The Mao Case (5 page)

To his surprise, Jiao then walked into the studio, wearing high-heeled slippers, holding a long-stemmed glass in her hand.

“Hi, you’re new here.”

“Hi. My name is Chen. It’s the first time for me.”

“My name is Jiao. You are a novelist, I’ve heard.”

She could have overheard his earlier conversation with Xie or heard this from Xie a couple of minutes ago.

“No, I have just started writing,” he said. “That’s interesting.”

That seemed to be a stock response to his new identity. Instead of leaving, however, she perched herself on the chair Xie had occupied earlier, drawing one leg under her. Twirling the glass in her hand, she appeared content with his company in the studio.

“It’s a lousy crowd out there. It’s not a bad idea to take a short break here,” she said, waves of smile rippling in her large eyes. “According to Mr. Xie, you are a successful businessman. Why do you want to change your career?”

It was a question he’d prepared for, but it was the first time that anyone had asked.

“Well, I’ve been asking myself another question. People are busy making money — true, they live on money, but can they live in money?”

“People make money, but money makes people too.”

“An excellent point, Jiao. By the way, I forgot to ask about your line of business — or your illustrious family, as the people here have made such a point of bringing up their family background.”

“I’m glad you didn’t. And please don’t start now. You want to write about the past, not live in the past,” she said, lifting the glass to her lips. Her teeth were white, slightly uneven. “But what a coincidence! I’ve made some money working at a company, like you, so I’m doing what I want to do — recharging myself for a short period.”

He wasn’t too surprised at the response. She must have given the same answer many times. Only it didn’t sound convincing, given what he knew of her work history. The character he was playing had a company of his own and could have saved enough to “be a writer.” She had been a receptionist, however, working at a company for low pay.

“In today’s society, it’s not easy for a young pretty girl like you to retreat courageously from the swift waves,” Chen said, paraphrasing a proverb like a would-be writer. “Mr. Xie must be a wonderful teacher.”

“Most of his works are of the old mansions in the city. He has a passion for his subject matter, so he projects a sort of value in what he sees through his passionate touches. Each of the buildings in his paintings seems to have a story shimmering through its windows. It’s really fascinating. Of course, he has his skill as well as his perspective.”

“That’s very interesting,” Chen said, his turn to resort to a stock response. “How long have you been taking lessons here?”

“About half a year. He’s quite well-known in this circle.” Sipping at her wine, she changed the subject. “Tell me about what you’re writing, Mr. Chen.”

“It’s about old Shanghai, in the thirties. That’s why people recommended Xie to me.”

“Yes, there’s no better man for that purpose. No better place, either,” she said, rising. “Now that we’ve taken a break, let’s go out and dance. It’ll be good for your book.”

“I can hardly dance, Jiao.”

“You’ll learn so quickly. I didn’t even know the difference between a two-step and a three-step a year ago.”

That was probably true. At that time, she still worked at a low-end job, alone, with no social life at all.

They went back to the party and onto the “dance floor.” She was a capable and patient partner. It was not long before he found himself being guided around by her, not that smoothly, but not precariously, either. Turning in her high-heeled slippers, she danced in an effortless way, her black hair flashing against the white walls.

It was a summer evening. Holding her supple waist, he noticed she left the top button of her white blouse unbuttoned, revealing an alluring cleavage, as a dreamy ballad swelled into the soft fantasies of the mansion. She looked up at him, wisps of her hair brushing against his face, the lambent light burnishing her cheek with a painter’s brush. He suddenly thought of what he had read about Mao and Shang, in another magnificent mansion like this one, in the same city…

In the celestial palace, which year is this year
? A fragment of a Song-dynasty poem came swirling across his mind, her hand clasping his.

“You’re not bad at all,” she said, her soft lips close to his ear, in a mock-serious assessment of his qualities as a dancing partner.

“Perfect,” Xie said, gliding by them in the arms of the middle-aged woman.

“She’s leading me well,” Chen said. “Oh, some people are playing Monopoly over there, a fascinating game.” Xie added, “All in English, if you care to join.”

