by Qiu Xiaolong
“You are a well-known authority. It made sense for Xing to consult you from time to time,” Chen said, taking a deliberate sip of the tea. “Great tea. I’ve just heard something else about you, Director Dong. A coincidence, I would say. My mother is in her seventies, living in an attic. So I have been looking for an apartment for her. I happened to learn about your house in the Hongqiao area. Congratulations, Director Dong!”
“Oh, that,” Dong said, staring at Chen. “What a hard time I had borrowing the money from my friends and relatives, you can hardly imagine.”
“It’s not easy to borrow such a large sum, I know.” Chen might be able to discover something not so pleasant for Dong if the chief inspector were to push in that direction. Dong knew that.
“I literally begged around,” Dong said, taking a drink of tea. “Let me tell you something, Chief Inspector Chen. When my nephew Junjun was a toddler, I used to buy him Coca-Cola. A luxurious treat then, and I became his favorite uncle. Now only in his mid-twenties, Junjun is a millionaire in the property market. My monthly income is like a bottle of Coca-Cola to him. But for his generous loan, I would have never dreamed of purchasing that house. Indeed, the world has been changing dramatically, as from the azure ocean to the mulberry field.”
It might be partially true. Chen understood why a large number of Party cadres were unable to resist the materialistic temptation. As Dong had implied, the system was far from fair. As a hardworking chief inspector, Chen earned about the same state-specified salary that a janitor in the bureau did. Of course, Chen had subsidies in recognition of his position, like the bureau car, a business expense allowance, a special housing assignment, and so on. All these might not be bad, but he could not cash in the car service when he wanted to take a walk. Once he had seen a Ming-style mahogany desk in a furniture store. It took him five or six months to save enough money for it. When he finally went there with the sum, the desk was long gone.
Still, he had to consider himself well off, compared with those working in the state-run companies on the edge of bankruptcy or with those hanging on in the waiting-for-retirement program. Was it really fair for the CEOs, Party cadres or not, to earn hundreds of times more than the ordinary people? A product of his education in the sixties, Chen maintained a nostalgic passion for a sort of egalitarian society. Others did, too-that might also be one of the reasons why people complained so much about corruption.
“So we have to study those new issues in the transitional period,” Dong went on, “and find solutions in a realistic way.”
Dong had regained his footing, unshakable no matter what the chief inspector might say. It would not be difficult for Dong to have the bank documents prepared, whether through a real nephew or not. Chen was going to try anyway, but it would be pointless for him to stay here any longer, wasting his breath with Dong.
As Chen was about to take his exit, Dong broached a new topic, rising to pour more hot water into Chen’s cup.
“In today’s world, people have to move around through their connections. No one is an exception, not even you, Chief Inspector Chen. When the water is too clear, there will be no fish left.”
“Well, it depends on your definition of connections. I am a cop. I want to do a good job of it.”
“Who is going to define it, then? Hardworking Party cadres like you and me-we know how difficult it is to do a job well.” Dong went on casually, “Of course, you are more than an ordinary Party cadre. You are also a well-known poet and translator. You have recently published a collection of poetry, I know. And a huge hit too.”
“Oh, you like poetry?”
“Not exactly, but a friend of yours, Mr. Gu of the New World Group, gave me a copy. As you may or may not know, he has given copies to a lot of people.”
“Really! He never told me anything about it.”
Gu was a highly successful businessman Chen had become acquainted with during an investigation. Gu had helped, and been helped, and since considered himself a friend of Chen’s. So Gu had been doing him favors- “out of friendship.”
“I happen to know he bought a thousand copies from the publisher even before the book came out,” Dong said with a knowing smile. “Publishers lose money with poetry.”
So that’s all there was to it. The success of his poetry. He should have questioned it from the beginning. The publisher’s ravings had for once gone to his head. Still, he was not too surprised that Gu had orchestrated it. But how could Dong have learned all the details?
Dong must have checked Chen’s background before his visit. The chief inspector was troubled. He hadn’t told anybody about his plan. The only possibility of it leaking out would have been, he realized, through the bureau computer room. Somebody else had accessed his computer research, and Dong had been informed beforehand.
If Dong pushed further in that direction, things between Gu and Chen could be interpreted in a variety of ways. Chen might believe he had not done anything unjustifiable, but others might not see things from his perspective.
“You surely have your expert way of looking at things, Director Dong,” Chen said, trying to gain time. Instead of surprising Dong, he found himself being ambushed. The talk was moving in a direction he had not foreseen at all. There might be something in Detective Yu’s warning. Knocking on Party doors could be truly dangerous.
But Dong was not going to stop there.
“Things are not fair in China. For example, you do not have a large enough apartment for your mother to live with you. An old woman living by herself in an attic with a dark, difficult staircase could easily have an accident.”
“An accident-” Chen was more than alarmed. He wondered whether Dong had brought it up as a hint. “Thank you for your concern, Director Dong.”
Without waiting for Chen to respond further, Dong continued, “You have been doing a great job, Chief Inspector Chen. You should have at least a three-bedroom apartment, so your mother could move in with you and you wouldn’t have to worry about anything happening to her at her age. You are son of filial piety, as we all know. And you know what? I might be able to put in a word for your special situation with the city government.”
