Hold Your Breath, China Read online

  Like a Chinese proverb, however, eight or nine times out of ten, things in this world do not work out the way we expect. An unexpected turn in a series of deadly events toward the end of his Wuxi vacation had left him stranded in a scene from Casablanca, watching the woman he loved throwing herself into the arms of another man.

  Confucius says: time flows away non-stop, day and night, like water in the river.

  But it was not a moment to indulge himself in sentimental reminiscences of the romantic moments by Tai Lake, Chen hastened to tell himself.

  He turned to cast a look at the desk. Among the books and files, he was surprised to see a copy of Shanghai Literature in a pile on the desk, and a red-headed document about ‘The Ecological Disaster of the Petroleum Industry’.

  It was then he heard the bedroom door handle turning.

  As Zhao emerged from the bedroom holding the phone in his hand, Inspector Chen was just picking up the literature magazine from the desk.

  ‘Yes, you’re rereading the poem, our poet inspector.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘“Don’t Cry, Tai Lake,” right? It’s really a good poem about the polluted lake in Wuxi. I like it a lot.’

  ‘Oh … you are carrying that issue with you, Comrade Secretary Zhao, but that’s a couple of years old.’

  ‘Yes, I’m carrying the magazine with me. The pollution has been going from bad to worse. That’s why your poem really matters,’ Zhao said, taking over the magazine and opening to the page with the beginning of the poem on it. ‘Tell you what, several people I know in Beijing have also read the poem. An excellent piece with a high level of ecological awareness, they all agreed with me about it.’

  ‘Thank you so much, Comrade Secretary Zhao,’ he said, not knowing what else to say.

  ‘In face of the insurmountable problem, the characters in the poem do not just give up. That’s the spirit, Chief Inspector Chen. It was written during that vacation of yours at Wuxi Cadre Recreation Center, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it was so kind of you to let me have that all-inclusive vacation, which had been originally arranged for you. I truly enjoyed it. While staying by the lakeside, I also happened to see a lot with my own eyes how disastrously the lake was polluted—’

  ‘And you happened to find your muse for the poem, I suppose.’

  What was Zhao driving at? The senior Party leader was not a man in the habit of talking about the muse for poetry or anything like that. Unable to figure it out, Chen chose to make no immediate response.

  ‘The poem shows that you have been following the environmental issues in your conscientious way,’ Zhao said, looking him in the eye, ‘and that’s why you will do the job. It does not require an environmental expert, but a knowledgeable, sensitive and resourceful investigator. More importantly, an honest one I can trust.’

  ‘But writing in sentimental lines is totally different from investigating in scientific terms.’

  ‘Well, just come up with whatever you can uncover. Afterward, you may write another environmental poem, our gifted poet inspector.’

  ‘But what “whatever”, exactly, Comrade Secretary Zhao?’

  ‘What are they doing? Who are involved and contacted and connected? From where comes the financial support and means to their project? How far are they making progress?’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘More material will follow. Make sure you report to me personally. For whatever expense is involved in your work, you may have it reimbursed through the Party Central Discipline Committee, about which I’ve given specific instruction to my assistant in Beijing. You don’t have to explain anything to him. Nor to any other people, for that matter. I’ve told some comrades in the Shanghai city government that you shall be keeping me company – as an experienced tourist guide – during my stay here. So you don’t have to worry about your routine work in the police bureau.’

  So it was an assignment to which Chen was not in a position to say no any more.

  And for a personal reason, too, even more than the political reasons Zhao had just given him.

  Chief Inspector Chen, Chen said to himself, would not let any harm come to Shanshan, or Yuan Jing.

  At the same time, he wanted to find out what had happened to her since their parting in Wuxi.

  ‘Thank you so much for your trust in me, and for your thoughtful arrangement, Comrade Secretary Zhao. I’ll do my level best.’

  ‘Now, with anything you find – anything important – call me or text me at once. You have my special cellphone number, don’t you?’ Zhao added, as though in afterthought, ‘Some of these activists can be acting out of their concerns for the problem, so there may be nothing really wrong with their motive. I’ve read one of her posts online – Yuan Jing’s, I mean – and it’s quite well written. We don’t have to jump to any political conclusion.’

  ‘I understand, Comrade Secretary Zhao, and I’ll keep you posted.’

  ‘At the same time, they can be too recklessly pushing forward with their agenda, regardless of its consequences in today’s China. And there’s no ruling out, needless to say, that some of the so-called activists are taking advantage of the current situation with their ulterior political motive.’

  A number of possible scenarios flashed across Chen’s mind. But then others were coming up, conflicting, contradicting …

  He rose to take leave with the folder grasped tight in his hand.

  As he strode into the high-speed elevator in a hurry, he nearly stumbled, the bulging folder heavier than expected.

  Emerging from the hotel, Inspector Chen decided not to take a taxi from the long line waiting for customers in front.

  He was going to take a short walk first. Walking, he was sometimes capable of making a concentrated effort to think.

  But it took only a couple of minutes for him to realize the mistake. The polluted air outside was horrible, and more noticeable after he had been in the luxurious hotel suite installed with the advanced fresh air system.

