A Loyal Character Dancer - [Chief Inspector Chen Cao 02]

by Qiu Xiaolong

  “What’s that, Chief Inspector Chen?”

  “As soon as you arrive in the United States, relocate Wen and Feng. At once.”

  “That’s what we planned, but why the urgency, Chief Inspector Chen?”

  “Because the gangsters will make every attempt to harm Wen even after she joins Feng.”

  “Why?” Yu took out a cigarette.

  “It’s a long story. The Flying Axes learned about Feng’s deal in the States early in January, weeks before Wen started to make her passport application. She preferred to stay in Fujian rather than go to live with him. But they coerced her into a conspiracy: she was to join Feng and then to poison him. They promised to get her out of trouble afterward. She agreed. Not because she hated Feng so much that she wanted to kill him, but because she knew what the gangsters would do to her if she refused.

  “Now the situation is even more complicated,” Chen went on, heedless of the effect of his revelation upon his audience. “Once she gets there, she will be in danger not only from the Flying Axes, but from the Green Bamboo as well. The latter have a branch in the United States. They present a very serious threat to her.”

  “What are you talking about?” Yu asked again. “What do these Green Bamboo have to do with anything?”

  “The Green Bamboo is an international gang, far larger and more powerful than the Fujian-based Flying Axes. In their effort to extend their operations, and to take over the human smuggling operation in the Fujian area, they planned to extort crucial information from Feng by holding Wen as a hostage. In fact, it was the Green Bamboo, not the Flying Axes, that approached Feng in the United States. And they were the masked men who attacked us in Changle Village.”

  “How did you learn all this, Chief Inspector Chen?” Li said.

  “I will explain everything in due course, Party Secretary Li,” Chen said, turning to Wen. “Comrade Wen, I now understand why you changed your mind about the passport application, why you wanted to stay with Liu, and why you insisted on going back to Fujian. If you were going to the United States, you needed to bring with you the poison the Flying Axes had given you. You had left it behind when you fled on April fifth.”

  Wen did not utter a word but as Liu touched her shoulder lightly, she dropped her face into her hands and began to sob.

  “Feng ruined your life. The gangsters gave you no choice. The local police did a poor job protecting you. You had to think of your baby,” Chen continued. “Any woman in your position would have considered doing the same thing.”

  “But you cannot, Wen,” Liu said in an emotional voice. “You must start a new life for yourself.”

  “Liu has done such a lot for you, Wen,” Catherine interjected. “If you do something stupid, what will happen to him?”

  Chen said, “I am not saying this to scare you, but you have stayed with him for a couple of weeks. People will suspect that you two planned it together. And Liu will be held responsible.”

  “I cannot see how Liu can keep out of trouble if anything happens to Feng.” Yu added, “People must find somebody to punish.”

  “Nor can I see how the Flying Axes will be able to get you out of trouble afterward,” Li joined in.

  “They won’t be able to,” Qian said, speaking up the first time, like an echo.

  “I’m sorry, Liu,” Wen sobbed, clutching Liu’s hand. “I did not think. I would rather die than get you into trouble.”

  “Let me tell you something about my Heilongjiang years,” Liu said. “My life was a long tunnel without any light at the end. Thinking of you made the only difference. Thinking of you holding the red loyal character with me on the railway platform. A miracle. If that was possible, anything might be possible. So I hung on. And everything changed for me in 1976, at the end of the Cultural Revolution. Believe me: Things will change for you, too.”

  “As I promised you in Suzhou,” Chen said, “nothing will happen to Liu as long as you cooperate with the Americans. Now, in the presence of Comrade Party Secretary Li, I’m making the same promise.”

  “Chief Inspector Chen is right,” Li said with all sincerity. “As an old Bolshevik with forty years in the Party, I, too, give you my word. If you act properly, nothing will happen to Liu.”

  “Here is an English dictionary.” Yu took out of his pants pocket a dog-eared book. “My wife and I were both educated youths. In Yunnan, I never dreamed that some day I would become a Shanghai cop speaking English with an American officer. Things change. Liu is right. Take the dictionary. You will have to speak English there.”

  “Thank you, Detective Yu.” Liu accepted it for Wen. “It will be most helpful.”

  “Here is something else.” Chen produced an envelope, which contained the picture of Wen leaving Shanghai as an educated youth, the picture used in the Wenhui Daily.

  Catherine took it for Wen, who still had her face buried in her hands, sobbing inconsolably.

  Twenty years earlier, at the railway station, a turning point in her life…Catherine gazed at the picture, and then at Wen. Now at the airport, another turning point in her life, but Wen was no longer the young, spirited Red Guard loyal character dancer looking forward to her future.

  “One thing about the witness protection program,” Catherine said quietly. “People can leave at their own risk. We do not recommend it. Still, things may change. In several years, when the triads have been wiped out. I may be able to discuss a new arrangement with Chief Inspector Chen.”

