“That’s okay, we don’t play stakes the first round,” said Madam Xia, who had already started to mix the tiles. “Sit down. My husband doesn’t like my playing here. He is worried about money. I don’t really care about money. I come to play mah-jongg, and that’s all.” Her sausage fingers moved as calmly as if she were doing household chores. “So how do you know these two pigs?”
“From Lai Chun,” replied Old Huang, smoking one of his cheap cigarettes.
Madam Xia started to build her wall of tiles. Looking at Mei sidelong, she asked, “You are a Beijinger, aren’t you? What were you doing at Lai Chun?”
Mei took her time lining up her tiles carefully. When she had finished, she looked up and saw that Madam Xia was waiting for an answer. “I came to look for someone and got friendly with Wonton Queen,” said Mei.
“She’s looking for a man from Luoyang called Zhang Hong,” Old Huang said angrily. “The bastard came to Beijing to sell old stuff—”
“Antiques,” interrupted Uncle Ma almost inaudibly, then he hastily retreated into his own shadow.
“Whatever. So, hear this: The guy gets the money, a lot of money. But he doesn’t go home to his wife. Instead, he picks up a young girl and lives the high life in Beijing.” Old Huang blew some smoke and dumped a tile on the table. Mei picked it up.
“Ah, one of those. Men—how can you trust them?” Madam Xia combed the wall of tiles in front of her with searching eyes. Across the table, Uncle Ma had buried his head greedily in his tiles. “What does this Zhang Hong look like?” Madam Xia went on, taking a new tile.
“He has a scar over his left eye, medium height, broad build.” Mei was keeping to the facts.
Madam Xia nodded. “I don’t think I’ve seen him here, but then I don’t come every day. And my husband never tells me anything. He is very discreet. But I find out things nonetheless.” She looked at Mei. “You see, the hostesses know a lot around here. Let me ask my regular girl, Liu Lili. She’s one of the hostesses for the gambling room. But I haven’t seen her tonight.”
Nothing more was said. They played mah-jongg, taking turns changing their tile holdings.
“How much money are we talking about? Ten, twenty thousand yuan?” Finally, Madam Xia asked the question that was burning a hole in her heart.
“Much more,” said Mei.
“Heavens!” exclaimed Madam Xia, tapping the table with a tile.
“Enough to buy one of those hostesses,” Old Huang remarked with a smirk.
Madam Xia gave him a sharp glance that made no impression. Old Huang merely grinned, caressing a tile in his hands as though to smother it. Uncle Ma sniggered.
“Let’s get some tea.” Madam Xia waved to her husband. He came over to their table, took the order, and then left the gambling room. Madam Xia looked at Mei, smiling, and asked in a practiced sweet-pea voice, “So what is this antique that can fetch such money?”
“Something very old. I was told it was from the Han Dynasty.”
“Got to be older than Ming,” Old Huang said knowledgeably, speaking as if he were a true expert. “We don’t have anything like that in Beijing anymore. It was all smashed up in the Cultural Revolution. These days you can find such things only in the countryside.”
“I wonder.” Madam Xia had stopped moving the tiles. “Big Wife Li from the second floor brought back antiques when she went to visit people she’d known from her labor-camp time. I don’t know whether she sold them. Ah, over twenty thousand yuan, you say? I’ve got relatives in my hometown, a small village down south. I wonder whether they have anything like that.” She tilted her head to one side as if it were being weighed down by the sheer heaviness of her thoughts. “How would you know that they are genuine? Where would you go to sell them?”
“The stores in Liulichang buy them,” said Mei. She could sense Madam Xia’s enterprising mind taking wing. These days everyone was enterprising. A bit of gambling, a bit of buying and selling at the local stock-trading outpost, and a visit to poor relatives in hope of finding valuable antiques—it was all in a day’s work.
A tea girl brought in a brown porcelain teapot and a stack of plastic teacups. She poured tea for everyone.
“Where’s Lili?” Madam Xia asked.
“She hasn’t been at work for a few days,” the tea girl replied. She had a long chin, and her face was without expression, her eyes squinting, her short black hair parted in the middle. She was very young, sixteen or seventeen.
