Becoming Inspector Chen

by Qiu Xiaolong

  ‘Yes, I know, I’ve read a poem about it,’ Chen said in a hurry, having to prevent Lu from digressing into a prolonged epicurean discourse. ‘Zhang Jiying, a high-ranking official of the Jin dynasty, missed the fish so much that he resigned the highest official position under the emperor for the live fish available only in his home town—’

  ‘Oh, the fish soup,’ Lu said, jumping up in haste. ‘It’s time to throw in a pinch of fresh ground black pepper.’

  With the bowl of soup placed on the table, the talk was lost in an unbroken string of Lu’s exclamations, his spoon delving in and out of the soup, clinking in a quick succession. He would not talk about anything else, and the steaming hot, milky white fish soup truly exceeded Chen’s expectations.

  When they finished the last spoonful of the fish soup, it was almost ten.

  ‘The location of the crime scene is close to the railway station, right?’ Lu asked abruptly, picking his teeth with a bamboo toothpick in satisfaction.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because of the inspiration of the fish soup. Don’t worry, Inspector Chen. I’ll let you know as early as possible.’

  At noon the next day, as Chen was about to go down to the bureau canteen, he got a phone call from Lu.

  ‘Yes, it’s such an “imperial recipe” restaurant, known only in a limited circle. Obscenely expensive. And it’s not far from the railway station.’

  ‘You’re so effective, Lu.’

  ‘The chef/owner is said to be from a family that used to cook for the Qing royal family. Just one room with enough space for a round table. No printed menu. The chef chooses from whatever he sees as the freshest in the food market for the day. It’s so popular in the city that customers have to make reservations weeks beforehand. Because of the exorbitant expense, customers may choose to share the table with others, and the courses are served the Western way, with a separate spoon for each dish, and a small plate in front of each customer. Each of the customers just needs to pay for his or her portion—’

  ‘That’s intriguing,’ Chen said, having to cut short Lu’s passionate report again. ‘Give me the name and address. I’m going there right now.’

  He left the bureau without getting lunch in the canteen.

  About half an hour later, he found himself arriving at an old shikumen house tucked in a winding narrow lane on North Zhejiang Road. There was a small sign barely noticeable on the doorframe: Aixin’s Imperial Recipes. From the half-open door, he looked into a littered courtyard, which served as a sort of open kitchen, with large basins containing fish and shrimp and vegetable and some other indescribable stuff. Across the courtyard, he had a partial view of a front room sporting a round table already covered with a white tablecloth, and a lacquer screen behind that partially obscured an old ladder leading precariously to a retrofitted attic, which probably served as the bedroom for the family.

  A middle-aged man was preparing for the dinner in a corner of the courtyard. Wearing a purple Qing-style vest plus a gray apron instead of a white uniform, he was busy scaling a live fish on a bamboo cutting board.

  ‘The swallows, once the visitors to the noble families, / are now flying into the ordinary homes …’

  Chen thought of the Tang dynasty lines as he approached the chef in the supposedly imperial Qing costume, and introduced himself as a writer working on an article about the restaurant, taking out his Writers Association membership card in support of his statement.

  ‘This is a restaurant carrying on the glorious Chinese culinary tradition for thousands of years. I appreciate what you are doing here. And I will do my best for the article.’

  The man in the purple vest turned out to be none other than the chef/owner and was surnamed Aixin, who apparently had no aversion to publicity.

  It was not a difficult role for Chen to play, truly being a member of that association, and a self-styled gourmet too. After spending ten minutes on rehearsed questions about the restaurant and the supposedly imperial recipes, he said, ‘For the purpose of the article, I’ve interviewed several gourmets in the city. One of them surnamed Lu has heard a lot about your restaurant, especially from an old friend of his.’

  Chen produced a notebook showing the picture of the dead man placed between the pages.

  ‘Oh, Mr Fu.’

  ‘Yes, that’s him,’ Chen said vaguely, registering the name Fu in his mind. ‘He’s one quite well known both in and out of the gourmet circle.’

