Fan finally said, “I will, of course. I owe you a big one, Old Hunter.”
The waiter came back to the table, carrying over two big bowls of mo in the steaming hot mutton soup, the mo golden against red soup with chopped green onion. The sight of it drove away the lingering chill of the night.
“Old Hunter and I have been cops all our lives,” Fan said, raising his chopsticks. “After over thirty years on the force, we remain at the bottom. You know Old Hunter well. An able, conscientious cop. Just because he’s incapable of doing things against his conscience, he’s a failure professionally. I may not be as able, but I, too, have held to my principles.”
“Confucius says,” Chen said, “‘There are things you do, and things you do not do.’ It’s not easy to be a cop.”
“Your father was a Confucian scholar, Old Hunter just told me. No wonder,” Fan said, putting down his chopsticks. “Many years ago, I worked with Old Hunter on a homicide case. I got into big trouble, and he saved me. Suffice it to say that it was something I did on principle, which I never regretted. As a result, I was reassigned as a neighborhood cop. It was a huge setback for a young officer, but without his help, I could have ended up in one of those labor camps. Now that he’s told me what kind of a man you are, I don’t think I need to be concerned anymore.”
“Thank you for telling me all this. But what are you concerned about, Comrade Fan?”
“About some aspects of her death. I didn’t go into detail regarding them because-” Fan cleared his throat. “Because an old man’s memory may not be that reliable. After all, it happened so many years ago.”
Memory could always serve as a face-saving excuse. The change came from his comradeship with Old Hunter, Chen guessed.
“Also because I didn’t know what you are really looking for,” Fan went on. “I didn’t want her memories to be dragged again through the humiliation mire for nothing.”
“I understand,” Chen said, recalling a similar statement by Professor Xiang.
“I think I mentioned Tofu Zhang.”
“Yes, you did. Zhang hesitated and closed the door without going out to help.”
“Before closing the door, he saw someone sneaking out of her room. Zhang thought it was Tian, but he wasn’t absolutely sure.”
“Tian-the Mao Team member from the steel mill.”
“Yes, the very Tian you wanted your partner to check.”
“Did anyone ask Tian about that afternoon?”
“According to Tian, he had planned to have a talk with her, but she appeared too disturbed, so he left,” Fan said. “But that didn’t hold water. Zhang saw him leaving after Mei’s accident, not before. In those years, however, who wanted to question the word of a Mao Team member? She died in an accident anyway. It was nobody’s fault.”
“The district police station didn’t do anything about it?”
“I was then about your age,” Fan said, taking a spoon of soup instead of responding directly. “I still wanted to do something as a cop. When I heard about the tragedy, I hurried over to the scene. There I took pictures, and I talked to some of her neighbors, including Zhang. According to another neighbor, two or three nights before, he heard something weird in her room. As an old proverb goes, there are a lot of troubles before a widow’s door-let alone such a black widow. No one reported it. I believed that it was worth investigating. It was no coincidence that Tian went in and out of her room. What’s more, if she thought to ask me for help, she could well have turned to Tian too. The poor woman was desperate, ready to do anything for her son. And Tian, unlike me, had the power to help.”
“Yes, it was unusual for Tian to join that particular Mao Team at Mei’s school in the first place,” Chen said, “not to mention his then joining the investigation group in the neighborhood here.”
“The release of the boy was sudden and suspicious. Also, I talked to a member of the neighborhood committee about it. It was Tian that had made the decision, though he hadn’t specified the release time. The boy was sick with a high fever, so she thought she might as well let him out that afternoon.”
“That explains the boy’s reaction upon his return-you can imagine the scene he stumbled upon.”
“Exactly. It was too much for him, and that’s why she ran after him like that. She knew what a shock it must have been. She forgot her nakedness, she slipped, and she fell.”
“And that also explains why the son, who loved his mother so much, ran away without even looking back,” Chen said. “Indeed, all those details make sense.”
“But it was a time when the police bureaus themselves were seen as a bourgeois institution. Red Guards and Worker Rebels alone had the real power. When I talked to my boss about an investigation, he brushed aside the idea.”
“A question. Do you still have the pictures, Comrade Fan? The pictures of the death scene, I mean.”
“Yes. I have them at home, but it may take a while to dig them out.”
“I would really appreciate it if you could show them to me today.”
“Wait a few minutes for me then.” Fan got up and strode out of the eatery.
Chen was sitting alone at the table, waiting, when the waiter put the bill down. As he had guessed, the taxi money left in his pocket was more than enough for the meal. It cost less than seven Yuan each. For the amount spent in the nightclub last night, he could come here every morning for three months.
In Dream of the Red Chamber, a young girl calculates that a crab dinner in the Grand View Garden costs more than a farmer’s food for a whole year. The same gap had appeared in today’s society.
Chen rose to pay the bill at the counter. As he took the change, he cast another look at the couplet on the door. It was in bold calligraphy, a sharp contrast to the shabby appearance of the eatery. The horizontal comment-“True in your mouth”-seemed to be humorous, yet thought-provoking.
“It’s not just about food,” the restaurant owner said with a smile. “The character ‘mouth’ carries an association of food, but of language as well. All the words come out of the mouth, true or false.”
“Yes. The couplet reminds me of another one in the Dream of the Red Chamber, in a celestial palace-”
“I know the one you are talking about, on the arch in the Illusion Wakening Palace, where Jia Baoyu reads the couplet and gets lost, but I can’t remember the exact lines.”
“The couplet reads like this,” Chen said. “‘When the fictional is real, the real is fictional; where there’s nothing, there’s everything.’ ” Jia zuo zhenshi zhen ji jia, wu wei youchu you yi wu.
“Exactly. You must be a well-to-do scholar. A prosperous attorney or something,” the owner said, glancing at the briefcase on the table.
The Italian leather briefcase was a gift from Gu, who insisted that it became Chief Inspector Chen. Ironically, it could have become him in the eyes of Green Jade too, who also took him as a prosperous “attorney or something” last night.
“The author of Dream of the Red Chamber was good at making puns,” the restaurant owner said, “even in the names of the characters. The name Jia Baoyu, the hero of the saga, could mean ‘fictional gemstone,’ and there is another family in the book, Zheng, which means ‘real’-”
At that word, Chen’s heart skipped a beat.
Ending the conversation abruptly, he went back to the table and pulled up his briefcase. Before his departure for the vacation village, he had stuffed the files on the housing development case into the briefcase along with those on the red mandarin dress case, though he hadn’t planned to study either of them there. In his hurried return to Shanghai, he hadn’t had the time to look at them.
He took out the folder on the housing development case and started reading the part about Jia.
It was scanty and simplistic, focusing on Jia’s possible antigovernment motive. It provided little solid information. Only a couple of sentences about his unhappy childhood during the Cultural Revolution, in which he had lost his parents. It didn’t even mention his parents’ names.