Qiu Xiaolong - The Mao Case

“You never talked to me about this.”

“I don’t want to talk about Mao. Not in our home. Hasn’t he brought enough disaster for all of us?”

Yu was taken aback by her vehement response. Considering what her family had suffered during the Cultural Revolution, however, her reaction was understandable.

“Mao lived in Beijing, and Shang, in Shanghai,” he said. “How was that possible?”

“Well, Mao came to Shanghai from time to time. Whenever he was here, the local officials would arrange parties for him at a grand mansion that had belonged to a Jewish businessman before 1949. Shang was waiting for him there.”

“He might have danced with her, but that did not necessarily mean he slept with her.”

“Come on, Yu. Mao could have danced with anyone in Beijing. Why come all the way to Shanghai?”

“But Mao traveled a lot. There’s a song about his traveling for the welfare of the country, I remember.”

“You’ve never heard these stories about Mao? I can’t believe you, Yu. Shang wasn’t the only one. Mao had so many personal secretaries, nurses, orderlies. Remember Jade Phoenix, the pretty secretary who took care of him day and night at his imperial residence? Now mind you, she was a young woman with only elementary school education who actually worked as the confidential secretary for Mao. Again, it was written up in the Party newspapers that even Madam Mao had to suck up to Jade Phoenix. Why? Everybody knows the answer.”

“Yes, Jade Phoenix was in a documentary movie in Yunnan, that I do remember. It was just a glimpse of a knockout helping Mao walk out of his room. You know what? In that moment, I, too, couldn’t help speculating about their relationship, and I felt so guilty about it afterward, as if I had committed a most unforgivable crime.”

“You didn’t have to feel guilty at all. Jade Phoenix is now an honorable manager of a Mao restaurant in Beijing and she sits there occasionally. The business is booming and reservations have to be made days beforehand. All the customers go there for a chance to see Jade Phoenix.”

“But it all happened so many years ago. Why this assignment for Chen, all of a sudden?”

“That I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “Some power struggle at the top?”

“No, I don’t think they are going to remove Mao’s portrait from the Gate of Tiananmen Square, not anytime soon.”

“Chen’s not working on some cover-up for him, I hope.”

“But what can I do to help?”

“He’ll come to you when he’s in need. Don’t worry about it, but – I do understand Old Hunter’s concern,” she said, rising abruptly. “Oh, I have to put the chicken in the pot. I’ll be right back.”

She hurried back in a minute, picking up the copy of Cloud and Rain in Shanghai again. “I’m going to reread it closely. Perhaps I can find some clue for your boss.”

“You, too, have a soft spot for our irresistible chief inspector,” he said with mock jealousy. “He also has a personal problem at the moment.”

“What problem?”

“Ling, his HCC girlfriend in Beijing, has married somebody else – people have been gossiping about it at the bureau.”

“Oh that,” she said. “He got a call from Beijing during the bureau political studies meeting a couple of days ago. Somebody overheard the conversation – a few words of it. Chen looked devastated afterward.”

“It might not be that bad for him. He’s a successful cop – and not because of her. In fact, I wondered what he would become if they stayed together. You know what I mean.”

“He’s become a chief inspector on his own merits, no question about it,” Yu readily agreed. “Which is easy for others to see, but not for him.”

“Then now he can turn over a new page. With his HCC girlfriend constantly at the back of his mind, it was impossible for him to see other girls. White Cloud, for instance.”

It was another of her favorite topics. Peiqin appeared to think that the breakup had come as a shock to Chen, but Chen’s relationship with his HCC girlfriend had long been on the rocks. Last year, Chen had passed on an opportunity to go to Beijing, but Yu decided not to mention that to Peiqin at the moment.

“No, not White Cloud,” he said instead. “I don’t think she’s a good one for him, either.”

“You know what I found in a bookstore the other day?” she said, delving into the book box again to pick up a magazine. “A poem written by your chief inspector. For his HCC girlfriend, though it isn’t that explicit. Even then and there, they were already lost in their different interpretations. It’s entitled ‘Li Shangyin’s English Version.’ ” She took off her apron and started reading aloud.

The fragrance of jasmine in your hair / and then in my teacup, that evening,/ when you thought me drunk, an orange /pinwheel turning at the rice-paper window./ The present is, when you think/ of it, already the past. I am / trying to quote a line / from Li Shangyin to say what / cannot be said, but the English version /at hand fails to do justice / to him (the translator, divorced / from his American wife, drunk, found English / beating him like a blind horse), any / more than the micaceous mist / issuing from a Lantian blue jade / to your reflection. // Last night’s star, / last night’s wind – the memory / of trimming a candle, the minute / of a spring silkworm wrapping itself / in a cocoon, when the rain / becomes the mountain, and the mountain / becomes the rain… // It is like a painting /of Li Shangyin going to open / the door, and of the door / opening him to the painting, / that Tang scroll you showed me / in the rare book section / of the Beijing Library, while you / read my ecstasy as empathy / with the silverfish escaping / the sleepy eyes of the full stops, / and I felt a violent wonder / at your bare feet beating / a bolero on the filmy dust / of the ancient floor. Even then / and there, lost in each / other’s interpretations, we agreed.

“I can make neither heads nor tails of it,” Yu said with a puzzled smile. “How can you be so sure it’s a poem written for her?”

“She worked at the Beijing Library. But more importantly, why Li Shangyin? A Tang-dynasty poet, Li was seen as a social climber because he married the daughter of the then prime minister. Unfortunately, the prime minister soon lost his position, which cast a shadow on Li’s official career. He wrote his best lyrical poems in frustration.”

“So that turned out to be good for his poetry, right?”

“You could say so. Chen’s too proud to be seen as a climber.”

“If he had really cared for her, why should it have mattered so much?”

“No one lives in a vacuum, not to mention all of the politics at your bureau.”

She was passionate in Chen’s defense, waving the magazine dramatically, her face flushing like a flower.

“Oh, the chicken soup,” she said, dropping the magazine. “It’s time to turn the fire down low.”

He watched her hurrying out with a touch of amusement. After all, the chicken soup proved to be just as important as Chen to her. But then he started worrying about Chen again. It was an investigation fraught with danger, involving knowledge which could kill, as Old Hunter had warned.

Detective Yu had to do something, whether Chief Inspector Chen included him or not.

CHEN WOKE UP, BLINKING in the glaring sunlight streaming in through the half-drawn curtain. Still lying in bed, he reviewed his unsuccessful “approach” to Jiao in the restaurant the previous night.

In spite of the “romantic” dinner in the well-preserved attic room under the time-sobered beams allegedly from Madam Chiang’s days, with a couple of tiny red paper lanterns dangling overhead, he had learned little that was new. Sitting opposite, in a pink tank top and white pants, her shoulders dazzling against the candlelight, Jiao appeared preoccupied, “the autumn waves” in her eyes reflecting something far away. Tossing a wisp of hair back from her forehead, she brushed off his efforts to bring the talk around to her family background. “No, let’s not talk about it,” she said. A silver knife lay beside her plate, like a footnote, the waiters and waitress coming and going, all dressed in the fashion of the thirties.