A Case of Two Cities

4

IN THE FIRST GRAY of the morning, Chen felt as if he were waking out of the ancient battle of iron-clad horses galloping through the ignorant night, and coming back to reality again. As a cop, he could put himself at risk, but not his mother.

There are things a man should do, and there are things a man should not do.

Nothing should happen to his mother. That was the bottom line for the son who, though far from being a Confucianist, remembered that Confucian maxim.

He brushed his teeth vigorously. There was a bitter, ammonia-like taste in his mouth. For years, he had let his mother down, time after time. Through his career choice, his political allegiance, and his personal life. She had dreamed of her son pursuing an academic career like her late husband, staying away from politics, and settling down with a family of his own. She did not care about his Party position. It was only of late-while she was in the hospital-that he and his position proved capable of providing for her, at least materialistically. Now, because of his position, she would not even be able to enjoy her remaining days peacefully, like an ordinary old woman.

According to another Confucian principle, however, one might occasionally find oneself unable to fulfill political and filial duty at the same time. If so, the former should take the priority. And his mother, though not the scholar his late Confucianist father was, would not forgive him for backing away from his investigation because of her.

He had to find a way to pursue the investigation without exposing his mother to danger. But that seemed impossible. His work was no longer a secret to Xing’s circle. His next interview would be like a declaration of war among those officials.

He dug out a copy of Thirty-Six Battle Strategies, a book of war stratagems over a thousand years old. Lighting a cigarette, he searched the table of contents before turning to a chapter entitled “Cutting through Chen Trail in Stealth,” which was about a battle in the early Han dynasty. General Han built a bridge, leading the enemy forces to believe he intended to maneuver his troops across it, but then he took a trail called Chen Cang instead and surprised them.

The chief inspector had to find his own Chen trail. He was going to focus on the people considered unlikely as interviewees. No one would suspect that he was trying to break the case through them. In the meantime, he would start making formal phone calls, scheduling interviews with the officials on his list, but he would not approach them the same way as Dong. They would conclude that Chen was merely putting on a show.

He took out the list before he started to brew a pot of coffee. It was the last spoonful from the jar of Brazilian coffee an American friend had given him. Hongyan zhiji. He whistled wistfully into a bitter smile. He had already kept the coffee for a long period, and eventually, it would have lost all its flavor.

It was a long list. Xing had an incredible reach of social contacts. Some of them, however, were hardly connections. “Nodding acquaintances” would perhaps be a more appropriate phrase. They were the people of little relevance to his business.

As he took a sip of the fresh coffee, going through the list again, a name jumped out as if printed in red.

Qiao Bo.

Qiao had met Xing only once the previous year. Their meeting was mentioned in local newspapers, for Xing donated twenty thousand yuan to Qiao. Not a large sum. Like a single hair from an ox, but it was much reported, as an “entrepreneur’s generous support to a patriotic project.” It was all because of a book entitled China Can Stand Up in Defiance, of which Qiao was the author. Not an academic book, it appealed to popular sentiment and became a national best-seller.

Chen happened to know Qiao, however, against a totally different backdrop. In the early eighties, a self-styled postmodernist poet, Qiao put his works into a manuscript and approached Chen for a preface. His poems attracted a number of young students, but postmodernism was not considered politically acceptable. As a member of the Writers’ Association, Chen declined to write the preface. Qiao later attracted far more attention when he went to jail for his “corrupt bourgeois lifestyle.” Newspapers came up with lurid stories of his seducing girls in his dorm room. According to his roommates, however, it was those girls that went after him-a young, handsome, romantic poet. Nothing but consensual sex. But Qiao was sentenced to seven or eight years.

