The Mao Case

TWENTY-EIGHT

AND AT THE SOUND of a key in the lock, he backed up several steps.

When the front door started creaking open, he retreated in haste into the smaller closet, pulling the door closed behind him.

He heard footsteps in the living room, and then the bedroom. The situation was desperate. The first thing a young girl like Jiao would probably do now that she was back home was change her clothes. That meant a visit to the big closet. And as an industrious art student, she would then start to work. That meant the small closet.

Behind the closet door, Chen couldn’t see into the room, but he seemed to catch a whiff of perfume wafting near. He listened, holding his breath. She was stepping toward the large closet, as he had anticipated.

He prayed that after taking off her clothes, she would go to the shower. If so, he might be able to sneak out.

But then there came another sound, indistinctly, from the living room area -

“Jiao, I’m back.”

It was a man’s voice, with a strong provincial accent, though which province Chen couldn’t immediately tell. He was confounded, not having heard someone come in with Jiao, nor hearing the door reopen later. What’s more, the voice seemed to come from the other end of the living room, not close to the door -

Could there be another door – a secret one in the living room? Though it was hard to imagine, it would explain Internal Security’s failure to detect a man coming in and out of her apartment.

If so, the mysterious man behind Jiao must be rich and resourceful, having bought this apartment along with the one adjacent, and having a secret door installed between the two. But why all the elaborate secrecy?

He could hear Jiao hurrying out, saying, “Why did you want me to hurry back?”

“What a nice meal,” the man said with a chuckle. “Fatty pork is good for the brain. I’ve been fighting so many battles. An emperor, too, has to eat.”

The two met up in the kitchen area. Chen hadn’t paid much attention to the dishes on the table there. The fatty pork, which Peiqin had mentioned as one of Jiao’s favorites, turned out to be one of the mystery man’s favorites, for an uncommon reason.

“It’s hot, it’s revolutionary,” the man said, clanking his chopsticks on a bowl. “You should learn to eat pepper.”

Jiao murmured something in response. “Having just enjoyed the Yangtze River water,” the man went on in high spirits, “I am relishing the Wuchang fish.”

Chen finally recognized the man’s accent as Hunan, possibly affected, as he spoke slowly, almost deliberately. But there was something else mystifying about his comment. It sounded like a paraphrase of the two lines Mao wrote after swimming in the Yangtze River. “I’ve just tasted the Yangtze River water, / and I’m now enjoying the Wuchang fish.” The original carried an allusion to the ambitious King of Wu during the Three Kingdom period. The king had wanted to move the capital from Nanjing to Wuchang, but the people were unwilling, saying that they would rather drink the Yangtze River water than eat the Wuchang fish. Mao dashed off the poem, comparing himself favorably to the Wu emperor, having both the water and the fish to his heart’s content.

There might be a fish on the table, presumably a real Wuchang fish too.

“No, the Huangpu River water,” Jiao responded debunkingly.

Chen slid the closet door open an inch, trying to peep out. From where he stood, however, he couldn’t see into the kitchen area. He fought down the temptation venture out farther.

Jiao and her company continued eating in silence.

But Chen saw a mini recorder on the corner table, which reminded him of the one in his briefcase. He took it out and rewound the tape to the beginning.

“Leave the dishes alone,” the man said to Jiao. “Let’s go to bed.”

The two of them were already moving into the bedroom, his footsteps heavier than hers.

“Haven’t you put up the scroll I bought you?” he asked.

“No, not yet.”

“I wrote the poem for you years ago. Now I finally got it back. I paid a high price for it.”

Chen was totally lost. The man was presumably talking about the scroll in the closet, which had a huge price tag. But Mao had composed the poem for Shang, so how could the man outside claim it as his for Jiao?

And what was the relationship between the two? Obviously, he was the “keeper.” Judging from her response, Jiao didn’t feel strongly about the scroll. At least, she didn’t put it up quickly. Having rewound the tape, Chen pressed the button to start recording. It had become hot, almost suffocating, in the closet. He remained still, worried that the man might insist she hang the scroll up right now.

