Qiu Xiaolong - Shanghai Redemption

With regard to “dead pigs,” the e-mails revealed nothing new. In several messages, Sima urged the high-end hotels in the city to make certain of the quality of the meat served to international tourists, highlighting it as a political task. There was even a special fund from the city government allocated for that purpose. And in another message to Sima, someone mentioned a secret supply channel of organic food-including high-quality pork-for the top city officials.

“Shang’s son” was mentioned mostly as a joke in several e-mails to Jin and to Sima’s colleagues. There was also an e-mail on the subject to an editor at Shanghai Daily , an English-language newspaper. Sima asked the editor not to say anything about the scandal, as “it concerns the image of our socialist country.”

Then Chen keyed in his own name. It actually appeared in a e-mail sent the day he visited Sima. It was difficult to identify who received the e-mail-someone called “Jacoblang”-but the message was clear.

“ Chen came to my office today. Questions about the dead pig case. What is he really after? ”

In response, Jacoblang wrote, “ I appreciate your reporting this to me. Find out as much as you can. If he makes no further move, you may contact him. Don’t raise his suspicions, he’s experienced. Report to me as soon as you get anything new .”

Jacoblang, whoever that could possibly be, spoke from a higher, more powerful position.

There was no mail after that. Perhaps Sima didn’t think he had anything new or important to report.

Then, all of a sudden, “Chen” appeared in another e-mail, also sent to Jacoblang.

“ Someone named Cao has been in touch with Qian in Suzhou. They’re helping each other. Cao claims to be a private investigator, but Qian’s actually making inquiries for him through her connections about the Heavenly World-and the people related to it. In a conversation with Cao, she mentioned Kaitai LLC as the legal representative of the club, the ‘First Lady,’ and some death in Sheshan. All of these are beyond me. As far as I know, Chen Cao is also in Suzhou .”

The response from Jacoblang was simple. “ What do you suggest ?”

“ The bitch is barking like crazy ,” Sima wrote back. “ It has to be silenced-quick. A long night is full of nightmares .”

Chen paused, his hands cold with sweat. Sima was devilish, maneuvering, manipulative-he was, as the proverb went, “killing with someone else’s knife.” Without mentioning Qian’s assignment to Cao, Sima had succeeded in moving Jacoblang into action by focusing only on the nightclub.

The day Qian was murdered, a simple message came in from Jacoblang: “ It’s done .”

And the next day, “ Cao called her. Unmistakable Shanghai accent .”

Chen had no doubt whatsoever about what had happened. Sima’s report about Qian’s inquiries for Chen sealed her fate in a “home invasion robbery.” It was done for a reason unknown to Chen, but known to Sima, and so crucial that Jacoblang deemed it necessary to get rid of her and then to station someone at her apartment to intercept Chen’s call.

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?”