by Qiu Xiaolong
There was no immediate response from Meihua, who was probably too confounded for the moment.
‘It will also be a dinner in Fu’s memory, Meihua. As I’ve mentioned, his suffering during the Cultural Revolution reminded me of what my father went through during those years. It’s proper and right for me to burn a bunch of incense for him.’
‘Yes, a bunch of tall incense, and I’ll tell the news to him over the dinner with all his favorite dishes. In the Jiangxi village, we also do that. He then can really rest with his eyes closed. Thank you so much, Comrade Chen. You’re such a capable police officer. In the snack eatery, I immediately knew you were different from other cops.’
‘Well, it’s the first case I’ve helped to solve since I started working in the bureau. It too is worth celebrating. Spare no cost. How about three hundred yuan? It’s on the bureau. The special investigation allowance. Oh, please invite Old Root, too. He’s Mr Fu’s friend.’
‘Old Root’s a good man, the only one that spoke to Mr Fu in the lane during those horrible years, he told me about it.’
But there was another reason Chen chose not to discuss with her. With those gossips speculating about the relationship between Fu and Meihua, Old Root’s first-hand account of the apprehension of the murderer should settle the dust.
‘I’m going to the food market right now. I know a seafood peddler with the freshest supply from Zhoushan. Mr Fu left some money behind, you know. I don’t think you should spend yours for the dinner. He would be so pleased with your presence at the dining table.’
Then he called Dr Xia and Overseas Chinese Lu, asking them to meet him at Red Dust Lane that evening. He told them that it was an investigation-related occasion without going into detail, and that for their help, they would enjoy a private-kitchen dinner with him in a shikumen house there. The two foodies promptly agreed, with their curiosity roused and their expectations raised.
And he himself also had great expectations for the dinner, considering the fact that even a sophisticated epicurean like Fu had been pleased with her culinary skills, her serving around the dishes steaming hot from the wok, and her wooden sandals clinking pleasantly on the flagstones of the courtyard.
What else could he bring to the dinner party? For gourmets like Lu and Xia, something from a delicatessen on Jinling Road might not really work. Then he hit on a cool idea. Ice cream. It took only five minutes for him to bike from the First Food Department on East Nanjing Road to Red Dust Lane. With the rare luxury of the refrigerator in Fu’s wing unit, they could have the ice cream as dessert.
Before he could leave his spot in the reading room for the day, the phone started ringing. It was Party Secretary Li.
‘Detective Ding has told me about your great passion for police work. You talked to him about the case, even with some original ideas from a novel.’
So Detective Ding had talked to Party Secretary Li about him. Ding might have merely touched on ‘some original ideas from a novel’, without mentioning in detail about the real difference his work had made to the investigation or about any credit due to him. But Chen was not surprised.
‘To be more exact, some original ideas come from books, particularly the police procedure booklet I’ve been translating in the reading room, a project you assigned me, Party Secretary Li,’ Chen said respectfully, thinking that it was not entirely untrue.
‘That’s fantastic. The translation of the booklet truly helped, right? Indeed, as Comrade Deng Xiaoping has pointed out, we need to further open up to the world. You’re young, and you’ll have a great future as a police officer with higher education in the unprecedented transformation of our country. I told you so the first day you came to report yourself to the bureau. You must have heard of our Party’s new policy regarding the promotion of young cadres with college degrees. Indeed, a long way for you to go.’
That came as a surprise to him, but he said simply, ‘Thank you so much, Party Secretary Li.’
‘Oh, one more thing. It’s such a high-profile case at the moment. With Fu’s connections abroad, we’ll have to give an official version of the investigation. Detective Ding will tell you more about it. Revelation of some politically sensitive details in the case won’t serve the interests of the Party.’
‘I understand, Party Secretary Li,’ Chen said, though he failed to see any politically sensitive details relating to the case.
Putting down the phone, he found himself much less excited at the prospect of the dinner, particularly about the dramatic revelation in the midst of the narration about suspenseful twists and turns after the fashion of the incredible Poirot. Chen now had to modify his theatrical account in accordance with Detective Ding’s official version, about which he hardly knew any details yet.
Perhaps he was required to say that he had merely discussed the case with the experienced detective, without bringing up any exciting details about his part in the investigation. It was not that the true story of the investigation would mean a terrible ‘loss of face’ to his senior colleague, but perhaps to the Party authorities, he guessed.
Chen felt he had no choice. Again, Es muss sein, that is, if he wanted to become a real cop.
He did not know whether he really wanted it or not.
There was something satisfying in solving the case, though. It was the first time that he found himself, to his surprise, looking forward to the possible career with some genuine interest.
But there were so many things for him to think about. He decided not to worry any more – at least, only about things just now, such as the ice cream, as he was somehow reminded of an absurd cartoon he had seen in his childhood: a man staring at a cup of ice cream with a green-headed fly in it.
Instead, he picked up the copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and started reading again. He was going to say no to his friend who wanted to join him in the translation job. It was a great book, definitely worth translating, but the job should be up to someone with a good command of the French language, he told himself again. Nor would he have the time. Nevertheless, he had to read through Kundera’s novel one more time. ‘Es muss sein.’
