by Qiu Xiaolong
“I see. But he works in Wuxi. Does he have to come back to Shanghai regularly as part of the housing plan?”
“Well, it is said that he has a girlfriend in Shanghai, someone who used to live in this same neighborhood. She would come to see him here whenever he was back, but I’ve not seen her for a while. Perhaps a lovers’ fight or something like that. Between two young people, you can never tell.”
This was something Chen hadn’t mentioned—a girlfriend in Shanghai, Yu noted to himself. It could be totally irrelevant, however.
“Is there anything strange or suspicious about him, Wei?”
“What do you mean? Is there anything strange or suspicious? No, I don’t think so. He passed the entrance exam and was accepted to Fudan University. As his parents are both barely educated, it wasn’t easy. He studied hard. He became a representative at a national Youth League conference and then joined the Party. And he must have worked really hard at his job, too, if he’s already the head of a large state-run factory.”
“How long have you worked here?” Peiqin cut in.
“Three—almost four years.”
“I used to live here,” she said with a wistful look on her face, “but it was almost thirty years ago.”
“Really!”
“I’d like to take a walk around, Yu. It’s such a fine day today.”
“Good idea,” Yu said.
“Come back if you have any other questions,” Wei said, smiling.
They took leave and walked out of the neighborhood committee office.
As Peiqin had supposed, a lot of old neighbors had moved away. After half a block, she hadn’t recognized anyone. It was almost lunchtime, and there was a group of people standing around. Some were cooking on a coal stove, some were using a common sink, and some were enjoying early lunch. Only one or two looked up in curiosity at the two strangers passing by.
Finally, she noticed a makeshift scallion and ginger booth on a street corner facing a side lane. The old woman sitting at the booth used to live in the building next door to her family. Back then, Peiqin called her Auntie Hui. Now, white-haired, toothless, sitting on a small stool with a pronounced stoop, she must have been in her seventies. The booth looked the same as always, though, with the green onion still succulent, and the ginger still golden, spread out on the same narrow wooden board. The one difference after all these years was that the small bunch of green onion that had cost only one cent at that time now cost fifty cents. Peiqin stepped up to the booth and introduced herself.
“I was a slip of a girl then, Auntie Hui. Once you gave me a bunch of green onion for one cent and a large piece of ginger for free. After that, my mother called me a capable girl for days.”
“You still remember that after all this time,” Auntie Hui said, her face wreathed in smiles like a dried-up winter melon. “And this is…?”
“Oh, this is my husband, Yu.”
Auntie Hui was pleased by the unexpected reunion, and the two spoke of little other than memories of the bygone days. The continued existence of the tiny booth spoke for how little the old woman’s life had improved since then. Peiqin finally brought the conversation around to the question she had in mind.
“The Fu family lives just opposite here, right?”
“Yes, three generations of them now.”
“I’ve just heard that Fu Hao, the eldest grandson, is now the managing director of a large state company in Wuxi.”
“Yes, I heard about that too,” the old woman said, eyeing Peiqin somewhat warily.
“Our old neighborhood has produced some successful people,” Peiqin said with a smile.
The door of the shikumen house opposite opened with a grinding sound, as if echoing from twenty years ago, and a tall, angular man wearing a light gray wool suit and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses walked out.
Auntie Hui looked up at Peiqin and whispered, “It’s none other than Fu Hao. Do you know him?”
“No, I moved away many years ago, you know.”
“We have to get going, Peiqin,” Yu said. “We’ve spent too long here as it is.”
Peiqin picked up Yu’s cue as he spoke.
“Yes, let’s go. It’s Saturday. We have to do some shopping,” she said, like an understanding wife. “We’ll come again, Auntie Hui.”
They sauntered away, hand in hand like a loving couple, which they were. It was as in a popular song, “It’s the most romantic thing to live, love, and grow old with you, side by side.”
