Shanghai Redemption

by Qiu Xiaolong

  “I haven’t seen her for a while. She’s a happy soon-to-be mother, I think. She gave me the then-current contact information for Melong, but I’m not sure it’s fair of me to involve him in this. He could get in trouble simply by talking to me.”

  “I see,” Peiqin said. “Why don’t you give me Sima’s e-mail address?”

  “You—”

  There was another knock on the door.

  She didn’t say any more as a waiter stepped in, holding a menu in his hand. “We can also serve breakfast in the room. Just check the items that you’d like.”

  Neither of them was in the mood to pick and choose breakfast items, but they did, like typical Shanghainese, pointing at one item after another, discussing them until the waiter withdrew.

  “Old Hunter has Jin’s e-mail address. Give me Sima’s.”

  “So you are—”

  “Don’t worry. I’m just an ordinary netizen. No one really pays attention to me. Oh, don’t you also have Shen’s?”

  He hesitated, but he copied them onto a napkin.

  “We often keep lists of customers’ e-mails,” she said with a knowing smile. “It helps our business.”

  This wasn’t for her restaurant, he knew, shaking his head as the waiter came back with a tray.

  “It’s not too bad,” Chen said, after taking a bite of a fried dough stick. He helped himself to a spoonful of the soy soup strewn with green onion and pepper oil.

  “But you can never tell if the dough stick here is fried in gutter oil or not,” she said. “At least you don’t have to worry about that at my place.”

  TWENTY

  PEIQIN WOKE UP, CONSUMED with worry again.

  In the dim light peeping through the curtain, she gazed at Yu, who snored lightly at irregular intervals, his forehead knitted.

  Last night, Yu hadn’t come back until after eleven. It was too late for her to talk things over with him, and she wasn’t sure it was something she should discuss with him or not.

  She got up, put on her slippers, and walked out into the kitchen. She poured water into a pot of cold leftover rice and turned on the gas.

  Waiting for the water to boil, she tried to sort out her tangled thoughts.

  Both Yu and Old Hunter had been trying their best to help Chen, each in his own way. But the water is too far away and the fire too close at hand. That was another saying from Old Hunter, whose proverbial way was infectious.

  She wasn’t just worried about Chen, but about Yu too. The camaraderie between the two was no secret in the bureau. Sooner or later, Party Secretary Li would get rid of Yu too, in spite of his recent promotion to the squad head. Chen’s crisis was escalating, and any move on Yu’s part could lead to more trouble.

  So what could she possibly do?

  “What are you thinking, Peiqin?”

  Yu walked over to the table in the kitchen area, yawning.

  “Nothing,” she said, putting chopsticks on the table. “Breakfast is almost ready. It’s just cold rice reboiled in water. Sorry about that, Yu. The pickles are in the refrigerator. You can take them out.”

  “Why are you sorry? I love pickled cucumber and fermented tofu. It’s perfect with reboiled rice,” he said. “What’s your plan for the day?”

  “I have to go to the restaurant. Yesterday, after visiting Chen’s mother and delivering something to Old Hunter in Pudong, I didn’t make it back to the restaurant until three o’clock.”

  It was an evasive answer, leaving something important out. Luckily, Yu appeared to be absent. He didn’t say much while washing down a second bowl of watery rice and then wiping his mouth with back of his hand. She refrained from discussing the vague ideas she had in mind for the day.

  After Yu left home shortly after seven, Peiqin called in sick to the restaurant.

  “But I’ll come in if I feel better this afternoon.”

  She made herself a pot of strong tea and sat down in front of the computer. But less than fifteen minutes later, she stood up again. The idea she’d tried to put off came back.

  What Chen needed wasn’t something she could find in an Internet search. The Internet might provide background information, but it failed to cut to the heart of the matter. He needed to know something more about those directly involved.

