by Qiu Xiaolong
“If you are not using the quota, you don’t lose anything by giving it to me,” he explained in a voice he thought full of reason. “As Yang’s only grandnephew, I am asking you to please help me.”
“Well,” she said after giving him a long look. “I’ve been trying to save some money to buy a color TV for myself, but the quota is only valid for six months. Give me a call in two months. If I still do not have enough money by that time, then you can have the quota.”
It was not an outright refusal, and she was already standing up. “You have to leave now. I have a class in ten minutes. Let me walk you to the door.”
Before she marched him to the end of the corridor, however, two young female students came over to her with notebooks in their hands.
“You know the way out from here, “ she said to him.
He did, but he heard something that made him pause and hide behind a concrete pillar.
“Professor Yin. You must remember me,” one of the girls said in a sweet voice. “You taught me two years ago. You said I was your favorite student. And I will need your help when you get to the United States. I will need a letter of recommendation.”
From what he overheard, he concluded that in two months Yin would be far away in the United States. So her promise was worthless.
The more he thought about it, the more upset he became. In his mind, even her opportunity to go abroad was derived from her relationship with Yang. He had to take action, he decided, before it was too late.
He remembered that she had left the keys dangling from the keyhole of her desk when she had literally pushed him out of her office, and that she had not locked the door because one of her colleagues happened to be coming in at that moment. So he sneaked back to her office. Her colleague was not there, and the office door was not locked either. No one had seen him enter the room, but his search of her desk drawer was not successful.
The only money he could find was some coins in a small plastic box. But then he realized that on the key ring were the keys to the back door of the shikumen and to her room. And he remembered something. During his previous stay with her, Yin had had him duplicate these keys for his own use. Perhaps because he had an accent, or because of his countrified appearance, the locksmith produced two duplicates for each, and charged him for them. Bao did not tell Yin for fear of losing face and he paid for the extra set out of his own pocket. Later on, he only gave back one set. He kept the keys together with the key ring decorated with the image of the dancer from the ballet Red Woman Soldier, as a souvenir. When he returned to Shanghai, he brought the keys with him.
He started to make plans, but he was cautious. He remembered her habit of getting up early in the morning for tai chi. Normally, she left the shikumen building at around five fifteen, and she did not come back until after eight. In that period, he could get into her room, take whatever there was, and leave either through the back or the front door. The earlier, the better, of course, as most residents would not get up before six. As long as he was not actually seen leaving Yin’s room, he would not be in danger. The only possible risk was that one of her neighbors might recognize him. But since his previous visit, he had grown up, and that risk was slight. Even if he were to be identified as the thief, the police would probably not exert much effort to track down a mere burglar, nor would it be easy to trace him in Shanghai.
To make sure of his plan, he did some surveillance work. After having observed the lane secretly for a week, he decided to act. He sneaked in through the back door shortly after Yin left on the morning of February 7. He did not really consider that he was doing anything wrong, for he believed that it was only fair that he receive a share of Yang’s legacy.
But it took him much longer than he had anticipated to find anything valuable to steal. There was less cash than he had expected and no checkbook, much less a credit card. Then he found the English manuscript in a cardboard box under the bed. He could not read it, but he could tell what it must be.
When he heard footsteps mounting the stairs, he paid no attention. There were so many people in the building. Some of the women went to the food market quite early in the morning. But when he heard the sound of the key being inserted in the lock, he was thrown into a panic. He rushed to hide behind the door, hoping he might somehow sneak out unseen. Her face registered horror upon the sight of the ransacked room, in which most of the drawers had been emptied out, and the shoeboxes shoved into the middle of the floor. As she turned in his direction, he jumped out, snatched up the pillow from the bed, and covered her face while pushing her body hard up against the wall. He was trying to stop her from shouting, but he used too much force. When he finally let go of the pillow, she collapsed to the floor like a sack.
It was impossible for him to stay with her corpse in that tiny room.
He knew that he could not take the slightest risk of being seen or recognized by a neighbor, now that this had happened. It was a murder case now. He picked up the manuscript and the few valuables he had found, opened the door to her room, and stepped out onto the stairs. He could not leave the building through the front door. At any second, people might come from the rooms in the wings on either side.
As he went downstairs toward the back door, he saw the woman peeling shrimp outside. He could not retreat, so he had no choice but to hide in the space under the staircase. He did not have a plan; he was just bumping about like a headless fly. After the longest two or three minutes of his life, he heard some commotion in the lane. He peered out and saw that the shrimp woman was no longer there.
He dashed out.
