She walked down the narrow alley of Wutan Hutong. In daylight, it was overcrowded with life. Grandmothers chatted with each other while hanging up washing. Their conversations stopped when Mei passed by in her high heels. A woman who looked about a hundred years old sat on a wooden stool by the wall, alone and smiling. Two old men were locked in a battle of go by the gate of a courtyard house. Three toddlers in open-bottomed pants played with dirt and ants that lived under the dried-up trees, paying Mei no attention. Wild red flowers bloomed unnoticed atop decaying tile roofs.
Number 6 was made up of three low-beamed houses surrounding a courtyard, forming the shape of a U. Once this would have been a single-family dwelling. Now three families lived here. The middle house, facing the entrance, was the biggest and, traditionally, would have been the main reception room. The west and east houses were smaller; they would have been bedrooms.
In the middle of the courtyard stood an old brown tree. A family of magpies had made a nest among its bare branches. Under the tree, a middle-aged man with black-rimmed glasses sat on a tiny wooden stool with a basin of water. Next to the washing basin was a beat-up bicycle standing on its seat with the wheels in the air. The man held a pink tube under the water and searched for the puncture.
“Who are you looking for?” he questioned Mei.
“Liu Lili.”
For almost a minute, the man stared at Mei. At last, he pointed at the west house and spat.
Mei thanked him and went up to the door. She knocked on it a few times, rattling it in the narrow wooden frame. After about two minutes, a soft voice rose from the inside. “Who are you?”
Mei heard footsteps stopping at the door. “My name is Wang Mei. I’d like to talk to you.”
There was no reply. She tried again: “It’s very important. It’s about Zhang Hong.”
At the window, a floral curtain parted about an inch. A pair of eyes appeared. Mei smiled. Twenty seconds later, the door opened.
The first thing Mei noticed was the smell, unmistakably bitter and with enough kick to upset the neighborhood. It was a smell that Mei was familiar with, perhaps even fond of. It reminded her of the dark winter days of childhood. As a child, Mei had been rather sickly, and her mother frequently took her to see Chinese herbalists.
“Are you sick?” asked Mei.
Lili sat down next to a square dining table covered with a white embroidered tablecloth. She wore a man’s wool vest over a skimpy little black dress. She had a permed bob with thick bangs above her round eyes. With her puffy cheeks and pouting lips, she had the look of a child, though Mei couldn’t tell her exact age.
Lili glanced at the clay pot brewing on the stove. “A minor illness,” she said.
Black smoke billowed from the stove, drifting along the wall and out through a hole cut in the boarded-up window.
“I know a very good doctor at the Chinese Medicine Research Institute, if you need another opinion,” said Mei. Chinese herbalists were notorious for rarely agreeing.
The lights in Lili’s eyes were soft, as was her voice. “Please sit down. Did Zhang Hong tell you about me?” She was neither nervous nor eager. She combed her hair with her fingers.
“No. He didn’t tell me anything. Are you in love with him?”
Lili burst out laughing. “Don’t you know that he’s the same age as my father?”
“But you like him.”
“I don’t know. He’s a gambler, as bad as they come. But he treats me well—I mean, with respect.” She crossed one leg over the other, dangling a plastic slipper from her toes.
“How did you two meet?”
“Who are you, anyway?” Lili tilted her head, slipping her pink fingers through her hair again.
Mei passed her a card, which Lili read two or three times. “What is an information consultant?”
“People pay a fee for me to look for something or someone. For example, I was hired by a collector to look for an antique that Zhang Hong might have known about. No, it is not the Han Dynasty ceremonial bowl.”
“What did he say?”
“I didn’t have a chance to ask him.”
Lili played with the card and smiled. “He lost all the money he got from the Han bowl. Can you believe it?”
“He did what?” Mei was shocked.
