Shanghai Redemption (36 page)

Then his cell phone buzzed.

“Where are you?” Wenting asked, her voice energetic and exuberant against a background of muffled noise.

“In a Sichuan restaurant—Heavenly Sichuan—near the American consulate.”

“Oh, I know it. It's close to Wulumuqi Road, right? I'm in the subway on the way to the train station. I'm glad I called you to check, so now I just have to take a taxi over to the restaurant. This way I don't have to make a trip to Suzhou to talk to you. I'll see you at Heavenly Sichuan in half an hour.”

Twenty minutes later, Wenting scampered into the restaurant, heading straight over to the table as if she were late for a date.

“Sorry I'm late.”

“Don't worry about it.”

She reached across the table to peck him lightly on the forehead, her hand taking his tenderly. She put something in his hand.

“Oh, you look terrible,” she said with a note of affectionate concern.

That might be true. He'd slept little, what with Gong's phone call that stretched late into the night, and then the train back to Shanghai so early in the morning.

“The latest update,” she whispered in his ear, her finger touching his unshaven face like a lover.

The waiter hurried over, carrying a bottle of red wine in his hand.

“No, I have to leave soon,” Wenting said. “I've got some urgent business.”

Nodding, the waiter withdrew in quick steps.

“He's waiting for me,” she said to Chen, standing up. “He insists I shouldn't take up too much of your time.”

After Wenting left, Chen turned on his laptop and inserted the new flash memory drive she had delivered from Melong. It had the same three folders as before, updated to include recent e-mails. There weren't too many e-mails in the past two days. He skipped over those between Sima and Jin.

But some of the e-mails in Shen's folder caught his attention. The date stamp on these e-mails was today. Melong must have captured them this afternoon.

In one message from FL earlier this morning:
“The widow may have started talking.”

Shen's response was curt:
“Talking about the guy buried and dug up again? I'll have her place bugged tomorrow.”

“Do whatever necessary,”
FL wrote back.
“Better something done once and for all.”

FL wrote again five minutes later, as if in afterthought.
“Just like in the hotel.”

There were no further e-mails from Shen.

Was the widow in the e-mail Liang's widow? If so, she could be the next target. But Liang was dead and buried with all his secrets—why were they being so ruthless toward her? Whatever the answer, once again it pointed to some high, unknown stake that had put them on an unbearable edge.

It also meant that surveillance cameras or secret agents would be installed outside her house. Fortunately, Yu had been suspended, unable to visit Liang's widow again, no matter what breakthrough might come from her. It was good that Yu wouldn't be caught on the new surveillance.

Was FL the First Lady? If so, then the Chinese man caught on the hotel camera beside her must be none other than Shen. Judging by the latest e-mail, Shen knew something about what had happened at the hotel. Whatever the real identity of FL, it seemed they were becoming really desperate.

But the cell phone buzzed again and broke his train of thought. To his surprise, it was Huang from Wuxi.

“I have to report the latest development, Chief.”

He hadn't really instructed Huang to do anything, but Huang had taken the matter into his own hands.

“What's that?”

“I've checked the missing person files. A body was found not too far from the Grand Buddha temple. Nobody has reported a missing person or tried to claim the body. It originally looked like it was a tourist who fell sick suddenly and died. But the body matches the description of Fei that I got from Gong. I'll need some more data to be a hundred percent sure. I'm on the way to check out the body, Chief. I'll send you a list of its traits, and once we identify the corpse definitively, I'll let you know—before anyone else.”

“Thanks, Huang. You might want to send pictures of the body to my phone too. His colleagues can help us to identify it.”

One victim after another in quick succession. Liang had been killed, and Qian, and Fei, and Skinny Wang, who lay paralyzed in the hospital.

It was just a matter of time before they silenced Wei, too.

Wei had chosen not to talk, but what if she was made aware of the impending danger to her? Detective Yu hadn't been able to change her mind, but Chen thought he might be able to do something different, particularly with all the new information that he had to share. He helped himself to another spoonful of cold tofu, which tasted slightly greasy.

The waiter came by to add hot water to the teapot. How long had he been sitting here? Customers around him were beginning to leave. It was eight thirty. Once again, it seemed too late for him to go out to Lu's apartment in Pudong. A Shanghai melody was coming out of a speaker somewhere. It wasn't a red song; rather, it was a black, decadent song banned during the Cultural Revolution.

After our parting tonight, / when can you come again? / Drink the cup, / help yourself to a delicacy. / How many times can you get really drunk? / Enjoy! Seize the moment …

He noticed the waiter hurrying past, carrying a large box to the entrance, where a young man in a restaurant uniform took it and rode off on an electric bike.

“Your restaurant also does delivery?” he asked the waiter when he came back to his table.

“Yes, we do. Because of our location, some of the deliveries are for the consulates nearby. Some of them place orders quite late in the evening, too. Our delivery men wear the restaurant uniform and ride electric bikes with our logo painted on the side so the guards there recognize them.”

“That's a good idea. People in those offices might work late, and it's convenient for them to order delivery. But hold on…” Chen said. He counted out five hundred yuan. “That's for dinner, and the rest is a tip for you. Also, can you lend me a uniform and a bike?”

“Why do you need that?” The waiter looked confounded.

“You don't have to know. The bike and uniform will be returned to you tomorrow.”

“Don't do anything stupid. The guards at the consulates check every delivery and call for confirmation before letting anyone in.”

“Come on. What do you think I am?” Chen showed him his police bureau business card as well as his ID card. “It's highly confidential. Don't say a word to anyone.”

“So you are…” The waiter stopped and broke into a smile. “Of course, anything you want, Chief Inspector Chen. You should have told me earlier. Of course, not a word to anyone.”

Fifteen minutes later, Chen walked out dressed in a restaurant uniform, carrying an insulated box, and picked up an electric bike.

 

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?