“Excuse me,” he said, pulling up his motorcycle by the roadside. “Do you know where Baili Canal is?”
“Baili Canal, oh yes, straight ahead, about five or six miles.”
“Thank you.”
He also asked for a big bowl of tea.
“Three cents,” the girl said, without looking up from her book.
“What are you reading?”
“ Visual Basics.”
The answer did not fit the picture in his mind. But it should not be surprising, he thought. He, too, had been taking an evening class on Windows applications. It was the age of the information highway.
“Oh, computer programming,” he said. “Very interesting.”
“Do you also study it?”
“Just a little.”
“Need some CDs?”
“What?”
“Dirt cheap. A lot of advanced software on it. Chinese Star, TwinBridge, Dragon Dictionary, and all kinds of fonts, traditional and simplified…”
“No, thank you,” he said, taking out a one-Yuan bill.
The CDs she offered might be incredibly cheap. He had heard people talking about pirated products, but he did not want to have anything to do with them, not as a chief inspector.
“I’m afraid I don’t have enough change for you.”
“Just give me all you have.”
The little girl scooped out the coins to give him, and put the one Yuan bill in her purse, instead of into the tin cup at her feet. A cautious teenage profit-maker in her way. She then resumed her readings in cyberspace, the bow on her ponytail fluttering like a butterfly in a breath of air.
But his earlier mood was gone.
What irony. The wistful thoughts about the innocent tip of a cardamom bud, a solitary curl of white smoke, an unlost innocence in a rural background, a poetry collection… And a lapse in his professional perspective. Not until he had ridden another two or three miles did he realize that he should have done something about the CD business-as a chief inspector. Perhaps he had been too absent minded, in a “poetic trance,” and then too surprised by the realities of the world. The episode came to him like an echo of his colleagues’ criticism: Chief Inspector Chen was too “poetic” to be a cop.
It was past two o’clock when he reached the canal.
There was not a single cloud drifting overhead. The afternoon sun hung lonely in the blue sky, high over a most desolate scene, which was like a forgotten corner of the world. Not a soul was visible. The canal bank was overrun with tall weeds and scrubby growth. Chen stood still at the edge of the stagnant water, amid a scattering of wild bushes. Not too far away, however, he thought he could hear the hubbub of Shanghai.
Who was the victim? How had she lived? Whom had she met before her death?
He had not expected much from the scene. The heavy rains of the last few days would have washed away any trace of evidence. Being at the crime scene, he had thought, might help to establish a sort of communion between the living and the dead, but he failed to get any message. Instead, his mind wandered to bureau politics. There was nothing remarkable about the recovery of a body from a canal. Not for Homicide. They had encountered similar cases before, and would encounter them in the future. It did not take a chief inspector to tackle such a case, not at the moment, when he had to prepare himself for the important seminar.
Nor did it appear to be a case he could solve in a couple of days. There were no witnesses. Nor any traceable physical evidence, since the body had been lying in the water for some time. What had been found so far did not mean much for the investigation. Some old hands would have tried to avoid such a case. In fact, Detective Yu had implied as much, and as a special case squad, they were justified in not taking it on. The possibility of a failure to solve the case was not tempting. It would not help his status in the bureau.
He sat on a jutting slab of rock, dug out a half-crumpled cigarette, and lit it. Inhaling deeply, he closed his eyes for a second.
Across the canal, he then saw for the first time a tiny spangling of wildflowers, blue, white, violet in the hazy green weeds. Nothing else.
White puffs of cloud appeared, scuttling across the sky, when he started the trip back. The girl was no longer selling tea at the turn of the road. It was just as well. Perhaps she was no peddler of pirate CDs. She might just have an extra copy, and a couple of Yuan could mean a lot to a village kid.
When he got back to his office, the first thing he saw on the desk was a copy of the official admittance letter Party Secretary Li had referred to, but it did not give him the feeling of exaltation he had expected.
The preliminary autopsy report also came late in the afternoon. It produced little of interest. The time of death was estimated as between 1:00 A.M. and 2 A.M. on May 11. The victim had had sexual intercourse before her death. Acid-phosphate tests were positive for the presence of male ejaculate, but after the period of time the body had been immersed in the water, there was not enough left to isolate other positive or negative factors. It was difficult to tell whether the sexual intercourse had taken place against the victim’s will, but she had been strangled. She was not pregnant. The report ended with the following wording: “Death by strangulation in conjunction with possible sexual assault.”
The autopsy had been conducted by Doctor Xia Yulong.
Having read the report a second time, Chief Inspector Chen reached a decision: he would postpone making his decision. He did not have to take the case immediately, nor did he have to relinquish it to another squad. If some evidence appeared, he could declare his special case squad to be in charge. If the trail turned “deadly cold,” as Detective Yu expected, it would not be too late for him to turn it over to others.
He believed that this was a correct decision. So he informed Yu, who readily agreed. Putting down the phone, however, he found his mood darkening, like the screen at the beginning of a movie, against which fragments of the scene he had just visited were displayed.
She had been lying there, abandoned, naked, her long dark hair in a coil across her throat, like a snake, in full view of two strangers, only to be carried away on a stretcher by a couple of white uniformed men, and, in time, opened up by an elderly medical man who examined her insides, mechanically, and sewed the body together again before it was finally sent to the mortuary. And all that time Chief Inspector Chen had been celebrating in his new apartment, having a housewarming party, drinking, dancing with a young woman reporter, talking about Tang dynasty poetry, and stepping on her bare toes.
He felt sorry for the dead woman. There was little he could do for her… but then he decided not to pursue this line of thought.
He made a call to his mother, telling her about the book he had bought during the lunch break. She was very pleased, as it happened to be the one she did not have in her attic collection.
“But you should have taken the poster as well, son.”
“Why?”
“So that the girl could walk down from the poster,” she said good-humoredly, “to keep you company at night.”
“Oh, that!” he laughed. “The same old story you told me thirty years ago. I’m busy today, but I’ll see you tomorrow. You can tell me the story again.”
Chapter 5
S everal days had passed since the housewarming party. At nine o’clock in the morning, grasping a Shanghai Evening Post in his hand, Chen had a feeling that he was being read by the news, rather than the other way round. What engaged him was the report of a go game between a Chinese and a Japanese player, with a miniature map of the go board showing all the movements of black and white pieces, each occupying a position full of meaning, and possibly of meanings beyond the surface meaning.
This was nothing but a last minute self-indulgence before the invariable bureau routine.
