Qiu Xiaolong - A Case of Two Cities

“Don’t move the body or do anything,” Chen said. “I’m on my way.”

“I won’t. Celebrity cases can be too tough for our ordinary homicide squad.”

Chen detected the sarcasm in the response. Kuang wasn’t eager for his cooperation. Every now and then, Chen’s special case squad had to take over the politically sensational cases-which was not pleasant for him. Still, such a division of labor was far from pleasant for people in the homicide squad too, depriving them of the limelight as it did.

The traffic was bad, as usual. Along Yen’an Road, the taxi simply crawled, like a disoriented ant. It had grown dark when the taxi finally arrived at the high-end apartment complex on Wuzhong Road. There were a couple of guards standing at the entrance. Apparently it was a secure, high-class neighborhood.

The apartment building in question had already been roped off. A man in plainclothes standing near the entrance recognized the chief inspector, nodding vigorously, but Chen failed to place him.

Kuang was waiting for Chen outside the apartment on the third floor, waving a newspaper like a fan. A short skinny man in his early thirties, Kuang had protruding eyes like a special kind of goldfish Chen had seen in his childhood.

Chen went up and said, “Well?”

“Doctor Xia has come and left,” Kuang said. “According to him, she was strangled to death early in the morning. Possibly around two o’clock. Having had sex shortly before. Rape of some sort. The criminal used a condom.”

“That’s uncommon in the best area of Shanghai. The murderer might not have been a stranger to her.”

“That’s possible. He could have committed the crime after having consensual sex with her. There is no sign of forced entry, no bruises on her body, no noise heard by the neighbors. The location of the apartment complex makes the scenario of a stranger breaking in hardly possible.”

It was not unimaginable for a woman like her, with a husband away in Germany for years, to have a lover, in the city of Shanghai, in the nineties. She had had one, at least, Chen knew.

He walked with Kuang into the bedroom, where her body had not been moved yet. On her back on the carpet, An lay spread-eagled, wrapped in a white terry robe that slipped high up, revealing her bare thighs and belly. Her silk lace panties were removed, not torn, but rumpled into a ball beside her. Her face turned to one side, already bluish under the light. He noticed that her skin was slightly waxy. Her fingernails and toenails, painted scarlet, looked unbroken, unsoiled.

He had seen her numerous times on TV, always elegantly dressed, reading the news with a halo of political correctness. He had never imagined his last image of her would be like this. It would perhaps haunt him for a long time.

He knelt down and gazed into her eyes, which stared back, unblinking. The corneas appeared cloudy, which reinforced Dr. Xia’s estimate of the time of death. He studied her face for a minute before touching her eyelids. He muttered almost inaudibly, “I’ll catch the murderer, An.”

To his astonishment, her eyes closed slowly, as if in response to his words.

“Wow! It’s like in those old stories,” Kuang exclaimed in a low, shocked voice. “Your touch worked the miracle.”

In a story Chen had heard long ago, a murdered woman refused to close her eyes until someone swore her revenge. Kuang, too, must have heard it. Chen was also aware of the consternation implied in Kuang’s comment. For in that particular tale, the man who swore her revenge was romantically involved with her. It wasn’t the moment, however, for Chen to be concerned about his colleague’s interpretation.

He remained standing beside her, staring, trying and failing to imagine what could have crossed her mind in her last moment. The effort was momentous to him, sort of establishing a bond of pledge between the living and the dead.

Beside him, Kuang started elaborating his theory of a rape murder case in detail.

Chen listened, nodding, his eyes now fixed on An’s family picture in a crystal frame on the nightstand. An, Han, and their son, all of them smiling and basking in the happy sunlight on the Bund. Possibly taken in the days before Han’s departure to Germany, their marriage probably already on the rocks. The picture still told a story expected by the camera. Smile- click-done. But the fact that the picture remained on the nightstand in her last days saddened Chen.

The scene behind An’s family might not be far away from Golden Island, for he noticed the neon sign of Kentucky Chicken, which had enjoyed a tremendous success in Shanghai, in a colonial building at the corner between Yen’an and Zhongshan Roads. The building had been named East Wind Restaurant in the seventies, and even earlier, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was the Shanghai Club, a prestigious establishment that catered to English expatriates and featured the longest bar in the world at the time. Whatever its names, the building had a much longer life.

Chen did not say anything to Kuang. An’s death must be related to the Xing investigation, but he saw no point discussing it with the young cop.

Kuang might have been baffled by the inscrutable chief inspector, who made little response to his analysis. For Kuang, there were also earlier questions left unanswered. Chen’s call to her, for one.

When the morgue people came to carry away the body, Chen said to Kuang that he would like to stay there for a while, alone. Kuang nodded and left in respectful confusion.

Chen stepped out onto a tiny balcony overlooking the area. It was a high-end subdivision. Down there were parking spaces outlined for the residents. He didn’t know which car was hers. He then noticed a broken guitar, apparently long untouched, dust-covered, in a corner of the balcony. Once again, a poem came to him out of the unlikely moment, this one by Li Bai, a Tang dynasty poet from hundreds of years earlier.

Chief Inspector Chen was not intent on searching the room one more time. Had there been something important, it must have been taken away. Still, he wanted to hang on there.

He pulled out the small drawer of the nightstand. Among some scrap papers was an address book. Its cover bore the faded emblem of the TV station with the year 1982 printed. He opened it and found it belonged to Han. Most of the addresses and phone numbers must be outdated. On a page he saw a quote from the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities. It was perhaps in their reading-group days. The address book might have been there only for sentimental reasons. Still, he put it in his pocket.

Now, in the room where she had spent her last days, he chose to see her life in a new light. He did not want to see An simply as someone in a corruption case. Her involvement was admittedly a mistake on her part, but could she have done all that because of her loneliness? People had to keep themselves busy with one thing or another, like himself. A public relations company might not have been a bad idea in itself, and it was natural for someone in PR to work with businesspeople like Ming. As for her personal life, Chen thought he was no judge-he knew he wouldn’t like to be judged by others.

What would her life have been like if things had remained as they were in their reading-group days? Both An and Han might have been here, like so many others. A contented wife, opening a colorful career album over the weekend…