by Qiu Xiaolong
On the night of the raid, Shen got a message from a sender named FL. “What a disaster! Shame on you for having bragged about the certainty of catching a turtle in an urn.”
Shen wrote back, “He got a call at the last minute. There is a possible leak at the very top. Nothing to do with us here.”
Shortly afterward, Shen e-mailed again: “R came back, protesting about the disappearance of C after the raid.”
FL responded, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of him. He knows better than to make trouble if he still wants to do business with the government.”
Chen paused to make a note: “C = Chen?”
One minute later, he added another: “R = Rong? Is he in the dark?”
What White Cloud had told him about that night came back in a flash, filling in the blanks.
Shen also had another strange exchange with the e-mail account named “FL.”
Several days before that night at the club, there was a mysterious message from Shen to FL: “L gone from the surface of the earth.”
The response from FL: “Good riddance. The boss has to console the black widow of a white tiger.”
Chen stopped again. What did L stand for here? And “the black widow of a white tiger” sounded like a jargon spoken by gangsters. He put another question mark in his notebook.
Another short piece from FL to Shen got Chen’s attention. “Did the American have his favorite in your place?”
Shen wrote back: “I’ve talked to several of them. His lips seemed to be sealed about his business. He knew better.”
There were many Americans in Shanghai, but during the last few days, Chen had heard or read about the death of a mysterious American several times and from various sources.
He lit a cigarette, half closing his eyes, trying in vain for a short break.
There were still so many messages he hadn’t read. Many that he’d skimmed were too elusive to reveal their full meaning. Some seemed to be marginally related, but he didn’t want to jump to conclusions.
He felt he had reached a point of no return. He might not have been the sole cause of Qian’s death, but he was fairly sure she had been murdered because of her contact with him. Finding her killers wouldn’t necessarily redeem him, but he owed it to her.
The waitress came over again, carrying a thermos of hot water.
“You have been working nonstop for more than four hours,” she said with an enigmatic smile.
“The quiet garden helps me concentrate,” he said. But when he looked up, he realized that there were several tourists sitting outside, talking, drinking tea, or cracking watermelon seeds. It was a sunny, glorious day, but he’d been too absorbed in gloomy conspiracies to notice.
It was time for him to leave. He didn’t want to appear suspicious, working so long in a garden full of tourists.
He needed to go somewhere else, perhaps that bookstore near the hotel. He needed a quiet place where he could dive back into the depth of these e-mails, however fathomless they were.
TWENTY-THREE
CHEN CAME BACK TO Shanghai the next morning.
But this time, he wasn’t coming in quite so surreptitiously, Chen thought, as he walked out of the Shanghai Railway Station. It felt good to be back in the city so familiar to him.
He was exhausted after reading and rereading all those e-mails yesterday. Some of the clues in those messages needed to be investigated more thoroughly. What direction those clues would lead, he had no idea.
Unexpectedly, an empty taxi came to a stop right in front of him, before Chen got into the long taxi line. Chen liked that. It was a stroke of luck and not a bad beginning to the day. Also, for once, the driver turned out not to be very talkative. Chen liked that almost as much.
The traffic was terrible, as always, but he was in no hurry. The car stereo was playing some classical music, not too loudly, and Chen tried to sort out some of his tangled thoughts during the ride.
He had made the trip back to Shanghai today for a conference where he was going to be a keynote speaker. It had been scheduled months ago, and he’d practically forgotten about it. Party Secretary Li had called him last night and said, “The conference sent a notice to the bureau. The organizers must not have gotten your new office address. We know you’re busy in Suzhou, but your speech is important to the building of a harmonious society. There are newspaper and TV reporters who will come to cover it.”
The event would also function as proof that Chen retained a high-ranking position, thus heading off any speculation about disharmony in the “harmonious society.”
Chen, however, thought he’d better attend for his own reasons. The meeting was cosponsored by the Shanghai Writers’ Association and the Shanghai Entrepreneurs’ Association. He was supposed to deliver a speech about a writer’s responsibility to reflect the changes in today’s society, focusing on the contribution of entrepreneurs to the unprecedented economic reform. In Mao’s time, the proletariat had been portrayed as the sole masters of society, and entrepreneurs as capitalists of the most egregious sort. Now, the role of entrepreneurs was totally reversed. As far as the Writers’ Association was concerned, the conference was also arranged to push an undeclared agenda—to solicit financial support from the Entrepreneurs’ Association. As a member of the former, Chen considered it his duty to help this effort.
While in Shanghai, Chen also wanted to see his mother, who had returned home from the hospital but remained weak.
Time permitting, he wanted to have another bowl of noodles at Peiqin’s place as well.
He felt a net closing in on him, and he knew that any move he made—even a move he didn’t make—could pull him deeper into the mire. The consequences of his going to talk to Sima, for instance. He thought he’d had a plausible pretext for the conversation, but then what happened? Immediately, their conversation was reported to someone higher up as evidence that Chen was trying to make trouble. And the consequences of his contact with Qian …
It hurt for him even to think about it.
