by Qiu Xiaolong
he morning brought with it consciousness of the scent of toasted bread, of fresh coffee, the sound of the telephone ringing, and then of a slender hand reaching for the receiver on the nightstand—
“No!” Chen jumped out of bed, snatching the receiver as he rubbed his sleepy eyes. “I’ll take it.”
It was Party Secretary Li. But for his quick reaction, Chen might have had some explanations to make to his Party boss. White Cloud must have arrived and prepared breakfast while he was still asleep.
Li wanted Chen to take a look at the Yin case.
“I’m on vacation,” he said. “Why am I needed, Party Secretary Li?”
“Some people claim it is a political case, saying that our government has gotten rid of a dissident writer in an underhanded way. That’s just bullshit, you know.”
“Yes, of course. People may make irresponsible remarks, but we do not have to pay attention to them.”
“Foreign correspondents have also joined in the vicious chorus. The government held a memorial service for her, but one American newspaper described it as a cover-up,” Li said indignantly. “The mayor has spoken to me about it. We have to solve the case in the shortest time possible.”
“Detective Yu is an experienced police officer. I discussed the matter with him over the phone yesterday. He is doing all that can be done. I don’t think I can make any difference.”
“This is an extremely complicated, sensitive matter,” Li said. “We have to employ our best people.”
“But this is my first vacation in three years. I’ve already made my plans,” Chen said, having decided not to mention the translation project he had undertaken. “It may not be a good idea for Detective Yu, or for the special squad’s morale, for me to have a finger in every pie.”
“Come on. Everybody knows Detective Yu is your man,” Li said. “Moreover, you are a writer yourself and, as such, you may understand Yin better. Some aspects of the case will be familiar to you, but not to Detective Yu.”
“Well, I wish I could help,” Chen said. That part of Li’s argument made sense. Had it not been for the lucrative translation project Chen might have been willing to cut short his vacation.
“The mayor will call me again next week, Chief Inspector Chen,” Party Secretary Li went on. “If the case remains unsolved, what shall I tell him? He understands the case is being investigated by your special case squad.”
Chief Inspector Chen bristled at the implication. “Don’t worry so much, Party Secretary Li. Surely the case will be solved under your leadership.”
“We cannot overestimate the political significance of the case. You have to help Detective Yu in whatever way you can, Chief Inspector Chen.”
“You are right, Party Secretary Li.” It was not unusual for Li to harp on the political significance of a case and Chen decided to compromise. “I’ll go there to take a look as soon as I have time. Today or tomorrow.”
Putting down the phone, he saw a sly smile on White Cloud’s lips. Then he observed something like a briefcase on the desk.
“Oh, what’s that?”
“A laptop. It may save you some time. You won’t have to type and retype on your typewriter. I told Gu about your work and he asked me to bring this computer to you today.”
“Thank you. I have a PC in the office but it’s too heavy for me to bring home.”
“I know. I have also installed the software for a Chinese/English dictionary. It will be quicker for you to look up words on the computer.”
She also took out the list of words he had given her. She had printed it out both in English and Chinese.
A clever girl. Gu had been right in sending her to help him. As Confucius said, You tell her one thing, she will know three things, Chen thought. But then he grew unsure if Confucius had really said that.
“You are helping a lot, White Cloud.”
“It’s a pleasure working with you, Chief Inspector Chen.”
She started toward the kitchen area. She was wearing a pair of soft-soled cotton slippers which she must have brought with her. Quite a considerate girl too: she’d realized it would be best to walk about without making noise.
He started working on the laptop. The keyboard action was much lighter than the typewriter’s, like her soft-footed step.
Every movement of hers seemed still to be registering on his subconscious, even when she was busy in the kitchen area. It was hard for him not to think of her as the K girl he had met in the private karaoke room at the Dynasty Club, or to remember the way Gu had referred to her as a little secretary—though, in a different environment, people could appear to be very different.
She’s a temporary assistant for a project, he reminded himself.
In one of the Zen lessons he had read, the master said solemnly, It is not the banner moving, nor the wind blowing, but your own heart jumping.
As he reentered into the computer what he had previously translated on the typewriter, he took a sip of the coffee, which was fragrant, strong, though now lukewarm. She brought over the coffee pot again to refill his cup.
“I have something else for you to do today,” he said, giving her the list he had prepared the previous night. “Please go to the Shanghai Library and borrow these books for me.”
It was not exactly an excuse to send her away. These books should be able to tell him something about the splendors of old Shanghai. He needed to know more about the history of the city.
“I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” she said, “just in time to make lunch for you.”
“I’m afraid you are doing too much for me. It reminds me of a line by Daifu,” he said, trying to be ironic since he did not know what other pose to strike. “It’s the hardest thing to receive favors from a beauty.”
