by Peter May
Li shook his head. Someone’s lost their Mom, Margaret had said, and she had known because she was cutting up the mother’s womb on an autopsy table. And he knew that if the x-rays showed a break in the right index finger, the young man who spent his days huddled over a sewing machine in a draughty alleyway, and his nights trying to reassure a young boy who’d lost his mother, would have to try to identify her remains. And Li would not have wished that upon his worst enemy.
Mei-Ling’s mobile started ringing, and she fumbled in her purse to find it. Li didn’t pay much attention as she answered the call and talked for about a minute. He couldn’t rid himself of the image of a small boy constantly asking about his mother, and a young man with no answers who could provide no comfort. And he couldn’t help making the comparison with Xinxin, those emotional months after her mother had abandoned her and her father had refused to take her back. What a big change in a small life, what huge adjustments she had had to make. And how inadequate to the task of helping her through it he had been. Living with an unmarried uncle, constantly in the care of a string of babysitters … it was no life for a little girl. She needed a family, some stability.
‘I think we might have found our singer.’ Mei-Ling’s words crashed into his consciousness. She was putting the phone back in her bag.
‘What?’
‘Dai found a girl in the missing persons file. A twenty-eight-year-old teacher and singer at the Shanghai School of Music and Opera.’ She consulted a note she had hastily scribbled. ‘Xiao Fengzhen. She went missing just under a year ago.’
II
The Yi Fu Theatre sat in the corner of Fuzhou Road and Yunnan Road, a stone’s throw from People’s Square. It was a white stone building with a semi-circular façade decorated by dozens of small coloured flags and a giant representation of a Peking Opera mask in vivid red, pink, yellow and black. Staff were just raising shutters and opening glass doors to the entrance lobby and booking office when Li and Mei-Ling arrived. A sour-faced woman behind the illuminated window of the booking office glowered at them. ‘We’re not open yet. Another half-hour.’
Mei-Ling flashed her ID, and the woman looked as if an electric current had just passed through her seat and up her rectum. ‘We’re looking for somebody from the music school,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘We understand the students are putting on a performance here sometime today.’
‘This afternoon,’ the woman said, suddenly anxious to help. ‘An extract from one of the Peking Operas — Romance of the Western Chamber. They are just beginning the dress rehearsal. You can go around the back to the stage door.’
In the entrance to the stage door in Shantou Road, an attendant sat on a stool smoking and sipping from a glass jar of tepid green tea. A pile of cigarette ends was gathered on the floor around him, and he watched as labourers heaved great wicker baskets filled with the elaborate costumes of the Peking Opera from a large blue truck. A cage elevator slid slowly up the side of the building, carrying the hampers to an opening in the wall which led to the wardrobe department. Hundreds of bicycles lined a wall bordering waste ground on the other side of the street. The attendant hawked a gob of phlegm from his throat and spat it out on to the pavement as Li and Mei-Ling approached. Li reached for his ID, but the man just pointed up above his head. ‘Second floor,’ he said. ‘They phoned through from the front.’
A maze of corridors on the second floor led to several dressing rooms and the make-up and wardrobe departments. From the auditorium, they could hear the ten-piece orchestra and some of the singers rehearsing. It was a bizarre cacophony, even to Chinese ears, which were becoming increasingly attuned to the sounds of Western music. The screeching falsetto of the female vocalists, the loud clacking of the clappers, the strident shriek of the hu-gin violin and the seemingly random clatter of drums and cymbals. Li’s Uncle Yifu had taken him once to the Peking Opera in the Stalinesque Beijing Exhibition Centre which contained a vast theatre built by the Russians in the middle of the last century. Hard wooden seats rose in curved tiers. They were not designed for comfort, and the audience had fidgeted all the way through the performance, eating noisily from picnic hampers, drinking and smoking, taking and making calls on mobile telephones. The music and the story were almost less important than the spectacle — extravagant costumes and startling masks placed against a sweep of bold sets on a vast, imaginatively lit stage. The costumes, his uncle had told him, were such a garish collection of contrasting colours because the stages upon which the original operas were performed had been lit only by oil lamps.
