Don't Cry Tai Lake

by Qiu Xiaolong

  “I’ve also come to ask a favor of you, Chen.”

  “Anything I can do for you, Shanshan.”

  “I’ve gathered some information about the industrial pollution here.” She produced a bulging folder from her satchel. “Firsthand, authentic data. None of it has appeared in even the so-called inside newsletters.”

  “Yes?”

  “Internal Security might come to search my room at any time. I want you to keep the folder for me. If you have an opportunity, publish the information. Not for me, but for the people who’ve been suffering as a result of the pollution.”

  “Nothing will happen to you, Shanshan.”

  “It might not be easy, even for someone like you, but I’m still asking you to do it.”

  “I will do whatever is possible to get it published. I give you my word.”

  “You’re the only one I trust,” she said, looking into his eyes.

  “I promise,” he repeated and gripped the folder in her hand.

  And he then grabbed her hand too.

  She leaned toward him unexpectedly, her hand in his, her head touching his shoulder. He became aware of her breath, warm on his face.

  They were standing close to each other, by the window. Behind her, the lake water appeared calm and beautiful under the fair moonlight. In the deep blue evening sky, the night clouds grew insubstantial.

  She tilted her face up to him, her eyes glistening. He tightened his grasp of her hand, which was soft, slightly sweaty. She raised her other hand, her long fingers moving to smooth his face, lightly, as a breeze from the lake.

  Several lines came back to him, as if riding on the water: Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!… / Ah, love, let us be true / To one another …

  Another poet, long ago, far away in another land, looking out the window at night, standing in the company of one so near and dear to him, thinking of the reason why they should love each other:… for the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain …

  It was a melancholy love poem, presenting love as the only momentary escape—from a faithless world, hopeless with “human misery, and the eternal note of sadness.” But at this moment, this world of theirs by the lake was even worse—an utterly polluted one. There was no certitude even in the air, in the water, or in the food. They were here … on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  Still, they could be true to one another.

  He had had some vague anticipation since her arrival, but they had been so busy talking about the murder, conspiracy, and politics around them. Now, in the sudden silence, the significance of the night fell upon them.

  A moment ago, she had looked preoccupied, but now she was intensely present. The moonlight seemed to focus on her face in a stilled glare. He put the folder on the windowsill and touched her lips, and she murmured his name against his hand.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Haven’t we talked enough about other people and things?” She tugged his hand, turning.

  Turning to their right, he saw the door of the bedroom standing open, inviting, the lambent light shedding like water.

  SEVENTEEN

  HE AWOKE AT MIDNIGHT.

  She was sleeping beside him, her head nestling against his shoulder, her legs entangled with his. Through the curtain, slightly pulled aside, a shaft of moonlight peeped in. Her naked body presented a porcelain glow, a small pool of sweat beginning to dry in the hollow between her breasts barely covered by a rumpled blanket.

  Through the window, he glimpsed a faint light flickering in the distance, then vanishing across the nocturnal water. The stars appeared high, bright, as if whispering down to him through the lost dream. A ship sailed by in silence. The tick of the electric clock was measuring the invisible seconds.

  So it had happened. He still found it hard to believe. It seemed as though he had been another man earlier, and now he was reviewing in amazement what had happened to somebody else. He looked at her again, her black hair spilled over the white pillow, her pale face peaceful yet passion-worn, after the consummating moment of the cloud coming, and the rain falling.

  In the second century BC, Song Yu, a celebrated poet of the Chu state, composed a rhapsody about the liaison of King Chu Xiang and the Wu Mountain goddess. At parting, the goddess promised she would come again to him in clouds and rain. A breathtaking metaphor, which had become a sort of euphemism for sexual love in classical Chinese literature.

  The memory of the night surged back in the dark, intensely, illuminating Chen in fragmented details. The intensity of their passion had been accentuated by a touch of desperation that affected them both. There was no telling what would happen—to her, to him, to the world. There was nothing for them to grasp except the moment of being, losing, and finding themselves again in each other.

  With her above, she turned into a dazzling white cloud, languid, rolling, soft yet solid, sweeping, almost insubstantial, clinging, pressing, and shuddering when she came, into a sudden rain, incredibly warm yet cool, splashing, her long hair cascading over his face like a torrent, washing up sensations he had never known before. Then she undulated under him like the lake, ever-flowing, rising and falling in the dark, arching up, her hot wetness engulfing him, rippling, pulling him down to the depth of the night, and bearing him up to the surface again, her legs tightening around him in waves of prolonged convulsion.

  Afterward, they lay quietly in each other’s arms, languorous, in correspondence to the lake water lapping against the shore, lapping in the quietness of the night.

  “We’re having the lake to ourselves.”

  She whispered a throaty agreement before falling asleep in his arms. “Yes, we’re the lake.”

  A night bird hooted, close, yet sounding eerily distant. Chen hoped it wasn’t an owl, which were supposedly unlucky at this hour. An inexplicable sense of foreboding brought him back to the present.

