Hold Your Breath, China

by Qiu Xiaolong

  She stirred, her shapely leg sprawling out. He could not help reaching out and tracing his fingers along her bare back, which seemed to be rippling smoothly under his touch, like the waves that begin, and ease, and then begin again, with slow, tremulous cadence.

  Once again, he found himself too distracted to concentrate on the case. Nor did he want to think along that line.

  So he got out, went to pick up the laptop, and moved back to the bed. Leaning back with a couple of pillows propped against the headboard, he placed the laptop above his drawn-up knees, overlooking her moon-blanched face.

  He did not start all at once, sitting still, thinking, unaware of time flowing away like waves in the dark.

  With her lying against him, the water of the lake made its way into that long poem, with those lines gushing out from his pen, from the lake – all through her.

  Working in the attic office overlooking the eatery packed with customers, Peiqin got another short message from Lianping.

  ‘It’s announced that Zhou has been put into custody as a suspect in Xiang’s murder, but the head of the newspaper also emphasized that it is not an official announcement – not to the outside.’

  What did it mean?

  She tried to contact Chen on the special number, but he did not pick up. He must have been so busy with the developments in his own investigation.

  Her phone call to Yu was not picked up either. Getting more worried, she was debating with herself whether she should make a visit to the police bureau. But she had delivered a basket of Zongzi there just the other day. Besides, she did not even know if he was in the office.

  The subsequent scene in the video began. Still in the same dorm building. More than three or four hours later, according to the time recorded in the upper right corner of the image. The dorm room door suddenly opened, and she was slipping out barefoot in a large T-shirt. She was seen looking about, turning right, running toward the other end of the corridor, out of the range of the hidden camera, but in less than five minutes, hurrying back along the corridor and disappearing into the room.

  The sequence of the images confused him for a second, but then he got it. Like in most factory dorm buildings, people had to share the public toilet on the same floor. She must have come out of the dorm room, light-footed, while he was still sleeping.

  Again, nothing was visible on the tape for a second or two when the door closed after her, except the empty corridor.

  It was about two hours later, in the grayness of the early dawn, that the door opened again. This time, it was the man coming out. With the lights out in the corridor, the visibility barely improved, and it presented a rather indistinct image of his heading toward the staircase in a hurry.

  There seemed to be nothing graphic going on in that entire section, but the caption popped up:

  ‘The adulteress spending the whole night with another secret lover in her dorm room.’

  All at once, the juxtaposition of the scenes with the time recorded on them made an unequivocal impression, which the audience would most likely accept, perhaps most eagerly too.

  That would deliver another devastating blow to Shanshan.

  He pressed stop on the video, tapping his fingers on the table.

  The camera must have been installed with the governmental instruction then.

  So was the government now ordering the making of the video from Rong?

  According to Rong, however, it was a state-run company that had given the job to an outsider like him.

  Whoever was behind the making of the video must have been able to secure some of the contents from the government, and for a mega state-run company like Zhonghua Petroleum Company, it made sense.

  Still sitting on a bench in Zabei Park, Detective Yu found a text message from Peiqin on his phone. It could have come in while he was busy listening to the tape. It was about the message from Lianping to Peiqin.

  Yu was not exactly surprised at Lianping’s going out of her way to help. He now saw clearly it was because of Inspector Chen, after what Peiqin had said to him the other night.

  But for the moment, he had to focus on the development in the investigation. Internal Security and Detective Qin were moving fast to their conclusion. Once officially declared, there was no turning over the table.

  What else could Yu possibly do?

  With its door closed, the private room in Small River was getting hot as Chen moved to click the start button again for the video.

  The next part consisted of scenes at different locations, in sharp contrast to the previous one.

  In this new section, Shanshan was seen moving gracefully in upper-class society, with pictures of her stepping out of a brand new Mercedes, entering into a grand villa with an immense meadow surrounding it, carrying a Hermès purse at a private airport, lying immersed in the bubbles of a Jacuzzi tub and holding a glass of champagne in her slender hand, like a toast to an invisible man holding the camera.

  In the midst of all these, the intimate scenes of her with Yao in the moments of ‘cloud and rain’ were interspersed.

  In the second century BC, Song Yu, a celebrated poet of the Chu State, composed a rhapsody about the liaison of King Xiang of Chu and the Goddess of the Wu Mountains. Parting after a passionate night, the glamorous goddess promised she would come again and again to him in ‘clouds and rain’, which had since turned into a breathtaking metaphor for sexual love in classical Chinese literature.

  Thousands of years later, the scenes of rolling cloud and pouring rain were sweeping over the laptop screen under Chen’s gaze, just like in the ancient rhapsody:

  I live in the high mountains south of Wu, turning into colorful cloud in the morning, and into misting drizzle in the evening, day and night, turning into all the shapes and forms of your lord’s imagination …

  Was it just happening in the ancient rhapsody, or through it, in his mind’s eye?

  After the previous two sections, these scenes came as no real shock to the inspector, as if in sequence of the same theme, but at different locations.

  A caption crept up underneath: ‘A soulless gold digger in the disguise of a public intellectual, who ensnared a rich businessman back from the United States – all for the sake of his money.’