Chen was then an entrance-level police officer, and there was little he could do about it. Afterward, he heard nothing about Qiao until the early nineties. Out of jail, Qiao became a bookseller. A poet no longer seemed like a prince on a white horse riding into the dreams of young girls. Poetry, if anything, became synonymous with poverty. Selling books in a store converted out of his one single residential room, Qiao wrote China Can Stand Up in Defiance, with a subtitle, The Strategic Choice in the New Global Age. It was a project developed out of his business sensibility, for he sensed a need in the market. The book received favorable reviews, and Qiao knew how to “stir-fry”-how to attract public attention. With the forever-turning wheel of fortune, Qiao came once more into the limelight, only it did not last long this time. When the waves of nationalism gained too much momentum, the Beijing government intervened. The book was not banned, but once all the official media was hushed, it soon fell from the best-seller list. Then numerous new books on similar topics came out, quickly overwhelming Qiao’s.

Xing had met Qiao before the book had fallen out of the market’s favor.

Chen stood up, searched the bookshelf for a long while, and dug out a dust-covered book. It was Qiao’s poetry collection, for which he could have written the preface. He turned over several pages to a love poem and skipped to the last two stanzas:

Not a bad poem, written through a female persona. Rereading it, Chen thought he could understand Qiao’s popularity among those girls in the eighties.

Chen decided not to approach Qiao in a conventional way. It was not easy for an ex-poet-or an ex-convict-to survive, and an investigation in the name of the Party Discipline Committee would not make things any easier for his business. So instead of a bureau car, Chen took a taxi to go and visit him.

The bookstore was located on Fuyou Road, one of the few remaining pebble-covered streets in the Old City area. Chen told the driver to stop one block away. Fuyou was a street lined with booths, kiosks, stands, barrows, and shabby stores on both sides. Several stores appeared to be makeshift extensions, or conversions, out of the former residential rooms. A few peddlers did business on wooden tables or white cloths set out on the sidewalk.

It was an age when everything could be put up on sale, and everywhere, too.

He stepped into the bookstore, which consisted of two sections. One selling so-called antiques, and the other selling books.

The antique section exhibited a hodgepodge of objects. A time-yellowed picture of an old woman shuffling in her bound feet along the Qing trail, a long brass opium pipe immortalized with the moss of ages, a cigarette box card of a Shanghai courtesan flashing her thighs through the high slits of her floral cheongsam. To his surprise, things as recent as the Cultural Revolution were also marked as antiques, cramming a whole glass counter. A stamp of Marshal Lin Biao standing with Chairman Mao on the Tiananmen Gate. Lin was killed shortly afterward in an unsuccessful coup. The stamp was now marked as worth ten thousand Yuan. There was an impressive collection of Chairman Mao badges-plastic or metal-copies of the Little Red Book of Mao’s Quotations, the four-volume Collected Works of Chairman in the first edition…

Next to the collection of the Cultural Revolution, Chen saw a poster of Dietrich in Shanghai Express. This city seemed to be suddenly lost in a collective nostalgia for the twenties and thirties, an allegedly golden period of exotic and exuberant fantasies. Things from those days were being discovered and rediscovered with a passion. The poster stood as a plastic-covered valuable, fetching a much higher price than a larger portrait of Chairman Mao standing on Tiananmen Square.

Chen took a bamboo shopping basket. He picked a stainless steel lighter in the shape of a Little Red Book, marked for only five yuan. He also chose something like a large plastic Mao badge with a long red silk string attached. Possibly a pendant, but the red string was too short.

Looking up, he saw a middle-aged man in a traditional Tang jacket in a corner partially sheltered by a bookshelf. He recognized him to be none other than Qiao. Qiao, who had changed a great deal, deeply wrinkled like a shrunken gourd, did not come over. Perhaps what Chen had chosen were merely cheap imitation antiques.

Chen then walked toward several special-price bookshelves with some of the books marked as eighty to ninety percent off. Qiao moved over, drawing his attention to a section marked “beauty authors.”

“A lot of people buy these books,” Qiao said.

Not because of those glamorous authors on the covers, Chen knew, but because of the pornographic contents-allegedly autobiographical. Like Lei Lei, the author of Darling, Darling, whose cover bore a blurb praising the book as “a lush, lustful account of her sexual experience with three Americans.” Or like Jun Tin, the author of Peacocks, notorious through her fight with Lei Lei for the number one Chinese-female-Henry-Miller title. With the first lessening of the government censorship, books featuring sexual descriptions turned into the hottest product. Surprisingly, there was a bronze ancient monster crouching on top of that particular shelf, as if moving out of a Chinese myth.