Instead of pushing her, the man started yawning and slumped across the bed, which then creaked under his weight. Jiao kicked off her shoes, her heels falling on the floor, one after another.

It was still early, but the two on the bed sounded tired. Before too long, hopefully, they would stop talking and fall asleep. Then Chen would be able to get out.

“You’ve got something on your mind,” Jiao said. “Talk to me.”

“Well, I have overcome so much, sweeping away all my enemies like rolling up a mat. How can I have anything on my mind? Let’s forget our worries in the cloud and rain.”

“No, it’s useless. And it’s too early.”

“A plum blossom can always come out a second time.”

The conversation in the bedroom struck Chen as inexplicably stilted. The metaphor of “rolling up a mat” sounded like another line by Mao, though Chen wasn’t sure. But he was certain that in erotic literature, a plum flower blossoming a second time could refer to a second climax during sexual intercourse.

Their talk was becoming quiet, indistinct, intelligible only to themselves. Chen had a hard time hearing their murmuring to each other, except for occasional exclamations interspersed with moaning and groaning.

“You are really big, Chairman, big in everything,” she said breathlessly.

Chen was thunderstruck. She called her bed partner “Chairman.” Nowadays, “Chairman” wasn’t exclusively reserved for Mao, but “CEO” or “President” would be far more common for Big Bucks in contemporary China. Chen was able to puzzle out the sentence because it was something he had read in the file about Shang – what she had said about Mao after their first night together: “Chairman Mao is big – in everything.” It could mean a lot of things. But in the present context, it meant only one thing.

Was Jiao imitating Shang?

The groaning and moaning intensified, rising to a crescendo. Chen had never imagined he would ever investigate a case like a peeping Tom in a closet, or to be exact, an eavesdropping Tom. The sound kept breaking in, wave upon wave, whether he liked it or not.

If he tried to slip out now, he might succeed in getting away unnoticed. Lost in sexual rapture, the lovers might hardly pay attention to anything else, and there was only a faint night light flickering in the bedroom.

But he decided to stay. The two might soon fall asleep, and it would be less risky to sneak out then. Besides, he was intrigued by their talk in the midst of the grunting and grinding on the wooden-board mattress.

“Oh, oh, against the gathering dusk stands a pine,” the man burst out in a loud falsetto, “sturdy, erect -”

It befuddled Chen. At the dinner table, the man’s comment about the fish might have been a witty joke. In the midst of sexual passion, however, he was quoting Mao again, and that was bizarre -

Chen finally recognized the Hunan-accented voice as an imitation of Mao.

Could he be playing a role – that of “Mao?”

From the moment of his entry into the apartment, the man had been talking and acting like Mao, including his remarks at the dinner table about fatty pork being beneficial for the brain, about hot pepper being revolutionary. Those were details from the memoirs about Mao. Not to mention all the quotes from Mao, and now the very poem he wrote to Madam Mao, “On the Picture of the Fairy Cave in Lu Mountains.” “Mao” must have heard the erotic interpretation and was applying it to that very context.

The chief inspector had read about sexual fantasies, but what was being staged in the bedroom was far more than that – it was elaborate, perverted, absurd.

Abruptly, something seemed to be going wrong on the bed in the dark.

“What a fairy cave it is, born out of the nature! / Ineffable – ineffable -”

“Mao” failed to complete the last line. Could he have forgotten the remaining words in his climb up to the height of sexual ecstasy?

In the ensuing silence, Chen heard Jiao making a muffled sound which went on for two or three minutes before she burst out in frustration.

“What a great pine! A broken one, sapless, lifeless.”

“Come on,” “Mao” said, “I’ve just overworked myself of late. There are so many things on my hands, you know.”

“So many things on your mind, I know. You’ve been acting differently.”

“Don’t worry. No matter how winds blow and waves beat, / I’m at leisure, like strolling at a courtyard.”

“Don’t quote him all the time. I’m so sick and tired of it. Tonight, you’re not even as good as the old man!”

