Qiu Xiaolong - Enigma of China

“I’ll take care of it, Mother,” Chen said, putting the card in his pocket.

His cell phone rang. It was Detective Yu. Chen excused himself and stepped out into the hall.

Yu called to fill Chen in on the meeting that had just finished in the bureau. Among other things, Party Secretary Li had been surprisingly adamant in refusing to acknowledge that Detective Wei’s death happened while he was on duty. Wei was killed during the investigation, but no one knew what he was doing there at that particular intersection, at that particular moment. Li claimed that Wei might have been there for himself, checking out some evening courses at a night school around the corner.

To Chen, the change in Li’s attitude was not too surprising. Initially, Li must have been shocked and saddened, like everybody else in the bureau. Wei was a veteran cop, having worked hard in the bureau for years. But the prospect of pursuing his death as a possible murder case could further complicate the Zhou situation. In the final analysis, any more speculation concerning the Zhou case wasn’t seen as in the Party’s interest.

“His wife is sick and jobless at home, and his son is still in middle school,” Yu concluded on a somber note.

Chen got his point. If Wei had died in an accident, there wouldn’t be any bureau compensation for his family.

Walking back into the room with the phone in his hand, Chen felt even more guilty. Had he attended the meeting, at least he could have tried to speak up for Wei, though he wondered whether that would have made any difference. Probably nothing would, unless it was proved that Wei was doing his duty, investigating around the corner near Wenhui Office Building, when he was killed.

But what was Wei doing there?

“I have to leave, Mother,” he said. “Something has come up at the bureau. I’ll come back soon.”

The next morning, Chen went to Pingliang Road in the Yangpu District.

According to the address he had, the Weis lived on an old lane. In the early sixties, a number of “worker apartments” were built there, which were undoubtedly an improvement over the pre-1949 slums, but each apartment unit had then been partitioned and partitioned again, resulting in an entire family inhabiting one room of the original three-bedroom design, and all of the families sharing the kitchen and toilet.

It wasn’t a surprise that the lane showed all the wear and tear of the past decades, even more so now that the apartment buildings were in sharp contrast to the skyscrapers that surrounded them. As he stepped into the lane, Chen felt a weird sense of disorientation. He was walking under a network of bamboo poles stretched across the lane, filled with damp laundry, like an impressionist expanse obliterating the sky overhead. The lane was rendered even narrower by the bewildering jumble of stuff stacked along both sides-a locked bike with a large bamboo basket, another covered with a large plastic sheet, a broken coal stove, a ramshackle tool-and-junk shed, and all sorts of residential add-ons, legal or illegal, seeming almost to have sprouted magically from the original houses.

It was like another city in another time, and the people seemed baffled at his intrusion: an old man squatting sideways with his bare back stuck against the wall, looking up at him; another straddling a wooden stool with one foot outstretched, inadvertently blocking the lane; and several more farther down the lane, one holding a large bowl of rice, another stretched out on a tumbledown bamboo recliner, and still another vigorously scaling a beltfish in a moss-covered common sink. Chen had never been to the lane before, yet some of the details struck him as eerily intimate, virtually inviting, as if someone close to him was waiting for him in the depths of the lane.

He stopped and knocked on a peeling door, which had to have been repainted quite a few times, at least once in red. It wasn’t a visit he was looking forward to, but he had no choice.

An emaciated woman with swollen eyes and silver-streaked hair opened the door. Behind her was a small room furnished with old, worn-out basic necessities and a new black frame containing a photo of Wei in his police uniform. The woman recognized Chen and seemed flustered.

“Oh, Chief-Party Secretary Chen.”

“Please just call me Chen, Mrs. Wei.”

“Call me Guizhen, then.”

She stepped out of the doorway and invited Chen in.

She had a hard time finding a chair for Chen in the tightly packed room. Judging from the two beds squeezed into the less than fifteen square meters of space, Chen assumed one of the beds was for their son in middle school. Wei hadn’t been able to buy a larger apartment for his family, and now it would be totally out of the question.

Chen knew that Guizhen used to do piecework sewing for a neighborhood production group at minimum pay but that the group went bankrupt several years ago. Since then, the family had been dependent on Wei’s income alone. With his sudden death, they would have to apply for the minimum city resident allowance, which, if eventually approved, would be pathetically small.

Chen thought about the possibility of bureau compensation again. But regulations were regulations, and if Wei died in a traffic accident on his own time, then the only money available would be what his colleagues around the bureau chipped in for him.

“You might not know this, Guizhen, but I joined the police force about the same time as Wei did-though he was older, having come back from Jiangxi Province as an educated youth. I still remember that in our first year at the bureau, we were both assigned to traffic. He was transferred to homicide after that, and he’s done a great job all these years.” Chen paused briefly, then resumed. “Before he died, Wei was engaged in an important investigation, to which I was serving as a consultant. Since it was really a case for the homicide squad, we didn’t meet every day, and not on the day of his accident. Consequently, I don’t know exactly what he was doing that afternoon, nor why he was at that particular intersection.”

“He left early that morning without telling me what he was planning to do. As a rule, he didn’t talk to me about police matters.”

“Did he say or do anything unusual that you can think of?”

“Er-he was dressed rather formally that morning. He’s not the type of man who was particular about his clothes. But occasionally, he would choose to dress more formally because of his work.”

Occasionally, Chen would do the same. And if Wei was going to the hotel surreptitiously, that would have made sense.

“About the location of the accident, did he say anything to you? Like, if there was something he wanted to do there, or somebody he wanted to visit in that particular neighborhood?”

“Not that I can recall. Not at all.”

“Did he call during the day?”

“No. I called him toward evening, but I didn’t get him. He could work late, though, even stay overnight at the bureau. But the next morning I still hadn’t heard from him. I was worried, so I called the bureau.”

“In the bureau, some of his colleagues are suggesting that he might have been planning to take an evening class. There’s a night school in the area.”

“I don’t know, but I don’t think so,” she said, wiping her eyes. with the back of her hand. “He worked hard all those years but was still a detective of the second rank because he didn’t have a college degree. We were both ‘educated youths’ with our best years wasted during the Cultural Revolution, and sometimes he grumbled about it. But what could he do? Already in his fifties, he didn’t have the time or energy for night school. Besides, our son is in middle school, and we couldn’t afford the expense of another student.”