Don't Cry Tai Lake

by Qiu Xiaolong

  “Hold on a minute, Shanshan. Are all these figures based on research?”

  “Yes. They are no state secret, I can assure you. If you do your research, you can find all of this in the officially published material.”

  “It’s shocking.” He searched his pockets for a scrap of paper, but without success. “Can I have a piece of paper to write down some of those figures?”

  “Why, Chen?”

  Chen was thinking of the report he had to turn in to Comrade Secretary Zhao. At the moment, the chief inspector didn’t have any solid evidence to support his argument. However, he wasn’t going to tell her the real reason, even though he would never do anything to get her into trouble.

  “I’ve been trying to write a poem about the pollution in China, but I’m not an expert like you. Still, I don’t want to publish something unsupported by facts.”

  “Are you serious?” she said. “That might get you into trouble. Besides, I doubt if such a poem would be publishable.”

  He was serious and had, in fact, already written several stanzas.

  “I have the connections to get it published, I think. Connections aren’t something to be proud of, but they do help get things done.” After a short pause, he went on. “After our conversation in the sampan, I did some serious thinking about the issue. Environmental protection must be an uphill battle. It is as difficult as it is complicated. But what is at the root of the ever-worsening pollution problem? Human greed. Pollution isn’t a problem that pertains to our country alone—as the proverb says, crows are black all over the world—but the shape the problem takes here is certainly characteristic of China.”

  “Characteristic of China,” she said, looking him in the eye, “as the newspapers say about China’s socialism.”

  “Because China lacks any history of a sound legal system and because of the general ideological disillusionment, particularly resulting from the disastrous Cultural Revolution, people take whatever they can grasp in their hands, by hook or by crook, in this brazen ultra-acquisitive age. Some economists even declare greed a necessary evil for our economic development. Marx himself said something to that effect too, though he was very critical about it.”

  “Wow, you even dragged Marx into it, Chen. But I know the passage you mean. According to Marx, for a three hundred percent profit, a capitalist would do anything, commit any crime, even at risk of being hanged.”

  “Exactly. I don’t think doing everything possible for profit will lead to anything good—not for the environment or anything else. But the issue is complicated. The Party authorities must be aware of the environmental problem, but, to some extent, the legitimacy of the Party’s regime depends on maintaining economic growth, so any regulatory effort that gets in the way of growth will be suppressed.”

  “You’ve hit the nail on the head, Chen!” she said, her eyes bright.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about all this, Shanshan,” he said earnestly, “because of your company, and because of the poem I’m working on. I’ve just started, but it could be a longer, more ambitious poem than any I’ve ever done before.”

  “Let me get my folder for you.”

  She got down on all fours, reached under the bed, and pulled out a cardboard box, her bare legs sticking out and her elegantly arched soles faintly dabbed with dust. She emerged out from under the bed with a blue folder in her hand and a smudge on her face.

  “Anything you might want to know,” she said. She seated herself at the table and opened the folder.

  Chen moved his chair nearer to the table so he could read the small print on the pages in the folder.

  He was reminded again of his college years, when he spent hours bent over a similar table in a similar small dorm room: idealistic, passionate, and doing what he believed to be the right thing.

  Outside the room’s small window, the color of the sky was changing, dimming into a deep blue with sparse glittering stars starting to show.

  He didn’t know how long they had talked. He was only aware of her hair touching his cheek, once or twice, like a refrain in a half-forgotten poem, and of her slender finger pointing at the material, as she explained it all in detail.

  She then sat up, drawing one foot under her in a casual pose. But then she immediately thought of something else and leaned over the table again. As she bent over the folder, her robe parted slightly. He thought he caught a flash of her breasts. If she was aware of his glance, she said nothing.

  A spell of silence fell over the room when she finished going over all the material in the folder.

  “I really appreciate your coming over tonight,” she finally said, her eyes lambent in the flickering fluorescent light.

  He glanced at his watch. It was past nine. She didn’t say anything about it’s being late, so he could choose to stay, perhaps, for a bit longer.

  It wasn’t comfortable to sit in the same unchanging position for long, particularly in the cramped space between the desk and the bed. He was reminded of a so-called lovers’ room in a restaurant on the Bund in Shanghai. The tiny size lent itself to intimacy. He had been there with another woman—though not his lover—who was murdered shortly afterward. He shivered at the sudden, inexplicable premonition. He shifted on the chair, which warbled with a screeching sound.

  She sat further back, her back touching the bare wall, her arms no longer clasping her knees, and her legs parted. She patted the bed, an invitation for him to sit alongside.

  As his glance fell to the bed, he noticed a sauce stain from the noodles she had made earlier in the evening on the fleshy spot below her big toe. In the soft light, her toe looked rounded and snowy like a creamy scallop in a chef’s special. The absurd association only made her look appealingly vulnerable. As a Jin dynasty poet said, she’s so beautiful that she could be devoured. He thought he could read a message rippling in her eyes, reflecting back what he fantasized.

  Instead he rose to leave.

  They looked into each other’s eyes.

