Enigma of China

THIRTEEN

The next morning, Chen went to Pingliang Road in the Yangpu District.

According to the address he had, the Weis lived on an old lane. In the early sixties, a number of “worker apartments” were built there, which were undoubtedly an improvement over the pre-1949 slums, but each apartment unit had then been partitioned and partitioned again, resulting in an entire family inhabiting one room of the original three-bedroom design, and all of the families sharing the kitchen and toilet.

It wasn’t a surprise that the lane showed all the wear and tear of the past decades, even more so now that the apartment buildings were in sharp contrast to the skyscrapers that surrounded them. As he stepped into the lane, Chen felt a weird sense of disorientation. He was walking under a network of bamboo poles stretched across the lane, filled with damp laundry, like an impressionist expanse obliterating the sky overhead. The lane was rendered even narrower by the bewildering jumble of stuff stacked along both sides-a locked bike with a large bamboo basket, another covered with a large plastic sheet, a broken coal stove, a ramshackle tool-and-junk shed, and all sorts of residential add-ons, legal or illegal, seeming almost to have sprouted magically from the original houses.

It was like another city in another time, and the people seemed baffled at his intrusion: an old man squatting sideways with his bare back stuck against the wall, looking up at him; another straddling a wooden stool with one foot outstretched, inadvertently blocking the lane; and several more farther down the lane, one holding a large bowl of rice, another stretched out on a tumbledown bamboo recliner, and still another vigorously scaling a beltfish in a moss-covered common sink. Chen had never been to the lane before, yet some of the details struck him as eerily intimate, virtually inviting, as if someone close to him was waiting for him in the depths of the lane.

He stopped and knocked on a peeling door, which had to have been repainted quite a few times, at least once in red. It wasn’t a visit he was looking forward to, but he had no choice.

An emaciated woman with swollen eyes and silver-streaked hair opened the door. Behind her was a small room furnished with old, worn-out basic necessities and a new black frame containing a photo of Wei in his police uniform. The woman recognized Chen and seemed flustered.

“Oh, Chief-Party Secretary Chen.”

“Please just call me Chen, Mrs. Wei.”

“Call me Guizhen, then.”

She stepped out of the doorway and invited Chen in.

She had a hard time finding a chair for Chen in the tightly packed room. Judging from the two beds squeezed into the less than fifteen square meters of space, Chen assumed one of the beds was for their son in middle school. Wei hadn’t been able to buy a larger apartment for his family, and now it would be totally out of the question.

Chen knew that Guizhen used to do piecework sewing for a neighborhood production group at minimum pay but that the group went bankrupt several years ago. Since then, the family had been dependent on Wei’s income alone. With his sudden death, they would have to apply for the minimum city resident allowance, which, if eventually approved, would be pathetically small.

Chen thought about the possibility of bureau compensation again. But regulations were regulations, and if Wei died in a traffic accident on his own time, then the only money available would be what his colleagues around the bureau chipped in for him.

“You might not know this, Guizhen, but I joined the police force about the same time as Wei did-though he was older, having come back from Jiangxi Province as an educated youth. I still remember that in our first year at the bureau, we were both assigned to traffic. He was transferred to homicide after that, and he’s done a great job all these years.” Chen paused briefly, then resumed. “Before he died, Wei was engaged in an important investigation, to which I was serving as a consultant. Since it was really a case for the homicide squad, we didn’t meet every day, and not on the day of his accident. Consequently, I don’t know exactly what he was doing that afternoon, nor why he was at that particular intersection.”

“He left early that morning without telling me what he was planning to do. As a rule, he didn’t talk to me about police matters.”

“Did he say or do anything unusual that you can think of?”

“Er-he was dressed rather formally that morning. He’s not the type of man who was particular about his clothes. But occasionally, he would choose to dress more formally because of his work.”

Occasionally, Chen would do the same. And if Wei was going to the hotel surreptitiously, that would have made sense.

“About the location of the accident, did he say anything to you? Like, if there was something he wanted to do there, or somebody he wanted to visit in that particular neighborhood?”

“Not that I can recall. Not at all.”

“Did he call during the day?”

“No. I called him toward evening, but I didn’t get him. He could work late, though, even stay overnight at the bureau. But the next morning I still hadn’t heard from him. I was worried, so I called the bureau.”

“In the bureau, some of his colleagues are suggesting that he might have been planning to take an evening class. There’s a night school in the area.”

