Becoming Inspector Chen

by Qiu Xiaolong

  ‘Oh, it’s a Swedish mystery. I’m trying to learn some investigation techniques from it,’ Chen said, showing the cover of the book that represented a drowned female body.

  ‘Just back from Red Dust Lane,’ Ding said, pulling a chair over. ‘According to Comrade Jun, the head of the Red Dust neighborhood committee, Fu had told his maid Meihua – the day before he got killed – that he might go to Suzhou for the seasonable food by taking the night train after the “imperial recipes” dinner. That’s why nobody reported him missing even after he was not seen for a few days.’

  ‘Yes, that makes sense,’ Chen said. ‘And the restaurant in question is close to the railway station.’

  Detective Ding produced two cassette tapes without waiting for Chen to go on.

  ‘Here are the tapes of the interview with Fu’s children, Xiaoqiang and Hongxia. There may be something in them. The old man refused to see them because of what they had done to him during the Cultural Revolution.’

  ‘So you think the two of them could have some unrevealed motive?’

  Chen noticed a frown flashing across the detective’s forehead. Possibly because of the assertive way he talked, having forgotten himself in the suspense of the mystery novel.

  ‘About their family matters, that’s just like in a proverb: it’s difficult even for an incorruptible and capable judger to tell what’s what, but you are interested in the investigation, aren’t you?’

  ‘It’s the first time for me, and it’ll be so exciting to listen to a real police interview tape. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity, Detective Ding.’

  ‘Party Secretary Li has just called me. People in the city government are talking about it too. There may be something special in the case.’ Detective Ding added as if in afterthought, ‘Let me know if you have anything new from that foodie friend of yours, anything and everything he can think of. He must have been really well informed.’

  Afterward, Chen wondered whether the tapes left by Detective Ding were meant merely as an acknowledgment of his help. He could not shake the feeling that the detective did not like his meddling in the investigation. Still, Detective Ding’s request for information could come close to a green light for him to go on.

  Before Detective Ding’s visit that afternoon, Chen had actually considered his job on the Fu case finished, which didn’t seem too bad for a first attempt on his part. Besides, it was not a good idea for him to appear too pushy among other real cops.

  But his interests were roused by his initial success, he admitted to himself. He put the son’s tape into an old recorder. Before pressing the start button, he dug out a packet of instant coffee and made a cup with the lukewarm water from a bamboo-shelled thermos bottle.

  Yes, what we did during the Cultural Revolution hurt the old man. But who was not hurt at the time? Because of the black shadow cast by his capitalist class status, I got nowhere for all my hard work at the company. No promotion. Nor bonus. Not to mention all the horrible discrimination I suffered because of the black family background.

  Now think about it, even Liu Shaoqi’s daughter denounced her father in public. Indeed, none other than the daughter of the Chairman of The People’s Republic of China, second only to Mao, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. What choice did I have? You surely know better, Detective Ding. And what did I do? I only wrote a half-hearted statement against him, which was far from a public denunciation. And it was only for the sake of my baby son that I moved out of the lane, so that he would have an unshadowed life, different from mine. It was a move totally understandable under the circumstances.

  After the ending of the Cultural Revolution, I would have liked to come back to take care of him in the lane here. He was old. It was up to us to help. It had nothing to do with his unexpected fortune. As an engineer in a joint venture company, I’ve been doing fine, so I’m not after his money, not at all.

  Having said that, I want to add that Hongxia is a far less lucky one. In reality, no less a victim of the Cultural Revolution than our father. She married the first time in a hurry like some damaged goods. Just for the sake of obtaining the working-class status through her husband. But what then? He started to abuse her like a dirty mop even on the honeymoon, taking her family background as the ready excuse. They got divorced in less than three years. And what about her second husband? Worse than the first. An ex-Red Guard who lost all his money in cricket fighting and ran into a high debt. For a woman of her age, however, it’s difficult for her to think of getting rid of him and marrying for a third time …

  Some of the contents seemed to be neither here nor there, Chen observed. Unlike Detective Ding, Chen had no overall background information from the neighborhood committee. But he found some details in the tape helped, though they were at the same time vaguely disturbing. Not so much in terms of possible clues for the investigation, but more like a reminder of what he himself had felt toward his father during the Cultural Revolution.

