Hold Your Breath, China

by Qiu Xiaolong

  Their talk was interrupted by Chang’s reappearance with a silver tray holding several dishes: cold tofu mixed with wild shepherd’s purse blossom, white shrimp in saltwater, fried carp head, slices of thousand-year egg in soy sauce seasoned with minced tender ginger.

  ‘All organic,’ Chang said, smiling a proud smile before withdrawing and closing the door behind him.

  ‘What do you want me to do, Chief Inspector Chen?’ Melong said, picking up a piece of the slippery ginger-covered thousand-year egg with his chopsticks.

  ‘You must have heard of the latest, perhaps the most notorious, sex scandal video posted online, Melong.’

  ‘You mean the video of Geng and his massage girl who later became his wife?’

  ‘Yes, but she was murdered just a couple of days ago.’

  ‘I’ve heard of something about it too in connection to the video put online.’

  ‘It could have been hacked.’

  ‘Its contents hacked from Geng’s computer? Well, that would be something like an old lecher’s collection in a Sherlock Holmes story. It’s possible, but for Geng to have it taped in a massage room? I don’t know. He could have easily had a girl do whatever he pleased at home instead of a massage parlor. Too much of a risk for a Party cadre like Geng. Besides, there are secret cameras installed in those clubs or massage places, as you may have heard.’

  ‘So you mean the club videotaped the two of them without their knowledge?’

  ‘I think I’ve heard stories like that. Nowadays you can never tell who’s behind those clubs. Geng’s powerful, but he must have his adversaries too. I’ll double-check it for you if it’s needed for your investigation.’

  ‘That could be really helpful.’

  ‘Our circle is not that large. It should not be too difficult to find out.’

  ‘And there’s another favor I have to ask of you. Sort of related. It’s about a young woman named Shanshan. Some people might be trying to hack into her computer, possibly into the computers of the people close to her as well. Supposing that’s the case, do you think you may be able to detect any buzz about it in your circle?’

  ‘You mean someone is hacking her, and the people related to her too?’

  ‘Yes, that’s a possibility. Her husband’s computer has recently been hacked, but hers is a far more likely target. It may just be a hunch on my part.’

  ‘You have any specific clues?’

  ‘No,’ he said. It was out of the question for him to share the bits and pieces accumulated over the last few days.

  ‘But for what reason are people hacking her?’

  ‘She’s an environmental activist, making a self-funded documentary about the air pollution in China. Such a documentary will not be pleasant to the government. Devious plots could have been attempted against her,’ Chen said in earnest, taking out a copy of Shanghai Literature. ‘We met in Wuxi, where I wrote the poem about the contaminated Tai Lake in her company. Now she’s making a documentary here about the polluted air, and I don’t want any harm to come to her.’

  ‘You don’t have to say any more,’ Melong said, standing up, letting the slice of darksome egg slip splashing back into the saucer of soy sauce. ‘I’ll be damned.’

  ‘What do you mean, Melong?’

  ‘Your friend is doing the right thing, and so are you. But what about me? Catching and eating turtles like a contented fool,’ Melong said bitterly. ‘My mother had lung cancer, you know that. She never smoked, not once in her life. It’s all because of the murderous air pollution. But for your invaluable help, she might not even have had the surgery in time.’

  ‘You’re mentioning that again, Melong, but the air pollution is a serious problem to our people.’

  ‘Yes, the Party government has been declaring for years that the people’s right to live should be far more important than the human rights as advocated in the West. But what about the rights to have the clean air, the unpolluted water, the healthy food? You must have heard stories of high-ranking Party officials having for themselves the special water and food supply that’s not contaminated. And imported fresh air machines installed everywhere within the Forbidden City.’

  ‘Not just within the Forbidden City. Wherever they go, the fresh air machines will be installed into their hotel rooms, too. I had a talk with Comrade Party Secretary Zhao at the Hyatt Hotel just the other day. I know.’

  Melong eyed him questioningly, refraining from raising a question about it.

  Chen moved on with the necessary background information for Melong, who listened attentively, not interrupting him a single time.

  When Chen was nearly done, Chang came in with the special dishes in addition to a bottle of Maotai brewed in the early sixties.

  Melong raised the cup with an exaggerated ‘Wow,’ and Chen readily joined him.

  Indeed it was a lavish banquet. The fish immersed in Shaoxing wine tasted tender and delicious. The monstrous turtle steamed with Jinhua ham and rock sugar in a bamboo steamer was finished in the midst of Chen’s delighted exclamations. Whether it was because of the psychological effect produced by Melong’s elaboration about the organic food or not, it was a palatable surprise.

  ‘Don’t worry, Chief Inspector Chen,’ Melong said with a flushed face when ready to leave. ‘You know you can count on me.’

  In the growing dusk, Detective Yu was walking out of the hospital with heavy steps, taking a deep breath, when his cellphone started to ring. It was Peiqin.

  ‘Anything new?’

  ‘I’ve just learned something from Shanghai Number One People’s Hospital where Peng, the first victim of the serial murder case, worked as a night caregiver.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Not only was it confirmed that the yellowish mask came from the very hospital, but also that there’s a patient who died there, exactly seven days prior to Peng’s death.’

