Hold Your Breath, China Page 5

  Reading on, Chen wondered how that article could have survived online with the net cops patrolling around all the time. Then he noted that it was an article originally posted a couple of years earlier. Somebody must have saved it as a Word document and reposted it with the latest waves of toxic air overwhelming the country again. The reposted article would most likely be blocked soon. He printed out a hard copy and saved it to a file in his own computer as well.

  Clicking on the mouse, he came upon another related Weibo post, which read like a sequence to the earlier one. Apparently, it was one of the most heated topics on the Internet.

  Indeed, China is in an environmental crisis, a result of the GDP-oriented economic development and of the one-Party system corruption, for which people are now paying a terrible price.

  The debate about the ‘American air quality monitor’ drew angry protests from the Chinese people. They condemned the government spokesman, comparing him to a thief in an ancient Chinese proverb – one who stuffs his own ears in the act of stealing a bell while hoping that others may not be able to hear anything just like him. In the last analysis, the clean air being so essential to people’s daily life, you cannot simply say, ‘Hold your breath, China.’ In a Weibo cartoon, underneath a picture of the Beijing spokesman’s solemn face, a netizen commented: ‘To say in the Beijing dialect, he just asks for a slap on the face.’

  It did not take that long for the authorities to include, however reluctantly, the PM 2.5 level as part of the official air quality index. Needless to say, the same spokesman was now busy producing the reasons why it’s an officially acknowledged part of the index, rather than the unscientific fabrication on the part of the American Embassy …

  Taking a deep breath, Chen bookmarked it along with several other posts. He might have to reread them more closely, he thought, with the onset of a dull headache, when he heard a light knock on the door.

  It was a young delivery man carrying a small basket of Zongzi, speaking to Inspector Chen with a strong Shandong accent. ‘Zongzi for you, sir. Cooked this afternoon, still warm.’

  The food delivery too was something new, fashionable in the city – everything possible for delivery to the door.

  With more and more people pouring into Shanghai from other provinces, delivery services became a new industry with job opportunities for them. To start up, they just needed a bike or an electronic bike, piling up a variety of delivery goods behind them like acrobats, cutting through the lanes of traffic throughout the city. It was a great convenience to some consumers, who, instead of going out to restaurants, would simply take out their smartphones, click the order on such websites as Are You Hungry or Time to Eat, and their delicacies would come to the door in twenty minutes.

  Chen had a mixed feeling, however, about the food delivery service. Perhaps he was just too old-fashioned. For him, delicacies had to be served fresh and hot. With delivery like that, no matter how fast, the taste could not be the same.

  Besides, the plastic containers and bags used in the delivery service – particularly with such huge demand – could be a horrible ecological waste.

  But it was a different story with the Zongzi from Peiqin. She was just so thoughtful, even though she knew he had mentioned it as an excuse in the phone call.

  In addition, there was a printout with a short sentence: ‘Anything else I can do?’ Beneath it, a number of web links. She apparently wanted him to check these.

  He gave the delivery man a tip.

  After unwrapping a Zongzi into a bowl and picking up the laptop, Inspector Chen stepped out to the balcony despite the bad air. Having skipped lunch, he was hungry.

  The stuffing of pork belly and salted egg yolk in the Zongzi tasted surprisingly savory, blending different textures and flavors miraculously, and the soy-sauce-soaked sticky rice proved to be no less satisfying. He could not help beginning to unwrap another Zongzi.

  The electronic links turned out to be a different surprise.

  None of them showed any content apart from a note saying that ‘the post is in violation of the government regulation, so it is deleted’.

  Peiqin must have collected the list in a hurry. Judging by the wording in the links, they could have been about a video posted online, or stories about it.

  Then it came to his realization. The links to the sex video concerning Xiang and Geng.

  If so, they might still have been viewable at the time Peiqin compiled the list, but shortly afterward they were all deleted by the net cops, who could do anything and everything in the name of fighting ‘violation against the government regulation’.

  But such a speed in itself spoke about the political sensitivity of the video. Otherwise it would not have been blocked so quickly.

  So there was nothing else for Chen to do about the video – at least not at the moment. Taking out a cigarette, he put it back into the pack.

  He decided to go on with the research around the assignment from Zhao.

  It could be a different approach, he contemplated, to start by sorting out what Zhao had said to him in the light of the newly conducted online research.

  Among the things highlighted in his mind was Zhao’s mention of Shanshan’s recent trip to the United States. That now made much more sense. The official media had repeatedly tried to blame the people’s complaining about the air pollution on the American propaganda conspiracy, of which Shanshan’s trip could have been easily interpreted as an integrated part.

  But with the existence of PM 2.5 in the air finally acknowledged in China, putting Shanshan and America together could backfire, serving as a reminder of the Party propaganda fiasco.

