by Qiu Xiaolong
Chen heaved a sigh of relief. It would break his wrist if he were to sign five hundred copies at one sitting. And that wasn’t to mention the rest of the copies that others wanted signed. Chen walked over to the table where a line was quickly forming.
He took up a position in the middle of the table, and two of the girls in cat costumes came to squat beside him, one on each side. The one on the right, Red Coral, opened each book to the signature page, while the other, Green Jade, wrote down the buyer’s name on a piece of paper. Sandwiched between the two, Chen scribbled his name on one book after another, brushed on the cheek by Red Coral’s long hair, and tickled by the tail dangling from the bare buttocks of Green Jade.
“The party’s a huge success,” Wuting said, wandering over to Chen’s side again to comment. “People are snatching up copies like potato chips. We’ll sell almost as many copies as a memoir of a celebrated movie star.”
The assistance of the two cat girls helped keep the signing line moving. Several customers bought a bundle of copies, “giving face” to Rong, and some of them didn’t even bother asking Chen to sign their copies. The cat girls carried their books out for them.
In the room the girls come and go, / talking about anything but Michelangelo.
After another tall pile of copies was gone, Chen looked up to see Rong sidle up to Wuting and whisper something before heading out of the room.
“Rong had to leave for an urgent business meeting,” Wuting said, coming over to speak to Chen. “He asked me to pass on his regrets.”
Chen nodded. It made sense that a busy banker would have to leave early, having delivered what he’d promised.
People began to leave. They’d come as a favor to Rong, and with the host gone, there was no reason for them to stay. Some of them might continue to enjoy themselves at the club, but they were done with the book launch party. A couple of them even left with a cat girl on their arm.
There weren’t many copies of book left, and Wuting looked pleased.
Then Wuting got a phone call and stepped aside to take it in relative privacy. It was a fairly long call, and by the time he finished, the last Big Buck was limping out, leaning heavily on the bare shoulder of a slim cat girl.
“Sorry, I can’t stay,” Wuting said, closing the phone with an embarrassed smile. “I have an emergency conference call with the City Propaganda Ministry. I have to hurry back to the office. But please stay. Rong will be back around ten for a celebratory banquet. Some other Big Bucks will be coming as well, and if the conference call doesn’t last too long, I’ll be back here for it. Everything has been arranged. So please, for the sake of Eliot, stay. It’s essential for the success of the book.”
Once again, Chen felt he had no choice but to comply.
After Wuting left, Chen was the only one remaining—except for the two cat girls who had helped him with the signing.
The lights was starting to dim again, suspiciously.
“Mr. Rong thought you might want to take a break in the inner room before the banquet,” Red Coral said.
“It’s much more comfortable there,” Green Jade said.
They dragged him through a side door into the inner room, which turned out to be a bedroom furnished with a large bed, a leather sofa, and an antique dresser with a large mirror on top. As soon as they entered the inner room, the two girls started shedding their remaining clothes.
“Now you can enjoy a break in privacy,” Green Jade said.
“Why don’t you relax on the bed?” Red Coral added.
Chen retreated to the sofa.
“Let’s sit and talk,” he said in a hurry,
Red Coral moved in beside him, kneeling on the couch. “You must be tired, sir. Let me give you a massage.”
For other customers at the nightclub, this might be a natural part of any party, like a cold appetizer before the banquet.
“A special oil massage,” Red Coral pushed.
“But your hands—”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, noticing the greenish paint on her hands. “I’ll take a quick shower. Green Jade will keep you company.”
He had no idea that the room had a shower as well, but considering the stories he’d heard about the Heavenly World, it was no surprise.
“Mr. Rong has engaged us for the night,” Green Jade said, edging up more closely. “He’s paid for the full service, whatever you like. And there will be a nice tip for us from him if you’re satisfied.”
“I don’t know what to say. I don’t know anything about the arrangements he’s made. I just came for the book party.”
“I can promise you an unimaginable night.”
“A night like never before,” Red Coral said, calling out from the door of the bathroom. She was giggling, her naked body glowingly pink like a skinned cat. “Flying in pair, with both of us serving you at the same time if you prefer.”
Green Jade was reaching for his belt, and he hastened to stop her. His hand deflected hers and brushed up against something throbbing in his pants pocket. It was his cell phone, he realized. It had started vibrating as if on cue. He sat straight up.
“Hold on,” he said, pulling out his phone. He looked at the number—it was his mother. She probably had questions about the restoration of his father’s tomb. “It’s urgent business.”
Pushing the girl aside, Chen stood up and headed to the door. It was the perfect excuse to disengage, and he didn’t want his mother to hear the background noise.
The moment Chen stepped out into the corridor, the door of the next private room over flew open. A girl, her robe unbelted and largely fallen off her shoulder, ran out of the room. She was bare-legged and barefoot, swaying her hips exaggeratedly, like a seductive robot. A sturdy foreigner rushed out after her. All of a sudden, the dimly lit corridor felt stifling.
Chen hurried to the elevator at the end of the corridor, holding on to the phone. A girl in a yellow dress with a sweet smile like a flowering apricot blossom held the elevator door open for him.
