A Case of Two Cities

19

IN SPITE OF HER efforts against it, Peiqin found herself getting more and more involved in the investigation.

She reflected with a self-depreciating smile as she stepped into the hot-water shop. It was located at the entrance of the lane Chen’s mother lived on. Putting on a black, soot-spotted apron, she stood beside the huge coal stove as a “temporary helper.” There was a small cracked mirror on the somber wall. Studying a slightly soot-smudged reflection, she thought she did not look too bad in her late thirties.

It was hot. One third of the shop consisted of the stove with a gigantic pot and long, serpentine pipes. It was an antique coal-devouring monster, possibly one of the last few remaining in the city. The only thing that might have kept the stove from being put into a city museum was a thermometer, supposedly showing the temperature of the boiling water. She had to shovel coal into the stove regularly.

She wiped her forehead with a smeared towel, taking another look around the room. She noticed a wood screen close to the back door. Behind the screen, there were several soft-cushioned chairs and a table covered with a plastic foam top. The space was like a private room. She wondered who would need the luxury here.

Ironically, it took Peiqin some effort to obtain a temporary position- without pay-at this shabby water shop.

It was all because of Old Hunter’s worries. Since Chen’s departure with the delegation, Old Hunter had patrolled the lane several times, and he thought he had sniffed something. Being an old-fashioned cop, however, he did not think it right for him to patrol an area too much without an official assignment. Besides, it would not be that safe for him to circle the lane time and again. He could have been recognized. So Yu wanted to patrol instead. It seemed to Peiqin that both the father and son were overreacting. As diabolical as Xing and all the red rats might be, what could they gain by hurting an old woman? If anything happened to her, Chen would surely fight back with a vengeance.

Still, Peiqin had volunteered for a day’s reconnaissance in the neighborhood. She happened to be in a position to help. She had talked so much about the legendary chief inspector to Old Geng, the owner of the private restaurant, that the latter mentioned that he was related to Chang Jiadong, the owner of a hot-water shop at that lane. So Peiqin offered to work there for one day. Both Geng and Chang proved to be very understanding. They made the arrangement for her without asking her any questions.

For the first half an hour, there was no business in the water shop. No one seemed surprised at the sight of her working there, either. With so many people laid off in the city, a middle-aged woman like Peiqin perhaps would consider herself lucky to get any kind of job.

She decided to read for a while. Nowadays she did not have much time for herself. Even in her state-run restaurant office, things had begun to change. For the sake of profit, there were three shifts instead of one, and she still had to do all the accounting by herself. She took out the dog-eared book, The Dream of the Red Chamber. It was a classic novel she had read numerous times.

She occasionally wondered why the saga of a Qing aristocratic family so appealed to her. In the novel, what happened to those beautiful, talented yet ill-fated girls was preordained, prerecorded in a mysterious register in a heavenly palace. It was fiction, she knew. She did not believe in the supernatural yin/yang arrangement that prevailed in spite of tragic human effort. But she had come to see her life as a sort of a parallel. For one thing, she had never read any mysteries in her school years during the Cultural Revolution, when she was panic-stricken at the sight of policemen like those who had taken her father away. Afterward, however, she married a police officer, and now she was becoming something like the officer’s private assistant and acting like a character in those mysteries.

But she did not think she was tragic like those characters in The Dream of the Red Chamber-”her hope as high as the sky, and her fate as thin as the paper.” She considered herself as fairly lucky; Yu working with a secure job at the bureau, and Qinqin studying hard for college. Only all of that could be jeopardized because of those “red rats”-she liked the term coined by Old Hunter. In traditional Chinese culture, red had a lot of connotations. Red was about sensual vanities of the human world, like the red chamber in the novel or the Red Tower in the Xing case. And these red rats were surely sexually depraved. She thought of those pictures of An and her man.

Failing to concentrate on the book anymore, she thought she had an excuse for putting it down. A hot-water woman holding a classic novel would attract attention. Placing the book back into her bag, she decided to look again around the lane. It might once have been a decent neighborhood, but with so many new tall buildings rising around like bamboo shoots after a spring rain, the area had turned into a shabby “forgotten corner.”