  Another highlight concerned Shanshan’s office in Shanghai. The information contained in the folder from Zhao provided no specific clues, except that the office was located at a high-end area in Shanghai, on Huaihai Road close to the New World. An expensive office under her name for more than one year. Why? She was anything but materialistic, as far as he remembered. With such a widespread community complaining and protesting about the pollution, she could have been really busy with a variety of activities as a ‘public intellectual’, working with a considerable number of her associates and visitors at the office, including some influential Big Bucks in the city of Shanghai, as Zhao had emphatically put it.

  During all that time, however, she had not tried to contact him – not once. It could have been much easier for her to learn things about him in Shanghai, with news about his work available from time to time in the local newspapers.

  Still, he thought he was able to guess the reason why she had chosen not to do so, though there could have been hundreds of other reasons, which remained unknown or inexplicable to the befuddled inspector, and unpleasant for him to speculate on.

  He pulled himself together for the other puzzling emphases in Zhao’s talk, particularly about his familiarity as a native Shanghainese with the city and its people, and in addition, with the contaminated Tai Lake as the author of the poem. It did not add up for Zhao to give him the job for those reasons.

  Could it be possible that the stakes for the investigation – whatever or whoever got involved – were so high that Zhao had to request his service so obliquely instead of telling him the true reason?

  Whatever the scenarios, the inspector had to move ahead, floundering and struggling like the protagonist in the Beijing opera Crossroads, knowing not who’s attacking who in the pitch-black night, flourishing his sword blindly.

  It was out of the question for him to wait in uncertainty, doing nothing.

  The night was spreading out against the sky, reminiscent of the cold, darksome water Shanshan and he had touched as she dabbled her feet in Tai Lake.

  Finally back to the desk in the study, Inspector Chen was no longer hungry, having finished three Zongzi out on the balcony, yet he’d made no real progress whatsoever on the case except for another text message from Ouyang.

  ‘I’ve just checked with our office assistant Nanhua. Two groups reque
sted copies, both from Beijing. She’s positive about that. One, the Party Central Discipline Committee, and the other, from some office in the China Petroleum Building, possibly related to the Ministry of Petroleum Industry.’

  The request by Zhao was no news. But the inspector did not remember having anything to do with the people in the Petroleum Ministry. Why should they be interested in the poem?

  In the hotel, Zhao had mentioned about his recommendation of the poem to some others in Beijing, who too could have requested copies as a result. That seemed to be a plausible interpretation, but not really a convincing one.

  Then he recalled something else – albeit just a glance of it – about the petroleum industry in a document spread out on the desk in Zhao’s hotel room.

  ‘That’s intriguing,’ Chen texted back.

  ‘Come and talk to her if you have some specific questions. She may be able to tell you more about it. Nanhua has prepared the copies of the magazine for you.’

  It was just like Ouyang, meticulous about everything.

  But what if Ouyang’s message was intended as an urge for the inspector to approach Nanhua for more information about the petroleum industry? It had been criticized for its impact on air pollution.

  He might have just been too paranoid of late, he tried to reassure himself, in connection with Shanshan.

  ‘Thanks, Ouyang. I will. See you tomorrow.’

  There was no point in continuing to cudgel his brains out in the dark. Exhausted, he felt more like a hollow man, his head filled with straw, with the shadow inevitably falling between the idea and the reality, and between the speculation and the action.

  Out of the window, he glimpsed a faint light flickering in the distance, then vanishing. The room appeared so still, solitary, with nothing except the tick of the electric clock measuring the invisible yet the always present second moving into the past. The stars were staring down through the dark and murky sky, as if trying to whisper to him from a long-lost dream in which thousands of ships were sailing out in the silence of the night.

  Was he being Eliotic again?

  On a moment of impulse, he dug out the copy of Shanghai Literature and turned to the poem, in which he found himself moving with her with a real purpose – not at all like a hollow man.

  Who is the one walking beside you?

  Last night, a white water bird

  flew into my dream again,

  like a letter, telling me

  that the pollution’s under control –

  I awoke to see the night cloud

  breaking through the ether, thinking

  with difficulty, shivering,

  as if the prison cell key was

  heard turning only for once

  before the door opens

  to the anemic stars lost

  in the lake of the waste …

  But is it Shanshan in real life, or Shanshan in Inspector Chen’s imagination?

  His head heavy, he tried to see in those lines the same Shanshan by the lake as the one in Zhao’s description at the Pudong hotel, but with little success.

  Detective Yu had something on his mind, which Peiqin saw clearly the moment he came home that evening.

  ‘It must have been a busy day for you, Yu.’

  ‘A tough day,’ he grumbled.

  ‘Take a break first. Dinner will be ready soon. I’ve brought back some cooked dishes from the restaurant. Among them, the fried small croak is your favorite.’

  She knew he would soon start telling her about things in the bureau. She did not have to push. Whatever the problem, they should have dinner first. It was already quite a late dinner for them.

  About half a year ago, Peiqin and Yu had been to a school reunion in which those ‘ex-educated youths’ agreed unanimously that things for Yu and Peiqin were more than acceptable, practically enviable. With the decent pay from Yu’s job in the bureau, and with the fairly good income from her job in the state-run restaurant as well as from her private-run eatery, and with their son Qinqin doing great in college, she too thought she had hardly anything to complain about. Their generation was usually called a ‘wasted generation’. Yet despite ten years wasted in the countryside of Yunnan Province as ‘educated youths’, and with their opportunities for any real education like Qinqin’s lost, things had turned out to be relatively fine for the two of them.

