“OH – CHIEF INSPECTOR CHEN!” Old Hunter bumped in, panting. “I was patrolling on the street when I heard a crash and saw a black object flying out of the window. Is something wrong -”
He cut himself short at the sight of the naked body on the bed – Jiao, lying stiff, still – and then the other one, a naked man on the floor, sprawling over a splintered portrait of Mao.
The utter disarray of the room was presented in ghastly somberness, with only the tiny night-light flickering in the corner. The clothes of the two bodies were scattered around. There was a chunk of plaster on the bedsheet that had fallen from the wall above the headboard. A pocketknife glittered beside the rumpled pillow. A broom lay not too far away, sticking out of an open closet, pointing to the bed.
How did Chen come to be in the midst of all that?
Chen looked distraught, his eyes bloodshot, his hair disheveled, and his T-shirt and pants crumpled and soiled, as if he had been just released from a prison cell. Old Hunter knew that Chen had just come back that morning on the night train from Beijing.
However, nothing about the eccentric chief inspector would be surprising.
“I’m calling for an ambulance,” Chen said, producing his cell phone.
Feeling for a pulse on her ankle, Old Hunter said, shaking his head, “It’s too late, Chief. Who’s the man?”
“His name is Hua. They had a fight. She started shouting, and he tried to stop her -”
“So he strangled her -” Old Hunter didn’t finish the sentence, wondering where Chen had been at the time. He checked to see if the man on the floor was breathing. There was a thin trail of blood congealing along his temple, but he breathed evenly. “He’s alive.”
“I let myself into the apartment and was looking around. Then they came back unexpectedly – no, Jiao arrived first, and then Hua, possibly through a secret door. So I had to hide in the closet. I couldn’t see and I could hardly hear.”
Old Hunter turned on the lamp on the nightstand. The light glared on her white body, which had a purplish bruise around her shoulders and neck. Her breasts were flat and appeared unbruised, yet bore something like a bite mark. There were no other outward signs of sex – no semen around the genitals, thighs, or in the black pubic hair. Her large eyes remained open, staring. The corneas were not yet cloudy, a sign of a recent death. Her fingernails had hardly lost their pinkish color.
Chen picked up her crumpled dress and covered her in silence.
Technically, they should wait for the arrival of the detectives from the homicide squad or Internal Security before touching anything, Old Hunter thought, shifting his glance toward the closet.
“I should have come -” Again he left the sentence unfinished. A couple of minutes earlier? He was outside on the street, unaware of the situation here. As in an old saying, the water’s too far away for the fire close at hand. Still, he didn’t want to sound too critical of Chen. It could have been hard for Chen to judge the situation in the room while hiding in the closet. “But you subdued him.”
“When I became aware that something was terribly wrong, I jumped out of the closet. He hurled the cinerary casket of Shang at me. It was empty except for a picture of Shang inside. Then, in an effort to dodge my attack, he caused the Mao portrait to fall and hit him on the head with the full weight of the metal frame.”
“Mao’s spirit worked,” Old Hunter murmured, shuddering at the realization. He didn’t really believe in the supernatural, but there was something so unbelievable about the case. It was almost like those Suzhou operas. “Hua killed Shang’s granddaughter under his portrait, and Mao knocked him out. Mao’s not dead.”
“Mao’s not dead – you can say that again.”
“But how did Jiao and Hua get together?”
“Here’s what I think,” Chen said. “Hua learned about her family history while she was working as a receptionist at his company. He then overwhelmed her with his Big Buck advances, buying her the apartment and everything else, cutting a ‘little concubine’ deal with her. He did all that, however, not because of her, but because of Shang, her grandmother.”
“I’m totally lost, Chen. It’s even more mind-boggling than a Suzhou opera ghost story. Shang died so many years ago. Is Hua such a crazy fan of hers?”
“No, he fell for Jiao because of Shang’s affair with Mao. I should have made that clear.”
“So – Hua fucking Jiao was like a parallel of Mao fucking Shang. Is that what you mean?”