Now that was a hint, Chen had no doubt about it. All of a sudden, sitting before him was a diabolical triad gangster instead of a senior Party cadre. But it was also a turning point. If he backed away like that, Chief Inspector Chen would never forgive himself for being a coward.
“Thank you, Director Dong. I will keep every word of yours in mind, but I really have to go now.”
Chen rose to leave, thinking of a poem written before a battle by Wang Changling, a Tang dynasty poet:
The bright moon of the Qing dynasty…
The ancient pass of the Han dynasty…
Soldiers after soldiers,
not a single one of them ever returns
from the long march-thousands
and thousands of miles long.
Oh with the winged general
of the Dragon City stationed here,
the Tartar horses would never
have crossed the Yin Mountain.
4
IN THE FIRST GRAY of the morning, Chen felt as if he were waking out of the ancient battle of iron-clad horses galloping through the ignorant night, and coming back to reality again. As a cop, he could put himself at risk, but not his mother.
There are things a man should do, and there are things a man should not do.
Nothing should happen to his mother. That was the bottom line for the son who, though far from being a Confucianist, remembered that Confucian maxim.
He brushed his teeth vigorously. There was a bitter, ammonia-like taste in his mouth. For years, he had let his mother down, time after time. Through his career choice, his political allegiance, and his personal life. She had dreamed of her son pursuing an academic career like her late husband, staying away from politics, and settling down with a family of his own. She did not care about his Party position. It was only of late-while she was
in the hospital-that he and his position proved capable of providing for her, at least materialistically. Now, because of his position, she would not even be able to enjoy her remaining days peacefully, like an ordinary old woman.
According to another Confucian principle, however, one might occasionally find oneself unable to fulfill political and filial duty at the same time. If so, the former should take the priority. And his mother, though not the scholar his late Confucianist father was, would not forgive him for backing away from his investigation because of her.
He had to find a way to pursue the investigation without exposing his mother to danger. But that seemed impossible. His work was no longer a secret to Xing’s circle. His next interview would be like a declaration of war among those officials.
He dug out a copy of Thirty-Six Battle Strategies, a book of war stratagems over a thousand years old. Lighting a cigarette, he searched the table of contents before turning to a chapter entitled “Cutting through Chen Trail in Stealth,” which was about a battle in the early Han dynasty. General Han built a bridge, leading the enemy forces to believe he intended to maneuver his troops across it, but then he took a trail called Chen Cang instead and surprised them.
The chief inspector had to find his own Chen trail. He was going to focus on the people considered unlikely as interviewees. No one would suspect that he was trying to break the case through them. In the meantime, he would start making formal phone calls, scheduling interviews with the officials on his list, but he would not approach them the same way as Dong. They would conclude that Chen was merely putting on a show.
He took out the list before he started to brew a pot of coffee. It was the last spoonful from the jar of Brazilian coffee an American friend had given him. Hongyan zhiji. He whistled wistfully into a bitter smile. He had already kept the coffee for a long period, and eventually, it would have lost all its flavor.
It was a long list. Xing had an incredible reach of social contacts. Some of them, however, were hardly connections. “Nodding acquaintances” would perhaps be a more appropriate phrase. They were the people of little relevance to his business.
As he took a sip of the fresh coffee, going through the list again, a name jumped out as if printed in red.
Qiao Bo.
Qiao had met Xing only once the previous year. Their meeting was mentioned in local newspapers, for Xing donated twenty thousand yuan to Qiao. Not a large sum. Like a single hair from an ox, but it was much reported, as an “entrepreneur’s generous support to a patriotic project.” It was all because of a book entitled China Can Stand Up in Defiance, of which Qiao was the author. Not an academic book, it appealed to popular sentiment and became a national best-seller.
Chen happened to know Qiao, however, against a totally different backdrop. In the early eighties, a self-styled postmodernist poet, Qiao put his works into a manuscript and approached Chen for a preface. His poems attracted a number of young students, but postmodernism was not considered politically acceptable. As a member of the Writers’ Association, Chen declined to write the preface. Qiao later attracted far more attention when he went to jail for his “corrupt bourgeois lifestyle.” Newspapers came up with lurid stories of his seducing girls in his dorm room. According to his roommates, however, it was those girls that went after him-a young, handsome, romantic poet. Nothing but consensual sex. But Qiao was sentenced to seven or eight years.
Chen was then an entrance-level police officer, and there was little he could do about it. Afterward, he heard nothing about Qiao until the early nineties. Out of jail, Qiao became a bookseller. A poet no longer seemed like a prince on a white horse riding into the dreams of young girls. Poetry, if anything, became synonymous with poverty. Selling books in a store converted out of his one single residential room, Qiao wrote China Can Stand Up in Defiance, with a subtitle, The Strategic Choice in the New Global Age. It was a project developed out of his business sensibility, for he sensed a need in the market. The book received favorable reviews, and Qiao knew how to “stir-fry”-how to attract public attention. With the forever-turning wheel of fortune, Qiao came once more into the limelight, only it did not last long this time. When the waves of nationalism gained too much momentum, the Beijing government intervened. The book was not banned, but once all the official media was hushed, it soon fell from the best-seller list. Then numerous new books on similar topics came out, quickly overwhelming Qiao’s.
