"The Mao Case" - читать интересную книгу автора (Xiaolong Qiu)

TWO

WHEN CHEN GOT BACK to his apartment, it was past eight.

The room was a scene of desolation, as if corresponding to his state of mind: the bed unmade, the cup on the nightstand half empty, a mildew-covered orange pit in the ashtray looking like a mole – the mole on Mao’s chin.

He pressed hard on the lid of the thermos bottle. Not a single drop of water came out. Putting the kettle on the stove, he hoped that a cup of good tea might help to clear his head.

But what first came to mind was, unexpectedly, a fragmented image of Ling serving tea in a Beijing quadrangle house, her fingers breaking and strewing petals into his teacup, standing by the paper window in a white summer dress, silhouetted against the night like a flowering pear tree…

The news of her marriage wasn’t entirely unexpected. She wasn’t to blame, he told himself again; she couldn’t help being the daughter of a Politburo member.

No more than he could help being a cop at heart.

He willed himself to focus on the waiting work, pressing a fist against his left cheek, as if battling a toothache. He didn’t want to conduct an investigation concerning Mao, even indirectly. Mao’s portrait still hung high on the gate of Tiananmen Square, and it could be a political suicide for a Party member cop to be even tangentially associated with the skeleton of Mao’s private life.

Chen took out a piece of paper and was trying to scribble something down to help him think, when Party Secretary Li called.

“Minister Huang told me about your special assignment. Don’t worry about your work at the bureau,” Li said. “And you don’t have to tell me anything about it.”

“I don’t know what to say, Party Secretary Li.” The water began boiling and the kettle hissing. Li, at one time a mentor for Chen in bureau politics, had come to regard him as a rival. “I hardly know anything about it, not yet. It’s just that I cannot refuse the assignment.”

“The minister told me that you are to have access to all the available resources of the bureau. So simply tell me what you need.”

“Well, first, don’t tell anyone about the assignment. Instead, say I’m taking a leave for personal reasons.” He added, “Detective Yu should take over the work of the Special Case Squad.”

“I’ll announce his temporary appointment tomorrow. I know that you trust Detective Yu. Are you going to tell him anything?”

“No, not about the assignment.”

“I’ll take care of everything at the bureau. Call me whenever you need anything.”

“I will, Party Secretary Li.”

Putting down the phone, Chen paced about the room for a minute or two before he went over to the boiling kettle, only to discover that the tea box was empty. Rummaging through the drawer, he failed to find any tea. No coffee either, which didn’t matter, as the coffee maker had been broken for weeks.

He leaned back, stroking his chin. He had cut himself shaving this morning. It had been a rotten day from the beginning.

Suddenly there was a knock at the door. To his surprise, it turned out to be a special delivery package containing the Jiao files from Internal Security. He wasn’t expecting to get it so quickly.

He sat down at the table with a cup of hot water, and an impressive file spread over several manila folders. Internal Security had done a comprehensive job. The file contained not only information about Jiao, but about Qian and Shang as well, covering all three generations.

Chen decided to start with Shang. He lit a cigarette and took a sip of water. The water quality was terrible, and it tasted strange without tea leaves.

Shang had come from a “good family” in the thirties. While still in college, she was named the college “queen,” nicknamed a “phoenix,” before being discovered by a movie director. Soon she came to prominence as a young, graceful actress. After 1949, because of her family background and her husband’s political trouble, her career suffered. It was said that her career’s decline also had something to do with her pre-1949 image. She was known mostly for playing upper-class ladies, elegant in their magnificent houses and stylish dresses, and those roles had practically disappeared from the movie screens of socialist China. Mao had declared that literature and art should serve workers, farmers, and soldiers through representation of them on stages and screens. Suddenly, however, her photos began to reappear in the newspapers, in articles that said Chairman Mao was encouraging Shang and her colleagues to make new, revolutionary films. She then starred in several movies, playing workers or farmers, and she won major awards for the roles. Her resurgent career was cut short by the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. Like other well-known artists, she was subjected to mass criticism and persecution. What’s more, a special team was sent by the Cultural Revolution Group of the Central Committee of the Communist Party to interrogate her. Shortly afterward, Shang committed suicide, leaving her daughter Qian alone.

A sad story, but not uncommon in those years, Chen reflected, rising and rummaging through the drawer again. This time he uncovered a tiny ginseng tea bag. How long it had been lying there, he had no idea. He tossed it into the cup, hoping it could somehow boost up his energy. He had practically skipped his dinner, thanks to the phone call from Beijing.

Sipping at the ginseng tea, he settled back down to the file and began reading the part about the second generation, Qian, the heroine of the best seller Cloud and Rain in Shanghai.

An orphan after Shang’s death, Qian had a hard time adjusting to her drastically changed life. Shang’s problem shadowed her – Qian was forcibly exposed to what the file referred to as Shang’s “shameless sex saga” – and the daughter grew up to be a “shameless slut.” In those years, a girl of black – politically questionable – family background was supposed to behave with extra care, but Qian abandoned herself to youthful passion. She fell in love with a young man named Tan, also of black family background. Despairing of their future in China, they made a desperate attempt to sneak into Hong Kong. They were caught and marched back to Shanghai, where Tan committed suicide. Qian survived because she was pregnant. She gave birth to a daughter, but soon after fell for a boy named Peng, about ten years younger than she, who was said to look like Tan. Peng was thrown into jail for sexual perversity. Not long afterward, toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, she died in an accident.

