by Xiaolong Qiu
Whether it was because of Yao, or because of him, that the call had been tapped, he could not tell.
‘They’re talking about the conspiracies against the socialism with China’s characteristics, the conspiracies through the joint effort of intellectuals and officials within the Party system—’
‘What!’ The accusation of conspiracies against the Chinese socialism sounded alarmingly familiar, just like another echo from the Cultural Revolution. ‘Thanks, Ling. I’m no longer a chief inspector, but I still know how to protect myself.’
‘If there’s anything I can do, let me know, though perhaps not like before …’
He knew what she meant by ‘not like before’, catching a slight tremor in her voice. His father had stepped down from the powerful Politburo Standing Committee of the CPC. What she was capable of doing for the ex-inspector could be limited, though she would still go out of her way for him, like this phone call, or like the first time he had got into trouble because of the first major case he had investigated concerning a national model worker and an ‘HCC’ – a term used many years ago for high cadre’s children, but nowadays known simply as a Red Prince.
He was struck with a sad sense of déjà vu.
But it was not déjà vu, not exactly. The fact that she had now learned so fast about his trouble, and from so far away in London, was more than alarming.
‘Thanks for your call from London, Ling. I will be really careful.’
‘I think I’m moving to London permanently, what with the changes inside the Forbidden City, and with the air pollution in Beijing.’ She went on after a short pause, ‘I have a two-bedroom apartment in London. Maybe I’ll see you here. And you can stay in the apartment as long as you like. It’s such a long time since we last saw each other.’
She had an apartment there, and had built plenty more business connections than she had started with. Thanks to her family background, she had also made quite a lot of money. She could live quite comfortably without having to work anymore, traveling between Beijing and London in leisure. But why was she telling him about her moving to London, and about her meeting him there at this moment?
Could that be another hint about the dire danger facing him; that he should flee from China?
If so, his appointment to the new office could have been a devious trap. On convalescent leave or not, he would have to talk to others about the problems of the judicial system, and whatever he said would then be gathered as evidence of the anti-Party conspiracies.
Things like that had happened in China, and they were happening again.
That’s why she was making the call from London.
He could not help but feel grateful to her, and for the subtle suggestion, too. After all these years, it was now possible for them to be reunited – outside of China. Ironic as it was, it made some sense with her business established there.
What about him? He still had to make a living, but he knew he could not work as a cop in London. He might try his hand at writing in English, as a couple of American writers had suggested to him. He wondered, however, how far he could really go.
Putting down the phone, he was suddenly furious. He had been laying low on medical leave, and contemplating a different career, but those in power still would not let him off the hook.
And the video cover image of Judge Dee standing in the prison cart came shooting back to his mind. It was a real possibility.
Like Judge Dee, Chen had to fight back for his survival.
DAY TWO
Chen arrived at Old Half Place on the intersection of Fuzhou and Zhejiang Roads at six thirty in the morning.
It was still quite gray outside the restaurant, but its first floor was packed with early customers, most of them elderly, who had to shout loudly the numbers on the order slips, carry their breakfast trays by themselves from the sordid kitchen windows, and squeeze through the waiting crowd to their respective oil-smeared tables.
Not so with the clean, spacious second floor, especially with the pretentious private room overlooking the street below. An elderly waiter was leading him there respectfully.
Huang was already in the room, sitting at a mahogany table by the window, sipping at a cup of green tea with several small dishes of nuts and dried fruits aside the teapot. A white-haired and white-browed man in a scarlet silk Tang jacket, Huang struck Chen as singularly familiar. Then he recalled having seen the old man in a popular TV program about antique appraisal. He moved over and bowed low, his right hand grasping a set of books in a blue cloth box.
It was a collection of annotated Three Hundred Tang Dynasty Poems. Of excellent bamboo paper and traditional thread bounding, supposedly of the late Qing dynasty edition, it was probably of not too high value in today’s antique market, but it would work as an excuse for them to start chatting.
‘Thank you so much, Master Huang, for agreeing to see me this morning. It’s such an honor for me.’
‘You are most welcome, Chief Inspector Chen … oh, Director Chen.’
‘Just call me Chen, Master Huang.’
The moment he seated himself opposite Huang, the waiter hurried over to open the menu for them with a proud grin. ‘The knife anchovy noodles here. Ours is the one and only restaurant in Shanghai that serves this celebrated special. And now is the very best season to have them with the fish swimming back into the Yangtze River.’
‘Long-jaw anchovy, but people simply call it knife anchovy because of its knife-like shape,’ Huang said, an authentic authority on gourmet food, too. ‘My treat today. Two portions of knife anchovy noodles. Anything else?’
‘No. For me, it’s always the noodles with Xiao pork in this restaurant. Too many tiny bones with the fish, I’m afraid,’ Chen said, appalled at the price listed on the menu. Thirty thousand yuan per kilo for the fish, minimum a hundred kilograms per bowl of noodles.
Huang eyed him in surprise.
‘And anything else?’
‘A small portion of fried cabbage rice.’
