Qiu Xiaolong - Enigma of China

“Oh, go ahead.”

He pushed the button, then stood up and walked two or three steps out of the pavilion. A short distance away, he started talking, his brows knitted.

It was difficult for her to guess the content of the phone conversation from the fragmented words she occasionally overheard. He seemed to be saying little except “yes,” “no,” and other terse, disjointed words.

While he talked to the doctor, she turned to look at the distant hills wrapped in light mist. The mist came rolling off the hills like a scroll of traditional Chinese landscape painting, as if what wasn’t painted in the space was telling more than what was.

Finally, he came back, putting his hand on her shoulder absentmindedly as he joined in and gazed at the same view.

“Is everything fine with your mother?”

“She’s fine. The doctor had something else to discuss with me.” He then changed the subject abruptly, “Oh, we’d better go to the festival for the dinner party. Otherwise, people will start complaining about Inspector Chen.”

“Whatever you say, Chief Inspector Chen.”

“I had a cup of Shaoxing rice wine during lunch. It was extraordinarily mellow and sweet. I had it with a small dish of peas flavored with aniseed, just like Kong Yiji in a Lu Xun story. It makes me think that the dinner won’t be too bad here.”

“Of course, you are first and foremost a cop,” she said, barely concealing the satirical edge in her voice, “always covering yourself meticulously, while at the same time, an epicurean enjoying yourself at every opportunity.”

Whether he took that as a compliment or something else, she didn’t know, but it put a period to their moment in the secluded garden.

He helped her to her feet.

The trail ahead of them appeared slippery, treacherous, and moss-covered here and there.

An indistinct sound came from behind them, hardly audible, perhaps bubbles from the fish bursting on the surface of the pool.

Chen returned to Shanghai the next morning. Once there, one of the first things he did was check his e-mail. In his in-box was a response to his e-mail to Comrade Zhao, the retired secretary of the Central Party Discipline Committee in Beijing.

Thank you for your note. For a retired Party cadre of my age, I’ve been doing fine. I don’t want to get involved in too many things, and of late, I’ve been reading Wang Yangming. Your father was a neo-Confucianist, so you must be familiar with Wang Yangming. I particularly like a poem he wrote in his youth. “The mountains nearby make the moon appear small, / so you think the mountains larger than the moon. / If you have a view stretching out to the horizon, / you’ll see the mountains against the magnificent moon.” While reading the poem, I thought of you. You, too, should have a view reaching all the way to the horizon.

As for the team you mentioned, there’s nothing I can tell you. You’re an experienced police officer and you know better. At your age, Wang Yangming was already playing an important role in maintaining the well-being of his country.

It was an enigmatic e-mail. There was nothing surprising about Comrade Zhao being tight-lipped about the Beijing team. It wasn’t like the retired Party leader, however, to quote a poem in his e-mail.

Despite the fact that his father was a neo-Confucianist, Chen didn’t know much about Wang Yangming. What he did know was that he was an influential Ming dynasty Confucian philosopher who advocated the concept of innate knowing, arguing that every person knows from birth, intuitively but not rationally, the difference between good and evil.

Chen decided to spend some time researching Wang Yangming on the Internet. It turned out that Wang Yangming embodied the Confucianist ideal of a learned person who is both a scholar and an official. In 1519 AD, while serving the governor of Jiangxi province, he suppressed the uprising of Prince Zhu Chenhao, saving the dynasty from a huge disaster.

It was gratifying that Comrade Zhao expected Chen to have a career as prominent as Wang Yangming’s, but why express this now, all of a sudden?

The poem itself didn’t impress Chen. Wang Yangming wasn’t known as a poet, but the context in which Zhao quoted the poem made Chen think. Chen was sure that it meant something.

Writing Zhao for an explanation, however, would be useless.

With the sun obscured by the floating clouds, / I’m worried for not seeing Chang’an .

Chen picked up the phone, thinking for a minute, and then dialed Young Bao at the Writers’ Association.

“I need to ask you a favor, Young Bao.”

“Whatever I can do, Master Chen.”

“You’ve got a friend who works at the Moller Villa Hotel.”

“Yes, a good friend. In fact, I’m going to meet him at the hotel canteen for lunch today.”

“Can you copy a couple of pages from the visitor registry for building B? Specifically, last Monday and Tuesday.”

“That’ll be a piece of cake. He works in building B, and from time to time, he works at the front desk, keeping the register. I’ll call you as soon as I get it.”

That afternoon Chen went to meet with Lieutenant Sheng of Internal Security. The meeting had been requested by Sheng, and the meeting place was the hotel where he was staying. It was the City Hotel, located on Shanxi Road, only a two or three minutes’ walk from the Moller Villa Hotel. Perhaps it was just a coincidence-something that Chen, as a cop, didn’t believe in.

The request was a surprise. Chen had crossed paths with Internal Security on previous occasions, but rarely had it been on friendly terms. In the last analysis, Chen was a cop before all else.

Internal Security had different priorities. For them, the Party’s interests were first and foremost. In the name of the Party, they were capable of doing anything and everything.

So, Chen wondered, what was the purpose of the meeting?

Chen arrived at the hotel and was promptly ushered in to see Lieutenant Sheng. Sheng was a tall man in his late thirties or early forties. His receding hairline highlighted a broad forehead covered with lines. His accent revealed his origins-it was unmistakably from Beijing.

“I’m so glad to meet you, Chief Inspector Chen. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“I’m glad to meet you, too, Lieutenant Sheng. You’re here on special detachment from Beijing, I hear.”

“Oh, there’s nothing special about it. If anything, I think I was sent because of the computer science classes I took at night school.”

“That can be important these days.”

“You’re a capable and experienced police officer, so there’s no point in beating around the bush,” Sheng said. “I was sent here because of the Zhou case, but I’m to focus on a different aspect. You know how all this trouble started. It was that search-the human-flesh search engine-which started on that Web forum. These witch hunts have become an Internet mass movement, and they are getting out of control. They are tearing the image of our Party and government to shreds. The bloggers and forum users-those so-called netizens-will use any and every excuse, no matter how flimsy, including a pack of high-priced cigarettes, to vent their frustration and fury against the Party authorities. If it keeps on like this, the stability of our socialist country will be destroyed.”

Chen listened without responding immediately. It was always easy to talk about motives, no matter what sort of investigation it was, and as far as Internal Security was concerned, the motive behind the Internet pile-on in the Zhou case was obvious.

Jiang, who was in charge of the team from the city government, seemed to be inclined toward the same conclusion. Sheng should have talked to Jiang instead.