  ‘I do not know about that, but he seems to be a modest, old-fashioned gentleman, never boasting and bragging about himself like some other customers here.’

  Judging by the present tense, Aixin had no knowledge that Fu – the man in the picture – had been killed at a location not far from the restaurant.

  ‘Well, tell me something about Mr Fu for the benefit of the article, particularly from your advantageous point of view. It’ll be a plus for the publicity of your restaurant.’

  ‘Mr Fu is a regular customer of ours. About five days ago. Hold on …’ Aixin said, turning to dig out a notebook from under a pile of old newspapers. ‘Yes, five days ago, he came over for dinner, sharing the round table with nine others, each with a small plate in front—’

  ‘Yes, that’s very practical, I mean the table-sharing arrangement. Anything else special about him?’

  ‘A really nice old gentleman, but he books only for himself, never bringing in any company with him. Quite well to do, apparently, though he’s never dressed like a Big Buck. He keeps pretty much to himself. So we know little about him.’

  ‘He called in for reservations here?’

  ‘Yes, we sometimes call him too. Because he wants us to keep him informed of anything new or exciting in our imperial recipes, and about the table-sharing opportunity, too. It’s not always available, you know.’

  ‘Do you have his phone number?’

  ‘The number of his neighborhood public phone station,’ Aixin said, taking out the address book. ‘He lives in a lane called Red Dust, on the corner of Jinling and Fujian Roads, in the former French Concession.’

  ‘Red Dust Lane!’ Chen said excitedly, copying the address in a notebook. ‘By the way, anything different about him that night – during his last visit to your restaurant?’

  ‘His last visit? No, nothing I can think of. He seemed to be satisfied as always. Been here more than fifteen times, I’d say. But why that question?’

  ‘For the article, I want it to be as objective as possible. It’s good to know that he’s not complaining or anything like that,’ Chen said, rising. ‘I’ll probably come back. Thank you so much, Aixin.’

  Then he noticed on a shelf a stainless-steel basin of fried fish chunks immersed in special brown sauce.

  ‘House specials. Made of live carp,’ Aixin said, with unmistakable pride. ‘Big wok, big fire, then immediately immersed in the special soy sauce with sugar and other secret spices for hours.’

  ‘That looks so delicious. I’ll have a few pieces for my mother.’

  Chen had the chef put two pieces in a plastic box. It was more expensive than he had imagined, but he did not have to tell her, and he was sure she would like the fish from the Imperial Recipes restaurant.

  On the way back to the bureau, Chen tried to think like a real cop. More likely than not, it was a case of a botched mugging, as Detective Ding had said, a scenario Chen was also inclined to.

  Still, there were things that didn’t seem to add up. For one, how could an old man in ordinary clothing have made a likely target for a desperate thug at that particular locale? Not to mention the fact that there was no sign of a struggle at the scene or on the body. Just one single vicious stab.

  And then something else in the crime scene report, too. With Fu’s wallet missing, a diamond ring was found in his watch pocket. As a possible scenario, the murderer could have been startled away by an unexpected passerby, but Fu’s body was not discovered until the next morning, at least five or six hours later.

  The loca
tion too lent itself to the puzzle. It was not one of the high-end residential areas where people walked around with their bulging wallets, but it was not a slum-like neighborhood either, which would be haunted with desperadoes.

  And with the identity of the dead established as an old man living in the center of the city, a new question came up. How was it possible that four or five days had passed without a missing person’s report submitted to the police?

  He played with the idea of making a visit to Red Dust Lane that afternoon. It was a lane not unfamiliar to him from his childhood, but with all his college years in Beijing, he had not been to the lane for a long time. He had thought of the lane as a page turned over in his life. But no, he was going there again.

  Was there something providential in it?

  Still, he decided to go back to the bureau first. Detective Ding seemed not to have been paying any special attention to the case.

  Would that change now, with the identity of the dead being discovered?

  Stepping into Detective Ding’s office, Chen reminded himself again that he was hardly a cop in the eyes of his colleagues.

