“Zhou’s entanglement with other corrupt officials above him might explain why he was murdered,” she said deliberately. “But it still leaves the question of how it was done in such a well-guarded hotel.”
“Remember the lead that Detective Wei mentioned in his phone call?”
“You said he said something about the interview with the hotel attendant. What did you learn from the attendant at the hotel? Did you talk to her?”
“No, not exactly. Detective Wei walked into that fatal ambush because of his overt move in that direction. I tried not to make the same mistake. I listened to the tape of the interview God knows how many times, and I even brought it with me all the way to Shaoxing,” he said, with a sudden sigh. “That night, after the festival dinner party, I tried to call you, but your cell phone was turned off, and you weren’t registered at the hotel.”
“I took the night train back to Shanghai before the party was even over. I thought you were just too busy to notice me,” she said, draining another cup, her face burning under the light. “I’m sorry, Chen, but I didn’t know how serious your situation was.”
“No, you don’t have anything to be sorry for.” He, too, drained his cup. “Anyway, I couldn’t fall asleep in the hotel, so once again I thought through the sequence of events the night Zhou died, as described in the hotel attendant’s statement. Then something occurred to me. That night in Shaoxing, when I stepped into my hotel room, the bedcovers were already turned down and there was a small bag of chocolate and a ‘Sleep well’ card placed on the pillow.”
“That’s not uncommon with a luxury suite in a five-star hotel. That shouldn’t be surprising. And does that relate somehow to the interview tape?”
“To something on the tape. According to Jiang, he left the hotel Monday afternoon for an important meeting and spent the night at home, all of which has been confirmed. But according to the statement from the hotel attendant, when she tried to turn down the covers for the other two guests on the third floor, both Liu and Jiang were in their rooms.
“Now, with turn-down service, usually an attendant knocks on the door and asks the guest inside if they want their bed turned down. If the guest isn’t in, she might let herself in and prepare the bed. Just like the attendant had done in my room earlier that night in Shaoxing. But if the guest is in, he’ll answer loudly, without opening the door, that it’s not needed, and then the attendant will leave. In other words, there had to be another man in Jiang’s room when the attendant knocked.
“If that’s true, then why and who? From the very beginning, there was something we took for granted. Jiang and Liu were the shuangguiing Party cadres, and as such, they were above suspicion. What made us further rule them out was that Jiang wasn’t at the hotel at the time and had a solid alibi, and Liu, a short and feeble old man, seemed physically unable to do such a thing. Building B is well guarded. Anyone who enters has to sign in, and then sign out when they leave. There is also a surveillance camera over the landing to the third floor.
“I managed to obtain copies of the register pages for building B for that Monday and Tuesday. To my surprise, I found a man named Pan Xinhua had signed in Monday afternoon, visiting Jiang in his room. Jiang left the hotel about an hour later, but there’s no record of Pan signing out that day. Pan could have stayed in Jiang’s room and could have been the one who spoke to the hotel attendant when she came around six fifteen. Several hours later, he could have sneaked into Zhou’s room, where Zhou was in a deep sleep after having taken sleeping pills, strangled him, and staged the room to make it look like Zhou had hanged himself from the beam.
“From the same source, which I have to protect, I was able to get the surveillance camera tape for those two days. On the video, Pan can be seen coming up to the third floor on Monday afternoon, but there’s no sign of him leaving later that day. The next morning, when the commotion broke out after Zhou’s death was discovered, Pan was caught by the camera walking down the stairs shortly afterward. It was total chaos then, with many people coming and going in a hurry, so no one paid any special attention to him-”
“I have to interrupt with a question, Chen. Did he stay in Zhou’s room the whole time? Or did he return to Jiang’s?”
“No, I don’t think so. After killing Zhou, Pan probably left Jiang’s room and stayed somewhere else. There were three unoccupied rooms on that floor. He waited until the morning, then during the pandemonium he slipped out of the room, and the building, without even signing his name to the register.”
