Shanghai Redemption

TWENTY-EIGHT

IT TOOK CHEN ONLY five or six minutes to ride over to the lane off Wulumuqi Road where Wei lived. He circled the area before he got off the bike and locked it to a poplar tree near the lane. Then he trotted over to a European-style condo, one hand carrying the box like a delivery man, the other pulling out his cell phone.

“You gave me this new number just the other day, Wei,” he said the moment she picked up. “I’m at your door.”

“What?”

Wei opened her door with surprise on her peculiarly pale, fatigue-laden face. She was wearing a black embroidered silk robe and black silk slippers. She was in mourning, as Yu had described. Her sadness was not something temporarily put on for a cop or a delivery man.

“Delivery from the Heavenly Sichuan,” he said, and then added in a hushed voice before she uttered another word, “Detective Yu gave me this number.”

“Come on in,” she said, managing to respond, “I love the spicy tofu from your place.”

Chen stepped inside, and she quickly closed the door after him. It might be suspicious for a delivery man to step into her condo without leaving again almost immediately, but it was a quiet residential neighborhood with apparently no one around to notice.

Chen set the box down on the corner table. “The box is from the restaurant, but I’m the partner of Detective Yu. Or, rather, the ex-partner, and an ex-chief inspector of the Shanghai Police Bureau. My name is Chen Cao. At this moment, I’m also the head of the Shanghai Legal Reform Committee.”

He handed her his new business card. It was only the second time he’d ever used that card. The first time had been back in the office of the cemetery where his father was buried. Perhaps this was another bad omen-to a widow.

On the wall behind Wei, there was a long silk scroll painting of a white tiger crouching on a lone singularly shaped rock. The painting bore the signature of Zhang Shanzi, a celebrated modern painter. The artist’s winged aspiration had created a tiger vividly ferocious, its eyes burning bright in the forest of the night. The painting was probably worth a fortune.

She looked confounded, but she waved him over to the leather sofa, which was covered in scattered books, magazines, newspapers, a white blouse, jeans, and other random items.

“I remember seeing your picture in the newspaper,” she said. She changed her mind and pulled out a chair for him, then seated herself on the sofa. “But why are you here, dressed in a restaurant uniform?”

“No one pays attention to a delivery man.”

“Liang talked to me about you as well, Chief Inspector Chen. I’m sorry that the room is such a mess…”

“It’s not a night for formality, Wei. I’m here to talk about what happened to Liang, and about you. I’ve worked on quite a number of complicated cases, as you know, but this is the most difficult and dangerous one. And quite possibly, my last one, too. Now, to answer your question, why do I have to approach you like this? It’s a long story. Let me start by telling you what has happened to me in the last few days. A lot of things that seemed unrelated, at least initially, are actually connected. I’m just beginning to see from what direction they were coming.”

He hadn’t prepared what he was going to say. He was just going to present a comprehensive picture, with all the necessary details, of the diabolical intrigues that threatened to ruin both their lives. He hoped to make her see the impending danger and then persuade her to cooperate with his plan, even though he had no idea how that would play out. He also hoped that talking about it might help him sort out the tangled ideas that were still crowding his mind.

It was like a win-or-lose move in a go game. So much remained as yet unknown, he felt as if he were jumping into an abyss. But he didn’t have much left to lose anyway, and soon, there would be nothing left.

“Please go on, Chief Inspector Chen.”

There was half a bottle of whiskey on the coffee table, along with a single glass. Was she drinking alone? She got up and fetched another glass from the cabinet, poured out a finger, and offered it to him. There was a faint touch of alcohol on her breath as she leaned over to hand him the glass.

“This evening, I’m not talking to you as a police officer, which I’m not, though I still can’t help feeling like one,” he started. “You might have heard that I was moved to a new position outside of the police bureau. As a cop, I’ve ruffled high feathers, so I wasn’t totally surprised. But after that, things happened in such quick succession that I was overwhelmed. To begin with, I nearly fell prey to a setup in the Heavenly World last week.”

“The Heavenly World?” she interrupted.

“Yes, it was touch-and-go. If not for an unexpected phone call from my mother, I might have ended being another Pan Ming that night.”

She didn’t appear to be mystified by the name Pan Ming. It had been a notorious setup.

“Detective Yu thought that all of this-my sudden removal from the police department, the attempt to discredit me in a setup-must have something to do with one of the cases recently assigned to the squad. In other words, it was to prevent me from looking into one of those cases. So that’s exactly what we did. Detective Yu and I checked into each and every one of those cases, including those involving Shang’s son, the dead pigs on the river, and your missing husband. To our surprise and confusion, though, everything turned out to be unbelievably bizarre. I’ve translated some mysteries, as you may have heard, and from time to time, I find fault with the implausibility of the plots. That’s just fiction, you may well say. But things in China can be far stranger than fiction.