Nonetheless, it was a convenient corner. Beside the water shop was a small husband-and-wife grocery store. On the other side of the lane entrance was a public phone booth. Then she noticed something. Opposite the lane entrance across the street, there was a middle-aged peddler perching on a stool, and his goods on the white-cloth-covered ground caught her attention. Snuff bottles. She had read about snuff bottles as far back as in The Dream of the Red Chamber. People today still liked them as inexpensive imitation antiques with the painting on the inside of the glass bottle. It took a lot of training to paint with a miniature brush inserted through the tiny opening. But there were no customers there, like at the water shop. And unlike a water shop, a snuff bottle peddler usually had to station himself near a tourist attraction, like the Bund. How could the poor residents here afford to be interested in those useless bottles? Still, the peddler could be someone living in the neighborhood.

Poking at the fire, she tried to refocus her thoughts on the investigation. So far the only progress made was transcripts of An’s cell phone calls. Old Hunter had moved heaven and earth in his efforts to get them. But no matter how the father and the son cudgeled their collective brains out, the record failed to lead to anything suggestive of a possible breakthrough.

Things seemed to be getting really tough for Chen too. According to Yu, people in the bureau had been looking into the relationship between Chen and An, thereby turning him into a possible suspect. They probably would not be able to bring Chen down so easily, but a subtle suggestion of a scandal could be obnoxious enough.

Indeed, Peiqin found it hard to figure out this chief inspector. A successful survivor in the jungle of politics, he could nonetheless be stubborn, unbelievably bookish, sticking to a cop’s responsibility like his Confucianist father. And as long as Chen persisted in scouting in the woods, Yu had to stay there too.

A little girl came over with two bamboo-slice-covered thermos bottles, making one careful step after another.

“Five pennies in a bottle,” she said to Peiqin. The coins fell from her hand and sparkled in a tin can.

In her childhood, Peiqin had run the same errand for her family, with the bottles in her hands that were covered with frostbite like a map…

She then looked up to see an old couple shuffling over from a side lane. They had no kettle or thermos bottle in their hands. The man with a maze of white hair wore a rumpled black jacket, as thin as a bamboo stick, his face wrinkled, weatherbeaten as seen in a postcard of a Shanbei farmer, and the woman was much shorter, rounded like a wine barrel, in something like much-patched-up pajamas. They stepped into the shop, nodding at Peiqin, as if she had been working there all those years. Perhaps because of their cramped living conditions in the lane, the shop had become sort of a daily resort to them. They moved straight to one of the tables and seated themselves side by side on a bench. It would be understandable for customers to come here in the winter, but in the summer, Peiqin failed to understand.

They must have reached some agreement with the owner of the water shop for them to hang out there. They carried their own tea leaves, took cups from a small cabinet in the shop, filled their cups with hot water without paying a single penny. Then the old woman produced a plastic-wrapped homemade cake and put it on the table.

“Taro, you eat first.”

“You eat first, Chrysanthemum.”

Taro and Chrysanthemum sounded like their intimate nicknames, Peiqin observed. Chrysanthemum broke the cake into two, gave one half to Taro, and dipped hers into the hot tea. She started chewing it with great gusto. Eating, they chatted to each other without paying any attention to Peiqin. She had no objection to their noisy presence.

She wondered whether they had spent all their lives in this shabby lane. Whatever their life story, their little indulgence toward the end of it was no more than cups of tea and hard, cold, homemade cake in this ramshackle place. But Peiqin looked on with admiration rather than anything else. Dramatically as the world might have changed, they seemed to have a world of their own, in which they had each other.

“Holding your hand, I’ll grow old with you. “That was one of her favorite lines in the Book of Song, years earlier, when her father still had had the energy to teach her those classic poems. In the nineties, in one of the popular songs, she had heard a variation, “It’s the most romantic thing to grow old by your side,” with the image of an old couple shuffling into the distance on a karaoke screen, and wealth and fame drifting away like the clouds in the skies.

