Hold Your Breath, China

by Qiu Xiaolong

  He then made his way into the subway station for Line 11. No morning jogger would get on a train after running for just a few minutes.

  Yu hastened his steps and got into the train after the man in question. Once in the train, he managed to take a few pictures of the man with his cellphone. Even so early in the morning, there were quite a number of passengers sitting or standing with a phone in their hand, so it was not something suspicious for Yu to do. Five minutes later, however, the man moved out in haste and changed to Line 10. Again, Yu did the same.

  Shortly afterward, both of them got off at the New World station.

  It was getting even weirder. The New World was a high-end shopping complex for the successful elite in the city. Yu had had coffee with Inspector Chen here the day before. It was too early, however, for shoppers and visitors.

  Why should the jogger – if that was what Lou was, after all – have come all this way, taking one subway train and changing to another, to the New World? It did not make any sense. The New World was, if anything, not an area for jogging.

  But the man was turning into a jogger once again, slower now, more like one walking at a relatively quick pace. He was obviously up to something, but it was already past six twenty.

  For a plausible scenario, Yu thought frantically, the man was out there for reconnaissance. Today might not necessarily be the day. The murderer had to familiarize himself with the surroundings first. That was probably why he did not have to worry about the established time pattern.

  And the choice of the New World, another central location of the city, made sense too. Historically, it was in one of the shikumen houses here that the Chinese Communist Party had held its first national conference. After the first four cases in other central locations, the New World certainly made a justifiable spot.

  Jogging on, the man seemed to suddenly quicken his steps and move close to a middle-aged man in front, dangerously close, but instead of making any attempt, he turned away, and several minutes later, closed in on an elderly woman with a limp. Still, he did not try to do anything.

  People were beginning to show up in the New World. The lights of the Starbucks at its north entrance turned on, almost time for the arrival of its earliest customers.

  The man was turning round again and retracing his steps to the Line 10.

  Yu moved behind at a cautious distance until the man disappeared into the crowd at the subway station.

  At least there was no time for him to strike out that morning. Too late. It was already six twenty. A serial murderer would have closely followed the established time pattern.

  There were a lot of things still beyond the detective, but he thought that the murderer would come back to the New World the next day. And most likely much earlier.

  Chen was awoken by a shrill sound, like a cricket moaning in the first chilly wind of the fall. It turned out to be the ringing of that special cellphone of his.

  Rubbing his eyes, he saw the light streaming in through the window. It was seven twenty-five. There appeared a weird text message on the phone screen:

  ‘Another monstrous live turtle for two of us there. Eleven o’clock.’

  The message came from Melong, who was moving quickly. And cautiously, too.

  For a notorious gourmet like Chen, an invitation to a turtle meal – even if the message was intercepted – would not have sounded suspicious.

  But what it really conveyed to him, the inspector knew only too well. Melong must have got something specific – too specific for him to talk about on the phone.

  The sickly inspector had no choice but to go there, but he still had some time, so he tried to make another attempt at the report after taking two more pills for his badly upset stomach.

  Standing in front of the crowded station, Detective Yu started typing a text message.

  ‘A man from Lou’s apartment building came out early this morning, jogging for a few minutes before taking subway trains to the New World, and jogging around there for a while before he headed back. I followed him all the time, and—’

  He stopped typing. He was going to say it was the husband of the patient named Shen who’d passed away in the hospital seven days before the death of the first victim.

  But things were suspicious, and Inspector Chen too must have a lot on his plate. Yu decided to do something more on his own before he would send the message to the inspector so early in the morning. Chen had looked so sick at the café, and Yu did not think it really had a lot to do with coffee.

  So Detective Yu decided to go to the neighborhood committee with the pictures in his cellphone.

  Around seven fifty, Detective Yu arrived at the office of Zabei Park neighborhood committee again.

  It was still early, but luckily enough one retiree neighborhood activist there was capable of getting several of the committee members into the office for him. Yu was able to show the pictures he had just taken of the morning jogger to them. They immediately confirmed it was Lou.

  Sitting around the long desk in the office, they were very cooperative, each of them trying to say something about what he or she knew regarding Lou. With their permission, Yu put a mini recorder on the desk so that he could listen more carefully later. If need be, he could also give a copy to Chen, though he wondered whether the inspector might have the time for it.

  ‘The Lous have lived in our neighborhood for less than a year. Newly married, they passed around wedding candies in the building, amiable to all the neighbors there. But Lou’s been a changed man since his wife got sick.’

  ‘That’s understandable for the newly married husband. Just about a month after their moving in, the wife was admitted into hospital. Heartbroken, he was heard crying like a baby at night! And he has been making an unbelievably big deal of the seven-seven ritual for her, spending money like water for the meal dedicated to her.’

