Qiu Xiaolong - A Loyal Character Dancer

So she started writing a fax to Ed Spencer. After briefing him on the unexpected development, she requested that he look for a tape of Feng’s phone call on April fifth, being especially alert to a possible coded message. She then asked his approval for her joining the investigation. At the end, she made a request for information about Chief Inspector Chen Cao.

Before she went down to the hotel’s fax room, she added one sentence, asking Ed to send his reply to the hotel around 10 a.m. Shanghai time, so she could be waiting by the fax machine. She did not want anybody else to look at the contents, even if written in English.

After the fax went through, she had a quick meal in the dining room. Back in her own room, she took another shower. She was still not sleepy. Wrapped in a bath towel, she looked out again at the illuminated expanse of the river. She caught a glimpse of a ship bearing a striped flag. At that distance, she could not make out its name. It might be an American cruise ship anchored for the night in the Huangpu River.

Around four in the morning, she took two tablets of Dramamine, which she had brought with her in case of motion sickness. Its soporific side effect was what she needed. In addition, she took a bottle of Budweiser out of the refrigerator; its Chinese name was Baiwei meaning-”a hundred times more powerful.” The Anheuser-Busch brewery had a joint venture in Wuhan.

As she turned from the window, she thought of a Song dynasty poem she had studied in a class. It was about a traveler’s loneliness, in spite of the marvelous scenery. Trying to recall the lines, she fell asleep.

She was awakened by the bedside alarm clock. Rubbing her eyes, she jumped up, disoriented. It was 9:45. She had no time to take a shower. Pulling on a T-shirt and a pair of old jeans, she left her room wearing the hotel’s disposable slippers which were almost paper thin, and seemed to be made of the same material as that used for transparent plastic raincoats. Hurrying down to the hotel fax room, she straightened her hair in the elevator with a pocket comb.

The fax for her came at the time she had specified. The feedback was more substantial than she had expected. First, the fact of Feng’s phone call on April fifth was confirmed, and there was a tape. Ed was having its contents translated. As a potential witness, Feng was not allowed to disclose anything about his status in the program. Ed had no idea what he might have said to precipitate Wen’s disappearance.

Second, her proposal to join the investigation was approved.

In response to her request for the background information on Chen, Ed wrote: “I’ve contacted the CIA. They will send us Chief Inspector Chen Cao’s file. From what they told me, Chen is someone to watch. He is associated with the liberal reformers in the Party. He is also a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association. He is described as an ambitious Party cadre, on the rise.”

As she stepped out of the room with the fax in her hand, she saw Chen seated in the lobby browsing through an English magazine, a bouquet of flowers lying on a chair beside him.

“Good morning, Inspector Rohn.” Chen stood up, and she realized he was taller than the other people in the lobby. He had a high forehead, penetrating black eyes, and his expression was intelligent. Dressed in a black suit, he looked more like a scholar than a policeman, an impression enhanced by the information she had just read.

“Good morning, Chief Inspector Chen.”

“This is for you.” Chen handed the flowers to her. “There were so many things happening at the bureau yesterday, I forgot to prepare a proper welcome bouquet for you in my rush to the airport. For your first morning in Shanghai.”

“Thank you. It’s beautiful.”

“I called your room. No one answered. So I decided to wait for you here. I hope you don’t mind.”

She didn’t mind. The flowers were a surprise, but as she stood beside him in her plastic slippers, with her hair in such a mess, she couldn’t help a feeling of annoyance at his formal courtesy. This was not behavior she expected from a colleague, and she didn’t quite care for the veiled reminder that she was “just” a woman.

“Let’s go up to my room to talk,” she said.

As they entered her room, she gestured for him to sit and picked up a vase from the corner table. “I’ll put the flowers in water.”

“Have you enjoyed a good night’s sleep?” Chen asked, glancing around the room.

“Not really, but it should be enough,” she said. She refused to be embarrassed by the disarray of the room. The bed was not made, her stockings were thrown down on the rug, pills were scattered on the night stand, and her rumpled suit had been tossed over the back of the chair. She made a curt excuse, “Sorry, I had to pick up a fax.”

“I should have given you notice. My apologies.”

“You are being very polite, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen,” she said, trying to keep the sarcasm from her voice. “Last night you were up late too, i imagine.”

“Last night, after I left you, I discussed the case with Superintendent Hong of the Fujian police. It was a long discussion. Early in the morning, my assistant, Detective Yu, phoned me. He explained that at his hotel, there’s only one telephone at the front desk, and after eleven o’clock the night manager locks up the telephone and goes to bed.”

“Why lock up the phone?”

“Well, a telephone is a rare commodity in the countryside,” Chen explained. “It’s not like in Shanghai.”

“Is there new information this morning?”

“About your question concerning the delay in our passport approval process, I’ve got an answer.”

“What is that, Chief Inspector Chen?”

“Wen would have received her passport several weeks ago, but she did not have her marriage certificate. No legal document to prove her relationship with Feng. She moved in with Feng in 1971. Government offices were all closed at the time.”

“Why were the government offices closed?”

“Mao labeled a lot of cadres as ‘capitalist roaders.’ Liu Shaoqi, the head of the People’s Republic, was thrown into jail without a trial. The offices were shut. The so-called revolutionary committees became the only power.”

“I’ve read about the Cultural Revolution, but I did not realize that.”

“So our passport people had to search the commune records. It took time. That’s probably why the process has been so slow.”

“Probably,” she echoed, tilting her head slightly to one side. “So in China, every rule is to be strictly followed-even in a special case?”

“That’s what I learned. Besides, Wen only initiated her application in mid-February, not in January.”

“But Feng told us she applied in January-mid-January.”

“That’s my information. Even so, it has taken a long time, I have to admit. There may have been another factor. Wen does not have any guanxi in Fujian. This word may be translated as ‘connections,’ only guanxi means far more than that. It’s not merely about the people you know, but about the people who can help you with what you want.”

“The grease that keep the wheels turning, so to speak.”

“If you like. Perhaps, like anywhere else in the world, the wheels of bureaucracy move slowly, unless there is some lubrication for the bureaucrats. That’s where guanxi comes in. Wen has remained an outsider all these years, so she had no guanxi whatsoever.”

She was astonished by Chen’s frankness. He made no attempt to gloss over the way the system worked. This did not seem to be characteristic of an “emerging Party cadre.”

“Oh, there is something else. According to one of Wen’s neighbors, there was a stranger looking for Wen on the afternoon of April sixth.”