“I don’t have time to dwell on some of the cases Yu and I have explored and reexplored in the past few days, so I’ll stick to the pertinent details.

“Now, shortly after I was removed from the police bureau and made a director, I went to Suzhou on some personal business. There I met a young woman named Qian, who mistook me for a PI. She offered me the job of catching her cheating man back in Shanghai, and I took on her case in exchange for her help making inquiries about the nightclub. Before any progress was made on my part, however, Qian was killed in a home invasion robbery. As it turned out, her phone was tapped and her calls recorded, including the inquiries she made on my behalf.”

He produced the CD, with her profile still smiling wistfully on the cover.

“She was also a very attractive woman, like you,” he said with difficulty. “I hold myself responsible for her death.”

Wei made no response, studying the cover of the CD intently.

“Meanwhile, Detective Yu, who took my place as the head of the Special Case Squad, was working on the Liang missing person case. He investigated various scenarios to find out what had happened to Liang. When officials who are the subject of a corruption investigation disappear, the most likely scenario is that they’ve gone into hiding with the hope of staging a comeback later. With so many scandals in today’s China, any given transgression might easily blow over. But when Liang’s body turned up in Nanhui, that changed things. Both Detective Yu and you ruled out the possibility of suicide. Then what had happened?

“Somebody must have been anxious to quickly and permanently get him out of the way. With Liang in the limelight, his death had to be orchestrated as a disappearance, so that the real cause of his death wouldn’t come to light for months, or years, if ever. It might have played out that way but for a crane accident at a faraway construction site.

“Now, Qian’s death and Liang’s might appear unrelated, but there was one thing the victims had in common. Both were threats to a person or persons in power. The murderers wanted them out of the way to make sure they couldn’t speak out against them.

“Speak about what? About something in which the stakes were too high for the murderers to risk failure. Were there several important secrets to protect, or just one? I didn’t have any clue initially.

“I came back to Shanghai two days ago to deliver a long-promised lecture. The car that the police bureau sent over to take me to the conference was practically destroyed in an explosion. I happened to have already left to take care of something else before the car arrived, but the driver, my former colleague Skinny Wang, was paralyzed in the incident.

“In the meantime, in the midst of my bumping about like a headless fly, I also heard about the death of an American in Sheshan. Intriguingly, I heard about it more than once, and from various sources. That death wasn’t even a case for our squad. Nor for the bureau. But the topic came up repeatedly.”

She nodded contemplatively, picking up her glass but putting it down again without touching a drop.

“Have you heard of it?”

“Yes, different versions.”

“People talked about his connections to the top.”

This time, she didn’t respond.

“Now, that death may have had nothing to do with me, with Qian, with Liang, or with the other cases we’ve been looking into,” Chen went on. “But then there was another missing person, a local policeman from Sheshan named Fei. At this moment, Fei’s still listed as missing, but I got a call from Wuxi just about an hour ago. A body was found there, matching Fei’s description. He was the first one in the hotel room where the American died. Later, he was joined there by Internal Security and another local cop. Fei and his colleague were told to turn the investigation over to Internal Security. The American was cremated the next day without an autopsy being performed. The cause of his death was announced as alcohol poisoning. The dead man, however, was known to be someone who didn’t drink, according to the gossip in social media.

“Back in the hotel room, Fei had sensed this American’s death was something more than merely gossip material. He moved fast, and he got the recordings from the hotel surveillance camera before Internal Security arrived. He didn’t report this to the higher authorities immediately, for the people implicated by the hotel footage were untouchable. Before he could do anything, however, he found himself under suspicion and questioned about his actions at the crime scene. It could only mean more trouble, he knew, if he turned over the footage from the hotel surveillance camera. He’d seen too much, and had become too much of the threat to those involved in the murderous conspiracy resulting in the American’s death. Fei was suddenly sent to Wuxi, where he went missing…”

“Yes, horrible things are happening, Chief Inspector Chen,” Wei said, “but I’m having a hard time following you. What’s connection among all of these and, in particular, with my husband’s death?”

“You’re right. It’s difficult to see the connections. That’s why I didn’t think of coming to you earlier. That’s also why I’m telling you the story in this way. It’s a long chain of related and interrelated links. Almost too long. All these diabolical actions weren’t just about Liang, about me, or about any other victim. It’s a particularly high-stakes political move at this crucial moment that is the hidden common denominator among all of them.”

“At this crucial moment?”

“The National Congress of the Communist Party of China is scheduled for the end of the year, when the members of the most powerful Politburo Standing Committee will be replaced by new people. Shanghai Party Secretary Lai is on the rapid rise and has a good chance to grab one of the top positions. But he has political rivals within the Forbidden City. So he can’t afford to have anything go wrong at this moment. As luck would have it, things went wrong.”

