E: Kang’s daughter is nothing. Have you heard about the First Son? He’s getting an apartment to himself in the best neighborhood in New York City. And it was all paid for in cash.
B: Well, my man is not heartless. He’s promised to pay for me to go abroad in five years…
Yu pressed the stop button, wondering how the conversations on the tape could possibly lead to anything. Then he pulled out a granite go board along with a box of black and white stones from under the bed.
It was a game he enjoyed playing with Chen. Both of them felt like they were talking through the white and black stones, as if they were comparing notes. Chen was brilliant but eccentric, inclined to putting his pieces in positions unimaginable to others. In contrast, Yu preferred a more conventional approach, building up pressure, step by step, until the game reached a climax. They had one thing in common, however. Neither of them gave up easily. Each of them, when faced with a board that seemed hopeless, would persist, making one stubborn move after another, hoping for a dramatic turnaround.
Yu found himself positioning one black piece on the board, and then a white one, as if his right hand were playing against the left. Pondering the possible moves in both sides of a game of go was a bit like weighing all the possible actions he could take as the new head of the Special Case Squad.
At present, he was pushing ahead with the Liang case, whether it was relevant to Chen’s current troubles or not. It wasn’t really a “special case.” Liang was a crooked official, the head of the commerce department for the Huangpu District, and he ran a private company on the side. Unluckily for him, his corruption had been exposed on the Internet.
Yu wasn’t nearly as Web-savvy as Peiqin, but he’d learned how to run a search on the Internet, combing through all the online posts on a particular topic, some of them barely relevant, and some, barely reliable. Liang’s case, however, was a classic example of unbridled corruption. Liang, as an official, was involved in the emerging high-speed train industry being established by the central government. Liang’s private company supplied furnishings for the trains, such as chairs, tables, sinks, and other low-technology items. A couple of weeks ago, a copy of the invoice that Liang’s company was charging the government for those furnishings had been posted on the Internet. The invoice caused a huge storm on the Internet because of the prices Liang was charging the government. A chair, for instance, was being invoiced at 200,000 yuan. On the Internet, people were raising legitimate questions about pricing practices and possible corruption and were demanding that a broad search be launched for any other corruption surrounding Liang and his company. Liang, however, had disappeared before the government could take him into custody. So right now, it was a missing persons case, which had been turned over to Detective Yu’s squad.
Liang couldn’t have pulled off a complicated scheme like that on his own, Yu suspected. According to the People’s Daily, the high-speed train project was both a political and an economic priority. It was a symbol of China’s great progress and was therefore a high-profile project for the central government as well as every department that had a piece of it, including the state council in Beijing, the Railway Ministry, and the Shanghai city government.
According to the rules, any contract had to be awarded to the company with the lowest bid and the most experience. Liang’s company, however, didn’t have any experience manufacturing equipment for trains, and it was widely believed that Liang had used his political connections to land those unbelievably lucrative orders.
There were several popular theories on the Internet about Liang’s disappearance. One was that Liang had gone into hiding somewhere nearby. But with new information and photos constantly being posted on the Internet, he would be spotted the moment he poked his nose out-he couldn’t expect to stay hidden long. Still, it couldn’t be ruled out entirely. Liang might have fled in panic, without giving too much thought about the future.
Another possibility was that Liang had fled China entirely. If this was true, he had to have started preparing for it long ago, had a passport and visa ready, and a substantial sum of money stashed abroad. But would he really have left his wife behind? Other “naked officials”-people whose corruption was exposed on the Internet-sent their families out of the country before they themselves fled. However, there might be something special about Liang’s wife that kept Liang from sending her abroad. Yu thought he’d heard something about her having a dubious background, but he couldn’t remember anything specific.
There was yet another possibility, Yu thought broodingly, but so far there was nothing to support it except for a slightly odd conversation he’d had with Party Secretary Li. Li had asked Yu about the progress of the investigation into Liang’s disappearance, and when Yu filled him in, Li clearly implied that it wasn’t necessary for the Special Case Squad to go all out to find Liang.
Yu didn’t have Old Hunter’s passion for old sayings, but Yu couldn’t help thinking of one in particular: Treating a dead horse as if it’s still alive. Yu couldn’t help wondering how Chen would have handled Liang’s case. Of course, Chen had connections, some quite powerful, that Detective Yu couldn’t imagine having.
When Peiqin finally came into the room, the ashtray on the nightstand was half full. She cast a glance at it, frowning.
“Old Hunter finished all of the chicken tonight,” she said. “I’ll have to scramble two eggs with onion for your lunch. I have to leave early tomorrow to go to the new restaurant, so there won’t be time to make anything else.”
About half a year ago, Peiqin and a partner had started a small restaurant of their own. She had managed to hold on to her job as the accountant for a state-run restaurant by agreeing to do the work mostly online at half pay. This allowed her to invest the time necessary to launch her own restaurant.
“Don’t worry about it. I can eat lunch at the canteen.”
“I don’t even want to think about the food in your canteen.”
She slipped into a blue-and-white striped pajama top that barely reached her waist, and slid under the quilt beside him.
Absentmindedly, he put his hand on her shoulder. She sighed, nestling up against him.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Old Hunter mentioned that Chen had electronic copies of two case files on his laptop. So I’m going to go through the rest of them. I was just thinking about the Liang case.”
“What’s your reason for focusing on that one first?”
“The case file was handed over to Chen the day before he was removed from the bureau,” Yu said. “He didn’t have to accept the case. In fact, corruption cases involving Party officials like Liang are usually handled by the Party Discipline Committee, so Chen could easily have said no.”
“Then why didn’t he?”
“I don’t know. The Liang scandal first broke on the Internet, and then it snowballed rapidly. Before the Discipline Committee could do anything, Liang disappeared. As a result, it wasn’t a corruption case, like it should have been, but a missing person case.”
“I might have read about Liang online, but with so many corruption scandals, I didn’t follow it closely.”
“It started with an invoice posted online for the accessories like chairs, tables, and sinks that Liang’s private company was supplying for the new high-speed train. The prices listed on the invoice were outrageous, at least ten times more than normal. How could Liang have gotten away with charging so much? That wasn’t hard to figure out, and a lot of information about Liang and his dealings, from a broad range of sources, was quickly posted on the Internet. No more than a couple days later, Liang disappeared.”
Yu picked up the laptop, clicked a bookmarked page, and the screen filled with the invoice in question. Underneath it were hundreds and hundreds of angry comments and armchair analyses.