A Case of Two Cities

7

AN DID NOT COME or call the following day, nor the day after it, as she had promised.

Chen did not want to think too much about it. He tried to put his father’s calligraphy scroll on the wall. Liu Zhongyuan was a great Tang poet, and like some of his contemporary intellectuals, Liu had been politically disappointed- with those red rats controlling the court-but it was in his exile that he wrote his best poems. Chen wondered whether this could be the reason why he wrote so little of late. Then his mind wandered away, thinking of several lines by another Tang dynasty poet who also wrote in his down-and-out days:

Chen recalled those lines in a self-depreciative mood. But he was not exactly worried. There was no telling whether Ming was still hiding in the city, and it would take time for An to find out. Still, she would cooperate. After all, he had the pictures in his hands.

In the meantime, he kept himself busy interviewing other officials on the list. He made a point of being perfunctory and polite, never pushing anyone too far. The message would be clear: he had learned the risks involved from Director Dong and now Chief Inspector Chen was merely putting on a show-that’s all it was.

He also made inquiries into Ming’s business-through his personal connections, under the excuse of apartment hunting. He had been talking about buying his mother an apartment for some time, so his questions about real estate companies seemed natural. Ming having disappeared, his company had gone temporarily into disarray, but the housing project was said to be moving forward with no real disruption. Before his mysterious evaporation, Ming sold the company to someone named Pan Hao. Pan was a mystery man, allegedly from Beijing, with several large companies under his name. So the financial future of the new company seemed to be secure.

He got a call from Detective Yu in the afternoon.

“In a press conference held yesterday,” Yu said, “Party Secretary Li bragged and boasted about your work under the Party Discipline Committee.

“What? He promised not to tell anyone about it!”

“He mentioned you as our ace detective, and your assignment as another proof of the government’s determination to fight corruption.”

“It’s really becoming a part of a show, as you’ve said.”

“The publicity won’t do you any good.”

“No, it won’t. But my assignment is probably no longer a secret after my talk with Director Dong. Not in that circle anymore.”

“Director Dong-any new development?”

“Not yet,” Chen said. “I’ll keep you posted.”

For quite a long while afterward, Chen remained upset with the news. Why should Party Secretary Li have trumpeted his investigation like that? It was putting him on the grill of public attention. Not to mention the political.

He made a few more calls for interview appointments.

An still didn’t call. Chen gazed at the scroll and lit a cigarette. The ashtray was already full. It was shaped like a shell, as if trying to catch a message from the distant oceans. He was seized with a portentous feeling. She should have touched base with him, progress or not. So he called her. No one answered. Neither in her office, nor at her home.

Around six o’clock, he opened a can of Qingdao beer with a pop, and again dialed her home number. It was answered by an unfriendly, unfamiliar male voice.

“Who are you?”

“Oh, I’m a friend of hers,” Chen answered. It was not her husband Han, that much Chen could tell immediately.

“A friend of hers-” the man said. “What’s your name?”

Chen wondered whether it could be someone she was seeing-possibly none other than Jiang. But the way the man asked the question was ridiculous. Whoever Chen was, the man had no reason to be jealous. An was probably not at home, otherwise she would not have permitted another to talk like this.

“What’s that to you?” Chen said, ready to hang up. “I’ll call back later.”

“Don’t hang up, man. It’s useless. I’ve got your number.”

That was strange. Caller ID was still something rare in the city. She might have it at home, but what could the man do? Chen took a gulp of the cold beer and said, “What do you mean?”

“Tell me who you are, and your identification card number too, or we’ll find out, and then it will be big trouble for you.”

“Are you a cop?”

“What the hell do you think I am?”

“What do you think I am?” Chen snapped.

“Listen”-the man at the other end of the line raised his voice-”I am Sergeant Kuang of the Shanghai Police Bureau.”

“Listen-I am Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Bureau.”

“What-oh, I am so sorry, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen. It’s like the flood washing away the Temple of the Dragon King.”

“What has happened, Kuang?”

“An Jiayi was killed early this morning.”

“What?” Chen was stunned. “So you are there in charge of the homicide case?”

“Yes. I’ve just arrived.”

“Where was her body found?”

“At home. She was supposed to appear at the TV station in the afternoon, but she did not turn up. People called everywhere, without success. She had never missed a show before. According to the secretary at her PR company, An complained about not feeling so well the last few days. So the station sent someone over to her home, and they discovered her body.