They followed Fu at a discreet distance, even though Yu didn’t have a plan in mind. It wasn’t something Chen had asked him to do, but he had nothing else planned for that afternoon. Yu redialed Bai, who wasn’t home yet. So it might not be a bad idea, he thought, to continue following Fu for a while.
They cut across Yanan Road, and then on to Fuzhou Road. Fu walked steadily, heading north, without looking at the bus stop or for a taxi, seemingly unaware of being shadowed. Fu then turned left on Nanjing Road, which, at the intersection with Henan Road, became a pedestrian street thronged with shoppers and tourists.
No one could move quickly along Nanjing Road. The street was lined along both sides with stores, some of which were very crowded; it would be easy to lose sight of someone. With the two of them following Fu, however, Yu thought they could still manage.
“We haven’t been to Nanjing Road in months,” Peiqin said.
“We’re here today, so we might do some shopping,” he said, “if we lose sight of Fu. We shouldn’t worry about it. Chen didn’t say he was a suspect, and sending us out to look into him was probably nothing more than a whimsical hunch of our eccentric chief inspector.”
But Fu slowed down near the corner of Zhejiang Road and started looking around, as if anxiously awaiting someone. Sure enough, he spotted a slender girl standing near Sheng’s Restaurant and walked over to her. She was smiling and waving her hand at him. However, instead of walking into the restaurant, they went into an old building next to it.
Yu and Peiqin hurried across the street. To their surprise, the old building was a hotel. They peered inside, but there was no sign of Fu or his companion at the front desk or along the dimly lit corridor. They must have already checked in.
In front of the hotel, there was a large sign that declared in bold characters: “Serve the people, hourly rate available, both day time and nighttime, full of leisure, convenience.” The first part sounded like an echo of a saying from Mao, but the part about their business hours was puzzling.
Yu couldn’t help walking up to take a closer look, leaving Peiqin behind.
“It’s really convenient,” a young hotel attendant with a sweet dimple in her cheek came out and said to him. “And very clean too. We change the sheets after every customer. If you don’t have a companion, we can recommend one to you. ”
The full meaning of the hourly rate advertised in the sign finally dawned on him. The hotel was charging for a couple of hours in bed and then a quick shower. That’s all that their operation was about. “Oh, no, thank you,” said Yu, retracing his steps in a hurry.
For a hotel like that, Yu doubted that Fu and his companion had registered under their real names. It would be pointless to ask at the front desk, and he didn’t want to raise unnecessary alarm. In the city, such places were sometimes closely connected to the police, and he thought there was a good chance that this hourly hotel was one of them.
But why would Fu have gone there if that was his girlfriend that he picked up? Was she possibly one of the girls “working” for the hotel? Would Fu come back to Shanghai just for that?
“You know what kind of a hotel it is?” Peiqin said, as Yu walked up.
“I think so,” Yu said, a bit sheepish. “Let’s sit down somewhere and wait for a while.”
He decided to wait and watch for them to come out. Fu’s behavior was strange—even suspicious.
Across the street, there was a small square. It sported a huge LCD screen mounted high and in the background. Next to it stood
the celebrated Seventh Heaven, a notorious dance hall back in the pre-1949 era. After 1949, it was turned into the Shanghai Number One Pharmacy Store, but nowadays, it had reverted back to its original function as a nightclub attached to a hotel, though it was no longer that notorious. Nor as classy as its original name suggested. The seven-story building was now dwarfed by all the new surrounding high-rises.
At the edge of the square, there was a somewhat fashionable teahouse, so they went over and took a table outside. No one would pay much attention to a middle-aged couple sitting at a teahouse.
Yu ordered a cup of Lion Hill tea and Peiqin, a bowl of white almond tofu.
“I wouldn’t have the pleasure of sitting with you here if it weren’t for your boss’s request,” she said in mock peevishness.
“After Chen comes back, I will also request vacation time—a whole week. And I’ll sit here with you just like today, every day, all day, if that’s what you really want, Peiqin.”
