Enigma of China

by Qiu Xiaolong

  “Did you notice anything broken or missing from the office?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Did you ever go back into his office after he was put into shuanggui?”

  “No. I used to work in a cubicle outside his office. That morning they conducted a very thorough search, and they took away a lot of things, including the computers and all the files. Then his office was sealed up. My cubicle was ransacked, too, and a group of people came back and searched again about a week later.”

  So the search on that first morning had been done by Jiang’s city government team. There was nothing surprising about that. Whatever they had or hadn’t found, Jiang hadn’t shared with Chen.

  “About a week later. That was after Zhou’s death, right?”

  “Yes.”

  What were they looking for? Chen wondered. Whatever it was, they were still looking for it. Fang had touched on that possibility back when they had talked in Shaoxing.

  Chen noticed that the screen on the phone was showing a message about the calling card running out of time.

  “Sorry, there’s no time left on my calling card. I have to go, but I’ll call you again, Fang.”

  * * *

  Late that afternoon Chen arrived at the City Government Building. As a rule, he would show his ID, then breeze through the security checkpoint. The guard would merely nod at him, never bothering to ask him to declare the purpose of his visit. With his ID in hand, Chen simply signed his name in the register book.

  Instead of taking the elevator directly to Zhou’s office, Chen went to a small canteen on the first floor and sat down with a cup of coffee. He pulled out his notebook and started making notes on events and observations over the last few days.

  It wasn’t until five thirty that he stood up and went over to the elevator, taking it to the floor of the City Housing Development Committee. There was no one in the hallway. He hurried over to the director’s office. The door still bore a broken police seal.

  The director’s position left vacant by Zhou’s death hadn’t yet been filled. The city government, it seemed, was being extraordinarily cautious, taking their time in making a decision about the crucial position.

  Chen took another look around, then inserted a key, entered, and closed the door after him.

  It wasn’t a really large office, but with the computer gone and the desk and chairs dust-covered, it looked rather desolate.

  It would be unrealistic to think that he’d be able to find something critical in just one short visit, after the office had already been thoroughly searched. Still, he had to come and try.

  Instead of digging into every nook and cranny, Chen opened the door to the attached bedroom, sat down in the leather swivel chair, and tried to imagine himself as Zhou on that night.

  In spite of his efforts, a mental image of Fang dancing kept cropping up. Perhaps it was too dramatic to ignore the echo of the ancient story of an imperial concubine dancing for her lord, knowing that it would be her last before she committed suicide. It was a scene much celebrated in classical Chinese literature.

  Making a beauty willing to die for you, / the King of Chu was after all a hero. These were two sympathetic lines by Wu Weiye, a Qing dynasty poet.

  Like the King of Chu, Zhou had refused to give up, though he was aware of the approaching doom.

  The parallels were eerie, but the details confounded Chen.

  In the case of the King of Chu, his favorite concubine danced and then killed herself so that she wouldn’t be a burden to her lord in his last battle. Fang didn’t do so, nor did Zhou want her to.

  The King of Chu still wanted to fight, clinging to the belief that he could break through the opposing army, that he had enough forces left at the camp east of the river to back him up. Zhou must have believed the same.

  Chen again started to go over the sequence of events that fateful night, this time more closely. While she was dancing, Zhou hummed a Mao-quotation song and lit a cigarette—

  Chen wondered whether there could be something in Zhou’s choice of the Mao-quotation song, but he quickly brushed aside that idea. It could be simply that the melody was familiar to Zhou from his youth, or because Fang was dancing the loyal character dance …

  The chief inspector again lost the thread of his thoughts.

  He, too, wanted to light a cigarette. He took out his pack before he realized that he must have left his lighter back at the security checkpoint. That might be just as well. Theoretically, the office should be left intact and undisturbed. Still, his glance swept the office, falling involuntarily upon a lighter next to the mini marble bookstand on the desk.

  He wasn’t sure if that was the lighter Zhou had used that night. After all, a heavy smoker might have kept several of them around. Chen went over and picked it up. It wasn’t a fancy, expensive lighter, but it was intriguing due to its torchlike shape, bright red color, and a Mao quote engraved in gold: “A spark can set the whole prairie ablaze.”

  He struck the tiny wheel atop the lighter. No spark. He tried harder. Still no luck.

  It was probably another sign that he shouldn’t smoke in the office. He shrugged his shoulders and slumped back down in the swivel chair with a thump.

  He stroked the lighter again distractedly.

  Why would Zhou have kept a useless lighter in his office?

  A hunch gripped him.

  Chen jumped up and started pacing around, and then sat back down again with the lighter clasped in his hand.

  Setting the lighter down on the desk, he took out his Swiss knife, and with the screwdriver blade, he managed to open up the bottom part of the red lighter.

  As the bottom fell off, Chen glimpsed an object inside.

  Not a butane reservoir but a flash drive, with part of the plastic shell cut off to fit it in.

  Finally, one of the crucial missing pieces had appeared.

  That night Zhou had still wanted to fight—like the King of Chu—with something in hand that might save him from total destruction. Something that could ensure that people above him, far more powerful, would provide enough help to enable him to survive the engulfing storm.

