Hold Your Breath, China Read online

  ‘Censorship is a matter of course in the socialism of China’s characteristics – that is if the documentary is ever going to make its way into the movie theater. But for something put on the Internet, with a stroke of luck, it could be a different story.’

  ‘That’s intriguing, Bian.’

  ‘Theoretically, it’s permissible for people to post a video online as long as there’s no anti-government stuff in it. With those latest smartphones, they can so easily make videos for fun – a clip of several minutes or a bit longer, no big deal like before. The government is not too worried about it. After all, it can be instantly blocked once the net cops find in it anything politically incorrect or dangerous.’

  ‘But how long is her research documentary?’

  ‘Longer than one hour, I think, covering a considerable number of aspects. Possibly an hour and a half.’

  ‘So it’s quite professionally made – not at all like those cellphone video clips?’

  ‘Yes, as professionally as you can imagine.’

  ‘But what about the funding for the production of such a professionally made documentary?’

  ‘That’s where we came in, offering to cover a part of the expense,’ Bian said with a touch of pride. ‘Several other entrepreneurs like me. At the end of the movie, Shanshan will make a list of donors for the project. To be honest, that shall be a marvelous marketing opportunity for our companies. Exceptional PR work. Really worth every penny we have put in.’

  ‘Is she that well known?’

  ‘Quite well known, I should say, especially in our circle. And among the netizens too, who follow her posts all the time. But of course, you don’t say a single word about the documentary to others, not even to that leading comrade from Beijing. Not until after its release.’

  ‘Not a single word, you don’t have to worry about it. I totally understand, Bian.’

  For a privately funded documentary about the national environmental crisis, Chen observed, its eventual release to a large audience appeared to be open to question, when the net cops kept prowling around. So the secrecy of its production could be crucial, as Bian emphasized.

  But how was it possible that people like Zhao – and Internal Security too – had not heard something about it? It was a puzzle, to which he had no answer.

  ‘So the documentary will be put on one particular website?’

  ‘Well, more than one. You know how much those websites depend on commercials?’ Bian said with a proud smile. ‘My company put a lot of them on the New Waves website. Its owner knows what a favor he owes me for them, and he promised he would have the documentary on as soon as it’s available.’

  ‘But it can be a huge risk to him – and the website, too.’

  ‘Well, it’s a calculated risk. The website people can claim that they know nothing about its contents, and it’s simply put on there by somebody unknown to them. So it may not necessarily spell too much trouble. Besides, it’s not just me alone doing that. My associates are taking care of the remaining major websites. When the documentary appears simultaneously on each and every major website, plus the instant forwarding and reposting among the netizens all over the country, it will be such a national hit, the government may have a really hard time dealing with it.’

  ‘I see. Like in an old Chinese saying: the law may not be able to punish too many people. Still, it’s so generous of you to do so.’

  ‘It’s no waste of money as far as my product line goes. The commercials have to appear somewhere anyway. Why not for the movie? Imagine my company name shown at the end of it – to be seen by millions and millions.’

  ‘Are you also involved in the process of the documentary making?’

  ‘No, not exactly. Shanshan has a free hand with the production, but she sees to the effective communication and discussion among all of us. We are encouraged to express our opinions about it. For instance, some of us want to make sure that the film does not go too far, lest it might not be able to come out, or even if it did, it would get instantly banned. Then it would amount to a waste of effort and money. Needless to say, none of us wants to get ourselves into serious troubles with the government. We have to do business in the system.’

  ‘Yes, all of us have to walk a tightrope in the system.’

  ‘You can say that again, Chief Inspector Chen.’ Bian added after a short pause, ‘In fact, there will be a meeting at the Oriental Club tomorrow afternoon. It’s in the New World, you know.’

  ‘Oriental Club, I know. So it’s tomorrow afternoon – are you going there, Bian?’

  ‘We don’t have to attend each and every one of those meetings. Occasionally, we send our representatives there. So we’ll have some ideas about how things are moving along.’

  ‘How about,’ Chen said, draining the cold coffee in one gulp, ‘sending me there as your representative tomorrow? I’ll simply sit there and listen without saying a word, that much I can promise you. No one will pay any attention to me.’

  ‘I think that may work, but I just want to say it once again: it’s a good, much-needed project, that documentary about the air pollution in China.’

  ‘I cannot agree more,’ Chen said emphatically. ‘Let me give you my word again: no harm will happen to her, or to the documentary.’

  Detective Yu was still poring over the pictures when his special phone rang.

  ‘We have added the noodles stirred with fried green onion oil and dried shrimp to the list of the Shanghai Number One Noodles,’ Peiqin said on the phone. ‘You have to come. So delicious, you would bite your tongue off.’

  ‘Shanghai Number One Noodles …’ That was the joke between Inspector Chen and Peiqin. She would not have called into his new phone about it, whether a chef’s special had been added to the list or not. ‘But I’m in the middle of something here. Bring it home tonight.’

  ‘You won’t regret it for your trip. Lianping too likes it so much.’

  ‘Lianping?’

