Shanghai Redemption

TWENTY-TWO

CHEN WAS STILL LYING in bed when his cell phone buzzed. The screen displayed a number unknown to him.

It was probably a wrong number, but he pressed the accept button anyway, propping himself up on the pillow.

A female voice, young, buoyant, spoke.

“Would you like to come to the Lion Rock Garden, Chen? It’s nearby, and we could enjoy some excellent tea in the garden.”

Chen was baffled. On the hotel room phone, he had gotten suspicious calls from “girls” offering a variety of services. But this call had actually come to his cell phone, with the new SIM card, and she knew his name. She spoke as if she were an old acquaintance.

“The Lion Rock Garden?” he repeated. Apparently, she also knew where he was staying.

“I’ll be waiting for you there, sitting near the entrance of the teahouse.”

Twenty-five minutes later, he stepped into the Lion Rock Garden. It was so named because the grottos there had a number of rocks that resembled lions. In traditional Chinese culture, rocks that resembled other objects were prized and could command unbelievable prices. The last emperor of the Northern Song Dynasty was defeated and captured by the emperor of the Jin Dynasty because the money in the Song state treasury had been squandered on collecting singular-shaped rocks from all over the country. Despite that historical tragedy, the rock fetish lingered. The Suzhou garden, for example, still drew visitors mainly because of those lion-shaped rocks.

It was early in the morning, and there weren’t too many visitors in the garden. Chen took two or three turns around the meandering grottos before he saw an ancient-looking teahouse. There appeared to be only one young woman sitting outside, her head bent, her long fingers poking at a smartphone, while an untouched pot of tea sat beside her. She was wearing high heels and a white trench coat made of light material. Chen could see her shoulder-length hair shining in the morning light: it contrasted nicely with one of the teahouse’s antique vermillion-painted lattice windows, which framed her silhouette gracefully.

As he approached the table, she looked up and saw him. She stood up, slim and tall, smiling with two dimples.

“So you are Mr. Chen?”

“Yes. And you are-”

“I am Wenting, Melong’s girlfriend,” she said, gesturing him to sit at the table. “He asked me to come see you this morning. Melong talks about you a lot, and he’s shown me several pictures of you on the Internet. It’s like I’ve known you a long time. It’s a real honor to finally meet you, Chief Inspector Chen.”

“Thank you, Wenting. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

So the connection was from Melong to Wenting, and probably from Peiqin to Melong first. Peiqin had taken the matter into her own hands, and she had lost no time doing so. Nor, apparently, had Melong. Wenting’s trip here was certainly not to enjoy a cup of tea in a traditional southern-style garden.

“Melong asked me to deliver this to you in person,” she said, pushing a padded envelope across the table, “and, once I’d done so, to hurry back. If there’s anything you need, you may call him at this number. He just installed a new SIM card last night.”

“I really appreciate your coming all the way from Shanghai for this.”

“He owes you a big favor. You don’t have to thank me for anything,” she said. She smiled with those engaging dimples. “We’re getting married at the end of the year.”

“Congratulations! Melong’s a talented man, and a lucky one too, to have such a pretty girl as his fiancée.” After a short pause, he went on, “Was there anything else he wanted you to tell me?”

“He asked me to tell you just one more thing. Everything is in the name of the good doctor.”

What could that possibly mean?

He wonder whether it was a reference to Dr. Hou of the East China Hospital, who, at Chen’s request, had operated on Melong’s mother. Was that Melong’s way of saying that he was paying Chen back?

“I have to leave, Chief Inspector. You don’t mind my calling you Chief Inspector, do you? That’s how Melong refers to you, and I like it.” She stood up and reached out her hand. “You can call me, if you need me. You already have my number in your cell.”

He rose, watching her depart, her youthful figure finally disappearing behind a gigantic rock that weirdly resembled a pouncing lion.

That had been an unexpected turn of events.

He took the laptop out of his briefcase. There was no point in going back to the hotel room, particularly since it might be under surveillance. He looked around for a power socket.

A young waitress came over, noting his laptop and the cable in his hand.

“We provide free Wi-Fi service with a fifty yuan purchase of tea and snacks. If you prefer, you can also use a table inside. There are several sockets in there.”

It was early yet, and no one else seemed to be in or near the teahouse. So he went in, sat himself at a mahogany table, and inserted the flash drive into his laptop.

A screen popped up and, to his confusion, there was a request for a password.

Wenting had said nothing to him about that. Melong was a computer expert, but Chen was not. He was reaching for his phone when he remembered that enigmatic statement of hers-“in the name of the good doctor.”