  Again, he turned to her curled up beside him, the serene radiance of her clear features vivid in a flood of moonlight. He was awash in gratitude.

  All this was perhaps too much for him to think about now. But he had to, he told himself. At least, to think of a plan to protect her, and then, if possible, a plan for their future.

  Eight or nine times out of ten, however, things in this world don’t work out in accordance to one’s plan, as an ancient sage once said.

  In his college years, Chen had planned to be anything but a cop, but he failed.

  Then he tried to be a good cop. Was he failing at that too?

  That he wasn’t ready to admit. Not yet. Nothing could be judged out of context. That was something he’d learned—by being a cop.

  For him, being a good cop came down, invariably, to the conscientious conclusion of a case. The present case now came with an obligation to make sure that nothing would happen to her.

  Would he be able to do that? What was involved in this case, in the final analysis, was politics, which kept turning like colored balls in a magician’s hand, unfortunately not in his hand. So all he could do was to play a cop’s hand. It wouldn’t be easy. The approach taken by Internal Security might be political, but they at least had witnesses and evidence. Politics aside, he had practically no trumps in his hand. Not to mention, for the first time in his career, a possible conflict of interest.

  Now, there was something in what she had told him earlier tonight, something concerning one statement crucial to the investigation …

  She stirred, turning, her shapely leg sprawling out. He couldn’t help reaching out and tracing his fingers along her bare back, which rippled smooth under his touch, like the waves that begin, and cease, and then again begin, / with tremulous cadence slow.

  Once again, he found himself too distracted to concentrate on the case. So he got up, found the laptop in the living room,
and brought it back to bed. Propped up by a couple of pillows stacked against the headboard, he placed the laptop on his drawn-up knees, overlooking her moon-blanched face.

  He didn’t start all at once. He was sitting still, thinking, unaware of the time flowing away like waves in the dark. It started to rain. He listened to the rain pattering against the windows, imagining the lake furling around like a girdle.

  To his surprise, she flung one arm over, her fingers brushing against the keys as her hand fell, then grasping his leg, as if anxious to reassure herself that he was beside her in her sleep. Her accidental touch brought up the lines he had composed earlier.

  So he began working with a multitude of images surging up into his mind, thinking of the lone battle she had been fighting for the lake.

  Soon, the spring is departing again.

  How much more of wind and rain

  can it really endure? Only the cobweb

  still cares, trying to catch

  a touch of the fading memory.

  Why is the door always covered

  in the dust of doubts?

  The lake cries, staring

  at the silent splendid sun.

  Who is the one walking beside you?

  The moon wakes up from a nightmare

  immersed in ammonia, pale,

  pensive in speculation,

  in the acid reflection of the lake,

  the stars blinking tearfully

  trembling in the cold.

  By the lake, an apple tree is blossoming

  transparent in the light, expecting—

  only a gesture, nothing

  but a gesture, the test always done

  by selecting the pure sample

  up to the standard.

  The lines were disorganized, but it was imperative for him to put them all down without a break. He went on typing, juxtaposing one scene with another, jumping among the stanzas, worrying little about the structure or the syntax. Realities, too, were disorganized.

  He felt as if the lines were flowing in from the lake, flowing through her. He simply happened to be there, pounding at the laptop. The stillness around was breathing with a subtle fragrance from her naked body. Amidst the images rushing up to the monitor, he paused to look at her again. He could hardly remember how she had seemed to him when he first saw her in the small eatery just about a week ago.

  And he tried to visualize the hard battle she’d been fighting here, working at her environmental protection job, day after day, alone by the lake.

  But what had he contributed? As a successful Party member and police officer enjoying all the privileges, and now even standing in for a high-ranking cadre at the center, he had paid little attention to environmental issues. He was simply too busy being Chief Inspector Chen, a rising Party cadre in the system. Pushing a strand of sweat-matted hair from her forehead, he wished he had met her earlier and learned more about her work.

  He then put an intimate touch into the poem, imagining a conversation she’d had with him about the lake.

  Last night, a white water bird

  flew into my dream again,

  like a letter, telling me

  that pollution was under control—

  I awoke to see the night cloud breaking

  through the ether, thinking

  with difficulty, shivering.

  It seems as if the key was heard

  turning only once

  before the door opens, only

  to the anemic stars lost

  in the lake of the waste …

  Finally, he moved back to the beginning of the poem, typed out a tentative title, “Don’t Cry, Tai Lake.” It wasn’t finished, he knew, but he also knew he was going to have a busy day as a cop tomorrow. He set the laptop on the nightstand, held her hand, and finally drifted off to sleep.

  EIGHTEEN

  NOT UNTIL SUNDAY MORNING did Detective Yu receive a callback from the message he’d left for Bai.

  “I know you’re a good friend of Mrs. Liu, so I’d like to talk to you,” he said, repeating the message he’d left for her.