“Oh, Chief Inspector Chen, you are as romantic as Daifu!”
“I’m joking,” he said. “A pack of Chef Kang instant noodles will do for me.”
“No, that won’t do,” she said, pulling on her street shoes. “Not for Mr. Gu. He will fire me.”
There appeared to be a small tattoo, like a colorful butterfly, above her slender ankle. He did not remember having seen that in the Dynasty Club. He tried to get back to his translation work. After Li’s phone call, however, there was something else on his mind. He did not agree with Li, yet he kept thinking of the fact that Detective Yu, alone, was handling the murder case of a dissident writer. It seemed to Chen that a number of Chinese writers had been labeled as “dissidents” for reasons that were hardly plausible.
For example, there were the so-called “misty” poets, a group of young people that had come to the fore in the late seventies. They did not really write about politics; what made them different from the others was their preference for difficult or “misty” images. For one reason or another, they had a hard time having their poems published in the official magazines, so they started publishing an underground magazine. That got the attention of Western sinologists, who praised their works to the skies, focusing on any conceivable political interpretation. Soon the misty poets became internationally known, which was a slap in the face for the Chinese government. As a result, the misty poets were labeled “dissident” poets.
Might he himself have become a dissident writer had he not been assigned, upon graduation from Beijing Foreign Language University, to a job in the Shanghai Police Bureau? At that time, he had published some poems, and a few critics even described his work as modernist. Police work was a career he had never dreamed of. His mother had termed it fate although, in the Buddhist religion she believed in, there was no particular deity in charge of fate.
It was almost like a surrealistic poem he had read, in which a boy picked up a stone at random and threw it carelessly into the valley of red dust. There the stone had turned into . . . Chief Inspector Chen?
Around one o’clock, he received a phone call from Detective Yu.
“What’s the news?”
“We have found her safe deposit box. Two thousand Yu
an, and about the same amount in American dollars, were all that was in it.”
“Well, that’s not very much for a lockbox.”
“And a manuscript,” Yu said, “that is, something like a manuscript.”
“What do you mean? Another book?”
“Perhaps. It is in English.”
“Is it the translation of her novel?” Chen went on, after a pause, “I don’t see the point of locking it up when the book has already been published.”
“I don’t know what it is for sure. You know that my command of English is not good. It appears to me to be a poetry translation.”
“That’s interesting. Had she done any translations from Chinese into English?”
“I really don’t know. Do you want to take a look at it?” Yu said. “The only words I understand in it are some names, like Li Bai or Du Fu. I don’t think Li Bai and Du Fu are related to the case.”
“There might be something in it,” Chen said. “You never know.” Poetry had once given him some insight into the complexities of a case involving a missing person.
“The bank is not far from your place. Let me buy you lunch, Chief. You need to take a break. How about meeting me at the restaurant across the street? Small Family—that’s its name.”
“Fine,” Chen said. “I know the restaurant.”
As he had promised Party Secretary Li, he was going to take a look at the Yin investigation.
Would White Cloud, who had offered to make lunch for him, be disappointed? She’s only here for business reasons, Chen reflected as he got ready to go out. He left a note for her.
The restaurant opposite the bank seemed to enjoy good business. Yu was in his uniform, so they were able to get a table in the corner that offered some privacy. They each had a bowl of noodles covered with soy-sauce-braised tripe. At the suggestion of the amiable hostess, they also had two appetizers, one of river shrimp fried with red pepper and bread crumbs, and one of soya beans boiled in salt water, plus a bottle of Qingdao beer each, which the hostess offered them with the compliments of the house.
There were a couple of young waitresses flitting around like butterflies. From their accents, Chen judged them to be non-Shanghainese. During the ongoing economic reform, provincial girls too had come pouring into the city. Private entrepreneurs hired them at low wages. Shanghai had been a city of immigrants as early as the turn of the twentieth century. History was repeating itself.
The manuscript Yu brought to the restaurant consisted of two folders. In one the manuscript was handwritten; in the other, it was neatly typed. There were no signs of whiteout corrections or of mistakes in the typed manuscript. Apparently it had been done by a computer. The two were practically identical in their content.
Detective Yu was right. The manuscript consisted of a selection of classical Chinese love poems, including poets like Li Bai, Du Fu, Li Shangyin, Liu Yong, Su Shi, and Li Yu, with focus on the Tang and Song dynasties. The translation appeared fluent as Chen glanced through the first few pages.
Something else was noticeable: the original form—either a four- or eight-line stanza—disappeared in the English renditions, some of which were informed with a surprisingly modern sensibility:
A spring silkworm may not stop spinning
silk until death. A candle’s tears dry
only when it is burned down to ashes.