“Oh, we went to play big stakes at an entertainment center in West City District. He just had the most terrible luck. But not to worry, he told me yesterday that he’ll soon be rich again.” Lili toyed with the plastic flowers in a vase on the table. “When he was at Luck Come Together, he actually won sometimes. When he did, we’d go eat at expensive restaurants, and then he’d take me shopping.”
The talk of gambling must have reminded her of something. She got up suddenly. “Excuse me,” she said. She vanished through a blue curtain into what Mei guessed was her bedroom.
When Lili came back, she had a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in her hands. She stopped by the stove and lifted the clay pot down with a poker. With the same poker, she picked up a heavy iron lid and covered the stove. She poked and shifted the lid until it sat tightly on the stove’s mouth. She then put the clay pot back on top. “Can we go outside? I’m dying for a smoke,” she said. “My parents won’t let me smoke inside the house.”
Outside, she leaned against the door frame and surrounded herself with smoke rings. “Do you know what the medicine is for?” she asked.
Mei looked at Lili’s face and wondered how old she was.
“It’s for women’s illness. I get terrible cramps when I have my period, so bad that I sometimes wish I were dead. It’s a torture that never ends. This is why I am always off work for four, five days a month. No one bothers about it anymore.”
“Does the medicine work?”
“I hope so. This is my fifth dose. I think the pain is getting better, but I can’t be sure. It nauseates me sometimes. The herbalist says it’s to be expected.” She looked over to the brown tree. “See that man over there? He’s been unemployed for a while. All day long he hangs around and spies on me.” She shot the man a hostile look, and he quickly turned away. “What are you looking at, you dirty old man!” she shouted at him. “He thinks I am a slut,” she explained to Mei. She shouted at him again: “At least I am not eating my wife’s meal!
“It’s the money I am after, of course,” she said to Mei. “Look at it here: no gas, no running water or central heating, no privacy. The house is full of worthless junk. I swore I’d never live like my parents. I go out with clients from Luck Come Together. We go to high-class restaurants and nightclubs.” She puffed brutally and exhaled through her perfectly formed rings of smoke. “My parents think I’m a slut. The other hostesses at Luck Come Together think I’m a slut. As if they are any better. What’s the difference between them and me? They let men buy them drinks and touch them.” Her eyes were wide open. She spoke with the conviction of a teenager who had just discovered the meaning of love. “Why should I make money for the management?” Her childish voice lingered like those smoke rings, sending ripples through the air.
Mei let the question hang, waiting for the girl to go on. When she didn’t, Mei said, “You mentioned that Zhang Hong talked about becoming rich again. Did he tell you where the money was to come from?” The questions did not fit with the mood, but Mei needed some answers.
“What money?” Lili lowered her eyes. She had been gazing at the nest at the top of the tree. “Are you spying on me?” She stared at Mei as if she had never seen her before.
Mei took a step back. She saw something murky and sinister behind Lily’s eyes, something that did not quite belong to that rosy-cheeked face of childlike innocence.
“Don’t you worry, he’ll be rich, and he will share his money with me.” Lili leaned into Mei’s face. “The eye of jade,” she whispered. She sniffed loudly and began to sway. She twisted her index finger into her permed hair like a drill. Her round eyes clouded. She giggled.
Mei wondered what the medicine was really for. So
mething wasn’t quite right with the girl.
The bike man was now heating glue on a burner. A sharp odor rose from streaks of thin black smoke.
Quietly, Mei walked out of the courtyard and into the normality of noisy alleys and laundry lines.
TWENTY TWO
FROM THE CAR, Mei made a call to her office. Gupin told her that Ms. Fang had called from the Motor Vehicle Bureau. “She asked you to call her back,” he said.
Fang Shuming sounded cautious on the phone. “Could we meet up? It’s better to talk face-to-face.”
Mei sensed that Shuming had found something for her. They agreed to meet after work in the street-corner park on Ten Thousand Springs Road.