  Wen looked up through her tears, but she did not say anything. Instead, she reached into her purse, produced a small package, and handed it over to her. “Here is the stuff the Flying Axes gave me. You don’t have to say more, Inspector Rohn.”

  “Thank you,” Chen and Yu said, in chorus.

  “Now that she has promised full cooperation with you,” Liu said, casting a glance at the adjoining small room, “can we have some time for ourselves?”

  “Of course.” Catherine said promptly. “We’ll wait here.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 37

  A

  fter Wen and Liu had retired, Catherine Rohn turned to Chen, who made an apologetic gesture to the remaining people.

  “Now, it’s story time, Chief Inspector Chen,” she said dryly. The latest development had surprised her, though probably less than his Chinese colleagues. During the last few days, she had more than once sensed something going on with the enigmatic chief inspector.

  “This has been an extraordinary investigation, Party Secretary Li,” Chen said. “I had to make decisions without being able to consult you or my colleagues, to act on my own responsibility. And I withheld some information because I was not sure of its relevance. So if you hear something you’ve not heard before, please be patient and let me explain.”

  Li said expansively. “You had to make such decisions under the circumstances. We all understand.”

  “Yes, we all understand,” Catherine felt obliged to echo, but she decided to take the questioning into her own hands before it turned into a political lecture. “When did you become suspicious of Wen’s intentions, Chief Inspector Chen?”

  “I did not think about her motives at first. I assumed she was going to the United States because Feng wanted her to, it was obvious. But I was disturbed by a question you raised, the question about the delay in her passport application. So I looked into the process. It was slow, but there was also an inconsistency about the dates. In spite of Feng’s claim that she started in early January, Wen did not do anything until mid-February.”

  “Yes, we discussed that briefly,” she said.

  “From Detective Yu’s detailed report, I came to see a picture of her terrible life with Feng. From those interview tapes, I also learned that Feng called her quite a number of times in early January, and that on one occasion Wen was not willing to come to the phone. So I assumed that Wen was refusing to leave at that point.”

  “But Feng said she was most eager to join him.”

  “Feng did not tell
you the truth. Too much loss of face for a man to admit his wife’s reluctance,” he said. “What caused her change of her mind? I checked with the Fujian police. They said they did not put any pressure on her. That I believed, considering their indifference throughout the investigation. And then I found something else in Detective Yu’s report.”

  “What’s that, Chief?” Detective Yu did not try to conceal the bafflement in his voice.

  “Some of the villagers seemed to be aware of Feng’s problem in the United States. Since the word they used—’problem’— could refer to anything, at first I thought that they might have gotten wind of Feng’s fight in New York, for which he was arrested. But then Manager Pan used another word, saying he had heard of Feng’s ‘deal’ with the Americans before her disappearance. ‘Deal,’ that’s unmistakable. If that information was available to the villagers, I did not see why the gangsters would have waited so patiently until Inspector Rohn was on her way here. They could have abducted Wen earlier.”

  “And much more easily,” Yu added. “Yes, I overlooked that.”

  “The gangsters had reasons for trying to beat us in the race for Wen. But as those accidents kept happening in Fujian and Shanghai, I started wondering. Why were they so desperate, all of a sudden? A lot of resources must have been tapped. And cops involved, too. After what happened in the Huating Market last Sunday, I became really suspicious.”

  “Last Sunday,” Li said. “I suggested you take a day off, right?”

  “Yes, we did,” Catherine replied. “Chief Inspector Chen and I went shopping. There was a raid on the street market. Nothing happened to us.” She equivocated, mindful of the fact that Party Secretary Li seemed surprised. “So you knew something then, Chief Inspector Chen?”

  “No. I guessed, but things were not clear to me. To be honest, there are one or two things I do not grasp even today.”

  “Chief Inspector Chen did not want to make a false alarm, Inspector Rohn,” Yu intervened hastily.

  “I understand.” She did not think it necessary for Yu to rush to defend his boss, who had raised valid alarms—not false ones. “Still—”

  “The investigation has been full of twists and turns, Inspector Rohn. I’d better try to recapitulate chronologically. We each had our suspicions at various stages of the investigation, and discussed them. It was your observations that more than once threw light on the situation.”

  “You are being very diplomatic, Chief Inspector Chen.”

  “No, I am not. Do you remember our talk in the Verdant Willow Village? You called my attention to a fact: Despite Feng’s request in his last phone call to Wen, she did not try to contact him when she reached an apparently safe place.”

  “Yes, that puzzled me, but I was not so sure then that she was in a safe place. That was the seventh or eighth day of her disappearance, I think, the day we had that discussion in the restaurant.”

  “Then in Deda Cafe, you convinced me that Gu knew something more than what he had told us. That prompted me to explore further in that direction.”

  “Oh no, I cannot take credit for that. At the club, you had already told Gu about your connection with the Traffic Control Office—” She stopped herself at a glance from Chen. Had he told Party Secretary Li about the parking lot deal? Or even the visit to the club?