“No, I’m not complaining. You don’t have to envy your boss’s vacation. True, his may be an all-expenses-paid vacation with all the privileges of a high-ranking cadre, but does he have someone sitting beside him there, looking over that beautiful lake?”
“One can never tell what Chen is up to,” Yu said. “What he has asked us to look into today, I suppose, may have something to do with that girl, the one who is connected to the man in trouble. It might possibly even be a murder case.”
“That’s true,” she said with a low sigh.
“Do you like the area?” Yu asked, changing the subject.
“Yes, but for me, it might be more because of nostalgia. When I was still a small girl, back in the neighborhood we just visited, I sometimes passed by the Seventh Heaven, which then loomed up so high, seemed so unreachable, to me.”
Sipping at the Lion Hill tea, Yu glanced back at the pedestrian street, which seemed to not have changed as dramatically as much of the rest of the city. Several of the old-brand stores remained standing there, though even those had been refurbished.
In the square, a group of people began dancing to music that blared from a cassette player on the ground. A middle-aged, bald man, apparently the leader, dressed in an old sweat-drenched T-shirt with the character Dance printed on the front and in white silk pants with flared legs, danced intently, earnestly. For him, his green belt streaming in the breeze, the movement of the moment seemed to carry the meaning of the world. Across the square, another group was practicing tai chi, striking one pose after another, like floating clouds or flowing water. Continuing to look around the square, Yu then noticed something else going on across the street.
Two young girls, probably only seventeen or eighteen, were approaching a stoutly built Westerner, pointing at the hotel sign. China had been changing so rapidly and radically, it was like the proverb his father, Old Hunter, liked to quote: changing as if from the azure ocean into a mulberry field.
“I can hardly remember what the store was that used to be where the hotel is now,” Peiqin said, following his gaze.
“It was just a stationery store, as I remember,” Yu said.
Apart from the scene unfolding in front of the hotel, sitting there, drinking, relaxing, and looking around was pleasant.
“The only place that looks unchanged is Sheng’s Restaurant. At least the name is the same. And the outside as well.”
“Nanjing Road is no longer the busiest, most important street in the city, but then the city itself has always seemed young and vital, always with young people moving in and out,” Peiqin said, sipping at her drink, “and around here new stores, hotels, and restaurants are springing up.”
It was Yu’s turn to follow her glance to another new hotel, this one near Fujian Road. It was a high-end one built in the European style. He must have walked by it a number of times, but he never thought about going in. As Yu watched, a Big Buck emerged from the revolving door of the hotel, turned and blew a kiss to someone inside, a large diamond ring shining like a dream on his finger.
“Oh, the stock market,” Peiqin exclaimed, as if suddenly inspired, “We don’t know any businesspeople, but Chen does. Remember, he knows a Big Buck called Mr. Gu whose company, New World Group, is in the market.”
“That’s right. I met him once during an investigation. He helped us, claiming to be an admirer of Chen’s. He’ll help out again, I think, if I let him know that the information is for Chen.”
Yu was taking out his cell phone when Peiqin touched his elbow.
“Hold on. He’s coming—they are coming out.”
Fu was walking out with the girl. Instead of parting outside the hotel, they started strolling around, her arm locked in his. They walked across the street to the Yongan Department Store, another old building from the pre-1949 days, newly redecorated from the inside out.
An elderly African man in a white suit had stepped out onto a white balcony on the third floor of Yongan and was playing the trumpet like in an old movie. His performance soon drew a crowd of people, including Fu and his girl.
His cell phone still in his hand, Yu seized the opportunity to quietly take pictures of the two without their knowledge. Even if they had noticed, it was common for people to take photos in the area around Nangjing Road.
It wasn’t what Chen had asked him to do, but it couldn’t hurt. Besides, it wasn’t a bad idea to have a few photos of the street. Nanjing Road was changing at such a rapid pace that in a couple of years, he and Peiqin wouldn’t be able to recognize it.