Some sort of scuffle had broken out at one of the poker tables. A beer bottle was smashed. Someone screamed, “Fuck your mother!”
Everyone suddenly stopped moving. The two policemen stood up. Old Xia, stony-faced, marched over with stiff fists. He looked as if he could be cruel when he was angry.
Mei picked up her handbag from under the table and said that she was going to the toilet. No one seemed to have heard or cared. She left through the kitchen. The two cooks had disappeared.
She found the cross-eyed tea girl in the front room. The lights seemed to have dimmed. The same groups of drunks hovered over the same tables and hostesses, their singing now distorted by alcohol.
The tea girl was sitting on a chair biting her fingernails and staring at the empty space in front of her.
“There’s a fight inside,” Mei said, leaning against the counter.
The tea girl glanced sideways at Mei and said nothing.
“You’ve worked here for a long time?”
“Two years,” the girl said reluctantly.
“Don’t you want to be a hostess?”
The girl threw her a fierce look. “What’s your business?”
“Nothing. I just thought it would be better money.”
“I’m not allowed to drink with customers. Can’t you tell that I have an unlucky face? I don’t care for that kind of money anyway, dirty.”
“What about Lili? Does she care for the money?” Mei sat down on an empty chair next to the girl.
“Oh, yes,” she said. A dark shadow drifted almost imperceptibly across her face. “She loves it.”
“Is that why she went off with Zhang Hong?”
The tea girl stopped fidgeting with her nails. “Are you a cop?”
“No,” said Mei.
The girl stared. She seemed to be wondering whether she should believe Mei. She stretched her chin out absently.
Slowly, Mei counted out three hundred-yuan bills and folded them into a roll. She watched the girl staring at her fingers. “Where can I find her?”
The tea girl took the money. “Lili lives with her parents. Number 6 Wutan Hutong, off Exhibition Hall Road. She hates it; she’s always trying to make enough money to move out.”
Mei wrote down the address in her notebook. She thanked the tea girl and got up to go.
“Miss?”
Mei turned and saw the girl standing against the counter, one hand holding the money inside her trouser pocket.
“She will come back, you’ll see,” the girl said. “She always does.”
Mei waited, but the tea girl said nothing more. Instead, she turned away, gazing again at the space.
NINETEEN
THE WIND HAD PICKED UP. Mei put up the collar of her jacket. The streetlamps had been switched off, and the wires overhead reached into darkness. Mei walked silently through the narrow alleyways, past abandoned buildings, derelict huts, and the occasional dimly lit window. The city was sleeping. She came to Lotus Pond Road and saw the lights of the train station ahead.
Inside her car, she took out the city map and pored over the hutongs off Exhibition Hall Road, looking for Wutan Hutong.
When she found it, she turned the key in the ignition. The Mitsubishi shivered, and its engine hummed. Mei put on the headlights. It was ten to one in the morning. She turned out of the parking lot and onto Lotus Pond Road.
She went north at White Cloud Street and drove for a mile by stocky chestnut trees and anonymous gray apartment buildings. She crossed the City Moat and drove onto the we
st extension of the Boulevard of Eternal Peace. She took in a long breath and repeated the words silently—“Eternal Peace.” What a beautiful wish, she thought, and a fitting name for the road that led to the Forbidden City. She thought about the golden dynasties of the past. In the dead of night, she was racing down the lonely streets of the northern capital of Kublai Khan in her little red Mitsubishi, and somewhere behind her, she thought she heard the ghost of time.
Twenty minutes later, Mei turned off at Exhibition Hall Road and then onto a one-lane street that swerved before becoming an unlit dirt path. Slowly the path narrowed, flanked by low courtyard houses and their belongings, until she could go no farther. She switched off the engine and stepped out.
The oval spot of her flashlight moved like a magnifying glass, revealing tiny pebbles, candy wrappings, and shreds of plastic and paper. A patch of vomit, pale and still moist, was piled at the side of a house to her left. Next to it were an old chest with unwanted belongings spilling out of it and two rusty bicycles. A pair of white socks waved on the washing line above, like flags admitting defeat.
Mei found Number 6, recently but carelessly repainted. With wind and rain, the double wooden door had shrunk in size and was chipped at the edges. Mei switched off her flashlight and slowly pushed the door open. It creaked like a thirsty man crying for water.
