Shanghai Redemption (31 page)

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.

 

TWENTY-THREE

CHEN CAME BACK TO
Shanghai the next morning.

But this time, he wasn't coming in quite so surreptitiously, Chen thought, as he walked out of the Shanghai Railway Station. It felt good to be back in the city so familiar to him.

He was exhausted after reading and rereading all those e-mails yesterday. Some of the clues in those messages needed to be investigated more thoroughly. What direction those clues would lead, he had no idea.

Unexpectedly, an empty taxi came to a stop right in front of him, before Chen got into the long taxi line. Chen liked that. It was a stroke of luck and not a bad beginning to the day. Also, for once, the driver turned out not to be very talkative. Chen liked that almost as much.

The traffic was terrible, as always, but he was in no hurry. The car stereo was playing some classical music, not too loudly, and Chen tried to sort out some of his tangled thoughts during the ride.

He had made the trip back to Shanghai today for a conference where he was going to be a keynote speaker. It had been scheduled months ago, and he'd practically forgotten about it. Party Secretary Li had called him last night and said, “The conference sent a notice to the bureau. The organizers must not have gotten your new office address. We know you're busy in Suzhou, but your speech is important to the building of a harmonious society. There are newspaper and TV reporters who will come to cover it.”

The event would also function as proof that Chen retained a high-ranking position, thus heading off any speculation about disharmony in the “harmonious society.”

Chen, however, thought he'd better attend for his own reasons. The meeting was cosponsored by the Shanghai Writers' Association and the Shanghai Entrepreneurs' Association. He was supposed to deliver a speech about a writer's responsibility to reflect the changes in today's society, focusing on the contribution of entrepreneurs to the unprecedented economic reform. In Mao's time, the proletariat had been portrayed as the sole masters of society, and entrepreneurs as capitalists of the most egregious sort. Now, the role of entrepreneurs was totally reversed. As far as the Writers' Association was concerned, the conference was also arranged to push an undeclared agenda—to solicit financial support from the Entrepreneurs' Association. As a member of the former, Chen considered it his duty to help this effort.

While in Shanghai, Chen also wanted to see his mother, who had returned home from the hospital but remained weak.

Time permitting, he wanted to have another bowl of noodles at Peiqin's place as well.

He felt a net closing in on him, and he knew that any move he made—even a move he didn't make—could pull him deeper into the mire. The consequences of his going to talk to Sima, for instance. He thought he'd had a plausible pretext for the conversation, but then what happened? Immediately, their conversation was reported to someone higher up as evidence that Chen was trying to make trouble. And the consequences of his contact with Qian …

It hurt for him even to think about it.

You left, like a cloud drifting away, / across the river. The memory / of our meeting is like a willow catkin / stuck to the wet ground, after the rain
.

He'd decided the best thing to do was to attend the lecture as originally scheduled, while taking all possible precautions.

His cell phone buzzed. It was a text message, and it looked to be one of those chain messages that spammers occasionally sent around. Often the message was a joke at the expense of the government. The sender usually used a fake name, so it was difficult to trace. Chen didn't receive too many, since not many people knew his number.

But today's text was strange. It sounded more like a vicious, practical joke in the form of a bit of doggerel:

Prelude

You are sick, dangerously sick / too sick for the higher-up's pick / like her cat tongue's old trick / purring, trying to suck your dick
.

Like most doggerel, it didn't make much sense. But he couldn't help reading it again. It wasn't like the usual work composed by a youngster who spent all day and night on the Internet. Then he realized what struck him as strange. As a rule, run-ons don't appear in the syntax of Chinese doggerel. This one was more like a piece written by someone familiar with Western poetry. And then there was the title, which seemed to echo an early poem by Eliot—full of ominous hints and suggestions. It was likely a coincidence—but Chen didn't believe in coincidences.

Then his cell phone rang: another call was coming in. This time, it was his mother. The driver looked over his shoulder and turned the volume down on his radio.

“Where are you, son?”

“I've just gotten back to the city,” he said. “How are you, Mother? After I get out of a morning meeting, I'll come to visit you this afternoon.”

“Don't worry about me. I'm fine. I know you're busy.”

“I have some new pictures of the renovation of father's grave in Suzhou. I'll bring them to show you.”

“Don't go out of your way on this renovation project. Things in this world are fleeting. It's a large sum of money on a policeman's salary. Buddha watches. You act with a clean, clear conscience and you'll be protected.”

It was a subtle warning from her. She'd long since given up pushing him to change his career, but she still insisted that he follow the right path. She had no idea that he wasn't a cop any longer, and he doubted he would be protected by Buddha, either.

Ironically, that night at the Heavenly World, he'd been protected by the phone call from his mother, a call related to his filial duty. Karma.

He'd just gotten out the taxi when he received another phone call from Party Secretary Li.

“So you're back in Shanghai. That's great,” Li said cordially. “As you haven't yet started work at your new office, I'm sending a bureau car to pick you up.”

“There's no need. I can take a taxi.”

“It's going to rain today. On a rainy day, it's not easy to hail a taxi. Remember, you're not speaking at the conference for yourself alone. Your speech there will be a credit to our bureau. So, don't worry about it. People here miss their chief inspector. Skinny Wang will arrive before nine thirty.”

There was more than an hour before the car was due to arrive.

Back at his apartment, Chen checked in his refrigerator, since he'd left the hotel in Suzhou too early for breakfast. There was only a half a bag of frozen dumplings from a long time ago. He boiled a pot of water and threw in the dumplings. While he was waiting, he began jotting down some points for his talk. He'd given speeches like this before. It wouldn't be too difficult to pull this one together.

Halfway through his outline, however, he got another spam text message on his phone. This one was even more bizarre than the first. It actually consisted of nothing but the last stanza of “Sweeney among the Nightingales” by T. S. Eliot, by no means a frequently quoted poem. Chen recognized it because of its inclusion in the new volume of Chinese translations. In an intertextual twist, the Eliot stanza alludes to the fatal scene of Agamemnon walking across the purple carpet, entirely unsuspicious, the moment when he's murdered by his wife.

But how could that possibly be a practical joke sent as a spam text?

What … what if it was the message meant for him alone? From someone familiar with Eliot, sent to him as a warning about some imminent disaster, from something or someone he didn't suspect at all.

He shuddered at the possibility.

Then he was reminded of Rong, whom he had met at the Heavenly World the night he was set up. Rong was familiar with Eliot, and familiar with Chen's knowledge of Eliot. Chen hadn't had the time to check into the background of the banker yet, but judging from the e-mails gathered by Melong, Rong hadn't been involved in the setup at the book launch party. As a literature-loving banker, and possibly a designated donor, Rong might have heard about something that was going to happen at today's conference.