  “A chain of crabs bound together on a straw rope—” What Fang had said to him in Shaoxing came back to him.

  What she said was an idiomatic expression that referred to a common sight in the food market. A peddler would bind live crabs together with a thick straw rope, making it easier for customers to carry without worrying about any of them escaping. As a figure of speech, however, it meant something quite different. “Crabs” usually meant evildoers. What bound them together wasn’t a straw rope but their common interest—the schemes or secrets they shared. They had to protect or shield each other; no one could betray another, or one fallen would bring everybody else down.

  Zhou must have threatened the people above him by telling them that the bell wouldn’t toll for him alone. Zhou had in his hands evidence, which he hid in a place known to no one else, in the lighter in his office. However, Jiang came earlier than expected, surprising him in the canteen and taking him into custody there. In all the confusion, the lighter had been left behind in his office.

  Eventually, the threat he posed led to his death in the hotel. He might have said something, and his coconspirators had had to silence him once and for all. But they still had to find the evidence he’d left behind, or they’d never be able to sleep in peace.

  The arrival of the Beijing team at the hotel, with the possible showdown looming in the Forbidden City, only served to make them more desperate.

  What Fang saw in the trash bag that morning, the tiny pieces of broken plastic, could have either been parts of the broken butane reservoir, or parts of the shell of the flash drive.

  Chen didn’t think he had to read the flash drive there and then. He had to get out of the office immediately.

  Luckily, there was still no one in the hallway. He made it to the elevator and then to the lobby without anyone seeing him. He walked by the securit
y guard with barely a nod.

  Outside, it was surprisingly warm in the People’s Square. Chen again began sweating profusely.

  The square was swarming with people, as always. Several groups of people in their fifties or sixties were dancing or exercising to music blaring from CD players on the ground. They were enjoying the moment, with the sun setting and the City Government Building still shining in the fading light.

  Behind the people filling the square, there was a line of limousines waiting patiently along the driveway in front of the magnificent City Government Building.

  Amidst them all, a lonely figure was standing in a corner, absentmindedly clicking a red lighter in vain.

  TWENTY-THREE

  CHIEF INSPECTOR CHEN KNEW that the investigation had reached a critical point and that he had to make a decision.

  But, instead, he decided to visit his mother.

  At least for the moment, he wanted to put aside all the confusing and conflicting thoughts that were plaguing him, no matter how urgent the situation was. He couldn’t shake the feeling that this would be his last case. The people involved were far better connected and more powerful than a chief inspector could deal with. This was a feeling that was intensified by the bits and pieces he’d been picking up over the last few days including, paradoxically, the conversation he’d had with Sheng, the Internal Security officer he’d met with at the City Hotel. The scenario he’d spun out for Sheng turned out to be almost self-fulfilling.

  Whatever the flash drive contained, the chief inspector could choose to do nothing. No one knew about his discovery in Zhou’s office. Chen was only consulting on the case; he wasn’t really expected to make any breakthroughs on it. He wasn’t supposed to carry out any secret missions for Comrade Zhao, despite the poem he cited for Chen. The power struggle going on in the Forbidden City was way beyond his grasp and his interest. It might be just as well to be nothing more than an ordinary cop.

  But would that work? He wasn’t sure. Others might not even let him keep his position as chief inspector.

  As an alternative, he could give the flash drive to his immediate superiors, like a loyal Party member who believed in the system. But he shuddered at the thought in spite of himself.

  For the early summer, it was an extraordinarily warm day. He looked up to glimpse a spray of red apricot blossom stretching out over a white wall on Zuzhou Road, trembling in a fitful breeze.

  With so many details unknown to him, he couldn’t properly analyze the situation. He thought once more of the metaphor of a blind man riding a blind horse toward a deep lake during a dark night. Any move he might make felt risky, unguided. What’s worse, any move could play right into a political situation beyond his control, and out of his depth.

  Even if he did decide to do what was expected of him in his position as a chief inspector, taking all the risk on himself, what about the people close and dear to him—particularly his old, sick mother?

  He found himself walking over to the old neighborhood. Like the rest of Shanghai, it had been changing as well, though not much beyond new food stalls, restaurants, and convenience stores appearing here and there. Near Jiujiang Road, he saw a new whiteboard newsletter standing at the corner of the side street, on which was written, “To build a harmonious society.”

  It was another reminder that, as a Party member police officer, his job was supposed to be nothing more than damage control. As repeatedly urged in the People’s Daily, everything he did was supposed to be for the sake of a “harmonious society.”

  But how was he supposed to do that?

  He took a shortcut through a lane once familiar to him. He wasn’t particularly surprised to feel a drop of water splashing on his forehead. He tilted his head to see a line of colorful clothing, freshly washed and dripping from bamboo poles overhead. It was another ominous sign for this assignment. According to a folk superstition, it was bad luck to walk under women’s underwear, let alone under ones dripping from above—

  “Damn! What a shitty taste!”

  Chen was startled by a curse echoing from a middle-aged man who was eating from a large rice bowl, shaking his head like a rattle drum over a shrimp that he’d spat out onto the ground.