  Had Chen anticipated the move she was likely to make? Had he mentioned Lianping in the karaoke room to suggest it? There was no point in speculating. He hadn’t said anything explicit about it. Nor had she.

  But the only way that Chen would be able to protect himself would be by turning the tables on the people going after him. And it was the only way to protect Yu, too.

  Draining up the bitter tea, she made up her mind.

  After checking the subway route to the Wenhui office online, she set out.

  Near the exit to the lane, a black cat jumped out of nowhere, hissing, its tail trembling like a live whip. It might be an ominous sign. She spit on the ground three times in spite of herself.

  * * *

  An hour and a half later, Peiqin left the Wenhui Office Building and headed for the subway entrance near Shanxi Road. In her hand, she had the new address of Melong the hacker, though Lianping wasn’t sure about his latest phone number.

  She had but a fleeting impression of Lianping from years ago, thinking of her mainly as a potential girlfriend for the now former chief inspector. But as another proverb said, In this world, eight or nine times out of ten, things don’t work out the way one wishes.

  Peiqin took the subway to Minghang, then grabbed a special bus, and finally took a taxi to a new subdivision in Nanhui. She was taken aback at the amount shown on the taxi meter. With a wry smile, she paid it and got out. It was a high-end villa complex, where people had their own cars.

  The villa matching the address in her hand was a two-story with a red brick façade and a large backyard looking over a creek. Though located far from the center of the city, a standalone house like that would be worth at least three or four million yuan. Melong must have been very successful in his special field, if that was the only business in which he was involved.

  A tall man opened the door at her persistent ringing of the doorbell. He was probably in his midthirties, with a receding hairline and deep-set eyes. Alert, he studied her carefully.

  “Who are you looking for?”

  “Melong. I’m Peiqin, a friend of Chen Cao’s.”

  “A friend of Chen’s,” he said. He gave a hurried glance around before he moved to let her in. “Oh, come on in. I’m Melong.”

  She followed him into a spacious high-ceilinged living room. It was simply furnished. To her surprise, she couldn’t see a single computer or monitor there. He motioned for her to sit on a black leather sofa.

  “How is he?” he asked as soon as she sat down. “I haven’t been in contact with him for quite a long while. It isn’t advisable for him to be seen with me. I understand.”

  “He’s in big trouble.”

  “What? Chief Inspector Chen—”

  “He’s no longer a chief inspector.”

  He jumped up. “I’ll be damned. I’ve heard nothing about it, it’s not anywhere on the Web.”

  “I spoke with him yesterday and it isn’t just that he’s lost his position: things are getting worse. He mentioned you and Lianping in passing, but it was my own idea to make an unannounced visit today. By the way, I got your address from Lianping. She would have come with me, but she’s pregnant, so I talked her out of it.”

  “You don’t have to explain. If Lianping gave you my address, you must be a very good friend of Chen’s. What happened to him? Tell me the whole story.”

  “The trouble is that Chen doesn’t even know what’s really gotten him into so much trouble. So what I can tell you may not be that much.”

  She proceeded to tell Melong what had happened to Chen, speaking as objectively as possible, yet withholding some of the specific details. She wanted to see his reaction before going any further.

  He listened attentiv
ely, letting her talk without interruption except once—when he heard about someone breaking into Chen’s mother’s room, he cursed between clenched teeth.

  “Now he’s dead meat!”

  This seemed an odd comment, but Melong must have known that Chen was a devoted son.

  After she finished her account, there was short spell of silence. Then Melong said simply, “So what can I do?”

  “I’ve been trying to help. I’ve been searching the Internet for clues, but what I’ve found there is limited.”

  “You’re a friend of Chen’s. He knows what I do—or I used to. So does Lianping. As well as a number of other people. But only a very few have any idea why I’ve moved out here.”

  “Why have you, Melong?”