  Next Chen put in the daughter’s tape, which, not rewound properly, started somewhere in the middle.

  Father did not forgive us, I know, for what we did such a long time ago. But did we have any choice? A schoolmate of mine was beaten into a cripple for life because of her refusal to denounce her black family at the time. We too have suffered an unimaginable lot during the Cultural Revolution because of him, he knew better than anybody else.

  Now, it’s just proper and right for him to leave all his things to us. It’s nothing but the Chinese way. As you may not know, I actually contributed to the existence of the list of the things taken away by the Red Guards that night – the very list that survived the “Sweeping away Four Olds Campaign” at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. That night, I was shivering beside our poor mother in the midst of those Red Guards. I still remember vividly as she showed us the jewelry box, saying in tears, “I have never shown the jewelries to you, but after today, you may never be able to see any of them again. Look at this diamond ring. When your father bought it for me, I swore I would never part with it. So I’m wearing it for the last time.” A young Red Guard snapped there and then as he overheard her words. He accused her of urging us to remember the decadent luxuries in the old society. As a result, she was dragged out as a target of the revolutionary mass criticism. With the chaos following her sudden death, the Red Guards forgot to take back the very list of the things seized as “Four Olds” from our home, and it’s the list which later made possible the compensation, and then the reunion with his old buddy from abroad, and the stock shares too. The long, long chain of cause and effect indeed, you may say. The old man was simply befuddled by the bewitching maid …

  Chen pressed the stop button. All in all, not too much for the investigation. If there was anything that sounded like a possible lead, it was their insistence on making the maid into a gold digger, and consequently a suspect. But that seemed understandable, nothing too suspicious in it.

  Was it possible that he had missed something on the tape? Or perhaps there was not a lot in the interview to begin with.

  He thought about discussing the tapes with Detective Ding, but thought better of it. The detective seemed to have not budged from his initial position. There was nothing new Chen could tell him after listening through the tapes.

  And then he found himself drawn toward the sociopolitical background of the family drama.

  For years during the course of the Cultural Revolution, Chen too could not help holding a secret resentment against his father for being a ‘black monster’, which practically meant the end of the world in a young boy’s imagination. Years later, he bitterly regretted having felt like that toward his father, but it was too late. So the murder investigation could turn out, hopefully, to be something he had not been able to do for his own father. A sort of personal redemption, at least symbolically, he thought somberly.

  Then he was determined to go for a couple of extra miles. It could serve as a sign – if nothing came out of it – that he was not
meant to be a cop. But for the moment, he wanted to try, and in a different way from Detective Ding’s methods.

  For Detective Ding, the investigation had turned in an unexpected direction once the victim’s identity was established.

  Party Secretary Li had called him immediately, and then several times more, saying repeatedly that with Fu’s connections abroad, including a super-rich businessman surnamed Cai in the States, the case was now the top political priority for the bureau, which had to push the investigation to a conclusion in a quick and satisfactory way.

  The scenario of a botched mugging was practically brushed aside. In the view of the office of the United Front Work of the city government, it would have appeared too unconvincing to Fu’s overseas friend Cai and others like him, who were debating about the prospect of investing in Shanghai.

  So Detective Ding hurried over to Red Dust Lane again. With the help of Comrade Jun, a list of possible beneficiaries from Fu’s death was hammered out.

