by Qiu Xiaolong
Chen read through the case report for a second time, and then realized that it was lunchtime. As he stepped out, he found a message for him in the large office. It must have been left before his arrival that morning: Hi, it’s Lu. I’m working at the restaurant. Our restaurant. Moscow Suburb. A gourmet paradise. It’s important I talk to you. Give me a call at 638-0843.
Overseas Chinese Lu talked just like that-excited and ebullient. Chen dialed the number.
“Moscow Suburb.”
“Lu, what’s up?”
“Oh, you. How did it go last night?”
“Fine. We were together, weren’t we?”
“No, I mean what happened after we left-between you and Wang?”
“Nothing. We danced a few more dances, and then she left.”
“What a shame, old pal,” Lu said. “You’re a chief inspector for nothing. You cannot detect even the most obvious signal.”
“What signal?”
“When we left, she agreed to stay on-alone with you. She really meant for the night. An absolutely unmistakable signal. She’s crazy about you.”
“Well, I’m not so sure,” Chen said. “Let’s talk about something else. How are things with you.”
“Yes, Ruru wants me to thank you again. You’re our lucky star. Everything is in good shape. All the documents are signed. I’ve already moved in. Our own restaurant. I just need to change its sign. A big neon sign in both Chinese and English.”
“Hold on-Chinese and Russian, right?”
“Who speaks Russian nowadays? But in addition to our food, we will have something else genuinely Russian, I tell you, and you can eat them, too.” Lu chuckled mysteriously. “With your generous loan, we’ll celebrate the grand opening next Monday. A booming success.”
“You’re so sure about it.”
“Well, I have a trump card. Everybody will be amazed.”
“What is it?”
“Come and see for yourself. And eat to your heart’s content.”
“Sure. I won’t miss your Russian cabbage soup for anything, Overseas Chinese.”
“So you’re a gourmet too. See you.”
Other than that, however, they did not have too much in common, Chief Inspector Chen reflected with a smile, putting down the phone. It was in their high-school years that Lu had gotten his nickname. Not just because Lu wore a Western-style jacket during the Cultural Revolution. More because Lu’s father had owned a fur store before 1949, and was thus a capitalist. That had made Lu a “black kid.” In the late sixties, “Overseas Chinese” was by no means a positive term, for it could be used to depict somebody as politically unreliable, connected with the Western world, or associated with an extravagant bourgeois life style. But Lu took an obstinate pride in cultivating his “decadent” image-brewing coffee, baking apple pie, tossing fruit salad, and of course, wearing a Western-style suit at the dinner table. Lu befriended Chen, whose father was a “bourgeois professor,” another “black kid.” Birds of a feather, comforting each other. Lu made a habit of treating Chen whenever he made a successful cooking experiment at home. After graduating from high school, as an educated youth Lu had been sent to the countryside and spent ten years being reformed by the poor and lower-middle-class peasants. He only returned to Shanghai in the early eighties. When Chen, too, moved back from Beijing, they met with the realization that they were different, and yet all those years they had stayed friends, and they came to appreciate each other’s differences while sharing their common delight in gourmet food. Twenty years has passed like a dream. It is a wonder that we are still here, together.
Two lines from Chen Yuyi, a Song dynasty poet, came to Chief Inspector Chen, but he was not sure whether he had omitted one or two words.
Chapter 4
A fter a nongourmet lunch in the bureau canteen, Chen went out to buy a collection of poems by Chen Yuyi.
Several new privately run bookstores had just appeared on Fuzhou Road, fairly close to the bureau. Small stores, but with excellent service. Around the corner of Shandong Road, Chen saw a tall apartment building, seemingly the first finished in a series of the new developments. On the other side of the street there was still a rambling cluster of low houses, remnants of the early twenties, showing no signs of change to come in the near future. It was there, in the mixture of the old and the new, that he stepped into a family bookstore. The shop was tiny but impressively stacked with old and new books. He heard a baby’s babble just behind a bamboo-bead curtain at the back. His search for Chen Yuyi was not successful. In the section of classical Chinese literature, there was an impressive array of martial arts novels by Hong Kong and Taiwan authors, but practically nothing else. When he was about to leave, he lighted on a copy of his late father’s collection of Neo-Confucian studies, half hidden under a bikini-clad girlie poster marked “For Sale.” He took the book to the counter.
“You have an eye for books,” the owner said, holding a bowl of rice covered with green cabbage. “It’s a hundred and twenty Yuan.”
“What?” he gasped.
“It was once criticized as a rightist attack against the Party, out of print even in the fifties.”
“Look,” he said, grasping the book. “My father wrote this book, and the original price was less than two Yuan.”
“Really,” the owner studied him for a moment. “All right, fifty Yuan, with the poster free, for you.”
