The Mao Case Read online

  He wasn’t surprised that Xie had told her, but he was surprised that she had said “we.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing.”

  “Nothing to you, but everything to him.”

  Their talk was interrupted by the arrival of another girl, Yang.

  “Come with me tomorrow evening, Jiao. How can a young girl like you spend so much time in one ancient place? The world outside is young, exciting. They have a home theater, and a better karaoke machine than in the Money Cabinet.”

  “Money Cabinet” was the name of the top karaoke club in Shanghai. So it was probably a party at an upstart’s place, more luxuriously equipped than the club.

  “But I’m not that keen on the fashionable parties,” Jiao said.

  “There’s no party here tomorrow night. If you really don’t like it there, you can leave anytime you like. So why not?”

  “I’ll think about it, Yang.”

  “What about you, Mr. Chen?” Yang said, pouting her lips provocatively.

  “I’m no dancer. Last time, Jiao had to teach me step by step.”

  “Then you’re not only responsible for yourself, Jiao. You have to bring Mr. Chen along with you,” Yang said, turning to scamper away. “Bye, Jiao, bye Mr. Chen.”

  It was an interesting interruption, as it raised a question he himself had about Jiao. For the Old Dicks, the mansion was symbolic of their youthful dreams, so their frequent visits made sense. They didn’t have anywhere else to go. That wasn’t so with Jiao, surely.

  “Yang always talks like that,” Jiao said, her knees drawn up on the chair, her arms wrapped around her legs. “She’s a butterfly, flitting from one party to another. Those parties can be exhausting, you know.”

  Perhaps those parties were full of fashionable people and were wilder, longer, like in the TV movies. He didn’t know.

  There was another question he refrained from asking. What was Yang’s background? Moving from one party to another, always in stylish clothes, she was surely an “expensive girl.” A couple of times, he had seen a limousine waiting for her outside.

  But it wasn’t his business to be concerned about any other girl here.

  “Moving from one party to the next,” he repeated. “What’s the point?”

  “Well, it depends on your perspective. What is it from the perspective of a butterfly?” she said, a pensive smile playing on her lips. For instance, “you may have noticed the brass foot warmer by the fireplace in the living room. Granny Zhong used it as a trash bin in the old neighborhood. But here, it became a valuable antique, symbolic of old Shanghai when well-to-do ladies put their feet above the warmer in the winter.”

  Granny Zhong was someone Jiao had not mentioned before. And where was the old neighborhood? Jiao grew up in an orphanage. Possibly some relatives. Someone of Shang’s generation. He failed to recall anyone with that name from Cloud and Rain in Shanghai. He might have to check it again.

  “You have a good point, Jiao. So is painting going to be your career?”

  “I don’t know if I have the talent. I’d like to find out, so I’ve been studying with Mr. Xie.”

  “Now, I’m just curious: Xie may be well-known in this circle, but he hasn’t had any formal training in painting. So how did you come to study with him?”

  “You went to college, but not everyone is as lucky, Mr. Chen. I started working quite young. For me, it was a stroke of unbelievable luck to find a teacher like Xie.”

  “That’s an unusual decision for a girl like you.”

  “I am learning more than painting here. Mr. Xie is no upstart, and his work captures the spirit of the time.”

  He was not clear about what she meant by “the spirit of the time,” but he waited, instead of pressing her for a definition.

  “He really captures it all,” she went on wistfully, “in that distinctive frame of his. A frame that puts the picture in perspective.”

  It reminded Chen, surprisingly, of a remark made by his late father, who saw Confucianism as a frame that provided an acceptable shape for the working ethical system. Perhaps the same could be said of Maoism, except that it wasn’t really a working frame. Not even for Mao himself, whose own double life might have resulted from its failure.

  “You are insightful,” he said, pulling himself back from his wandering thoughts.

  “It’s just my way of looking at his paintings — so informed by his aspirations and afflictions through these years.”