  ‘Really! But what connects the two?’

  ‘What connects the two dots, to use Inspector Chen’s words,’ Yu said, unwilling to withhold the credit, ‘may be the very point the murderer tried to make.’

  ‘I’m so confused. Please explain. After all, I’m a cop’s wife, not a cop.’

  So Yu told her briefly about the discussion he had had with Chen in the New World, and then about the subsequent visit to the hospital.

  ‘Seven days before Peng’s death, a female patient named Shen died in the hospital. Quite young. Only in her early thirties. No medical dispute whatsoever. When she was admitted into the hospital, she was diagnosed with lung cancer of the fourth stage. She and her husband Lou knew her days were numbered. Still, the two fought a hard battle to the bitter end.

  ‘According to the doctors and nurses in the hospital, Lou has been an extraordinary husband who, in spite of his day job, came to the hospital to sit by her bed almost every night for the first month, until he himself collapsed with over-exhaustion. But even then he managed to come to the hospital every morning before going to work, and to stay by her bed at least two or three nights a week. He paid all the hospital bills on time until the last two weeks of her life. It’s not easy, considering the mounting medical expense. No medical dispute whatsoever—’

  ‘I’m still so confused, Yu.’

  ‘Yes, there’re a lot of questions unanswered. I think I’m going to Zabei Park neighborhood committee right now.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll be able to answer some of your questions back home. Lou lives close to the park, and the neighborhood committee may be able to tell me a thing or two about him.’

  ‘But it’s too late. No one will be in the neighborhood office.’

  ‘I just want to give it a try. Time really matters. You don’t have to wait for me.’

  Later that night, still under the influence of Maotai, Chen received another phone call from Ouyang.

  Still no news about Qiang yet. People in the association were getting really worried. They’d come up with all sorts of speculations. At the insistence
of Qiang’s wife, they contacted the police bureau again regarding the missing persons’ list, but nothing reported so far matched Qiang’s appearance.

  Qiang had gotten into trouble not because of anything he had done wrong, Chen contemplated. The only thing possibly suspicious at all on the part of Qiang, as far as Chen could see, was perhaps his talk with Chen at the café instead of in the office.

  But their conversation could not have been recorded at the café, with so many people coming and going there and talking to each other or talking on their phones, and with Dvorˇák’s ‘New World’ playing in the background. If such a talk there had raised the alarm for the people prowling in the dark, it had to be because of Chen.

  So Qiang was compelled to come clean to Internal Security because of the inspector. And until Internal Security believed they had got everything out of him about the talk in the café, Qiang had to remain disappeared, drinking one cup of tea after another.

  Possibly because of the inspector’s connection with Shanshan as well.

  Or possibly even his connection with Zhao?

  Zhao was not without his adversaries at the top, Chen knew. But for such a senior Party leader in semi-retirement, it was hardly conceivable for anything to happen to him at this juncture, which could have shattered the ‘political stability’ advocated in the People’s Daily.

  Chen drank a large cup of instant coffee, trying to keep himself thinking clearly before composing another text message to Zhao.

  ‘Managed to sneak into a meeting with Yuan Jing and her associates. She turned out to be someone I met in Wuxi, but long out of touch, she did not recognize me there. They were discussing what they could do for the air pollution, about the responsibility of large companies like Zhonghua Petroleum Company, and about the people who backed them. More to follow tomorrow.’

  Zhao had most likely known about Shanshan’s project as well as her being the heroine in his poem. So the text message would have served as proof that the inspector was throwing himself into the investigation and keeping nothing from Zhao.

  As for any other details about the meeting at the club, he did not know what to say. The promise about ‘more to follow’ might prove reassuring to Zhao for the moment. As for the mention of Zhonghua Petroleum Company and the people behind it, it was intended as another indirect push in ‘the right direction’, hopefully, as mentioned in Zhao’s earlier text message.

  But the inspector still had no clue regarding what he could possibly do for Qiang. He gulped at the second cup of instant coffee, hardly tasting it.

  He rose to open the window. In the distant sky, the stars too seemed to be chilly, dim.

  Two lines from the Qing dynasty poet Huang Zhongze came flashing back to mind, unexpectedly.

  Alas, tonight is not last night, for all the sparkling stars,

  For whom I stand out long, long against chilly dew drops?

  He was missing Shanshan.

  But he became aware of getting ‘drunk’ with coffee again, feeling suddenly sick in the stomach and sweating profusely. The window under the lamplight showed a pale face staring out vacantly into the night.

  The memory of that far away night surged back in the dark, intensely, illuminating him in fragmented remembrances at the unlikely hour …

  With the intensity of their passion accentuated by a touch of desperation that affected them both, they were aware there was no telling what would then happen – to her, to him, to the world. Nothing for them to grasp except the fleeting moment of being, losing, and finding themselves again in each other’s arms for the present.