  “It’s because of my mother. She’s sick. She had a cancer operation not too long ago. That night, while waiting outside the operating room, I thought about a lot of things. I’d made some money by licking blood off the knife edge, and she had worried herself sick about me. What an unfilial son I was! She’d brought me up single-handedly. So I swore to Buddha that I would change and give her nothing to worry about if she recovered.”

  “How is she?”

  “She’s in recovery. It was a successful operation, I suppose, but the doctor said that good air quality could be crucial to her continued health. At the same time, the city government offered to buy my Web forum for an incredible price.”

  “Excuse me, Melong. I visited your Web forum about a week ago. It’s still there.”

  “It’s not mine anymore. The government official who arranged to buy it promised to keep the original forum name, and to run it in a way similar to the original. So people might still read those posts there and have no idea that it’s now officially controlled. They hinted at the possible consequences if I refused to cooperate. It wasn’t the first time they had asked me out for ‘a cup of tea.’ So I sold the forum, and bought this house with the money. Since then, I’ve kept myself busy growing vegetables in the back garden.”

  “Just like General Liu in Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” Peiqin said, hit with a sense of déjà vu, “so people won’t pay attention to you anymore.”

  “I’ve also washed my hands of the hacking business. Part of the deal.”

  “So you don’t—” she said, unable to conceal the disappointment in her voice.

  “True, I made a pledge to Buddha for my mother’s sake,” he said with a sudden light in his eyes. “But it’s different in the case of Chief Inspector Chen. Without his help, my mother wouldn’t have been admitted to the hospital. He got her into East China Hospital, the one for high-ranking cadres. And he also saw that the operation was done by the head of the hospital himself.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Buddha will forgive me if I do it for my mother’s sake. She would want me to help if I told her about Chen’s trouble.”

  “That’s a valid point, Melong.”

  “So it’s crucial to find out who’s behind all this, and why. Right?”

  “Exactly, but Chen’s hands are bound.”

  “Does he have a list of people in mind?”

  “Yes, he’s has an idea of who some of the people involved in this diabolical scheme are, and perhaps, through them, something more can be found.”

  “Then give me their names and any information you have on them, particularly their e-mail addresses.”

  Peiqin pulled out a small notebook and copied the names and e-mail addresses she had onto a page torn from it. “Here they are. I don’t know much more than you about these people, but they must be involved in one way or another. Whatever private information you can find out about them, Chen himself should be able to figure out the relevance.”

  “Okay, I’m going to try to access their e-mail files, and I’ll put everything I can find on a flash drive for him. Does he have a laptop with him?”

  “I think so, but it’s probably best for you to give the drive to me.”

  “To you?”

  “Yes, I work at a restaurant. No one pays any attention to a nobody like me, and even if the authorities are watching somebody like you, it’s nothing unusual if you step into an eatery for a bowl of noodles,” she said, with a self-deprecating smile. “That’s another reason I didn’t want Lianping to come out here with me.”

  “I see. How is she?”

  “She’s now a Big Buck’s wife and a soon-to-be mother,” she said. “Anyway, I don’t think Chen would want her implicated in any of this. Let me give you my cell number.”

  “Fine, I’ll set up a new phone number for myself, one that’s exclusive between you and me. Oh, what’s the name of your restaurant?”

  “Small Family. It’s a new one, on the corner of He’nan and Tianjin Roads. I work there from eight thirty to five thirty every day.”

  “Oh yes, I remember you now. Your husband is his longtime partner.”

  “Yes, he is. Detective Yu Guangming.”

  “Great. I’m sure I’ll find my way to your place for a bowl of steaming hot noodles.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  DETECTIVE YU STARTED HIS day on a busy note.

  It had begun with a routine phone call about a body discovered at a construction site in Fengxian. While there did happen to be an unsolved missing person case that the squad was working on, that didn’t necessarily mean that Yu had to go himself and check out the body. A couple of digital photos would be enough for an initial evaluation. He listened, barely catching all the details about the body: it had been found in nothing but boxers, in an advanced state of decay, with practically nothing to identify it with except for a tattoo on the lower belly, a blue dragon interwoven with someone’s name—

  At the mention of the tattoo, Yu jumped back as if someone had cracked a knuckle on his forehead. After he took that detail in, Yu decided not to mention it to his young assistant but instead said, “Xiao Yang, let’s go and take a look.”

