“I wish I had an alternative. So I want to talk to you first as an old friend.”
“What do you mean?”
“What if I had turned these pictures in to the committee first? You don’t need me to tell you. In a worse scenario, if somebody else-not necessarily in the committee-got hold of those pictures, God alone knows what could happen. An unscrupulous rascal could have sold them to a tabloid magazine for a fortune.”
She didn’t say anything for a minute or two, staring at the pigeon head, which stared back at her with its dead eyes.
“Your company would be closed, your job lost, your property taken, and your apartment would be gone too. What a nice apartment! I don’t think it would be easy for you to move back to your tingzijian room of eight or nine square meters, An. If that room it is still there.”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen.”
He did not have to be sarcastic, but sitting in a “lovers’ nest” he had to justify himself. He went on, “Don’t believe those high up will try to help you. They have their own necks to save. Beijing means business this time, and they know it. An anticorruption bureau will be set up in Shanghai. Do you want to sacrifice yourself for those who would throw you out as a pawn? In the end, they may get away scot-free, but you’ll have to pay the full price.”
She studied him up and down, still in disbelief over her humiliating downfall in front of an old friend.
His cell phone started ringing again. “Nothing important,” he said, turning it off after looking at the number.
“You think you can pull this off?” she said. “Evidence like this may not be permissible. As a cop, you know better.”
“Let me put it this way, An. When I got the assignment, a leading comrade in Beijing joked about me being the emperor’s special envoy with an imperial sword. You know what it means, don’t you? In ancient China, such an envoy could kill without having obtained official approval first. Believe me, the evidence will be more than permissible.”
“So I have no choice? Listen, Chen,” she said hoarsely, “I want you to know something-”
He did not say anything, waiting to hear what she wanted him to know. But the waitress knocked at the door again. She came to light a new candle for them, bowing before she left with a smile. In the fresh candlelight, he noticed that An was without makeup. Her face clear and clean, suggestive of an innocent purity, untouched by evil. She looked up at him, in a long gaze, as if the autumn waves were breaking against the shore in her large black eyes.
“Xing has so many connections in Shanghai,” she finally said. “But why have you chosen me, a helpless woman, of all the people? Are the others too monstrous for you to touch?”
She was sharp. The accusation hit home. He did not wince. It was not that he did not have the guts, he told himself.
“I have no choice, An. The investigation is under the committee,” he said. “If you collaborate, I won’t mention your name in the report. I give you my word.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“You tell me everything related to Xing-or to Ming-and I’ll return those photos to you. Your choices in your personal life are not my business. The anticorruption campaign, however, is a matter of life and death for our country.”
“Can I have some time to think?”
“About what?”
“It may be a matter of life and death for me.”
He lit another cigarette for her and pushed the window slightly open. Unexpectedly, a mosquito came buzzing in. An incredible nuisance at such a height, like a tedious song coming from next door during a sleepless night.
An then began to tell about the business deal she had helped to arrange for Ming. A long, complicated story. The beginning part of it had little to do with An, comprehensible only in a larger context. With the development of the economic reform, there were a large number of state-run factories that had fallen in terrible shape. In the old days, they manufactured products in accordance to the state planning, without having to worry about profit or loss. Now they had to struggle for survival in the market economy. Shanghai Number Six Textile Mill was such a factory. Its products were poor quality, and it could not obtain the raw material at the state price as before. Most of the workers, iron-bowl holders, were hardly in a position to help. Still, they clamored for the same socialist pay and benefits, desperate as ants crawling on a hot wok.
According to the People’s Daily, the problems might be insignificant, “inevitable in the historic transition.” But these factories became an increasingly impossible liability. So with a new government policy, a state-run company was allowed-for the first time since 1949-to go bankrupt. Interested entrepreneurs were encouraged to buy them at a discount, and even enjoy a further reduction by retaining its workers. That, too, was considered contributing to the political stability. The buyer for Number Six Mill was none other than Ming, who, without revealing a specific plan, promised to keep five hundred employees and so got the factory at a “symbolic sum.” No one knew anything about Ming’s coup until after the deal was done. He razed the factory for residential property construction. The location turned out to be close to a not-yet-announced subway route, so it attracted a number of investors the moment word got out. The value of the land proved to be five times more than what he had paid for the factory.
To meet the government requirement for keeping the factory in operation, Ming set up a small workshop of about ten people for equipment maintenance. He reached a housing development agreement with a construction company, through which he was able to retain the ex-state employees as temporary construction workers. Upon completion of the project, he would own one-third of the apartment complex.
In an inside report to the city government, Ming’s maneuver was described as one arrow that killed three birds. It helped the state stop losing money through a bottomless hole; it kept ex-state employees holding their rice bowl-though no longer made of iron-for a couple of years; and it met the housing needs of the city. Of course, the report did not touch on the profit Ming had walked away with. He did not pay a single penny out of his own pocket. With an official copy of the factory buying-over document as the mortgage, he had acquired a low interest loan from the government bank. In short, it was like “capturing a white fox empty-handed.”
Nor did the report mention a snag hidden in the operation. It was against government policy to turn a factory into a commercial construction lot. Otherwise Ming would have not gotten the land at such an incredibly low price.
Everything had been achieved through his connections, or rather, through Xing’s. The large network of corruption worked. The PR service provided by An also contributed: among other things it represented the small workshop for equipment maintenance as the factory’s continuous operation, a claim accepted by Dong for the Shanghai State Industry Reform Committee, and it obtained the land development permission from Jiang for the City Land Development Office. All this was not difficult, as An put it, just offering incense to every god in sight. She knew the doors, both the front and the back.
“Perhaps not simply because of your knowledge about the doors,” Chen said, casting another glance at the pictures on the table. But the deal was big: even with all her connections, it was probably too big for the sweet words she had whispered on the phone or in the bedroom. Still, there was no denying her part.
She did not respond to his remark.
He said simply, “Now tell me more about Ming.”
“Ming keeps a low profile. He stays in the shadow of Xing. As far as I know, he’s focused in Shanghai, and Xing takes good care of his little brother. They are much closer than ordinary stepbrothers. Xing does whatever his mother says, and Ming is her favorite son.”