  ‘It could have been nothing but coincidence, Detective Ding,’ Chen started with a diffident manner.

  ‘What do you mean, Chen?’ Ding said, eyeing him up and down.

  ‘I was having lunch with a friend – another impossible epicurean like Dr Xia. Among the cups, I mentioned what Dr Xia had told me about the body discovered on Zhejiang Road near the railway station. Particularly about the bizarre fusion of the food undissolved in the stomach of the dead. My friend said he knew which restaurant could have provided such an unbelievable meal of mixed cuisines.’

  ‘You’re kidding, Chen. He could tell the restaurant by what Dr Xia discovered on the autopsy table! What’s the name of your gourmet friend?’

  ‘Now that’s a favor I have to ask of you, Detective Ding. He does not want to get implicated in a homicide investigation. So I gave him my word that I would not give his name away.’

  ‘But how can that possibly be of any help, Chen? What’s the name of the restaurant then?’

  ‘Aixin’s Imperial Recipes.’

  ‘Aixin sounds like a Manchurian name.’

  ‘Yes, the chef/owner claims his great-grandfather served in the royal kitchen of the Qing dynasty. And Aixin also knows the name of the dead, too. Fu Donghua, a regular customer to his restaurant.’

  ‘Now that’s something. Tell me more about it.’

  ‘Fu was a resident of Red Dust Lane on the corner of Fujian and Jinling Roads, I’ve just learned.’ Chen decided to be vague about his visit to the restaurant, unsure about Detective Ding’s reaction regarding Chen’s stepping on his turf.

  ‘Really!’ Detective Ding said, hurrying to pick up the phone before Chen even had time to say another word. ‘Operator, I want the phone number of the neighborhood committee of Red Dust Lane, Huangpu District.’

  Chen hesitated, lingering there for a minute or two before he backed out without waiting for the phone call to get through to the neighborhood committee.

  For the following discussion, Chen’s company might not be needed, even though it was Chen who had provided the clue. As he was retreating, Detective Ding made a vague gesture with his raised hand, but did not really try to stop Chen.

  Back in the reading room, Chen picked up Roseanna, an Inspector Martin Beck mystery by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. It was ironic that the Swedish writers had set out to write about the evils of the Swedish capitalist society, but ended up producing one bestselling detective story after another, though with a determined social focus. It did not take long for him to get lost in the laborious investigation pushed on by the stubborn Swedish inspector, following a number of false clues.

  Before any decisive breakthrough came in that far-away investigation, however, the phone rang in the reading room.

  ‘Yes, that’s him, Mr Fu. Confirmed. He’s been missing for days. The neighborhood committee is gathering info for us,’ Detective Ding said at the other end of the line. ‘It’s a promising breakthrough, Chen. I’m going there first thing tomorrow morning. Let me know if there’s anything new from that gourmet friend of yours.’

  ‘It’s just a random harvest,’ Chen said, wondering at the plural pronoun ‘us’ used by Detective Ding.

  Early the next morning, on the way to Red Dust Lane, Detective Ding could not help having doubts about Chen’s ‘random harvest’.

  Cops do not believe much in coincidence. It appeared implausible for Chen’s friend to turn up at this opportune juncture to establish the identity of the dead, with nothing to go on but the description of the mixed delicacies left in the stomach of the dead. Was Chen trying to do something on the sly regarding the investigation?

  Detective Ding did not think he had anything personal against Chen, in spite of some stories he had heard about the bookish young man in the reading room. Some said Chen was studying for an MA test at Fudan University, and some said he was striving for a different career, writing modernist poems. It was understandable for a young man to try his hand at something different, Detective Ding reflected, when Chen had been state-assigned a job not exactly after his heart. But why the sudden interest in the murder case?

  With his steps slowing down, Detective Ding stepped into a public phone booth on the corner of He’nan Road and called his assistant Liao.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Liao said with a chuckle after hearing his boss out. ‘Even if Chen tries to take a look into the case, what difference can he possibly make? He has no training or experience whatsoever.’