He typed in the doctor’s name, and sure enough, the file opened. Three folders appeared on the screen.

Each folder contained e-mails. Those in the first folder were from the e-mail account of Shen, the owner of the Heavenly World; the second, of Sima; and the third, of Jin. Each file contained about two months of e-mails, both sent and received. Sima’s folder was thicker than the other two, with an average of thirty to forty e-mails per day, which was understandable for a busy official in his position.

Chen took in a deep breath. It could take him a whole day to read through even just one folder, and most, if not all, of its contents would be irrelevant.

The waitress came back to his table with a tea and snack menu. “What would you like to choose, sir?”

“Anything that meets the minimum of fifty yuan. You choose. I don’t have the time to look.”

“You’re a hard-working customer,” she said.

She came back with a pot of tea and a dish of dried tofu cubes, then withdrew light-footedly.

Picking up a tofu cube with a toothpick, he started with Sima’s folder. He did a search of keywords, such as “chief inspector,” “death of an American,” “dead pigs,” “Shang’s son,” “Liang,” “red songs,” “Qian,” “high-speed train,” and so on. For most of the e-mails, with the names in pinyin and using this or that abbreviation, it was difficult to establish the identities of the senders or receivers. And in the majority of the official e-mails, people tended to be extremely cautious when referring to specific things or people. Still, the keywords appeared here and there.

With regard to “dead pigs,” the e-mails revealed nothing new. In several messages, Sima urged the high-end hotels in the city to make certain of the quality of the meat served to international tourists, highlighting it as a political task. There was even a special fund from the city government allocated for that purpose. And in another message to Sima, someone mentioned a secret supply channel of organic food-including high-quality pork-for the top city officials.

“Shang’s son” was mentioned mostly as a joke in several e-mails to Jin and to Sima’s colleagues. There was also an e-mail on the subject to an editor at Shanghai Daily, an English-language newspaper. Sima asked the editor not to say anything about the scandal, as “it concerns the image of our socialist country.”

Then Chen keyed in his own name. It actually appeared in a e-mail sent the day he visited Sima. It was difficult to identify who received the e-mail-someone called “Jacoblang”-but the message was clear.

“Chen came to my office today. Questions about the dead pig case. What is he really after?”

In response, Jacoblang wrote, “I appreciate your reporting this to me. Find out as much as you can. If he makes no further move, you may contact him. Don’t raise his suspicions, he’s experienced. Report to me as soon as you get anything new.”

Jacoblang, whoever that could possibly be, spoke from a higher, more powerful position.

There was no mail after that. Perhaps Sima didn’t think he had anything new or important to report.

Then, all of a sudden, “Chen” appeared in another e-mail, also sent to Jacoblang.

“Someone named Cao has been in touch with Qian in Suzhou. They’re helping each other. Cao claims to be a private investigator, but Qian’s actually making inquiries for him through her connections about the Heavenly World-and the people related to it. In a conversation with Cao, she mentioned Kaitai LLC as the legal representative of the club, the ‘First Lady,’ and some death in Sheshan. All of these are beyond me. As far as I know, Chen Cao is also in Suzhou.”

The response from Jacoblang was simple. “What do you suggest?”

“The bitch is barking like crazy,” Sima wrote back. “It has to be silenced-quick. A long night is full of nightmares.”

Chen paused, his hands cold with sweat. Sima was devilish, maneuvering, manipulative-he was, as the proverb went, “killing with someone else’s knife.” Without mentioning Qian’s assignment to Cao, Sima had succeeded in moving Jacoblang into action by focusing only on the nightclub.

The day Qian was murdered, a simple message came in from Jacoblang: “It’s done.”

And the next day, “Cao called her. Unmistakable Shanghai accent.”

Chen had no doubt whatsoever about what had happened. Sima’s report about Qian’s inquiries for Chen sealed her fate in a “home invasion robbery.” It was done for a reason unknown to Chen, but known to Sima, and so crucial that Jacoblang deemed it necessary to get rid of her and then to station someone at her apartment to intercept Chen’s call.

For the moment, Chen didn’t want to read on. He opened Jin’s folder instead. It told different stories with two subfolders for her two e-mail addresses. A Sina e-mail account seemed to be for all her social contacts, but there was a Yahoo.co.uk account that was used just for the correspondence between her and Sima.