“I don’t know, but I don’t think so,” she said, wiping her eyes. with the back of her hand. “He worked hard all those years but was still a detective of the second rank because he didn’t have a college degree. We were both ‘educated youths’ with our best years wasted during the Cultural Revolution, and sometimes he grumbled about it. But what could he do? Already in his fifties, he didn’t have the time or energy for night school. Besides, our son is in middle school, and we couldn’t afford the expense of another student.”

That made sense but left unanswered the question of why Wei had been where he was.

“Let me ask a different question, Guizhen. Did he bring his lunch with him that day?”

“No, not that day. He frequently brought his lunch but only on the days that he knew he’d be at his desk in the bureau.”

So it was possible that Wei could have gone to the intersection for lunch, given those inexpensive food stalls on that corner. But that was a stretch. It was difficult to imagine that, after leaving the hotel, Wei would have climbed the overpass across the street just to get lunch.

In the short spell of silence that followed, Guizhen stood up to pour him a cup of tea.

“I’m sorry, but the water isn’t that hot, Chief Inspector Chen,” she said in apology.

For a poverty-stricken couple, so many things are sad.

“The thermos bottle no longer really works,” she said desolately. There was only one old-fashioned, bamboo-shelled hot-water thermos, which stood on the table like an inverted exclamation mark. There was no refrigerator or appliances like that visible in the small room.

He couldn’t help remembering the home of another widow he’d recently visited. Mrs. Zhou was heartbroken, too, but at least her family would be well taken care of. Some of the money embezzled by Zhou might eventually be recovered, but some would never be found.

“The reason I’m asking these questions, Guizhen, is because I’m trying to look into the possibility of compensation. If we could establish that he died on duty, I’d be able to have him acknowledged as a martyr with the due arrangement for his family.”

“I don’t know how I could ever thank you enough, Chief Inspector Chen. You’re sending a cart of charcoal over in the winter. Let me tell you something about Wei. You just mentioned that he entered the force at about the same time as you.”

“Yes, that’s what I remember.”

“Sometimes I couldn’t help nagging at him. He was nothing compared to you, even though it wasn’t exactly his fault. Like most people of his generation, he remained at a low level.”

“That was because of the cadre promotion policy with its overemphasis on higher education. I was just lucky, with an unfair advantage over some of my colleagues.”

“Do you know what Wei said when he was assigned to work the case with you? He said that there were things about you he didn’t like or agree with, despite your high-ranking position, but at the end of the day, he would rather work with you than with anybody else. Period. You were one of the few conscientious cops left in today’s society.”

“It means a lot to me to hear of his opinion. Thank you for telling me this, Guizhen.”

Chen felt even more wretched about what happened to Wei and about his inability to do anything for Wei’s family. He could tell Guizhen all the things he planned to do, but it wouldn’t make any difference unless he succeeded in doing something.

Suddenly inspired, like a magician he whisked out the envelope containing his mother’s gift card and handed it to the widow.

“Something small for your family,” he said.

She didn’t open it. That wasn’t the Chinese convention. Instead, she pushed it back.

“I can’t take it from you. It would be a different story if it were from the bureau, since Wei gave his best years to the job.”

“It’s not from me,” he said, believing that honesty would be the best approach. “It’s from a Big Buck friend of mine. In fact, I had been debating whether or not to accept it. Now I can use it for a good cause, so you’re actually helping me out.”

She stared at him for several seconds, incredulously.

“I was with Wei just the day before his death, drinking coffee and reviewing the case,” he went on, pulling out the Häagen-Dazs gift card from his wallet. “For our discussion, he picked an ice cream place, mentioning that it was his son’s favorite. This one is from me. Please accept it for both of them.”

“Chief Inspector Chen…”

He rose and took his leave without waiting to hear anything else she might want to say.

But he’d barely made it to the end of the lane when he heard footsteps rushing up behind him. It was Guizhen, still clutching the envelope.

“It’s way too much.”

“Let’s not talk about it anymore. As I have said, you’re actually helping me out. The Big Buck friend gave it to me because of my position. I wouldn’t be able to live up to Wei’s trust if I took it for myself.”

“I shouldn’t-” Once again, she didn’t finish the sentence. “Oh, you asked me if there was anything unusual about Wei that morning.”

“Yes?”

“Before he left home, he examined and reexamined the picture in Wenhui Daily. The picture of Zhou and the pack of 95 Supreme Majesty, you know. He went so far as to look at it through a magnifying glass. At home, he seldom talked about his work, but that morning he showed the picture to me, asking whether I could make out the words on the cigarette pack.”

“Could you?”

“No, I couldn’t. They were too small and blurred.”