Li opened a door, and a young woman, who was bent over a costume hamper, turned guiltily. Vividly coloured costumes were draped over chairs and desks, rows of them hanging from rails along one wall. Empty hampers were piled up in one corner, another was appearing in the elevator as it drew level with the hole in the wall. Beyond the waste ground opposite, a cream and brown building had a huge neon billboard mounted on its roof advertising Mitsubishi. Where the Japanese had failed to hold on to Shanghai by force, they were conquering it now with commerce. ‘In the name of heaven,’ the girl said, ‘you gave me a fright! I thought you were the director for a minute.’
‘We’re looking for somebody who knew Xiao Fengzhen,’ Mei-Ling said.
‘I really don’t have the time just now,’ the girl said. ‘I’m way behind schedule here, and if I don’t have all the singers dressed by noon, the director’s going to kick my ass all the way across People’s Square.’ Li showed her his Ministry ID and she went very still for a moment. ‘What about her?’ she said.
‘Did you know her?’
‘Sure. Everyone knew her. She was the star pupil at the school. She was only teaching till she could go professional. What a voice that girl had.’ She paused. ‘Whatever happened to her?’
‘That’s what we’re trying to find out,’ Mei-Ling said.
The girl frowned. ‘But she disappeared — what, about a year ago?’
‘We have a body,’ Li said. And all the colour drained out of the wardrobe mistress’s face. ‘We’re trying to identify it.’
‘Oh, no …’ The girl appeared genuinely distressed. She pulled up a stool and sat down. ‘Not Fengzhen. She was such a lovely girl. Everyone thought maybe she’d just gone off to Beijing or something. I figured she’d be a star by now.’
‘So you weren’t surprised when she just disappeared?’ Li said.
‘Oh, yes,’ said the girl. ‘It wasn’t like her, you know, not to say anything. She just didn’t show up for a couple of days, and we thought maybe it was her throat again. She had a lot of trouble with her voice if she was singing too much. But, then, I remember her mother came to the school wondering where she was. That was the first time any of us knew she was missing. I never did hear what happened after that.’
‘Did she live with her mother?’ Mei-Ling asked.
‘Oh, sure. She had a kid, but no husband. Her mother looked after the kid. ’Cos, you know, we keep pretty strange hours in this business. And then we can be away touring.’
Li said, ‘Who was the father?’
The girl shrugged. ‘No idea. She was pretty tight, you know. Kept herself very much to herself. Left her personal life at the door when she came in. Maybe that’s one of the reasons she was so popular. She never got close enough to anyone to fall out with them.’ She stopped and thought for a moment, and her clear, bright face clouded. ‘Was she … you know … murdered?’
‘We don’t know,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘Do you know where her mother lives?’
The girl shook her head. ‘Like I said, Fengzhen kept her private life to herself. But I do remember where her mom worked.’ She chuckled. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you forget.’
‘Where?’ Li asked.
The girl smiled, her face colouring a little from embarrassment. ‘The sex museum.’
The door burst open behind them, and a red-faced man with only a few grey strands of hair scraped back across a bald pate shouted at the girl, ‘Cheng, where the fuck ar
e those costumes!’
*
The entrance to the Museum of Ancient Chinese Sex Culture was tucked away in an alley between the Sofitel Hotel and an upmarket department store off a pedestrianised stretch of Nanjing Road. It was only ten minutes’ walk from the theatre.
Mei-Ling laughed when Li had expressed incredulity at the existence of a museum of sex in Shanghai. ‘You’re all so stuffy and stiff-lipped about sex in Beijing.’ She laughed again. ‘Come to think of it, that’s about all that would be stiff in Beijing. You’re just like the British. Sex is all right behind closed doors, just let’s pretend in public that it doesn’t really exist. We’re a little more sophisticated than that in Shanghai. We can acknowledge the existence of sex without sniggering behind our hands like schoolboys — or schoolgirls.’
Li found her superiority mildly irritating. ‘And just what sort of sophisticated exhibits are there in this museum?’ They climbed a couple of steps to the entrance hall and took the elevator to the eighth floor.
‘Oh …’ Mei-Ling said vaguely, ‘… I don’t know, dirty pictures, jade dildos, that sort of thing.’