‘But you cannot have the knife anchovy noodles anywhere else in the city,’ the waiter said, apparently disappointed.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Huang said simply. ‘We will pay for the minimum expense for the private room. Eight hundred yuan per person, right?’
As the waiter reluctantly left with their order, Huang turned to Chen with a smile. ‘You really don’t care for the special fish noodles?’
‘No, I don’t. I had one bowl about twenty years ago. Nothing that special for the price. A lot of tiny bones. About thirty yuan per bowl at the time, I think. It’s become so ridiculously expensive nowadays. What’s the point having something you don’t really like, however expensive?’
‘That’s the spirit, Chen. To tell the truth, I too don’t like the fish that much. It’s quite delicious, but with numerous bones. In my younger days, it was less than ten yuan a kilo in the food market, but as our fishermen kept catching relentlessly, the knife anchovy appeared on the list as a sort of endangered species. So the price shot up like crazy. For a bowl of knife anchovy noodles, it is said that the chef here has to put the fish scales, crumbles, bones, heads and tails into a cloth bag and boil it in a pot of soup for hours. And he then adds the tiniest bit of fish meat on top of the noodles. You can hardly find any trace of it.’
‘It’s definitely not worth the money.’
‘No, it’s not. But in our brave new world of conspicuous consumption, if I treat a distinguished man like you with only a bowl of Xiao pork noodles here, both you and I may lose a lot of face.’
‘No, your agreeing to meet with me here today already gives me too much face. What’s wrong with the Xiao pork? My dad used to bring me here for a bowl of Xiao pork noodles. It was such a treat, and it still is, not to mention the fond memories of those days. Of course, we dined downstairs at that time. I myself have come to this restaurant quite a few times, but never to the second floor before.’
‘To tell the truth, it’s just the second time for me, I m
ean in the private room on the second floor. What is served on the first floor is way cheaper, but with no difference in taste. It’s just too noisy downstairs, we can hardly talk,’ Huang said after taking a slow, leisured sip at the tea. ‘Now we really have one thing in common between us. My favorite food is not expensive, either. In fact, it’s not even in a restaurant. Nothing but the cheap street food.’
‘That’s unbelievable!’
‘A rice ball at a street corner stall in Yangpu District, and that too with a lot of memories,’ Huang said, turning out to be an energetically talkative old man – like another Old Hunter. ‘It’s almost thirty years ago since I first ate there. At that time, I worked at a neighborhood production group, earning seventy cents per day, and working like a deadbeat dog on three shifts. One chilly early morning, I passed by the stall on the way to the neighborhood production group, and bought a rice ball from a cotton-padded, coat-wrapped wooden container, with a fresh-fried dough stick put into it there and then. What a blissful first bite, it kept me energetic and happy for the whole day. And I’ve since been going back to the stall quite regularly, though I moved away, far away from Yangpu District years ago.’
‘What an experience, Master Huang!’
‘As luck would have it, the stall is still standing there, sticking to the traditional way of making a rice ball. The same taste just like the first time. Now that’s a secret I’ve shared with nobody else. Once it’s brought up in the media, the old business model would soon be gone.’
‘Thank you for letting me into this secret. I’ll definitely go there next week, and you can rest assured that I won’t tell anybody about it, Master Huang.’
‘The highest level of gastronomic enjoyment is to have what you crave in your heart. Whether it’s well known or expensive hardly matters. Like in an old saying, “You’re a man who really understands the music,” Chen. But you’re a man much more than that. For a man of my age, I think I can tell a thing or two about a piece of antique, about a special dish, and about a man, too.’
‘Yes, you’re the number-one antique authority in the city. Lu may not have told you about the favor I’m going to ask of you,’ Chen said, taking the books out of the blue cloth box. ‘Here is an old collection left behind by my late father. I should not part with it, I know, but with my mother moving into a nursing home for twenty-four-hour care service, it’s getting too expensive for me to cover. That’s why I think of selling some of the old books at home.’
With the generous payment from that mysterious client Sima, he would be able to send his mother back to the nursing home, but that sum would not last too long, considering the inflation, and he was truly worried about it.
‘It’s an honor for you to think of me, Chen. For a man of your position, you actually have to sell books to take care of your mother, which in itself speaks volumes about your filial piety, and about your integrity as one of the few honest Party officials in today’s China, standing out like a white crane against those chickens of corrupt Party officials. They really fatten themselves like the red rats described by Tang poet Liu Zhongyuan.’
‘No, I’m just old-fashioned. As Confucius says, there are things a man should do, and things he should not do. That’s all there is to it. As for my mother, it’s just like in another Tang poem, “Who says that the splendor of a grass blade can prove enough / to return the generous warmth of ever-returning spring sunlight?” That’s the least I should do for her.’
‘I’ll take a good look at your books. Old and rare books are not my forte, but I have some friends in the circle. Things can be quite complicated in our line of business.’
‘That’s so true,’ Chen said, thinking he’d better not come to the point too quickly. And he might have to sell some more books. He knew very little about the business except its being so hot of late. ‘And you surely can teach me a lot more about the antique business.’