  ‘He behaves as if it’s the end of the world for him. According to a neighbor in his building, he has shut himself up in the room since her death, mourning with her pictures against his bosom for hours, and hardly coming out. Not even for the work at the company. In a matter of time he’ll lose his job. It cannot go on like that. Neighbors are sympathetic toward him.’

  ‘Well, things may not have been that dramatic. According to his next-door neighbor, once or twice, he has been seen jogging early in the morning. So he’s trying to recover from it.’

  ‘But he’s not his normal self. I went to his apartment to express the condolence on behalf of our neighborhood committee, but he hardly talked to me, murmuring something inexplicable with such a vacant look in his eyes.’

  ‘A walking corpse, he’s finished together with her.’

  The Zabei Park neighborhood committee basically confirmed what Yu had learned about Lou in the hospital. A heartbroken man, but nothing really suspicious or strange for a husband who had just lost his beloved wife.

  If anything, it backed up the part of the scenario that for such a grief-wrecked man, Lou could have been pushed over the edge.

  As Inspector Chen labored up to the second floor of that red-lantern-decked Small River restaurant, Chang hurried over to him with a broad grin and pointed toward the same private room.

  Melong was already waiting in there, standing up on Chen’s entrance. There was no plastic bag visible on the floor, just a pot of tea with two cups beside a laptop on the table.

  ‘Absolutely no disturbance today. I’ve told Chang about it. Don’t worry,’ Melong said, turning to lock the private room door. ‘But I have to make it quick.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Your hunch is right, Chief Inspector Chen. Someone has been hacking your friend Shanshan, and in fact, doing much more than that.’

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘The number of people doing reputable business in our line is not that large. As a rule, we do not talk much among ourselves, and it’s understandable, you know, for the confidentiality of our clients. For these deals, the less said the better. If one
of us asks for some specific help in the inside circle, however, one usually gets the responses needed. After all, each of us may be limited to his or her own expertise, and we have to help each other from time to time.

  ‘Last night, I made no more than five or six phone calls before I learned something from a guy named Rong. I helped him with a project about two months ago, so he did not hesitate to tell me that he had been recently given a job – not from the government, but from someone in Zhonghua Petroleum Company, one of the largest government-run companies in the country – to make a video about your friend Shanshan. An incredibly lucrative job, for which the client offered two hundred thousand yuan, but Zhonghua Petroleum Company is so obscenely rich, no worry about the expense.’

  ‘Wow, Zhonghua Petroleum Company. Go on.’

  ‘It’s a video about her personal life. With scenes and pictures from surveillance cameras or computers provided by the client. Rong had to hack into her computers for more, and into those of the people related to her too, as you have suspected. Some of her hacked email content may be used as part of the video – more authentic in her own words, as specially requested by the client. Rong has already edited quite a large number of the images from the surveillance cameras, but he’s still working on the hacked material. It may take a couple of days before he will be able to turn in the finished product to his client.’

  Melong took out of his jacket pocket a flash memory stick and inserted it into the laptop. But the moment he did this, he stood up abruptly, stealing a look at Chen before he pressed the play key, saying with a touch of unease in his voice, ‘I have to make several phone calls in my business circles, sorry about that, but I’ll be back in about forty-five minutes. You can lock the door. I’ll knock when I come back.’

  Chen had a strong foreboding about the reason why, all of a sudden, Melong had to make those business phone calls.

  With the private room door locked, the video started on the laptop screen – for Inspector Chen alone.

  Apparently, the video had not yet been properly edited. Its contents seemed to cover quite a long period of time, which started about five or six years ago, judging by the dates printed on some of the images in the beginning section.

  It began with scenes evidently captured by a hidden camera, which represented fragmented scenes of Shanshan staying with a man in his bedroom. Some of the scenes turned out to be quite explicit. Chen took in a deep breath, watching their intimate moments, but he recognized neither the man nor the room. The date was earlier than the inspector’s vacation in Wuxi.

  It was hard for him to be sitting there as a detached viewer. He was confounded by the identity of the man who was holding her tight, but then he saw the light as the caption appeared underneath the scene:

  ‘What a shameless slut who’s sleeping around, even with a married criminal!’

  So the man in the scene must have been Jiang, another environmental activist who had been sentenced to years, a prey to a government set-up.

  What the video drove at, however, was not fair to Shanshan. At the time, she’d had no idea that Jiang had not been divorced yet. Huang, the young cop in Wuxi, had confirmed that.