Bao’s narration lasted nearly two hours. Yu almost used up the tape. A few minutes before Bao finished, Chen returned carrying his briefcase and the manuscript under his arm.
A large part of Bao’s tale confirmed Yu’s earlier hypothesis, though some details surprised him.
“He did it,” Yu said, nodding to Chen.
Chen put the manuscript on the bed, in front of Bao. “Did you know that Yin had this English manuscript?”
“No, I had no clue,” Bao said. “But I had wondered about it. My mother thought she might have it. My mother had never met her uncle Yang, you know.”
“Shall we take him to the bureau now?” Yu asked.
“Yes. I called Little Zhou from the restaurant downstairs. He said he’d be here at one o’clock in a bureau car. He may be waiting downstairs now.”
They walked Bao down. Sure enough, Little Zhou was waiting for them in a Mercedes.
“Chief Inspector Chen, we will always have the best bureau car for you.”
Chen seemed to be lost in thought as he tapped his fingers on his bulging briefcase, which rested on the seat beside him.
“I have one question, Chief Inspector Chen,” Yu said. “Yang’s novel manuscript should have been kept in the bank safe, together with his translation of Chinese poetry into English. Why did she leave it in her room?”
“She was too clever for her own good. Do you think the safety deposit box would be safe enough for someone like her?” Chen said. “She might have purposely rented a bank box so people would assume her valuables were there and would not suspect that she kept anything important in her room.”
* * * *
Chapter 23
T
he investigation of Yin Lige’s case had been successfully concluded, Chen could assure himself, and the translation of the New World business proposal was finished. But the phone in his apartment started ringing early in the morning, like an alarm clock set at the wrong hour. It was Gu.
As Chen listened to him, a line came to mind. What will come, eventually comes.
That line had been inscribed beneath a traditional Chinese painting of a wild white goose carrying an orange sun on its wings, an exquisite painting he had seen years ago, in Beijing, in the company of a friend. It had hung on the wall of her room in Muxudi.
The line would often come back to him unexpectedly. This morning, what brought it back was a request
for a multi-level garage, or, to be exact, for additional land close to the New World upon which such a garage could be constructed. Gu had a number of good reasons for this request, which he had made to the city government, and now he was telling Chen about it.
“So many people will come to the New World, not only in taxis, but in their own cars. For most of these customers, private cars will be a matter of course. The middle class is no longer interested in shopping along Nanjing Road. Why? There is no parking and no garage space. That’s at least one big reason. GM has already signed a multi-year agreement with the Shanghai government for a gigantic automobile joint venture. In addition to Volkswagens, you will soon see as many Buicks in Shanghai as in New York. The New World will be a landmark for this century, and for the next one. We have to be foresighted in our business planning or the neighboring area will be terribly jammed with traffic.”
“That may be true,” Chen said.
“This concerns the image of our city, especially from perspective of the city traffic control office. I believe it’s important to take preventive measures.” Gu added, “You were the director of that office, I remember.”
“Acting director. I was only the acting director for a short while.”
“Oh, what’s the name of that secretary of yours? Meiling or something. She simply adores you. ‘The temple is too small for a god like Chief Inspector Chen,’” was what she said, the night she was with you at the Dynasty Club. The traffic control office will surely do whatever you say.”
So Gu was asking him to put in a word on his behalf to the city traffic control office.
“You cannot rely on Meiling’s words, Mr. Gu,” Chen said. “Why didn’t you put this request in your earlier proposal to the city government?”
“It’s such a big project that some details may have been overlooked.”
But Gu had not overlooked this necessity, Chen was sure. Gu must have had in mind Chen’s former position when he’d offered him the well-paid translation project, and sent him White Cloud as a little secretary, as well as the air-conditioner that now stood against the bookshelf, the heater in the bathroom, the presents on his mother’s nightstand in the hospital—and the tip about Bao’s address, too.
There’s no free lunch. He should have known better.
After having translated the New World business proposal, however, he believed that the request was a reasonable one. In fact, he found himself attracted to the vision of the New World, and not only because he had been paid so generously for the translation of the proposal; he had come to believe that the project would enhance the cultural image of the city. For a fast-developing city like Shanghai, cultural preservation could be of great significance, even though the New World was designed to meet only the demand for an exterior retro look.
And for a grand project like this, a multi-story garage would be necessary. It would be a disaster for Huaihai Road, as well as the neighboring areas, to be jammed with cars of New World shoppers parked everywhere at random. So the traffic control office might make a suggestion to the city government.
