by Qiu Xiaolong
“You’re so right, Mother.”
“Perhaps it’s also like a painting. When you are deeply involved in it, you never really have perspective on it. You never really see yourself in the painting. Once you gain some distance, you might become aware of something you never saw before. Enlightenment comes when you’re no longer part of anything.”
It reminded him of several lines by the Song dynasty poet Su Shi, but for her, it came from Buddhist scripture. He was grateful that she retained her perspective and remained clear-headed, in spite of her frail health. But there was also something disturbing in her remark.
“I remember a favorite quote of your father’s: ‘There are things a man will do, and things he will not do,’” she said. “It’s that simple, and that’s all there is to it.”
That was a quote from Confucius. Chen’s late father was a renowned neo-Confucian scholar, who drew such lines for himself, and consequently suffered a great deal during the Cultural Revolution.
Where would Chief Inspector Chen himself draw the line today?
It didn’t take long for his mother to appear tired. She started yawning repeatedly, without even finishing the apple he’d peeled for her. It might not bode well for her recovery, and he didn’t want to add to her discomfort by staying any longer. So he took his leave of her, gently pulling the door closed as he left.
He walked through the neighborhood, becoming aware of people’s occasional curious glances. Some of them might have recognized him, so he kept walking, his head ducked down. Soon he reached Yun’nan Road, where he stopped and waited for the traffic light to change before crossing the street.
In existentialism, one makes a choice and accepts the consequences. That’s where freedom comes from. But what if the choice brought about consequences to others?
His mother, for instance.
The traffic light turned green.
Looking up, he saw a relatively tall building with its gold-painted name, Ruikang, shining on the façade. It wasn’t exactly a new, upscale building, but because of its excellent location, one square meter here cost no less than thirty thousand yuan in the present market.
Then he remembered that Lianping lived in this building. It was close to his mother’s, as she’d told him, and was just one block behind Great World, an entertainment center built almost a century ago that was now closed for restoration. For a non-Shanghainese girl, she was doing quite well. She had an apartment at the center of the city, her own luxury car, both symbols of the Shanghai dream.
He glanced around the subdivision but didn’t see her car. Perhaps it was parked in back. He wasn’t in any mood to drop in on her, but he was surprised that his thoughts kept returning to her even though he was in the midst of a developing crisis.
That was probably because she’d been so helpful with the investigation. He was impressed by her cynical criticism of the unbridled corruption in the nation’s socialism with Chinese characteristics, though he’d known her for only a couple of weeks and known her real name, Lili, for only a couple of days. He was aware of the gaps that separated them—between their backgrounds and their ways of looking at society, not to mention their age difference. Still, it wasn’t too much to say that she already left a mark on his police work. Not only had she provided him a general grounding in the world of the Internet, she had also given him a sense of the ways people used it to resist and expose corruption. It was also her suggestion that he go to Shaoxing, and prior to that she had helped him set up the meeting with Melong, both of which affected the course of his investigation.
Again, he restrained himself from thinking of her other than in a professional capacity. He walked down Guangxi Road, stopping abruptly at the corner of Jinling Road.
There was an Internet café at the corner called Flying Horse. It was the one mentioned by Lieutenant Sheng, the one from which the e-mail with the photo had been sent to Melong. The evening when Chen met Melong, at the cross-bridge noodle place, Melong had told him that the Internet café was nearby.
Next to the Internet café there was a Chinese herbal medicine store. There was a line of people waiting outside the herbal medicine store, obscuring the entrance to the Internet café. Like most others, Flying Horse was open twenty-four hours a day, and through the line of people Chen could see that the door stood ajar.
Suddenly, he realized that there was something he might have overlooked. Transfixed at the idea of it, Chen shuddered in spite of himself. He crossed the street and stepped into the Internet café. A smallish girl at the front desk asked him for his ID with a sleepy yawn. As at the other Internet cafés, the new regulation requiring that users provide ID and sign the register was being observed.
Chen showed her his police badge and pointed at the register.
“I need to make a copy of all the entries for this month.”
She blinked at him as if desperately trying to rouse herself out of a stupor.
“My manager won’t be back until eight o’clock.”
“Don’t worry about him. Here’s my business card. Tell him to call me if he wants to talk. Now give me the register. You must have a copy machine in the office, and it’ll only take me about ten minutes to copy the pages I need. I’ll pay you accordingly.”
She hesitated and then pushed a button, which brought the owner to the front desk. He was a stout man with a large head and broad shoulders. He appeared to be flabbergasted, having recognized Chen and realized his position.
“What wind has brought you here today, Chief?”
“So it’s you—Iron Head Diao. That’s your nickname, right?”
“Wow, you still remember me. We went to the same elementary school, but you were my senior. You’re really somebody now,” Iron Head Diao said obsequiously. “What can I do for you?”
“Let me see the register.”
“This one?” he said, handing it to Chen.
Chen glanced at the first two pages. The register was a new one, with the first entry in it being from just three days ago.
“Let me look at the two before this one.”