  ‘She also brought me a new video. A very exciting one.’

  ‘Very well then, I’m on my way.’

  Now Detective Yu knew why Peiqin called.

  When Inspector Chen finally got back to his apartment he collapsed into the chair close to the computer, too drained to reach out to click the mouse.

  It might not have been such an eventful day for him as a cop – he had had worse ones – but there was still a lot for him to do before he could call it a day, and a lot for him to worry about in terms of what might come the next day.

  But in the midst of all these wandering thoughts, he took out the pictures from Huang and dismissed the fear of whatever might happen next.

  He began to spread them out one by one on the table, like at the Wuxi hotel room in the morning.

  Then one picture seemed to be jumping out to him, which showed her lying on her back with her crossed arms covering her bare breasts, nestling against Yao who was holding up her bare foot, caressing the red-painted toes like petals …

  It was far from a pleasant experience for him to go through those pictures of Shanshan lying beside another man.

  The dusk was quickly sinking into darkness, as if on the wings of an ominous black bird.

  There’s no blaming Shanshan for her earlier decision to not leave Jiang for him, Chen told himself. She did not know Jiang’s marital status at the time. Nor for her subsequent decision to leave Jiang for Yao in the changed circumstances.

  The inspector had stayed far away, long out of touch, too busy with his own work in the system.

  Since their parting in Wuxi, he had tried only once to contact her – to have the magazine office send her a copy of Shanghai Literature with the poem in it – without giving away his own mailing address.

  Was it done out of magnanimity, as Huang called it? No, he did not think so. It was nothing but a pathetic pose dictated by the wounded ego.

  Under the lamplight, Shanshan looked slightly tanned in those pictures. In one of them, she was stretching out gracefully on
the beach, showing sand stuck on her feet and toes. Again, there was something strangely familiar, reminiscent of her stepping out barefoot from the sampan to the lake shore.

  It was not a night for him to indulge in romantic nostalgia, he knew, but he succumbed to the temptation of pulling out the magazine again, and came upon the ending of ‘Don’t Cry, Tai Lake’.

  Who is the one walking beside you?

  By the water, an apple tree

  blossoming again, flashing

  smiles among the waking boughs,

  petals transparent in the dazzling light,

  she walks in a red trench coat

  carries a report in her hand

  like a bright sail cutting

  through the contaminated currents

  to the silent splendid sun.

  It was an optimistic ending, suggested by the editor for the sake of circumventing government censorship, which Chen understood and complied.

  But it was also a scene he had been envisioning, in a sentimental fantasy, time and again.

  In a fleeting figment of imagination, she seemed to be coming over to him just like that, with the white apple blossom dazzling under the sun, her arms reaching out, smiling after the successful release of the documentary, and inhaling the new fresh air.

  But what about the development in real life – in his as well as hers?

  Willows at Zhangtai, willows at Zhangtai,

  still so green as in the past?

  The soft, long shoots still clinging –

  in another man’s hand …

  The lines from the Tang dynasty poem came back to him like a satirical echo of the present moment, of the poem he was holding in his hand.

  The refrain ‘Who is the one walking beside you?’ had been originally put in there as a means for the spatial structure of his poem, but in his subconscious mind he must have projected himself into the ‘one’, and not just in the lines of the poem.

  Now the refrain read like a self-fulfilled sign. It’s somebody else, not him, walking beside her at the moment.

  And he was doing the investigation as a cop, not as a poet, with the utmost detachment imaginable for him.

  As if through a mysterious correspondence in cyberspace, Detective Yu gave Inspector Chen an unexpected call.

  ‘You know where Old Hunter will be in the morning, Chief?’

  ‘The Bird Corner in People’s Park. It’s good for your father to really enjoy his life in retirement in the midst of twittering birds.’

  ‘Tomorrow morning, he wants to show you a new bird he has just got. A very sexy bird.’

  ‘Really!’

  He had met Old Hunter there before – not for the sake of birds.

  Nor could it be the real reason for the meeting next morning. It would probably be something not safe for Detective Yu to send electronically.

  ‘I’ll be there. Six o’clock. I’ve not seen him for a couple of months.’

  Chen thought he got the hint about the ‘sexy bird’. And he also had to get a new email address for himself.

  DAY THREE

  WEDNESDAY

  Early Wednesday morning, Detective Yu went to have another talk with Detective Qin in his office.

  ‘You’re not our legendary infallible chief inspector, Detective Yu,’ Qin started with a tone quite different from the day before, ‘so I’ll keep nothing from you.’

  ‘Thanks, Detective Qin.’

  ‘I think we have got the one with the real motive for Xiang, victim number four.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It’s in the original direction pursued by Internal Security,’ Qin said, tapping on the desk with his forefinger. ‘From the very beginning, they suspected that it had been done by someone bearing a really deep grudge against Xiang, or against Geng, or against both of them.’

  ‘So they have discovered such a one?’

