by Qiu Xiaolong
At the level of a chief inspector, his monthly pay was 560 Yuan, plus all his bonuses under various titles, which added up to 250 more. His rent was fairly inexpensive. Together with utilities, it was less than 100 Yuan, but he had to spend half of his income on food. As a bachelor, he did not cook much at home; he ate at the bureau canteen.
A great help in the last few years had been the advances he earned from his translations, but at this moment he was not working on anything. He had not had the time, nor the energy— nor even the interest—since he had taken over the Guan case. The case did not make sense, not the sense he found in the mysteries he had been translating. Still, getting another advance was possible. He could promise the editor that he would complete the job by October. He needed such a deadline for himself, too.
Instead he started to summarize on a piece of paper beside the bowl what he had learned so far about the case. All the odds and ends of information he had been collecting and storing during the week, without having them sorted out and pieced together to consider where they could possibly lead, filled a sheet of paper. In the end, however, he tore up the paper in frustration. Perhaps Detective Yu was right. Possibly it was just one of those “insoluble” sexual murder cases. The bureau had had enough of them.
He knew he could not fall asleep. Often insomnia was the effect of little things coming together. A poem rejected without a rejection slip, a crazy woman cursing in a crowded bus, or a new shirt missing from the wardrobe. This night, something about the Guan case vanquished sleep.
The night was long.
What might have crowded into Guan’s mind during such a long night? He thought of a poem by the mid-Tang dynasty poet Wang Changling:
Boudoir-sheltered, the young lady knows no worries,
Fashionably dressed, she looks out of the window in spring.
What a view of green willow shoots —all of a sudden:
She regrets having sent her love away fighting for fame.
So after the flashlight along the corridor, after the shadows shifting on the sleepless wall, after the cold sweat in the dark, solitary dorm room, Guan, too, could have been thinking of the price paid for fame.
What’s the difference?
In the Tang dynasty, more than a thousand years earlier, the girl had been unable to console herself because she had sent her lover far away in pursuit of fame, and in the nineties, Guan couldn’t because she had kept herself too busy pursuing fame.
What about Chief Inspector Chen himself?
There was a bitter taste in his mouth.
Sometime after two, when he had slid into that floating area between sleep and waking, he felt hungry again. The image of the dried bun on the window came back to his mind.
And another image with it.
Caviar.
Only once had he tasted caviar. It was years earlier, at the International Friendship Club in Beijing, where at the time only foreign visitors were admitted and served. He was there with a drunken English professor who insisted on treating him to caviar. Chen had read about it in Russian novels. Actually he did not like it too much, though afterward the fact he had tasted caviar took Overseas Chinese Lu down a peg or two.
Things had been changing. Nowadays anybody could go to the International Friendship Club. A few new luxurious hotels also served caviar. Guan could have had it in one of those hotels, though not too many people could have afforded to order it—on that particular night.
It would not be difficult to find out.
Caviar—he jotted the word on the back of a matchbox.
Then he felt ready to fall asleep.
* * * *
Chapter 10
I
t was a humid Friday morning for May.
Detective Yu had slept fitfully, tossing and turning half of the night. As a result, he was feeling more tired than the night before, with patches of partially forgotten dreams hovering in his mind.
Peiqin was concerned. She made a bowl of sticky rice dumplings, a favorite breakfast for him, and sat with him at the table. Yu finished the dumplings in silence.
Finally, as he was ready to leave for the bureau, she said, “You’re burning yourself out, Guangming.”
“No, it’s just I’ve not slept well,” he said. “Don’t worry about me.
When Yu stepped into the bureau meeting room, the restless feeling surged up again. The topic of the meeting, which had been requested by Commissar Zhang, was the progress of the investigation.
A week had passed since the special case group had taken the case. The team, formed with such a fanfare of political jargon, had made little progress. Detective Yu had been working long hours, making numerous phone calls, interviewing a number of people, discussing all the possible scenarios with Chief Inspector Chen, and making quite a few reports to Commissar Zhang, too. Yet there was no breakthrough in sight. In routine police work when a case went beyond a week without a solid lead, it might as well be thrown into the “open” file. Yu had learned from experience. In other words, it was the time to close the case as unsolved.
It was not the first time in the bureau’s history that this had happened, nor would it be the last.
Yu sat beside the window, smoking a cigarette. The streets of Shanghai were spread out beneath his gaze, gray and black roofs with curls of peaceful white smoke undulating into the distance. Yet he seemed to smell crime smoldering in the heart of the city. Skimming a copy of the bureau newsletter, he read of several robberies, each bigger than the other, and seven reports of rape in the last night alone. And then new cases of prostitution, even in the upper area of the city.