  Some of the pictures seemed to be of excellent quality, Chen noted, with her properly posed in good lighting and photographed in high resolution, unlike the product of a hidden camera. The pictures of the moment of ‘cloud and rain’ appeared revealing, but at the same time not too revealing, sensual but not erotic. They could have been taken by Yao with some selfie instruments, and then stolen from his computer.

  Combined with the previous sections, however, it would inevitably give rise to the impression of a light or even promiscuous woman, particularly with another caption shooting up: ‘Look at the date on the images. She moved in with him long before their marriage.’

  Prenuptial affairs were no big deal in today’s China, especially for those who got married afterward, but given the context, it reinforced the earlier message about her being one of easy virtue, at least in the eyes of the implied viewers.

  He pressed stop again.

  The video was reaching its end. He did not have to continue watching, though he had not yet seen anything in her own words from the hacked emails, which were probably still being hacked or edited.

  It was a no-brainer to figure out that the video was being made to annihilate Shanshan – along with her documentary. It was like an ancient proverb: ‘To stop cooking, it is the most effective to pull all the firewood out of the stove.’

  Chen thought he could guess who had ordered the making of the video.

  Kang, the head of Zhonghua Petroleum Company, having heard of the documentary in the making, was worried about the interview with Shanshan at the time when the GDP-justifying-everything arrogance had been seen as politically correct, in line with the official propaganda about economic development being the one and only truth at whatever expense. But things were
turning out to be quite different now. The environmental expense was too huge, and his argument would have infuriated the mask-wearing viewers. What’s more, the documentary had gathered so much irrefutable evidence about the company riding roughshod over environmental regulations, and causing horrible damage to the people’s health. With the public outcry louder than ever in the air pollution crisis, and with the man behind the ‘petroleum gang’ losing in the power struggle, Kang could be conveniently thrown out as a scapegoat, so he must have been desperate to prevent the release of the documentary.

  In The Thirty-Six Stratagems, one of the stratagems was ‘to rescue the State of Zhao by attacking the State of Wei’. In a devious attempt to save his neck, Kang had secretly ordered the making of the tape, by hook or by crook, against Shanshan.

  But that was a game two could play.

  A knock was heard on the door.

  Instead of sending Inspector Chen the text message about Lou’s jogging in the early morning, and about the interview at the neighborhood committee, Detective Yu decided to do one more thing since he was in the neighborhood.

  The neighborhood committee had been a dynamic ‘watchdog’ for the Party authorities during the Mao period, when the word yinsi – privacy – did not exactly exist in the Chinese language. If anything, yinsi was totally negative, meaning something done in secret from the surveillance of the ‘revolutionary people’. So the committee could have done everything in those years in the name of the ‘class struggle’, spying on and suspecting anyone as a possible ‘class enemy’. In recent years, however, it was no longer that easy for a committee member to barge into a resident’s home without a justifiable reason.

  Yu left the park. It took him less than ten minutes to get back to the apartment building, of which Lou’s was on the sixth floor. For an apartment without an elevator, it required some energy to climb to the top floor, but it was the least expensive in the building.

  On the sixth floor, the door to Lou’s unit was locked, as was no surprise, and Yu knocked on the door opposite.

  It opened with a slender woman in her mid-thirties reaching out wearing her florid pajamas, barefoot in plastic slippers.

  Yu raised a finger to his lips and handed over his police badge to her.

  Examining the badge, she nodded and let him into her apartment without much ado.

  ‘My name is Mi,’ she said, gesturing for him to sit on an old leather-covered chair in a scantily furnished room. She had a lean face and pale, thin lips.

  ‘I just want to ask some questions about your neighbor, Lou. And I hope I won’t take too much of your time.’

  ‘Ask any questions you want to ask. I got fired from my old job last month, and I am still looking for a new one. Time is one thing I have a lot of nowadays. Did he do something horrible?’

  ‘We don’t really know anything yet. But perhaps you can help by telling me about what you know about him?’

  ‘He moved in here only half a year or so ago, but prior to that, he and Shen, still his girlfriend at the time, came quite regularly to renovate the apartment opposite, doing all the hard work themselves. Not well-to-do, but a loving, happy young couple they were! But about a month after they moved in, she was checked into the hospital. What a tragic story! You must have heard about it.’

  ‘He must have been so devastated.’

  ‘Yes, he’s a totally different man after her death.’

  ‘So is there anything strange, abnormal about him now?’

  ‘It’s difficult for one to remain normal after suffering such a terrible loss. From time to time, he could be heard weeping alone in the apartment. And cursing too.’

  ‘So he shut himself up all the time?’

  ‘Not all the time, but he could stay in for the whole day.’

  ‘He does not go to work any more?’

  ‘I think he took his leave, but you may have to ask his company about it,’ she said, wetting her lips with the tip of her tongue. ‘And there may be something else. He spares no expense for the seven-seven ritual for her at home, you know, bringing basketfuls of fish and meat for the meal dedicated to her every week. Now it is conventional to invite other family members to the seven-seven meal, for he surely buys enough for a “round table banquet”. But you know what? He declared he just wanted to be with her alone. No relatives or friends were invited. He simply locked himself in with her tablet on the table. And almost all the food was dumped afterward.’

