Qiu Xiaolong - The Mao Case

In the limousine, he had suspected some sort of arrangement by Yong. Ling, however, appeared to be genuinely surprised, and she stood up. She could have come over from some business activity, wearing a purple satin mandarin dress, with a purse of the same color and material, apparently custom-made, like in a page torn from a high-class fashion magazine.

There was no “wind-receiving” banquet on the table, not as Yong had promised. There was only a cup of tea for Ling. Yong hastened to pour a cup for Chen and gestured both of them to sit down.

“My humble abode is brightened by two distinguished guests tonight,” Yong said. “Ling, CEO of several large companies in Beijing, and Chen, chief inspector of the Shanghai Police Bureau. So my ‘nail family’ has existed for a good reason.”

“You should have told me,” Ling said to her.

That was what he also wanted to say, but he said instead to Ling, “I’m so pleased to see you, Ling.”

“Now, I have to hurry back to my new place,” Yong said. “My man works the night shift and I have to take care of my little daughter.”

It was too obvious an excuse. Yong had played a similar trick once before. The memories of a similar occasion were all coming back to him.

Yong left promptly, as years earlier, closing the door after her, leaving the two of them alone in the room.

But things were not as before, not anymore for the two of them. He found himself at a loss for words. The silence seemed to wrap them up in a silk cocoon.

“Yong is a busybody,” Ling said finally. “She dragged me over without telling me why, and insisted on my waiting here.”

“A well-meant busybody,” he said, his glance sweeping over the room, which appeared little changed. There was still a basin of water in the steel-wire basin holder near the door. The large bed at the other side of the room was covered with a dragon-and-phoenix-embroidered sheet, identical to the one in his memory. And they were sitting at the same red-painted wooden table by the paper windows, against which the old lamp cast a lambent light.

That might be the very effect Yong had intended. The past in the present. Like the last time they were here – Ling, a librarian, and he, a college student. In those days, she still lived with her parents, and he, in a crowded dorm room with five other students. It was difficult for them to find a quiet place to themselves. So Yong invited them to her place, and as soon as they were here, she left them alone with an excuse.

That evening was like this evening. But to night, as in a couplet by Li Shangyin, “Oh the feeling, to be collected later / in memories, was already confused.”

“I received the book you sent from London,” he said. “Thank you so much, Ling.”

“Oh, I happened to see it in a bookstore there.”

“So you are back from the trip.” It was idiotic to say that, he knew. She thought of him on her honeymoon trip, but what else could he say to her? “When?”

“Last week.”

“You could have told me earlier.”

“Why?”

“I would have been able -” He left the sentence unfinished – to buy a wedding present for you.

There ensued another short spell of silence, like in a scroll of traditional Chinese painting, in which the blank space contains more than what was painted. There is always a loss of meaning / in what we say or do not say, / but also a meaning / in the loss of the meaning.

“Oh, did you visit the Sherlock Holmes Museum?” he said, trying to change the topic.

“Now you are really a chief inspector,” she said, eyeing the cold tea. “A cop above everything.”

That was another blunder on his part. She had a point. He was tongue-tied, as a cop or not, thinking that her response might have also referred to his role in another case, one that had exasperated her father because of its political repercussions. A case Chen didn’t have to take, yet he did. The outcome of it had strained their relationship.

“You must have done well on the force,” she went on. “My father, too, mentioned you the other day.”

“As a monk, you have to strike the bell in the temple, day after day.” He was deeply perturbed by the comment about her father, a powerful politburo member in the Forbidden City.

“So it has become your lifelong career?”

“Perhaps it’s too late for me to try anything new,” he said, not wanting to continue like this, but not knowing how to shift the topic.

“I tried to write you,” she said, taking the initiative, her head slightly tilted in the faltering lamplight, “but there’s not much to be said. After all, the tide does not wait.”

He wondered at her choice of the words – “the tide does not wait.” Did it mean she couldn’t wait any longer? He wondered whether it was about her marriage choice or career choice. To start a business was nowadays described as “to jump into the sea” – tides of money-making opportunities. She was a successful businesswoman, and her husband, for that matter, was another tide-riding businessman.

Or were they a reference to the Spring Tide? That was the title of a Russian novel that they had read together in North Sea Park.

But he was supposed to say something more relevant to the occasion. It was an opportunity not to be missed, as Yong would have urged, a chance for the “salvation mission.” Ling was staying with her parents at the moment.

He took a sip of his tea. Jasmine flower tea. Another surprising strike of déjà vu. That evening, so many years ago, she brewed a pot of hot tea for him, putting the jasmine petal from her hair into his teacup – “The transparently white unfolding in the black.”

“So are you here in Beijing on another case?” she said.

“No, not exactly. It’s more of a vacation. I haven’t been to Beijing for a long time.”

“Our chief inspector is enjoying a vacation!”

He was upset by the sarcasm in her voice. It was she who had married somebody else, not the other way round.

“Any sight of specific interest on your vacation?” she went on without looking up at him.

Actually, there was one, he suddenly realized. Mao’s former residence in the Central South Sea, the Forbidden City. He had just read about it on the train. The residence was closed, and it didn’t have a direct bearing on the investigation, but he had taken to visiting the people involved in an investigation or, failing that, their residence, as a way of closing the distance between cop and criminal. For this case, Chen didn’t set out to judge Mao. Still, a visit to his residence might help the chief inspector, if only psychologically, gain insight into the personal side of Mao.

Ling should be able to get him into the Central South Sea through her connections in Beijing. “Mao’s old home in the Central South Sea,” he blurted out, “but it is closed.”

“Mao’s old home!” she echoed in surprise. “Since when have you become a Maoist?”

“No, I’m not that fashionable.”

“Then why?” She gave him an alert look.

He didn’t respond at once, trying to recall whether he had ever talked to her about Mao.

“You remember that evening in Jingshan Park? With the evening spread out against the tilted eaves of the ancient, splendid palace, we sat together, and you murmured a poem to me.”

And it came back, the memories of her sitting on a gray slab of rock, holding his hand, and of his catching sight of a tree hung with a white board saying, “The tree on which Emperor Chongzhen of the Ming dynasty hung himself,” and of his shivering with the memory of the blackboard hung around his father’s neck during the Cultural Revolution…

“I still have that poem,” she said, producing from her purse something like a cell phone but larger, palmlike, which he had never seen before. She pressed several keys on the gadget.