In the park, a bearded man was trying to fly a kite. He would wet his index finger and hold it in the wind. Then he would run with the kite, each time from a different angle. Mei watched the kite struggle from the pavilion.
On the street, traffic was roaring. People were on their way home for dinner. Jam-packed buses rocked past.
Mei thought of Zhang Hong. He must have traveled on one of these buses at one point. He might have passed street-corner parks like this one. Perhaps he had seen the Hotel Splendor from a bus, liked the look of it, and moved there after he got paid. But now he was a cold body lying in the morgue. Had he been killed by the thugs from the gambling house? Had there been a struggle? Had he been poisoned? For what?
In her mind’s eye, Mei saw again the man running down the stairs at the Hotel Splendor. She rubbed her eyes. She tried to rewind his movements frame by frame. He had a square, muscular back and solid arms. But when Mei tried to picture his face, nothing came up.
Mei thought about Lili, the girl with the mind of a fourteen-year-old and the body of a twenty-year-old. She seemed to have no idea how far she’d gone or where she belonged.
A young couple, unmistakably migrant workers, had sat down on one of the stone benches in the square. The girl laid her head in her boyfriend’s lap. She looked exhausted. The tight sweater she was wearing rode up over her naked belly. He looked as if he had just come off work, perhaps from the kitchen of a hotel or a restaurant. Sometimes they kissed, not passionately but painfully. Two local retirees were taking their daily walk around the square, glancing spitefully at the young couple.
A few yards away, a sparrow skipped mindlessly along a stone path, looking for food. The wind had died a little, and the air was growing colder. A distant fragrance of clove was infusing the dusk like a tiny drop of pigment in clear water.
Mei thought of her mother and was sad.
A cacophonous beat of drums and cymbals burst in from the distance. Mei listened as the noise grew closer. A procession of Yang Ge dancers appeared—men and women of fifty or sixty years of age in loud makeup. The dancers wore balloon-sleeved shirts and silk pants with wide legs. Their feet, in white socks and black canvas shoes, danced crazily. As they went forward, they tossed their heads and shook their red silk handkerchiefs about exuberantly. Their faces glowed with bliss.
Yang Ge was originally a popular peasants’ dance, performed around bonfires in villages and fields. It was a dance of celebration that mimicked the blossoming flowers and the flapping of birds’ wings. The People’s Liberation Army had brought Yang Ge into the grand cities. Later on, somewhere along that winding road of revolution, Yang Ge was transformed into an art form, but after Chairman Mao died, it was kicked a thousand li back to the fields. The fashion in the cities was ballroom dancing, elegant and Western. Ling Bai and her neighbors took lessons at the Comrade Activity Center. Mei did fox-trots at student canteens turned dance halls on Sunday evenings. Lu was one half of the University League ballroom-dance champion pair. Last year, out of the blue, Yang Ge had been revived. No one knew how or by whom. All of a sudden Beijing had thousands of Yang Ge parades at dusk, organized by citizens, causing traffic chaos.
Plenty of people stopped to watch the Yang Ge dancers. Some pointed and laughed. A group of teenagers in tracksuits, on their way home after a game of football, watched in silence, looking disgusted and horrified.
A plump woman pushing a spotless Flying Pigeon bicycle made her way to the pavilion. She was dressed with great care: Her silk scarf had been chosen to match the color of her jacket, and she wore leather pumps that should have belonged to a woman ten years younger. She parked her bicycle next to the pavilion and came up the stone steps. Her permed hair hardly moved.
“I pass here every day, but I’ve never stopped,” Shuming said, smoothing down her blue wool jacket. “My goodness, you can see every dancing foot from up here!”
“Good to see you, Shuming. You look great.” Mei stood up to greet her friend. She had helped Shuming in her divorce.