“What old man are you talking about?”

“Aren’t you talking about him, acting like him, and being him all the time?”

It dawned on Chen that a fiasco had been playing out in the bedroom. “Mao” kept reciting the poem as sexual stimulation so that he could come in cloud and rain with Jiao, but he failed.

“Let’s take a short break,” “Mao” said. “I need to close my eyes for a minute.”

“I told you not to hurry,” she said.

Another short spell of silence engulfed the room.

“Oh, have you met with Chen of late?” “Mao” said abruptly.

“I heard that he’s just come back to Shanghai. Where he’s been, I have no idea. Why?”

“This afternoon he sort of approached me at the cocktail party.”

“He has business connections. Don’t worry about him. I’ve told you that he’s a nice man.”

“He’s very nice to you, of course.”

“He has a book project on the thirties, so he asked me some questions.”

“So you had a candlelight dinner with him the other night.”

“What? How do you know about that?”

“And you’re nice to him too.”

“Mao” said sarcastically, “He’s so different, as you’ve said, talented, and capable of buying you an expensive dinner too.”

“No, that’s not true. He’s nothing but a would-be writer, I assure you.”

“He is anything but what he claims to be. He is one who might have high connections. I just got a tip about him, and his appearance at the cocktail party was no coincidence. I’ll find out. The damned monkey won’t get away from the palm of Buddha.”

The “monkey” he referred to was the one in the Journey to the West. In the classic novel, Monkey tried to challenge the power of Buddha, who turned his palm into the five-peaked mountains and crushed the monkey underneath. Chen hadn’t “approached” a Hunan-accented man, however, at the cocktail party that afternoon.

“What are you going to do about him?”

“See, you are concerned about him even when lying naked in my arms.”

“You’re being so unreasonably jealous. If that’s what you want, I’ll stop seeing him. I accepted his invitation because he was helping Xie. There’s nothing going on between us.”

“Well, let’s not talk about him now.”

“Mao” didn’t seem to want to pursue the subject too far. Whoever “Mao” could possibly be, he was possessive, taking Chen as a threat.

Again, the old familiar sound surfaced, bubbling up from the stillness of the room. This time, “Mao” didn’t recite any lines. Chen heard only his labored breathing and the screeching of the wooden-board mattress.

But “Mao” failed again. “I’m too tired today,” he mumbled.

Sliding open the closet door a bit, in the semi-darkness Chen could make out only the silhouettes of two white bodies on the bed, both partially sitting up, propped up against pillows.

“You’re beat today,” she said, “what with your worries about Chen, what with -”

“What are you talking about?” “Mao” snarled in exasperation. “You think Chen could beat me? Tell you what! He won’t get away so easily the next time.”

“I have nothing to do with him. Really. I swear by my grandma’s soul.” Jiao took it seriously, whatever he meant by “the next time.” “He goes to Xie’s place only for his book project.”

“Why the hell can’t you stop going there? Neither Chen nor Xie is your damned business.”

“I’ve been studying painting there because of you. You wanted me to be educated and cultured – to be worthy of you.”

“I wanted you to dabble a little, like Shang – to be like her in every way.”

“But I have been learning a lot of things there. Xie’s really knowledgeable.”

“So you really care for Xie, I see…”

“Oh, how can you say that?” she exclaimed. Then something fell to the floor, like a glass, breaking and splintering.

She might have knocked a cup from the nightstand with a sudden motion. In the Romance of Three Kingdoms, Liu Bei, too, dropped his cup when Cao Cao made an unexpected comment about Liu’s secret ambition.

“Don’t move,” she said, springing up from the bed. “I’ll get the broom and clean it up.”

In the closet, hiding behind the door, Chen caught a partial glimpse of her naked body padding over. He might be able to break away, he calculated, at the instant she pulled open the door. She would be too shocked to react or recognize him, considering the poor light. “Mao,” still sprawling on the bed, wouldn’t be able to catch him in time to detain him.

He put his hands on the groove of the door, listening closely to her steps, which approached softly on the floor…