The Mao Case Read online

  After what help he had offered, first with the real estate company and then with the Yang murder case, though indirectly, both Xie and Jiao had become quite friendly to him. The candlelight dinner with Jiao might have made a subtle difference too. There was something in the way she spoke to him. At least she had come to trust him, as she had just said. He wished that he could prove to be truly trustworthy.

  She got up again, aware of the wistful expression on his face. “I’ll take a look upstairs and tell him you’re here. You may have something to say to him.”

  “No, don’t worry about it. I have to leave now,” he said, rising too, “for a lunch appointment.”

  He was going to find a maid for her. That could be a move crucial to the investigation. The maid had to be someone he himself was able to trust, making it out of the question to approach the bureau for help.

  Hardly had he stepped out, however, when he realized that he didn’t have her phone number. So he turned back in haste.

  Jiao was speaking on her cell phone again. She said something hurriedly at the sight of him.

  “Oh, I forgot to ask for your phone number, Jiao.”

  “Sorry, I forgot about that too,” she said, covering the phone with her palm. “I have yours. I’ll call you in a few minutes, so you’ll have mine too.”

  Leaving again, closing the door after him, Chen decided to walk for a while. In the late summer morning, he heard cicadas screeching, sporadically, in the green foliage of French poplars that lined along the street. The area had belonged to the French Concession in the early years of the century.

  He took out his phone and started dialing White Cloud, but he halted after pressing only the first three numbers. It wasn’t only too much of a risk for her. She was too young and too fashionable. No matter how she tried, she wouldn’t pass as a maid. After a minute’s hesitation, he dialed Old Hunter, explaining the situation.

  “So I need to find a maid for Jiao. A reliable one. Not really for her, but for us. Someone who can work inside while you patrol outside.”

  “I’ll talk to my old wife about it. She knows quite a lot of people,” Old Hunter said. “I’ll call you back as soon I have any news.”

  Putting the phone back into his pants pocket, Chen looked ahead to see a stinking tofu peddler bending over a portable stove and wok on a shaded side street. Chen realized he must have smelled it first, the familiar tang strong in a breeze. A typical Shanghai snack with a special pungent flavor, which he liked — an unlikely moment for temptation, which he tried to resist.

  Still, he found himself turning down the side street, at the end of which he could take a shortcut to the subway station. He had walked this route before. It was also quieter here, better for his thinking.

  If there was anything interesting to the visit this morning, it was the extraordinary concern Jiao had, once again, exhibited for Xie. It was perhaps more than what was usual between a student and his teacher, but he couldn’t identify the ulterior motive that Song — and Chen himself — had suspected.

  He passed by a wrought-iron gate across the entrance to a lane. In front of it squatted a man wearing a black Chinese-styled short-sleeved shirt, smoking, who looked up at the passing Chen from under a white canvas hat pulled low, shading most of his face. It was not an uncommon sight in the city, with so many people laid off in the recent years. The smell of the stinking tofu floated nearer, more pleasantly pungent…

  But then Chen became aware of footsteps hurrying up from behind. Glancing over his shoulder, he glimpsed the white-hatted man rushing over to him, wielding an iron bar in one hand, cursing between clenched teeth, “You busybody bastard!”

  Chen hadn’t been trained at the police academy, but his reflexes were sharp. He ducked his head to the side and swirled around. The assailant, having put the weight of his body behind his blow, missed, lurched forward. The two were now in a typical kongfu hand-push position. Chen swung his arm over, bearing it down hard on the back of the attacker, who staggered, his blue-dragon-tattooed forearm flailing out for support. Before Chen could deliver a second blow, however, he caught sight of another black-attired man dashing across from Shao-xing Road, brandishing an identical iron bar. The two gangsters could have been sitting in ambush, waiting for him at the intersection.

  “You must have taken me for another, brothers,” Chen said, trying to think of Triad jargon as the first gangster was regaining his balance. “The flood is surging into the Dragon King Temple.”

  “Who are your brothers? An ugly toad let its mouth water at a beautiful swan! You should pee and take a look at your own reflection,” the second man said, charging toward him in a lightning-fast movement.

  Dodging, Chen counterattacked with his right fist. He felt the iron bar brushing against his left shoulder. Reeling, Chen fell backward, his head bumping against the umber brick wall of a two-story house at the street corner. But he managed to kick out simultaneously, his feet hitting the abdomen of the second thug, who then doubled over in pain. Chen moved a step to the left, blocking instinctively with his numbed left arm another blow from the first one. Panting, swaying, he sized up the situation with a sinking heart. He could cope with one, but against two, both wielding iron bars, he had no chance.

  His only way out would be to cut back to Ruijing Road. With more people moving around and a cop standing there — possibly a plainclothes Internal Security as well — the gangsters might not be able to chase him all the way, especially if he raised hue and cry in the broad daylight.

  Pivoting, he hurtled back toward the main street, with the two gangsters running after him.

  Neither a cop nor an Internal Security man was in sight as he sprinted onto Ruijing Road.

  Only a couple of pedestrians were visible in the intersection, neither of them choosing to do anything, watching like the spellbound audience at an absurd scene in a martial arts movie.