As the other divisions were so short of manpower, a number of cases had been designated as “special” and pushed over to their squad, but they were in no better shape. Qing Xiaotong had come back from his honeymoon, but with that dreamy look in his eyes, not really back to work, and Liu Longxiang was still recovering from his injury. With Chief Inspector Chen’s increasingly busy schedule of meetings and other activities, Detective Yu had to take on the main responsibility for the squad.
Why should they spend so much time on one case?
Political priority, of course—Yu knew the answer. To hell with politics. It’s a homicide case.
But others did not think so. Commissar Zhang, for one, sitting straight at the head of the table, wearing the neat but nondescript Mao suit, high buttoned as always, holding a pen in his hand, and leafing through a leather notebook. The commissar had never discussed anything with him, as far as Yu could remember, except politics. What could possibly be up that grizzled, skinny commissar’s sleeve, Yu wondered.
Looking at Chief Inspector Chen, who nodded at him, Detective Yu was the first to take the floor, “We have already put a lot of hours into the investigation. For my part, I’ve talked to the general manager of the First Department Store as well as Guan’s colleagues. In addition, I have checked with the Shanghai Taxi Bureau and a number of travel agencies. I’d like to sum up some important aspects of my work.
“A national model worker, Guan lived a model life, too, dedicated to the Communist cause, way too busy with all her Party activities for anything else. She seemed never to have dated anyone, nor was she involved with anyone at the time of her death. Needless to say, she did an excellent job at the store. With her position there, she might have been the envy of some people, but there’s no reason to suspect that this made her a murderer’s target.
“As for her activities on the day she was murdered, according to her colleagues, there was nothing unusual about her during that day. All routine work. Lunch at the canteen around twelve o’clock, and a Party meeting in the afternoon. She mentioned to a colleague that she was going to take some vacation time, but did not say where. Not too far away, nor for long, it was assumed. Otherwise she should have submitted a written request to the general manager. She didn’t. The last time she was seen in the store was around seven ten, after her shift, which was not unusual for her. She went back to the dorm, wher
e she was last seen at about ten thirty or a bit later, carrying a suitcase, alone, presumably leaving for her vacation.
“Now comes the difficult part. Where was she going? There are so many tourist groups nowadays. I’ve checked all of the local travel agencies, but Guan’s name was not registered with any of them. Of course, she could have chosen to travel by herself. To travel by air would have been out of the question. Guan’s name was not registered with any of the airlines. She might have gone to the railway station. In her neighborhood, no bus goes directly to the station. She might have walked to Xizhuang Road for Bus Number Sixty-four. The last scheduled bus arrives there at eleven thirty-five; after that there’s one every hour. Again it’s rather unusual for a young woman alone to carry a heavy suitcase along the street, when she might easily miss the last bus.
“So whether she was going to travel with a group or by herself, there’s reason to assume that she got into a taxi after leaving the dorm. But she did not finish the trip. Somewhere along the way, she was attacked and murdered by someone, who could be no one other than the driver. That also explains how her body came to be found in the canal. A taxi driver would have the means of transporting the body to dump it into a distant canal. That’s my hypothesis, and that’s why I have been conducting my investigation at the taxi bureau.
“My original plan was to check copies of all drivers’ receipts for the night to focus on those who failed to show any transaction during those few hours of the night. But according to the bureau, taxi drivers do not always give receipts, so there is no way to account for their activities. In fact, a considerable number of the drivers showed no business for the whole night—for tax avoidance reasons.”
“Hold on, Comrade Detective Yu,” Commissar Zhang interrupted. “Have you done any investigation into the political aspects of the case?”
“Well, as for the political aspects, I don’t think I have seen any. The murderer would have been a stranger to her. For her part, there would have been no reason for her to reveal her identity to a taxi driver. So it’s possible that he might not know her identity yet.”
“So what’s your suggestion for the next stage of the investigation?” Zhang continued, without changing his position in the chair, or the expression on his face.
“At present, with no evidence, and no witness,” Yu said, “there’s not much we can do. Let the case run its natural course. A rapist is a repeater, so sooner or later he will strike again. In the meantime, we will keep in close touch with the taxi bureau and travel agencies; hopefully, some new information will turn up. In fact, the taxi bureau has promised to give me a list of possible suspects, those drivers with something suspicious in their history. I have not gotten it yet.”
“So basically we’re not going to do anything until the criminal strikes again?”
“No, we are not going to close the case as unsolved. What I’m saying is—um, it’s not realistic to expect a quick solution. Eventually, we should be able to find the murderer, but that takes time.”
“How long?” Zhang asked, sitting even more upright.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s an important political case, comrade. That’s something we should all be well aware of.”
“Well—” Yu paused.
