A Loyal Character Dancer - [Chief Inspector Chen Cao 02] (13 page)

Chen explained, “We describe a girl as beautiful as a peach blossom. There is also a superstitious belief that someone born under a peach tree will grow up to be a beauty.”

“Whether born under a peach tree or not,” Lihua continued with another sigh wreathed in cigarette smoke, “she was born in the wrong year. The Cultural Revolution broke out when she was in sixth grade. She became a Red Guard cadre as well as a leading member of the district song-and-dance ensemble. Schools and companies invited her to appear and sing the revolutionary songs and dance the loyal character dance.”

“Loyal character dance?” she asked once again. “Please excuse my interruption.”

“During those years, dancing was not allowed in China,” Chen said, “except in one particular form—dancing with a paper cut-out of the Chinese character for Loyalty or with a red paper heart bearing the character, while making every imaginable gesture of loyalty to Chairman Mao.”

“Then came the movement of the educated youths going to the countryside,” Lihua went on. “Like others, she responded to Mao’s call whole-heartedly. She was only sixteen. Father was concerned. At his insistence, instead of leaving with her schoolmates, she went to a village in Fujian Province, Changle Village, where we had a relative who would look after her, we hoped. Things seemed not to be too bad at first. She wrote back regularly, talking about the necessity of reforming herself through hard labor, planting seeds in the rice paddy, cutting firewood on the hill, plowing with an ox in the rain ... In those years, a lot of young people believed in Mao as if he were a god.”

“Then what happened?”

“She suddenly stopped writing. It was impossible for us to call her. We wrote to the relative, and he said vaguely that she was fine. After a lapse of several months, we got a short letter from her, saying that she was married to Feng Dexiang, and expecting a baby. Father went there. It was a long, difficult trip. When he came back, he was a changed man, totally broken, white-haired, devastated. He did not tell me much. He had cherished high hopes for her.

“We hardly heard from her at all then.” Lihua rubbed his forehead forcefully with one hand, as if in an effort to ignite his memory. “Father blamed himself. Had she remained together with her schoolmates, she, too, might have eventually returned home. This notion sent him to an early grave. And that’s the only time she came back to Shanghai. To attend Father’s funeral.”

“Did she talk to you when she came back?”

“Only a few meaningless words. She was totally changed. I wondered whether Father could have recognized her in her black homespun and white towel hood. How could Heaven have been so unfair to her? She cried her heart out, but talked little to anybody. Not to me. Nor even to somebody like Zhu Xiaoying, her best friend in high school. Zhu came to the funeral and gave us a quilt.”

Chen saw Catherine taking notes.

“Afterwards, she wrote back even less,” Lihua continued in a flat tone. “We learned that she got a job in a commune factory, but that was no iron rice bowl. Then her son died in an accident. Another devastating blow. We got the last letter from her about two years ago.”

“Are there others in Shanghai still in contact with her?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Well, her classmates had a reunion last year. A grand party in the Jin River Hotel, organized and paid for by an upstart who had an invitation card mailed to each classmate, saying that anyone unable to attend could send a family member instead. Wen did not come back for the reunion. So Zhu insisted on my going. I had never been to a five-star hotel before, so I agreed. During the meal, several of her former classmates approached me for information about her. I was not surprised. You should have seen her in high school. So many boys were infatuated with her.”

“Did she have a boyfriend in school?” she asked.

“No, that was unthinkable in those years. As a Red Guard cadre, she was too busy with her revolutionary activities.” Lihua added, “Secret admirers, perhaps, but not boyfriends.”

“Let’s say secret admirers,” Chen said. “Can you name any of them?”

“There were quite a few of them. Some were present at the reunion, too. Some of her schoolmates are down and out. Like Su Shengyi, totally broke. But he was a Red Guard cadre then, and came to our home a lot. He went to the reunion for a free meal, just like me. After a few drinks, he told me how he had admired Wen, his eyes brimming with tears. And Qiao Xiaodong was there too—he’s already in a waiting-for-retirement program, gray-haired, broken-spirited. Qiao had played Li Yuhe in
The Story of the Red Lantern.
They were in the same district song-and-dance ensemble. How things change.”

“What about the upstart who paid for the reunion?”

“Liu Qing. He entered a university in 1978, became a
Wenhui Daily
reporter, a published poet, and then started his own business. Now he’s a millionaire with companies in Shanghai and Suzhou.”

“Was Liu also a secret admirer of hers?”

“No, I don’t think so. He did not talk to me, too busy making toasts to other classmates. Zhu told me that Liu was a nobody in high school. A bookish boy with a black family background. He wouldn’t have presumed to be Wen’s admirer. It would have been like an ugly toad’s mouth watering at the sight of a white swan. Indeed, the wheel of fortune turns quickly. It does not have to take sixty years.”

“Another Chinese proverb,” Chen explained. “ ‘The wheel of fortune turns every sixty years.’ “

Catherine nodded.

“My poor sister was practically finished when she was only sixteen. She was too proud to come to the reunion.”

“She has suffered too much. Some people close up after a traumatic experience, but where there’s life, there is always hope.” Catherine said, “Is there no one your sister might contact in Shanghai?”

“No one except Zhu Xiaoying.”