  “It’s late, Shanshan. I think I have to leave. The center locks the entrance around twelve.”

  It would be out of the question at this stage, Chief Inspector Chen knew, for him to do anything unacceptable for a cop, particularly for an incognito cop on vacation.

  If he was going to help, he had to stick to his role as a policeman. There could be no conflict of interest, even if he kept his identity a secret from her.

  ELEVEN

  FRIDAY MORNING, SERGEANT HUANG parked his car in the shade near the center’s entrance, rolled down the window, and waited. According to the plan Chen had discussed with him, the first interviewee of the day would be Mi, Liu’s secretary at the chemical company.

  It wasn’t exactly a surprising move to Huang, who’d already talked to Mi before Chen involved himself in the case. Huang lit a cigarette, trying to guess which approach the chief inspector would use.

  At the appointed time, Chen showed up at the gate, where an elderly security guard hastened to salute him obsequiously. Huang stepped out of his Shanghai Dazhong, which, as Chen specified, didn’t look anything like a police car.

  “Thank you, Huang,” Chen said, sliding in to the front passenger seat. “Before we go to see Mi, I want to take a look at Liu’s home office.”

  Huang jumped at the suggestion. His team had hardly finished working at the crime scene, with several reports still waiting to be processed by the lab, when Internal Security intervened and pushed them straight to a conclusion that left little for them to do. Being the youngest member of the team, Huang knew better than to protest when the other team members, older and far more experienced, chose to keep their mouths shut.

  But it wouldn’t be difficult for him to show Chen Liu’s apartment, which wasn’t being watched at the moment. They had talked about the photos of the crime scene, but Chen’s going over the scene in person could make a difference. In Sherlock Holmes stories, the detective never failed to find something important yet previously unnoticed by others who exa
mined the crime scene.

  “No problem,” Huang said. “We’ve gone over it closely, but you should definitely take a look.”

  Less than ten minutes later, they arrived at the apartment complex, which was located near the back of the chemical company plant. Sure enough, there wasn’t any sign of police stationed near the complex, and no residents were out walking in the area.

  “It’s a relatively new complex and it’s not fully occupied yet,” Huang remarked. He showed his badge to the security guard standing as stiff as a bamboo pole under the white arch of the entrance.

  “There has been a lot of new residential construction in the last few years, but with the soaring housing prices, few can afford one of the new apartments.”

  “But Liu had his for free, and that was in addition to his large house,” Chen noted.

  The apartment building in question was six stories tall with a pink-painted exterior that looked new and impressive in the daylight. They went up to the third floor without seeing anyone else.

  Liu’s was a three-bedroom apartment. Huang opened the door with a master key. They stepped into a hallway with hardwood floors that led into a living room and an open dining room, which in turn was connected to a kitchenette. On the other end of the living room were the three bedrooms, one of which was a guest room, and another the office where Liu had been murdered.

  Chen looked at each of the rooms before he came back to the office. The office was practically furnished. On the L-shaped oak desk facing the door sat a computer with a large monitor, a printer, and a combination telephone and fax machine. A couple of chairs stood against one wall near the corner and beside a custom-made bookshelf, which had books and magazines on it. A flat-screen TV hung on the opposite wall.

  “The people who live in these new apartment buildings don’t talk to one another much. That was particularly true in Liu’s case. He was only here once or twice a week, and usually in the evening. On that particular night, no one in the building saw him or heard anything from his apartment. But when their doors are shut, people can hardly hear anything from the outside. According to a neighbor on the fourth floor, a young woman was walking down the stairs around nine, but the staircase was dimly lit, so he didn’t get a clear look. She could have been visiting anyone in the building.”

  “Yes, she could have come from the fifth or sixth floor,” Chen said while picking up a framed picture from the bookshelf. It was a photo of Liu and a young man standing in front of that same bookshelf in the office. Liu was a robust man of medium height with wide-set, penetrating eyes, deep-lined brows, and a powerful jaw, and the young man was a lanky one with a pensive look on his fine-featured face.

  “The young man is his son, Wenliang,” Huang said. “He interned here at the company last summer.”

  Placing the picture back on the bookshelf, Chen started examining the books themselves. It was a curious mixture, including a number of fashion magazines.

  “He read fashion magazines?”

  “Well, Mi came here from time to time,” Huang said.

  Chen nodded in acknowledgment, then said, “Tell me again what you see as unusual about the crime scene.”

  “There is no sign of forced entry, and no sign of struggle, either. The murderer was likely somebody Liu knew well, and it was probably a surprise attack. The security guard didn’t register any visitors for Liu that night. So it was possibly someone who lived in the complex, or even in the same building.”

  “But as you said, he didn’t mix with his neighbors,” Chen said. “Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for the murderer to be one of them. But what would be the motive?”

  “That suggests another possible scenario. Someone familiar with the complex could have come in without stopping at the entrance. The security guard might make things difficult for a diffident visitor, but wouldn’t try to stop a Big Buck who was striding in with an air of confidence.”