A popular Western game — Chen had heard of it. Little wonder that it was being played here, but it reminded him of the lines by Li Shangyin about a different game, at a different party.

Here, the game of the palm-hidden hook / between the seats, the spring wine warm, / the candlelight red, and the game / of the napkin-cover surprise in groups.

When the Tang-dynasty poet felt like a total outsider in spite of being around others enjoying a happy night, he composed those lines, lamenting about “lacking the soaring wings of a colorful phoenix” to fly to his love far away, and comparing himself to “a tumbleweed turning and turning around” for no purpose. At least he had written some wonderful lines out of the experience. What about Chen himself?

The night went on, one dance after another, one cup after another, one melody after another …

Chen did not dance much. He talked to some others, including the silver-haired man with the gold spectacles and the gold pocket watch — Mr. Zhou, from the illustrious Zhou family that had monopolized the importation of red wine in the thirties. Zhou proved to be friendly after learning of Chen’s connection to Mr. Shen.

“Xie is an embroidered pillow stuffed with straw,” Zhou commented. “What a joke! But Mr. Shen is of the real old class, from a prominent banker family and himself a man of great learning too.”

Chen was surprised at the harsh criticism of the host. He murmured something vague in response. There were Old Dicks and Old Dicks.

Alternating between talking and dancing, Chen managed to stay to the end of the party. With the melody of “Auld Lang Syne” falling in the half-deserted room and Xie rubbing his sleepy eyes, Chen left along with Jiao and several other girls.

They parted outside the mansion. He saw a luxurious car waiting for one of the girls. Jiao and another girl nicknamed Golden Oriole shared a taxi, for they lived not far from each other. Jiao since waved out at him under the starry night. Chen waited for a second taxi.

Standing on the curb, alone, he thought he heard a piano from an open window somewhere along the quiet street. He decided to walk along Ruijin Road to the subway station. It hadn’t been too bad a start, he reflected, strolling along.

There was no judging Jiao from just one meeting. He couldn’t rule out the possibility of her being a kept girl, but at least there was no car waiting for her at the end of the party. A Big Buck would have arranged for her to be picked up. Nor did she get any phone call during the party, either. A clever, vivacious girl, she didn’t strike him as being involved in some “little concubine” arrangement.

As for Xie, Chen did not see him as a straw-stuffed pillow. Rather, he seemed to be playing a role, one designed to create some meaning missing in his life. Perhaps having played the role for so many years, Xie found the role had taken him over.

Chen caught himself humming a snippet from “When Can You Come Again?” one of the nostalgic pieces Xie had played at the party.

The chief inspector, too, was playing a role, though for two weeks only, as a would-be romantic writer. Which Internal Security would probably already have reported, having witnessed him dancing with Jiao.

SIX

OLD HUNTER WAS GREATLY
intrigued by Chen’s invitation to a tea house on Hengshan Road.

The chief inspector knew about his passion for tea but didn’t know much about tea itself, Old Hunter contemplated as he caught sight of the magnificent tea house Tang Flavor. Such a fashionable place would charge for service, for atmosphere, for so-called culture, but not for tea itself.

A slender waitress in a florid mandarin dress with high slits hurried over in her high heels, leading him to an antique-looking private room where a mahogany table was already set up with an array of delicate tea cups, as small and exquisite as peeled lychee.

Chen hadn’t arrived yet, so Old Hunter had a cup for himself. The tea tasted watery, disappointingly ordinary.

As the old saying goes, one does not come to the Three-Treasure Temple without praying for something. So what was Chen going to talk to him about? A special case, presumably. If so, Chen shouldn’t discuss it with him but with his son, Detective Yu, who had been Chen’s partner for years. The two were good friends.

Old Hunter had also been in close contact with Chen, of whom he had a high opinion. A capable and honest cop, Chen was a rarity in an age of wide-spread corruption. Yu was really lucky to work with a boss and partner like him.