“American Lover by Rain Cloud,” Qiao said, picking up a book. “Graphic description of the sexual ecstasy between a Chinese woman and her American lover. The book has caused a sensation because the alleged protagonist’s daughter sued the author. Rain settled the case for a large sum, but guess what-the book was then reprinted to roaring success, bringing in far more than what she paid.”

“How?” Chen said.

“She claimed that the trial was orchestrated by the government. Once a writer was ‘persecuted,’ her book sold like hotcakes. It was translated into five foreign languages. People are contrarily curious. Not to mention all the lurid details, much reported during the trial.”

“What a shameless profiteer!”

“Is there any ashamed profiteer? Look at that paragraph. ‘They write not with their pens, but with their pussies,’“ Qiao read aloud from a newspaper clipping taped above the book.

“Well, what else can you say?” Chen picked a couple of different books at random and put them into the bamboo basket.

“Look at this red silk string, so cute,” Qiao said, noticing the other chosen objects in the basket. “You can hang it in your car.”

“Are Shanghai people so nostalgic for the old days?”

“Are you a professor or a PhD?” Qiao’s wrinkles seemed to be expanding in surprise.

“Ah-” That was an allusion to a popular saying: As poor as a professor, as silly as a PhD. “I wish I could be either one.”

“Traffic is so terrible. Numerous accidents. Taxi drivers are superstitious. To them, the evil spirits must have been let loose on the roads.”

“So people believe in Mao’s posthumous power as a protector?”

“Oh, you must be cracking another international joke!” Qiao shook his head violently in mock disbelief. “Little evil spirits are afraid only of big evil spirits. Who do you think is the number one evil spirit?”

“Mao?”

“Now, you are not that dumb. I was just joking, of course. The books you have picked are not bad at all.”

“I have another stupid question,” Chen said. “These books sell well. Then why at such a discount?”

“Because they sell so well, pirated copies come in incredibly large quantities.”

“I see,” Chen said. Some private-run bookstores had no scruples about ordering through dubious distribution channels, with tons of pirated copies coming in, ending up in the special-price section. “So these books are sold illegally here.”

“What do you mean?” Qiao demanded sharply. “All the private bookstores are the same. How else can they make money in today’s market?”

“I’m not concerned with other bookstores, Qiao,” Chen said, producing his business card. “I think we need to talk.”

“Now I recognize you,” Qiao said, staring hard at the card. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Chief Inspector Chen. You didn’t come to my store to buy discount books, did you?”

“You are not that dumb.”

“There are many booksellers like me. You don’t have to be so hard on me, Chen,” Qiao said in a pleading voice. “I’m down and out, like a dog already drowning in dirty water. Do you have the heart to beat it to death?”

“You have not lost your poetic metaphors, Qiao. Let’s open the door to the mountains. Your books are not my business-pirated or not-but I need to ask you some questions about Xing.”

“About Xing? You mean that bastard in the headlines?”

“Yes. You met him last year, right?”

“I did, but I haven’t seen him for more than a year. If you’ve come here because of Xing, go ahead. Any question you want to ask, Chief Inspector Chen.”

There was no mistaking Qiao’s willingness to collaborate. Qiao had not met with Xing for a period of time, as Chen had learned from the file. There must have been a reason.

“What an exploiter!” Qiao went on indignantly. “Xing just played a cheap PR trick at my expense.”

“Please explain it for me, Qiao.”

“When China Can Stand Up in Defiance was a national hit, he arranged a meeting at the Shanghai Hotel. The meeting was reported in newspapers-the generous support promised by a successful entrepreneur to a struggling writer. But when the initial sensation of the book ebbed, he did not keep any of his words.”

“What did he promise you?”

“The larger check he had promised never came. Among other things, a three-bedroom apartment, which disappeared into the air like a yellow crane in that Tang poem.”

“He offered to buy you an apartment?”

“No, he said he would give me one when the construction was completed, but then he didn’t contact me anymore. I called him several times. He never returned my calls, not a single time.”

“Did he put down anything-black and white on paper?”