The lobby on the first floor turned out to be no less noisy, crowded with girls and customers milling around. An elegantly dressed lady was barging in through the revolving door, followed by a couple of fierce-looking men who looked like bodyguards. She was definitely not a “girl.” Confused, Chen wondered whether female customers came to the club as well, but quickly dismissed the question. It was none of his business.
He slipped outside the club, then looked around. His phone was no longer vibrating. He saw a convenience store on the corner and headed over to buy a pack of cigarettes. Before lighting one, he took a deep breath of the fresh night air to clear his head. There was no need to go back inside, he decided. At least, not until it was time for the banquet.
Not far away, he could see the Wuning Bridge stretching across Suzhou Creek, unfolding like a splendid dream, with golden statues glistening atop the magnificently lit arch. Shanghai had changed dramatically, but in spite of all the complaints, some of those changes were welcome.
He pulled out his phone again, ready to call his mother back, but he stopped abruptly. He caught a glimpse of a black-clad man moving stealthily toward the nightclub. He was not alone: there were several others in similar clothing following him.
Chen recognized the first one as a cop named Tang Guohua. He was in the Sex Crimes Squad of the Shanghai Police Bureau. Whatever Tang’s appearance here signified, Chen knew better than to step back into the club.
Instead, he moved a few steps farther to stand under the awning of a small café, the phone in his hand undialed. He sat down at an outside table on the street corner side and watched as the black-clad team entered the nightclub. There were seven or eight of them in all.
For the next twenty minutes or so, Chen remained at the table, finishing a cup of espresso and three cigarettes. Strangely, there seemed to be no commotion inside the nightclub. Fashionably clad men and women kept coming and going, visibly undisturbed.
The Sex Crime Squad was a relatively
new one in the bureau, and it was directly responsible to the city government. It was even more “special,” so to speak, than Chen’s Special Case Squad. The hair salons, nightclubs, karaoke rooms, and other such places where sex business was conducted in the back rooms were usually run by people with connections. Deciding which establishment to target was often the most complicated matter of police politics. It was no secret—not even to the taxi driver who had brought him here—that the squad worked in accordance with specific orders from above. Some of the raids were conducted as part of some political campaign, but the targets were often tipped off ahead of time.
So a raid against the Heavenly World could be politically motivated, part of another campaign to “Sweep Away Pornography.” But as far as he knew, there was no such campaign going on at the moment.
He shuddered at another possibility.
The target of the raid might not be the club, but somebody in it.
Grinding out his cigarette, Chen rose to leave, his questions unanswered. He glanced over at the nightclub one more time. The neon sign of the Heavenly World was still dancing fervently.
There was no point in lingering there anymore.
As he turned down another shaded street, he felt vulnerable, superstitious, as if weighed down by a sudden oppressiveness of the black night sky. If not for the phone call from his mother …
He didn’t want to think about it.
SIX
THE NEXT MORNING, CHEN woke up with a splitting headache. He hadn’t slept much last night, tossing and turning for most of it.
It portended another rotten day with an unshakable headache. But it wasn’t a morning that he could stay in bed, groaning in self-pity.
He rolled out of bed with an effort and brewed a pot of black coffee. When the coffee was ready, he poured himself a cup and swallowed a couple of aspirin.
It was time to get started. The first thing on his agenda was to find out more about what went on last night.
He turned on his computer to see what he could find on the Internet. It was about all he could do to move the mouse around, while gulping down the bitter, strong coffee and rubbing his eyes against the morning light reflecting off the screen.
Chen tried several different searches, but he couldn’t find any news whatsoever about the raid at the Heavenly World. He stood up, shaking his head in confusion. So much for the new media; maybe he could find something in the old media. Chen walked downstairs and, at the street corner newsstand, picked up several different newspapers. Looking through them on the way back, he didn’t see anything about the raid.
Back in his room, he went through the newspapers one more time, looking through them page by page for any reference at all. With another cup of coffee in hand, he finally found something. On the fourth page of Wenhui Daily, there was a tiny piece tucked in a corner.
“A new collection of T. S. Eliot’s poetry is finally being published, which has been much anticipated by poetry-loving readers. A grand book launch party was held by Shanghai Publishing House last night, and a large number of people came to the celebration.”
It didn’t mention where the party was held, who attended, or anything about Chen, the primary translator, giving a talk at the event.
It was possible that the journalist simply wrote the piece based on a press release, without so much as a fact-checking phone call about the details of the party. Or was it possible that no one there, including Wuting or Rong, was aware of the raid? It would certainly be understandable for the nightclub management to keep mum.
All of this, however, pointed to the scenario that occurred to him last night: that the raid was targeting not the Heavenly World, but rather someone who was there—a surprise attack by the police in collaboration with the nightclub management. Chen recalled the surprising overtures of the cat girls and realized that it was very possible that the person they were targeting was the former chief inspector Chen himself.
If so, if he was indeed the target, then he’d had a very lucky escape last night. But that kind of luck wouldn’t last long.