“Don’t move the body or do anything,” Chen said. “I’m on my way.”

“I won’t. Celebrity cases can be too tough for our ordinary homicide squad.”

Chen detected the sarcasm in the response. Kuang wasn’t eager for his cooperation. Every now and then, Chen’s special case squad had to take over the politically sensational cases-which was not pleasant for him. Still, such a division of labor was far from pleasant for people in the homicide squad too, depriving them of the limelight as it did.

The traffic was bad, as usual. Along Yen’an Road, the taxi simply crawled, like a disoriented ant. It had grown dark when the taxi finally arrived at the high-end apartment complex on Wuzhong Road. There were a couple of guards standing at the entrance. Apparently it was a secure, high-class neighborhood.

The apartment building in question had already been roped off. A man in plainclothes standing near the entrance recognized the chief inspector, nodding vigorously, but Chen failed to place him.

Kuang was waiting for Chen outside the apartment on the third floor, waving a newspaper like a fan. A short skinny man in his early thirties, Kuang had protruding eyes like a special kind of goldfish Chen had seen in his childhood.

Chen went up and said, “Well?”

“Doctor Xia has come and left,” Kuang said. “According to him, she was strangled to death early in the morning. Possibly around two o’clock. Having had sex shortly before. Rape of some sort. The criminal used a condom.”

“That’s uncommon in the best area of Shanghai. The murderer might not have been a stranger to her.”

“That’s possible. He could have committed the crime after having consensual sex with her. There is no sign of forced entry, no bruises on her body, no noise heard by the neighbors. The location of the apartment complex makes the scenario of a stranger breaking in hardly possible.”

It was not unimaginable for a woman like her, with a husband away in Germany for years, to have a lover, in the city of Shanghai, in the nineties. She had had one, at least, Chen knew.

He walked with Kuang into the bedroom, where her body had not been moved yet. On her back on the carpet, An lay spread-eagled, wrapped in a white terry robe that slipped high up, revealing her bare thighs and belly. Her silk lace panties were removed, not torn, but rumpled into a ball beside her. Her face turned to one side, already bluish under the light. He noticed that her skin was slightly waxy. Her fingernails and toenails, painted scarlet, looked unbroken, unsoiled.

He had seen her numerous times on TV, always elegantly dressed, reading the news with a halo of political correctness. He had never imagined his last image of her would be like this. It would perhaps haunt him for a long time.

He knelt down and gazed into her eyes, which stared back, unblinking. The corneas appeared cloudy, which reinforced Dr. Xia’s estimate of the time of death. He studied her face for a minute before touching her eyelids. He muttered almost inaudibly, “I’ll catch the murderer, An.”

To his astonishment, her eyes closed slowly, as if in response to his words.

“Wow! It’s like in those old stories,” Kuang exclaimed in a low, shocked voice. “Your touch worked the miracle.”

In a story Chen had heard long ago, a murdered woman refused to close her eyes until someone swore her revenge. Kuang, too, must have heard it. Chen was also aware of the consternation implied in Kuang’s comment. For in that particular tale, the man who swore her revenge was romantically involved with her. It wasn’t the moment, however, for Chen to be concerned about his colleague’s interpretation.

He remained standing beside her, staring, trying and failing to imagine what could have crossed her mind in her last moment. The effort was momentous to him, sort of establishing a bond of pledge between the living and the dead.

Beside him, Kuang started elaborating his theory of a rape murder case in detail.

Chen listened, nodding, his eyes now fixed on An’s family picture in a crystal frame on the nightstand. An, Han, and their son, all of them smiling and basking in the happy sunlight on the Bund. Possibly taken in the days before Han’s departure to Germany, their marriage probably already on the rocks. The picture still told a story expected by the camera. Smile- click-done. But the fact that the picture remained on the nightstand in her last days saddened Chen.

The scene behind An’s family might not be far away from Golden Island, for he noticed the neon sign of Kentucky Chicken, which had enjoyed a tremendous success in Shanghai, in a colonial building at the corner between Yen’an and Zhongshan Roads. The building had been named East Wind Restaurant in the seventies, and even earlier, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was the Shanghai Club, a prestigious establishment that catered to English expatriates and featured the longest bar in the world at the time. Whatever its names, the building had a much longer life.