  Moving along Century Avenue, he found it hard even to breathe, as if all the surrounding high-rises were pressing down around him. It was too uncomfortable for him to think with any clarity. The fragments of Zhao’s talk kept swirling, even more entangled than before.

  While Zhao did not give a hint about any knowledge regarding his relationship with Shanshan in Wuxi, his insistence on Chen taking the job – in connection to the poem – was darkly suggestive.

  Nor would it have been too astonishing that the inspector, having ruffled enough high feathers, had been secretly placed under the governmental radar as early as his vacation days in Wuxi, where he was in the company of Shanshan.

  So it was turning out to be something like an investigation against the investigations about him. With no other cops working under him, no official resources available, he had to grope along all by himself, employing those deceptive stratagems like in that time-honored Chinese classic The Thirty-Six Stratagems, maneuvering in a roundabout way, and moving stealthily without being detected by others.

  ‘To sail across the sea undetected by the eyes in the skies.’ He thought of the first stratagem in The Thirty-Six Stratagems. He had no idea how he could possibly achieve that.

  But his opponents had been maneuvering against him, against Shanshan.

  After making several wrong turns, he caught the sign pointing to the subway station at Lujiazui, where he could take Line 1 back home, but he slowed down, stopped, and turned into a side street.

  He walked for a couple of blocks before spotting a small convenience store on the corner. For the time of the day, he found himself the only customer there.

  ‘A new SIM card,’ he said, handing over three one-hundred bills to a salesgirl – double the amount for the SIM card he wanted to buy.

  ‘Just for the SIM card?’ She raised the money in her hand questioningly. According to the latest city regulation, a SIM card purchaser had to show his ID for registration.

  ‘Yes, you can keep the change.
’ He nodded with a smile. It’s just like in a popular Chinese saying: While the government has one regulation, people have ten counter-regulations.

  Smiling back, she was about to hand him the SIM card when she said, ‘Why don’t you have another phone? A different one, so you won’t get the two phones confused.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘Then another seven hundred yuan. You have both the phone and the SIM card.’

  ‘One thousand yuan for the two, right?’

  It was not a small sum, but he turned over the money. So he got from her a SIM card as well as a white phone, a special one for the investigation, which would not get confused with his regular phone, a black one.

  Pocketing the new phone, Inspector Chen headed toward the riverbank.

  Not far from the convenience store, there was a park-like area, which was usually crowded with tourists taking or posing for pictures with the Oriental Pearl Tower in the background. For the day with the PM 2.5 level high in the air, however, it looked deserted, with few people visible.

  There he came to a stop. Taking another deep breath in spite of himself, he stood leaning against the embankment and looking up.

  Across the river, the Bund stretched out, with those magnificent imposing neoclassical buildings sporting time-yellowed art-deco facades, enveloped in the gray air, almost unreal, eerily reminiscent of those black and white movies made in the late twenties in the last century. It represented such a surreal scene as to galvanize him into the realistic role he was supposed to play: that of a police inspector working in secret.

  But there were things in Zhao’s talk that both alarmed and confused him about the role. Things that gave conflicting and foreboding signals, different from those in the People’s Daily, which usually interpreted the environmental crisis as a temporary bump in China’s marching forward along the great socialist road.

  For a senior Party official on a ‘research tour’, Zhao could have easily had the entire Shanghai Police Bureau at his disposal if he had really wanted to do something about a group of activists. No one would have murmured anything about his ‘research’.

  Then why choose Chen for the job, with the insistence on secrecy, and with the deliberate cover of his serving as a ‘tourist guide’ during Zhao’s vacation in Shanghai?

  There was also something ambivalent in Zhao’s attitude toward Shanshan and other activists, as if he was not so anxious to crush them in a preemptive strike – at least not until the chief inspector had found out something meaningful about them.

  Not informed with Zhao’s real intention, Chen could probably try to play safe by making a show of checking the activists, yet providing some selective information, which Zhao might have already obtained anyway.

  But could the inspector really do that?

  The river water lapping against the shore, he thought hard with an unlit cigarette in his hand, but his efforts did not yield an easy answer. Instead, he was beginning to have a dull headache.

  A sudden siren came piercing the somber sky over the river, like a line in the poem.

  Inspector Chen started walking again, along the bank like a tourist, before he took out the white cellphone. He changed his mind, however, at the sight of a public phone booth on another side street.

  Few public phone booths were left behind and in use in the fast-changing city. As he was striding over, reaching out to pull open the dust-covered door of the booth, a young girl scampered by, eyeing him curiously, if not suspiciously, while talking non-stop to a cellphone through her white mask.

  Once inside, he dialed the phone number of the Shanghai Literature magazine editor surnamed Ouyang.

  ‘You have some new poems for me?’ Ouyang said, more like a statement than a question.

  ‘Not right now, but I have to ask you a favor, Ouyang. Do you still have copies of the issue that contains “Don’t Cry, Tai Lake”? Some people want to read the poem.’

  ‘I’m not at all surprised, Chief Inspector Chen. You’re truly a rising star in the system. Some other people asked for the issue too. From Beijing, I remember.’

