Qiu Xiaolong - Enigma of China

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Away from Shaoxing. I know things are hard for you, but you have to stay out of their hands. What happened to Zhou shouldn’t happen to you.”

“But how long do I have to hide and wait?” She went on without waiting for an answer: “Is there anything new in Shanghai?”

“We’re making some progress, but-”

“The other day,” she said, interrupting, “you asked me to recall anything unusual-anything at all-about Zhou before he was shuangguied. I thought this through several times, and I think there might be something, but I’m not sure.”

“Yes?”

“There’s a small bedroom attached to his office. He usually worked late, so occasionally he stayed overnight. One evening, after more pictures were posted on the Internet, he looked very upset. He wanted me to join him in that bedroom to, among other things, dance for him.”

“What? In a parody of the Mighty King of Chu?” Chen asked. Zhou must have known of the impending disaster and had reacted like the King of Chu, who requested that his favorite imperial concubine dance for him before he went off to fight his last-ditch battle.

“I’ve seen the movie based on that story. I think it’s called Farewell My Concubine. I’m no dancer, but he was so insistent that I did a loyal character dance for him. He hummed a Mao-quotation song, lighting one cigarette after another like there was no tomorrow…

“The next morning, when I first got to the office, he wanted me to take out a large plastic trash bag. That was odd because, as a rule, that was the cleaning woman’s job. He said he needed me to do it because he was going to have some important guests that morning. Sure enough, they showed up even before he got back from his breakfast at the bureau canteen.”

“Who was it that showed up that morning?”

“It was Jiang and his team from the city government. As soon as they saw he wasn’t in his office, they headed straight to the canteen and marched him away from there.”

“So Jiang’s team came before the city discipline committee team did?”

“Yes. It was all so sudden.”

“But what about the trash bag?”

“Before I dumped it, I took a look inside. It was nothing but ashes.”

“Perhaps he burned documents overnight. There was nothing else?”

“Well, it wasn’t just ashes; there were also some small broken plastic pieces.”

“Where did you dump it?”

“In a large trash bin outside the office.”

“Did the team from the city know anything about it?”

“No. The whole office was thrown into turmoil and no one paid attention to the trash bin outside. I went back and looked in the next day and everything was gone. The trash bin was empty.”

“Now,” Chen said, glancing at his watch, “what can you tell me about those plastic pieces?”

“They looked like pieces from a plastic pen. Perhaps he crushed it in agitation. It was bright red. I don’t remember having ever seen such a pen in the office before. It wasn’t something that struck me as unusual at the time, though.”

“Did you notice anything broken or missing from the office?”

“No, nothing.”

“Did you ever go back into his office after he was put into shuanggui?”

“No. I used to work in a cubicle outside his office. That morning they conducted a very thorough search, and they took away a lot of things, including the computers and all the files. Then his office was sealed up. My cubicle was ransacked, too, and a group of people came back and searched again about a week later.”

So the search on that first morning had been done by Jiang’s city government team. There was nothing surprising about that. Whatever they had or hadn’t found, Jiang hadn’t shared with Chen.

“About a week later. That was after Zhou’s death, right?”

“Yes.”

What were they looking for? Chen wondered. Whatever it was, they were still looking for it. Fang had touched on that possibility back when they had talked in Shaoxing.

Chen noticed that the screen on the phone was showing a message about the calling card running out of time.

“Sorry, there’s no time left on my calling card. I have to go, but I’ll call you again, Fang.”

* * *

Late that afternoon Chen arrived at the City Government Building. As a rule, he would show his ID, then breeze through the security checkpoint. The guard would merely nod at him, never bothering to ask him to declare the purpose of his visit. With his ID in hand, Chen simply signed his name in the register book.

Instead of taking the elevator directly to Zhou’s office, Chen went to a small canteen on the first floor and sat down with a cup of coffee. He pulled out his notebook and started making notes on events and observations over the last few days.

It wasn’t until five thirty that he stood up and went over to the elevator, taking it to the floor of the City Housing Development Committee. There was no one in the hallway. He hurried over to the director’s office. The door still bore a broken police seal.

The director’s position left vacant by Zhou’s death hadn’t yet been filled. The city government, it seemed, was being extraordinarily cautious, taking their time in making a decision about the crucial position.

Chen took another look around, then inserted a key, entered, and closed the door after him.

It wasn’t a really large office, but with the computer gone and the desk and chairs dust-covered, it looked rather desolate.

It would be unrealistic to think that he’d be able to find something critical in just one short visit, after the office had already been thoroughly searched. Still, he had to come and try.

Instead of digging into every nook and cranny, Chen opened the door to the attached bedroom, sat down in the leather swivel chair, and tried to imagine himself as Zhou on that night.

In spite of his efforts, a mental image of Fang dancing kept cropping up. Perhaps it was too dramatic to ignore the echo of the ancient story of an imperial concubine dancing for her lord, knowing that it would be her last before she committed suicide. It was a scene much celebrated in classical Chinese literature.

Making a beauty willing to die for you, / the King of Chu was after all a hero . These were two sympathetic lines by Wu Weiye, a Qing dynasty poet.

Like the King of Chu, Zhou had refused to give up, though he was aware of the approaching doom.

The parallels were eerie, but the details confounded Chen.

In the case of the King of Chu, his favorite concubine danced and then killed herself so that she wouldn’t be a burden to her lord in his last battle. Fang didn’t do so, nor did Zhou want her to.

The King of Chu still wanted to fight, clinging to the belief that he could break through the opposing army, that he had enough forces left at the camp east of the river to back him up. Zhou must have believed the same.

Chen again started to go over the sequence of events that fateful night, this time more closely. While she was dancing, Zhou hummed a Mao-quotation song and lit a cigarette-

Chen wondered whether there could be something in Zhou’s choice of the Mao-quotation song, but he quickly brushed aside that idea. It could be simply that the melody was familiar to Zhou from his youth, or because Fang was dancing the loyal character dance…

The chief inspector again lost the thread of his thoughts.

He, too, wanted to light a cigarette. He took out his pack before he realized that he must have left his lighter back at the security checkpoint. That might be just as well. Theoretically, the office should be left intact and undisturbed. Still, his glance swept the office, falling involuntarily upon a lighter next to the mini marble bookstand on the desk.