The Mao Case

TWENTY-ONE

IN THE HOT-WATER HOUSE, Old Hunter sat alone, drinking tea in silence, in the afternoon sunlight.

The hot-water house was far less than a tea house, with the sort of dual function of providing hot water to the neighborhood and tea to occasional customers. There were only a couple of rough wooden tables behind the stove. There were several cheap snack booths nearby. In the past, people sometimes came to the hot-water house with baked cakes and steamed buns, spent a penny or two for a cup of tea, then would talk and enjoy themselves like lords.

But Shanghai was rapidly turning into a city of contrasts and contradictions. Across the street stood expensive new apartment buildings, but here beside the hot-water house, it remained pretty much a slum. In fact, no tea-drinking customers came in for hours.

It suited Old Hunter well, though. He didn’t have to play a role. An old, non – Big Buck tea drinker, that’s what he was, even bringing in his own tea. All he needed to pay for was the hot water. He could sit there for hours, talking about the tea to the proprietor, or, like that afternoon, drinking tea alone without a single waiter walking around with a long-billed kettle, ready to serve.

The tea was getting cold but was still black as hell. He had put in a large handful of oolong, trying to revive himself with extra-strong tea. It was because of the scene he had caught at Jiao’s window last night and had continued watching, sitting there across the street, late into the night. As a result, the next day, he was feeling as groggy as a sick cat.

He was old, he admitted, spitting out the bitter tea leaves, but the case – though not his case – was special to him. He thought about his interview yesterday of Bei, the security guard at the Jiao’s apartment complex.

The meeting with Bei had yielded little. Like him, Bei was a retiree, working at a post-retirement job to supplement his scant pension. Unlike Old Hunter’s, Bei’s job paid little, and the security guard had to stand at the complex entrance, rain or shine, six days a week. To their pleasant surprise, the retirees shared a passion for tea. So they went to a better place, the celebrated Lake Pavilion Tea house at the City God’s Temple Market, where Old Hunter tapped Bei for information about Jiao over the exquisite Yixing tea set on the mahogany table. Bei started talking without reservation.

According to Bei, Jiao had few visitors here. It was a well-guarded subdivision, where visitors had to call up from the entrance, so Bei was quite sure about that. Nor could Bei remember having seen her in the company of any man. Then he recalled that about half a year earlier, Jiao had had an unusual visitor, a poor old woman dressed in rags – a rare sight for the complex – who claimed to come from Jiao’s old neighborhood. She was not educated, not even that coherent, and Bei questioned her long and carefully. When he finally called up, Jiao hurried out to usher the visitor in. After two or three hours, Jiao accompanied the visitor out, calling her granny and hailing a taxi for her. The old woman never appeared again.

It wasn’t too surprising for Jiao to be nice to a visitor from her old neighborhood. If anything, the question was, which neighborhood? She had grown up in an orphanage. After that, she shared a room with “provincial sisters” until she moved over here.

But Jiao had other visitors, at least another one, who went unnoticed by Bei, and by Internal Security. Old Hunter pondered, taking another drink from the half-empty cup, raising his hand, about to bang the table like a Suzhou opera singer, when he restrained himself. What he had seen last night, after his talk with the security guard, confirmed Peng’s suspicions about Jiao’s secret life. From across the street, the view of her room wasn’t good, but the one glimpse of the two standing close to the window was unmistakable, though it was just one fleeting glimpse.

Now, a security guard like Bei might not have closely watched each resident every minute, but Internal Security’s video camera should have. How could the mysterious man have entered the building, and then her apartment, without being noticed even once? Old Hunter chewed the tea leaves he had scooped up from the bottom of the cup. A habit picked up from reading about it in a memoir about Mao.

There was no progress in the investigation of Yang’s murder, either, not from what he had heard. No suspect arrested or even targeted. Lieutenant Song was furious with Chen’s unexplained vacation.

Like Detective Yu, Old Hunter didn’t think the chief inspector was taking the vacation for personal reasons, even though the emergency number given by Chen suggested that during his stay in Beijing, he was in contact with, if not in the company of, his HCC ex-girlfriend.

It was then that Old Hunter’s cell phone rang. It was Chen. Without saying anything about his vacation, Chen went straight to the suspicious involvement of the special team from Beijing at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Among other things, Chen mentioned Shang’s passion for taking photographs, some of which might still be around, and Shang’s maid. It was a hurried call; Chen sounded guarded, as if nervous that the call was being tapped. He didn’t divulge the source of the information and hung up before Old Hunter had time to ask any questions.

Still, Old Hunter managed to copy down the number from Beijing. It was not Chen’s usual one. The phone call was clearly a tip on a direction Chen wanted him to follow here in Shanghai.

Regarding the special team, Old Hunter had used up all his connections making inquiries, but got nothing. They came to Shanghai such a long time ago, and in such a secretive way.