The courtyard was dark except for a light yellow window in the west house. There was no sound or movement in any of the households. The light must have been left on for someone who was still expected to come home.
Mei backed out quietly, leaving the door ajar. She didn’t know whether Lili’s family lived in the west house, but something told her to wait. A daughter, however wayward, is seldom allowed to stay out overnight.
She moved her car off the narrow path, stopped a few shadows down from the entrance to Wutan Hutong, and turned off the engine again. As her eyes began to adjust, she was able to make out certain shapes around her—a meter-high storage hut undoubtedly built without permission; a tar sheet that had blown off the roof; and lifeless trees. A gust of wind sent a sheet of newspaper swirling into the alleyway.
Mei thought of her mother, lying inside the white space of the hospital. Mei wondered how she felt in the night and whether pain kept her awake. She tried to see her mother’s face but instead saw her moving actively about her apartment the last time Mei had visited her. Mama had cooked fish. Later, they had quarreled.
“I’m sorry,” said Mei softly. But Mama was too far away to hear her.
A taxi pulled onto the street, stopping some distance away. The driver turned off the engine but left the lights on, outlining two figures, one taller than the other, as they walked from the car. Their shadows stretched into the night, a man and a woman. Mei watched them walking unsteadily into the dark hutong.
Something metallic, perhaps a bicycle, fell over, echoing in the silence. Then there was another faint bang from farther away. Mei waited, her eyes and mind awake.
A few minutes later, the man came out of the hutong, stumbling into the blinding headlights. His shadow elongated and turned into a monster with a tiny head.
Then he disappeared. The engine started. Its headlights shook, accelerating toward Mei’s car. She ducked her head beneath the dashboard.
The taxi swung into the hutong and made a left turn toward the main road. Mei waited for it to get a little distance ahead, then followed it out with her headlights off.
On Exhibition Hall Road, Mei turned her lights on. The taxi drove south and then east to Glory City Gate, where it took a circle under the overpass into a turnout. There was a light at the entry of a brand-new hotel. The opening banner was still hanging over the entrance: CELEBRATING THE OPENING OF HOTEL SPLENDOR.
The taxi turned into the hotel’s driveway. Mei stopped her car on the curb and killed the lights. She watched the back of the man disappearing into the hotel, swaying from side to side. A minute later, the taxi started off again, headlights blazing, back to the road of wanderers and dreamers.
Mei drove home, happy in the knowledge that she could come back tomorrow morning and find Zhang Hong.
TWENTY
THE NEXT MORNING, Mei got up just before ten o’clock. She made coffee and sat on the sofa holding the cup. A rich aroma rose with the steam and woke up her thoughts. In her mind, she ran through the details of the night before. In the train station, she had played precious, letting others assume that she was important and had powerful connections. It had worked like a charm. The less she said and the ruder she was, the more she got out of people.
Quickly, she finished her coffee and dressed. She called Gupin to say that she might not be in at all today, depending on how things worked out. She gave him a brief summary of what had happened the night before while she heated up some soy milk in the microwave.
“I’d better go to the hotel soon,” she said. “I hope Zhang Hong can tell me what happened to the jade seal.”
“Good luck,” said Gupin.
They hung up. Mei found two leftover red-bean steamed buns in the fridge. She washed them down with warm soy milk. She left the dirty bowls and cups in the sink, picked up her car keys and handbag, and left.
“I am here to see Zhang Hong,” Mei told the reception clerk at the Hotel Splendor. She looked at her watch. It was almost eleven o’clock.
“Room 402.” He smiled eagerly, showing neat white teeth.
“That is service. You didn’t even need to look it up.” Mei was impressed.
The young clerk blushed, lowering his eyes. Rather attractive, Mei thought.
“Miss exaggerates. I wish I were that good. No, I only remember the room because I looked him up for someone a short while ago.”
That someone could not have been Lili. She would have gone straight up to his room.
“When was that?”
“Ten, maybe fifteen, minutes ago.”
Someone called for him. “Excuse me,” he said. At the other end of the reception desk, a couple was disputing something. The woman pointed and waved her hands.