“Do you have Zhu’s address?” Chen said. “And the addresses of some of her schoolmates too, like Su Shengyi and Qiao Xiaodong?”

Lihua took out an address book and scribbled a few words on a scrap of paper. “Five of them are in here. Among them, I’m not sure about Bai Bing’s. It’s a temporary one. He moves a lot, selling fake stuff in Shanghai and elsewhere. I don’t have Liu Qing’s, but you can find his easily enough.”

“One more question. Why didn’t she try to come back to Shanghai after the Cultural Revolution?”

“She never wrote to me about it.” There was a slight catch in Lihua’s voice. This time he rubbed his hand across his mouth. “Zhu may be able to tell you more. She also came back in the early eighties.”

As they stood up, Lihua said hesitantly, “I’m still confused, Chief Inspector Chen.”

“Yes. What do you want to know?”

“Nowadays so many people go abroad—legally or illegally. Particularly the Fujianese. I’ve heard quite a lot about them. What is so important about my sister?”

“The situation is complicated,” Chen said, adding his cell phone number to his card. “Let me say this. Her safe arrival there is in the interests of the United States and China. A Fujian triad also may be looking for her. If they get hold of her, you can imagine what they will do. So if she contacts you, let us know immediately.”

“I will, Chief Inspector Chen.”

* * * *

Chapter 9

t was Detective Yu’s third day in Fujian.

There had been hardly any progress, but he had had second thoughts. The discovery of Feng’s phone call seemed to lead in a new direction. Interviews with Wen’s neighbors, however, had diminished the probability that she was hiding in the area. Wen had no local friends or relatives, and Feng’s had long since cut themselves off. Some villagers showed undisguised hostility by refusing to talk about the Fengs. It was hard to conceive that Wen Liping could have lain low there for days.

As for the possibility of her having left the area, that also appeared unlikely. She had not boarded the only bus passing through the village on that particular night, nor any of the buses passing within a radius of fifty miles. Yu had conducted careful research at the Transportation Bureau. There was no possibility of a taxi coming anywhere near the village unless it was requested several hours beforehand. And there was no record of such an order.

Another idea suggested itself. Wen might have left the village, but been abducted before she boarded a bus. If so, unless the local police took direct action against the gangsters, she would never be found in time, or at all.

So Detective Yu had talked to Superintendent Hong about possible moves against the local triad. In response, Hong gave him a list of the leading local gangsters, but the list indicated that none of them was available—all were either in hiding or out of the district. Yu suggested that they make arrests of low-level members. Hong maintained that the ringleaders alone would have the information they sought, and he also declared that it was up to the Fujian police to decide how to cope with the gangsters. In terms of cadre rank, Superintendent Hong’s was higher than Chief Inspector Chen’s. So Detective Yu was left with the useless list, as well as an impression that the local police were not pulling their weight—at least not on behalf of a Shanghai cop. And he suspected, gloomily, there might be something else involved.

Whatever his suspicions, Yu had to keep on doing what he now considered futile—interviewing people who had no relevant information, just as Chief Inspector Chen was doing in Shanghai.

On the interview list for that particular day, there was an appointment with the commune factory manager Pan in the late afternoon, but Yu got a call from Pan around nine in the morning.

“I have a business meeting this afternoon. Can we move our appointment up?”

“When would you like it?”

“What about between eleven thirty and twelve?” Pan said. “I’ll come to your hotel as soon as I have finished things here.”

“That will be fine.”

Yu contemplated informing Sergeant Zhao of the change, but he thought better of it. For the past few days, Zhao had been of little help. Sometimes Yu even had a feeling that interviewees chose not to talk because of Zhao. So he phoned Zhao, saying that Pan could not come in the afternoon, and that he himself would stay in the hotel for the day, writing a letter home, doing some laundry, and drafting a report to the bureau. Zhao readily agreed. Yu had heard a rumor that Zhao had a profitable business sideline; perhaps he was glad of some time free of police-work to devote to it.

Yu considered it too wasteful to have his laundry done by the hotel when he could save two Yuan a day by doing it himself. Kneading the dirty clothes on a wooden washboard in a concrete sink, he thought of his years like the foaming water dripping away through his fingers.

In his childhood, he had nurtured dreams about a career in the police force, listening to his father’s stories about solving cases. A few years after he himself became a cop, however, he had few illusions left about his career.

His father, Old Hunter, though an experienced officer and loyal Party member for so many years, had ended up a sergeant at retirement, with too meager a pension to indulge in a pot of Dragon Well Tea. Detective Yu had to be realistic. With his lack of education and social connections, he was in no position to dream of a great career in the force. Just one of the insignificant cops at the bottom, making the minimum wage, having little say in the bureau, forever at the end of the waiting list of the housing committee—

And that was another reason he had not been keen on this assignment. There would be a housing committee meeting late this month in the bureau. Yu was on the waiting list. If he stayed in Shanghai, he might be able to push the committee members a little, perhaps in imitation of a recent movie, by sleeping on his bureau desk as a gesture of protest. He believed he had every reason to complain. He’d had to stay under his father’s roof for over ten years after his marriage. It was a crying shame for a man approaching forty not to have a home of his own. Even Peiqin occasionally complained about it.