  “You did an excellent job in dealing with a man like Gu, Chief Inspector Chen,” Li commented. “ ‘You have to fish for a golden turtle with a sweet-smelling bait.’”

  “Thank you, Party Secretary Li,” Chen said with surprise. “And then in the evening after the Beijing Opera, following your instruction, I walked Inspector Rohn back to the hotel. On our way, we had some drinks in Bund Park. There I mentioned the two cases I had been assigned to on the same day—the park victim case, and the search for Wen. She touched on the possible connection between the two. I had never thought about such a possibility until that evening. More importantly, she discussed the ax wounds on the body in connection with a Mafia novel, in which a murder was committed in such a way as to direct suspicion onto to a rival gang—”

  “The ax wounds suggested a triad killing. It was a signature,” Li cut in, “as Detective Yu pointed out at the outset.”

  “Yes, it’s called the death by Eighteen Axes,” Yu observed. “The highest form of punishment inflicted by the Flying Axes.”

  “That’s true, and that’s exactly what made me suspicious. Wasn’t such a signature too obvious? So Inspector Rohn’s comment started me thinking of another possibility. The victim in Bund Park could have been killed by somebody in deliberate imitation of the Flying Axes to cast the blame on them. As a result, the Flying Axes had to look into the matter and lose their focus on the search for Wen. Besides, muddying the water diverted the attention of the police, too. Under that hypothesis, who benefited? Someone with an even higher stake in the race to find Wen.”

  “I’m beginning to see, Chief Inspector Chen,” Yu said.

  “So you deserve the credit, Inspector Rohn. In spite of my suspicions, I was as puzzled as anybody else, unable to put the pieces together into a comprehensible whole. Your comments really helped.”

  “Thank you, Inspector Rohn. It’s a marvelous example of the fruitful collaboration between the police forces of our two countries. Almost like the tai chi symbol, yin in perfect match with yang—” Li stopped abruptly, coughing with a hand against his mouth.

  She understood. As a high-ranking Party official, Li had to be careful in his speech, even in using a seemingly harmless metaphor, which nevertheless crossed the line, due to the male and female elements suggested by the ancient symbol.

  “I also got a call from Old Hunter that evening,” Chen went on. “He told me that Gu had called to ask for information about a missing Fujianese. That was a surprise. Gu had told us about a mysterious visitor from Hong Kong. Why was Gu looking for a Fujianese? So that evening in Bund Park put me on the right track for the first time.”

  “The park is a lucky place for you,” she said, “in accordance with the five-element theory. Little wonder, Chief Inspector Chen.”

  “Explain, Chief Inspector Chen?” Li asked.

  Apparently Li did not know so much about Chen’s life as she did, though the Party Secretary had hand-picked Chen as his successor.

  “It’s a joke made by my father, Party Secretary Li,” Chen said. “Actually I had another idea that evening. Inspector Rohn happened to ask me about the two lines on my folding fan. Daifu’s couplet. My thoughts flowed to the mysterious death of Daifu, and then back to the body in the park. It further supported the supposition that the body had been placed there to distract attention or to shift the blame, as I had suspected in Daifu’s case.”

  “But you did not mention that to me, Chief Inspector Chen,” she said.

  “Well, these ideas did not coalesce until I got back home late that night. I dug out the poem in an attempt to recollect all the possibilities I had studied before writing it. As an unexpected result. I was able to recite those lines in Moscow Suburb the following day,” he said with a smile. “No, it’s not my favorite poem, Inspector Rohn, though it might have put me in a poetic mood at the Huating Market.”

  Party Secretary Li looked at Chen, and then at Catherine, before he broke into a broad smile. “That’s how Chief Inspector Chen moves in his investigation—by leaps and bounds.”

  “As for what happened at the market, let me say a word about contingency. There’s no better way to describe it. I happened to be there, together with Inspector Rohn. As she put it, it’s a chain of seemingly irrelevant links. Daifu’s couplet, a light green cellular phone, the rain, the line of Oriole’s wet footprints, Su Dongpu’s lines. So I thought of the poetry anthology left at Wen’s home. If one link had been missing, we would not be sitting here at this moment.”

  She wondered whether his colleagues could follow this cryptic explanation. She happened to be there, but even she did not understand all his references. The light green cellular phone, for instance.
He had never mentioned that before.

  Yu made an obvious effort to refrain from asking questions. Qian remained respectfully self-effacing throughout. But Li appeared eager to season the discussion with political clichés.

  “You have performed brilliant work in the glorious tradition of the Chinese police force, Chief Inspector Chen,” Li declared, though perhaps he was still largely in the dark.

  “I could not have made progress without the collaboration of Inspector Rohn, or the work of Detective Yu,” Chen said earnestly. “In his interview with Zheng, for example, Detective Yu pushed for the clarification of a gangster’s phrase—She changed her mind. What did he mean—changed her mind? That was a question I had in my mind while talking with Wen the following day.”