The subject lines of the messages in the Sina account pretty much indicated the e-mail’s contents, such as “Henglong on sale” or “Hotpot Groupon.” Those without subject lines were mostly gossip of the sort recorded by Old Hunter in the café. It would take too long to read through all of them, so Chen did another keyword search. Jin touched on some of the those topics, but mostly in the context of her ernai café. For “dead pigs,” she lamented about the business she lost because no customer would order pork steaks at the café. “Shang’s son” was only referred to in the context of the lurid details of the sexual imagination among the women in the café. “The death of an American” was one of the whispered topics among some of the messages, but Jin didn’t seem to know anything specific about it.

In the e-mails between Jin and Sima, Chen performed different searches. As expected, the search for “Qian” yielded quite a lot. Jin knew about the existence of Qian, though from time to time, Jin simply called her “the other woman.” In one message, Sima talked about his dissatisfaction with Qian. “She simply lives in the world of her opera. Otherwise, her body lies there, totally unresponsive, cold, still, like a broken pipa.” Sima was cautious, seldom if ever mentioning his job in his e-mails to Jin. Jin, on the other hand, could be quite demanding. In the last two months, she had had him get her a hair salon gift card for three thousand yuan, a supermarket gift card for fifteen thousand yuan, and three pairs of shoes paid for with a gift card in his own name, among other things. The list was too long for Chen to calculate. The use of “gift cards” was no secret among officials. They readily accepted them from those trying to seek favors. In the meantime, Jin seemed to be pushing him to divorce his wife, or, failing that, to set up some type of long-term financial arrangement for her, in addition to transferring to her the title of her apartment. Sima appeared to be trapped between a rock and a hard place, considering the pressure he was getting from Qian at the same time.

But Sima also seemed to be interested in some of gossip at the café. On one occasion, he asked her what she’d heard concerning the death of an American, and on another, about the disappearance of Liang, but her responses were vague. Sima also asked her to play red songs in the café from time to time and to tell him how the customers reacted.

Chen then moved on to Shen’s folder. Shen proved to be widely connected, certainly not only because of his nightclub, and he was busy dealing in both the white and black ways with a vast number of correspondents. The search for “Chen” didn’t yield any results. So Chen changed his tactics and focused on the days before and after the raid. Suspicious e-mails surfaced immediately.

On the night of the raid, Shen got a message from a sender named FL. “What a disaster! Shame on you for having bragged about the certainty of catching a turtle in an urn.”

Shen wrote back, “He got a call at the last minute. There is a possible leak at the very top. Nothing to do with us here.”

Shortly afterward, Shen e-mailed again: “R came back, protesting about the disappearance of C after the raid.”

FL responded, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of him. He knows better than to make trouble if he still wants to do business with the government.”

Chen paused to make a note: “C = Chen?”

One minute later, he added another: “R = Rong? Is he in the dark?”

What White Cloud had told him about that night came back in a flash, filling in the blanks.

Shen also had another strange exchange with the e-mail account named “FL.”

Several days before that night at the club, there was a mysterious message from Shen to FL: “L gone from the surface of the earth.”

The response from FL: “Good riddance. The boss has to console the black widow of a white tiger.”

Chen stopped again. What did L stand for here? And “the black widow of a white tiger” sounded like a jargon spoken by gangsters. He put another question mark in his notebook.

Another short piece from FL to Shen got Chen’s attention. “Did the American have his favorite in your place?”

Shen wrote back: “I’ve talked to several of them. His lips seemed to be sealed about his business. He knew better.”

There were many Americans in Shanghai, but during the last few days, Chen had heard or read about the death of a mysterious American several times and from various sources.

He lit a cigarette, half closing his eyes, trying in vain for a short break.

There were still so many messages he hadn’t read. Many that he’d skimmed were too elusive to reveal their full meaning. Some seemed to be marginally related, but he didn’t want to jump to conclusions.

He felt he had reached a point of no return. He might not have been the sole cause of Qian’s death, but he was fairly sure she had been murdered because of her contact with him. Finding her killers wouldn’t necessarily redeem him, but he owed it to her.

The waitress came over again, carrying a thermos of hot water.

“You have been working nonstop for more than four hours,” she said with an enigmatic smile.

“The quiet garden helps me concentrate,” he said. But when he looked up, he realized that there were several tourists sitting outside, talking, drinking tea, or cracking watermelon seeds. It was a sunny, glorious day, but he’d been too absorbed in gloomy conspiracies to notice.

It was time for him to leave. He didn’t want to appear suspicious, working so long in a garden full of tourists.

He needed to go somewhere else, perhaps that bookstore near the hotel. He needed a quiet place where he could dive back into the depth of these e-mails, however fathomless they were.