There was a lot more Yu wanted to say, but he knew it was not the moment. Chief Inspector Chen had not yet made any comment. As for the commissar’s position, Yu thought he understood it well; this might well be the old man’s last case. So naturally the commissar wanted to make a big deal out of it. Full of political significance. A finishing touch to his life-long career. It was easy for Zhang to talk about politics, of course, since he did not have to attend to the daily work of the squad.
“There may be something in Comrade Yu’s analysis.” Zhang stood up, opening his notebook, and cleared his throat before he began his formal speech. “It is a difficult case. We may spend hours and hours before seeing any real progress. But it’s not an ordinary case, comrades. Guan was a model worker of national renown. She dedicated her life to the cause of communism. Her tragic death has already had a very negative impact. I’m a retired old man, but here I am, working together with you. Why? It’s a special case assigned by the Party. People are watching our work. We cannot fail. So we have to find a new approach.”
Yu enjoyed a reputation as a detail man: patient, meticulous, sometimes even plodding. It was possible to waste time, he knew, on ninety-nine leads and to break the case on the hundredth. That was the way of almost all homicide investigations. He had no objection to that. They just had too many cases on their hands. But there was no “new approach”—as Commissar Zhang called it—except the ones in those mysteries Chief Inspector Chen translated.
“Rely on the people,” Zhang was continuing. “That’s where our strength lies. Chairman Mao told us that long ago. Once we get the people’s help, there’s no difficulty we cannot overcome ...”
Yu had had it. It was more and more difficult for him to concentrate on the commissar’s lecture filled with such political rhetoric. At the bureau political education sessions, Yu sometimes could choose to sit in the back of the room and let the speaker’s voice lull him while doing meditation exercises. But that morning he could not.
Then Chief Inspector Chen took the floor. “Commissar Zhang’s instruction is very important. And Comrade Yu Guangming’s analysis makes a lot of sense, too. It is tough, especially when we’ve got so many other cases on our hands. Comrade Yu has done a lot of work. Most of it, I would say. If we have so far made little progress, it’s my responsibility. There is one point, however, that has just come to my attention. In fact, Comrade Yu’s analysis is bringing it into focus.
“According to the autopsy report, Guan had a meal between one and two hours before her death. The food she had consumed included, among other things, a small portion of caviar. Caviar. Expensive Russian sturgeon caviar. Now there are only three or four top-class Shanghai restaurants serving caviar. I’ve done some research. It’s hard to believe that she would have chosen to dine at one of those expensive restaurants by herself, with a heavy suitcase at her feet. Think about the timing, too. She left home around ten thirty; she died between one and two. So the meal would have to have been eaten around midnight. Now, according to my investigation, not a single restaurant served caviar to a Chinese customer on that particular night. If this information is accurate, it means she had caviar somewhere else. With somebody who kept caviar at home.”
“That’s something indeed,” Yu said.
“Hold on,” Zhang raised his hand to interrupt Chen. “So you are suggesting the murderer could be somebody Guan knew?”
“Yes, that’s a possible scenario: perhaps the murderer’s no stranger to Guan. After she left home, they met somewhere and had a midnight meal together. Possibly at his home. Afterward they had sex—remember, there were no real bruises on her body. Then he murdered her, moved her body into his car, and dumped it in the canal. The plastic bag would make sense, too, if the crime was committed at the murderer’s home. He was afraid of being seen in the act of moving the body—by his neighbors or other people. Furthermore, that also explains the choice of that far-away canal, where he hoped that the body would never be found, or at least not for a long time. By then no one might be able to recognize her, or remember with whom she was involved.”
“So you don’t think it’s a political case either,” Zhang said, “though you are offering a different theory.”
“Whether it is a political case or not, I cannot say, but I think there are some things worth further investigation.”
Yu was even more surprised than Zhang by Chen’s speech.
The plastic bag was not something new, but the caviar was something they had not discussed. Whether Chen had purposely saved it for the meeting, Yu was not sure. It appeared to be a master stroke, like in those of western mysteries Chen had been translating, perhaps.
Was Chen doing this to impress Commissar Zhang?
&
nbsp; Yu did not think so, for Chen did not like the old man either. It was nonetheless a crucial detail Yu had overlooked, that portion of caviar.
“But according to the information at the department store,” Yu said, “Guan was not seeing anyone at the time of her death.”
“That puzzles me,” Chen said, “but that’s where we should be digging more deeply.”
“Well, do it your way,” Zhang said, standing up to leave. “At least, that’s preferable to waiting for the criminal to act again.”
So Detective Yu was placed in an unfavorable light. A cop too lazy to attend to the important details. Yu could read the negative message in the old man’s knitted brows.
“I overlooked the caviar,” Yu said to Chen.
“It just occurred to me last night. So I have not had time to discuss it with you.”