For Gu, the grant of land in the heart of the city, in the name of cultural preservation, would save him a huge amount of money, and perhaps even the project itself. Businessmen applied to the city government for the use of land and the government charged them in accordance to the specified land usage. For a high-end commercial use like the New World, Gu would have had to pay a very large sum. But, as he had confided to Chen, Gu had applied instead for a cultural preservation project. Of course he had not included a multi-level garage in that proposal, for it would have aroused suspicion. But as an add-on, backed up by the traffic control office, he might get quick approval. What Gu had paid for the translation was nothing, like a feather plucked from a Beijing duck, compared with what he hoped to gain.
From another perspective, however, the grant of Gu’s request would mean a loss of revenue to the traffic control office. A large modern garage would put a lot of cars out of sight, but it would also put a lot of patrol officers out of work and eliminate the fines they might otherwise collect. So it might not be that easy for him to back Gu’s request, he understood, and Gu understood this too.
“Well, when it is convenient, put in a word for the New World,” Gu said very smoothly.
Chen could always claim that he was still waiting for that convenient moment, but he would probably not do so. The bottom line was that he was obliged to help Gu with respect to the garage request. “I’ll make a couple of phone calls,” he said vaguely at the end of the phone conversation. “And I will call you back, Gu.”
Chen decided that first he had better go to the hospital. He had to pay the medical bill there. His mother would be released that evening. She had been worried about the expense. There was no point letting her know how much it cost; in any case, the money from the translation would surely cover it. This gave him an extra sense of self-justification, he reflected, as he arrived at the hospital accounting office. In the age of the market economy, the hospital made no exceptions, so neither need he, as long as he made money in a way that was acceptable to the system.
To his surprise, he learned that his mother’s factory had already paid the hospital bill. “It’s been taken care of, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen,” the hospital cashier said with a broad grin. “Comrade Zhou Dexing, the factory director, wants you to give him a call when you have time. This is his number.”
Chen dialed the number from a pay phone in the lobby.
It was no great surprise to him to hear a warm speech from Comrade Zhou Dexing: “Our factory is having a difficult time, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen. The national economy is in a transitional period, and a state-run factory meets with one problem after another. For an old worker like your mother, however, we will take responsibility for her medical expense. She has worked all her life with utter dedication to the factory. We know what a good comrade she is.”
“Thank you so much, Comrade Zhou.”
What a good comrade her son is; somebody must have tipped him off about that, thought Chen. Whatever his motivation, what Comrade Zhou had said and done was politically correct, even an appropriate subject for an editorial in the People’s Daily.
“For our work in the future, we will continue to enjoy her support, I hope, and yours too, Comrade Chief inspector. I have heard so much about your important work for the city.”
These official courtesies were a polite veneer. But Chen was not worried. There are things a man can do, and things a man cannot do. This Confucian dictum could also mean that no matter what others might ask him to do, he would make his decision in accordance with his principles.
A new sort of social relationship, cobweb-like, seemed to have developed, connecting people closely together along the threads of their interests. The existence of each thread depended on the others. Like it or not, Chief Inspector Chen was bound up in this network of connections.
“You really flatter me, Comrade Zhou,” Chen said. “We all work for socialist China. Of course we will help each other.”
That was not the Confucian ideal of a society, not the one envisioned by his father, a Neo-Confucian intellectual of the old generation. Ironically, Chen reflected, it was not totally irrelevant to Confucianism either. Yiqi, or the oughtness of the situation, a Confucian principle that emphasized moral obligation, had somehow evolved into oughtness of one’s own interest.
But Chen reminded himself that he had no time for such philosophical speculation.
He walked into his mother’s room. She was still asleep. Although the test results had excluded the particular possibility that had worried him, she had been growing visibly weaker in the last few years. He decided to stay with her for a while. Since the onset of the translation project, almost simultaneously with the murder of Yin Lige, this was the first day that he could spend some peaceful time with his mother without worrying about this clue or that lead, or about definitions and phrasing.
She stirred in her sleep, but
she did not wake. It might be as well. Once awake, she would probably lead their talk to her number one question: Now that you are established in life, what about your family?
In traditional Chinese culture, both “establishment” and “family” were at the top of a man’s list of priorities, though the latter appeared more urgent to his mother. Whatever he might offer about his career and Party standing, his personal life was still a blank page to her.
Again, he thought of the line under the painting of the goose in Beijing, although in a different context: What will come, eventually comes. Perhaps it was not time yet.
He started peeling an apple for his mother. That was something White Cloud had done in his place, he remembered. Afterward, he put the peeled apple in a plastic bag on the nightstand. He looked into the drawer of the nightstand. He might as well start putting things together for her. Perhaps he would have to leave before she woke up.