It might have little to do with being romantic, but it was infinitely touching. Peiqin was sure the old couple was hardly aware of her presence in the store, so she took out the transcript of An’s cell phone calls. She wanted to reread it. Some of the phone conversations were perhaps valuable only in the names they provided as possible leads, yet because of their high status Yu was in no position to question either the people An had spoken with or the people mentioned. Nor were the conversations really incriminating. Everyone involved could say that they knew Ming but had no clue about Ming’s relation to Xing.

But one short phone conversation intrigued Peiqin. It was between An and Bi Keqin, a senior city government official in charge of the textile industry export and import. As with other phone calls, An approached Bi directly about the whereabouts of Ming, but Bi’s answer was a strange one.

“Come on, An. How can I know? It’s like in that Tang dynasty poem. ‘You ask where the tavern is, / and the cowboy points toward apricot blossom village.’”

“Oh, thank you so much, Bi.”

[An turns off the phone.]

It was strange. In Peiqin’s circle, Chen was the only one that quoted poetry in his daily conversation. But she doubted if Chen would have quoted in a short phone conversation. And then An thanked Bi-for what?

Peiqin knew the poem. A Tang dynasty quatrain. The first two lines read: “With the continuous rain on the day of Qingming, / people feel brokenhearted, on the road. “What Bi quoted were the next two lines. In the original, whether “apricot blossom village” was the name of a tavern or the village in which the tavern was located, she failed to recollect.

Then she remembered something. In one of his investigations, Chen had quoted a poem to say what was impossible for him to say under the circumstances. If Chen had done that, so could Bi. So “apricot blossom village” might be a hint.

There was a restaurant called Apricot Blossom Pavilion on Fuzhou Road, but no Apricot Blossom Village. Nor a hotel by that name. With so many new restaurants or hotels in the city, however, she didn’t think she knew every one of them. Especially the expensive ones, since neither she nor Yu had paid much attention to them. Someone else might, she knew. She took a look out of the shop. No one was coming in its direction. She ran across to the phone booth and dialed Overseas Chinese Lu, a card-carrying gourmet owner of Moscow Suburb, and a buddy of Chief Inspector Chen.

“ Apricot Blossom Village? Oh yes, it’s an exclusive club. Not a karaoke club, but a real one,” Overseas Chinese Lu said. “Super class with the most wealthy members. The chef there used to work in the Forbidden City for Chairman Mao. Mao’s Pork is his famous special. The nutrition goes directly to the brains. Mao had to eat a large bowl of it before finding his inspiration for a national movement. You have to taste it to believe it. The pork simply melts on your tongue, and then in your brains. Also the South Central Sea Carp. The fried fish is served on the table hot with its eyes still rolling, its tail still twitching-”

“Have you been there?” She had to cut him short, knowing Overseas Chinese Lu would hardly stop once on the topic of food.

“Only one time. Obscenely expensive. Most of the people going there are club members, those new upstarts showing off or those high officials squandering money out of the government’s pockets.”

“Thanks, I think that’s all I need to know,” she said.

At least it was a possibility. For people like Ming or Xing, nothing could have been too expensive.

When she ran back to the shop, the old couple inside started talking to her.

“How much does Chang pay you?” Chrysanthemum said.

“Not much,” Peiqin said. “Better than nothing. A beggar cannot complain.”

“Don’t be too disappointed. No more than fifty yuan business a day here, I would say,” Taro said. “With more and more families having propane gas tanks at home, people do not come to the water shop like before.”

“You are right,” Peiqin said. So far she had made only ten cents. “Old Chang could turn it into a teahouse.”

“Not in our location. Poor people can’t afford it, and rich people won’t come,” Taro said. “Chang hangs on to it because people say a subway station may be built here. In that event, a store will be worth more in terms of government compensation.”

“Chang makes most of his money with the mahjong table,” Chrysanthemum said. “He charges a different price for a cup of tea.”

“I see,” Peiqin said, nodding. Mahjong had been a popular game for years. It was not exactly gambling, but it was no fun without small money put on the table. Since 1949, mahjong had been banned. Of late, however, the city government had legalized the game-on the condition that no money was visible on the table. So that’s why the screen was in the shabby water shop.