  ‘Chen has succeeded in identifying the dead. Any further breakthrough on his part would mean a loss of face for our squad, Liao. It would not hurt to stay on the lookout.’

  Still, the head of the homicide squad had one advantage, Detective Ding believed. The case was his, officially, and he had the authority and resources to conduct the investigation.

  In the neighborhood committee office tucked near the back exit of Red Dust Lane, the head of the committee, a middle-aged man named Jun, received Detective Ding with due respect and gave him a quite detailed report of three pages in a manila folder. Comrade Jun had done an effective job after the phone conversation with Ding the previous day.

  ‘You may read it here, Detective Ding, if you like. I’ll be in the back room – oh, I think I’ll have to go to Fu’s home first. And we can discuss afterward.’

  So Comrade Jun put a ‘closed’ sign on the front door after him, and Detective Ding lost no time immersing himself in the basics about Fu.

  Fu had lived in the lane in a wing unit of the shikumen house toward the mid-lane for more than forty years. In the late 1940s he started a seafood company, initially in the courtyard, but soon expanding; as a result, he was classified as a capitalist in Chair Mao’s class system after 1949. In 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he and his wife suffered brutal humiliation and persecution at revolutionary mass criticisms, during which she abruptly dropped dead one night. Shortly afterward, his son Xiaoqiang and daughter Hongxia moved out in a politically determined break from the family. Fu had since lived there by himself. In recent years, with his financial situation dramatically improved, he rejected his children’s efforts at reconciliation, and hired a maid named Meihua for help at home. In the lane, he was known as an eccentric old man who hardly mixed with his neighbors, but it was understandable after all he had gone through.

  Once Comrade Jun came back to the neighborhood committee, Detective Ding wanted Xiaoqiang and Hongxia to come to the office for interviews. The two children happened to be in the lane at that moment. They were trying to take back the wing unit from the sobbing maid.

  They talked rather incoherently, perhaps anxious to defend what they had done to the old man during the Cultural Revolution. If there was anything surprising to Detective Ding, it was their complaining in chorus against the maid Meihua as an insatiable gold digger.

  Around three in the afternoon, Dete
ctive Ding believed he had learned enough about the Fu family saga, but he was not that sure about its direct bearing on the murder investigation.

  ‘Like in a proverb, their father’s body is not that cold yet,’ Comrade Jun said to Detective Ding with a stern frown after they were left alone in the neighborhood office, ‘and they’re already fighting like cats and dogs.’

  ‘But they are his children.’

  ‘But he practically disowned them.’

  Comrade Jun then moved into an account about the bad blood between Fu and his children. There was not any legal document left by Fu, however, to cut off his son and daughter, nor any move taken by Fu known to the neighborhood committee in that direction. Detective Ding listened patiently to the end, thanked Jun, and left the office.

  Detective Ding chose to walk back to the bureau, at least for part of the way, trying to sort through his entangled thoughts.

  A black cat jumped out of a pebbled side street. Allegedly an ominous sign. He spat on the ground three times, superstitiously, in an effort to dispel any potential bad luck for the investigation.

  For a murder case like that, a possible first step was to question who would have benefitted from the victim’s death. The answer seemed to be simple: Fu’s two children. No one had any knowledge as to whether Fu had intended to leave his huge fortune to anyone other than Xiaoqiang and Hongxia, but it was not likely. At least nothing had been done about it by the time of his death.

  According to Xiaoqiang and Hongxia, there was one suspect with a plausible motive: the gold-digging maid, but as it was, Meihua gained nothing from the old man’s sudden death. No arrangement had been made – according to Jun – in her benefit. So their focus on her could only have been something like a preemptive strike.

  Detective Ding then thought about that mysterious friend of Chen’s, who might be able to provide some additional background information. He decided, instead of walking on, to get a bus back to the police bureau.

  The light was fading in the late afternoon. Chen was still reading Roseanna when Detective Ding barged in without bothering to knock at the door.