  He was amazed by her response. Perhaps Jiao was nice to Xie not because of his help as a middleman for the “Mao material,” as Internal Security suspected, but because of her sincere appreciation of Xie’s work.

  “According to T. S. Eliot, you have to separate the artist from the art. A poem doesn’t necessarily say anything about a poet, nor does a painting —”

  His phone rang, interrupting him before he could bring the conversation around to a question he wanted to ask. She stood up quietly, waving a finger at him as she headed for a shaded corner of the garden.

  It was Wang, chairman of the Writers’ Association in Beijing. Wang told Chen that Diao, the author of Rain and Cloud in Shanghai, had attended a literary conference in Qinghai, but at the end of the meeting, Diao had gone somewhere else instead of returning to Shanghai. At Chen’s request, Wang promised to continue his efforts to find out the exact whereabouts of Diao.

  Closing the phone, Chen looked around to see Jiao squatting in the corner, plucking weeds and twigs with her bare hands, her overalls daubed with paint and her bare feet dotted with soil, like a hardworking gardener. Or like someone living in the mansion, taking care of her own garden.

  It was a poignant image: a blossoming girl silhouetted against the ruins of an old garden, her bare shoulders dazzlingly white in the afternoon sunlight, the sky dappled with drifting clouds like sails, the smell of the grass rising in a fresh breeze.

  She was vivacious, and smart too, in spite of her lack of good education. He wished he could come to know her better, watching the curve of her slender bottom as she leaned over her work. But it was a Mao case, he told himself again, and he had only about one week left — the deadline set by Internal Security. He had to “approach” her more effectively.

  He got up and moved over, squatting beside her, joining in the work. There was a bunch of uprooted weeds by her feet.

  “Sorry about the phone call. I was enjoying our talk.”

  “So was I.”

  “There’s no party here this evening, Jiao?”

  “No.”

  “I would love to stay longer,” he said, glancing at his watch, “but I have some urgent business to take care of. But it won’t take long. If you don’t have anything this evening, how about continuing our talk over dinner?”

  “Well, that would be nice, but —”

  “Then let’s do it,” he said, his eyes holding hers momentarily. “There is a restaurant not far from here. It used to be Madam Chiang’s residence.”

  “You’re so into the past. The food is not that great, I’ve heard, and the restaurant is expensive. Still, many people want to go there.”

  “They want to imagine themselves as President Chiang Kai-shek or Madam Chiang — for an hour or so — over a cup of sparkling wine. Illusion cannot be too expensive.”

  “Oh horror!”

  “What do you mean, Jiao?”

  “Why can’t people be themselves?”

  “In Buddhist scripture, everything is appearance, including one’s self,” Chen said, rising. “The restaurant is very close. You can walk there. So I’ll see you this evening.”

  Striding out of the premises, he saw a middle-aged man loitering outside the small café, looking stealthily across the street. Possibly an Internal Security man, Chen thought, though he hadn’t seen him before. If so, Internal Security would soon witness him and Jiao sitting together at a candlelight dinner and report back that the romantic chief inspector was making his “approach.”

  After all, it was like a couplet in t
he Dream of the Red Chamber, “When the true is false, the false is true. Where there is nothing, there is everything.”

  Jiao saw in Xie’s painting something not only invisible to others but also closely connected to Xie’s life. Chen thought of the book Ling had sent him; in it, critics claimed to have discovered evidence of Eliot’s personal crisis in the manuscript of The Waste Land — his future as a poet uncertain, his marriage on rocks, and his wife a neurotic drag. According to them, the water in the poem could signify what the poet didn’t have in his life, metaphysically as well as physically —

  He was struck by an idea — not exactly new, since it had actually crossed his mind the night that he was assigned the Mao Case. That night, in the midst of a confusion of ideas, he had thought of the connection between Li Shangyin’s life and his poetry. That was why he scribbled the word poetry on the matchbox before falling asleep. Only he had forgotten its relevance to the Mao Case by the next morning.