Still, there was something elusive about Chen — he was stubborn, scrupulous, and smart, yet shrewd and occasionally sly in his way. His promotion to chief inspector when only in his thirties spoke for itself. A hard-working cop himself all his life, Old Hunter was only a sergeant when he retired.

Old Hunter still had connections in the bureau, so he also knew Chen had received a phone call during the political studies meeting, a message from Beijing regarding his HCC girlfriend. Chen had supposedly looked devastated. The next day, he took a sudden leave of absence. The gossip about that spread through the bureau fast.

As Old Hunter was about to sip at his second cup of tea, the waitress returned, leading Chen into the room.

“Sorry, I must have kept you waiting,” Chen said, taking a cup of tea from Old Hunter. “Thank you.”

“No, that’s my job,” the waitress said, taking over the teapot in haste. She added hot water to the purple sand teapot before pouring the tea in a graceful arc into the tiny teacups. Instead of serving them the tea, however, she poured it out into the pottery basin beside her. “That was to warm up your teacups,” she explained, her fingers dazzlingly white against the cup. “It’s the beginning of our tea ceremony. Tea has to be enjoyed in a leisurely way.”

Old Hunter had heard of the so-called Japanese tea ceremony, but he made a point of having nothing to do with anything coming from Japan. His uncle had been killed in the Anti-Japanese War, and the memory still rankled. When the tea was finally served in a tiny cup, he drained it in one gulp — in his way. She hastened to serve the second cup.

He noticed Chen was drumming his fingertips on the table, absent-mindedly. Possibly a sign of acknowledgement, but also one of impatience. The way the tea was served, with the waitress standing and waiting, they wouldn’t be able to talk.

“In Japan, tea drinking is advocated as a sort of cultivated art. That’s bull. You enjoy the tea, not all the fuss about it,” Old Hunter said. “It’s like in an old proverb: an idiot returns the invaluable pearl but keeps the gaudy box.”

“You’re quite right, especially with a collection of old sayings to back you up.” Chen nodded, turning to the waitress with a smile. “We will enjoy the tea for ourselves. You don’t have to stay with us and serve.”

“That’s the way it is done in our tea house,” she said, blushing in embarrassment. “It is very fashionable nowadays.”

“We’re old-fashioned. You cannot carve anything fashionable out of a piece of rotten wood,” he concluded. “Thank you.”

“Sorry,” Chen said after the waitress left. “This is the only tea house I could think of — with a private room where we could talk, I mean.”

“I see,” Old Hunter said. “What’s new under the sun, Chief?”

“Oh, we haven’t talked for a long time.”

That was an excuse, Old Hunter knew, so he asked casually, “So you’re enjoying your vacation?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“In this world of ours, eight or nine times out of ten, things will not work out in accordance to your life’s plan, but as the ancient proverb tells us, who knows if it’s fortune or misfortune when the old man of Sai loses his horse? A vacation will do you good, Chief. You’ve worked too hard.”

“I wish I could tell you more about fortune or misfortune,” Chen responded elusively, “but I’m not taking vacation for personal reasons.”

“I understand. You know what? For the last few months, I’ve been enjoying the Suzhou opera version of the
Romance of Three Kingdoms
. The lines at the end are simply fantastic. ‘So many things, past and present, are told by others like stories over a cup of tea.’ ”

“You do have a passion for Suzhou opera,” Chen said. “Time really flies. When I first read
Romance of Three Kingdoms
, I was still an elementary school student. There was a lot I didn’t understand in the novel. For example, the episode about Cao Cao building his tombs in secrecy.”

“Yes, I remember — he built several tombs and killed all the workers afterward. So no one knew the location of the real tomb. And Cao Cao was not the only one. There was also the First Emperor of Qing, who had human beings as well as terracotta soldiers buried with him in different tombs.”

“Indeed, knowledge of the emperor’s secret could be deadly.”

Old Hunter put down the teacup, detecting a strange note in the younger cop, who wouldn’t have invited him out simply for a leisurely talk about the emperors and their tombs.

“So is that what worries you, Chief?”

