Qiu Xiaolong - The Mao Case

Chen hadn’t been trained at the police academy, but his reflexes were sharp. He ducked his head to the side and swirled around. The assailant, having put the weight of his body behind his blow, missed, lurched forward. The two were now in a typical kongfu hand-push position. Chen swung his arm over, bearing it down hard on the back of the attacker, who staggered, his blue-dragon-tattooed forearm flailing out for support. Before Chen could deliver a second blow, however, he caught sight of another black-attired man dashing across from Shao-xing Road, brandishing an identical iron bar. The two gangsters could have been sitting in ambush, waiting for him at the intersection.

“You must have taken me for another, brothers,” Chen said, trying to think of Triad jargon as the first gangster was regaining his balance. “The flood is surging into the Dragon King Temple.”

“Who are your brothers? An ugly toad let its mouth water at a beautiful swan! You should pee and take a look at your own reflection,” the second man said, charging toward him in a lightning-fast movement.

Dodging, Chen counterattacked with his right fist. He felt the iron bar brushing against his left shoulder. Reeling, Chen fell backward, his head bumping against the umber brick wall of a two-story house at the street corner. But he managed to kick out simultaneously, his feet hitting the abdomen of the second thug, who then doubled over in pain. Chen moved a step to the left, blocking instinctively with his numbed left arm another blow from the first one. Panting, swaying, he sized up the situation with a sinking heart. He could cope with one, but against two, both wielding iron bars, he had no chance.

His only way out would be to cut back to Ruijing Road. With more people moving around and a cop standing there – possibly a plainclothes Internal Security as well – the gangsters might not be able to chase him all the way, especially if he raised hue and cry in the broad daylight.

Pivoting, he hurtled back toward the main street, with the two gangsters running after him.

Neither a cop nor an Internal Security man was in sight as he sprinted onto Ruijing Road.

Only a couple of pedestrians were visible in the intersection, neither of them choosing to do anything, watching like the spellbound audience at an absurd scene in a martial arts movie.

The door of Xie Mansion was closed, as usual. It was then that his glance swept across the street, to the small café he had visited. On the front door flashed a neon sign saying “open.” And there was a back door behind the partition wall, he recalled.

He spun round and dashed across the street, nearly colliding with a bike. A couple was emerging from the café, chatting and holding hands. He ran through them, sending the woman sprawling against the window and the man flinging his arm in rage. Bursting into the café, to the consternation of both the customers and waitress, he closed the door and locked it behind him, before slipping out through the back door and darting into a small lane.

It was only a matter of a minute or less before the gangsters started to bang on the front door, but it was enough time for him to escape the lane without the two barking at his heels. Turning onto Shaoxing Road, he thought he heard terrible shouts and crashes somewhere in the lane.

A taxi sped along. Waving his hand frantically, Chen rushed toward it and hurried in, gasping for breath.

“Drive.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Drive.”

It wasn’t until after the taxi swung into Fuxing Road that Chen was capable of reconstructing the encounter in clear sequence.

Ambush. No question about it. The gangsters could have been following him for days. A couple of times, he had walked along Shao-xing Road and turned down the side street as a shortcut to the subway station. The attackers had stationed themselves at the intersection, waiting for him whichever way Chen might have turned.

Judging by their clothing, the iron bars, the tattoo on one’s arm, and their jargon, the two were undoubtedly Triad members. They didn’t try to disguise it.

But he couldn’t remember having ruffled the feathers of any particular organization. Of late, there had been a special squad formed at the bureau for the purpose of coping with organized crime in the city. His Special Case Squad’s main responsibility was dealing with politically special or sensitive cases. Thanks to his connection to Triad-related people like Gu, Chen had been able to keep himself out of troubled water.

There was no ruling out the possibility of mistaken identity, but he couldn’t count on it.

And as for an ambush, what would be the purpose? In the Triad tradition, as far as he was able to figure out, an ambush was either a warning or a punishment. The iron bars, characteristic of the Triad culture, could have been intended for a nonfatal beating, as in a Triad movie he had seen, in which the victim writhed on the ground, beaten and crushed, while the gangsters hissed out the message: “If you don’t mend your ways, it will be worse next time.”

What the thugs said to him, however, pointed to different possibilities.

“Busybody” probably referred to his getting involved in something the Triad thought he shouldn’t have. Chen had no idea what it was. After all, a lot of things the chief inspector had done could have been interpreted that way.

As for the “toad and swan” metaphor, it had originally been about a man going after an unapproachable woman – usually an ugly man or one in inferior position going after a beautiful woman or one in a superior position. So it could have come as a warning to him about an impossible relationship.

There was no woman in Chen’s life, not at the moment. Ironically, Ling could have qualified as a “swan” with her HCC family background, but she had just married somebody else.

As for White Cloud, a young pretty college student who had once worked as his “little secretary,” there had never been anything serious between them – at least not on the part of Chen. It made some sense, however, if a jealous lover saw Chen as an insurmountable obstacle. It was a remote possibility, but Chen thought he should talk to Gu about it.

Alternatively, the warning could have come from his mixing with the girls at Xie’s place. Most of them had wealthy and powerful men behind them, and one of those men could have become insanely jealous. But he was a newcomer to the circle, a bookish if not clownish would-be writer who hadn’t made advances on any of them, not even Jiao. In the mansion, most people could be a little flirtatious with one another, dancing and drinking under the somber light, in the lambent music. No one took it seriously -

“So where are you going, sir?” the driver asked again. “Oh, Fuxing Road,” Chen said, his shoulder hurting terribly. He’d better see a doctor. Dr. Xia, having retired from the bureau, was working at a private clinic on Fuxing Road.

“Then we have to make a detour.”

“Why?” he asked absentmindedly. “New construction. An expensive apartment complex is going up along Tiantong Road.”

Another possibility flashed across his mind. The real estate company with connections in the black and white ways. He might have been seen as a busybody by them. Those companies had long ears and arms, could have learned of him from their contacts in the city government. But what about the “toad and swan” metaphor? That seemed totally unrelated.

At last, the taxi pulled up in front of the clinic. It was a new white building. Through the door, Chen saw a velvet tapestry bearing Mao’s quotation in bold characters: To serve the people.

He was taking out his money to pay the taxi driver when another idea struck him. Could it have been an attempt to stop him from looking further into the case? In that scenario, possibly on the order from another section. Or from Internal Security, who had their own reasons to be furious at him. Or even from the Forbidden City. He was actually conducting the investigation as a Mao case, at least partially, a move that could affect the legitimacy of the Party. But it was a move known only to Old Hunter and Detective Yu, known only partially -