That kind of political assassination was most thorough. Pan Ming, the former Shanghai Propaganda Minister, had been personally and professionally annihilated in a very similar way. During the eventful summer of 1989, Pan had chosen the “wrong side” and was removed from his position. But his political enemies worried that he might be able to stage a comeback. So one evening, he was caught in the company of a naked massage girl. It was obviously a setup, but there was evidence and witnesses, so Internal Security nailed Pan to “the pillory of humiliation.” After he was released from prison several years later, it was rumored that Pan was a broken man, running a small eatery somewhere near Shanghai.
The sponsor of the book launch party, Rong Pan, undoubtedly had close ties to the local government, otherwise his non-state-run bank wouldn’t exist in the first place. As for his fondness for and knowledge of T. S. Eliot, he could have been stuffed with it like a Peking duck, all for the purpose of staging that party.
Was Wuting involved? To what extent? It was a convenient fact that Wuting got an emergency phone call, causing him to leave the nightclub shortly before the raid. Chen had always thought of him as a capable publisher. But it wasn’t easy to run a decent publishing house in this materialistic age, especially under the constraints of Party censorship. That Wuting’s survival might have required some sort of collaboration between the publisher and the authorities wasn’t unimaginable.
But for his mother’s call, Chen—if he was indeed the target—could have ended up like Pan, caught by the police in the company of the two undressed cat girls. There would have been no use in his arguing or trying to explain. Being discovered in such a scenario would have finished him and put him beyond redemption.
Suffering another assault from his dull headache, Chen didn’t want to speculate further.
He picked up the phone and called his mother.
“I’d planned to come over yesterday, Mother, but something unexpected came up. So I had the pictures delivered to you instead.”
“Don’t worry. I know you’re busy. The pictures arrived,” she said. “Last night, I placed them on the small table in front of the Guanyin image and burned incense and candles. Guess what? Sparks flew up from the candles like small flowers, and then the picture quivered a couple of times. It’s a sign.”
She was a devout Buddhist, capable of seeing signs in many things. Chen never tried to argue with her.
“What time, Mother?”
“It was almost ten, I think,” she said. “I was thinking of your father. So the candle must have been his message to us. He’s still around here, blessing and protecting us.”
“Yes, I think so too.” That was around the time the black-clad police were sneaking into the nightclub.
“About the grave renovation—you do whatever is necessary, but don’t spend too much. And don’t go out of your way. You already have a lot on your hands.”
“I have a week’s vacation time right now, so I’m going to go to Suzhou and supervise the renovation. But I’ll come back from time to time.”
“That’s good.”
He said his good-byes and put down the phone. He thought that the sparks from the candle were just another coincidence. As a cop, he didn’t believe in coincidences for the most part, but neither did he see it as a sign.
He started pacing about the apartment. It was a two-bedroom apartment, assigned to him in accordance to his cadre rank. His new bureau head position would entitle him a larger one. In China’s one-party system, to be a Party official meant access to all sorts of privileges, including better housing. In return, he was supposed to place the Party’s interest above everything else.
The pacing didn’t really help him think. The ex-inspector felt an attacking wave of nausea instead, and a cold sweat broke out all over his body.
During the trip to Suzhou, he had thought about lying low, but doing so hadn’t made a difference. The day he came back to Sh
anghai, he had been lured straight into what might well have been a devilish trap. He wasn’t going to just sit there worrying, with his arms crossed, waiting to be crushed.
But was he absolutely sure that he was the target of the police raid? Or was he being paranoid?
He had to find out.
It would be difficult for him to “investigate.” He had no idea who might be plotting against him in the dark. For years, he had acted, unwittingly or not, against the interests of many people: random speculation was useless. So he decided to start by checking into the nightclub and the people associated with it. But he wasn’t a cop anymore—he didn’t have access to resources like he used to, and any move he made might be closely watched. He looked up the phone number of Tang, the cop who was at the nightclub last night, but before he called Tang, Chen hesitated again. A low-level cop in the Sex Crimes Squad, Tang might not have been told anything about the real target of the raid, particularly one conducted at well-connected place like the Heavenly World.
It wasn’t a good idea, he concluded, for him to contact Tang—at least, not at this moment. There was no telling how Tang would react. Still, if Chen was in fact the target, information from Tang would be essential before Chen could make any definite move.
Had he still been a chief inspector, Chen would have been able to check into the background of the nightclub and its untouchable owner, Shen. As it was, all he could do was stir up the snake.
Approaching Rong could also backfire, given all his possible connections to the people in the city government. For the same reason, Chen thought he’d better not contact Wuting either.
At the same time, he knew that if he was being targeted, he needed to try and buy some time, however short, before the next strike against him.
Finally, Chen wandered back to his desk and settled down to compose a request for one more week’s leave from the city government. In his e-mail, he maintained that he needed more time to prepare for the new position. As a chief inspector, he’d been too busy handling one case after another, and he hadn’t had any time to study the legal system properly. He thought that such a request might not appear unreasonable to the higher authorities. The Legal Reform Committee was rumored to be one of the offices where Party cadres were sent as they prepared for retirement: a nondeputy position, with all the corresponding perks and benefits but not much responsibility. As such, a week off didn’t really matter.