  The door of Xie Mansion was closed, as usual. It was then that his glance swept across the street, to the small café he had visited. On the front door flashed a neon sign saying “open.” And there was a back door behind the partition wall, he recalled.

  He spun round and dashed across the street, nearly colliding with a bike. A couple was emerging from the café, chatting and holding hands. He ran through them, sending the woman sprawling against the window and the man flinging his arm in rage. Bursting into the café, to the consternation of both the customers and waitress, he closed the door and locked it behind him, before slipping out through the back door and darting into a small lane.

  It was only a matter of a minute or less before the gangsters started to bang on the front door, but it was enough time for him to escape the lane without the two barking at his heels. Turning onto Shaoxing Road, he thought he heard terrible shouts and crashes somewhere in the lane.

  A taxi sped along. Waving his hand frantically, Chen rushed toward it and hurried in, gasping for breath.

  “Drive.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere. Drive.”

  It wasn’t until after the taxi swung into Fuxing Road that Chen was capable of reconstructing the encounter in clear sequence.

  Ambush. No question about it. The gangsters could have been following him for days. A couple of times, he had walked along Shao-xing Road and turned down the side street as a shortcut to the subway station. The attackers had stationed themselves at the intersection, waiting for him whichever way Chen might have turned.

  Judging by their clothing, the iron bars, the tattoo on one’s arm, and their jargon, the two were undoubtedly Triad members. They didn’t try to disguise it.

  But he couldn’t remember having ruffled the feathers of any particular organization. Of late, there had been a special squad formed at the bureau for the purpose of coping with organized crime in the city. His Special Case Squad’s main responsibility was dealing with politically special or sensitive cases. Thanks to his connection to Triad-related people like Gu, Chen had been able to keep himself out of
troubled water.

  There was no ruling out the possibility of mistaken identity, but he couldn’t count on it.

  And as for an ambush, what would be the purpose? In the Triad tradition, as far as he was able to figure out, an ambush was either a warning or a punishment. The iron bars, characteristic of the Triad culture, could have been intended for a nonfatal beating, as in a Triad movie he had seen, in which the victim writhed on the ground, beaten and crushed, while the gangsters hissed out the message: “If you don’t mend your ways, it will be worse next time.”

  What the thugs said to him, however, pointed to different possibilities.

  “Busybody” probably referred to his getting involved in something the Triad thought he shouldn’t have. Chen had no idea what it was. After all, a lot of things the chief inspector had done could have been interpreted that way.

  As for the “toad and swan” metaphor, it had originally been about a man going after an unapproachable woman — usually an ugly man or one in inferior position going after a beautiful woman or one in a superior position. So it could have come as a warning to him about an impossible relationship.

  There was no woman in Chen’s life, not at the moment. Ironically, Ling could have qualified as a “swan” with her HCC family background, but she had just married somebody else.

  As for White Cloud, a young pretty college student who had once worked as his “little secretary,” there had never been anything serious between them — at least not on the part of Chen. It made some sense, however, if a jealous lover saw Chen as an insurmountable obstacle. It was a remote possibility, but Chen thought he should talk to Gu about it.

  Alternatively, the warning could have come from his mixing with the girls at Xie’s place. Most of them had wealthy and powerful men behind them, and one of those men could have become insanely jealous. But he was a newcomer to the circle, a bookish if not clownish would-be writer who hadn’t made advances on any of them, not even Jiao. In the mansion, most people could be a little flirtatious with one another, dancing and drinking under the somber light, in the lambent music. No one took it seriously —

  “So where are you going, sir?” the driver asked again. “Oh, Fuxing Road,” Chen said, his shoulder hurting terribly. He’d better see a doctor. Dr. Xia, having retired from the bureau, was working at a private clinic on Fuxing Road.

  “Then we have to make a detour.”

  “Why?” he asked absentmindedly. “New construction. An expensive apartment complex is going up along Tiantong Road.”

  Another possibility flashed across his mind. The real estate company with connections in the black and white ways. He might have been seen as a busybody by them. Those companies had long ears and arms, could have learned of him from their contacts in the city government. But what about the “toad and swan” metaphor? That seemed totally unrelated.

  At last, the taxi pulled up in front of the clinic. It was a new white building. Through the door, Chen saw a velvet tapestry bearing Mao’s quotation in bold characters: To serve the people.

  He was taking out his money to pay the taxi driver when another idea struck him. Could it have been an attempt to stop him from looking further into the case? In that scenario, possibly on the order from another section. Or from Internal Security, who had their own reasons to be furious at him. Or even from the Forbidden City. He was actually conducting the investigation as a Mao case, at least partially, a move that could affect the legitimacy of the Party. But it was a move known only to Old Hunter and Detective Yu, known only partially —

  “Oh, your receipt,” the taxi driver said with evident concern in his voice. “Are you all right, sir?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, taking the receipt, which showed a large amount. The taxi driver must have been driving him around for quite a while before asking him for his destination.

  He moved out of the car groggily, his head aching like the Monkey in Journey to the West, wearing a cursed hoop around his forehead.