“That’s unbelievable, Chief Inspector Chen, but you’ve solved the case. Congratulations.”
“No, not entirely-”
There came another knock on the door.
TWENTY-SIX
The door opened, and the waitress stepped into the room, carrying a large silver tray.
“I’m sorry for the interruption, sir. There’s one special course before the hot dishes. We thought you might enjoy that.”
She placed a white plate in front of each of them, and then a large platter in between. Each plate had on it a deshelled steamed blue crab, still in crab shape, with the legs and claws arranged meticulously. The platter contained chunks of liquor-immersed raw crab.
“It’s not river crab season yet,” the waitress said, introducing the course, “so we use live blue crabs flown in special from the sea. The deshelled crab is a favorite among Western customers here. The liquor-immersed crab is a celebrated dish in Shaoxing cuisine. We use live crabs, plus Maotai liquor, and it’s stored at fifty degrees, so there’s no need to worry about the freshness of it.”
“Thank you. Liquor-immersed crab is my mother’s favorite.”
“Why not have it boxed and take it to her?” Lianping asked.
“Good idea. I hardly touch raw seafood myself.” He turned to the waitress, “We’re in no hurry for the hot dishes.”
“We can box the crab for you after you finish dinner. It’s seven now,” the waitress said, “and we’ll wait for your order to start cooking the hot dishes.”
She left, again closing the door after her.
Outside, the glittering splendors began to surge up along the Bund. Across the river, the ceaselessly changing neon lights from the jostling skyscrapers projected intoxicating fantasies of the new century on the shimmering water.
Lianping sighed. “What a feast!”
“I have no idea how long it takes to deshell a crab like that.”
“By the way, do you know the Internet joke about a river crab? ‘River crab’ in Chinese is a homophone for ‘harmony.’ When an online post is banned, people will say it was harmonized, deleted for the sake of harmony of our socialist society. Now they simply say the post has been river-crabbed.”
“The connotations are unmistakably negative, just like they are in the idiomatic expression about the chain of crabs.”
“Mr. Gu certainly went out of his way to have the Shaoxing style meal prepared for you,” she said, picking up a glistening white crab leg with her slender fingers. “But you were saying that there was something else left to resolve in your investigation.”
“Yes, there was another part. Remember the other clue in Detective Wei’s phone call to Party Secretary Li?”
“You mean the visit to
Wenhui
he planned to make?”
“Yes. From what his wife said, I thought it might have had something to do with the picture that got Zhou into trouble in the first place. That was certainly the focus of Internal Security, and to some extent, of Jiang too. For me, this part is still mostly guesswork.”
“So…”
Chen helped himself to the golden crab roe, which was displayed like a dainty chrysanthemum petal on the white plate. It tasted scrumptious, just as he remembered it from many years ago. It wasn’t an evening, however, for him to savor delicacies.
A shrill siren blared all of a sudden from a distance and reverberated along the darksome water.
“It’s an aspect of the case that is not only informed by a lot of guesswork, but also involves some people that you or I may know. Still, I wanted to tell you about it tonight-and not as a cop.”
“This is intriguing,” she said uncertainly.
“As I may have told you, it can be tiresome to be stuck in one’s professional role all the time. So for the sake of convenience, we might as well switch to something different, more like storytelling.”
“Storytelling?” she said, surprised by his sudden shift in manner. What was the enigmatic chief inspector up to?
“Do you remember what you suggested with regard to the poems you wanted me to write for
Wenhui
? You suggested that I adopt a persona. A persona that didn’t have to be the writer himself. Adopting such a persona has helped me with a couple of poems. It’s a pity that I don’t have more time for poetry.” He poured himself another cup of the aromatic and heady rice wine, which he drained before he went on. “In a police report, in some situations, people may be referred to as John Doe or Jane Doe. Or in some novels, characters might be referred to by letters such as C or L.”
“So… tell me a story, if you like,” she said, the wine rippling in the small cup in her hand, “Chief Inspector Chen.”