  Of late, however, there was something vaguely bothering her. After these years, she was ready to slow down a little into ‘the autumn of life’, like that described in books, but Yu remained restless. Not that it was easy for him to be relaxed, Peiqin understood, with his work involving life and death for people, but she also suspected another reason.

  Yu was fond of saying, ‘Working with Inspector Chen has been one of the best things to happen to me,’ with which she mostly agreed. He appeared to be quite content to play the second fiddle to Chen, who was not just his boss, but also his partner and friend. However, Chen was such a restless one, which must have infected Yu.

  So she prepared a special dinner, which might unwind him a bit. With their son Qinqin studying and working part-time in college, it was going to be a peaceful night for just the two of them. They could talk, and not just about the new case in his bureau.

  On the dining table she had bamboo shoots braised in soy sauce, and wok-fried small croakers. Both were his favorites. She also had a bowl of hot and sour soup of tofu, egg and minor mill. A new recipe she had learned from a short story by a rediscovered writer named Wang Zengqi. For a change, she put on the table a bottle of Qingdao, and slices of a thousand-year egg as well as peanuts in saltwater as the cold dishes for the beer.

  ‘I’ll have a sip with you this evening, Yu. Our small restaurant has been doing great. Its revenue has surpassed a hundred thousand yuan this month.’

  ‘That’s something calling for celebration.’

  Yu finished his cup of beer in three or four gulps. His mood seemed to have improved by the time she served the hot dishes and soup on the table. Sure enough, he opened up.

  ‘Like in an old proverb, the roof must get leaky again when it rains so hard,’ he started.

  Of late, Yu had come to talk more and more like his father, Old Hunter, who was in the habit of frequently quoting proverbs as a prelude to the talk.

  ‘Don’t talk too much about your case over the meal. It won’t help with digestion,’ she said, smiling a knowing smile, adding another piece of bamboo shoot to his bowl.

  Nothing’s like a good meal at home, she believed.

  When Yu finished the last piece of fried small croaker with a satisfied sigh, Peiqin rose to clear the table. He tried to help, but she stopped him.

  ‘You just enjoy a cup of tea inside. I’ll join you in a minute or two.’

  It was a fairly warm spring. When she stepped into the bedroom, he was sitting propped against a couple of pillows, holding a folder in one hand, hurrying to stub out a cigarette in the other. No teacup on the nightstand. For once, she chose not to say anything about it.

  ‘Another tough case for your squad, I guess, the way your inspector called me about the Shanghai Number One Noodles,’ she said instead, changing into a florid cloth robe she had made for herself in imitation of the fold-on style she had seen in her ‘educated youth’ years in Yunnan Province. The Dai minority women there made their robes like that. Memories of those years still lingered.

  ‘It’s not a case for our squad, but a tough one. In all appearances, it’s a serial murder case.’

  ‘Now tell me about it.’ She moved to sit beside him on the bed, taking up his hand as if examining the nicotine stain on his finger. ‘This afternoon you mentioned a video scandal online. I made a list of possible links to it in the restaurant – for you and for Chen. But when I tried to look into them, the content disappeared.’

  ‘No, I could not find any of them, either. But I’m not really surprised, I mean, at the disappearance of those posts.’

  She slid in beside him under the large towel
blanket. He draped an arm over her shoulder, like always, before telling her about things discussed in the bureau.

  ‘For a case not under the charge of your squad, you don’t have to worry too much,’ she said softly. ‘Just like in one of your father’s favorite proverbs: “People are not supposed to cook in other people’s kitchen.”’

  ‘But according to Chen, with the date of the opening session of the People’s Congress drawing nearer, Li wants us to help and have the case solved as soon as possible. He’s now anxious for others to work in the kitchen.

  ‘What’s more, the murderer will strike again, possibly in another week – actually less than a week with two days already gone. Qin and his squad have wasted more than three weeks without getting anywhere. No clue to the identity of the murderer, nor any idea as to where he will pounce on the next prey.’

  ‘What about Chen’s take on the situation?’

  ‘He has little doubt about it being a serial murder, so the murderer will go on killing – one victim a week until we catch him. But Chen was snatched away in the middle of the case discussion this morning.’

  ‘Snatched away – what do you mean?’

  ‘Zhao, the retired first secretary of the Party Central Discipline Committee, called into the bureau out of the blue, requesting his service for something else. Something so confidential our Party Secretary Li dared not ask any questions about it, let alone say no.’

  ‘But it may not be too bad for Chen. At least there’s still someone from the Forbidden City who trusts him. No wonder he contacted me in such a stealthy way. Another highly sensitive case, I bet.’

  ‘That I don’t know, but it’s quite likely. That’s why he gave you the new number in the coded message. But what about our serial murder case in the bureaus?’