“Yes, he must have phoned her,” Yu said. “I’ll call you later.”
But Yu had more immediate things to worry about. Party Secretary Li called him, demanding, “You are going to take care of the press conference today.”
“I have never done it before, Party Secretary Li.”
“Come on, Chief Inspector Chen has done it many times. You’ve surely learned the necessary tactics from him.” Li added, “By the way, where on the earth has he been?”
“I’ve just left a message for him,” Yu said evasively. “He’ll call back soon.”
On the way back to the bureau, he got White Cloud’s phone number from Peiqin.
It was not so enviable to be Chen’s partner, Yu thought.
TWENTY-ONE
IN A TAXI THAT was literally crawling through the traffic of Shanghai, Chen sat devastated by the news of Hong’s death.
Wednesday morning. A week earlier, he had been sitting in a car bound for the vacation village, worrying about his nervous breakdown; now he was heading back, sweating over the latest development in the serial murder case. So many things had happened in Shanghai, while all the time-or most of the time-he had slept on like an idiot and mused about love stories from thousands of years ago.
He shivered at the thought of the afterworld money he had bought at the local market Friday morning. He wasn’t a superstitious man, but he was unnerved at the coincidence.
It wasn’t until Yu succeeded in contacting White Cloud that she became aware of the desperateness of the situation. Still, she had been too concerned about Chen’s health to deliver the message to him instantly. She wasn’t a cop, and she was not to blame for it. After learning of his recovery at the vacation village that morning, she told him the news about the Joy Gate. He at once cut short his vacation and boarded the first long-distance bus to Shanghai, without even saying good-bye to his host.
Sitting in the car, his thoughts revolved around Hong. He hadn’t known much about her until their contact on the red mandarin dress case.
Hong was said to have a surgeon boyfriend at a Japan-China Friendship Hospital who had urged her to quit. He insisted that her income wasn’t worth all his worrying about her. But she happened to believe in her job. At a Chinese New Year Party in the bureau, she read a poem about being a “people’s cop.” Not much of a poem, but it was passionate about a young officer patrolling the city. One of its refrains read, Chen remembered, The sun is new every day.
Not for her, not today.
He would never regain his peace of mind, he knew, looking out onto the traffic snarl along Yan’an Road, if he failed to avenge her.
He opened his briefcase for the folder on the red mandarin dress case. While at the vacation village, he managed not to touch it. But now as he took out the folder, to his astonishment, he saw his cell phone lying under it. Turned off, of course, but lying there all the time. Before he had left for vacation, he had decided not to carry it, he remembered clearly. How the phone had gotten into the briefcase, he had no recollection. There might be something in Freud’s argument about forgetting, but he decided not to worry about Freud.
Checking through his phone messages he found that, in addition to the detailed messages left by Yu, Li and several senior officers had also called, repeatedly, urging him back to work. Even Old Hunter began fidgeting about his absence, leaving a message to the effect. A young cop had laid down her life in an effort to trap a serial murderer who struck out in defiance of the whole police force. It was a crisis beyond any that the bureau had experienced before.
What’s more, they weren’t able to openly investigate. As in the Chinese proverb, they had to swallow the knocked-out tooth without spitting out the blood. Any public knowledge of the identity of the latest victim-killed in a messed-up decoy attempt-would not only spell the worst humiliation for the police but also send new waves of panic through the public.
Although the identity of the victim still “remained unknown,” no one in the bureau believed that it would remain so for long. According to a message left by Yu, reporters were already suspicious. For the moment, Yu and his colleagues had even more serious worries. What would happen this week? No one had any doubt about it now. And no one believed that they could stop the killer in less than two days.
Chen looked at his watch. It was close to ten. He decided not to go to the bureau or even, for the moment, to contact Yu.
There was one thing in particular about the case that alarmed him. The devilish masterstroke-the whole Joy Gate episode, from the newspaper ad to the backdoor exit-could very possibly have been planned by the murderer from the first day of Hong’s work as a decoy. Everything had been arranged too perfectly. The more Chen thought about it, the more he suspected that the ad in the newspaper hadn’t come out of the blue. More likely, it was a countertrap set with the use of inside information.
So whatever Chen was going to do, he would keep the bureau out of it. People talked about the chief inspector having lost himself in his literature paper, or having lost his guts in the serial murder case. Let them talk like that. He would continue to stay in the background.
“Sorry, I’ve changed my mind,” he said to the driver. “Let’s go to the Joy Gate instead.”
“Joy Gate? The cops raided it last week.”
It was perhaps a well-meant caution. In his trench coat, with his bag and briefcase, Chen looked like a tourist interested in the must-see attraction of the city.
“Yes, the Joy Gate.”
He would do whatever was possible because he felt responsible for her death, more than anyone else in the bureau. If it weren’t for his vacation, he could have led the investigation and prevented her from going to the Joy Gate, or at least stayed with the cops outside.
He took out the copy of Oriental Morning he had bought at the bus terminal. The newspaper had a picture of her lying spread-eagled in the cemetery, in a torn red mandarin dress, against the ruined tombstones. Underneath the picture was a couplet, “The apparition of her in a red mandarin dress, / Petals on a wet, black bough.”
It read like a parody of an Imagist poem, but was poetry relevant at a moment when innocent people were dying, one after another?
Finally emerging out of the traffic congestion, the car came in sight of the refurbished art deco facade of the Joy Gate.
It might not be the time yet for regular customers to start arriving. There were only two or three people taking pictures in front of the building. Possibly journalists or plainclothes cops. He walked on in, keeping his head low. A middle-aged man sitting at the front desk didn’t even look at him.
His colleagues would have combed the place already. He didn’t expect to find anything new. Still, he wanted to step inside, as if to establish a bond between the living and the dead.
Moving up the marble staircase, he saw posters of 1930s movie stars on the walls. Each of them had danced here, leaving behind stories or pictures that echoed through the passage of time.
On the second floor, he thought he caught sight of a familiar face in the hall. So he turned aside, climbing up into a small balcony with a dark alcove behind. There he stood for several minutes, looking down at the now empty ballroom where Hong had danced like a radiant cloud. He murmured her name.
Several workers were arranging the tables and chairs for the night. The business would go on, as usual. He decided to leave.
As he stepped out of the Joy Gate, he saw, not too far away, a magnificent Buddhist temple with its glazed tiles and tilted eaves shimmering in the sunlight. It was Jin’an Monastery, allegedly built hundreds of years earlier, and lately redecorated. In his childhood, his parents had taken him there for ancestral worship services, sometimes renting a partitioned room, bringing in a variety of special snack offerings, and engaging monks for scripture-chanting.