by Xiaolong Qiu
He did not think it would be about the murder at the shikumen house.
About those deals between Min and Huang? Those shady but not necessarily illegal deals involved a huge amount of money, but they were not uncommon in the socialism with China’s characteristics. Whatever Min could say, it would not be such a big deal. And now Huang was already dead.
About her clandestine relationships with those really powerful people high up? Chen did not want to rule out that possibility. Particularly in the context of the intense power struggle at the top between the Red Princes, those from the families of the first-generation Party officials, and the Youth Leagues, those from ordinary families. So it was not Min personally, but the fact that her relationship with the people from one group could be used by another group in the cut-throat fight for the ultimate position in the Forbidden City. Her testimony against the man – or the men – involved with her could cause a political earthquake.
What about Huang then? In a way, it might throw some light on his death too. A regular visitor to the shikumen house, Huang could have learned something about Min’s private life. But for a sophisticated mingyuan like Min, she would have known what to say, or what not to say, to an old businessman like Huang, despite their business deals.
Chen decided not to say anything about all this to Detective Xiong. It was just a possible scenario, but unsupported by any investigation he had done.
And for that matter, he had hardly done any investigation in the way of a real cop. For the moment, he was but a tea drinker who had happened to be in a teahouse located not far from the hotel.
‘What did Internal Security say to you, Detective Xiong?’
‘Nothing so far – except they had to rush Min to another unknown place, and—’
But it was almost like a cue. Detective Xiong’s phone started ringing at that very moment. It was none other than Internal Security who wanted him over at their office for discussion. Xiong had to leave in a hurry.
Chen too rose to leave. Moving out toward the hotel gate, he saw people having tea and coffee in the hotel garden. They were talking, drinking, laughing, undisturbed by what had happened last night. Some of them were probably not in-house guests. There were a couple of colorful tents on the lawn, in which people could have privacy, like in a private room in a fancy restaurant.
Perhaps he should have come with Old Hunter a couple of days ago. Perhaps he could have discovered something here.
Usually, Jin would not read messages during a meal. According to her parents, it was not helpful to her digestion. But for her, it was not one of the ordinary days.
She’d had an email from Chen, with the letterhead of the Judicial System Reform Office. Strictly official business, so to speak. It started with a seemingly disarming pleasantry:
Dear Jin:
I hope the note finds everything well with you. I’m better, though still not well enough to come to the office. And I appreciate all the work you have been doing for the office.
But I cannot afford to stay at home doing nothing all day long, so I’ve started working on the Judge Dee story, more or less by way of preparation for my new job, as I have told you.
I truly admire Van Gulik’s masterful treatment of the Xuanji case in Poets and Murder. I think I also understand the reason for some of the changes made in his novel. Still, there are things so puzzling about the case. With your college major in history, you may help with your expertise about the things in the Tang dynasty. Naturally, you don’t have to feel obliged to do so, as you are busy with the office work, I totally understand.
In Van Gulik’s novel, Xuanji doesn’t want to talk because she is anxious to shield the high-ranking official she loves, but apparently some other people want her to talk. Was it because of the secret fight between the two factions at the top during the early Tang dynasty?
For another thing, the implausible motive for Xuanji. The maid might have carried on with the man behind Xuanji’s back, but it was quite another story for the man to fall for the maid. The Tang dynasty was one that set great store by the family background. It was hard for Wen or Zi’an to formally accept Xuanji with her low-level background – how much more so for a maid serving in Xuanji’s household?
As for the capital punishment, I’m not familiar with the Tang dynasty law. I know a story titled ‘Carved Jade Buddha Image’, in which a general was not even condemned, let alone punished, for beating a maid furiously to death for her eloping with an artist.
And here I may well tell you something about a habit of mine. Sometimes I talk to myself about the inexplicable in an effort to clear the entangled thoughts. Writing this mail to you is like talking to myself, just a bit more serious, more in a logical way. Needless to say, you don’t have to go out of your way to do anything because of it. And I thank you for patience with my monologue.
Chen Cao
P.S. I am at the Moller Villa Hotel for something totally unexpected this morning, but the hotel garden tea looks so wonderful on the well-kept lawn. I would like to treat you to an afternoon tea there some other day, for all your marvelous work and help. And thanks for TV links and the memory stick too. They’re truly helpful.
Jin took a deep breath, read the email again, and made herself a cup of tea.
The email was meant as a sort of discussion with her, she understood, in a language intelligible to them alone in the given context. The messages in it were related not so much to the Tang dynasty Xuanji case in the Judge Dee story, as to the Min case of the present moment. The two cases shared striking similarities, especially so for those points he made when read between the lines.