Chen nodded without responding to the question and raised a teacup. “Look at the phrase on the cup. ‘A long, eternal life!’ Originally, that was a chant for the emperors. During the Cultural Revolution, the first English sentence I learned was ‘A long, eternal life to Chairman Mao!’ Exactly the same phrase as was used with regard to the emperors for thousands of years. Mao surely knew that, but did he object to it?”

Old Hunter began to suspect that there was a secret investigation concerning Mao. He had worked with Chen, though not as his partner, and they trusted each other. Chen would usually have come to the point directly. But anything involving Mao would make the situation different. Chen had to be cautious — and not just for himself. Whatever the situation, Old Hunter had to assure Chen of his support.

“You hit the nail on the head, Chief. Mao was a modern emperor, for all his talk about Marxism and communism. During the Cultural Revolution, whatever he said — a sentence, a phrase — was called ‘the supreme decree,’ and we had to celebrate by beating drums and marching under the scorching sun through the streets. And you couldn’t complain about the heat. Once I even suffered sunstroke. In ancient times, an emperor was compared to the sun, but Mao simply was the sun. One politburo member was thrown in jail for the crime of slander against Mao, because he wrote an article about the black spots on the sun.”

“You know a lot about those years, but it may not be fair to judge Mao on something like that, considering the long feudalistic history in China,” Chen said.

“I don’t know about the so-called feudalistic history — not a familiar term to me. An emperor is an emperor, that’s all I know.” Old Hunter took a slow sip at his tea, the tea leaves unfurling unexpectedly, like tadpoles in the white cup. “Now, let me tell you about a case I had toward the end of the Cultural Revolution.

“In Suzhou opera, a story has to be told from the very beginning. To understand the things that happened during the Cultural Revolution, you have to learn about it from the beginning.”

“You certainly talk like a Suzhou opera singer,” Chen said, “using tricks like enriching your speech with proverbs and tantalizing the audience with digressions before coming to a crucial point. Yes, please, start at the very beginning. The tea is just beginning to be tasty, and I’m all ears.”

“I was about your age at the time, Chief. Li Guohua, then the associate Party secretary, gave me an assignment — the first ‘major political case’ in my career. In those days, everyone believed wholeheartedly in Mao and the communist propaganda. A low-level cop, I was so proud of working for the proletarian dictatorship. I swore to fight for Mao just like those young Red Guards. So I secretly called that case a Mao case.”

“A Mao case?”

“Oh, it gave such a tremendous boost to my ego. It was just like pulling a large flag over my body as if it were a ‘tiger skin.’ The suspect in the case was named Teng, a middle school teacher accused of slandering Mao in his class. Born in a worker’s family and a member of the Communist Youth League, Teng was dating a girl with a good political family background, so he appeared to be an unlikely culprit. He had no motive whatsoever. So I went over to the school, where Teng had already been in isolation interrogation for days.”

“How did Teng commit this crime?”

“I’m coming to it, Chen. You cannot enjoy the steaming hot tofu if you are so impatient,” Old Hunter said, holding his cup high in the air. “In those years, Mao’s poems made up a large part of the middle school textbook. In class, Teng was said to have given a viciously slanderous interpretation of one of Mao’s poems. However, Teng insisted that what he presented to the class was based on official publications, that he had done a lot of research and preparation beforehand —”

“Hold on, which poem are you talking about?”

“Mao’s poem to his wife Yang Kaihui.”

“Ah, that one — ‘I lost my proud Yang, and you lost your Liu —’” Chen said, murmuring the first line of the poem. “In my middle school years, that poem was held up as a perfect example of revolutionary romanticism. In a flight of imagination, Mao described Kaihui’s loyal soul flying up to the moon, where the Moon Goddess danced and served of osmanthus-fermented wine to her, and she shed tears in a pouring rain upon learning of the victory of the Communist Party. Mao missed his first wife very much —”

“No, his second wife,” Old Hunter cut him short. “Mao actually had a first wife, Luo, at his old home in Hunan. According to Mao’s official biography, Luo and Mao got hitched through an arranged marriage. So he didn’t acknowledge Luo as his wife, though he had lived with her for no less than two or three years. Of course, no detail of their married life ever appeared in official publications. Then he fell in love with Kaihui and married her. This time, the marriage was seen as a revolutionary act, under the circumstances.”