  The list, inevitably, had his two children at the top. When Detective Ding called back to the bureau, however, Party Secretary Li lost no time ruling out that possibility. Xiaoqiang and Hongxia might have panicked about the maid manipulating the old man, but they could have tried – even in desperation – to get rid of the maid instead of their father. It was improbable, with no convincing motive on the part of Xiaoqiang and Hongxia, and also politically unacceptable to the Party authorities, since the ‘family skeleton’ would have been dragged out of the closet of the Cultural Revolution.

  So Detective Ding started working on a different list of people with a possible grudge against Fu. Comrade Jun once again proved to be more than competent. In little more than an hour, a number of names were put together on a large piece of paper, along with some basic information about them.

  Old Hunchback Fang was a retired neighborhood security activist who had shouted revolutionary slogans at Fu during the Cultural Revolution, and after the Cultural Revolution complained and cursed about Fu’s dramatic financial improvement. He was recently heard saying in indignation: ‘Chairman Mao’s equalitarian society is really gone to the dogs. The capitalists are staging a comeback. Imagine that old bastard Fu having a young maid – young enough to be his granddaughter – to wait on him head and foot, and behind the closed door, too! He should have dropped dead with his equally black-hearted wife that long-ago night.’ Hence there was a convincing motive in terms of class hatred on the part of Old Hunchback Fang.

  Second on the list was none other than an ex-Red Guard surnamed Zhu, who had been sentenced to two years for dragging Fu’s wife out to the mass criticism and then removing the diamond ring from her not-yet-cold finger when she dropped dead in the courtyard. To ex-Red Guards like Zhu, the sentence appeared to be too severe a punishment, and he was released after less than a year. So he could have had a motive for taking revenge against Fu.

  Ironically, another suspect on the list was the other ex-Red Guard, surnamed Pei, who had given Fu the list of things taken away from his home. Years later, when the news of Fu’s stock fortune came out, Pei was heard arguing with him about his entitlement to a portion of it, which he believed he deserved. And about a month or so before Fu’s death, Pei was again seen in the lane, intercepting the old man, begging. Fu would not have been able to get away but for the maid coming to his rescue, pushing Pei away like a fury. According to the neighbors at the scene, Pei was shouting, ‘You cannot bring any money into the coffin, can you?’

  Detective Ding started making enquiries about their alibis. For Old Hunchback Fang, he maintained he had had a meeting with other Maoist activists that evening, and afterward played mahjong late into the night. It should not be difficult to have his alibi confirmed. From Zhu’s neighborhood committee, it was learned that Zhu had been doing business far away in Shenzhen for the last few months. But Pei’s neighborhood committee mentioned something suspicious, though perhaps not that uncommon for people like Pei, who had been seen coming back after twelve that night with unsteady steps.

  Immediately, Detective Ding got in touch with Ouyang, the cop in charge of Pei’s neighborhood. It took less than fifteen minutes for Ouyang to drag Pei into the office to talk with Detective Ding on the phone. Still out of breath, Pei stammered on the other end of the line as Detective Ding started questioning him about his whereabouts the night Fu was murdered.

  ‘Well, let me think. I was seeing … seeing a late-night movie.’

  ‘With whom?’

  ‘Alone.’

  ‘Really! What’s the name of the movie?’

  ‘It’s … Little Flower.’

  ‘Which movie theater?’

  ‘The Peace Cinema, you know, on Hankou Road.’

  After he was through with Pei, Detective Ding dialed his assistant Liao, who promised to check into it and call back the moment he got anything and to give a detailed report the next morning at the latest.

  ‘That will be fine, Liao. But call me any time you have anything new.’

  It was quite late, but more background information started to roll in. Several people confirmed Old Hunchback Fang’s presence at the mahjong table, losing and cursing all the time. One was positive that Fang stayed there until after midnight as he left at the same time, looking at his watch once outside. As for Zhu, his neighbors in the apartment building also confirmed that he had not been home for months, with the door locked and mail uncollected.

  It took quite a long time for Detective Ding to talk to the people through the public phone service. Then he realized that he had missed the last bus back home.