  ‘He’s beside himself with grief.’

  ‘But believe it or not, he may be already trying to get back on his feet.’

  ‘What do you mean, Mi?’

  ‘Shortly after her death – a week or so – he started jogging in the morning.’

  ‘Jogging regularly?’

  ‘No, not regularly. Perhaps once or twice a week. He gets up earlier than almost all the people in the building. I have slept badly lately, waking up around three or four, you know, since I lost my job. So I heard him walking down early several times. I looked out the window and saw him jogging.’

  ‘But what’s strange about that, Mi?’

  ‘Lou’s so heartbroken. How could he have had the heart to jog out early in the morning?’

  ‘That might just be his way of dealing with sadness. You can never tell.’

  ‘And there’s something else. About a week ago, with his door ajar, I happened to overhear Lou talking to a real estate agent and a buyer about selling off the apartment. It’s understandable that he wants to get out of the place with everything there reminding him of her, but where is he going to stay?’

  ‘Back with his parents, probably.’

  ‘But he never will be able to buy another one for himself. He borrowed a lot of money for her treatment in the hospital, we all know. It’s about a month after she left, and he has not gone back to work. And now he’s selling the apartment.’

  ‘Yes, like there’s no tomorrow for him, that’s what a neighborhood committee member told me. Anything else?’

  ‘I think I’ve told you everything. Having said all that, I want to add that things may not be strange or suspicious at all, considering his circumstances. We should not be too hard on such a grief-stricken man, Detective Yu.’

  ‘I cannot agree more. Thank you so much, Mi. Here is my business card. If you think of anything else, let me know.’

  Lou’s door remained shut. Yu moved downstairs.

  Halfway down the stairs, an idea tumbled across his mind. The selling of Lou’s apartment through a real estate agent. The third victim, Yan, was an agent in Zabei District. But then he ruled out the possibility. Yan was killed in Lujiazui, Pudong, and according to Mi, Lou was with the agent here just a week ago. So it could be anybody but her.

  Standing up, Chen pulled out the memory stick and closed the laptop before moving to open the private room’s door.

  The light pouring in from outside disoriented him for a moment. He blinked in confusion upon seeing a figure. It was Melong standing there.

  Like in an ancient Chinese saying: ‘Seven days high in a mountain cave, and a thousand years down in the mundane world.’

  The inspector had spent perhaps less than an hour watching the video in the private room, but it appeared as if he had lived a large part of his life moving back and forth in the midst of these fast-shifting scenes.

  ‘So what do you think, Chief?’

  The return of Melong derailed the train of his thoughts. Chen was at a momentary loss for words. No point discussing the contents of the video with Melong, who might have already viewed it – or at least part of it. And he could have recognized the man moving in and out of Shanshan’s room in the video. That explained Melong’s stepping out earlier, to make ‘business phone calls’, so the inspector could watch all by himself.

  ‘Can Rong try to do anything about the video?’ Chen said as soon as Melong closed the door after him.

  ‘What do you want him to do, Chief Inspector Chen? I may have put him off turning in the video to his
client, I suppose, for a couple of days, but probably not longer than that, I’m afraid. It’s a sizable sum of money for him, and his client will not let him put it off for too long.’

  ‘The video does not look properly edited yet. Has his client viewed it as it is?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘In that case, could Rong tell them that he’s unable to deliver in time? For one reason or another – for whatever reason – it’s undeliverable for a couple of weeks. Let him claim that the tape got accidentally wiped out and he has to start all over.’

  ‘I don’t think his client will like it. Rong has to worry about more than the loss of money. The client may choose to scrap the video project for him.’

  ‘Well, as for his possible loss, I think I may work out an adequate compensation. Better than his client’s pay. Say three hundred thousand yuan. Don’t worry about the sum. I’ll have it reimbursed through the Party Central Discipline Committee in Beijing.’

  The last sentence was partially true. At least as far as Zhao had promised him. For that amount a lot of questions would have to be asked, and he did not think he wanted to answer any of them. For now, it was just something said for the benefit of Melong, and Rong, too. For the imperative impression that Chief Inspector Chen was not acting alone, crazily, like Don Quixote fighting the gigantic windmill.

  Melong did not make an immediate response.

  ‘Five or sixty thousand yuan here, I believe,’ Chen said, snapping out a credit card. ‘And I’ll go to the bank this afternoon. And to some Big Buck friends, too. The total sum shall be available tomorrow evening.’

  ‘Don’t worry too much about the money. I too have some cash at home,’ Melong said. ‘You keep the memory stick. I’ll go to Rong’s place right now. I don’t know if he will agree with the plan. I have to talk to him in person.’

  Inspector Chen parted with Melong outside the restaurant, but he made no more than seven or eight steps when Melong turned round and caught up with him.

  ‘Something else, Chief. I almost forgot.’

  ‘Go ahead, Melong.’

  ‘About the video, not the one I showed you today but the one going viral online. Someone purchased it from the club.’