“It’s more than that. By sleeping with Jiao – Shang’s granddaughter – Hua turns himself into Mao. He started talking like Mao, thinking like Mao, living like Mao, and fucking like Mao too.”
“But Hua is a Big Buck. He could have girls like Jiao and live like an emperor – like Mao too. Why all the bother, Chief?”
“Being Mao gave Hua a meaning he had never known before. In terms of the cultural unconscious, it’s the emperor archetype – Son of Heaven, with the divine mandate and power, all the emperor’s men and women. That’s why Hua was so panic-stricken about the possibility of losing Jiao, a woman he didn’t really care for. Consciously, she was nothing to him. But in his subconscious, Jiao was everything.”
“Leaving your psychological jargon aside, he’s devil-possessed. He has fucked his brains out! He must have watched too many movies about Mao and the emperors. He’s totally crazy.”
“It’s sheer craziness, but for such a split personality, it makes sense. Jiao provided the mechanism for him to switch into Mao, so he couldn’t afford to let anyone know about their relationship. That led to a hell of secrecy: adjoining apartments, a secret door from his apartment into hers – somewhere in the living room, I believe – and financial transactions too. After she quit her job, he no longer was seen in her company, but he kept seeing her in secret. That’s how you caught a glimpse of them by the window the other night.”
“I’m still confounded, Chief. That bastard is crazy – why would Jiao have played Shang for him?”
“I don’t think Jiao liked the role of Shang, but he must have insisted on it as the condition of their Mao deal.”
“Beauty has a thin fate indeed. What a curse to three generations! A curse to her grandmother, to her mother, and to her too. But what’s the damned point for him?”
“There’s not a point in the world – its not like in a Suzhou opera. There isn’t always a transcendental point visible in life, so people have to have their own point, or to make one, at least, in their own imagination,” Chen said, his dismal smile getting lost in thought. “Anyway, Hua got increasingly uneasy about Jiao’s visits to Xie’s place, and about her mixing with other people. For instance, Yang kept trying to drag Jiao to other parties -”
Chen’s cell phone rang, cutting short his speech.
“Oh, it’s Liu,” he said to Old Hunter, pressing a button.
“Comrade Chief Inspector Chen, I’ve got the information you requested. Among the people Song interviewed during your vacation, there’s one named Hua. He owns several large companies, including the one for which Jiao once worked. It was just routine. Nothing suspicious on the record -”
“Nothing suspicious on the record,” Chen repeated in irrepressible sarcasm. “Then listen to this, Comrade Liu. Less than an hour ago, Hua killed Jiao in her apartment. He’s in my custody. Hurry over here with your people.”
“What?” Liu said, too astonished to absorb what Chen had said. “But you didn’t say anything about it this morning, or this afternoon.”
“You were so bent on your tough measures, expecting to get the warrant tomorrow. Did you really want to listen?” Chen added after a pause, “Hua also killed Yang, who he saw as a potential threat that could drag Jiao away from him.”
“He killed Yang! But – why should he have bothered to leave Yang’s body in Xie’s garden?”
Old Hunter, too, found it hard to believe. How could Chen have discovered it while on vacation thousands of miles away?
“In Hua’s imagination, Xie had became another threat because Jiao was nice to him.”
“How could an old pathetic fellow have been a threat?”
“Hua’s paranoid, and all he saw was that Jiao was nice to Xie. So by getting rid of Yang and planting her body there, Hua tried to kill two birds with one stone.”
“You – you have done an amazing job. We’re on the way. Stay there, Chief Inspector Chen.”
“Yes, I’ll stay here,” Chen said, snapping the phone closed in disgust. “An amazing job indeed, Old Hunter. Jiao was murdered in this very room, not even a stone’s throw away from the closet I was in.”
“But you did your job,” Old Hunter said in earnest, aware of the agony in Chen’s voice. A cop could close many cases successfully, but a single screwup could haunt him forever. “You were in the closet, unable to see or hear clearly. Nobody could have done any better under the circumstances. But for you, the criminal would have got away. What a case -”
Old Hunter lost his words in angst. What a Mao case – so many years ago for him, and now for Chen…
“Shang -”