You left, like a cloud drifting away, / across the river. The memory / of our meeting is like a willow catkin / stuck to the wet ground, after the rain.
He’d decided the best thing to do was to attend the lecture as originally scheduled, while taking all possible precautions.
His cell phone buzzed. It was a text message, and it looked to be one of those chain messages that spammers occasionally sent around. Often the message was a joke at the expense of the government. The sender usually used a fake name, so it was difficult to trace. Chen didn’t receive too many, since not many people knew his number.
But today’s text was strange. It sounded more like a vicious, practical joke in the form of a bit of doggerel:
Prelude
You are sick, dangerously sick / too sick for the higher-up’s pick / like her cat tongue’s old trick / purring, trying to suck your dick.
Like most doggerel, it didn’t make much sense. But he couldn’t help reading it again. It wasn’t like the usual work composed by a youngster who spent all day and night on the Internet. Then he realized what struck him as strange. As a rule, run-ons don’t appear in the syntax of Chinese doggerel. This one was more like a piece written by someone familiar with Western poetry. And then there was the title, which seemed to echo an early poem by Eliot—full of ominous hints and suggestions. It was likely a coincidence—but Chen didn’t believe in coincidences.
Then his cell phone rang: another call was coming in. This time, it was his mother. The driver looked over his shoulder and turned the volume down on his radio.
“Where are you, son?”
“I’ve just gotten back to the city,” he said. “How are you, Mother? After I get out of a morning meeting, I’ll come to visit you this afternoon.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I know you’re busy.”
“I have some new pictures of the renovation of father’s grave in Suzhou. I’ll bring them to show you.”
“Don’t g
o out of your way on this renovation project. Things in this world are fleeting. It’s a large sum of money on a policeman’s salary. Buddha watches. You act with a clean, clear conscience and you’ll be protected.”
It was a subtle warning from her. She’d long since given up pushing him to change his career, but she still insisted that he follow the right path. She had no idea that he wasn’t a cop any longer, and he doubted he would be protected by Buddha, either.
Ironically, that night at the Heavenly World, he’d been protected by the phone call from his mother, a call related to his filial duty. Karma.
He’d just gotten out the taxi when he received another phone call from Party Secretary Li.
“So you’re back in Shanghai. That’s great,” Li said cordially. “As you haven’t yet started work at your new office, I’m sending a bureau car to pick you up.”
“There’s no need. I can take a taxi.”
“It’s going to rain today. On a rainy day, it’s not easy to hail a taxi. Remember, you’re not speaking at the conference for yourself alone. Your speech there will be a credit to our bureau. So, don’t worry about it. People here miss their chief inspector. Skinny Wang will arrive before nine thirty.”
There was more than an hour before the car was due to arrive.
Back at his apartment, Chen checked in his refrigerator, since he’d left the hotel in Suzhou too early for breakfast. There was only a half a bag of frozen dumplings from a long time ago. He boiled a pot of water and threw in the dumplings. While he was waiting, he began jotting down some points for his talk. He’d given speeches like this before. It wouldn’t be too difficult to pull this one together.
Halfway through his outline, however, he got another spam text message on his phone. This one was even more bizarre than the first. It actually consisted of nothing but the last stanza of “Sweeney among the Nightingales” by T. S. Eliot, by no means a frequently quoted poem. Chen recognized it because of its inclusion in the new volume of Chinese translations. In an intertextual twist, the Eliot stanza alludes to the fatal scene of Agamemnon walking across the purple carpet, entirely unsuspicious, the moment when he’s murdered by his wife.
But how could that possibly be a practical joke sent as a spam text?
What … what if it was the message meant for him alone? From someone familiar with Eliot, sent to him as a warning about some imminent disaster, from something or someone he didn’t suspect at all.
He shuddered at the possibility.
Then he was reminded of Rong, whom he had met at the Heavenly World the night he was set up. Rong was familiar with Eliot, and familiar with Chen’s knowledge of Eliot. Chen hadn’t had the time to check into the background of the banker yet, but judging from the e-mails gathered by Melong, Rong hadn’t been involved in the setup at the book launch party. As a literature-loving banker, and possibly a designated donor, Rong might have heard about something that was going to happen at today’s conference.
It might be a wild guess, but Chen was starting to think that perhaps it wasn’t so important that he attend the conference this morning …
He was startled by a metal smell wafting over from the stove’s gas burner. The water had boiled away, and the dumplings had burned into a black and reddish mess at the bottom of the pot. He quickly threw the pot into the sink.
Glancing at his watch, he decided to leave.
He tried to think while he was heading out. He turned off his cell phone, lest his thoughts be interrupted by the phone.
As he walked past, several people stood by side of the road, waving frantically at taxis, shouting in vain. Party Secretary Li was probably right about needing to send over a bureau car. Still, it didn’t look like it was about to rain anytime soon.