The point about some people wanting Xuanji to talk and others wanting her not to talk, she took as a subtle reference to Min being in a similar situation, but the research she had done so far about the Min case failed to give her any clue in that direction. For the moment, all she could think of doing was approaching the other two guests at Min’s dinner party. Of the two, Peng Jianjun was a man in his sixties, who had recently gone through an advanced chemotherapy for his colon cancer. It was inconceivable for him to have the strength to commit the crime. As for Zheng Keqiang, he was just someone sent over by Huang on his behalf for that night, and she could not see any possible motive for the first-timer to the shikumen house to become involved in the murder on the same night.
She was touched, unexpectedly, with the point about his writing the email to her being like talking to himself. At least he no longer saw the two of them just as the Party-member boss and his secretary. The ex-inspector was said to be a romantic poet, but judging by the few poems of his she had read, she was not too sure about it. But she could have read too much into the message. For an ‘old-fashioned man’ like him, he might have just wanted to express his appreciation of the ‘research’ she had done for the office.
What about the implied message, then, in the cryptic postscript regarding the afternoon tea in the garden of the Moller Villa Hotel ‘for something totally unexpected’? She immediately started web-surfing. It did not take long for her to find bits and pieces about the hotel being used for keeping shuangguied Party officials. Min had also been put into an undisclosed location like a shuangguied official, as Jin had unearthed in a blog post. It was strange, but a lot of things were strange in the Min case. Then, in a couple of short WeChat posts, some netizens mentioned a disturbance – possibly a murder – committed at the Moller Villa Hotel the previous night.
What if something had happened to Min in that hotel? The posts provided no reliable details about the disturbance, or about the identity of the victim. But she had an instinctive feeling that the victim was not Min. Otherwise everything would be finished. So why this sudden, strange email from Chen?
Whatever the possible scenarios, Chen had not simply been to the hotel garden for tea, which would not have been described as ‘something totally unexpected’. Was he actually requesting more help from her, albeit by way of discussing a Tang dynasty case?
It
was a calculated move. Aware of others hacking into his emails, he wrote in a coded language accessible to her alone. In the meantime, it continued the show about his interest in a Tang dynasty story as a cover for his investigation on the sly.
As for the flash memory stick mentioned in the postscript, he seemed to have found it helpful, though without going into any details. She found herself singularly gratified. With the aid of the neighborhood cop, she had not met with any problems getting the contents of the surveillance system in Min’s neighborhood. Still, she had no idea about what he could have wanted to do with it.
In spite of his assurance that she did not have to go out of the way for the ‘office research’, the message could have been read as a suggestion for her to continue as before. And it would not hurt for her to move further along the line of enquiry.
After all, Chen had his hands tied. It was not convenient for him to openly investigate, and to approach the people possibly involved in it. But she could. As long as she took precautions, she should have no problem.
Chen found himself bogged down at a critical juncture where he could not afford to be bogged down.
So many things were happening in quick succession, so many things appearing inexplicable in the messy entanglement, that it was even more mind-boggling to examine the possible connections between them.
Things were related, he was nonetheless convinced, in a way he had not been able to grasp yet. It could take him a lot more effort to get to the bottom of it. The problem for him, however, was that he had to remain on convalescent leave. Any open move into the investigation could not only get him into more trouble, but alert the people behind the scenes as well.
Instead, he picked up the Judge Dee novel again, thinking it was ridiculous for him to be in the mood for the book. Nevertheless, it might help to clear his mind by doing something different for a change.
It turned out to be unexpectedly depressing for him to dip into the novel at that moment. Judge Dee too was overwhelmed with similar troubles in the Tang dynasty.
So he started to read a Chinese collection of Xuanji’s poems instead. It occurred to him that one of her problems – whether a murderer or not – was that she went after too many things. Poetry, celebrity status, idealistic passion, literary fame, romantic affair, wealth and security. In a simpler life, she might have found a man who truly cared for her like in her poems.
But there was no blaming Xuanji. No one is capable of stepping out of one’s world of self-interest. The same could be said of Min.
Once again he came across the poem partially quoted in Poets and Murder, and he tried to do a tentative translation of the whole piece. Xuanji’s poem was titled ‘A Letter to Wen Tingyun on a Winter Night’, an exquisite one written for her first lover, the famous Tang poet, about the unquenchable yearning she had for him on a cold, lonely night. On a moment of impulse, he translated into English, a version different from Gulik’s rendition:
Thinking and thinking, I search hard
for the lines I can recite
under the lamplight, too nervous
to spend the sleepless,
long night under the chilly quilt,
with the leaves trembling
in the courtyard, fearful
of the coming wind, and
the window curtain flapping
feebly under the sinking moon.
Keeping myself busy or not,
I cannot help being kept aware
of the unquenchable yearning
inside. My heart remains
unchanged through all the vicissitudes
in life. The parasol tree being
no place for perching, a bird circles
the woods at dusk, chirping,
and chirping in vain.
