by Qiu Xiaolong
An recommended the pigeon of the house, its skin fried to a golden brown, a crisp crust covering the tender meat. She started tearing the bird with her slender fingers. “The wing is the best part, its muscle juicy out of constant movement,” she said, placing a pigeon wing onto his plate.
“I have to tell you something, An,” he said abruptly and apologetically, putting down the glass as he moved on to explain the real purpose of the evening.
“It is an official investigation under the Central Party Discipline Committee. I need your cooperation,” he concluded. “Our friendship is very important to me, but for a cop, work has to come first. That’s what I am, whether I like it or not.”
“I thought,” she said slowly, “that you wanted to see me for old time’s sake.”
“It’s for old time’s sake, An, that I wanted to meet you here, first.”
That was both true and not true. Or, like the much-quoted couplet in The Dream of the Red Chamber: When the true is false, the false is true. / Where there is nothing, there is everything. An official investigation in the name of the Party Discipline Committee could have a disastrous impact on her business. No one would have engaged any service from such a PR company. As well as a disastrous effect on her reputation. There would be no way for her-an embodiment of political correctness-to appear on TV again.
“How could you have listened to those people?” she said, her face flushing in indignation.
“I would not have listened, but then I received something.” He produced the large envelope that contained the pictures.
Her face blanched at the sight of the photographs. He watched her closely. An was an experienced anchorwoman, her feelings always deftly hidden behind a professional mask, but she failed to conceal her immediate reaction. The hand that held her glass began to quiver. She put her wrist on the table to steady it.
He sat back, crossed his knees, and selected a cigarette from his case with deliberation.
“That’s what an old friend is for,” she said between her teeth. Putting her spoon into the fish soup, leaving it there, and digging a cigarette from her crumpled pack, she was trying to pull herself together, but not successfully. She was doing anything to keep herself from looking up at him.
“I wish I had an alternative. So I want to talk to you first as an old friend.”
“What do you mean?”
“What if I had turned these pictures in to the committee first? You don’t need me to tell you. In a worse scenario, if somebody else-not necessarily in the committee-got hold of those pictures, God alone knows what could happen. An unscrupulous rascal could have sold them to a tabloid magazine for a fortune.”
She didn’t say anything for a minute or two, staring at the pigeon head, which stared back at her with its dead eyes.
“Your company would be closed, your job lost, your property taken, and your apartment would be gone too. What a nice apartment! I don’t think it would be easy for you to move back to your tingzijian room of eight or nine square meters, An. If that room it is still there.”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen.”
He did not have to be sarcastic, but sitting in a “lovers’ nest” he had to justify himself. He went on, “Don’t believe those high up will try to help you. They have their own necks to save. Beijing means business this time, and they know it. An anticorruption bureau will be set up in Shanghai. Do you want to sacrifice yourself for those who would throw you out as a pawn? In the end, they may get away scot-free, but you’ll have to pay the full price.”
She studied him up and down, still in disbelief over her humiliating downfall in front of an old friend.
His cell phone started ringing again. “Nothing important,” he said, turning it off after looking at the number.
“You think you can pull this off?” she said. “Evidence like this may not be permissible. As a cop, you know better.”
“Let me put it this way, An. When I got the assignment, a leading comrade in Beijing joked about me being the emperor’s special envoy with an imperial sword. You know what it means, don’t you? In ancient China, such an envoy could kill without having obtained official approval first. Believe me, the evidence will be more than permissible.”
“So I have no choice? Listen, Chen,” she said hoarsely, “I want you to know something-”
He did not say anything, waiting to hear what she wanted him to know. But the waitress knocked at the door again. She came to light a new candle for them, bowing before she left with a smile. In the fresh candlelight, he noticed that An was without makeup. Her face clear and clean, suggestive of an innocent purity, untouched by evil. She looked up at him, in a long gaze, as if the autumn waves were breaking against the shore in her large black eyes.
“Xing has so many connections in Shanghai,” she finally said. “But why have you chosen me, a helpless woman, of all the people? Are the others too monstrous for you to touch?”
She was sharp. The accusation hit home. He did not wince. It was not that he did not have the guts, he told himself.
“I have no choice, An. The investigation is under the committee,” he said. “If you collaborate, I won’t mention your name in the report. I give you my word.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“You tell me everything related to Xing-or to Ming-and I’ll return those photos to you. Your choices in your personal life are not my business. The anticorruption campaign, however, is a matter of life and death for our country.”
“Can I have some time to think?”
“About what?”
“It may be a matter of life and death for me.”
He lit another cigarette for her and pushed the window slightly open. Unexpectedly, a mosquito came buzzing in. An incredible nuisance at such a height, like a tedious song coming from next door during a sleepless night.
