So did the man with an unmistakable Beijing accent in Uncle Bao’s description.
The man was tall, polite, well dressed.
Could it also be the same tall gentleman that Guan’s neighbor had seen in the dorm corridor?
The man had an expensive camera in the mountains.
There were many high-quality pictures in Guan’s album.
Chief Inspector Chen could not wait any longer. Instead of going back to his office, he turned in the direction of the Shanghai Telephone Bureau. Luckily, he had carried in his briefcase stationery with an official letterhead. It took him no time to pen an introduction on it.
“Nice to meet you, Comrade Chief inspector,” a clerk in his fifties said. “My name is Jia. Just call me Old Jia.”
“I hope that’s enough,” he said, showing his I.D. and the letter of introduction.
“Yes, quite enough.” Jia was cooperative, keying in the numbers on a computer immediately.
“The owner’s name is-Wu Bing.”
“Wu Bing?”
“Yes, the numbers starting with 867 belong to the Jin’an district, and-”The clerk started fidgeting. “It’s the high-ranking cadre residential area, you know.”
“Oh, Wu Bing. Now I see.”
Wu Bing, the Shanghai Minister of Propaganda, had been in the hospital for most of the last few years. Wu Bing was out of the question, but somebody in his family… Chen thanked Jia and left in a hurry.
To find information about Wu’s family was not difficult. A special folder was kept for every high cadre, along with his family, in the Shanghai Archive Bureau where Chen happened to have a special connection. Comrade Song Longxiang was a friend he had made in his first year in the police force. Chen dialed Song’s number from a street corner phone booth. Song did not even ask why Chen wanted the information.
Wu Bing had a son whose name was Wu Xiaoming.
Wu Xiaoming, a name Chen had already run across in the investigation.
It was in a list Detective Yu had compiled of the people he had interviewed or contacted for possible information. Wu Xiaoming was a photographer for Red Star magazine; he had taken some pictures of Guan for the People’s Daily.
“Do you have a picture of Wu Xiaoming?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Can you fax one to my office? I’ll be there in half an hour, waiting by the fax machine.”
“Sure. You don’t need a cover letter, do you? Just a picture.”
“Yes, I’ll call you as soon as I get it.”
“Fine.”
Chen decided to take a taxi.
He soon had a faxed copy of Wu Xiaoming’s picture. It might have been taken a few years ago. But clearly Wu Xiaoming was a tall man.
It was urgent for Chief Inspector Chen to move forward.
He did two more things that late afternoon. He made a phone call to the Red Star editorial office. A secretary said that Wu was not in.
“We’re compiling a dictionary of contemporary artists, including young photographers,” Chen said. “Any information about Comrade Wu Xiaoming’s work would be helpful.”
The tactic worked. A list of Wu Xiaoming’s publications was faxed to him in less than one hour.
And Chen went to visit the old couple again. The second visit turned out to be less difficult than the chief inspector had expected.
“That’s him,” Wei said, pointing at the fax copy in Chen’s hand, “a nice young man, always with a camera in his hand.”
“I’m not sure if he’s nice or not,” Hua said, “but he was good to her in the mountains.”
“I’ve got another picture,” Chen said, taking out Xie Rong’s picture. “She was your guide in the mountains, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, actually-” Wei said with an inscrutable smile, “she may be able to tell you more about them, much more.”
“How?”
“Guan had a big fight with Xie in the mountains. You know what, Guan called Xie a whore.”
Chapter 16
S unday morning, Chief Inspector Chen took more time than usual brushing his teeth, but it was a futile attempt to get rid of the bitter taste in his mouth.
He did not like the development of the investigation. Nor his plan for the day: to do a day’s research in the Shanghai Library.
It was evident that Guan Hongying had had an affair with Wu Xiaoming. Though a national model worker, Guan had led a double life under a different name in the mountains. So had Wu. This was far from proving, however, that her death came about as a result of the clandestine affair.
Whatever complications might be involved, Chen was determined to solve the case. He could not be a chief inspector without taking up the challenge. So he planned to learn more about Wu Xiaoming by examining his work. The approach could be misleading; according to T. S. Eliot’s “impersonal theory,” Chen recollected, what could be learned from a creative artist’s work was nothing but his craftsmanship. Nonetheless, he would give it a shot.
In the reading room of the Shanghai Library, Chen soon found that there was a lot more for him to do. The list he had received the previous day included only the work published in the Red Star magazine; as for Wu’s publications elsewhere, the list gave only the total number with abbreviated magazine names minus dates. As most of the magazines had no year-end index for photographs, Chen had to go through them issue by issue. The back issues were in the basement of the library, which meant a long wait before he could get what he ordered.
The librarian was a nice woman, moving about briskly in her high heels, but a stickler for library rules. All she could give him at one time were the issues of one particular magazine for a year. For anything more, he had to write out a new order slip and to wait for another half an hour.
He sat in the lobby, feeling idle on a supposedly busy day. Every time the librarian came out of the elevator with a bundle of books on a small cart, he would stand up expectantly. But they were other peoples’ books. Waiting there, he felt disturbed, distantly…
How long ago it was-the fragments of the time still book-marked- another summer, another library, another sense of waiting with expectations, different expectations, and the pigeons’ whistles fading in the high, clear Beijing sky… He closed his eyes, trying not to conjure up the past.
Chief Inspector Chen had to pull himself back to the work of the present.
At eleven thirty, he concluded that he had accomplished little for a morning; he packed up all his notes and went out for lunch. The Shanghai Library was located on the corner of Nanjing Road and Huangpi Road. There were a number of fancy restaurants in the neighborhood. He walked to the north gate of the People’s Park, where there was a young vendor selling hot dogs and sandwiches from a cart on the sidewalk sporting a Budweiser umbrella, an imported coffee maker, and a radio playing loud rock-and-roll music. The chicken sandwich he bought was not cheap. He washed it down with a paper cup of reheated, lukewarm coffee, not at all like what he had enjoyed with Wang at the River Cafe.
When he returned to the library, he phoned Wang at Wenhui. He could hear a couple of phones ringing at the same time in the background as he chatted a little about her heavy responsibility on Sunday as a Wenhui reporter before he switched topics.
“Wang, I have to ask a favor of you.”
“People never go to a Buddhist temple without asking for help.”
“They do not grab Buddha’s legs unless in desperation,” he said, knowing she enjoyed his repartee. A cliche for a cliche.