He liked the book and lit a cigarette for himself. It was a short break he thought he deserved.
In spite of the philosophical digressions by the author, Chen came to the realization, turning over pages, that he had just gained another inspiration from Kundera’s discussion about Sabina’s bowler hat, which unexpectedly shed light on Meihua’s wooden sandals. Only the symbolism in Red Dust Lane was not that complicated. When she wore the wooden sandals, Meihua felt as if she was in the other woman’s shoes. And she would have felt like that toward Fu, too. At least, she could have imagined that ‘It was a very special permission he gave me’.
Chen wondered whether the old man had really given permission in that sense – to her, and to himself.
Perhaps that could be said to be another disadvantage of doing a cop’s job. Sometimes it’s better to leave things unsaid, unexplained, uninvestigated. Like in one of Li Shangyin’s poems, so elusive from the echo of a Tang dynasty zither with half of its strings broken, simply titled as ‘Untitled’.
A pearl holds its tears
against the bright moon on the blue ocean;
a jade-induced mist arises
under the warm sun over Lantian field …
Oh, this feeling, to be recollected later
in memories, is getting confused …
The phone rang again. This time it was Meihua, seemingly through some mysterious correspondence.
As it turned out, she wanted to make a report of the dinner menu to him. Chen listened with some interest. It was not a dinner for him alone. Xia, Lu, Old Root and Meihua, all of them deserved a good night. As she moved on to the description of small croaker soup, he made a suggestion.
‘Add tofu to the soup. And a lot of minced scallions and gingers. I’ve had it before. It tastes delicious.’
‘Oh yes, tofu. A dinner in his memory should definitely have tofu
. Tofu dinner, that’s a conventional must for the deceased. How could I have forgotten about it for his memorial meal?’ she said, sobbing, suddenly breaking down again.
It was so unexpected. He’d mentioned it simply from a gourmet’s perspective. Then he heard her in the midst of weeping, ‘He’s the only one that really took care of me. Now I’m left all alone in this world of red dust. Who’s there to help? Old Root told me that he would not come to the dinner this evening. Probably because of Mr Fu’s children. Xiaoqiang has contacted the neighborhood police for Red Dust Lane through his connections. So he’s planning to move back in, whether I continue to stay in the shikumen house or not. And Hongxia too may come back as early as tonight – to get hold of the things allegedly left by her mother.’
So what if Hongxia came barging right into their dinner party tonight?
Already, there were things so unpredictable, troublesome, helpless in being a cop. And he could hardly claim to be the one in charge of the investigation.
He whistled, putting down the phone, and thinking of an ancient saying, ‘Eight or nine times out of ten, things in this world do not go the way one really wants to go.’
Or to paraphrase it, he murmured to himself, thinking he still needed to buy some fruit for the dinner in Red Dust Lane, ‘Eight or nine times out of ten, people in this world do not become the ones they really want to be.’
SEVEN
He keeps on wading precariously across the treacherous river, stepping on one stone after another, most of them jutting barely out of the water’s surface, when he looks up, panic-stricken at the sight of a face-masked girl stumbling in the distance, shouting for help, struggling in vain toward the other bank, and drowning against the horizon shrouded in the impenetrable smog except for a yellow butterfly winging its way to him—
And he is transported with the butterfly, fluttering, flying so high suddenly, it seems to be bringing the distant horizon beyond the unknown land, the mysterious ocean, all the way into the dark eye of the sun, with the immense landscape changing dramatically under its flapping wings, before it abruptly starts failing, falling with a thud to the ground, turning into a round black pebble sticking out of the food market’s pebble street covered in white snow, but trembling almost imperceptibly, like a blackened human toe—
Startled out of the dream, he thought that the sound had come from his mother knocking into a chair under the attic. She got up so early, preparing for him the breakfast of white rice soup with small dishes of pickled cucumber and ferment tofu, and getting ready for her routine shopping trip for fresh vegetables in the morning, even though the Ninghai Street Food Market had long disappeared, along with the original pebble street which had been repaved in gray concrete.
It had been a night full of eerie dreams, with the background scenes continuously shifting back to those he must have seen twenty or even thirty years earlier. And it was not just because of his sleeping in the old attic, he was pretty sure of that now.
His mother was tiptoeing around with only a tiny nightlight flickering downstairs, believing he was still asleep overhead. She slept less because of her age. He could hardly see the first ray of gray light peeping in through the attic window.
He lay quietly in bed, trying not to disappoint her, thinking in the dark that still surrounded him.
In the dream, he had seen a face-masked girl drowning in the river. It vaguely disturbed him, though he failed to recognize her face behind the mask. Then the no less perplexing scene of a colorful butterfly soaring out of nowhere, flapping its wings, and bringing an unbelievable metamorphosis across the vision of the land. Cudgeling his brains out, he managed to recall something he had read in his college days, but he could not help wondering at its relevancy to the present moment.