An then began to tell about the business deal she had helped to arrange for Ming. A long, complicated story. The beginning part of it had little to do with An, comprehensible only in a larger context. With the development of the economic reform, there were a large number of state-run factories that had fallen in terrible shape. In the old days, they manufactured products in accordance to the state planning, without having to worry about profit or loss. Now they had to struggle for survival in the market economy. Shanghai Number Six Textile Mill was such a factory. Its products were poor quality, and it could not obtain the raw material at the state price as before. Most of the workers, iron-bowl holders, were hardly in a position to help. Still, they clamored for the same socialist pay and benefits, desperate as ants crawling on a hot wok.
According to the People’s Daily, the problems might be insignificant, “inevitable in the historic transition.” But these factories became an increasingly impossible liability. So with a new government policy, a state-run company was allowed-for the first time since 1949-to go bankrupt. Interested entrepreneurs were encouraged to buy them at a discount, and even enjoy a further reduction by retaining its workers. That, too, was considered contributing to the political stability. The buyer for Number Six Mill was none other than Ming, who, without revealing a specific plan, promised to keep five hundred employees and so got the factory at a “symbolic sum.” No one knew anything about Ming’s coup until after the deal was done. He razed the factory for residential property construction. The location turned out to be close to a not-yet-announced subway route, so it attracted a number of investors the moment word got out. The value of the land proved to be five times more than what he had paid for the factory.
To meet the government requirement for keeping the factory in operation, Ming set up a small workshop of about ten people for equipment maintenance. He reached a housing development agreement with a construction company, through which he was able to retain the ex-state employees as temporary construction workers. Upon completion of the project, he would own one-third of the apartment complex.
In an inside report to the city
government, Ming’s maneuver was described as one arrow that killed three birds. It helped the state stop losing money through a bottomless hole; it kept ex-state employees holding their rice bowl-though no longer made of iron-for a couple of years; and it met the housing needs of the city. Of course, the report did not touch on the profit Ming had walked away with. He did not pay a single penny out of his own pocket. With an official copy of the factory buying-over document as the mortgage, he had acquired a low interest loan from the government bank. In short, it was like “capturing a white fox empty-handed.”
Nor did the report mention a snag hidden in the operation. It was against government policy to turn a factory into a commercial construction lot. Otherwise Ming would have not gotten the land at such an incredibly low price.
Everything had been achieved through his connections, or rather, through Xing’s. The large network of corruption worked. The PR service provided by An also contributed: among other things it represented the small workshop for equipment maintenance as the factory’s continuous operation, a claim accepted by Dong for the Shanghai State Industry Reform Committee, and it obtained the land development permission from Jiang for the City Land Development Office. All this was not difficult, as An put it, just offering incense to every god in sight. She knew the doors, both the front and the back.
“Perhaps not simply because of your knowledge about the doors,” Chen said, casting another glance at the pictures on the table. But the deal was big: even with all her connections, it was probably too big for the sweet words she had whispered on the phone or in the bedroom. Still, there was no denying her part.
She did not respond to his remark.
He said simply, “Now tell me more about Ming.”
“Ming keeps a low profile. He stays in the shadow of Xing. As far as I know, he’s focused in Shanghai, and Xing takes good care of his little brother. They are much closer than ordinary stepbrothers. Xing does whatever his mother says, and Ming is her favorite son.”
“Really!”
“Xing is not a monster throughout. A filial son in his way, like you,” she added in hurry. “Of course, I’m talking about you as a monster.”
“No one is good or evil a hundred percent. You are right about it.”
“But they didn’t tell me everything. Like the inside information about the subway-neither Ming nor Xing mentioned a single word about it to me. That’s the most important part of the operation and a number of people higher up were involved.”
The Bund was enveloped in the night. Across the river, numerous neon lights on the eastern bank started projecting fanciful attractions for a new part of the city. She might have been telling the truth, except the part about her own activities.
“How did you get those photos?” she said.
“Somebody sent them to me. Don’t worry about it. No one knows anything about our meeting tonight. No one could have suspected-in a lovers’ nest.”
“A penny for your thoughtfulness.”
“Now, you mentioned that Ming contacted you as late as the Chinese New Year. According to my information, Xing got away in early January. If that’s true, Ming got out later than Xing.”
“I can’t be sure of the exact date. Ming may still be here, I’ve heard something about it, but I’m not sure. I’m going to make phone calls, and I’ll let you know as soon as I find out.”
“That will really help. You know how to contact me.” He put down his cell phone number on the back of his business card and rose from the table.
At the restaurant exit, the elevator door opened like a grin, and she leaned over, whispering in his ear, “You promise that you will return the pictures?”
“I give you my word.”
“Get rid of them in your memory too.”
He was surprised at the coquettish way she made her second request. It was not like her-not in the days of their reading group. But he did not know her anymore, not after so many years.
“I will, An.”
“I will come or call, Chen,” she said. “If not tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow.”
7
AN DID NOT COME or call the following day, nor the day after it, as she had promised.