As for Shang’s pictures, he had also drawn a blank. It was trendy nowadays to collect old photographs – not just of Shang, but of other celebrities as well. whatever the case, he had no luck in finding pictures of or by Shang.

So the only thing for him to do was to approach the maid. Possibly the same old woman who had visited Jiao in her apartment here.

Consulting the Yellow Pages, he lost no time getting in touch with the orphanage. According to the secretary who answered the phone, there were records that people had visited Jiao years earlier, but there was no name or address of the visitor recorded.

Still, it could have been Shang’s maid. In Suzhou opera, there were stories about such loyal, self-sacrificing maids.

After several more phone calls, he managed to acquire some basic information about the maid, who was surnamed Zhong and now in her eighties. Instead of going back to the countryside after leaving Shang’s house hold, Zhong had stayed on in the city, alone, eking out a living on the “minimum allowance” of her registered city residence.

Old Hunter put the small envelope of tea leaves back into his pocket. The owner of the hot-water house still remained behind the partition wall, indulging himself with a popular TV soap opera. For five cents per thermos bottle, the business was just an excuse to keep the place registered as business property – which would mean more generous compensation in the event of its being torn down for a new housing project. Lunch time was over and no one would pop in until dinnertime, when provincial workers might purchase hot water for their cold rice.

Throwing ten cents on the table, Old Hunter left for a visit to Zhong.

He had to take two buses before getting off at a stop close to Sanguantang Bridge, which spanned the darksome water of Suzhou Creek. Zhong lived in Putou District, an area mixed with old slums, new skyscrapers, and ongoing concrete and steel constructions.

Was Zhong going to tell him anything? He wasn’t going to approach her as a cop, as someone with authority, who could make her talk. He slowed down, thinking, in the small clearing under the beginning curve of the bridge, perhaps only about a couple of minutes away from the lane she lived in. He lit a cigarette.

In a convenience store by the lane entrance, he bought a plastic bag of dried lychee. The end of the small lane brought him to an ancient two-story building. The black-painted door opened in to a narrow corridor littered with coal briquette stoves and bamboo baskets, and to a dark staircase leading up to an attic room. He fumbled for a while without finding a switch. So he groped up the stairs in the dark, the staircase creaking precariously underfoot, until he reached the top.

The door opened without waiting for his knock. An old woman presented herself in the doorway, probably in her eighties, short and shrunk. In the light streaming down from the attic window, she looked like an ancient peasant woman from a backward village, wearing a gray towel around her hair and a string of Buddhist beads at her neck, and twirling a shorter string of beads in her right hand. Still, she appeared to be quite alert for her age.

“What do you want with me?” she said, showing a frown on her deep-lined forehead.

“Oh, you must be Auntie Zhong. I’m Old Yu,” he started with a rehearsed story. “Please forgive me for taking the liberty to visit you. For an old retiree like me, I have only one wish unfulfilled in this mundane world.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m a loyal fan of Shang, having watched every one of her movies, but I haven’t seen a real-life photograph of hers. You were blessed to have been with her for so many years, Auntie Zhong. I wonder if you could show me or sell me some of her pictures.”

“She had so many fans. But what difference did it make in her last days?” She stepped back, however, making a vague gesture to let him in the pigeon coop – like attic room. “Now, after so many years, you come out of nowhere, asking for her pictures.”

“Now listen to me, Auntie Zhong. I knew nothing about her troubles at the time. Later on, I searched for her pictures everywhere, but without success. It was only yesterday that somebody told me about your relationship to her, and about her passion for photographs. So I thought she might have left some to you as souveniers.”

“No, Mr. Yu.”

“If you don’t have any pictures, would you be able to tell me where I can find them?”

“Why can’t you leave an old woman in peace? I already have one foot dangling in the coffin. And have mercy on Shang, leave her in peace too.”

“It’s more than twenty years since her death, but not a day passes by that I don’t have her in mind. A matchless pearl with her beauty radiating from her soul. These new movie stars nowadays are mud-covered hens compared to a graceful phoenix like her.” He declared, lifting the plastic bag, “I’m an ordinary retiree. This is just a token of my heart-felt gratitude to you, for all the help you have given her and her family. You’re the one sending a cart of charcoal to her in the dreadful winter.”

“Oh, I’m only an ignorant, illiterate woman,” she said. “I was nothing until Shang took me to Shanghai.”

“Please tell me something about her.”

“I was with Shang, then with Qian, and finally with Jiao too,” she said, appearing to be softening, taking the plastic bag. “Things are gone and past like the drifting smoke, like the passing cloud. What can I really tell you? At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, I had to leave her. Otherwise, she could have been charged with another crime – the crime of bourgeois life style.”

“Yes, that was so considerate of you.”