In the midst of her off-and-on talk with the old couple, Peiqin kept a lookout at the lane.

Around eleven, she saw Chen’s mother walking out of her building. The old woman was not alone, but with a tall, slender girl supporting her. Could she be Chen’s new girlfriend? There was perhaps nothing to wonder at, Peiqin thought, as far as Chen was concerned. Still, this girl looked a bit too young for him. Only in her early twenties, and too fashionable. She wore a short, sleeveless top with her belly button revealed, swaying her hips seductively in her transparent high-heeled shoes.

“What a dutiful daughter or daughter-in-law!” Peiqin said, turning toward the old couple.

“She is neither,” Taro said. “I don’t know who she is. Possibly a temporary maid hired by the old woman’s son. Chen is somebody.”

“No, not a provincial maid,” Chrysanthemum said. “Not the way she is dressed. Way too flashy.”

“The old woman seems to be very fond of her,” Peiqin said. “Her son’s girlfriend?”

“No, I don’t think so.” Chrysanthemum shook her head again. “I’ve never seen her in his company. Now that he’s visiting abroad, she comes with small and large bags in her hands. Perhaps she’s really after him. The old woman calls her White Cloud, or something like that.”

“White Cloud.” Peiqin had heard the name before. A temporary “little secretary” for Chen during a translation project not too long ago. Yu had joked about Chen’s peach blossom luck, but as far as she knew, nothing had developed out of it. And Peiqin found it hard to imagine the chief inspector growing old with the fashionable swell girl, sitting in her company in a place like the water shop. “Wow, he has hired a young girl to take care of his mother.”

“He’s a big bug, capable of doing that.” Taro took a long drink from his tea. “When he was still a nose-running kid, I already predicted a great future for him. He comes back here regularly to visit his mother.”

“Then why hasn’t he let his mother move in with him?”

“His mother won’t do so,” Chrysanthemum said. “Still a bachelor, he has numerous girlfriends knocking at his door. The old woman doesn’t want to cause him any inconvenience.”

“Well,” Peiqin said. People understandably exaggerated the lifestyle of a rising Party cadre in their imagination. Chen did not have “numerous girlfriends,” she knew. She chose not to say anything about it. After all, it was not inconceivable for a man in Chen’s position.

“His friends know what a filial son he is. So they come here too. A large number of them.”

“Really!” she said. “How do you know?”

“All those luxury cars. When they park near the lane entrance, and visitors walk into this building with bags and boxes in their hands, you can be pretty sure,” Taro said, starting to cough with a hand pressed to his mouth. “In our lane, there’s only one man with all those enviable connections.”

“For a Party official, everything is possible in this age of connections and corruptions,” Chrysanthemum said, turning back to him and patting him lightly on the back. “Everything okay?”

Peiqin did not have to comment. The old couple seemed to be withdrawing back into their own world, murmuring, in the midst of his coughing and her comforting, only to each other.

Then Peiqin looked up to see the snuff bottle peddler rising and moving after the two women. Her earlier suspicions came rushing back. No wonder he had been sitting there so contentedly-with no business at all. He was no peddler, but someone stationed there to watch for Chen’s mother. For surveillance? Peiqin did not think so. What could the old woman do? So it must be something against Chen. In retaliation for Chen’s move, or in an effort to stop Chen’s possible further move. Peiqin was inclined to the second scenario. Kidnapping the old woman to hold her as a hostage was a plausible course of action. And the peddler might strike out at any time.

Peiqin had to make a decision fast. She immediately thought of Ling-someone to contact in an emergency, as Chen had told Yu. But could that work? The water too far, and the firs too close. Things being so complicated in Beijing, hiding the old woman out of sight would perhaps be all Ling could do.

Peiqin could do that too, and more quickly.

She thought of Old Geng’s apartment, which he had just purchased without having moved in yet. With all the help she had given in the restaurant, she was sure that he would let the old woman stay there for a short while. White Cloud and she could help take care of the old woman.

