Qiu Xiaolong - Enigma of China

His mother, for instance.

The traffic light turned green.

Looking up, he saw a relatively tall building with its gold-painted name, Ruikang, shining on the façade. It wasn’t exactly a new, upscale building, but because of its excellent location, one square meter here cost no less than thirty thousand yuan in the present market.

Then he remembered that Lianping lived in this building. It was close to his mother’s, as she’d told him, and was just one block behind Great World, an entertainment center built almost a century ago that was now closed for restoration. For a non-Shanghainese girl, she was doing quite well. She had an apartment at the center of the city, her own luxury car, both symbols of the Shanghai dream.

He glanced around the subdivision but didn’t see her car. Perhaps it was parked in back. He wasn’t in any mood to drop in on her, but he was surprised that his thoughts kept returning to her even though he was in the midst of a developing crisis.

That was probably because she’d been so helpful with the investigation. He was impressed by her cynical criticism of the unbridled corruption in the nation’s socialism with Chinese characteristics, though he’d known her for only a couple of weeks and known her real name, Lili, for only a couple of days. He was aware of the gaps that separated them-between their backgrounds and their ways of looking at society, not to mention their age difference. Still, it wasn’t too much to say that she already left a mark on his police work. Not only had she provided him a general grounding in the world of the Internet, she had also given him a sense of the ways people used it to resist and expose corruption. It was also her suggestion that he go to Shaoxing, and prior to that she had helped him set up the meeting with Melong, both of which affected the course of his investigation.

Again, he restrained himself from thinking of her other than in a professional capacity. He walked down Guangxi Road, stopping abruptly at the corner of Jinling Road.

There was an Internet café at the corner called Flying Horse. It was the one mentioned by Lieutenant Sheng, the one from which the e-mail with the photo had been sent to Melong. The evening when Chen met Melong, at the cross-bridge noodle place, Melong had told him that the Internet café was nearby.

Next to the Internet café there was a Chinese herbal medicine store. There was a line of people waiting outside the herbal medicine store, obscuring the entrance to the Internet café. Like most others, Flying Horse was open twenty-four hours a day, and through the line of people Chen could see that the door stood ajar.

Suddenly, he realized that there was something he might have overlooked. Transfixed at the idea of it, Chen shuddered in spite of himself. He crossed the street and stepped into the Internet café. A smallish girl at the front desk asked him for his ID with a sleepy yawn. As at the other Internet cafés, the new regulation requiring that users provide ID and sign the register was being observed.

Chen showed her his police badge and pointed at the register.

“I need to make a copy of all the entries for this month.”

She blinked at him as if desperately trying to rouse herself out of a stupor.

“My manager won’t be back until eight o’clock.”

“Don’t worry about him. Here’s my business card. Tell him to call me if he wants to talk. Now give me the register. You must have a copy machine in the office, and it’ll only take me about ten minutes to copy the pages I need. I’ll pay you accordingly.”

She hesitated and then pushed a button, which brought the owner to the front desk. He was a stout man with a large head and broad shoulders. He appeared to be flabbergasted, having recognized Chen and realized his position.

“What wind has brought you here today, Chief?”

“So it’s you-Iron Head Diao. That’s your nickname, right?”

“Wow, you still remember me. We went to the same elementary school, but you were my senior. You’re really somebody now,” Iron Head Diao said obsequiously. “What can I do for you?”

“Let me see the register.”

“This one?” he said, handing it to Chen.

Chen glanced at the first two pages. The register was a new one, with the first entry in it being from just three days ago.

“Let me look at the two before this one.”

“Sure,” Iron Head Diao said, reaching below the counter and pulling out two more register books.

“Is there anywhere I can check through them in peace?” Chen asked.

“Come back to my office. It’s up in the attic.”

Without any further ado, Iron Head Diao led him to the back and up a shaky ladder. In the office there was a desk as well as a copy machine.

“It’s all yours,” Iron Head Diao said before climbing down the squeaky ladder. “Stay as long as you like.”

It wasn’t much more than a retrofitted attic: small, dimly lit, but with enough privacy for Chen’s purpose. What’s more, there was also a surveillance monitor, which commanded a view of the whole place. While he could watch what was going on downstairs, no one would be able to see up into the attic office.

He started looking through the entries. The second register covered the period he wanted to check. It only took him five or six minutes before he came to the date, the time slot, and a name, even though it didn’t correspond to the number of the computer from which the e-mail with the photo had been sent to Melong.

Another piece of the puzzle fell into place.

Gazing at the page, Chen heaved a long sigh.

He looked at the surveillance monitor, which showed Iron Head Diao pacing about, smoking and glancing up furtively. His enormous head hung low, as if weighed down with worries.

Chen then did something quite unusual for him. He tore out a couple of pages from the register and stuffed them into his pocket. It surprised even himself, as it was something he couldn’t have envisioned doing even a minute before.

It was unprofessional and unjustifiable, particularly for a police officer.

There were things that took precedence over being a cop, however, he hastened to assure himself. And he might not have to worry too much about it. A couple of missing pages from an outdated register might not be noticed.

He closed the registers, climbed down the ladder, and handed them back to Iron Head Diao.

As he left the Internet café, with Iron Head Diao waving at him from the door, still grinning from ear to ear, Chen realized that he hadn’t written his name in the register. That might be just as well. Like the other day, at the Internet café in Pudong, there were always loopholes in regulations.

On the street corner, he saw a white-haired man in rags shuffling out of a sordid lane across Yunnan Road, despite the superstition that people should avoid walking under wet clothing, which was hanging from bamboo poles that crisscrossed the alley overhead. But what could an old man do, moving slowly, leaning on a bamboo cane? Possibly born, raised, and then grown old in that same narrow lane, he would have had to enter and exit the lane here, day in and day out, likely to be down and out until the very end.

Chen was about to cross the street when a black BMW convertible sped along Jinling Road, splashing muddy rainwater on him.

“You’re blind!” The young driver cursed at him with one hand on the wheel and the other on the shoulder of a slender girl sprawled beside him, her bare legs stretched out like fresh lotus roots.

That such a contrast had become a common sight in the city depressed him.

Perhaps he was blind. At the moment, he really had no idea where he was heading. Then he got a phone call from Young Bao at the Writers’ Association.