Shanghai Redemption (19 page)

“After that, I got a bit worried. In a tea house, I may sit for hours with a cup of tea, with the waiter constantly adding hot water for free. But in a café, I couldn't sit for hours with one cup of coffee hardly touched. And it's so expensive, costing more than fifty yuan for a cup. For these ernai, money is no problem. But I couldn't have them take me for a poor, suspicious old idiot ogling them with nothing but a cup of coffee. So I had a bottle of French water with gas, called Perrier, for eighty yuan, and a wedge of pie as well. All together, it cost more than two hundred yuan. Chen's really bankrupting me!

“After sitting there for more than an hour, I didn't think her man was going to stop by anytime soon. It's like waiting by a tree for a rabbit to run into it and knock itself out against the trunk. So I decided to push the matter a little.

“When Jin came back and sat behind the counter, I approached her. For a veteran tea drinker like me, it's not difficult to introduce myself as a tea salesman. I made a point about a lot of high-end cafés serving tea as well as coffee, and I offered to provide her some free samples. After bringing out all my tea expertise for ten minutes or so, she trusted me, and she gave me her phone number and an e-mail address so we could discuss future business opportunities. More importantly, it gave me a pretext to go back and visit her café again.”

“You really are an experienced cop,” Peiqin said.

“That's what Chen said.”

Old Hunter then pulled out a small cassette tape. “Peiqin is right. No one can remember everything that's said, and most of their conversations are probably irrelevant, but Chen might be able to pick out what we're missing.”

“Give me the tape,” Peiqin said. “And the one with your conversation with Tang, too. I'll duplicate them, and you can come to my restaurant tomorrow morning to pick up the copies. I'll also make a copy of the tape of our conversation tonight. And, of course, I'll give you a bowl of our best noodles.”

“That sounds good.”

“If you think you're going to meet with Chen in the next few days, you can give him the recordings. But if necessary, I can also give them directly to him.”

“But how, Peiqin?”

“He likes noodles. If he calls you, recommend the noodles at Shanghai Number One. That's what he calls our new restaurant, since he likes the noodles mixed with green onion and oil so much. He'll know what you mean,” she said, then added, “Of the three of us, I might be the least noticeable. A lot of people come to the restaurant. So if Chen comes in, no one will suspect anything.”

 

TWELVE

WHEN OLD HUNTER FINALLY
left, it was already past ten thirty.

“Go ahead and go to bed, Yu,” Peiqin said. “I'll join you as soon as I've finished cleaning up.”

Yu lay on their bed, smoking, thinking, and listening to her footsteps in the kitchen. It would take her a while to clean up, he supposed. Turning over, he pulled out the cassette player and put in the tape that Old Hunter had recorded in the ernai café. The tape didn't start from the beginning, but that was fine with him.

A:
We really are pathetic, spending hours with a cup of coffee, stirring our lives with a little spoon, serving our men from head to foot. And as a result, we're called all sorts of bad names, as if we're the ones responsible for the problems of a corrupt society.

B:
Oh be content, woman. What those provincial sisters earn by working hard all day isn't enough to even buy a cup of coffee here.

C:
Not only is it a pathetic life, we don't know even how long it'll last. Youth slips away like a bird. It's just a matter of time before we'll be dumped in the trash like a worn-out mop.

B:
Enjoy it while you can. Why worry so much?

A:
There are always younger girls out there, pushing forward, wave upon wave, as in the grand Yellow River. We live in a state of constant apprehension, afraid that we're going to be replaced at any time.

C:
Kang is sending his daughter to private school in the States. The tuition alone is forty thousand dollars. And he's spending twenty thousand more for a chaperone.

E:
Kang's daughter is nothing. Have you heard about the First Son? He's getting an apartment to himself in the best neighborhood in New York City. And it was all paid for in cash.

B:
Well, my man is not heartless. He's promised to pay for me to go abroad in five years …

Yu pressed the stop button, wondering how the conversations on the tape could possibly lead to anything. Then he pulled out a granite
go
board along with a box of black and white stones from under the bed.

It was a game he enjoyed playing with Chen. Both of them felt like they were talking through the white and black stones, as if they were comparing notes. Chen was brilliant but eccentric, inclined to putting his pieces in positions unimaginable to others. In contrast, Yu preferred a more conventional approach, building up pressure, step by step, until the game reached a climax. They had one thing in common, however. Neither of them gave up easily. Each of them, when faced with a board that seemed hopeless, would persist, making one stubborn move after another, hoping for a dramatic turnaround.

Yu found himself positioning one black piece on the board, and then a white one, as if his right hand were playing against the left. Pondering the possible moves in both sides of a game of
go
was a bit like weighing all the possible actions he could take as the new head of the Special Case Squad.

At present, he was pushing ahead with the Liang case, whether it was relevant to Chen's current troubles or not. It wasn't really a “special case.” Liang was a crooked official, the head of the commerce department for the Huangpu District, and he ran a private company on the side. Unluckily for him, his corruption had been exposed on the Internet.

Yu wasn't nearly as Web-savvy as Peiqin, but he'd learned how to run a search on the Internet, combing through all the online posts on a particular topic, some of them barely relevant, and some, barely reliable. Liang's case, however, was a classic example of unbridled corruption. Liang, as an official, was involved in the emerging high-speed train industry being established by the central government. Liang's private company supplied furnishings for the trains, such as chairs, tables, sinks, and other low-technology items. A couple of weeks ago, a copy of the invoice that Liang's company was charging the government for those furnishings had been posted on the Internet. The invoice caused a huge storm on the Internet because of the prices Liang was charging the government. A chair, for instance, was being invoiced at 200,000 yuan. On the Internet, people were raising legitimate questions about pricing practices and possible corruption and were demanding that a broad search be launched for any other corruption surrounding Liang and his company. Liang, however, had disappeared before the government could take him into custody. So right now, it was a missing persons case, which had been turned over to Detective Yu's squad.