  ‘Really! Do you remember the name of the people who contacted you about it?’

  ‘No, just someone at a high-level government office in Beijing, that’s about all I remember. He must have talked to the city propaganda ministry before contacting me. The city people later called me, too. It’s a great honor, according to them, that the senior Party cadres in Beijing want to read our magazine because of your poem.’

  ‘What else did they say to you?’

  ‘Let me think.’ Ouyang started to speak reflectively. ‘The Beijing office did ask me some questions, such as whether the poem was based on your personal experience or not. I said I did not know. It’s impossible to say, as you know, how much of an imaginative literary work comes from the writer’s personal experience. Or at all.’

  ‘Well said, Ouyang. That’s what Eliot’s impersonal theory is all about. Anything else?’

  ‘Hold on. I may be getting things confused. It happened quite a while ago. It’s possible that a couple of people – actually from different offices in Beijing – called us about your poem. They both requested copies of our magazine, I think.’

  ‘Can you double-check that for me?’

  ‘Of course. Our office assistant Nanhua may have kept the mailing address or addressee in the office logbook.’

  ‘That will be great.’

  ‘You may pick up copies any time you like – as many as you like. The more people interested in our magazine, the better. By the way,’ Ouyang went on after a short pause, ‘Qiang is retiring after having been in charge of the foreign liaison office here for almost forty years. I saw him yesterday, and he specifically asked about you.’

  ‘Thanks, Ouyang,’ he said, thinking Ouyang’s mention of Qiang a bit out of the blue. ‘I’ve not seen Qiang for quite a long time. A nice man, he helped me a lot in the days when I first became a member of the Writers’ Association.’

  Chen put back the phone, frowning again. It had been a shot in the dark. What he had just learned, however, confirmed his suspicion. People had been checking out his work, and not because of their appreciation of literature.

  He knew better.

  What’s more, he was checked by two different groups of people in Beijing. If one inquiry was made by Zhao’s office, what about the other?

  Inspector Chen was ready to get out of the booth, pushing open the door, when the big clock on top of the custom house across the river began striking the hour.

  As if in an inexplicable correspondence with the chime, another thought struck him. So he stepped back into the booth and picked up the phone again.

  This time he dialed the number of Little Huang, a young cop he had met in Wuxi during his vacation there.

  Detective Huang, a passionate fan of Sherlock Holmes, and perhaps even more so of ‘Master Chief Inspector Chen’, had his imagination too much enriched with the mystery novels he devoured, and in his eyes, what the Shanghai inspector had done during the Tai Lake murder investigation simply put him on the same par as any fictional ‘Master’.

  As requested, Huang immediately called back to the number of the Shanghai public phone booth from a public phone booth in Wuxi. The young cop started with undisguised excitement in his voice,

  ‘Another confidential case, Chief Inspector Chen?’

  ‘Confidential, yes. It’s so confidential I can hardly give you any details, except that it’s directly from Beijing. That’s about all I can say at the moment. But it’s not exactly a case; not yet, at this moment. To start with, I want to know what has happened to Shanshan in Wuxi. You know whom I’m talking about, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, Shanshan. Of course I know.’ Huang began to sound even more excited. ‘Since you left Wuxi at the end of that investigation, I have made a point of inquiring about her from time to time. Not that directly, as you may imagine. More than two years ago, or perhaps even earlier, it was said that she was going to study
for a PhD degree in the UK. Sure enough, she came to the local police bureau to apply for the passport for that purpose. With her name still on the governmental blacklist, it could have been extremely difficult for her to obtain the passport, so I helped to smooth her application process without her knowledge.’

  ‘Good job, Little Huang. I appreciate it. But she did not leave for the UK as she had planned. Right?’

  ‘No. She did not. Shortly after she obtained the passport, she married a local businessman surnamed Yao.’

  ‘She married—’

  Chen checked himself from finishing the sentence. For an attractive, intelligent young woman like Shanshan, that was nothing to be surprised about.

  ‘Sorry, I thought about calling you at the time, Chief Inspector Chen, but things happened to get so busy here with a political case.’

  He could guess the reason why Huang had chosen not to upset him with the news. The Wuxi cop knew a thing or two about the relationship. But it was a closed chapter, at least so it seemed to the young cop, no point opening it again.

  ‘You don’t have to say sorry for that. So she’s married with someone surnamed Yao?’

  ‘Yes. Yao runs a successful solar energy company in Wuxi. Possibly the number one in the country. She stayed on with him, helping to take care of his business instead of working at that local chemical factory. She also started making frequent trips to Shanghai for her husband’s business, I think. In the meantime, she has become an “Internet celebrity” or a “public intellectual” for her online writing about environmental issues, all of which I’ve learned from a net cop stationed in Wuxi. His name is Bei, and he occasionally goes to Shanghai too – most likely because of her. She’s still being closely watched by government people, I suppose.’

  ‘That’s no surprise. But there was another man quite close to her at the time. I mean during the days I was on vacation, staying at the Wuxi Cadre Recreation Center.’