“You mean Liang’s… trouble?”

“That’s part of it. Under normal circumstances, Liang might have gotten shuangguied and punished for the high-speed train contracts, and then the newspaper would have declared it another victory attributable to the Party’s great determination to fight corruption. But what if Liang spilled his guts out about the other people involved in the scandal? You know what law firm Liang hired as the company’s legal representative, don’t you?”

She kept her head hanging low, muttering an inaudible word, her chin involuntarily quivering. Beside her, the bronze pendulum in a mahogany antique clock went on swinging, measuring the seconds in perpetual tranquility.

“Coincidentally or not, Liang’s company and the Heavenly World were both represented by the Kaitai law firm,” he resumed after a pause. “But perhaps most significantly here, the dead American, Daniel Martin, was also connected to the law firm. For some reason still beyond me, he posed such a threat that he had to be removed-or at least, so it seemed to Lai, or the people close to him.

“Now, there’s one thing I’ve learned during all my years as a cop. Murderers are capable of seeing something that makes sense only to their twisted and paranoid imagination. So what would paranoid people in power do? For one thing, anything or anyone that might be in their way would have to go. That’s why I was removed from my position. But that wasn’t enough: they were worried that I would still try to find out what was going on. For that reason, they put together an elaborate setup at the nightclub, one that would result in my complete disgrace. Then there was the explosion of the police bureau car. I’ll accept the consequences of my choices as a cop, but I can’t bear to see an innocent victim caught in the crossfire.”

“An innocent victim? You mean…” She didn’t finish her sentence.

“After the revelation of Liang’s death, you could have reacted in any number of ways.” He added after a deliberate pause, “Detective Yu told me you nearly collapsed when you recognized the tattoo on his body.”

“He told you that?”

“These kinds of details are important to a cop. But how might his killers interpret your reaction? In their minds, Liang might have confided in you, and you might try to do something with that knowledge. So what would people like that do? Such people live by Cao Cao’s statement, ‘I would let down all the people, rather than have any of them let me down.’ Furthermore, they see themselves as representing the Party, so they feel that whatever they do is politically justified. As the red song goes, ‘Only the Communist Party can save and rule China.’

“So I’m here now trying to help you-and to be honest, trying to help myself too.”

“Are you saying that you can’t even help yourself, Chief Inspector Chen?”

“No, I can’t. We have to find a way out, and we will. Not just for ourselves. You have to think of Liang, and I have to consider all of the victims,” he said in earnest. “Now, let me show you something. Yesterday in Wuxi, I came across the video that Fei took from the hotel surveillance camera. This is the reason for Fei’s disappearance. Kai was caught on tape entering the hotel room with the American, and leaving around the estimated time of his death.”

He produced the flash drive, and continued on without immediately putting it in his laptop. She stared at him without saying anything.

“In the meantime, I also came across these e-mails, some of which I just got a couple of hours ago. I have reason to believe they directly concern you,” he said. He turned on his laptop and opened the e-mail messages Melong had obtained for him. “You should take a look for yourself.”

“Now?”

But she moved over, kneeled beside him, started reading.

Not long after, she leapt to her feet shakily, shuddering. Chen reached out a hand to support her.

“I’ve come to the conclusion,” he went on, “that you most likely will be the next target. Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, a surveillance camera will be installed here, as indicated in the e-mails. Twenty-four hours. But there are worse scenarios than surveillance that I’m worried about.”

“But why should I be worried? An ill-fated woman like me, it’s all destined,” she said, with a hysterical note in her suddenly husky voice. “The black widow of a white tiger.”

It was Chen’s turn to be astounded. That phrase again.

“And blue dragon and white tiger indeed!” she went on. “He believes that he is a dragon, meant to eventually take the throne.”

In Chinese slang, “white tiger” was sometimes an obscene expression used to describe a woman without pubic hair. There was also a superstitious belief that such a woman brings bad luck to her man. Chen wasn’t sure what was meant by “blue dragon.” In ancient China, an emperor was believed to be a dragon incarnate. But whatever the correct interpretation was, a “blue dragon” was believed to be able to mate with a “white tiger” without worrying about any bad luck.

But she used the present tense in her last sentence. So she couldn’t be referring to Liang. And that last part-“eventually take the throne…” It began to hazily dawn on him.

“Thank you for telling me all this,” she said, making a visible effort to pull herself together. “Now, please tell me what I should do.”

That was an unexpected turn. She leaned forward, grasping the chair arm with one hand, the other adjusting her silk robe embroidered with a soaring dragon.

“Tell me what you know about what was going on with Liang,” he said.