  The description given to him over the phone reminded him of something he’d learned in a recent interview. It might be a long shot, but it wouldn’t hurt to follow up, especially since there were hardly any other steps for him to take in the case at that point.

  So he found himself in a police department jeep, sitting beside Xiao Yang, who was excited to going to his first real crime scene. It was appropriate to Yu’s new position as head of the squad that he’d been assigned an assistant, but it had been arranged by Party Secretary Li.

  Forty-five minutes later, they arrived at the construction site in question. Fengxian, originally mainly farmland, had been recently upgraded to a district and was in the process of being transformed into an urban center. A number of college campuses had been moved to Fengxian from other areas of the city, and there were numerous housing development projects, like everywhere else in Shanghai. The construction site had been a rice paddy field just about a year ago. Yu thought he could still see a narrow stretch of rice paddy not too far away.

  “This all happened because of an accident,” said the local cop on the scene. He’d come over to greet Yu and Xiao Yang. “The tower crane here collapsed, breaking its heavy arm in a dirt-covered pond. According to the development plan, the pond is to be completely drained, and a parking garage built on that site. When the workers were clearing away the broken crane, they found the body. It had been buried under a layer of dirt, and if it weren’t for the accident, it might not have been discovered for months, or even years.”

  Had the body not been discovered, Yu reflected, soon there would be nothing left for anyone to identify the body with.

  Before the local cop finished his report, Yu was fairly sure that this would not turn out to be a natural death or a suicide. At the very least, the deceased could not have buried himself under a layer of dirt.

  The degree of the decay indicated that he had been dead for a while. In spite of the strong stench, Yu squatted down next to the body and examined it himself. The tattoo on the lower belly was blurry. The blue dragon was still rec
ognizable, but the two characters intertwined in the figure, possibly someone’s name, were barely readable.

  “The poor man, he must have been smitten with her,” Xiao Yang said, partially covering his nose with his hand. “Some women would have fled at the sight of a tattoo like that.”

  “Well, if he was rich and high-ranking enough, tattoo or not, some women would have hung on to him—” Yu cut himself short, turning to the local cop. “Was anything else found at the scene?”

  “No, nothing else was found. The preliminary examination of the body showed multiple fractures on the skull. Possibly inflicted by a blunt object.”

  “So the body must have been moved here,” Xiao Yang chipped in. “The killer didn’t want the body to be discovered anytime soon.”

  “That seems likely,” Yu said. “But let’s wait to hear what the autopsy turns up.”

  Yu started taking pictures, including several close-ups of the tattoo. Xiao Yang looked on, rubbing his hands in excitement.

  The forensic team showed up at the scene shortly thereafter. Yu told his assistant to stay with them. They wouldn’t have a detailed report ready anytime soon, but the young policeman might learn something from watching the team.

  “I’m going to check on something else,” Yu added. “I’ll take the jeep and be back at the bureau later.”

  It felt different being in charge of the squad and not merely Chief Inspector Chen’s partner. He’d been Chen’s second-in-command for so long, that he’d almost taken it for granted. Now he had to make his own calls.

  This was a case assigned to the squad, and it was Yu’s decision whether or not to take the plunge. If the corpse was indeed Liang, it would stir up another storm on the Internet. A corrupt official exposed on the Internet had been murdered. Interpretations and speculations would inundate the Internet and the city in no time. That would probably put more pressure on the authorities. One result of the extra pressure on Shanghai authorities would be that Chen might be able to take a breath. In the Art of War, it was a stratagem called “Come to the rescue of the State of Zhao by surrounding the State of Wei.”