Chen did not say anything to Kuang. An’s death must be related to the Xing investigation, but he saw no point discussing it with the young cop.

Kuang might have been baffled by the inscrutable chief inspector, who made little response to his analysis. For Kuang, there were also earlier questions left unanswered. Chen’s call to her, for one.

When the morgue people came to carry away the body, Chen said to Kuang that he would like to stay there for a while, alone. Kuang nodded and left in respectful confusion.

Chen stepped out onto a tiny balcony overlooking the area. It was a high-end subdivision. Down there were parking spaces outlined for the residents. He didn’t know which car was hers. He then noticed a broken guitar, apparently long untouched, dust-covered, in a corner of the balcony. Once again, a poem came to him out of the unlikely moment, this one by Li Bai, a Tang dynasty poet from hundreds of years earlier.

Chief Inspector Chen was not intent on searching the room one more time. Had there been something important, it must have been taken away. Still, he wanted to hang on there.

He pulled out the small drawer of the nightstand. Among some scrap papers was an address book. Its cover bore the faded emblem of the TV station with the year 1982 printed. He opened it and found it belonged to Han. Most of the addresses and phone numbers must be outdated. On a page he saw a quote from the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities. It was perhaps in their reading-group days. The address book might have been there only for sentimental reasons. Still, he put it in his pocket.

Now, in the room where she had spent her last days, he chose to see her life in a new light. He did not want to see An simply as someone in a corruption case. Her involvement was admittedly a mistake on her part, but could she have done all that because of her loneliness? People had to keep themselves busy with one thing or another, like himself. A public relations company might not have been a bad idea in itself, and it was natural for someone in PR to work with businesspeople like Ming. As for her personal life, Chen thought he was no judge-he knew he wouldn’t like to be judged by others.

What would her life have been like if things had remained as they were in their reading-group days? Both An and Han might have been here, like so many others. A contented wife, opening a colorful career album over the weekend…

He pulled himself back from these useless thoughts. Some people had complained in the bureau that Chen wasn’t meant to be a cop-and perhaps he was indeed still too romantic for such a career.

But it was a battle of life and death now. An was not innocent, but she could have lived with her problems. It was his investigation that had led to her death. And the least he could, and should, do was to bring the criminal to justice for her.

Someone had forestalled him. In spite of his precautions, the path had been anticipated and blocked as soon as he had turned mistakenly pleased with his Chen trail-in targeting someone not conspicuous, and in a roundabout way. All his efforts had fallen through and he did not know which link had gone wrong. That was the terrifying part. It appeared he remained in the light, while the enemy remained in the dark, ready to pounce on him.

There were a lot of things he did not know, but he was almost sure-no use pretending to himself-that she had alarmed some people in her effort to find the whereabouts of Ming. She must have made phone calls.

So that would be the direction for him: her telephone records for the last few days. But the case was not assigned to the special case squad. His pushing Sergeant Kuang would be like attempting to cook in somebody else’s kitchen.

What was worse, if he himself was under watch, as he suspected, any steps taken by him could have consequences, not only for him. He thought of what Dong had ominously suggested.

That night, he failed to fall asleep for a long while. A cricket chirped intermittently, not too far away, rubbing its wings in a corner of the room. He stared up at the ceiling like one possessed. In his police experience, he had occasionally speculated on the possibility of investigating a victim close to him. An was not exactly close-never had been. Still, she had been nice to him in the reading-group days. More than anything else, he cherished the memories of their literary passion then.

One evening, he recollected, after their reading activity, four of them walked into a shabby ramshackle eatery near the Bund. Han, An, Ding, and he, sitting around a rough wood table. They were poor, ordering plain noodles, sharing a tiny dish of roast Beijing duck, and spending two hours over a poem, to the great annoyance of a white-haired waiter.

Tonight, the same night cloud, the same siren over the river, the same petrel flying, perhaps, as if out of a calendar, in spite of all the changes…

Lying on his bed, he also thought of Han, who by now must have learned about his wife’s death, and of Ding, who seemed to have disappeared in the south. Chen, alone, was the one still hanging on there. He should be grateful, he contemplated, for being able to do something for those not as lucky.

And he fell asleep with a new plan for his action.