Liang couldn't have pulled off a complicated scheme like that on his own, Yu suspected. According to the
People's Daily
, the high-speed train project was both a political and an economic priority. It was a symbol of China's great progress and was therefore a high-profile project for the central government as well as every department that had a piece of it, including the state council in Beijing, the Railway Ministry, and the Shanghai city government.

According to the rules, any contract had to be awarded to the company with the lowest bid and the most experience. Liang's company, however, didn't have any experience manufacturing equipment for trains, and it was widely believed that Liang had used his political connections to land those unbelievably lucrative orders.

There were several popular theories on the Internet about Liang's disappearance. One was that Liang had gone into hiding somewhere nearby. But with new information and photos constantly being posted on the Internet, he would be spotted the moment he poked his nose out—he couldn't expect to stay hidden long. Still, it couldn't be ruled out entirely. Liang might have fled in panic, without giving too much thought about the future.

Another possibility was that Liang had fled China entirely. If this was true, he had to have started preparing for it long ago, had a passport and visa ready, and a substantial sum of money stashed abroad. But would he really have left his wife behind? Other “naked officials”—people whose corruption was exposed on the Internet—sent their families out of the country before they themselves fled. However, there might be something special about Liang's wife that kept Liang from sending her abroad. Yu thought he'd heard something about her having a dubious background, but he couldn't remember anything specific.

There was yet another possibility, Yu thought broodingly, but so far there was nothing to support it except for a slightly odd conversation he'd had with Party Secretary Li. Li had asked Yu about the progress of the investigation into Liang's disappearance, and when Yu filled him in, Li clearly implied that it wasn't necessary for the Special Case Squad to go all out to find Liang.

Yu didn't have Old Hunter's passion for old sayings, but Yu couldn't help thinking of one in particular:
Treating a dead horse as if it's still alive
. Yu couldn't help wondering how Chen would have handled Liang's case. Of course, Chen had connections, some quite powerful, that Detective Yu couldn't imagine having.

When Peiqin finally came into the room, the ashtray on the nightstand was half full. She cast a glance at it, frowning.

“Old Hunter finished all of the chicken tonight,” she said. “I'll have to scramble two eggs with onion for your lunch. I have to leave early tomorrow to go to the new restaurant, so there won't be time to make anything else.”

About half a year ago, Peiqin and a partner had started a small restaurant of their own. She had managed to hold on to her job as the accountant for a state-run restaurant by agreeing to do the work mostly online at half pay. This allowed her to invest the time necessary to launch her own restaurant.

“Don't worry about it. I can eat lunch at the canteen.”

“I don't even want to think about the food in your canteen.”

She slipped into a blue-and-white striped pajama top that barely reached her waist, and slid under the quilt beside him.

Absentmindedly, he put his hand on her shoulder. She sighed, nestling up against him.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Old Hunter mentioned that Chen had electronic copies of two case files on his laptop. So I'm going to go through the rest of them. I was just thinking about the Liang case.”

“What's your reason for focusing on that one first?”

“The case file was handed over to Chen the day before he was removed from the bureau,” Yu said. “He didn't have to accept the case. In fact, corruption cases involving Party officials like Liang are usually handled by the Party Discipline Committee, so Chen could easily have said no.”

“Then why didn't he?”

“I don't know. The Liang scandal first broke on the Internet, and then it snowballed rapidly. Before the Discipline Committee could do anything, Liang disappeared. As a result, it wasn't a corruption case, like it should have been, but a missing person case.”

“I might have read about Liang online, but with so many corruption scandals, I didn't follow it closely.”

“It started with an invoice posted online for the accessories like chairs, tables, and sinks that Liang's private company was supplying for the new high-speed train. The prices listed on the invoice were outrageous, at least ten times more than normal. How could Liang have gotten away with charging so much? That wasn't hard to figure out, and a lot of information about Liang and his dealings, from a broad range of sources, was quickly posted on the Internet. No more than a couple days later, Liang disappeared.”

Yu picked up the laptop, clicked a bookmarked page, and the screen filled with the invoice in question. Underneath it were hundreds and hundreds of angry comments and armchair analyses.

“You've learned fast,” she said, with an approving smile. “Your Internet search skills have really improved.”

“I've learned it all from you.”

“What have you done so far to find Liang?”

“Well, I tried to get his bank account records, but I was refused by the higher-ups. I tried to get a copy of his phone records, but again, no. As I mentioned, anything concerning a Party official is turned over to the Party Discipline Committee to handle. Any files or records that might prove Liang had corrupt dealings have been denied to my squad. We've been given only the missing person part of the case to handle.”

“Perhaps he's in shuanggui,” Peiqin said with a sigh. “You know how a disgraced Party official is frequently placed in secret interrogation, so the dirty details won't become known to the public. It's all done for the Party's interest, which is above and beyond the regular legal system.”

“I made a list of what Liang did right before his disappearance—as much as I could find out, anyway. Considering the Internet storm he was facing, there didn't seem to be anything unusual. According to his colleagues, the day he disappeared, he received a phone call right before leaving the office in a hurry. The call came in about eleven thirty that morning. After he left the office, he wasn't seen by anyone. However, even though his colleagues were certain that he got a call at work, there was no record of any such call—according to the official in charge of office phone records—coming in at that time.

“After interviewing his colleagues, I went to Liang's home and interviewed his wife.”