‘What?’
She laughed again, that braying laugh. ‘How would I know? I’ve never been.’
‘So much for sophistication,’ Li said.
The lift doors opened and a woman’s recorded voice said, with an exaggerated English accent, ‘Eighth floah.’ They turned left, through glass doors, into a large and airy entrance lobby. A girl sitting in a booth told them that tickets were fifty yuan each.
Mei-Ling told her who they were and who they were looking for. The girl was flustered. ‘Ma Hanzhi is not here right now. She has gone to collect her granddaughter. The heating has broken down at the school and they have closed it for the day.’
‘Will she be long?’ Li asked.
The girl checked her watch and shook her head. ‘Not long. Ten minutes, maybe.’
‘We’ll wait,’ Mei-Ling said, and then under her breath to Li, ‘It’ll give us a chance to see the exhibition.’
Li was not sure that he wanted to see the exhibition. Across the lobby two women in white coats stood behind a counter selling all manner of seductive underwear and sexual apparatus, from transparent negligées and peek-a-boo bras to blow-up sex dolls with absurdly gaping mouths. He felt his face colouring, and he let Mei-Ling steer him away into the exhibition itself. Three bronze statues stood in the entrance, each with its own proclamation: It was the Source of Life; Welcome Guests from Afar; and No Shame for Nature.
The museum was centred around three main rooms with low, black-painted ceilings and concealed lighting. A video of the history of sex was running continuously, with a monotonous commentary in English. A plaque on the wall proclaimed, There are two instincts and basic needs of human life, one is food, and the other is sex. The exhibition proceeded to demonstrate this point in row upon row of glass display cases filled with sexual paraphernalia from across the centuries, mostly artificial penises in stone, or porcelain, and even iron. Mei-Ling could not contain her mirth when they actually came across a double-headed jade dildo used, apparently, by lesbians in the tenth to thirteenth centuries. There were photographs of copulating Japanese racehorses, a statistical chart of eighteenth-century prostitutes from Han Kou, an ivory horn carved into a series of figures engaged in every sexual act imaginable, from oral to rear entry. Li was shocked, and found himself blushing to the roots of his hair. To his intense private embarrassment he found that he was becoming sexually aroused, although that had more to do with the proximity of Mei-Ling than any graphic depiction of sex acts in erotic paintings from the Ming Dynasty. She was very close to him, and he could feel her heat through his clothes. When her hand touched his it was like receiving an electric shock. He was both confused and disturbed by his reaction.
She was laughing again and pointing to a stone carving of a reclining man with a huge penis. ‘Now, that’s what I call sophisticated!’ she said.
‘You were looking for me?’ a voice said, and they turned to find a small woman, perhaps fifty or fifty-five, standing holding the hand of a young girl who could have been no more than six or seven years old. The girl was gazing at them with great curiosity, and the woman had a frown of deep concern etched on her face. Li felt guilty and embarrassed, as if he had been caught looking at dirty pictures. And he was appalled that a child had been brought into this place.
‘We’ll talk outside,’ he said quickly. ‘Is there somewhere you can leave the child?’
‘We can talk in the office,’ the woman said. ‘The girls will look after Lijia.’
One of the women selling sex goods took Lijia by the hand and led her behind the counter. Li and Mei-Ling followed Xiao Fengzhen’s mother into an office through the back.
‘I don’t think you should be bringing a child into a place like this,’ Li said immediately she had shut the door.
The woman shrugged. ‘You tell me what else I can do with her. I have to work.’ Then she paused, hardly daring to ask. ‘You have news of Fengzhen?’
Li took a deep breath. ‘We have uncovered a number of bodies. We are trying to identify them. We do not know for sure if your daughter is among them. I am sorry to have to upset you like this.’
‘What makes you think Fengzhen might be one of them?’ she asked in a small voice.
Mei-Ling said softly, ‘We believe that one of the women we found was a singer.’
The woman let out a low, animal-like moan and closed her eyes. Li felt her pain almost physically. He took her hand and led her to a seat. He drew up a chair and sat beside her, holding her hand between both of his. It felt very small and cold. ‘Can you tell us,’ he said gently, ‘anything at all about the circumstances of Fengzhen’s disappearance?’ He could feel her trembling. But she made a great effort at composure.