“No. The sum he gave me there and then was only two thousand yuan. Like a pathetic, meatless bone thrown to a starving dog.”

“Now about the construction project-his own property in Shanghai?”

“That I don’t know. But it sounded like it.” Qiao said with a frown, “Let me think. ‘I’ll talk to my little brother about it. And he’ll give you the apartment key as soon as the complex is done.’ I think that’s what he said-or something like that.”

“Anything else can you remember about your meeting with Xing?”

“We met in a restaurant at the hotel. He talked most of the time. He had a young secretary with blond hair, dyed, and a tall bodyguard. The little secretary made notes of our conversation. She talked to the reporters afterward, I think. That’s about all I remember.”

“Frankly, I don’t think you were involved with Xing. But if you can think of anything else about him, let me know. You have my phone number.”

“If I can remember anything.”

“I still want to buy this stuff,” Chen said, taking out his wallet. “As for your bookstore business, it is not my concern, but it could be somebody else’s. You are clever enough to run a decent and profitable bookstore, like the West Wind. You might also try to contact the Writers’ Association for help.”

“Are you an executive member there?”

“Yes. I’ll put in a word for you,” Chen added, “because I did not write the preface. I remember.”

“Thank you. I’ll think about it.”

“I’ll come here to buy books. Good books. See you.”

When Chen stepped out of the bookstore, instead of getting into a taxi immediately, he decided to walk for a while.

The meeting between Xing and Qiao was perhaps no more than a PR trick-on Xing’s part. It was no surprise that Xing didn’t keep his word to Qiao, whose value disappeared once his book dropped off the best-seller list. So there was hardly any possibility of Qiao knowing about Xing’s business practice here. So far, the strategy of cutting through the Chen trail wasn’t working.

After crossing He’nan Road, he turned onto Shandong Road. Like Fuyou Road, it was lined with peddlers’ booths. Absentmindedly, he almost bumped into a booth of sugar-covered hawthorn when he saw a girl biking out of a winding lane, carrying books on her bike rack, riding swiftly past as on a breath of wind. She was obviously not bothered by the street commerce.

It reminded him of a scene in Beijing, years earlier, of a young girl gliding out of a hutong by the white and black sihe style houses, a lone peddler selling orange paper wheels, old people practicing tai chi, a pigeon’s whistle trailing in the clear sky, the girl’s bike bell spilling into the tranquil air… For a moment, it was as if he were back in his college years, standing on a street corner near Xisi subway station, when life seemed to be still so simple. He bought a stick of sugar-covered hawthorn, which was rare for that time of year.

He took a bite of the hawthorn, which tasted different than he remembered. There was no stepping back into the river for a second time. Chief Inspector Chen had to move on.

But why should Xing have chosen to make such a gesture to Qiao? It was a controversial book. Perhaps not a lot to gain from such a gesture for a businessman like Xing. Or could it have been done for somebody else who, much higher in Beijing, favored the nationalist stance? That was possible, but unsupported.

Then Chen thought of something said by Xing-”little brother.” It was a term that referred to one’s younger brother, or to someone in a triad organization, perhaps a member lower in the rank. Xing had no younger brother, but for such a businessman, a triad connection was not unimaginable. Possibly one of his gang buddies from Fujian was doing business in Shanghai.

He dialed Old Hunter, who had once worked on a case in Fujian in the sixties. That was probably how the old man had learned about Detective Hua’s death-through his own channels there.

“I’ll find out for you,” Old Hunter said without asking why, “who this ‘little brother’ could be. I still have some friends there who acknowledge my old face. It’s not a world of rats yet, red or black.”

“Be careful, Uncle. Don’t let anyone suspect your interest in Xing’s case. Not a single word about my investigation.”

“You don’t have to tell me that, Chief. I have been a hunter for years, and a hunter never retires.”

“I really appreciate your help.”

“You don’t have to say that. Hua was an old friend of mine. If I ask questions there, people will simply think me a retired old busybody.” Old Hunter added after a pause, “That’s the least I can do for him. You be careful, Chief Inspector Chen. I’m old, but you are still young.”