Xing had met Qiao before the book had fallen out of the market’s favor.
Chen stood up, searched the bookshelf for a long while, and dug out a dust-covered book. It was Qiao’s poetry collection, for which he could have written the preface. He turned over several pages to a love poem and skipped to the last two stanzas:
A drunken swan flushes
out of the canvas, carrying
my body to the sea, where
the coral was my eyes shining
in yours. How can I feel
the waves without your breath,
the waves seaweed-tangled, rising
and falling in me?
A blaze in the late autumn woods.
Dawn or dusk vomits blood again.
When you light a candle, will you
blow it out gently, for me?
Not a bad poem, written through a female persona. Rereading it, Chen thought he could understand Qiao’s popularity among those girls in the eighties.
Chen decided not to approach Qiao in a conventional way. It was not easy for an ex-poet-or an ex-convict-to survive, and an investigation in the name of the Party Discipline Committee would not make things any easier for his business. So instead of a bureau car, Chen took a taxi to go and visit him.
The bookstore was located on Fuyou Road, one of the few remaining pebble-covered streets in the Old City area. Chen told the driver to stop one block away. Fuyou was a street lined with booths, kiosks, stands, barrows, and shabby stores on both sides. Several stores appeared to be makeshift extensions, or conversions, out of the former residential rooms. A few peddlers did business on wooden tables or white cloths set out on the sidewalk.
It was an age when everything could be put up on sale, and everywhere, too.
He stepped into the bookstore, which consisted of two sections. One selling so-called antiques, and the other selling books.
The antique section exhibited a hodgepodge of objects. A time-yellowed picture of an old woman shuffling in her bound feet along the Qing trail, a long brass opium pipe immortalized with the moss of ages, a cigarette box card of a Shanghai courtesan flashing her thighs through the high slits of her floral cheongsam. To his surprise, things as recent as the Cultural Revolution were also marked as antiques, cramming a whole glass counter. A stamp of Marshal Lin Biao standing with Chairman Mao on the Tiananmen Gate. Lin was killed shortly afterward in an unsuccessful coup. The stamp was now marked as worth ten thousand Yuan. There was an impressive collection of Chairman Mao badges-plastic or metal-copies of the Little Red Book of Mao’s Quotations, the four-volume Collected Works of Chairman in the first edition…
Next to the collection of the Cultural Revolution, Chen saw a poster of Dietrich in Shanghai Express. This city seemed to be suddenly lost in a collective nostalgia for the twenties and thirties, an allegedly golden period of exotic and exuberant fantasies. Things from those days were being discovered and rediscovered with a passion. The poster stood as a plastic-covered valuable, fetching a much higher price than a larger portrait of Chairman Mao standing on Tiananmen Square.
Chen took a bamboo shopping basket. He picked a stainless steel lighter in the shape of a Little Red Book, marked for only five yuan. He also chose something like a large plastic Mao badge with a long red silk string attached. Possibly a pendant, but the red string was too short.
Looking up, he saw a middle-aged man in a traditional Tang jacket in a corner partially sheltered by a bookshelf. He recognized him to be none other than Qiao. Qiao, who had changed a great deal, deeply wrinkled like a shrunken gourd, did not
come over. Perhaps what Chen had chosen were merely cheap imitation antiques.
Chen then walked toward several special-price bookshelves with some of the books marked as eighty to ninety percent off. Qiao moved over, drawing his attention to a section marked “beauty authors.”
“A lot of people buy these books,” Qiao said.
Not because of those glamorous authors on the covers, Chen knew, but because of the pornographic contents-allegedly autobiographical. Like Lei Lei, the author of Darling, Darling, whose cover bore a blurb praising the book as “a lush, lustful account of her sexual experience with three Americans.” Or like Jun Tin, the author of Peacocks, notorious through her fight with Lei Lei for the number one Chinese-female-Henry-Miller title. With the first lessening of the government censorship, books featuring sexual descriptions turned into the hottest product. Surprisingly, there was a bronze ancient monster crouching on top of that particular shelf, as if moving out of a Chinese myth.
“American Lover by Rain Cloud,” Qiao said, picking up a book. “Graphic description of the sexual ecstasy between a Chinese woman and her American lover. The book has caused a sensation because the alleged protagonist’s daughter sued the author. Rain settled the case for a large sum, but guess what-the book was then reprinted to roaring success, bringing in far more than what she paid.”
“How?” Chen said.
“She claimed that the trial was orchestrated by the government. Once a writer was ‘persecuted,’ her book sold like hotcakes. It was translated into five foreign languages. People are contrarily curious. Not to mention all the lurid details, much reported during the trial.”
“What a shameless profiteer!”
“Is there any ashamed profiteer? Look at that paragraph. ‘They write not with their pens, but with their pussies,’“ Qiao read aloud from a newspaper clipping taped above the book.
“Well, what else can you say?” Chen picked a couple of different books at random and put them into the bamboo basket.