‘She went to try and patch it up with him,’ she said.
‘Who?’ Mei-Ling asked. But Fengzhen’s mother wasn’t really listening.
‘He used to beat her up. He was a monster. I told her he was no good, even if he was the father of her child. I don’t know why, but she seemed to love him. I just couldn’t understand it.’
‘She had a meeting with him?’ Li asked.
‘She went to his apartment. For the weekend, she said. Told me she’d be back Sunday night. When she never showed up I guessed maybe there had been a reconciliation. But by Tuesday I was getting worried, so I went to the music school, and she hadn’t been there either.’ She turned and looked at Li with big, moist, dark eyes. ‘I always thought he had something to do with it. She threw her life away for that bastard!’ There was real venom in her voice now.
‘What did he have to say about it?’ Li asked.
‘Hah! He told the police she never came to his apartment. Told them he thought she’d just changed her mind. But he knew her better than that. He knew he had her in the palm of his hand. She was such a lovely, lovely girl.’ Her face betrayed the range of emotions that were going through her head, from love to anger to tears. Then she turned to Li, a bitterness in her voice now. ‘And what’s worse … every time I look at the child, it’s him I see, not her.’ Her mouth set in a line that conveyed something close to hatred. ‘It’s a curse!’
‘Do you know where we can find this boyfriend?’ Mei-Ling asked.
‘An Wenjiang works on the boats. Or, at least, he did the last time I heard. Huangpu River cruises for tourists.’ She gazed off into space, an angry thought clearly forming. ‘He’s never once been to see his daughter. I pray at night that he will fall overboard and drown. With luck, perhaps, he already has.’
Outside, life ebbed and flowed along the length of Nanjing Road, people going about their lives, oblivious to the tragedies of others being played out all around them. But then, Li supposed, everyone had their own personal tragedies. Why should they be concerned about those of other people.
‘I hate this,’ he said to Mei-Ling. They were only stirring it all up again for these poor people. T
he memories, the hopes, the fears. And offering them nothing in return. Not hope, not even an end to it. Just more uncertainty.
She gave his arm a small squeeze. ‘Me, too.’ They walked back in silence to where they had parked the car, and Mei-Ling revved the engine and they dodged the bicycles in Guangdong Road to set a course for the river.
*
The booking office for the Huangpu River cruises was in a triangular granite edifice at the ferry terminal at the south end of the Bund. Mei-Ling parked the car in the street opposite, and they negotiated a complex network of pedestrian overpasses that led them, eventually, down to the quay. The first cruise of the day left at ten forty-five and it was almost that now. The waiting room was deserted, apart from a bored-looking girl standing at a drinks counter and a couple of uniformed women behind the sales desk. Clocks on the wall behind them gave the time in New York, London, Beijing, Tokyo and Sydney. Li wondered, distractedly, why anyone embarking on a two-hour river cruise in Shanghai would want to know the time in London.
Mei-Ling asked one of the women at the sales desk where they could find An Wenjiang. ‘He drives the boat,’ she said, pointing through glass doors towards the quay. ‘But they are just leaving.’
Neither Li nor Mei-Ling wanted to hang around for two hours waiting for him to come back. ‘Come on,’ Li said, and they sprinted for the door.
‘You haven’t bought your tickets!’ the woman called after them.
A sodden red carpet ran out across the landing stage beneath an arch of woven bamboo. The cruisers were berthed three-deep. The boat about to leave was on the outside. They could hear its engines gunning. Mei-Ling followed Li as he jumped aboard the first boat, ran across the bow and leapt on to the middle boat. He shouted to a couple of deckhands on the outside boat who were in the process of casting off. The cruiser was just beginning to ease away from its neighbour. ‘Open the gate!’ Li called, and he waved his Public Security ID at them. They opened the gate in the safety rail and he jumped across the two-foot gap without looking down, then turned to hold out a hand for Mei-Ling. The gap was widening all the time. She hesitated. He shouted at her to jump. She took a deep breath and leapt across. Several pairs of hands grabbed her and held her safely.