Abruptly, he stopped walking and took out his phone. He checked the weather forecast, and an image of a smiling sun beamed at him. He pondered for a moment, then composed a short text message to Li. In the message, Chen said that there was an accident during the renovation of his father’s grave site and that he had to rush back to Suzhou. Then, turning off the phone, Chen headed to the train station.
He wasn’t ready to go back to Suzhou. Instead, he planned to continue his research from the train station until evening, when he would go visit his mother. This way, it would be possible for him to claim that he’d actually hurried to Suzhou and then come back to Shanghai.
In Zhuangzi, there is a well-known saying: “To hide most effectively is to hide in the busiest section of the city.” So here he was, bent over his laptop at a train station café like many others, surrounded by the nonstop flow of commuters. From the train station, if need be, he could easily take the subway to Peiqin’s restaurant. She might have something new to share from her firewall-climbing efforts on the Internet. In the meantime, he’d try to sort through more of those e-mails.
Soon the e-mails overwhelmed him again with their conflicting, contradicting currents of possibilities. As he was working on his second cup of coffee, he decided to try a new approach. In the three files of e-mails, was there some intersection, something that all of them touched upon?
There was. To his surprise, it was the death of the American.
The topic came up in various contexts. In the e-mails between the ernai, it seemed it was just a curiosity to gossip about. Though such a death touched upon his work in the Foreign Liaison Office, Sima’s e-mails seemed very cautious on the subject. What struck Chen as particularly suspicious was the connection in those e-mails to someone named FL.
Was foul play involved in the American’s death?
If so, the death would become an international scandal, which would be far more disastrous to the city government than all of the other cases combined.
Perhaps his having gulped two cups of coffee without any breakfast was making him too intense and paranoid. He was beginning to feel something like coffee sickness.
A waitress came to refill his water glass. “Are you all right, sir? You look so pale.”
“I’m fine. I just need to sit by myself for a while.”
He turned on his cell phone to check for messages, and immediately the phone started ringing. Chen picked it up.
“Where are you, Chief?” Yu said breathlessly.
“At the Shanghai Railway Station.”
“Thank Heaven,” Yu said, with an audible sigh of relief.
“What happened?”
“Earlier this morning, Skinny Wang said that he was going to drive for you. He was excited…”
“Yes, I was told that a bureau car was being made available and to wait for the pickup,” Chen said, “but I had to leave before he arrived. Something urgent came up, so I sent Li a text message.”
“Skinny Wang had a car accident.”
“A car accident!”
“Just about an hour ago. There was a deafening bang, something like an explosion, apparently, and the car went out of control. There are different accounts about the accident, but it happened on his way back to the bureau. It’s so hard to understand. He’s such an experienced driver.”
“How is he?”
“He’s still at the emergency room. His life isn’t in danger, but he might end up paralyzed.”
“Go to the hospital for me and bring some money with you.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be there. You take care of yourself,” Yu said and ended the call.
Chen was reminded of the “spam” text messages he’d received, particularly the one that quoted “Sweeney among the Nightingales.” Now the warning was unmistakable.
Whoever sent that message was someone who had been informed that something devilish was being orchestrated but was too shrewd to send Chen an explicit warning.
For the moment, however, Chen decided not to speculate about who sent the warning. And not to contact Peiqin as he’d originally planned.
He was reminded of a proverb she’d quoted, which she’d gotten from Old Hunter: Treating a dead horse as if it were still alive.
He stood up, shaken but ready to move.
TWENTY-FOUR
CHEN STEPPED INTO THE public phone booth at the railway station, pulled out a phone card, and dialed Qi Renli, the associate head of the Songjiang district police bureau. Last year, Qi had worked under Chen on a special case. Afterward, Chen had described Qi’s work as “energetic and creative” in a recommendation letter he wrote as part of the Party cadre promotion process.
“Chief Inspector Chen—no, Director Chen.”
“Are you alone in the office, Qi?”
“Yes, I’m alone—and I understand. This call is confidential.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have much time to talk. Last month, the death of an American in Sheshan was reported to your district office?”
“Yes, it was reported to the Sheshan precinct in our district. They got a call from a hotel and immediately sent two policemen over, but when Internal Security arrived at the scene, they were kicked out.”
“But they got there before Internal Security?”
“That’s correct. I’ve met Fei, one of the two cops at the hotel that day, but he didn’t say much about the incident. With Internal Security in the background, few would.”
“Do you have their names and phone numbers?”
“Yes, let me find them for you.”
Chen could hear Qi typing on a keyboard on the other end.
“Here they are. Fei Yaohua and Jiang Hui.” Qi read Chen their cell phone numbers. “And the address of the precinct they work out of is 222 Shexin Road. By the way, Fei may not be there today. I heard that he’s helping on a case somewhere else, outside of Shanghai.”
“Has anybody else come to the district office asking about the dead American?”
“No, I don’t think so. If there were any complications, they would be referred directly to Old Kang, the head of our district office. But I heard that the American died of alcohol poisoning.”
“Let me know if you hear anything new,” Chen said. “Needless to say, don’t breathe a word to anyone else about this phone call.”