  With her above him, she turned into a dazzling white cloud, languid rolling, soft yet solid, sweeping, almost insubstantial, clinging, pressing and shuddering when she came, then into a sudden rain, incredibly warm yet cool, splashing, her long hair cascading over his face like torrents, 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.

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

  ‘We’re having the lake to ourselves.’

  ‘Yes, we’re the lake,’ she whispered a throaty agreement before falling asleep in his arms …

  A night bird hooted eerily, not too far away. Possibly an owl, which seemed to be quite a rarity in this increasingly mega-metropolitan city. It was supposedly unlucky at the late hour. An inexplicable sense of foreboding brought him back to the role of an inspector standing at the end of his rope, alone, in the dark.

  DAY FOUR

  THURSDAY

  Early Thursday morning, Inspector Chen woke up suffering from a splitting headache, what with so many cups of coffee the previous night, and with the ‘wild turtle’ the previous day, which must have thrown the yin/yang disastrously out of balance in his body.

  But it could only make the headache worse, he knew, to lie tossing and turning in bed and doing nothing.

  He rose, made a pot of strong black tea, and started working on a draft of the report to Comrade Secretary Zhao.

  Short, vague text messages would no longer be enough for the senior Party leader. Chen had promised ‘more to follow’. There was no putting it off any more.

  It would not be too difficult for him to produce an objective report about the documentary, but as for Zhao’s possible reaction to it, Chen thought he could guess.

  For him, what was the report trying to achieve at this stage?

  However hard he might try to go through the stratagems in The Thirty-Six Stratagems, none seemed to be enough to win Zhao over to Shanshan’s side.

  In impotent frustration, he took out the magazine again, as if in an attempt to get some inspiration from those lines written by the side of Shanshan.

  The broken metal-blue fingernails

  of fallen leaves clutching

  into the barren bank, the rotten fish

  afloat on the water, shimmering

  with their mercury-filled bellies,

  their glassy eyes still flashing

  the last horror at the apparition

  of a black-bikinied witch dancing

  with her raven hair streaming

  on her alabaster shoulders, hopping

  from the woods of the plant chimneys.

  Who’s the one walking beside you?

  Coincidentally, it happened to be a stanza full of horror. The moment he put it down, however, another thought came across his mind.

  The horror of the yellow mask serial murder case.

  What could the murderer be doing at this moment?

  And for that matter, what could Detective Yu be doing right now?

  Last night, Yu had texted him about the discovery at the hospital, particularly concerning a patient named Shen who’d died seven days earlier than Peng, the first victim in the case, and her devastated husband Lou. These could prove to be potential leads, but no more than that at the moment.

  Chen wished he had been able to give Detective Yu some more help in the investigation.

  Sighing, the sickly inspector ended up swallowing a couple of pills for the worsening headache. Perhaps no help any time soon, he frowned with the knowledge.

  To his dismay, the pills began to make him feel drowsy and depressed, and he dosed off in spite of himself, his head rested on the desk, beside the report with only a couple of lines written.

  Shortly after five in the morning, Detective Yu found himself standing in view of Lou’s apartment in Zabei District. It was not a new residential complex, built at least twenty years earlier, but nonetheless ‘modern’ compared to some others in the area.

  The only thing for him to do there, Yu thought, was to wait on the street corner, keeping the apartment building
closely in sight.

  Fortunately, there was a twenty-four-hour dumpling eatery on that particular corner. So he seated himself at a table near the entrance, ordered a bowl of shrimp and pork dumplings, and started eating slowly.

  Afterward, he lit a cigarette without rising from the table. At the early time, the sleepy old waiter did not mind a lone customer sitting a little longer there.

  Yu saw several middle-aged women walking past the eatery in a hurry carrying bamboo baskets or plastic bags in their hand. Most likely heading to a food market nearby for the fresher food early in the morning. For the fast-changing city of Shanghai, some old conventions lingered on in spite of the considerable number of new supermarkets.

  Still, nothing seemed to be happing in front of the apartment building. Yu began to smoke a second cigarette. It was almost five twenty-five. For the previous cases, all of them had happened before or around six. It would take Lou – if he was the one – at least twenty minutes to get to one of those locations to commit a horrific crime.

  The old waiter came over to take away the empty bowl. It was almost five thirty.

  So was Lou not the one after all? Yu crushed out the cigarette in the dented ashtray ready to leave in just another two or three minutes.

  Then the door of the apartment building across the street opened and a man stepped out. After taking a quick look around, he began trotting like a morning jogger under the still gray sky.

  It looked like Lou, and Yu thought he recognized him from the picture he had obtained from the neighborhood committee the night before.

  Running in the smoggy morning did not seem practical to Detective Yu, but it fitted with the pattern of the murderer.

  Still, it was open to question whether the jogger – if he was none other than Lou – would make it to one of those central locations before six in accordance with the established time pattern of the serial murder.

  Yu rose from the table and followed him at a distance in silence. To his surprise, the jogger seemed to be already slowing down.

  There was something strange about it. The man jogged for only three or four minutes. The moment he turned the street corner, he shifted pace to a leisured stroll, looking around, moving along with his hands in his trouser pocket.