After Tian left, Chen continued to think about Bao and his cell phone. Things had been strained between Chen and Bao. Not simply a matter of men of letters belittling each other. In modern Chinese literature, Bao had left his mark as a representative of a particular period, and the foreign visit before his retirement should be a crowning experience for him. But Bao must have found it hard to swallow a younger man’s having been appointed as the delegation head. Bao bore him a grudge, he understood, but there was something more than that.
Instead of going back to the hotel, Chen used his phone card at a pay phone in the café.
“I’ve been expecting your call, Chief,” Yu said.
“How is the weather in Shanghai?”
“Cloudy, but there seem to be some dark clouds approaching.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s difficult to describe the weather on the phone, you know, so unpredictable.”
Indeed, it was too difficult to talk the way they had agreed on. The weather terms had worked before, but not this time. There were so many new, unforeseeable factors involved. He wanted to know what Detective Yu had learned.
“Forget about the weather,” Chen said. “Let’s talk.”
It was a risk they had to take. Yu’s home line might not be tapped. Chen had not mentioned Yu’s assistance to anyone except Zhao.
“Kuang has found out about your phone call to An. And he talked to Party Secretary Li about a romantic night you had with her in a fancy restaurant. Little Zhou, who was driving Li that afternoon, overheard the talk. And he told me.”
“I interviewed An for Xing’s case. In order not to arouse any suspicion, I talked in a flirtatious way.”
“You don’t have to explain to me. I know that, but others don’t.”
“I’m not worried about that. Another romantic anecdote probably won’t be the end of the world.”
“But there may be someone behind Kuang. Otherwise he wouldn’t have the guts to mention it to Li.”
“Any new discoveries in An’s cell phone record?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Anything else?”
“Oh, Comrade Zhao is still in Shanghai. I don’t know what he’s doing here.”
Chen then told Yu what he had just learned about Little Tiger in relation to Xing, in the vaguest terms he could think of.
“Now we are really touching a tiger’s backside,” Yu concluded.
19
IN SPITE OF HER efforts against it, Peiqin found herself getting more and more involved in the investigation.
She reflected with a self-depreciating smile as she stepped into the hot-water shop. It was located at the entrance of the lane Chen’s mother lived on. Putting on a black, soot-spotted apron, she stood beside the huge coal stove as a “temporary helper.” There was a small cracked mirror on the somber wall. Studying a slightly soot-smudged reflection, she thought she did not look too bad in her late thirties.
It was hot. One third of the shop consisted of the stove with a gigantic pot and long, serpentine pipes. It was an antique coal-devouring monster, possibly one of the last few remaining in the city. The only thing that might have kept the stove from being put into a city museum was a thermometer, supposedly showing the temperature of the boiling water. She had to shovel coal into the stove regularly.
She wiped her forehead with a smeared towel, taking another look around the room. She noticed a wood screen close to the back door. Behind the screen, there were several soft-cushioned chairs and a table covered with a plastic foam top. The space was like a private room. She wondered who would need the luxury here.
Ironically, it took Peiqin some effort to obtain a temporary position- without pay-at this shabby water shop.
It was all because of Old Hunter’s worries. Since Chen’s departure with the delegation, Old Hunter had patrolled the lane several times, and he thought he had sniffed something. Being an old-fashioned cop, however, he did not think it right for him to patrol an area too much without an official assignment. Besides, it would not be that safe for him to circle the lane time and again. He could have been recognized. So Yu wanted to patrol instead. It seemed to Peiqin that both the father and son were overreacting. As diabolical as Xing and all the red rats might be, what could they gain by hurting an old woman? If anything happened to her, Chen would surely fight back with a vengeance.
Still, Peiqin had volunteered for a day’s reconnaissance in the neighborhood. She happened to be in a position to help. She had talked so much about the legendary chief inspector to Old Geng, the owner of the private restaurant, that the latter mentioned that he was related to Chang Jiadong, the owner of a hot-water shop at that lane. So Peiqin offered to work there for one day. Both Geng and Chang proved to be very understanding. They made the arrangement for her without asking her any questions.
For the first half an hour, there was no business in the water shop. No one seemed surprised at the sight of her working there, either. With so many people laid off in the city, a middle-aged woman like Peiqin perhaps would consider herself lucky to get any kind of job.
She decided to read for a while. Nowadays she did not have much time for herself. Even in her state-run restaurant office, things had begun to change. For the sake of profit, there were three shifts instead of one, and she still had to do all the accounting by herself. She took out the dog-eared book, The Dream of the Red Chamber. It was a classic novel she had read numerous times.
She occasionally wondered why the saga of a Qing aristocratic family so appealed to her. In the novel, what happened to those beautiful, talented yet ill-fated girls was preordained, prerecorded in a mysterious register in a heavenly palace. It was fiction, she knew. She did not believe in the supernatural yin/yang arrangement that prevailed in spite of tragic human effort. But she had come to see her life as a sort of a parallel. For one thing, she had never read any mysteries in her school years during the Cultural Revolution, when she was panic-stricken at the sight of policemen like those who had taken her father away. Afterward, however, she married a police officer, and now she was becoming something like the officer’s private assistant and acting like a character in those mysteries.
But she did not think she was tragic like those characters in The Dream of the Red Chamber-”her hope as high as the sky, and her fate as thin as the paper.” She considered herself as fairly lucky; Yu working with a secure job at the bureau, and Qinqin studying hard for college. Only all of that could be jeopardized because of those “red rats”-she liked the term coined by Old Hunter. In traditional Chinese culture, red had a lot of connotations. Red was about sensual vanities of the human world, like the red chamber in the novel or the Red Tower in the Xing case. And these red rats were surely sexually depraved. She thought of those pictures of An and her man.
Failing to concentrate on the book anymore, she thought she had an excuse for putting it down. A hot-water woman holding a classic novel would attract attention. Placing the book back into her bag, she decided to look again around the lane. It might once have been a decent neighborhood, but with so many new tall buildings rising around like bamboo shoots after a spring rain, the area had turned into a shabby “forgotten corner.”
Nonetheless, it was a convenient corner. Beside the water shop was a small husband-and-wife grocery store. On the other side of the lane entrance was a public phone booth. Then she noticed something. Opposite the lane entrance across the street, there was a middle-aged peddler perching on a stool, and his goods on the white-cloth-covered ground caught her attention. Snuff bottles. She had read about snuff bottles as far back as in The Dream of the Red Chamber. People today still liked them as inexpensive imitation antiques with the painting on the inside of the glass bottle. It took a lot of training to paint with a miniature brush inserted through the tiny opening. But there were no customers there, like at the water shop. And unlike a water shop, a snuff bottle peddler usually had to station himself near a tourist attraction, like the Bund. How could the poor residents here afford to be interested in those useless bottles? Still, the peddler could be someone living in the neighborhood.