Mei left the reception desk and went down a carpeted corridor. The corridor was brightly lit and smelled of new paint. Mei pushed the call button and listened for the elevator. It creaked from somewhere inside the wall and finally halted with a shudder. Mei stepped in. She came out on the fourth floor. She walked along the corridor casting her eyes over the numbers on the doors.
Suddenly, she heard hurried footsteps. Mei stopped. A figure came around the corner and rushed past her. She whirled around in time to see a man’s back disappearing down the stairs.
Mei ran. The door of Room 402 was ajar.
A slight breeze entered through a half-opened window, moving a thin white curtain. The room had been ransacked. A floral duvet, pillows, and articles of men’s clothing were dumped on the floor. A suitcase had been turned inside out. One of the bedside lamps had fallen to the ground. The mattress had been turned over and was hanging off the bed.
An expensive bottle of Wu Liang Ye rice wine—Five Virtuous Liquid—lay on the floor, and the room stank of its spilled contents. A porcelain shot cup had rolled to the window and rested on its side.
A stiff body in a new tracksuit lay on the floor. Mei gasped at the sight of his face. It was frozen in a flinching grimace. Blood had trickled from his nose and mouth. The scar above his eye, less bluish than the rest, gawked at her as if it were alive.
She covered her mouth. Her breath shortened. Suddenly, she couldn’t find air. Her hands trembled and her body shook. She backed away, hitting the wall.
A faint roar of a motorbike passed somewhere in the distance. Spring sunshine filtered through the white curtain.
Mei stared at the scarred face. She had finally found Zhang Hong, but he was not going to answer any of her questions. Lying dead in twisted agony, he looked small and helpless. Mei wondered what he had done to deserve such a death. She drew a couple of big breaths and walked over. She squatted next to the body and touched his face. It was sto
ne cold.
She stood up. She thought about the two shadows walking away from the yellow headlights at Wutan Hutong. She thought also, oddly, of the Luoyang peony, the national flower, with its baroque petals and soft colors of yellow, pink, and white. She had never been to Luoyang. She couldn’t think of anything else belonging to the city. Zhang Hong was the first person who had linked her to it, far away to the west. Did he have family there? Were they still waiting for his return? Mei felt her heart sinking.
She walked over to the bathroom. Whoever had searched the place had done a thorough job; everything had been tossed on the floor. She found a leather toiletry bag, toothbrush, towels, soap, toothpaste, a bull-horn comb, a strip of condoms, and a bottle of Five Flower oil for cuts and bruises. Mei wondered what the person was been searching for.
She took a last look at the dead man and backed out, closing the door behind her. Quiet reigned in the corridor.
In the lobby, it was noisy. A group of five men with alcoholics’ red eyes had just come in with shopping bags. They had obviously had a good lunch. A young woman with grasshopper legs and a short skirt tapped her heel by the door, possibly waiting for someone. The argumentative couple was still at it; the man was now waving his hands.
Mei went up to the young clerk at the reception desk and said, “You better call the police.”
“Police?”
“Yes. He’s dead.”
“Who?”
“The man in Room 402. Zhang Hong.”
It took another ten seconds for his smile to evaporate. Then he jumped to the telephone. Other reception clerks hurried over. Heads started to turn, and voices rose. Mei gave one of them her business card and suggested he pass it on to the police.
The manager was called. Guests hovered around the reception area, wanting to know what had happened.
Mei left quietly. She had to find Lili—fast.
TWENTY ONE
ON GLORY CITY GATE BOULEVARD, Mei began to feel sick. The dead man’s tortured face kept coming up to her. She saw again the blood, the scar, and his stiff body. She pulled over to a side street and vomited. Droves of high school kids in white tracksuits with red piping were on their way home for lunch. They frowned at Mei. There was a small vending hut at the street corner. Mei went over to it. A cardboard sign at the end of the counter read: TELEPHONE, THREE YUAN PER MINUTE. Two girls in tracksuits stopped to buy sweets. They carried on their conversation with an air of self-importance, rolling their eyes, laughing, and locking arms as though they would be friends for life. Mei bought a bottle of Coca-Cola and downed it in one go. The drink helped to settle her nausea. After a few minutes, she was able to get back in the car and drive on.
The Eye of Jade Page 11