As Yu watched, the couple under the balcony were parting. They hugged passionately several times.
“We should be parting too,” Peiqin said, looking up at him, “if you want me to follow the woman.”
“No, I don’t see the point,” Yu said.
However odd the hotel episode might have appeared, he couldn’t think how it could be relevant to Chen’s investigation. Later, he might check in with Wei, the neighborhood cop. That should be more than enough.
“You sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. It’s Saturday. Let’s do some shopping now, Peiqin. And then I’ll call that woman, Bai, one more time.”
FOURTEEN
ON SATURDAY MORNING, SHANSHAN awoke with both her eyelids twitching. It was another ominous sign, she thought, as she tried to remember the horrible dream that was fast fading.
She reached for the watch under the pillow. It wasn’t yet eight. Lying back on the bed, she tried to go over in her mind what had happened in the last few days.
She glanced over at the china saucer used as an ashtray during Chen’s unexpected visit the other day, her finger tapping the edge of the bed, unconciously, the same way that Chen tapped his cigarette. As if through mysterious correspondence, the scarlet cell phone that Chen had bought her started to vibrate.
She picked it up and, when she’d answered, heard his voice.
“Morning, Shanshan. I woke up this morning thinking of you.”
“Thank you for waking me up with the great news,” she said, then added in a hurry, rubbing her eyes, “Oh, I’m just kidding.”
“I’m standing at the window, holding my first cup of coffee for the day. The view is fantastic. I wish you were here with me at this moment. ‘Don’t lean on the railing, alone—/ with the boundless view of waters and mountains.’”
“How romantic of you! I’ll think about your invitation,” she said, suddenly aware of footsteps moving along the corridor and then coming to a stop outside her door. It might be one of her neighbors in the dorm, where young people, many of them single like her, would sometimes borrow sugar or salt from each other. “One of my neighbors might be at my door.”
Dressed in the shorts and a white tank top she wore to bed, Shanshan stood up, still holding the phone, and moved to the door.
“Think about it, Shanshan,” Chen said. “Come over this afternoon or evening, whenever you like. Also, if you happen to think of anything unusual that you noticed about your company—anything you hadn’t thought to ment
ion before—call me.”
They said their good-byes, and Shanshan hung up. Chen’s last line about calling him reminded her of something she’d heard in a popular police drama, she mused, before her thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door.
Opening it, she was surprised to see two strangers standing there. One was tall and stout, and another, short and thin. Both were dressed plainly yet were ferocious-looking, as if emerging out of Shanshan’s half-forgotten nightmare.
The tall man flashed something like a police officer’s badge at her, then handed her a business card that identified him as Ji Lun of Internal Security.
“Han Bing, my partner, is also from Internal Security,” Ji said, pointing to his companion. Neither made a move to enter her dorm room. Ji continued, “Our car is parked outside. Follow us.”
She had no idea what Internal Security could possibly do to her, but the two men standing outside her door meant that she was in trouble, far more serious trouble than she could have imagined.
“Can you wait there for one minute? Let me put something else on.”
She closed the door and when it opened again, she was dressed in a short-sleeved white blouse, jeans, and sandals.
They led her outside to a new black Lexus. She went without protest. Resisting would only make things worse, she supposed, as some of her neighbors were hanging around outside, watching while holding their breakfast in their hands.
They drove in silence, the only sound an occasional screech of the tires on the stretch of gravel road before the car turned onto the main road. The inside of the car was wreathed in cigarette smoke, both men smoking heavily.
It took them fifteen minutes to arrive at a towering hotel, somewhere close, though she had never been there before. It was a sprawling multistory building, squatting like a surrealistic monster over the lake.
The two officers nodded at the people manning the front desk, and they took her directly to a grand suite on the top floor. Ji Lun motioned her to a gray chair in the living room, while he and his comrade seated themselves opposite her on a velvet sectional sofa.