Chen did not want to think too much about it. He tried to put his father’s calligraphy scroll on the wall. Liu Zhongyuan was a great Tang poet, and like some of his contemporary intellectuals, Liu had been politically disappointed- with those red rats controlling the court-but it was in his exile that he wrote his best poems. Chen wondered whether this could be the reason why he wrote so little of late. Then his mind wandered away, thinking of several lines by another Tang dynasty poet who also wrote in his down-and-out days:
You say you will come, but you do not keep your word,
you ‘re gone, not a single trace left.
The moonlight slant on the tower,
at the fifth strike of the night watch.
Chen recalled those lines in a self-depreciative mood. But he was not exactly worried. There was no telling whether Ming was still hiding in the city, and it would take time for An to find out. Still, she would cooperate. After all, he had the pictures in his hands.
In the meantime, he kept himself busy interviewing other officials on the list. He made a point of being perfunctory and polite, never pushing anyone too far. The message would be clear: he had learned the risks involved from Director Dong and now Chief Inspector Chen was merely putting on a show-that’s all it was.
He also made inquiries into Ming’s business-through his personal connections, under the excuse of apartment hunting. He had been talking about buying his mother an apartment for some time, so his questions about real estate companies seemed natural. Ming having disappeared, his company had gone temporarily into disarray, but the housing project was said to be moving forward with no real disruption. Before his mysterious evaporation, Ming sold the company to someone named Pan Hao. Pan was a mystery man, allegedly from Beijing, with several large companies under his name. So the financial future of the new company seemed to be secure.
He got a call from Detective Yu in the afternoon.
“In a press conference held yesterday,” Yu said, “Party Secretary Li bragged and boasted about your work under the Party Discipline Committee.
“What? He promised not to tell anyone about it!”
“He mentioned you as our ace detective, and your assignment as another proof of the government’s determination to fight corruption.”
“It’s really becoming a part of a show, as you’ve said.”
“The publicity won’t do you any good.”
“No, it won’t. But my assignment is probably no longer a secret after my talk with Director Dong. Not in that circle anymore.”
“Director Dong-any new development?”
“Not yet,” Chen said. “I’ll keep you posted.”
***
For quite a long while afterward, Chen remained upset with the news. Why should Party Secretary Li have trumpeted his investigation like that? It was putting him on the grill of public attention. Not to mention the political.
He made a few more calls for interview appointments.
An still didn’t call. Chen gazed at the scroll and lit a cigarette. The ashtray was already full. It was shaped like a shell, as if trying to catch a message from the distant oceans. He was seized with a portentous feeling. She should have touched base with him, progress or not. So he called her. No one answered. Neither in her office, nor at her home.
Around six o’clock, he opened a can of Qingdao beer with a pop, and again dialed her home number. It was answered by an unfriendly, unfamiliar male voice.
“Who are you?”
“Oh, I’m a friend of hers,” Chen answered. It was not her husband Han, that much Chen could tell immediately.
“A friend of hers-” the man said. “What’s your name?”
Chen wondered whether it could be someone she was seeing-possibly none other than Jiang. But the way the man asked the questi
on was ridiculous. Whoever Chen was, the man had no reason to be jealous. An was probably not at home, otherwise she would not have permitted another to talk like this.
“What’s that to you?” Chen said, ready to hang up. “I’ll call back later.”
“Don’t hang up, man. It’s useless. I’ve got your number.”
That was strange. Caller ID was still something rare in the city. She might have it at home, but what could the man do? Chen took a gulp of the cold beer and said, “What do you mean?”
“Tell me who you are, and your identification card number too, or we’ll find out, and then it will be big trouble for you.”
“Are you a cop?”
“What the hell do you think I am?”
“What do you think I am?” Chen snapped.
“Listen”-the man at the other end of the line raised his voice-”I am Sergeant Kuang of the Shanghai Police Bureau.”
“Listen-I am Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Bureau.”
“What-oh, I am so sorry, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen. It’s like the flood washing away the Temple of the Dragon King.”
“What has happened, Kuang?”
“An Jiayi was killed early this morning.”
“What?” Chen was stunned. “So you are there in charge of the homicide case?”
“Yes. I’ve just arrived.”
“Where was her body found?”
“At home. She was supposed to appear at the TV station in the afternoon, but she did not turn up. People called everywhere, without success. She had never missed a show before. According to the secretary at her PR company, An complained about not feeling so well the last few days. So the station sent someone over to her home, and they discovered her body.
“Don’t move the body or do anything,” Chen said. “I’m on my way.”
“I won’t. Celebrity cases can be too tough for our ordinary homicide squad.”
Chen detected the sarcasm in the response. Kuang wasn’t eager for his cooperation. Every now and then, Chen’s special case squad had to take over the politically sensational cases-which was not pleasant for him. Still, such a division of labor was far from pleasant for people in the homicide squad too, depriving them of the limelight as it did.