“No, I moved away many years ago, you know.”
“We have to get going, Peiqin,” Yu said. “We’ve spent too long here as it is.”
Peiqin picked up Yu’s cue as he spoke.
“Yes, let’s go. It’s Saturday. We have to do some shopping,” she said, like an understanding wife. “We’ll come again, Auntie Hui.”
They sauntered away, hand in hand like a loving couple, which they were. It was as in a popular song, “It’s the most romantic thing to live, love, and grow old with you, side by side.”
They followed Fu at a discreet distance, even though Yu didn’t have a plan in mind. It wasn’t something Chen had asked him to do, but he had nothing else planned for that afternoon. Yu redialed Bai, who wasn’t home yet. So it might not be a bad idea, he thought, to continue following Fu for a while.
They cut across Yanan Road, and then on to Fuzhou Road. Fu walked steadily, heading north, without looking at the bus stop or for a taxi, seemingly unaware of being shadowed. Fu then turned left on Nanjing Road, which, at the intersection with Henan Road, became a pedestrian street thronged with shoppers and tourists.
No one could move quickly along Nanjing Road. The street was lined along both sides with stores, some of which were very crowded; it would be easy to lose sight of someone. With the two of them following Fu, however, Yu thought they could still manage.
“We haven’t been to Nanjing Road in months,” Peiqin said.
“We’re here today, so we might do some shopping,” he said, “if we lose sight of Fu. We shouldn’t worry about it. Chen didn’t say he was a suspect, and sending us out to look into him was probably nothing more than a whimsical hunch of our eccentric chief inspector.”
But Fu slowed down near the corner of Zhejiang Road and started looking around, as if anxiously awaiting someone. Sure enough, he spotted a slender girl standing near Sheng’s Restaurant and walked over to her. She was smiling and waving her hand at him. However, instead of walking into the restaurant, they went into an old building next to it.
Yu and Peiqin hurried across the street. To their surprise, the old building was a hotel. They peered inside, but there was no sign of Fu or his companion at the front desk or along the dimly lit corridor. They must have already checked in.
In front of the hotel, there was a large sign that declared in bold characters: “Serve the people, hourly rate available, both day time and nighttime, full of leisure, convenience.” The first part sounded like an echo of a saying from Mao, but the part about their business hours was puzzling.
Yu couldn’t help walking up to take a closer look, leaving Peiqin behind.
“It’s really convenient,” a young hotel attendant with a sweet dimple in her cheek came out and said to him. “And very clean too. We change the sheets after every customer. If you don’t have a companion, we can recommend one to you. ”
The full meaning of the hourly rate advertised in the sign finally dawned on him. The hotel was charging for a couple of hours in bed and then a quick shower. That’s all that their operation was about. “Oh, no, thank you,” said Yu, retracing his steps in a hurry.
For a hotel like that, Yu doubted that Fu and his companion had registered under their real names. It would be pointless to ask at the front desk, and he didn’t want to raise unnecessary alarm. In the city, such places were sometimes closely connected to the police, and he thought there was a good chance that this hourly hotel was one of them.
But why would Fu have gone there if that was his girlfriend that he picked up? Was she possibly one of the girls “working” for the hotel? Would Fu come back to Shanghai just for that?
“You know what kind of a hotel it is?” Peiqin said, as Yu walked up.
“I think so,” Yu said, a bit sheepish. “Let’s sit down somewhere and wait for a while.”
He decided to wait and watch for them to come out. Fu’s behavior was strange-even suspicious.
Across the street, there was a small square. It sported a huge LCD screen mounted high and in the background. Next to it stood the celebrated Seventh Heaven, a notorious dance hall back in the pre-1949 era. After 1949, it was turned into the Shanghai Number One Pharmacy Store, but nowadays, it had reverted back to its original function as a nightclub attached to a hotel, though it was no longer that notorious. Nor as classy as its original name suggested. The seven-story building was now dwarfed by all the new surrounding high-rises.
At the edge of the square, there was a somewhat fashionable teahouse, so they went over and took a table outside. No one would pay much attention to a middle-aged couple sitting at a teahouse.
Yu ordered a cup of Lion Hill tea and Peiqin, a bowl of white almond tofu.
“I wouldn’t have the pleasure of sitting with you here if it weren’t for your boss’s request,” she said in mock peevishness.
“After Chen comes back, I will also request vacation time-a whole week. And I’ll sit here with you just like today, every day, all day, if that’s what you really want, Peiqin.”
“No, I’m not complaining. You don’t have to envy your boss’s vacation. True, his may be an all-expenses-paid vacation with all the privileges of a high-ranking cadre, but does he have someone sitting beside him there, looking over that beautiful lake?”
“One can never tell what Chen is up to,” Yu said. “What he has asked us to look into today, I suppose, may have something to do with that girl, the one who is connected to the man in trouble. It might possibly even be a murder case.”
“That’s true,” she said with a low sigh.
“Do you like the area?” Yu asked, changing the subject.
“Yes, but for me, it might be more because of nostalgia. When I was still a small girl, back in the neighborhood we just visited, I sometimes passed by the Seventh Heaven, which then loomed up so high, seemed so unreachable, to me.”
Sipping at the Lion Hill tea, Yu glanced back at the pedestrian street, which seemed to not have changed as dramatically as much of the rest of the city. Several of the old-brand stores remained standing there, though even those had been refurbished.
In the square, a group of people began dancing to music that blared from a cassette player on the ground. A middle-aged, bald man, apparently the leader, dressed in an old sweat-drenched T-shirt with the character Dance printed on the front and in white silk pants with flared legs, danced intently, earnestly. For him, his green belt streaming in the breeze, the movement of the moment seemed to carry the meaning of the world. Across the square, another group was practicing tai chi, striking one pose after another, like floating clouds or flowing water. Continuing to look around the square, Yu then noticed something else going on across the street.
Two young girls, probably only seventeen or eighteen, were approaching a stoutly built Westerner, pointing at the hotel sign. China had been changing so rapidly and radically, it was like the proverb his father, Old Hunter, liked to quote: changing as if from the azure ocean into a mulberry field.
“I can hardly remember what the store was that used to be where the hotel is now,” Peiqin said, following his gaze.
“It was just a stationery store, as I remember,” Yu said.
Apart from the scene unfolding in front of the hotel, sitting there, drinking, relaxing, and looking around was pleasant.
“The only place that looks unchanged is Sheng’s Restaurant. At least the name is the same. And the outside as well.”
“Nanjing Road is no longer the busiest, most important street in the city, but then the city itself has always seemed young and vital, always with young people moving in and out,” Peiqin said, sipping at her drink, “and around here new stores, hotels, and restaurants are springing up.”
It was Yu’s turn to follow her glance to another new hotel, this one near Fujian Road. It was a high-end one built in the European style. He must have walked by it a number of times, but he never thought about going in. As Yu watched, a Big Buck emerged from the revolving door of the hotel, turned and blew a kiss to someone inside, a large diamond ring shining like a dream on his finger.