  That evening witnessed Chen walking toward Red Dust Lane, as if moving back into an evening of his childhood. There was something still vivid in his memory – the ‘Red Dust evening talk’, as it was called, in front of that lane, where the neighborhood residents sat out in the open, especially in warm weather, telling stories, exchanging gossip and cracking jokes. As early as his elementary school days, he had heard of the evening talk, and he had since been there quite a number of times, spellbound by those unconventional stories.

  Just like in his memory, a group of people were gathered on small bamboo chairs or wooden stools, a scene seemingly unchanged after all these years. But he must have changed a lot. No one there seemed to recognize him.

  There’s no stepping twice into the same river, Chen thought as he approached the audience of the evening talk, greeting those gathered with a smile.

  ‘I came years ago for all the wonderful stories here in the company of my friend, who was then a resident of the lane. This evening I have just run some errands not far from the neighborhood, so I came over here just like in the good old days.’

  No one seemed to be wary of his self-introduction, which happened to be true – at least the part about his visits to the lane in the past.

  A young man pushed over a bamboo stool to Chen while eyeing an elderly man sitting in the middle.

  ‘Old Root, how about a new, exciting story tonight?’

  ‘There’s nothing new or exciting under the sun,’ Old Root responded, waving a paper fan like a Suzhou opera singer about to perform on stage. ‘Things are new or exciting only in people’s talk.’

  ‘Or in the newspaper,’ Chen said, seizing the opportunity to take out a copy of Legal Daily, in which the Fu case was briefly mentioned. ‘There’s a story about Mr Fu from the lane here.’

  ‘Exactly, the murder story is known all over the city. I read about it in the Xinming Evening,’ another middle-aged man with a week’s growth of beard joined in the chorus. ‘If there’s anybody Fu befriended in this lane, it’s none other than you, Old Root.’

  Old Root lit a cigarette, shaking his head and then nodding slightly, as if debating with himself about whether to start telling the story about Fu.

  ‘Well, a disclaimer first. I cannot really claim Fu as my friend. Yes, he talked to me now and then, but it’s just because no one else cared to talk to him in the lane during those years of the Cultural Revolu
tion. If I know something about his life, it does not mean I have a right to tell tall tales about him in front of the lane. But with his death, people are coming up with all sorts of irresponsible speculations, so I think I may as well tell you some of the things I knew first-hand.

  ‘“In misfortune, there is a fortune; in fortune, there is a misfortune.” That’s from Tao Te Ching thousands of years ago. And it’s still so true about the beginning and the ending of Fu’s dramatic vicissitude in the mundane world of Red Dust.

  ‘In the mid-1940s, Fu got an accountant job for a seafood company, and he managed to save enough money for a first-floor wing unit for his family in the lane. An easily contented man, he indulged himself only in the occasional experiment with the not-too-fresh fish and shrimp bought with the employee discount from the company. In the days when refrigerators were seen only in foreign movies, he “invented” recipes for fish and shrimp balls, capable of keeping them for days without going bad. Whenever successful with his gastronomical experiments, Fu would step out into the lane, treating the neighbors to the tiny yet tasty samples. Neighbors could never forget the first bite into his special eel ball. Such an unbelievable texture!

  ‘One year after his son Xiaoqiang was born, his company boss lost huge in the market and fled away in the dark night. Unable to find a new job, Fu resorted to making fish and shrimp balls in the courtyard and selling them like the peddlers in the street food market behind the lane. But unlike them, what with his experience as an ex-accountant, and with his connections in the business circle, he was able to expand his product line into a small yet successful seafood company out of the lane.

  ‘So Fu “established himself” before he reached his thirties – earlier than in the Confucian formula. At the end of that year, he bought a diamond ring for his hard-working wife, who had been busy peeling shrimp and deboning fish, first in the courtyard of the shikumen house, and then at the workshop, her fingers swollen with too much immersion in the water, yet never complaining about it.