“I see. Thank you so much, Uncle. That is profound,” Chen said sincerely. To him, it seemed as if the talk were not just about the game of go. “I will put your teaching into practice, not just on a go board.”
“Young man, you don’t have to take me so seriously. When you play a game, you want to win,” the old man explained. “When you are absorbed in it, every piece counts, every move matters. Happy to win a corner, sad to lose a position, you are carried away with the illusion of gains or losses. Not until after the game will you come to realize it’s nothing but a game. According to Buddhist scripture, everything in this mundane world is a matter of illusion.”
“Exactly. You have put it very well.”
Chen decided to walk back to his apartment. He could not afford to spend a whole day in the lane. The conversation about go had cost him another ten minutes. The translation lay unfinished on his desk at home. Still, he wanted to think a little about the case, at least on his way back, after this talk with the elderly go player who had been as mysteriously enlightening as the old man of the Han dynasty who had helped Zhang Liang two thousand years ago.
At the exit of the lane, he looked back toward the building where Yin had spent the last years of her life after Yang’s death. Some more lines from Yang’s poetry translation manuscript occurred to him.
Where is the beauty?
Swallows alone are locked inside, for no purpose.
It is nothing but a dream,
in the past, or at present.
Who ever wakes from the dream?
There is only a never-ending cycle
of old joy and new grief.
Some day, and someone else,
in view of the yellow tower at night,
may sigh deeply for me.
These lines were from a poem by Su Dongpo, about a courtesan who shut herself up in the tower after her lover’s death. A tingzijian was not at all comparable to a romantic tower, but Yin, too, had shut herself up.
Chen was determined to do his level best for the investigation. He started by putting himself in the position of the government. He still couldn’t figure out what it could have possibly gained from murdering Yin. While Internal Security seemed to have some concern, Chen did not consider it really surprising or suspicious for them to show interest in a dissident writer’s sudden death; it could simply be their way of asserting authority. In recent years, the Party had changed its way of dealing with dissidents. Foreign investment, a vital part of China ’s economic reform, depended heavily on the new, improved government image. It did not make sense to assassinate someone like Yin. After all, she was not someone fighting for democracy and freedom under a red banner in Tiananmen Square.
Then he tried to think about Yin from the perspective of her neighbors. Yin was not rich; they all must have been aware of this. Someone might have been desperate for money, like Cai, but even then there must have been better targets: Mr. Ren, for instance, who was alone, and went out in the mornings too. Besides, no one would have kept much cash at home in this neighborhood.
As for the possibility of someone stealing Yin’s checkbook so he could withdraw her money from the bank, it was way too risky. Banks in the city did not open until after nine o’clock, and, by that time, Yin would surely have discovered that her checkbook was gone and notified the authorities. So it didn’t seem like it could have been a planned robbery gone wrong because of Yin’s unexpected return.
There seemed to be no reason to suspect an insider, a neighbor, whether he or she had intended to kill Yin or not.
But why would an outsider sneak in to kill her?
Chen caught himself shaking his head in resignation. The theoretical possibilities seemed to be unlimited. He could go on conjuring up one motive after another, but they remained nothing but theories; he did not have any facts to support them.
On the corner of Shandong Road, Chen came in sight of the New China Bookstore. To his surprise, the portion of the store devoted to books had been reduced, and now one large section was devoted to tawdry art and craft products, while another portion, under an impressive array of red paper lanterns, was selling Japanese noodles. He had not been to the bookstore for several months, and it had changed almost beyond recognition. It was like seeing an old acquaintance after he’d had plastic surgery: recognizable, yet different.
He decided not to go inside, for he wanted to focus on the case. He merely took a look at a bunch of new magazines and newspapers near the entrance: One Week in Shanghai, Shanghai Culture, Bund Pictorial, One Week’s Life. All of them featured big color photos of stars. He did not read any of these new trendy magazines, and only recognized one picture, that of a Hong Kong actress, on one cover.
Things had been changing very fast in the city.
Chen then tried to tackle the case from another perspective. Motive aside, what would an outside murderer have done after committing the crime?
Surely he would have tried to escape immediately.
In his attempt to get away, there was a possibility of his being seen by someone in the building. But that would not be too much of a risk. In a shikumen building, people might have relatives or friends staying over or visiting early, and a stranger’s presence would not have caused instant alarm. No one would have taken drastic action to stop him from leaving. In the worst-case scenario, if Yin’s body was immediately discovered, one of the neighbors might be able to produce a rough sketch of the suspect for the police bureau later, but such a sketch alone would not be much help to a homicide investigation.
To stay in her room with the dead body, with the growing possibility of a knock at the door, would have presented a much greater risk. The longer the murderer stayed in the room, the more people would go upstairs and down, passing by the closed tingzijian door, and the more suspicious they would grow if Yin did not emerge.
According to Yu’s hypothesis, the murderer could have waited in hiding, either in the tingzijian room or somewhere else, until an opportune moment to leave the shikumen building.
In terms of hiding places, Chen did not think it totally impossible for someone to hide briefly amidst the broken furniture pieces and other junk stored here and there in various nooks and crannies in the building; he might have hidden behind the open back door, for instance, or behind the tapestry under the staircase.
So either when the shrimp woman stepped away from her position, or when all the neighbors rushed upstairs, the murderer could have escaped in the confusion if he had been waiting in hiding.
But hiding and waiting involved another risk. If he were found lurking, he would instantly be seen as a suspect and grabbed, or at least questioned.
Why would the murderer have taken that risk? And why kill Yin? For what?
Those were questions to which he did not have answers.
In the afternoon Chen threw himself into his translation work. He had told White Cloud that he would spend the day in the Shanghai Library. Whether she believed him or not, she neither called nor came to his door.
He had told himself that he had probably done all he could in the criminal investigation. Cops may spend days, or weeks, on a case without getting anywhere. And he could not afford, despite his determination to do his best, to spend any more time on it.
Toward the evening, he got a phone call from Overseas Chinese Lu. As always, Lu started by referring to a loan Chen had made to him in the early days of his restaurant, Moscow Suburb, and then Lu repeated his usual dinner invitation.