“Sure,” Iron Head Diao said, reaching below the counter and pulling out two more register books.
“Is there anywhere I can check through them in peace?” Chen asked.
“Come back to my office. It’s up in the attic.”
Without any further ado, Iron Head Diao led him to the back and up a shaky ladder. In the office there was a desk as well as a copy machine.
“It’s all yours,” Iron Head Diao said before climbing down the squeaky ladder. “Stay as long as you like.”
It wasn’t much more than a retrofitted attic: small, dimly lit, but with enough privacy for Chen’s purpose. What’s more, there was also a surveillance monitor, which commanded a view of the whole place. While he could watch what was going on downstairs, no one would be able to see up into the attic office.
He started looking through the entries. The second register covered the period he wanted to check. It only took him five or six minutes before he came to the date, the time slot, and a name, even though it didn’t correspond to the number of the computer from which the e-mail with the photo had been sent to Melong.
Another piece of the puzzle fell into place.
Gazing at the page, Chen heaved a long sigh.
He looked at the surveillance monitor, which showed Iron Head Diao pacing about, smoking and glancing up furtively. His enormous head hung low, as if weighed down with worries.
Chen then did something quite unusual for him. He tore out a couple of pages from the register and stuffed them into his pocket. It surprised even himself, as it was something he couldn’t have envisioned doing even a minute before.
It was unprofessional and unjustifiable, particularly for a police officer.
There were things that took precedence over being a cop, however, he hastened to assure himself. And he might not have to worry too much about it. A couple of missing pages from an outdated register might not be noticed.
As he left the Internet café, with Iron Head Diao waving at him from the door, still grinning from ear to ear, Chen realized that he hadn’t written his name in the register. That might be just as well. Like the other day, at the Internet café in Pudong, there were always loopholes in regulations.
On the street corner, he saw a white-haired man in rags shuffling out of a sordid lane across Yunnan Road, despite the superstition that people should avoid walking under wet clothing, which was hanging from bamboo poles that crisscrossed the alley overhead. But what could an old man do, moving slowly, leaning on a bamboo cane? Possibly born, raised, and then grown old in that same narrow lane, he would have had to enter and exit the lane here, day in and day out, likely to be down and out until the very end.
Chen was about to cross the street when a black BMW convertible sped along Jinling Road, splashing muddy rainwater on him.
“You’re blind!” The young driver cursed at him with one hand on the wheel and the other on the shoulder of a slender girl sprawled beside him, her bare legs stretched out like fresh lotus roots.
That such a contrast had become a common sight in the city depressed him.
Perhaps he was blind. At the moment, he really had no idea where he was heading. Then he got a phone call from Young Bao at the Writers’ Association.
“I’ve got it, Master Chen,” Young Bao said breathlessly. “And something more—hopefully, something that will surprise you.”
TWENTY-FOUR
LIANPING WAS WAITING FOR Chen in an elegant private room at a high-end restaurant he had suggested. It seemed to her to be quite new. It was near the front entrance of Bund Park, and the window of the second-floor room overlooked a panorama of ships coming and going along the distant Wusongkou, the East China Sea.
Her mind was in a turmoil. So much had happened the last few days, and it was as if it had happened to somebody else. She thought back on all of it in disbelief.
But one thing proved that it really had happened—the dazzling diamond ring on her finger. Xiang had proposed, and she had accepted. He’d put the ring on her finger without waiting for a response. She hadn’t taken it off.
She didn’t know what to say to Chen, but she had to tell him about her decision. She owed it to him, and for that matter, she owed it to Xiang too.
On a fitful May breeze, a melody came wafting over from the big clock atop the Shanghai Custom Building. Her left eyelid twitched again. She must be stressed out, or perhaps it was just another omen. She remembered a superstition from back home in Anhui about twitching eyes.
Agreeing to marry Xiang wasn’t an easy decision for her. It was more like an opportunity she couldn’t afford to miss than something she really wanted. After all, she lived in materialistic times, having read and heard all the tabloid stories about pretty young girls hooking up with Big Bucks and living “happily ever after.”
Tapping her fingers on the table, she wished she could have lived in the world of the poems recited by Chen back in Shaoxing, but she had to face reality. Just the day before, her father had written to her about the problems his factory was facing with both a shrinking market and the rocketing price of commodities. She could no longer bring herself to ask him for help with her mortgage payments. The subdivision committee had just increased parking fees, but it was still difficult to find an open spot, so they suggested, as an alternative, that she buy a permanent spot for thirty thousand yuan. And gas prices kept going up too. The list went on and on.
Still, she had to achieve the Shanghai dream—not just for herself but for her family too. Xiang represented an opportunity she couldn’t let slip by, as her colleague Yaqing had repeatedly pointed out. Even though he was always busy and business-oriented, this could also bode well for his future. He was just like Chen in that he was overwhelmed by his work.
