by Qiu Xiaolong
That was an unexpected turn. She leaned forward, grasping the chair arm with one hand, the other adjusting her silk robe embroidered with a soaring dragon.
“Tell me what you know about what was going on with Liang,” he said.
TWENTY-NINE
A SHROUD OF SILENCE fell over the living room.
The moonlight streamed through the flapping curtains and landed on her face, which was bleached of color, yet infinitely touching.
“I appreciate your telling me about this, Chief Inspector Chen,” Wei said, finally. She picked up the Suzhou opera CD with the profile of Qian on the cover. “Your story is so unbelievable that no one would have tried to make up something like that. I believe every word of it. There was actually a catch in your voice when you declared yourself responsible for her death.
“You’re worried about me, I understand. An ill-fated woman like me, though, is beyond worrying about. I’m going to tell you all I know, but do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because I want to do something for Liang, just as you are trying to do for the other victims. Years ago, I also tried to do my best for him, but it all went terribly wrong. Did you read Kai’s e-mail joking about the ‘the black widow of a white tiger’? That really clinched it. Lai must have told her everything in bed, in an ecstasy of cloud rolling into rain.”
“Lai?”
“He must have been told about her murderous plan. After all, they’re the archetypal couple of a red prince and a red princess. What he’s said to me means nothing.”
There was something incomprehensibly confusing yet alarming in her words. Chen had a difficult time following the beginning of her revelation. Picking up his glass, he waited for her to go on.
“There has been a lot of gossip about me and Liang. What I’m telling you, though, is the truth. Like your story, mine has to be told from the beginning. As you said, only when all of the background is revealed can things come to light.”
“That’s right, Wei. I’m all ears.”
“You’re a writer, and someday you may write about us. If so, I hope you do Liang justice, at least in the part about our marriage. Believe it or not, Lai once told me you’re a good poet, but you’re just too bookish to be a politician. I remember that because my grandfather was a very bookish man. I grew up with him in a Jiangsu village, and he taught me how to read and write.”
“I wish I could write like in my college days,” he said, “but please go on.”
“After high school graduation, I failed to pass the college entrance exam. In the Jiangsu countryside, girls usually marry young. I was just seventeen when I married someone in the same village in a sort of arranged marriage. He was really good for nothing—gambling, drinking, hanging out with his wine-and-meat buddies during the day and beating me up at night. Soon lurid stories started to spread about me being a white tiger. Imagine him joking with other rascals, sharing the most intimate detail about my body, and blaming his bad luck at the mahjong table on me. White tiger! You know what it means, don’t you?”
He nodded.
“Then he died in a tractor accident. He was barely twenty at the time. His family all blamed me—a white tiger—for bringing the worst luck on him. I could no longer stay in the village, where people constantly pointed their fingers at me. So I came to Shanghai on my own.
“As a provincial girl without any skills or connections in a new city, I ended up working as a foot-washing girl. You know how things are like in a job like that. I spent my days bent over a stool, holding men’s feet in my lap, wiping the cracked skin on a worn-out towel, and pouring out dreams with the dirty foot-washing water. Day after day after day.… My life was a long black tunnel with no light at the end! After a couple of years, Liang came to the salon one evening. He came the next day, then quite regularly, and always to me exclusively. At first I took him for just another Big Buck customer who took a fancy to my service. With his company, and his official position, Liang could have easily targeted someone younger and prettier, not a pathetic widow from the countryside. One of the well-to-do clients had made an ernai out of one of the other girls at the salon, and most of us would have jumped at such an opportunity. Instead of treating me like trash, Liang showered affection on me, and to my astonishment, he then proposed. I told him about my disastrous marriage, along with being a white tiger, but he was determined. He said he didn’t care about the superstitions, and a week later, he came back to the salon, dragged me into a private room, and showed me the tattoo on his lower belly. It was a blue dragon interwoven with my name, and he declared, ‘Now I’m a blue dragon. We don’t have to worry.’ That’s another superstitious belief, as you may know. It’s said that only a man who is a blue dragon can sleep with a white tiger without being harmed.”
Chen had no idea what kind of man qualified as a blue dragon or whether or not, according to Chinese mythology, such a tattoo could make one a blue dragon.
“I was more than touched. For someone like me, what more could I possibly ask? I moved in with him that night, and I swore to be a good wife. After our wedding, Liang signed over a large number of his company shares to me. He loved to bring me around, to all his dinners and social parties, so I thought I should try to help him. If anything, I’d learned how to talk to men. Needless to say, his business associates knew nothing about my past, and they congratulated him on his choice of a wife. Coincidence or not, his business then picked up dramatically. According to him, it was because of the combined luck of the blue dragon and the white tiger. After that, he put me in charge of public relations for his company, though I didn’t have to go to the office every day.