In one of those stories she had heard from Yu, he had once exited through an unknown backdoor to shake off a follower during a dangerous investigation. She failed to recall the exact details. Or she might have read the story in The Song of Youth. She was momentarily confused, but that was not important. She scribbled a few lines on a piece of paper.

“I need to make another phone call,” she said to the old couple in the shop. “Can you look after the shop for me-just two or three minutes?”

“Those provincial workers may come here during lunch time,” Taro said. “They cannot afford to buy lunch at those eateries. So they buy one penny’s worth of hot water for their cold rice.”

“Come back soon,” Chrysanthemum said, looking up at the clock on the wall. “We are going back home for lunch too.”

Peiqin dialed Yu at the public phone booth. “Come in a taxi, and wait in the taxi at the back exit of the lane. His mother’s lane-you know.” Earlier, Peiqin had walked around the lane several times. She was able to reach the back lane exit through a side lane, a route invisible to anyone stationed opposite the front lane entrance.

“Why, Peiqin?”

“I’ll explain to you later.”

“Fine, I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes.”

“Wait in the taxi for me.”

By the time Peiqin made it back to the shop, the old couple was standing impatiently by the door.

“We’ll take a nap after lunch,” Chrysanthemum said. “We’ll be back around two.”

“Thank you. And see you.”

Their departure was timely. After adding more coal into the stove, Peiqin stepped out of the shop again. Sure enough, she caught a glimpse of the two women coming back toward the lane and, not too far behind them, the snuff bottle peddler. Peiqin plucked a hairpin from her hair and stepped back.

The two women were passing by the hot-water store again. Chen’s mother nodded slightly at Peiqin without showing any sign of recognizing her.

“Oh, young girl, you have just dropped something,” Peiqin exclaimed, holding out her hand.

“What?”

“A hairpin!” She made a gesture to White Cloud.

The girl was all surprise, taking over the hairpin from her hand.

“That’s-”

“You’re White Cloud, aren’t you?” Peiqin whispered in a hurry. “I’m Peiqin, Chief Inspector Chen’s friend. My husband Detective Yu Guangming is his assistant. His mother knows me too. Come back with her to the hot-water shop.”

“Oh, yes, that’s the hairpin my sister gave me,” White Cloud raised her voice. “Thank you so much.”

White Cloud was a clever girl. Instead of turning into the lane, she kept on walking with the old woman on her arm, moving past the lane entrance, strolling for another round, whispering in the old woman’s ear.

The snuff bottle peddler also passed by the shop, his head hung low, without casting a glance at Peiqin.

Peiqin then ran through the back door to the back exit of the lane. She caught a glimpse of a red taxi parked there. She hurried back, feeling guilty. She had done a lousy job for the shop. After fifteen minutes or so, she saw the two women come back. This time, they stepped into the water shop.

“A pot of good green tea,” White Cloud said.

“The best tea, and the best seat,” Peiqin said, showing them to the table behind the screen, before she leaned down to the old woman. “You still remember me, Auntie? I’m Peiqin, Detective Yu’s wife.”

“Oh, yes, in Xinya Restaurant, I remember. My son keeps saying what a wonderful wife Detective Yu has.”

“It’s an emergency. We have to move you to somewhere else. Temporarily. For the sake of your safety.”

“What-” The old woman quickly regained her composure. “Can I take something with me?”

“Don’t worry about that. We may not have the time.”

“Do whatever you think necessary, Peiqin. I sensed something, I think, before Chen left with the delegation.”

“Give this note to Yu,” Peiqin said to White Cloud. “He’s waiting for you at the back exit of the lane. He knows where to take you. You have to be with Auntie all day today. Don’t tell anybody. I’ll come over in the evening.”

“It’s for Chief Inspector Chen, I understand. I’ll do my best.”

Peiqin ran to the back door. There was no one out there. She came back to the table and showed them to the door.

It was not the end, she knew, but the beginning of her adventure.

The snuff bottle peddler was perched on the stool in the same old position, across the street, whistling a tune.