  ‘Yes, they have. It may not have been too difficult for them, with all the information about her at their disposal. Her promotion to the section head meant, as you’d expect, the exclusion of other candidates for the position. In her section, there’s a journalist surnamed Zhou. Having worked there for longer than a decade, he was known as a capable and experienced worker, too. Prior to her arrival at the newspaper, Zhou was acknowledged, though not that officially, as the acting section head in practical charge for the last two years – just like you, in practical charge of your special case squad—’

  ‘Chief Inspector Chen is a friend of mine. He has just been too busy with so many other things, you know,’ Yu said, feeling obliged to say something for Chen.

  ‘Whatever you may want to say about your boss, Xiang was not a friend of Zhou’s. Her arrival deprived him of the “acting” status. And a couple of months later, far from as capable or experienced, she was made the section head, which totally ruled out the possibility of his promotion. How do you think Zhou would have reacted?’

  ‘It’s not fair, but there’re so many things not fair in this world. Old Hunter entered the bureau earlier than Party Secretary Li. Li has never done a real case. But so what? People do not kill simply because of—’

  ‘But Zhou had his reason to hate her, and for that matter, even to hate the newspaper, right?’

  ‘Yes, it’s an enormous humiliation for him to have lost it to such a young girl.’

  ‘Well, it’s more than that. He happened to be the one working with Xiang that evening.’

  ‘That Thursday evening?’ Yu said, recalling things Peiqin had learned from Lianping the previous night, including the name of Zhou in the background. ‘You mean Zhou worked together with her during the night shift?’

  ‘He left earlier, but he’s the one familiar with her routine during the night shift, and with what she would do after going through the galley in the early morning. So you see, it really made sense for someone to have planned the attack with the knowledge about her movements that morning.’

  ‘But others in her office might also have known about her partiality for the Shanghai snack. And it’s not something invariable; she could have chosen the newspaper canteen for a change. Nor could anyone have foretold when exactly she would go down for the earthen oven cake.’

  ‘With Zhou’s familiarity about her routine, he could have waited for her to come down in the early hours.’

  ‘A long, long wait it could have been, not to mention a lot of cameras around the area. A lone wolf waiting there would have been so conspicuous in the early morning.’

  ‘But here’s another clue,’ Qin responded, raising his voice a little. ‘The video cameras at the Wenhui building entrance and exit happened to be down that night. In case of its being not an accident, Zhou certainly knew how to handle that as an insider, and for a reason known to him alone. According to his testimony, he left the office around twelve, but with the cameras down, that was not verified. He could have stayed on somewhere inside the building, in view of Xiang walking out, and followed her out to the stall for the fatal blow. He did not have to wait that long outside, standing or strolling about inconspicuously on the street.’

  ‘But I did not know anything about the camera problem at the Wenhui building, Detective Qin.’

  ‘Sorry, we too have just learned it.’

  Yu did not think that was true. Qin had been reluctant to work with the Special Case squad, or to share the information with him.

  ‘And another question related to the scenario,’ Yu went on after a short pause. ‘How could Zhou have possibly obtained the video tape at the club?’

  ‘The earlier relationship between Xiang and Geng was no news to the people in the newspaper. Zhou was certainly in a position to have heard about it.’

  ‘But the video was made in the days when she still worked as a massage girl. Zhou came to know her after she started working as a journalist for Wenhui. How could that have been possible?’

  ‘At the time, the video was possibly made against Geng.’

  ‘Zhou had no grudge against Geng, had he? I thin
k we have talked about it. No point going over it again. Even if it were the case, it should have been released at the time, with Geng still married to his former wife, and in the position of the vice mayor. So his affair with such a massage girl would have easily made the Weixin headline.’

  ‘I think you have made this point before, Detective Yu.’

  ‘And with her recent death, and his being in hospital, some people reacted to the tragedy not without a touch of sympathy.’

  ‘Yes, possibly less damage. But Geng’s known as a ruthless man, having crushed his opponents like ants, so one of them could have chosen to have the video come out in a different light. The combination of her death in a sensational murder and his exposure in a salacious massage scene. That could have called so much more public attention and devastated Geng in an irrecoverable way – at least from the revenger’s perspective.’

  ‘But the question remains: how could an ordinary journalist like Zhou have got hold of such a video?’

  ‘Internal Security has looked into that. Some club people secretly made videos like that for selling – for a really high price. It might be used for some secret purpose you may never imagine.’

  ‘Another question for your scenario: what about the other victims? They had done nothing against Zhou. In fact, they might not have known him at all.’

  ‘They were killed to make the murder of Xiang even more sensational,’ Qin said, with increasingly visible impatience.

  ‘It’s difficult for me to imagine Zhou could have done all that for such a reason.’

  ‘Zhou had another deeper reason, like your Inspector Chen says, “known only to himself”. He had been seeing a young woman for several years. With the prospect of his being promoted to the section head, and then possibly the associate editor in chief for the newspaper, things were not bad between the two, but she recently dumped him.’

  ‘What’s that to do with the murder?’

  ‘With Xiang serving as his boss, he’s seen as one with no future. Xiang’s much younger, plus with Geng’s power behind her, there’s no way for him to move up any more, and that’s the way Zhou’s girlfriend saw it.’