Qiu Xiaolong - Shanghai Redemption

“It’s a too crucial moment for the Lais. Liang was murdered because they couldn’t afford to have anything go wrong-especially not something high-profile like the high-speed train equipment orders, which had been orchestrated by Kai.”

“I think you’re right.”

“How pathetically naive I was, believing Lai cared for me just a little. He must have shared all the sordid secrets with Kai, telling cruel bedroom jokes about a hairless, brainless white tiger.” After making a visible effort to control herself, she went on, “If you have any questions, Chief Inspector Chen, go ahead and ask me anything that may help your work.”

“Yes, I do have some questions,” he said slowly.

Her story was absurd, even unimaginable, but he believed it. For the same reason she believed him earlier. “It would have been difficult to make up something like that.” Still, it was sadly shocking that Lai, a powerful member of the Party Politburo Committee, could have stooped so low, and for that matter, that his wife Kai had as well.

Much of what Wei described sounded impossible, absurd. But this was the story in an age of absurdities, and for all the light her story threw on a lot of things, others still puzzled him. It would take some time to sort them out. At the moment, he felt Wei was both relatable and reliable. He didn’t want to judge.

“Liang paid a substantial sum to Kai’s law firm,” he started, “so that’s how he came to know the things going on at the top?”

“I don’t know, but Liang became quite close with Kai.”

“What about the money transferred to that special account-do you still have a copy of that?”

“Yes, I’ve kept a copy.”

“So Lai knew how the so-called scholarship was being funded?”

“He didn’t talk to me about it. Like other high-ranking Party officials, he knows how shady these business transactions can be, but he let Kai and others take care of that.”

“Now, a different question,” he said, jumping to a different subject. “About the death of the American, did you hear anything about it from Lai?”

“Lai mentioned him one evening. He looked very upset, so I offered to massage him. He almost felt asleep in the middle of it, and he muttered drowsily that the American had been so annoying, actually threatening Xixi.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t say much about it on the massage table, but from some of his remarks on other occasions, I gathered it was probably something like this. The American helped to take care of Xixi in the States, and in return, he’d been working, with Kai’s help, on a large real estate project in the center of the city. If the land deal was approved by the city government, the project could have made him a huge profit. But someone high up in Beijing was watching the project with alarm, so Lai scrapped the deal at the last minute. The American must have lost some of his initial investment, so he tried to get compensation by threatening Xixi.

“Possibly connected to that, Liang mentioned one evening that Kai needed additional money for her son because she’d fallen out with an American business partner. I’m not sure if it was the same American. She needed money quick, so Liang had no choice but to touch that account of mine again.”

“Liang got more deals from the city government after that?”

“Yes, he did. He promised to put everything back into my account as soon as possible. I didn’t doubt or blame him. After all, he didn’t have to quietly set up the account for me in the first place,” she said. “Again, he said I shouldn’t worry about these things, about which, sometimes, the less said, the better…”

“Can I smoke?” Chen said abruptly, struck with a sense of déjà vu. It was if he himself had said something like that.

“Sure,” she said, her hand reaching into the clutter on the sofa, as if in an effort to find something, but without success. “You must be disappointed with what I’ve told you. As I’ve said, I’m beyond being worried about.”

“No, your account really helps. Now I see why they are so desperate and so cold-blooded.”

Many more questions came up in an ever-accelerating swirl of thoughts, but for the moment, the most pressing one was what he was going to do. He’d made the decision to visit Wei on the spur of the moment. To his surprise, the visit yielded far more than he’d expected. Whatever plans he devised for himself, how was he going to keep his promise to help her? The next day, Shen and his thugs would be here. At that point, an ex-cop wouldn’t be able to turn the tables. Not even with this new information he’d gotten from her, he calculated and concluded, would he have a chance to do anything-not for her, and not for all the others.

Looking up, he saw the silk scroll painting of a lone white tiger on the wall. Was that also something bought for her by Liang? The tiger crouched in ferocity, framed in fearful symmetry. He shifted his glance and leaned slightly forward, gazing down, holding his head in both hands. In the soft lamplight, she sat still like a forsaken wax image, her face ghastly pale, the worn-out red polish peeling on toes looking like petals in rainwater. She must have been so distressed and distracted the last few days. The west wind sighing and vexing / the green ripples, / it is unbearable to see / the beauty ravished by the grief of time . Some lines by Li Jing came out of nowhere. The ex-chief inspector, annoyed with the impossible poet within himself, started tapping on his laptop sitting on the coffee table.

“In the light of what you have just told me, the files and information I’ve got on my laptop would have made convincing evidence-under normal circumstances,” he said. “But as it is, the minute all of this was turned over to the higher authorities in Beijing, the official in charge would make a phone call to Lai in Shanghai.

“Quite simply, Lai is too high for the system to allow him to fall. It would deliver a irrecoverable, catastrophic blow to the legitimacy of the regime. With the Party’s interest placed above everything else, they would have to cover it up. Consequently, more innocent people would disappear, including you and me. That’s the way the Party machine works.

“As I mentioned, I made a recent trip to my father’s grave in Suzhou, where I realized how I’d let him down by working within the system. I had hoped to make a difference despite many setbacks, but it was of no avail. It’s time to redeem myself by venturing outside the system, and doing something that was unimaginable before. That pledge to my father has informed me ever since that morning at his graveside-has been with me every step in the investigation, or rather the investigations, which appeared to be unrelated until I started looking into the death of the American. That turned out to be the last straw for the conspirators.

“Now, this afternoon, I happened to get a phone call from a friend, who suggested that I go abroad as soon as possible, and with the help of a visa official in the American consulate. It was a practical suggestion, but even if I didn’t have to worry about the blacklist at customs, I don’t think I’ll do it.”

“What do you mean, Chief Inspector Chen?”

“With the death of the American, the evidence on the video clip, and with the e-mails, plus what you have in your hands-the phone records and bank transaction receipts-if you take it all with you to the American consulate, as a holder of a green card in real danger, the consulate will have to protect you. Then it could turn into an international scandal, something too huge for the Party authorities to cover up. After all, there are ways the ensuing scandal could be interpreted as being in the Party’s interest.”

“Yes, that’s a possibility,” she said with an incredulous note in her voice. “But what about you, Chief Inspector Chen? With all the evidence, you could do this for yourself.”