  In those clippings from Zhao’s folder, Shanshan was generally seen by her online followers as a courageous public intellectual fighting for an idealistic cause, so the video could go a long way to destroying such an image. In China, a sensational story about the extramarital affair of a public figure, once put on the Internet, could instantly attract millions of viewers in the age of WeChat and Weibo. The viewers would be without the knowledge that Shanshan was not aware of Jiang’s marital status at the time. Thanks to the time-honored tradition of moral criticism still going strong in China, the video could cause irreparable damage before she was able to provide any explanation, which most people, more likely than not, would ignore while so absorbed in those graphic images.

  And the reason why Zhonghua Petroleum Company wanted to produce such a video could not be clearer. It was intended as a devastating preemptive strike against Shanshan.

  A political murder, just as the government had done with Jiang by interpreting the consultation fee as an ‘environmental ransom’ for the local companies. Jiang was innocent, a victim in the set-up orchestrated from above, Chen was quite sure. Still, he could not forgive Jiang for all the trouble brought to Shanshan.

  Now something more sinister was being done to Shanshan, and to the people related to her. And she was still in the dark. In the event of its being posted online prior to the release of the documentary, the latter would have been doomed.

  So it was up to him, as a cop as well as a man, to thwart such a devious scheme.

  But how?

  After listening to the tape recorded at the neighborhood office in Zabei Park, Detective Yu began debating with himself whether he should get hold of Inspector Chen to discuss the latest information and development.

  Yu was now pretty sure Lou was the one. That being the case, it was the order of the day to put him into custody before his next move.

  But Yu was not absolutely sure, with neither evidence nor witness.

  What if he turned out to be wrong?

  In that case, why should he drag the inspector into the mess?

  To his surprise, a phone call came in. It was from Detective Qin.

  ‘Anything new on your side?’

  ‘Well, that’s what I want to ask of you, Detective Qin.’ Yu added deliberately, ‘You have put your suspect in custody, I’ve heard.’

  ‘No, not officially yet.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Given the circumstances, I don’t think Internal Security is one hundred percent sure about Zhou being the one. It’s almost a week since Xiang’s death. If nothing has happened for another week or so, then we can conclude the investigation.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Now what has your chief inspector said to you about the latest development? He’s hardly been seen in the bureau for the last few days.’

  ‘He’s made a trip to Wuxi for Zhao, that’s about all I know.’

  Chen had mentioned his getting a phone call from Li on the Shanghai-Wuxi train, so Qin must have heard about it, too.

  But Yu wondered why Qin raised the question about Chen again.

  In fact, he himself did not know what Chen had been up to. If it was something about which Chen chose not to talk to him, however, it could mean that the inspector knew he was in serious trouble.

  After the talk on the phone with Detective Qin, Yu dialed Chen, but without success.

  In the private room of the Small River restaurant, the contents of the video began to change, shifting to scenes from another location, a startlingly different one, which immediately grabbed Inspector Chen’s attention anew.

  He watched on, holding his breath, as if under an inexplicable spell.

  The new section of the video seemed to be of much lower resolution, rather blurred with dim light in the background. It had probably been taken in a shabby old building long out of repair.

  First it presented a narrow corridor, almost like a decrepit hotel, lined with a considerable number of rooms on both sides, storing stacks of briquettes, coal stoves, piles of vegetables and other nondescript stuff outside, but otherwise a deserted corridor.

  A man appeared from the landing of the stairs, heading stealthily to the middle of the corridor. What with his hat and glasses, with the poor light in the corridor, and with his moving along in a hurry, his face was practically unrecognizable.

  From its angle, the hidden surveillance camera caught him looking around, groping in semi-darkness, until a shaft of light penetrating in from a cracked corridor window showed him stopping in front of a door, knocking at it uncertainly with his back to the camera.

  The door opened, a young woman standing in a white terrycloth robe, barefoot and bare-legged, her hair still wet, hanging loose over her shoulders, and a soft ring of light on her face. ‘Come in,’ she said to the nocturnal visit
or.

  Recognition hit home. It was none other than Shanshan’s dorm room on that long-ago night. And it was Shanshan herself reaching out her hand to the inspector, then incognito, before the door closed.

  Then there was nothing else visible on the video except the deserted corridor again. The camera must have been installed somewhere opposite her door on a slight angle. It was no surprise that, for an environmental activist like Shanshan, the local government had placed a hidden camera there, as surveillance for people coming in and out of it.

  So what was happening inside her dorm room was invisible to the camera. But there was no need for him to see. The scenes inside were all in his memory, like a movie he had reviewed time and again.

  He pressed stop.

  Remembrance was somehow self-selective on occasions. As if unwilling to be juxtaposed with the earlier scenes in the tape, he found himself focusing on what happened after their passionate moment, on his writing the poem beside her …

  Afterward, 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, and 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.

  So it had happened. He still found it hard to believe. It seemed as though he had been another man earlier, and was now 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.

  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 with gratitude.

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