Chen took the book without accepting the additional offer. There was a tiny scar on the poster girl’s bare shoulder, which somehow reminded him of the picture of the dead girl pulled out of the plastic bag. There were one or two pictures of her in the mortuary, even less covered than the bikini-girl. He remembered having seen a scar somewhere on her body.
Or somebody else’s. He was momentarily confused.
He started leafing through his father’s book on his way back to the bureau, a reading habit his father had disapproved of, but the subject of the book made it difficult for him not to.
Back in the office, Chen tried to make himself a cup of Gongfu tea, another gourmet practice he had learned from Overseas Chinese Lu, so that he could read with more enhanced concentration. He had just put a pinch of tea leaves into a tiny cup when the phone started ringing.
It was Party Secretary Li Guohua. Li was not only the number-one Party official in the bureau, but also Chen’s mentor. Li had introduced Chen to the Party, spared no pains showing him the ropes, and advanced him to his present position. Everybody in the bureau knew Li’s legendary talent for political infighting- an almost infallible instinct for picking the winner in inner-Party conflicts all those years. A young officer at the entrance level in the early fifties, Li had stepped his way through the debris of numerous political movements, rising finally to the top of the bureau. So most people saw it as another master stroke that Li had hand-picked Chen as his potential successor, though some called it a risky investment. Superintendent Zhao, for one, had recommended another candidate for the position of chief inspector.
“Is everything okay with your new apartment, Comrade Chief Inspector?”
“Thank you, Comrade Party Secretary Li. Everything’s fine.”
“That’s good. And the work in the office?”
“Detective Yu got a case yesterday. A female body in a canal in Qingpu County. We’re short of men, so I’m wondering if we should take it.”
“Turn over the case to other people. Yours is a special case squad.”
“But it was Detective Yu who went to examine the scene. We would like to handle a case from the beginning.”
“You may have no time for it. There’s some news I want to tell you. You’re going to attend the seminar sponsored by the Central Party Institute in October.”
“The seminar of the Central Party Institute!”
“Yes, it is a great opportunity, isn’t it? I put your name on the recommendation list last month. A long shot, I thought, but today they informed us of their decision. I’ll make a copy of the official admission le
tter for you. You have come a long way, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen.”
“You have done so much for me, Party Secretary Li. How can I ever thank you enough?” He added after a pause, “Maybe that’s another reason for us to take the case. I cannot be a chief inspector without solving some cases on my own.”
“Well, it’s up to you,” Li said. “But you have to be prepared for the seminar. How much the seminar can mean for your future career, you don’t need me to tell you. More important work is waiting for you, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen.”
The talk with Party Secretary Li actually prompted Chen to do some investigation before making any decision about the case. He went down to the bureau’s vehicle service group, took out a motorcycle, and borrowed a county map from the bureau library.
It was hot outside. The cicadas, napping in the languid trees, turned silent. Even the mailbox by the curb appeared drowsy. Chen took off his uniform and rode out in his short-sleeved T-shirt.
The trip to Baili Canal turned out to be rather difficult. Once past the Hongqiao Industrial Area, there were few road signs. He had to ask for directions at a ramshackle gas station, but the only worker there was taking a midday nap, his saliva dribbling onto the counter. Then the scenery became more rustic, with lines of hills visible here and there in the distance, and a solitary curl of white smoke rising like a string of notes from an invisible roof somewhere. According to the map, the canal should not be too far away. At a turn of the road, there appeared a winding path, like an entrance into a village, and he saw a girl selling big bowls of tea on a wooden bench. No more than thirteen or fourteen, she sat quietly on a low stool, wearing her ponytail tied with a girlish bow, reading a book. There were no customers. He wondered if there would be any all day. Only a few coins glittered in a cracked tin cup beside a bulging satchel at her feet. Apparently not a peddler, not one out there for profit, just a kid from the village, still small and innocent, reading against the idyllic background- perhaps a poetry collection in her hand, providing a convenience to thirsty travelers who might pass by.
Little things, but all of them seemed to be adding up into something like an image he had once come across in Tang and Song dynasty writings: Slender, supple, she’s just thirteen or so, The tip of a cardamom bud, in early March.
“Excuse me,” he said, pulling up his motorcycle by the roadside. “Do you know where Baili Canal is?”
“Baili Canal, oh yes, straight ahead, about five or six miles.”
“Thank you.”
He also asked for a big bowl of tea.
“Three cents,” the girl said, without looking up from her book.
“What are you reading?”
“ Visual Basics.”
The answer did not fit the picture in his mind. But it should not be surprising, he thought. He, too, had been taking an evening class on Windows applications. It was the age of the information highway.
“Oh, computer programming,” he said. “Very interesting.”
“Do you also study it?”
“Just a little.”
“Need some CDs?”
“What?”
“Dirt cheap. A lot of advanced software on it. Chinese Star, TwinBridge, Dragon Dictionary, and all kinds of fonts, traditional and simplified…”
“No, thank you,” he said, taking out a one-Yuan bill.