‘Well, people complain about the soaring house prices. But it’s nothing compared with the soaring antique prices. I was so lucky as to stumble on a pair of Ming dynasty vases for nothing during the Cultural Revolution. The collectors, then scared shitless by the Red Guards, had to throw their once-treasured pieces away as “four olds”. They were dirt cheap. And you did not have to worry about them being fakes either.
‘But guess why they suddenly became hot cakes?’ Huang went on, putting a boiled peanut into his mouth. ‘It’s simple. The government has printed way too much money, and the price for a bowl of knife anchovy noodles here really illustrates the fast devaluation of yuan. The interest in the bank can never catch up with the inflation, the economy is in an increasingly terrible shape, and no one believes in the system any more. So antiques become a sort of hedge for some people, who believe they will hold on to something valuable when the huge bubble eventually breaks.
‘At the same time, it’s also more than that. For some Party officials, they choose to take bribes not in cash, but with antiques. When busted, they can claim it’s nothing but inexpensive knockoffs. And they can resell them too. It’s just another way of people currying favor by purchasing the “antiques” – more likely than not fakes – from them and paying the full price.’
‘I’ve never heard of those deals.’
‘That’s no surprise. These things are arranged and done under the table through connections.’
‘For your line of business, you have to have a large network of connections.’ Chen then added casually, ‘Oh, I remember having just read something online about your being a regular guest to a private kitchen party. Little wonder, of course, for a man of your epicurean sophistication.’
‘Well,’ Huang said, looking up from his cup. ‘You’re talking about the murder case in Min’s private kitchen dinner party, right?’
‘Right. I have read speculation about it on the Internet. But let me assure you: I’m no longer a cop, and I’m not doing any investigation. Just a bit curious about the case, and about her dinner too.’
‘The dinner at Min’s is expensive, but she is a consummate chef and host. And some people went there not merely because of her culinary skills. It’s more like an elite club, where she had her way of choosing her guests. You may be super rich, but you can still be put on the waiting list forever. Your appearance in her shikumen house speaks volumes about your social status. Some people attended the dinner party more for the sake of developing connections through her. That could be of immense importance in business, and particularly in the antique business. She’s said to have relationships with people really high up there, though she’s a cautious one, never bragging and boasting of the men she sees in secret—’
The talk was interrupted by the waiter coming back to the table with their order.
The Xiao pork noodles proved to be as tasty as Chen remembered, with a tiny dish of extra-thin sliced ginger that brought out the special pork flavor. Huang picked up a piece of half-transparent pork and buried it under the noodles in the steaming soup ritualistically.
‘That’s my father’s way of enjoying the noodles too,’ Chen said, watching.
‘Yes, that’s the way for the old customers in this restaurant,’ Huang said, nodding. ‘What was I saying? Oh, for some people, they went to Min’s for connections more than anything else. For me, it’s a lucky combination of gastronomical bliss and business opportunities. Some of her clients are super rich, and it’s fashionable for them to dabble in antiques for fun as well as for investment. In our line, there’re too many fakes, but it would not be that practical to buy or sell through auctions. So some connections of hers choose to do business through her instead. With her connections at the top, people do not have to worry about those shady transactions. She’s introduced a number of customers to me at her private dinner table.’
‘But you were not there that night, were you?’
‘I’m coming to that, Chief Inspector Chen. About two months ago, a mysterious connection of hers wanted to sell a scroll of Tang dynasty paintings. I spent days resea
rching it before I made sure that it was an authentic piece by Wu Daozi.’
‘Wow, by Wu Daozi in the Tang dynasty!’
‘It’s worth a huge fortune. And based on my research and recommendation, a buyer offered a reasonable price for it, considering the fact that the seller did not have to worry about the fee and tax in auction, the tiresome paperwork, and the undesirable publicity. But at the last minute she told me her connection had chosen not to sell. I got very upset. It could have been arranged for a free appraisal from me. And she would never tell me about what really happened.
‘So she arranged for a special dinner party as an apologetic gesture. I did not want to go, but it was not something so uncommon in the antique business. No point cutting off the nose to spite the face.
‘I sent my nephew Zheng there instead. Zheng was of course more than willing to go. He had heard and read about her, and asked me questions about her dinner party with great interest. His appearance at her dinner table could also add to his status. He was overjoyed.’
‘I see, it’s your nephew Zheng—’
Huang talked on without waiting for the ex-inspector to say more.
‘Not my real nephew, but from the same countryside, where people have a way of claiming one another as relatives. He came to Shanghai about ten years ago and ran a small printing shop, and then became a special assistant of mine in the antique business and made far more out of it. Younger and energetic, he’s quite helpful for me.’
‘You must have taught him a lot in the antique business.’
‘No, not really. He simply runs errands for me. And he travels for me too. Domestically, as well as internationally. You have heard of stories about a large number of Chinese traveling abroad for fun and shopping, but there’s also a small group of them going abroad for antiques.’