“Oh, hardly. How can I? Too busy at work.” Shuming sat down. “Do you know that every month, there are ten thousand new license-plate applications in Beijing? There has to be a waiting list. We can’t cope, and neither can Beijing’s roads.” She pulled out a tissue and wiped her nose, her cheeks flushed with warmth. “But I do feel good, much better than when I was married to that disgrace. And I have you to thank for it.” She looked at Mei and smiled. “At one point I worried about being single again, but now I love it, so much freedom. I think divorce has done me good. It has taught me self-respect.” She laughed, turning around to watch the Yang Ge dancers trotting their costumed selves in front of the pavilion. “Look at that one, the fat lady who looks like me. Look at how her feet move! People have this ridiculous belief that fat people are slow and clumsy. It’s not true. Some of us are very agile. You know why? Because we’ve got a lot of energy, naturally, from eating so much.” Shuming laughed a man’s laugh, low-pitched and loud.
“What was it that you couldn’t tell me on the phone?” Mei asked Shuming.
“I’ve got the registration for the license number you gave me. The Audi belongs to the Ministry of State Security.”
“The secret service?”
The Ministry for Public Security, where Mei used to work, was the headquarters of the police, the equivalent of Scotland Yard. The Ministry of State Security, however, was the true envy of all: the headquarters of the secret police and the intelligence service, the Chinese KGB.
Mei was at a loss. Big Papa Wu was meeting someone from the secret service? Mei wondered who this antiques dealer really was. “Could you find out to whom the car was allocated?” she asked.
“Not from our system. The allocation of official cars is an internal matter for the Ministry.”
Mei was disappointed.
Shuming moved closer and lowered her voice. “I don’t know what kind of case you’re on and what you are trying to do. But please be careful, Mei.” She stood up to go. “Goodbye. If there is anything else you need, just call.”
She went down the stairs, and soon her plump body and the Flying Pigeon had vanished from sight.
Mei made her way out of the street-corner park. The traffic had begun to ease on Ten Thousand Springs Road. A row of streetlamps glittered like a diamond necklace. Smoke was rising from the chimneys of newly built restaurants. The aroma of fat sizzling in spicy brown sauce and sugar lingered in the air.
A mean-faced woman jumped up from her wooden stool as soon as she saw Mei entering the parking lot, which was empty aside from Mei’s red Mitsubishi and a big blue tour bus. “You said you were only going to leave your car here for a little while!” the woman snapped. She strode over, a large canvas army bag swinging at her hip. Her hands were brown and clawlike and streaked with prominent veins. She thrust one of them in Mei’s face. “Five yuan extra,” she said sternly.
“It’s not like the lot is full!” Mei protested.
“Full or not, it’s none of your business. I did you a favor letting you park here.”
Mei pulled out a five-yuan note and slapped it into the woman’s hand. She was too tired to argue.
TWENTY THREE
NIGHT HAD FALLEN BY THE TIME Mei reached home.
She called Little Auntie.
“Big Sister is more or less the same. Sometimes she is alert and clear. Sometimes she is confused. She hasn’t eaten anything for three days now, so the doctor put in a feeding tube to get her some nutrition. A few people have come to visit her. In the morning, the director of Elderly Comrade Affairs came. He asked about her condition and saw the doctor. He said that the work unit would try their best to meet the medical costs. Then someone called Song Kaishan came. He said he was an old friend.”
“Did he see Mama?”
“Big Sister was awake, so he talked to her for a while, maybe for ten minutes.”
“What did they talk about?”
“I don’t know,” Little Auntie said. “He wanted to be alone with her. Your uncle Chen came in the afternoon. Big Sister was asleep, so we chatted a little bit. He said that he knew Mr. Song.”
“Who is he, anyway? Why is he suddenly coming to see Mama?”
“Oh, he is just an old friend,” Little Auntie said quickly. “Are you well?”
“I suppose. I’m working on a case. It helps me to keep my mind off things.” Mei paused; she had just thought of something. “Did Lu visit Mama? We agreed that she would go today.”
“She couldn’t. She called to say that something important had come up.”
The Eye of Jade Page 12