“She was so pitiable. She hung on to a last straw of hope that the guiren would come to her rescue.”

“Can you be more specific about that guiren, Auntie Zhong?” Guiren – an unexpected luck-bringer – was another word often heard in Suzhou opera.

“He didn’t come,” she said, sniffling. “Nobody came. She gave herself over to despair. Kalpa.”

In Suzhou opera, kalpa meant predestined disasters. He noticed a Buddha statue standing on the only table in the room, with a bronze incense burner in front of the statue.

“Kalpa or not!” he said. “People should have helped. Was there not a single one?”

“No, not a single one,” she said. “If the guiren chose not to do so, who else could?”

He understood the reason why she kept using the term guiren. They both knew who they were talking about. “Back to my earlier questions, did she show you her pictures?”

“Some of them.”

“Including those with the guiren?”

“I don’t remember exactly.”

“Yes, it’s such a long time ago,” he said, taking it as not a downright denial. “After her tragic death, did any of those pictures come to light?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Do you think she could have left them behind somewhere?”

“No, I don’t know that, either.”

For her age, she proved to be more than alert. So he decided to push on in a new direction.

“Oh, Buddha is really blind. Such disaster for Shang, and for Qian too. They did nothing to deserve such kalpa or karma.”

“Don’t ever talk like that, Mr. Yu. Buddha is divine. Karma works out in a way far, far beyond us. whatever might have happened to Shang and Qian, a real guiren finally came to Jiao.”

“What do you mean?” He added in haste, hardly able to conceal the excitement in his voice, “Didn’t Jiao grow up in an orphanage, alone all those years?”

“Someone helped her through those years – a guiren in the background. Now that Jiao has settled down comfortably, I think I can leave the world in peace. Buddha is so great!”

“Oh? Who helped?”

“A gold-hearted man.” She rose to put some tall incense into the burner. “I burn incense for him every day. May Buddha protect him!”

“Hold on, Auntie Zhong. A guiren in Jiao’s life. How do you know?”

“Like you, some people know about my relationship with the Shang family. So he came to me one day.”

“What kind of a man is he?”

“A real gentleman. He said that he knew Jiao’s parents. He is about their age, I guess. He gave me money to buy food and clothing for Jiao.”

“When did that start?”

“Two or three years after the end of the Cultural Revolution. In the late seventies or early eighties. He did all his good deeds anonymously, insisting that I not say anything to Jiao. What noble benefaction!”

“What Buddhist spirit!” he sort of echoed, trying to come up with more Buddhist improvisations. “A peck, a drink, everything happens with a cause and consequence.”

“You, too, kowtow to Buddha, don’t you? He might not have been that rich at first, giving me just a little cash each time, but he must have come from a good family, the way he talked and behaved. Good deeds will never go unnoticed. Now he’s so incredibly rich. So is Jiao – all through his help.”

“Can you give me his name and address, Auntie Zhong? I really want to thank him for what he had done for the Shang family.”

“He sows without caring about reaping. In fact, he has never given me his real name.” She said shaking her head resolutely, “I wouldn’t give it to you even if I knew. It’s against his principles.”

“I don’t know how to thank you enough,” he said as he got up, realizing it would be useless to push any further. “Like that noble benefactor, you have done so much for her family. The way of Buddha is truly beyond us. Karma works out in the life of her granddaughter.”

“Yes, may Buddha bless her, and him too. Goodbye, Mr. Yu.” Zhong rose, and opened the door to the dark staircase.

He nearly stumbled again, beginning to grope slowly down, grasping the railing, his stiff legs moving with difficulty. It took him several minutes before he reached the foot of the staircase, the way down being even longer than the way up.

Walking out into the busy and bustling street, he blinked in a burst of afternoon sunshine. It was a random harvest. He lit a cigarette, waving the match. The information from Zhong threw light on some, if not on all, of the mysteries about Jiao’s life. Particularly regarding the self-effaced “incredibly rich” benefactor. Zhong seemed convinced that his fortune had brought about the metamorphosis in Jiao’s life.

Could the benefactor be the man Old Hunter had glimpsed in the company of Jiao the other night? Not likely. The man seemed to be younger, whereas Zhong described the benefactor as being about the same age as Jiao’s parents.

It wasn’t until he was passing by the convenience store again, that he thought of something. In spite of Zhong’s ambiguous response about what she had told Jiao about her benefactor, if the changes in her life had been related to him, Jiao should know him by now.

Jiao didn’t seem to have any friend that age – not from what he had learned from Chen – except Xie. An old-fashioned gentleman, and from a good family too, but Xie was far from rich.

So Old Hunter would get hold of a picture of Xie and with it, go back to Zhong. She might acknowledge the man in the picture even if she didn’t know his name.

He started humming some fragments from a Suzhou opera. “Bursting with anger, I denounce you…”