“Old Hunter, you are a Mao authority. I should have known that earlier.” Chen raised his cup. “I’m sorry that it’s only tea, but cheers to your expertise.”

“Damn my expertise!” Old Hunter said, waving his hand. “Getting back to the case in question. According to Teng, he was trying to show his students what great sacrifices Mao had made for the revolution. His younger brother, his wife Kaihui, their children, and then the children by his next wife, Zizhen, all of them either died or were lost to their parents for the sake of revolution —”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Chen cut in again.

“That’s what I thought too. So I had a hard time straightening things out. Teng had been in isolation interrogation for days and was already a broken man only capable of repeating his statement over and over like a robot, ‘I just put together information from several books. The books must have it wrong.’

“So I interviewed his colleagues. They all declared that Teng did a conscientious job — at least on the surface. There was no copy machine in schools in the seventies. He had to work his butt off cutting stencils, copying passages from a number of books, proofreading all of it by himself, and paying for it out of his own pocket. I gathered together the information he had collected, including that concerning Mao’s second wife, Kaihui, and third wife, Zizhen. The material Teng distributed to his students was from official publications — and all written in an effort to eulogize Mao’s revolutionary spirit, no question about it.

“But here was the problem. One of the students read through the material and said in the class, ‘Teacher Teng, there’s a mistake. Chairman Mao couldn’t have married Zizhen that year.’ Now Teng was a very bookish and stubborn man. He happened to have the original book in his bag, so he took it out and double-checked the date in front of the class. ‘That’s correct. Study hard and don’t bother me.’ The student, being exasperated by Teng’s response and overly influenced by Mao’s theory of class struggle, reported him to the Mao Thought Propaganda Team in school, saying that Teng represented Mao as having married Zizhen when Kaihui was still alive.

“Now, in most official publications, there was no mention of the date of Mao’s marriage to Zizhen. It was taken for granted that he married her after the death of Kaihui. But in the sources Teng assembled, one text had a paragraph mentioning the date of Mao’s marriage to Zizhen, and another had a sentence containing the date of Kaihui’s death. The overlap of dates was unmistakable.”

Old Hunter paused for dramatic effect, picking up the teapot, but to his dismay, no water was left. He decided to go on without asking for more hot water. It was a crucial juncture in his story.

“It became evident that Mao was guilty of bigamy. And that meant a disaster for Teng. If he hadn’t been so devoted to accurate scholarship, he could have claimed that it was a typo. But confronted with the Mao Thought Propaganda Team, he insisted that he had carefully proofread all the material. What’s more, he produced the very book that gave the date of Mao’s marriage to Zizhen.”

“Who wrote the book?”

“Someone who had worked under Mao — Mao’s personal orderly. So the Mao Thought Propaganda Team had to put Teng in isolation interrogation, lest he keep blabbing. They sent a report to the police bureau, passing the problem on like a burning hot potato. And then the case came to me.

“After researching everything, I proposed to Li that we write to the author, asking for his cooperation. Li gave me a dressing down, declaring that I didn’t understand the complexity of the class struggle and that there was no possibility of contacting the author. Teng had to confess he slandered Mao, Li insisted, or at least to admit that it was a gross typo on his part. So I had no choice but to go on ‘investigating,’ turning myself into a mouthpiece for Mao’s famous quotation: ‘Leniency to those who confess their crime, and severity to those who resist.’ I tried to give advice to Teng by citing what proverbs I could think of, such as ‘A hero cuts his losses, for the moment’ and ‘You have to hang your head low under other’s eaves,’ but he wouldn’t listen. A couple of days later, he committed suicide, leaving a will written in blood, with only one sentence: ‘A long, eternal life to Chairman Mao!’ ”