  It was the possibility of learning something through Mao’s poetry. Not just as a critic, but as a detective. In spite of all the revolutionary messages in Mao’s poems, some of the lines must have come from his personal experience and impulses, consciously or subconsciously, untold and previously unknown to the public. If Old Hunter could manage to dig out the personal stuff behind Mao’s poem to Kaihui, Chen should be able to do a better job, given his training in literary criticism.

  So he really did have some urgent business to take care of, as he had told Jiao, before joining her for dinner. He turned onto a side street, taking a short cut to the subway station, where, in a medium-sized bookstore in the underground mall, he would start searching for all the books about Mao’s poems, like a devoted Maoist.

  EIGHT

  DETECTIVE YU WOKE EARLY Sunday morning and reached for his wife Peiqin, but she wasn’t in bed beside him. Probably shopping, he guessed. She would usually go to the market early on Sunday morning.

  He thought he heard a muffled sound outside the door. The building was old and housed many families — it was likely some residents were already up and moving. He didn’t get up. Reaching for a cigarette, he went over in his mind what he had done for the last few days.

  With the Party’s emphasis on “a harmonious society,” the bureau suddenly had a new focus. Several cases were assigned to the special case squad, temporarily under Yu during Chen’s leave. Those cases didn’t seem that special to Yu, but Party Secretary Li saw them in a different light. For instance, the squad was told to keep an eye on a “troublemaking” journalist who tried to expose the officials involved, directly or even indirectly, in a corruption case. Li’s lecture for the job was delivered in the name of “political stability” as a precondition for the “harmonious society,” condemning the journalist’s efforts, which could cause people to lose their faith in the Party. Yu didn’t have his heart in those assignments. Keeping an eye on someone didn’t necessarily mean seeing something, or doing something, as he told himself again, taking a long pull at his cigarette.

  His mind wandered off to the unannounced “vacation” for Chief Inspector Chen. It wasn’t the first time Chen had taken such a vacation, but it was the first time he had done so without saying anything about it to Yu. On the contrary, Chen had contacted Yu’s father, Old Hunter, instead.

  According to the retired officer, Chen’s decision was utterly understandable. Too much risk was involved. “Some knowledge can really kill, son.”

  But Yu felt terribly let down. He should have been told about what kind of an assignment it was. He had worked with Chen on many cases, weathering storms in the same boat. What was more frustrating was that even Old Hunter begrudged him the necessary information, hemming and hawing while trying to enlist him to help. And even that was only because of Yu’s personal connection to Hong, the neighborhood committee cop in charge of the Jiling district. Old Hunter had likely already approached Hong without success. So it was up to Yu to do a background check on someone named Tan who had once lived in the district. In addition, Yu was told to be alert to anything seen or heard at the bureau regarding Internal Security.

  Hong had also been an “educated youth” in Yunnan Province and had joined the Shanghai police force around the same time as Yu. They had known each other for more than twenty years. Hong cooperated without asking a single question, but the information he provided only mystified Yu.

  In the mid-seventies, Tan, the only son of a capitalist family, tried to sneak across the border to Hong Kong in the company of his girlfriend Qian, also of black family background. They were caught making the attempt. Tan was so badly beaten that he killed himself, leaving a note in which he shouldered all the responsibility, trying to shelter his girlfriend from the consequences of their act. It was an unquestioned suicide, and an understandable one too. For such a “crime,” Tan could have spent his next twenty or thirty years rotting in prison.

  Tan’s parents died shortly thereafter. Qian died a couple of years later. A sad story, but how someone who had died twenty years ago could have any bearing on Chen’s assignment today, Yu failed to understand.

  He didn’t stop there, though. He went on to look into the background of Peng, another lover of Qian’s. The initial check yielded little. In those years, it was a crime for people to have sex without a marriage license, and Peng was sentenced to five years for his affair with Qian, a woman then ten years his senior. He never recovered. Nor had he had a regular job since his release. If there were anything remarkable at all about Peng, it would be his ability to muddle along all these years.