The butterfly effect, that was the term in the book. With a butterfly flapping its wings in Chicago, a tornado occurs in Tokyo thousands and thousands of miles away, as the analogy describes in a poetic hyperbole. But to him, it seemed not to be just about something insignificant happening here which was capable of leading to another significant thing happening far, far away, or vice versa. It was also about the seemingly unrelated proving to be related through the complicated interactions among people known or unknown to each other, through which one’s identity was constructed or deconstructed. In other words, something unnoticeable happening to him at one point in time – or for that matter, happening to somebody else – could have an unbelievable impact on the people directly or indirectly concerned at a much later point in time.
Occasionally, he had thought about it during some of the complicated investigations. A criminal or a cop could have been made through those interactions – with or without his or her own knowledge – which turned out to be more challenging for him to sort through.
Then another thought jumped out to him. Was it possible that the Webcops and Internal Security had taken him as the one writing and posting the poem Reading Animal Farm? It was preposterous, but it might not have appeared to be totally unthinkable from their perspectives. Known as a published poet, Chen had undertaken investigations into those tricky moves and maneuvers in cyberspace, and now as one not ‘politically correct’, he had both the expertise and motive to deliver an anti-Party attack online like that – or to be more exact, an attack against the supreme Party leader, which was one and the same thing to Internal Security.
Also, the way the poem had spread so quickly among the netizens, without giving away the identity of the poet, suggested something of a well-executed scheme. As a matter of fact, in a case the chief inspector named for himself ‘Shanghai Redemption’, his secret investigation actually contributed to the downfall of a mighty politburo member. What he had done on the sly might never have come out in its entirety, but Internal Security could not help but have suspected.
What’s more, the chief inspector had connections higher up in Beijing. For one, Comrade Zhao, the ex-First Secretary of the Central Party Discipline Committee. Zhao had been seen as a patron of Chen, choosing to back him up in several high-stake political cases. Though not as powerful after retirement, Zhao’s name was still mentioned in connection with the power struggle at the top. So it was not unimaginable for Chen to write and post the poem as a part of Zhao’s charge against the Pig Head.
It was absurd, but given the opaqueness of China’s politics, anything seemed to be possible. And the trap set up – as a preemptive strike – by the paranoid Internal Security was far from insane …
The train of his thought was intercepted by a cock crowing in the neighborhood. Was it the same cock that crowed those long-ago mornings when he went to his English studies at Bund Park? At the time, he’d talked with his friend about a young hero in ancient China, who made a point of practicing the sword the moment a cock started crowing at dawn.
Time really flies. Decades had elapsed in a finger-snap. But he had truly heard the cock-crowing in those days, he was positive about that, in the neighborhood of Red Dust Lane, the back exit of which joined the street food market.
And the black pebble throbbing in the dream could have come, he realized, from the pebble street of Ninghai Street Food Market …
Long Chain of Karma
For the evening talk at the entrance of Red Dust Lane, the participants were not necessarily all residents of the lane. For instance, this story came from an unexpected visitor from the Shanghai Police Bureau, who looked more like an intellectual than a police officer. Needless to say, people were initially worried about the possible purpose of his visit.
‘Don’t be alarmed, folks. My name is Chen, and I’m here this evening not as a cop, but as a participant of the evening talk. I’ve been to the lane quite a few times. It was years ago, and I enjoyed the incredible stories in the audience.’ Chen smiled an apologetic smile before perching himself on a shaky bamboo stool offered to him. ‘So it’s my turn to tell a story, which happens to be one connected to this neighborhood – to be more exact, to the Ninghai Street Food Market at the bac
k of the lane. That’s why I want to share it with you here.’
To the confusion of the audience, he then launched into a rambling account of the demolished food market, as if having a sudden second thought about what he was going to say. The well-known street market of open booths, stalls and counters, once a huge convenience to the neighborhood, had become an unbearable eyesore for the increasingly metropolitan city of Shanghai, hence the eventual removal of the market into a building at the intersection of Ninghai and Zhejiang Road. Much smaller, but with a clean-looking appearance. The metamorphosis of the market was not something new or intriguing to the people sitting in front of the lane, but they all waited with patience. It was not common for a cop to come to tell a story there.
‘It’s a story about a colleague of mine. Let’s just name him C …’ Chen seemed to be finally coming to the point. ‘In the late sixties, people had to come to the food market early in the morning, as you know, a couple of hours or even earlier before its opening bell, stepping into long queues, waiting, because of the food supply shortages under Chairman Mao’s command economy at the time.
‘For his family, it was his mother’s job to make the daily visit to the food market, but that year she came down with hepatitis. The doctor emphasized the importance of the necessary nutrition as well as proper rest for her recovery. So C offered to go to the food market instead. There, by sneaking up to one of those kind-looking, middle-aged women in a position near the counter, murmuring something like, “Auntie, my mom is sick,” which happened to be true, he was capable of jumping the long queue. Naturally, some people turned out to be hardhearted, cursing and chasing him out of the line. For a skinny kid with little face to lose, however, he would instantly approach another line, applying the same thick-skinned technique, smooth-and-sweet tongued. More often than not, he would have pulled off the trick in less than fifteen minutes, and brought back home a full basket.