  “Or driving in a luxurious car,” Chen said, as if he had done the same himself before. “Do you have the pictures of the crime scene with you?”

  “Yes,” Huang said, producing a folder of pictures. “You’ve already seen all of them.”

  Chen placed a few on the desk, examined them, and then looked around the room a couple of times.

  He immersed himself in the comparative study for ten minutes or so. He walked out into the living room, but didn’t stay there long before heading back into the office. Huang followed, without interrupting, notebook in hand.

  “Has anything been moved here?”

  “No, of course not. Nobody—not even Mrs. Liu—has been in here, not since she was brought to check over the things in the apartment. That is, of course, except for those items bagged and taken to the lab for testing.”

  “Do you have that list with you?”

  “Yes, here it is.”

  Chen checked it carefully, then placed it on the desk and rubbed his chin with a finger.

  “Now, let me ask you a question. Where do you think the host would usually receive a guest?”

  “The living room, naturally. But we thought about that too. Liu might have simply stepped into the office to get a document or something.”

  “In that case, he would have entered the room first, and the murderer would have followed behind him—”

  Chen didn’t go on, apparently having a difficult time visualizing the murderer striking Liu from behind.

  “What do you think of the position of the other chairs in the office?” Chen resumed, sitting down on the swivel chair at the desk. “They haven’t been moved, right?”

  “No. But what do you mean?”

  “It doesn’t make sense. If Liu were sitting here, like I am, then the murderer would have been sitting opposite him. So why are the other chairs in the corner of the room?”

  “That’s a good point,” Huang said, writing it down in his notebook.

  “If he’d been talking to someone who was standing in front of him and who then swooped down on him ferociously—”

  “Then,” Huang said, nodding, “how come there is no sign of a struggle?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But what about the possibility that Liu was showing his visitor a file on the computer—something like a document about the antipollution efforts—when the visitor struck him from behind? That’s a scenario that I discussed with my colleagues.”

  “In the pictures, the computer isn’t on.” Chen picked up one of the photographs. “So, in your scenario, Liu had to have been struck at the very moment his hand was just touching the computer button.”

  Huang could see the chief inspector wasn’t convinced. As a matter of fact, neither was Huang.

  “That’s a good point. I’ll write it down,” Huang said, opening his notebook again.

  “In the pictures, there wasn’t a glass or a cup on the desk in the office. Or in the living room. Or in the list of the items bagged for testing. For a man who was working late at night, a cup of coffee or tea on the desk would seem logical.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And another thing. The estimated time of death is between 9:30 and 10:30. That’s very late for a visitor such as the one theorized by Internal Security to arrive. Maybe Liu and the visitor had already been talking and arguing for an hour or more. But then where? Surely not in the office. That brings us back to your hypothesis—that they moved from the living room to the office. But then why wasn’t there a cup of tea in the living room for the guest?”

  “Or at least a cup of water,” Huang said, scratching his head.

  “Now look on the shelf. An impressive array of Puer tea cans, a very expensive tea from Yunnan—”

  But Chen left his sentence unfinished, as he started to examine a row of gilded statuettes that were lined resplendently along the top shelf. He picked one statuette up. It was a tall, muscular worker holding aloft a shining globe and standing on a solid marble base. It bore an inscription: “In recognition of the outstanding increase in pr
oduction and profit achieved by the Wuxi Number One Chemical Company for the year of 1995. Issued by the Wuxi People’s Congress.” The statuettes were all identical in design, size, and caption, except for the year.

  “The chemical company under Liu’s leadership won that prestigious award nine years in a row,” Chen said

  “Wow, they are gold-plated too, ” Huang said, picking one up. It was quite heavy. “Such a statuette could be quite expensive.”

  “Let’s take some more pictures,” Chen said. “I’ll study them some more back at the center.”

  Chen took out a camera he had brought with him. He took photos for no less than fifteen minutes before he placed the framed picture of Liu and his son flat on the desk and photographed it as well. He then glanced at his watch.

  “By the way, I’ve contacted Liu’s attorney through some people I know in Shanghai,” Chen said. “While the Lius hadn’t made any specific moves regarding their marriage, Mrs. Liu made a joke over dinner about getting half of the IPO shares from Liu if he ever tried to divorce her.”

  A wronged wife out for revenge: that might throw a new light on a lot of things in the case. It gave Mrs. Liu a more plausible motive than Jiang’s. There was the possibility that Liu was going to divorce her before the IPO, with the little secretary pushing in the background. In that case, Mrs. Liu could have lost everything. She had the access to his home office, along with knowledge of his whereabouts that night. Furthermore, it would explain the points raised by Chen about the crime scene—Liu’s body being found in the office rather than in the living room, there being no sign of struggle, and the position of the chairs in the office. All of that would then make more sense.

  “That was a brilliant stroke, Chen. Contacting the attorney, I mean. What she said about getting half of the shares from the IPO probably wasn’t a joke,” Huang said. “Liu was good at cover-ups, and so was she. The couple must have been trying to sound out possible divorce arrangements with the attorney. Liu was going to do it, and she knew it.”