In the Chinese original, Chen remembered, this was a well-known couplet about a lover’s self-consuming passion. This was not the time, however, for him to study the manuscript at length. Nevertheless, he did not think this translation could have been Yin’s work.
“Yes, it’s a poetry translation.”
“I don’t know why she valued it so much.”
“It must have been done by somebody else—by Yang, probably,” Chen said. “Hold on—yes, I have found an Afterword here, written by Yin. Yes, it is Yang’s work, it says. She only edited the collection.”
“Please take it. Read it when you have time. Maybe you will spot something. Please, boss?”
Chen agreed, then asked “Have any new leads turned up in your interviews?”
“No, not really. I have been interviewing the residents of the building all morning. That hypothesis is not very convincing.”
“You mean the theory that she was murdered by one of the shikumen residents?”
“Yes. I’ve studied the list of suspects prepared by Old Liang. Yin was not popular there, either because of some trivial dispute in some cases, or because of her conduct long ago in the Cultural Revolution, but neither of these is a strong enough motive for murder.”
“Alternatively, the murderer could have intended to burglarize her room, but panicked when she came back early and interrupted him. You discussed this with Old Liang, I remember.”
“That’s possible. But was she a likely burglary target? Everybody knew she was not a rich businesswoman. And the contents of her safe deposit box have proven that.”
“Well, she had made a trip to Hong Kong. Someone might have imagined she was wealthy just on the basis of that.”
“As for her Hong Kong visit,” Yu said, “I contacted Internal Security, hoping they could give me some information. You know what? They shut the door right in my face.”
“Well, Internal Security. What can I possibly say?” Chen commented as he peeled the shrimp with his fingers. “It’s not easy for anyone to get them to cooperate. “
“They are the cops of the cops. I understand. But in such a case, they should help—in the interests of the Party or whatever. Their attitude does not make sense,” Yu said, as he put a green soya bean into his mouth, “unless they have something to hide from us.”
“I hope not, but what they do often makes sense only to themselves. You never know; they may have their own interests in the case,” Chen said. “Have I ever told you about my earliest encounter with them?”
“No, you haven’t.”
“It was in my college years in Beijing. I published a few poems, and made several pen pals. One day, one of them invited me to his home, and a guest there brought an American poet with him. On that day we talked of nothing but poetry, but the next day Party Secretary Fuyan of the English department summoned me to his office.”
“What did he say to you, Chief?”
‘“You are young and inexperienced, and we trust you, but you have to be more careful. Don’t be so naive as to believe that the Americans like our literature for literature’s sake,’” Chen repeated. “I was confounded. Then I realized he must be referring to the poetry discussion the day before. How could people have reported it so quickly? Years later, I found out that it was the work of Internal Security. I was lucky because the university dean did not want the image of the university tarnished by having one of his students put on the blacklist, so he worked out a deal with Internal Security.”
“That’s outrageous! Their arms reach everywhere.”
“So don’t worry about their refusal to cooperate. We may still be able to find out something indirectly. Let me make a couple of phone calls.”
“That would be great.”
The noodles arrived, the soup almost red with dried pepper, strewn with chopped green onion, the tripe done to just the right degree, quite chewy, a welcome contrast to the crisp texture of the noodles. It was a pleasant surprise for such a small family restaurant. The hostess stood beside their table, beaming, as if waiting for their approval.
“Wonderful food,” Chen said, “and wonderful service, too.”
“We hope you will come back, Boss,” the hostess said with a bright smile, bowing slightly before she moved on to another table.
That was another new term of address. Not that new, perhaps. Before 1949, people had used this term, and it was staging a comeback.
“It’s their own business,” Yu said, “a private business. Of course they want to please their customers, who are their bosses.”
“That’s true.”
“By the way,” Yu asked, the noodl
es hanging like a waterfall from his chopsticks, “is Old Half Place also a good restaurant?”
“A very good one, especially known for the noodles they serve early in the morning. Why?”
“Mr. Ren, a resident who is on the suspect list, told me that he goes there two or three times a week, and he calls himself a ‘frugal gourmet.’”
“Frugal gourmet. Great, I like it,” Chen said. “Yes, Old Half Place has a lot of regular customers early in the morning, every morning. It’s almost like their ritual.”
“Why?”
“You have asked the right man. I happen to have read about this restaurant. The chef there plunges noodles into boiling water in an extremely large pot, so the noodles acquire a special crisp texture. But the water soon turns thick with starch and then the noodles lose this texture. It’s not easy to change the water in such a large pot. Instead, the chef just adds more cold water, but that’s not really good. Gourmets believe that the noodles boiled in the early morning taste much better.”