  Yu had no idea how any of this could be helpful to Chen, who could have easily gotten the same information with a couple of phone calls.

  In the meantime, Yu had heard nothing concerning the movements of Internal Security, at least not within the bureau. There was something unusual about the quiet. Party Secretary Li’s reticence about Chen’s leave spoke volumes about it. Yu ground out his cigarette, more confused than before, and lonely too.

  Then, in spite of himself, he dozed off before putting the ashtray out of sight.

  When he opened his eyes again, Peiqin was in the room, half sitting, half squatting on a wooden stool, plucking the feathers from a chicken in a plastic basin full of hot water. A bamboo-covered thermos bottle stood beside. There was also a basket full of vegetables and soybean product on the floor.

  “The common kitchen area is too crowded,” she said, glancing up at him, then at the ashtray on the nightstand.

  So the sound he had heard earlier outside the door could have been the chicken struggling in Peiqin’s hand. It was too late, now for him to hide the ashtray.

  “Where is Qinqin?” he asked.

  “Group study with his schoolmates. He left early and won’t be back until late in the evening.”

  Lifting his towel blanket, Yu sat up. “Let me help, Peiqin.”

  “You have said that since our ‘educated youth’ days in Yunnan, but have you ever helped with a chicken?”

  “But I did in Yunnan, at least once — I ‘acquired’ a chicken in the middle of the night, remember?” He was pleased that she didn’t bring up the issue of his smoking first thing in the morning.

  “Shame on you! For a cop to talk about that.”

  “I wasn’t a cop then.” He smiled in spite of himself. During their “educated youth” years in Yunnan Province when they were poor and starved, Yu once stole a chicken from a Dai farmer during the night, and Peiqin cooked it in stealth.

  Today, in the morning light, her bare arms were specked with the chicken blood, just like so many years ago. He fought down the temptation to light another cigarette.

  “It’s almost over,” she said. “We’re going to have home-grown hen soup today. You and Qinqin have been working so hard.”

  As a rule, Peiqin didn’t put something special on the dinner table unless their son Qinqin was at home. It was an unwritten rule Yu understood well. Nothing was spared in support of Qinqin’s effort to get into a good colle
ge, which would be crucial to his future in the new China.

  “A chicken soup, plus carp filet fried with tomato and shepherd purse blossom mixed with tofu,” Peiqin said with a happy smile. “Because it is Sunday, you may have a cup of Shaoxing yellow wine too.”

  “But you don’t have to get a live chicken. It’s too troublesome.”

  “You haven’t learned anything from your gourmet boss. He would tell you that there is world of difference between a live home-grown chicken and a frozen one from the so-called chicken farm.”

  “How could you be wrong, Peiqin, with even Chief Inspector Chen supporting your chicken choice?”

  “Now you can help me by lying on the bed, and not smoking. It’s Sunday morning. You have hardly had the time to talk to me lately.”

  “But you’ve been busy too.”

  “Don’t worry about me. Soon Qinqin will be in college, and I won’t be busy anymore. Well, anything new about Chen’s leave?”

  He knew she would get around to that topic, and he reached for the ashtray absentmindedly. He told her what he had learned, mainly from Old Hunter.

  “Perhaps Chen chose Old Hunter,” she said finally, “because your father isn’t a cop anymore, and no one will pay close attention to him.”

  “But Old Hunter also withheld information from me.”

  “He either doesn’t know, or he must have his reasons. Now, what has the old man been up to?”

  “He has been busy patrolling somewhere — shadowing somebody, I believe. But if not for my connection to Hong, Old Hunter might not have let me do anything.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “I just did a background check on two men linked to a woman named Qian, who died about twenty years ago in a traffic accident. Of the two men, the older one, Tan, died two years before she did — suicide. There was nothing suspicious about the circumstances of his death. As for the second, Peng, he’s a nobody, one of those jobless loafers you see everywhere nowadays.”

  “Then, why all the fuss?” She put the pair of stainless-steel tweezers in the plastic basin. “Who is Old Hunter shadowing?”