds woven into her streaming black hair. It would do for the cover of a travel brochure.
“Are there pictures of her with other people?”
“A lot of them, of course. One with Comrade Deng Xiaoping himself.”
“Pictures from that mountain trip?” Wang said, picking up a grape with her slender fingers.
“Well, I’m not sure,” Chen said, “but I don’t think so. That’s something—”
Something worth looking into.
“Supposing Guan made the trip all by herself,” she was peeling the grape. “She could have met some people in the mountains staying in the same hotel, talked about the scenery, taken pictures for each other—”
“And taken pictures together. You’re absolutely right,” he said. “And some of the tourists would have worn their name tags.”
“Name tags—yes, that’s possible,” she said, “if they were traveling in a group.”
“I have looked through all the albums,” he said, stealing a glance at his wristwatch, “but I may do it all over again.”
“And as soon as possible,” she was putting the peeled grape into his saucer.
The grape appeared greenish, almost transparent against her lovely fingers.
He reached across to take her hands on the table. They had a sort of mutual understanding that he appreciated: Chief Inspector Chen had to investigate.
She shook her head, looking as though she was about to say something, but changed her mind.
“What is it?”
“I’m concerned about you.” She withdrew her hand with a small frown.
“Why?”
“Your obsession with the case,” she said softly, standing up from the chair. “An ambitious man is not necessarily obnoxious, but you are going a bit too far, Comrade Chief Inspector.”
“No, I’m not that obsessed with the case,” he said. “In fact, you are just reminding me of two lines—’With the green skirt of yours in my mind, everywhere, / Everywhere I step over the grass ever so lightly’.”
“You don’t have to cover yourself by quoting those lines,” she said, starting to move toward the staircase. “I know how much your work means to you.”
“Not as much as you think,” he said, imitating the way she shook her head, “certainly not as much as you.”
“How is your mother?” she was changing the subject again.
“Fine. Still waiting for me to grow up, get hitched, make her a grandma.”
“Work on growing up first.”
Wang could be sarcastic at times, but it might just be a defense mechanism. So he laughed.
“I am wondering,” he said, “if we can get together again—this weekend.”
“To talk more about the investigation?” she teased him goodhumoredly.
“If you like,” he said. “I also want to have dinner with you at my place.”
“Fine, I’d like that, but not this weekend,” she said. “I’ll check my calendar. I’m not a gourmet cook like your ‘Overseas Chinese’ pal, but I can work up a pretty good Sichuan pickle. How does that sound?”
“It sounds terrific.”
She turned to him with an enigmatic smile, “You don’t have to accompany me to my office.”
So he stood, lit a cigarette, and watched her crossing the street, coming to a stop at the central safety island. There she looked back, the green skirt trailing across the long curve of her legs, and her smile filled him with a surprising sense of completeness. She waved to him before she turned into the side street leading to the Wenhui building.
Of late, he had been giving some thought to the future of their relationship.
Politically she would not make an ideal choice. Her future would be affected by her so-called husband’s defection. Even after her divorce, the stain in her file would remain. It would not have mattered that much if Chen had not been a chief inspector. As an “emerging Party member cadre,” he knew the Party authorities were aware of every step he was making. So were some of his colleagues, who would be pleased to see his career tarnished by such a union.
A married w
oman, though no more than nominally married, was not “culturally desirable,” either.
But what was the point of being a chief inspector if he could not care for a woman he liked?
He threw away his cigarette. One decision he had made: he was walking to Qinghe Lane instead of taking a bus. He wanted to do some thinking.
Crossing the safety island, he stepped over the green grass lightly.
Chapter 12
This May morning was bright and despite the early heat the air was fresh.
The traffic wound itself into a terrible snarl along Henan Road. Chief Inspector Chen cut his way through the long line of cars, congratulating himself on his decision to walk. New construction was under way everywhere, and detour signs popped up like mushrooms after a spring rain, adding to the traffic problem. Near the Eastern Bookstore, he noticed another old building being pulled down. In its place, a five-star hotel would soon arise. An imported red convertible rolled by. A young girl sitting by the driver waved her hand at a postman late on his round.
Shanghai was changing rapidly.
So were the people.
So was he, seeing more and more meaning in his police work, though he stepped into a bookstore, and spent several minutes looking for a poetry collection. Chief Inspector Chen was not that obsessed with the case, nor with its political significance for his career.
There was, perhaps, one side of him that had always been bookish, nostalgic, or introspective. Sentimental, or even somewhat sensual in a classic Chinese version—”fragrance from the red sleeves imbues your reading at night.” But there was also another side to him. Not so much antiromantic as realistic, though not as ambitious as Wang had accused him of being at the Riverfront Café. A line memorized in his college years came back to him: “The most useless being is a poor bookworm.” It was by Gao Shi, a well-known general, successful in the mid-Tang dynasty, and a first-class poet at the same time.
General Gao had lived in an era when the once prosperous Tang dynasty was torn by famine, corruption, and wars, so the talented poet-general had taken it upon himself to make a difference— through his political commitment—for the country.