“This story flows more smoothly if it’s told from a third person perspective. More important, remember that you’re listening to something fictional. As such, the narrator doesn’t have to worry about possible liability and the listener doesn’t have any responsibilities. For the record, I’m just a storyteller at the moment, not a cop with any professional obligations, and you are just listening to a fantasized scenario, nothing that concerns you as a professional journalist.”
Whatever Chen was about to say, Lianping thought it would have direct bearing on her. She thought she should have guessed as much earlier.
There was a subtle change in his tone as he started to tell his story.
“C was a cop investigating the death of a shuangguied corrupt official named Z. It was a complicated case with different people from different agencies investigating different aspects, and needless to say, each of them had their own agenda. One of the aspects of the case concerned the subversive role in today’s society that the most devoted Internet users-the netizens-can play through those increasingly frequent human-flesh searches. The case in question could be said to have started with a picture posted online, which prompted just such a search, and which in turn exposed Z.
“As a cop, C didn’t think that the person who originally sent the picture to the Web forum did anything wrong. On the contrary, C had his reservations about the government’s control of the Internet. As for the other investigators, including Internal Security, they were focused on punishing the ‘Internet troublemaker’ in the name of maintaining social stability. But their target was clever and had sent the picture from a computer at an Internet café, thus making it impossible for them to track down the sender.”
Chen paused to pick up his cup again. She reached out, unexpectedly, and snatched the cup out of his hand.
“No, you’re drinking too much.”
“I’m fine, Lianping,” he said with a wan smile. “In the course of his investigation, C came to know a young journalist named L. He was drawn to her, not merely because she was attractive and intelligent but also because she was passionate about justice in socialism with Chinese characteristics. To his pleasant surprise, she helped him with the investigation, familiarizing him with the Internet users’ resistance to governmental control of the Internet. She introduced him to a computer expert who was able to break down some barriers for him. In the meantime, in some of the pictures she sent to him and his friends electronically, C came upon clues that had eluded Internal Security. While he was picking up some e-mail from her, C happened to discover a loophole in the new Internet café regulations. From there, he was astonished to learn that the identity of the original picture sender was none other than L.” Chen paused for a moment, then started up again. “Now, what was C going to do?
“As a cop and a rising cadre, he was supposed to report this to the higher authorities, but L didn’t post the picture out of any personal grudge. She was merely upset with the brazen, widespread corruption that was taking place while those responsible were pretending that their actions were in the Party’s interests. Her desire to cause Z trouble was, in fact, a spontaneous protest against the injustices of an authoritarian society. Her action led to a call to dig into the background of Z, which in turn resulted in a flood of responses. What happened to Z subsequently was beyond her imagining, and for which she wasn’t to blame, C concluded.
“So, if what she did was done on the spur of the moment, did he…” Chen trailed off.
In the silence that ensued, they heard footsteps moving closer to the door, and then trail off down the hall.
“So that’s it, the end of the story?”
“Yes, that’s the end. As I mentioned earlier, for C, that was an aspect of the investigation he has to wrap up, a missing piece to the puzzle. But there are things above and beyond playing one’s part in the system. Things far more important, like justice, however partial and paradoxical, in the present society. Of course, the persona in this narrative doesn’t have to be a real person. It’s just a story between you and me.”
Chen then produced an envelope containing the page he’d torn from the register at the Flying Horse Internet café and handed it to her. “Oh, this is for you. I almost forgot.”
“What is it?” she asked, as she opened the envelope. She looked briefly at the name “Lili” on the register page, and her face drained of color. Only a few knew that was her childhood name. Her ID card bore her new name, but the people in the Internet café in the neighborhood knew her well and never noticed or bothered about it. “I don’t know what to say, Chen.”
“
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence
. I think it was Wittgenstein who said that. A fitting paradigm. After all, exposing the original picture sender wasn’t the aspect on which C focused at all.”
He reached out to pour himself another cup of wine, but she didn’t stop him this time.