Looking back on it, she realized that the flirtation with Chen was perhaps the result of a vain, vulnerable moment. A connection to a high-profile Party cadre like Chen would be helpful to her as a journalist, and publishing his work in her section would also be to her credit. Add to this the fact that Xiang had vanished without telling her first or contacting her for days.
Then it developed further than she anticipated.
But now Xiang was back with an explanation for his behavior—a reasonable one—and with the surprise proposal, accompanied by a passionate speech as he slipped the ring onto her finger: “In Hong Kong, after finally signing the business deal, I realized that all the success in the world meant nothing without you.”
To be honest, she’d been waiting for Xiang to make a move. Xiang hadn’t done so earlier because his father had wanted him to make a different choice, one that made more business sense. Specifically, he wanted an alliance with another rich family in the city. Xiang finally made his own move, though, when she least expected it. She couldn’t afford not to accept.
So what explanation could she offer Chen?
It occurred to her that maybe neither of them had taken it too seriously, from the day they first met at the Writers’ Association. If there was a moment when something came close to developing between the two of them, it would have to be that afternoon in Shaoxing, with memories of the romantic poems and stories echoing around them in Shen Garden. It was also that afternoon, however, that she realized that nothing would ever develop between them. It wasn’t that he was first and foremost a policeman or that he was too much of an enigma for her; it was that he had disappointed her in the same way Xiang had, and he had done so even more dramatically than Xiang.
She reached into her bag and touched the book of translated poetry he’d given her. Somehow she’d brought it here with her. Looking out the window, she recalled some lines from the volume.
She leans against the window / looking out alone to the river, / to thousands of sails passing along— / none is the one she waits for. / The sun setting slant, / the water running silent into the distance, / her heart breaks at the sight / of the islet enclosed in white duckweed.
Except for the absence of white duckweed, it was the same scene, more than a thousand years later.
She couldn’t shake off the feeling that Chen might have approached her with an ulterior motive, though in her high-strung state of mind, she could be imagining things.
A waiter approached her with a pot of tea and interrupted the train of her thought. The service here was excellent. She had researched the restaurant online. It was obscenely expensive, yet perhaps that fact appealed to upstarts eager for a taste of elite status. Sipping at the tea, she looked out the window at the park.
It wasn’t much of a park, and it looked even more crowded with the recent additions, such as the concrete monument that looked like the logo of Three-Lance underwear, the fashionable new cafés and bars, and the array of other architectural add-ons along the bank. She had never understood why the Shanghainese made such a big deal of the park, but she’d heard it was a place special to Chen.
Beyond the park, petrels glided over the waves, their wings flashing in the gray light, as if flying out of a fast-fading dream. The dividing line between Huangpu River and Suzhou River became less visible.
It was then that Chen stepped into the room, smiling. To her surprise, he was wearing a light gray Mao jacket. He had never dressed so formally in her presence.
“Sorry I’m late. The meeting with the city government took longer than expected. I had no time to change.”
“No wonder you’re wearing a Mao jacket. That’s very politically correct, but there’s no need to change, Chen. Mao jackets are also fashionable now: even Hollywood stars vie to wear one at the Oscars. It fits well with this upscale, high-priced restaurant.”
“The food is not bad here,” he said, “and it’s on the Bund. You’re paying for the view.”
“To be exact, you pay to have your elite status confirmed, and for the satisfaction of knowing you can affo
rd it.”
“Well said, Lianping. For me, it’s really more for the view of the Bund in the background. My favorite place in the city.”
“It’s your feng shui corner,” she said, still hesitant about broaching the subject of her decision, though it wasn’t fair, she knew, to put it off any longer. “Tell me more about it.”
“In the early seventies, I used to practice tai chi with some friends in the park. Then I switched my major to English studies. Because of that, I was able to enter the college after the end of the Cultural Revolution with a high score in English. But as the proverb states, in eight or nine times out of ten, things in this world don’t work out as one plans. Upon graduation, I was assigned to the police bureau, as you know,” he said, taking a sip of tea. “But I still come back here from time to time, to recharge myself with the memories of those years. You may laugh at me for being sentimental, but here, on the very site where this restaurant now stands, for no less than three years I used to sit on a green bench almost every morning.”
“It’s the special feng shui of Bund Park for a rising star, where the water is constantly slapping against the memories of a forever youthful dream.”
“Now you’re being sarcastic, Lianping. It’s more like the fragments of the past that I’ve been using to shore up the present.”
“Now you’re being poetic,” she said in spite of herself.
“In those years, I never dreamed of being a cop, but now it’s too late for me to switch to another profession. It’s not the same for you—for you the world is still so young and various,” he said, changing the topic. “Well, let me tell you something about this restaurant. It doesn’t really reflect the history of Bund Park, but Mr. Gu, the owner of the restaurant, insists on doing it his way.”
“Mr. Gu of the New World Group?”
“Yes. Considering the history of the park, this should be a Western-style restaurant, one that is full of nostalgic flavor. However, Gu wouldn’t think of it. He wanted to serve Chinese cuisine to Chinese customers. This may just be his way of showing his patriotism.”