The CDs she offered might be incredibly cheap. He had heard people talking about pirated products, but he did not want to have anything to do with them, not as a chief inspector.
“I’m afraid I don’t have enough change for you.”
“Just give me all you have.”
The little girl scooped out the coins to give him, and put the one Yuan bill in her purse, instead of into the tin cup at her feet. A cautious teenage profit-maker in her way. She then resumed her readings in cyberspace, the bow on her ponytail fluttering like a butterfly in a breath of air.
But his earlier mood was gone.
What irony. The wistful thoughts about the innocent tip of a cardamom bud, a solitary curl of white smoke, an unlost innocence in a rural background, a poetry collection… And a lapse in his professional perspective. Not until he had ridden another two or three miles did he realize that he should have done something about the CD business-as a chief inspector. Perhaps he had been too absent minded, in a “poetic trance,” and then too surprised by the realities of the world. The episode came to him like an echo of his colleagues’ criticism: Chief Inspector Chen was too “poetic” to be a cop.
It was past two o’clock when he reached the canal.
There was not a single cloud drifting overhead. The afternoon sun hung lonely in the blue sky, high over a most desolate scene, which was like a forgotten corner of the world. Not a soul was visible. The canal bank was overrun with tall weeds and scrubby growth. Chen stood still at the edge of the stagnant water, amid a scattering of wild bushes. Not too far away, however, he thought he could hear the hubbub of Shanghai.
Who was the victim? How had she lived? Whom had she met before her death?
He had not expected much from the scene. The heavy rains of the last few days would have washed away any trace of evidence. Being at the crime scene, he had thought, might help to establish a sort of communion between the living and the dead, but he failed to get any message. Instead, his mind wandered to bureau politics. There was nothing remarkable about the recovery of a body from a canal. Not for Homicide. They had encountered similar cases before, and would encounter them in the future. It did not take a chief inspector to tackle such a case, not at the moment, when he had to prepare himself for the important seminar.
Nor did it appear to be a case he could solve in a couple of days. There were no witnesses. Nor any traceable physical evidence, since the body had been lying in the water for some time. What had been found so far did not mean much for the investigation. Some old hands would have tried to avoid such a case. In fact, Detective Yu had implied as much, and as a special case squad, they were justified in not taking it on. The possibility of a failure to solve the case was not tempting. It would not help his status in the bureau.
He sat on a jutting slab of rock, dug out a half-crumpled cigarette, and lit it. Inhaling deeply, he closed his eyes for a second.
Across the canal, he then saw for the first time a tiny spangling of wildflowers, blue, white, violet in the hazy green weeds. Nothing else.
White puffs of cloud appeared, scuttling across the sky, when he started the trip back. The girl was no longer selling tea at the turn of the road. It was just as well. Perhaps she was no peddler of pirate CDs. She might just have an extra copy, and a couple of Yuan could mean a lot to a village kid.
When he got back to his office, the first thing he saw on the desk was a copy of the official admittance letter Party Secretary Li had referred to, but it did not give him the feeling of exaltation he had expected.
The preliminary autopsy report also came late in the afternoon. It produced little of interest. The time of death was estimated as between 1:00 A.M. and 2 A.M. on May 11. The victim had had sexual intercourse before her death. Acid-phosphate tests were positive for the presence of male ejaculate, but after the period of time the body had been immersed in the water, there was not enough left to isolate other positive or negative factors. It was difficult to tell whether the sexual intercourse had taken place against the victim’s will, but she had been strangled. She was not pregnant. The report ended with the following wording: “Death by strangulation in conjunction with possible sexual assault.”
The autopsy had been conducted by Doctor Xia Yulong.
Having read the report a second time, Chief Inspector Chen reached a decision: he would postpone making his decision. He did not have to take the case immediately, nor did he have to relinquish it to another squad. If some evidence appeared, he could declare his special case squad to be in charge. If the trail turned “deadly cold,” as Detective Yu expected, it would not be too late for him to turn it over to others.
He believed that this was a correct decision. So he informed Yu, who readily agreed. Putting down the phone, however, he found his mood darkening, like the screen at the beginning of a movie, against which fragments of the scene he had just visited were displayed.
She had been lying there, abandoned, naked, her long dark hair in a coil across her throat, like a snake, in full view of two strangers, only to be carried away on a stretcher by a couple of white uniformed men, and, in time, opened up by an elderly medical man who examined her insides, mechanically, and sewed the body together again before it was finally sent to the mortuary. And all that time Chief Inspector Chen had been celebrating in his new apartment, having a housewarming party, drinking, dancing with a young woman reporter, talking about Tang dynasty poetry, and stepping on her bare toes.
He felt sorry for the dead woman. There was little he could do for her… but then he decided not to pursue this line of thought.
He made a call to his mother, telling her about the book he had bought during the lunch break. She was very pleased, as it happened to be the one she did not have in her attic collection.
“But you should have taken the poster as well, son.”