“The job required me to meet with more of his business associates and connections, some of whom turned out to be really powerful. You know what networking means in today’s business world, don’t you? It means drinking, partying, karaoke, and whatnot. Liang trusted me, and I was anxious to be really helpful to him, not simply washing his feet in the bedroom. Some of the people at those parties were high-ranking officials, and that included Lai, who had just been appointed the Shanghai Party secretary. I knew how important these associations could be to Liang’s business. Believe it or not, it’s much easier for a young woman to cultivate connections. Some of them proved to be so useful that Liang declared the expansion of his business was all to my credit. I knew better as I got deeper into his company’s PR work. Still, I drew a line for myself. Associates of Liang’s, the ones for whom three-accompanying girls are easily available, knew not to push too far with me. They all knew that I was out of bounds, and they knew they might have business to do with Liang in the future. Lai was the exception. One evening, after three cups in a private club room, Lai put his hand on my shoulder, caressing, though only for a short moment. I thought he might have simply had a drop too much to drink.
“There’s an old saying: ‘No boat can enjoy smooth sailing all year round.’ Liang’s company got into trouble during the nationwide economic crises. Liang quickly transferred more of his properties to my name, but he was heading for an irrecoverable disaster, unless he could get a huge order from the city government. So I thought of Lai, and contacted him. Lai invited me to his office. That evening he was alone there, looking beat, with documents piled high on the large desk, but he offered to help. Out of gratitude, I told him I had learned how to do massage. And I did a good job that night, I think. It’s not difficult to imagine what happened next. But you have to understand—I had to help Liang, no matter the cost.”
“It’s understandable,” Chen said. “As in the Confucian classic, ‘He treats me as the most special one in the whole country, and I have to pay back to him accordingly.’”
“Thank you for saying that, Chief Inspector Chen. But to be honest, I was also flattered by the attention from a powerful man like Lai. It didn’t take too long, between this and that, for Lai to tell me that, despite all the glories in the political world, he wasn’t happy at home. Kai was an ambitious, greedy, and vain woma
n from another high-ranking official family. Because of his position in the city government, he had to make her resign from her law firm, a decision she deeply resented. And her suspicion that he was being unfaithful had further derailed the marriage. Kai was said to have started having affairs of her own, and at home she cared only about their son, Xixi, who was now studying abroad. At one point, Lai said to me that they were staying married only out of political convenience. But I knew he would never leave Kai, whether the story about his family life was true or not. And that was fine with me. I would never leave Liang, and Lai knew that too.
“Oh, there’s another coincidence about the superstitious idea of a white tiger. Lai also declared himself to be a blue dragon, for he actually believes that I could bring him luck—”
“Hold on. What made Lai a blue dragon?”
“He’s ambitious, always has his eye on the top. When he was still a little child, he told me, his father had a well-known fortune-teller examine him. The fortune-teller predicted that Lai would have a chance at the throne…”
“And in the fortune-teller’s jargon, an emperor is a dragon,” Chen said, shaking his head. It was hard to believe that a Politburo member would have chosen to believe in fortune-tellers.
“Damn the dragon.” She reached up and crumbled the golden dragon embroidery on the front of her robe. “He chose this robe for me and for that very reason. And the dragon-embroidered slippers too,” she said, kicking them off in disgust.
“Except for that first time, I never asked anything of Lai again,” she went on. “That’s perhaps why he told me that he felt so stress-free with me. In the meantime, Liang continued to get large orders from the city government, but not just because of me. Liang’s company paid a large sum to engage the Kai’s law firm as its legal representative. As for the thing between me and Lai, Liang may have somehow guessed, but he never said a word about it. If anything, he seemed to be more secretive about his business. But he trusted me as before. He managed to obtain a green card for me and transferred a substantial amount to a foreign bank account under my name. When I asked him why, he said that one could never tell what would happen next in China. About six months ago, there was a sum wired from my account to someone in the States. It was his money and Liang could use it however he liked. Still, he explained to me that this sum was going to Lai’s son Xixi in the name of a scholarship foundation. Going from a prestigious private high school to a prestigious private university, the cost for Xixi’s schooling and expenses was more than a hundred thousand US dollars a year. I checked the transaction later and the money was indeed wired to this scholarship foundation.
“Things went on like that until the scandal about the high-speed train equipment broke on the Internet. Liang was worried sick. He got the order through his connection with Kai. He’d mentioned to me that more than half of the profit went into that so-called scholarship account. One or two days before Liang’s disappearance, I called Lai, who promised that it would work out all right for Liang. If Lai really wanted to help, he could have. But instead, Liang disappeared. I didn’t know what had happened. If he’d left on his own, Liang would have discussed it with me first. And he couldn’t he have slipped out of the country on his own. While he’d obtained a green card for me, he didn’t get one for himself, saying that as a Party official, he would get into trouble if he did that. After I heard nothing from him for several days, I suspected serious trouble. So I contacted Lai again, and like before, he promised me nothing would happen to Liang.
“The last two times that I begged Lai, I knew something wasn’t right, so I recorded our conversation. Not for myself, but for Liang.
“Then Detective Yu came to me with the pictures of Liang’s corpse. I think you know the rest only too well. I’m not saying that Liang conducted his business properly, but he wasn’t alone in today’s society. It was just his luck. And my luck too. When all is said and done, I did Liang terribly wrong. He cared for me so much, but what have I done for him? If I hadn’t slept with Lai, Liang might have lost his company, but not his life.”