  FIFTEEN

  TWO HOURS LATER, DR. XIA was writing out a prescription in his office, his silver brows knitted in a frown, after having taken both a CT scan and X-rays of Chen.

  Dr. Xia had been on the forensic staff of the police bureau. After retirement, he started working part-time as an “expert” at a clinic close to his home. He and Chen had known each other well in the bureau.

  “Really touch and go,” Dr. Xia said seriously, examining the X-rays one more time. “Your shoulder injury isn’t too bad. No bone was broken. But I’m worried about the impact on your head. You have to rest for a week. Keep away from work and take good care of yourself. Don’t forget your breakdown not too long ago.”

  “You know the work at the bureau —”

  His cell phone rang before he could finish the sentence. It was Gang. Chen had to speak under the glare of Dr. Xia.

  “I have already contacted Feng, my assistant during the Cultural Revolution. A Big Buck now, he still calls me Commander in Chief.”

  “That’s good,” Chen said. “Did he recall anything about the special team from Beijing?”

  “They came to get something Shang might have had, but were unsuccessful. She committed suicide.”

  “Did Feng know what they were looking for?”

  “No, he didn’t. The special team probably didn’t either, but they wanted to prevent any local Red Guards from coming near her, so that was why they contacted Feng for cooperation. It could have been top secret. Also, it seemed to be a different group from those sent by Madam Mao from Beijing. Feng had met with some of those other teams.”

  “What was the difference?”

  “Those other teams knew what they were looking for. Newspaper clippings and pictures concerning Madam Mao in the thirties. They were not that secretive or stealthy, either. In fact, Feng went in with them, helping to turn everything upside down in the houses of those target families. But the special team for Shang didn’t request any help like that, nor were they interested in those things from the thirties.”

  “That is surely different. Did Feng recall any team member’s name or keep in touch?”

  “One of them was surnamed Sima. A rare surname, that’s why Feng remembered it. Probably from a cadre family, that Sima, and he spoke with an authentic Beijing accent.” Gang added, “Among other things, Sima mentioned Shang’s dresses and shoes, two closets full of them, and the cameras and film-developing equipment at her home, which were rare in those years. So he was impressed. That’s about all Feng could remember.”

  After so many years, that was probably about all anyone could have remembered. Still, it was a sort of random harvest to Chen, particularly the part about the special team looking for something at the request of someone other than Madam Mao. That explained the urgency after so many years. Madam Mao had long turned into “dog shit,” and some additional “shit” on her head wouldn’t have mattered to the Beijing authorities. So it had to be, as they had said, something directly concerning Mao.

  “Thank you so much, Gang. That’s very important to my book. And I’ll come back to the eatery soon.”

  But how could he get in touch with Sima, or any other member of the special team? It would be futile to contact the minister or anybody in Beijing for help. On the contrary, the moment his investigation into “the Mao Case” was revealed, the chief inspector would be suspended.

  Dr. Xia had been shaking his head the whole time.

  “Sorry about the interruption, Dr. Xia. Police work, you know —”

  “Tell your ‘police work’ to others, Chief Inspector, not to me. Now, listen to me carefully. If you suffer continuing giddiness or sickness, you have to come back to me. You must stay completely off work for one week.”

  “For a week,” Chen echoed, wondering if he would be lucky enough to take off one day. Still, given the outcome of his skirmish with the gangsters, he should consider himself lucky — only his luck might not hold the next time. “Not a single word about my visit here to the bureau people
, Dr. Xia,” he said, rising to leave, when his cell phone shrilled out again.

  The number indicated it was a long distance call from Beijing. It was Wang, the head of the Writers’ Association there, whom Chen had touched for information about Diao, the author of Cloud and Rain in Shanghai.

  “Diao has just come to Beijing, staying with his daughter.”

  “Is he coming back to Shanghai soon?”

  “I don’t know. He’s taking care of his grandson at her place, I’ve heard.”

  “Well,” Chen said, realizing that could be a job taking weeks or months. “Thank you so much, Chairman Wang. That’s what I need to know. I appreciate it.”

  “Can’t you forget about your work for one minute, Chief Inspector Chen?” Dr. Xia said in mounting exasperation. “Take a vacation somewhere where no one can find you. I insist. Get rid of your cell phone too.”

  “A vacation — where no one knows me. And no cell phone. Thank you for your suggestion. I’ll think about it, Dr. Xia. I give you my word.”

  Indeed, he could use a vacation. In Beijing. To do something about the Mao Case while there under the disguise of a vacation. He left the clinic.

  At this stage, Diao could be crucial to the investigation, capable of providing information not only about Shang’s death but also about the special team from Beijing. More importantly, about what they had been looking for at the time. Diao must have done a lot of research for his book, not all of which might have been included in Cloud and Rain in Shanghai.

  But the “vacation” meant the chief inspector had to leave the situation here unattended for days. In the face of the new developments, however, Chen considered the trip a worthy gamble.

  He had a feeling that Mao was at the center of all the confusion and complications. Instead of focusing on his encounter with the gangsters, or on Yang’s murder case, he would cope, as in a proverb, by taking the firewood out from under the cauldron.