  “I would like to talk to you too, Mr. Yu, but I’m going to church right now. And I have to leave for Nanjing this afternoon,” Bai said. “If it’s something really urgent, though, we could meet after the service this morning. I will be at Moore Memorial Church, near the Peace Movie Theater. I may go directly to the train station from there.”

  So that Sunday morning Yu and Peiqin arrived at the church, which had been named to memorialize an American donor in the late eighteenth century.

  It was a gothic building of umber brick on the corner of Xizhuang Road, with a huge cross installed on the top of the bell tower. It might have been something of a landmark in earlier years, but like other old buildings such as the Seventh Heaven, it appeared lost among the new modern and ultramodern high-rises looming around. Still, the church looked as if it had received an extensive face-lift in recent years.

  The service had just started when they got there, but there were a considerable number of people still standing around, greeting each other, and talking outside.

  “I’ve been to the movie theater several times,” Peiqin said, “but I’ve never once stepped into the church.”

  “Neither have I.”

  “Well, better to believe in something than to have nothing to believe in, I would say.”

  “What do you believe in then, Peiqin?”

  “I don’t have any grand theories, but I believe it’s wrong for people to kill other people. That’s why I wanted to come out with you today.”

  “Thank you.”

  They moved inside. The church looked impressive with its rectangular pillars in the hall and the colorful stone balusters in the balcony, and it was packed. According to the brochures they picked at the entrance, it could accommodate about a thousand people, including some in the hall and some in the balcony.

  Yu and Peiqin failed, however, to find seats for themselves, so they had to stand in the back. To their surprise, they saw a large number of young people. Beside them, a fashionable girl in a low-cut yellow summer dress prayed devotedly, clutching a Bible in her hands, her head hung low, her hair dyed golden. She was perhaps in her early twenties.

  They waited patiently, hand in hand, till the end of the service.

  As soon as people began to pour out of the building, Yu pressed a number on his cell phone.

  “Who is it?” Bai said.

  “Oh, it’s Yu. We talked earlier this morning. I’m waiting for you near the entrance.”

  A middle-aged woman came over to them with questions in her eyes. She was in her late forties or early fifties, slightly plump, with a pair of gold-rimmed glasses on her round face.

  Small groups of people still lingered outside, conversing loudly. They might have come to go to the movie theater, or they might have just left church. At least some were holding tickets in their hands. The traffic rumbled on continuously along Xizhuang Road.

  “This is no place for us to talk,” Peiqin said. “Let’s go to People’s Park across the street.”

  They went through the underground tunnel to the park, which looked much smaller than Peiqin remembered. The park was built after the racetrack built by the British in the nineteenth century was torn down. Originally, the park was extraordinarily large, considering its location in the center of the city. In recent years, however, a lot of new construction had started to chip away at the park.

  They found a stone table with stools around it near the back, where they could look out onto the People’s Square.

  “I’m confused,” Bai started the moment she sat down with them. “Does Mrs. Liu know you two?”

  “No, but a friend of ours is trying to help her in Wuxi,” Yu said.

  “But what can I do to help you?” Bai said. “And to help her? Liu’s dead. No one can do anything about it.”

  “Well, some people are trying to push the investigation ahead with her as a suspect.”

  “
What? That’s too much! She’s already lost her husband.”

  “The Wuxi cops must have contacted you to talk about her alibi,” Yu said. “To them, there must seem to be something inexplicable and suspicious about her. The night her husband was killed in Wuxi, she wasn’t at home but with you here in Shanghai. Could that have been a coincidence? And they’re puzzled by her frequent trips back to Shanghai, trips taken during weekdays and over weekends simply for a game of mahjong. They are also aware that their marriage had long been on the rocks.”

  “I’m lost, Mr. Yu,” she said alertly. “If that’s the case, I don’t know how you or your friend can help.”

  Yu took out his badge. This revelation couldn’t be avoided, he decided. He also produced a business card of Chen’s.

  “Wow. Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Bureau! I think I’ve read about him in the newspapers.”

  “Yes, he’s my partner, and he’s the one who’s now in Wuxi. He’s not there on official business, but he’s trying to help Mrs. Liu in any case. That’s why he wanted me to contact you.”

  “Now I see, Detective Yu.”

  “So tell us what you know about her,” Yu said. “Right now, I’m approaching you informally, and talking to you as a friend of hers. Let me assure you that you are helping us and helping her too. It will be in everybody’s best interest. Once other officials take over, it will be a different story.”

  “Thank you for your frankness.” Bai started slowly. “I’ve been her friend since middle school. So of course I would like to help, though I may not be able to answer all of your questions. But as for her frequent trips back to Shanghai, particularly on the weekends, I can tell you why. She comes for the church service here.”

  “But aren’t there churches in Wuxi?”

  “People at a church are like brothers and sisters, having known one another well for years. Wuxi isn’t that far away now, just a little more than an hour by train. I live in Minhang, and it takes me about the same amount of time to get here. But more importantly, being the wife of an important Party cadre, she didn’t think it would be a good idea to let the local people in Wuxi know about her church attendance.”