  An elderly woman bending over a common sink beside him cast an inquiring look at the shrimp. “Oh, it was dipped in formalin so that it would look like a Wuxie white shrimp.”

  “It fucking tastes like Chairman Mao.”

  “What?”

  “Isn’t he still preserved in formalin in that crystal coffin?” The man stood up, raging in high dudgeon, dumping the remaining portion forcefully into the lidless garbage can. “What retribution!”

  “Come on. Under Chairman Mao, you wouldn’t have had shrimp like this.”

  “That’s true. Then there was no shrimp at all at the market.”

  Lately, there had been a fashionable “rediscovery” of shikumen houses and longtang alleyways, which was probably nothing but a nostalgic myth conjured by some of the “already rich,” wistfully thinking that the traditional way of living was still viable.

  With an increasing income and lifestyle gap between the rich and the poor, with blatant corruption and injustice everywhere, with hazardous chemicals in the everyday food, how could ordinary people sit outside contentedly in a scruffy, shabby lane, as if in some old photograph?

  The people who lived here were anxious to move out of one of the city’s forgotten corners into new apartment buildings, but they remained helplessly stranded.

  Near his mother’s residence, Chen saw a fruit stall. Next to it, a gray-haired man was sprawled out in a ramshackle chair, its original rattan replaced by plastic straw rope or whatever stray material was capable of keeping it in a recognizable shape. Spread out over his face was a newspaper with a partially legible headline: “Reading … Paradise of Intelligence,” and his stockinged feet dangled just above the cigarette-butt-strewn sidewalk. He seemed totally oblivious of everything going on around him, but he nodded at Chen mechanically, like a windup toy soldier.

  Chen recognized him as a middle school classmate. He’d been laid off from his factory job years earlier, now managing to eke out a meager living with this fruit stall at the corner. He sat out here every day, barely moving, as if slowly turning into an unmistakable street marker. Chen stopped at his stall and bought two small bamboo baskets, one of apples and one of oranges, then went on to his mother’s.

  With the baskets in his hand, he knocked on her door.

  Thanks to the help of the neighborhood committee, she’d moved down from the attic room to a corner room on the first floor, which was about the same size. The neighborhood committee went out of their way to look out for her, not because she was a good, old resident of many years but because her son was now a “big shot” in the Party system. Since she was still unwilling to move in with him or to leave the old neighborhood, the influence his position carried was about all he could do for her.

  After knocking on the door a couple of times, Chen pushed it open and stepped inside. He saw her dozing on a bamboo deck chair, a cup of green tea sitting on a tiny table beside her. She looked fairly relaxed but lonely in the sudden shaft of light streaming in through the door. She was hard of hearing and hadn’t heard his knock. Awakened by the sun in her eyes, she looked up, surprised at the sight of him in the room.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you could come over today, son. But you didn’t have to buy me anything. I’m really doing fine,” she said, trying to get up, leaning heavily on a dragon-head-carved bamboo cane. “You didn’t call.”

  “I had something to do at the City Government Building, so I decided to drop in on my way back.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing particular, but your birthday is coming up next month. We must do something to celebrate, Mother. So I wanted to discuss it with you.”

  “For an old woman like me, a birthday doesn’t call for celebration. But times have really changed. Several of your friends have called to talk to
me about their plans to throw a birthday party.”

  “You see, people all want to do something.”

  “Peiqin came over yesterday and cooked several special dishes for me. It’s so nice of her; she doesn’t have to come, since I have the hourly maid coming in to help. Peiqin insisted, however, that I should have a special diet. She suggested that she cook for the occasion. White Cloud dropped in the other day, too, and declared that she would buy a large cake for the birthday party.”

  “That was so kind of them,” he said, feeling even guiltier at her mention of both Peiqin and White Cloud. The old woman’s one regret in this world of red dust was that her son remained single. In her eyes, Peiqin had always been a model wife, and White Cloud had, at one time, been a possible candidate. He hadn’t seen White Cloud for quite a while, though he still thought of her occasionally. He was the one to blame for their estrangement, recalling a song she’d once sung for him in a dimly lit karaoke room.

  You like to say you are a grain of sand, / occasionally fallen into my eyes, in mischief. / You would rather have me weep by myself / than have me love you, / and then you disappear again in the wind / like a grain of sand …

  It was a sentimental piece titled “Sobbing Sand,” but he remembered the melody. People invariably get sentimental when it’s too late.

  Chen started peeling an apple for his mother. Putting it on a saucer on the small table, he nearly tipped over the teacup.

  Visiting her was perhaps just an attempt to delay the crucial decision, which he nonetheless had to make.

  “You have something on your mind, son,” she said, picking up a piece of apple and pushing it over to him.

  “No, I’m fine—just too busy. Things can be so complicated in today’s society.”

  “This world is too new, too capriciously changing for an old woman. I’ve been reading the Buddhist scripture, you know. It says that things may be difficult for people to see through. It’s simply because everything is only appearance, like a dream, like a bubble, like a dewdrop, like lightning. So are you yourself.”