“You don’t have to say that, Wei.”
“It’s a too crucial moment for the Lais. Liang was murdered because they couldn’t afford to have anything go wrong—especially not something high-profile like the high-speed train equipment orders, which had been orchestrated by Kai.”
“I think you’re right.”
“How pathetically naive I was, believing Lai cared for me just a little. He must have shared all the sordid secrets with Kai, telling cruel bedroom jokes about a hairless, brainless white tiger.” After making a visible effort to control herself, she went on, “If you have any questions, Chief Inspector Chen, go ahead and ask me anything that may help your work.”
“Yes, I do have some questions,” he said slowly.
Her story was absurd, even unimaginable, but he believed it. For the same reason she believed him earlier. “It would have been difficult to make up something like that.” Still, it was sadly shocking that Lai, a powerful member of the Party Politburo Committee, could have stooped so low, and for that matter, that his wife Kai had as well.
Much of what Wei described sounded impossible, absurd. But this was the story in an age of absurdities, and for all the light her story threw on a lot of things, others still puzzled him. It would take some time to sort them out. At the moment, he felt Wei was both relatable and reliable. He didn’t want to judge.
“Liang paid a substantial sum to Kai’s law firm,” he started, “so that’s how he came to know the things going on at the top?”
“I don’t know, but Liang became quite close with Kai.”
“What about the money transferred to that special account—do you still have a copy of that?”
“Yes, I’ve kept a copy.”
“So Lai knew how the so-called scholarship was being funded?”
“He didn’t talk to me about it. Like other high-ranking Party officials, he knows how shady these business transactions can be, but he let Kai and others take care of that.”
“Now, a different question,” he said, jumping to a different subject. “About the death of the American, did you hear anything about it from Lai?”
“Lai mentioned him one evening. He looked very upset, so I offered to massage him. He almost felt asleep in the middle of it, and he muttered drowsily that the American had been so annoying, actually threatening Xixi.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t say much about it on the massage table, but from some of his remarks on other occasions, I gathered it was probably something like this. The American helped to take care of Xixi in the States, and in return, he’d been working, with Kai’s help, on a large real estate project in the center of the city. If the land deal was approved by the city government, the project could have made him a huge profit. But someone high up in Beijing was watching the project with alarm, so Lai scrapped the deal at the last minute. The American must have lost some of his initial investment, so he tried to get compensation by threatening Xixi.
“Possibly connected to that, Liang mentioned one evening that Kai needed additional money for her son because she’d fallen out with an American business partner. I’m not sure if it was the same American. She needed money quick, so Liang had no choice but to touch that account of mine again.”
“Liang got more deals from the city government after that?”
“Yes, he did. He promised to put everything back into my account as soon as possible. I didn’t doubt or blame him. After all, he didn’t have to quietly set up the account for me in the first place,” she said. “Again, he said I shouldn’t worry about these things, about which, sometimes, the less said, the better…”
“Can I smoke?” Chen said abruptly, struck with a sense of déjà vu. It was if he himself had said something like that.
“Sure,” she said, her hand reaching into the clutter on the sofa, as if in an effort to find something, but without success. “You must be disappointed with what I’ve
told you. As I’ve said, I’m beyond being worried about.”
“No, your account really helps. Now I see why they are so desperate and so cold-blooded.”
Many more questions came up in an ever-accelerating swirl of thoughts, but for the moment, the most pressing one was what he was going to do. He’d made the decision to visit Wei on the spur of the moment. To his surprise, the visit yielded far more than he’d expected. Whatever plans he devised for himself, how was he going to keep his promise to help her? The next day, Shen and his thugs would be here. At that point, an ex-cop wouldn’t be able to turn the tables. Not even with this new information he’d gotten from her, he calculated and concluded, would he have a chance to do anything—not for her, and not for all the others.
Looking up, he saw the silk scroll painting of a lone white tiger on the wall. Was that also something bought for her by Liang? The tiger crouched in ferocity, framed in fearful symmetry. He shifted his glance and leaned slightly forward, gazing down, holding his head in both hands. In the soft lamplight, she sat still like a forsaken wax image, her face ghastly pale, the worn-out red polish peeling on toes looking like petals in rainwater. She must have been so distressed and distracted the last few days. The west wind sighing and vexing / the green ripples, / it is unbearable to see / the beauty ravished by the grief of time. Some lines by Li Jing came out of nowhere. The ex–chief inspector, annoyed with the impossible poet within himself, started tapping on his laptop sitting on the coffee table.
“In the light of what you have just told me, the files and information I’ve got on my laptop would have made convincing evidence—under normal circumstances,” he said. “But as it is, the minute all of this was turned over to the higher authorities in Beijing, the official in charge would make a phone call to Lai in Shanghai.
“Quite simply, Lai is too high for the system to allow him to fall. It would deliver a irrecoverable, catastrophic blow to the legitimacy of the regime. With the Party’s interest placed above everything else, they would have to cover it up. Consequently, more innocent people would disappear, including you and me. That’s the way the Party machine works.