Chen set down the file and finished the bitter ginseng tea. It was a Cultural Revolution tragedy that involved two generations. What had happened during those years now appeared absurd, cruel, and was almost unbelievable. Understandably, the Beijing government wanted people to look ahead and not back.

Finally, Chen spread out the investigation report on Jiao, focusing on what was suspicious about her. Jiao was born after Tan’s death. Qian’s fatal accident had happened while Jiao was still an infant. The girl grew up in an orphanage. Like “a tramped and trodden weed” from a sentimental popular song, Jiao failed to get into a high school. Nor could she find a decent job. Unlike other girls her age, she had no friends or fun but instead was prey to the tragic memories of her family, even though others had mostly forgotten that part of the history. After two or three years struggling along, with one odd job after another, she began working as a receptionist at a private company. Then, with the publication of Cloud and Rain in Shanghai, Jiao suddenly quit her job, bought a luxurious apartment, and started a totally different life.

She was suspected of getting a lot of money from the book, but the publisher denied having paid any to her. Then people supposed there was a man behind her metamorphosis. Usually, a Big Buck “keeper” would show off his kept girl like a piece of valuable property, and his identity would come out in time. However, with Jiao, Internal Security had drawn a blank. In spite of their vigilant surveillance, they didn’t see a single man entering her apartment or walking in her company. In yet another scenario, she had inherited a lot of money. But Shang left nothing to the family – all her valuable property had been swept away by the Red Guards in the early days of the Cultural Revolution. Internal Security checked out Jiao’s bank account and found she had very little. She had bought the apartment outright – “a briefcase full of cash” – without having to apply for a mortgage.

For a young girl, she seemed to be wrapped in mysteries, but according to Internal Security, she wasn’t the only suspicious one.

Xie, to whose mansion Jiao had become a regular visitor of late, was another one. Xie’s grandfather had owned a large company in the thirties and had built a huge house for the family – Xie Mansion, which was then considered one of the most magnificent buildings in Shanghai. Xie’s father took over the business in the forties, only to become a “black capitalist” in the fifties. Xie grew up listening to stories about the old glories, holding parties and salons while keeping the doors and windows firmly shut. Sheltered by the resplendent mansion and the family’s remaining fortune, he dallied in painting instead of working a regular job. It was nothing short of a miracle that he managed to keep the house intact through the Cultural Revolution. In the mid-eighties, he began to throw parties at his home again. But most of the partygoers were more or less like him – no longer young, and impoverished in every way except in their memories of their once illustrious family. For them, the parties were their dreams coming true, albeit for only one night. Soon, a collective fashionable nostalgia took hold of the city itself, and the parties became well known. Some took great pride in going to Xie Mansion, as if it was symbolic of their social status. Taiwanese and foreigners began to join in. One Western newspaper wrote that the parties were “the last landscape of the disappearing old city.”

The last landscape or not, the situation for the person hosting the parties was not idyllic after all. Without a regular job, Xie had a hard time maintaining the house and paying for the parties. His wife had divorced him and emigrated to the United States several years ago, leaving Xie alone in the empty house. He consoled himself by collecting the odds and ends left over from the thirties, like an Underwood typewriter, silver-plated dinnerware, a pair of trumpet-shaped speakers, several antique phones, a brass foot warmer, and the like. After all, these were the things his grandparents and parents had told him about, things pictured in the time-yellowed family albums in which he now buried his solitude. And his collection contributed to the legend of the mansion.

In recent years, Xie had started to teach painting at home. He was said to have an unwritten rule for his students: he would only accept young, pretty, talented girls. According to some people who had known him for years, the sixty-plus-year-old Xie might be fashioning himself after Jia Baoyu in the Dream of the Red Chamber.

Jiao went to Xie’s painting classes despite the fact that Xie had hardly received any formal training as a painter, and she went to the parties despite the fact that most of the partygoers were old or old-fashioned or both.

To explain all this, Internal Security had come up with a scenario. Xie must have functioned as a middleman, introducing Jiao to the people interested in the Mao materials in her possession. Foreign publishers would be willing to pay a huge advance for a book about Mao’s private life, just as they had for the memoir by Mao’s doctor. The parties would have provided opportunities for her to meet with those potential buyers.

The course of action proposed by Internal Security was to raid the house on grounds such as obscene or indecent behaviors, or whatever excuse would get Xie into trouble. In their opinion, he would not be a hard nut to crack. Once he spilled, they could take care of Jiao.

But the Beijing authorities didn’t like the proposed “tough measure,” nor were they convinced that such a measure would work. Which was why they had called Chen in.

In the file, Chen didn’t find a copy of the book written by Mao’s personal doctor. It was banned. Nor was there a copy of the bestseller Cloud and Rain in Shanghai.

He was intrigued by the title of that book. “Cloud and rain” was a stock simile for sexual love in classic Chinese literature, evocative of the lovers’ being carried away in a floating soft cloud and of the coming warm rain. It had originated in an ode describing the King of Chu’s rendezvous with the Goddess of Wu Mountain, who declared that she would come to him again in cloud and rain. But “cloud and rain” was also part of a Chinese proverb: With a turning of the hand, the cloud, and with another turning of the hand, the rain, which referred to the continuous, unpredictable changes in politics.

Could the title have a double meaning?

He looked at the clock on the nightstand. Ten fifteen. He decided to go out to buy a copy of Cloud and Rain in Shanghai at a neighborhood bookstore, which stayed open late, sometimes until midnight.