In Gulik’s novel, it was said to be a poem written by Xuanji for the guests of a banquet. Translating it, he felt like doing a closer reading. In the English version, the Dutch sinologist seemed to have taken some liberties. In the fifth line, Gulik opted for ‘lonely coverlets’ instead of ‘chilly quilt’. His version was more faithful to the original, and the adjective ‘chilly’ also more poignant in that it was not just getting colder in the depth of the night, but the poetess felt ‘chilly’ under the quilt because of her loneliness. The line ‘long night under the chilly quilt’ appeared to be particularly striking in terms of objective correlative.
But something else in the line made the ex-inspector come to a sudden stop. Something amiss, elusive yet critical he had felt earlier during the day.
Thinking and thinking, he succeeded in recollecting what he had momentarily sensed at the hotel, where Detective Xiong had described the suspect walking out in a T-shirt instead of the gray suit he had worn when he checked in. It did not make sense with the evening getting cold, but it did with people’s wariness of the omnipresent surveillance cameras in today’s China.
He stood up, took out the memory stick that Jin had left the day before, inserted it into the computer, and replayed the video, which he had already watched a couple of times.
Judging by the background research and the pictures of the guests at the shikumen house dinner party provided earlier by Jin, the four guests appeared to be moving out of the lane around eleven in the first section of the video. The first three were all in suits and ties, but Zheng, the last one moving into the scene, was in a long, light-colored jacket. It seemed not to be the proper dress code for the occasion, but Zheng could have hurried over to the shikumen house with the last-minute notice from Huang.
Then Chen moved on to the second section of the video. Because of the poor light, the video quality was not that good, presenting only blurred pictures of people passing through the lane, but this time he paid more attention to the clothes they wore. Halfway through it, he stopped the video, catching sight of a man in a white shirt with a light-colored jacket draped over his arm, and re-examined the image. It was not a cold day for May, but with the temperature lower at night, it did not make sense for one to go out earlier wearing the jacket and come back with the jacket over his arm – if the person in the jacket in the first section and the one with the jacket over his arm in the second section proved to be the same. Chen was not absolutely sure about it, though he thought he saw a resemblance.
It made sense, however, if the man in question was wary of the surveillance cameras at the entrances of the lane. With people talking about the cameras installed everywhere, especially after details of the Judge Jiao scandal coming out online, a would-be criminal could have taken some sort of precaution for himself.
But the ex-inspector had another unanswered question. Checking through the video again, he failed to see any trace of the man in question afterward. In other words, he could have been a resident in the lane returning home late at night, and the light-colored jacket nothing but a matter of coincidence. Chen gazed at the computer screen. The video ran to an end at one twenty-five – already much later than he had requested.
But what if the man in question had come out again later than that?
He did not like the idea of having Jin go to the neighborhood committee again. It could raise unnecessary alarm.
Chen took out his cellphone, hesitated for a minute, then dialed the special number of Mr Gu.
Mr Gu was one of the few he had never really figured out. A highly successful businessman, Mr Gu had been the first one to see the incredible potential in the development of the New World, which turned out to be one of the most fashionable landmarks in the city of Shanghai. As the chairman of the New World Corporation, in addition to the mega business/shopping center of the New World, the numerous real estate developments all around, he’d also made a number of successful investments and become one of the top Big Bucks in China. He claimed himself as a fan and friend of the chief inspector, though Chen remained wary of getting too close to him, in spite of his willingness to help, and sometimes going out of his way for the inspector during difficult investigations. They had not contacted each other, ho
wever, for quite a while.
In China’s fast-changing political landscape, a number of entrepreneurs had gotten into trouble of late, as the Party government made an abrupt shift, trying to boost the state-run enterprises at their expense. In an apparent attempt to turn the clock back to Mao’s time, ‘official scholars’ began clamoring about the ‘state capitalism’, the ‘Red emperor’ or the ‘historical justification for the Cultural Revolution’, like cicadas in the summer. Chen did not want to add to Mr Gu’s problems.
‘What a pleasant surprise to get your call, Chief Inspector Chen. You must have recovered well.’
‘Well enough to call you, I think.’
‘Anything I can do for you today?’
‘Nothing really important, I know you too have a lot of things on your hands, but do you know any people at the Pacific Ocean, the luxurious shopping mall close to Madang Road? To be more exact, people in a position to do something in the garage of that shopping mall? It’s not far from your New World.’
‘Well, I know the general manager of the Pacific Ocean, but not too well. He is a man with a governmental background. But why, Chief?’
‘A garage like that must be equipped with surveillance cameras. I’m wondering whether there are backup copies available there.’
‘Backup copies?’ Mr Gu went on in a hurry. ‘Sure, there are backup copies. As a rule, the video contents can be retrieved one way or another for what happened up to a couple of months ago.’
‘It happened just a couple of weeks ago. Friday the week before last. I need to check for that one particular night – for no more than several hours.’
‘Then no problem at all. The day before yesterday I happened to interview a store manager from that shopping mall, who has applied for a senior executive position in my New World Group. As long as it’s still in the surveillance system, it will be yours.’
About one hour later, Chen arrived at Judge Liu’s office for an unannounced visit, and with an unprecedented approach.
