So An’s name had appeared both as a guest at Xing’s parties and as a partner in Ming’s business.
Drawing in a deep breath, Chen turned to pour himself another cup of tea. The tea tasted stale, the water lukewarm, and the dried jasmine petals yellowish. He hadn’t needed to come to the office this morning, but Yu was inundated with the workload of the special case squad, and Chen thought he might be able to help a little. Yu was not in the bureau, though. Chen picked up the list again.
Flowers falling, water flowing, the spring gone, / it is another world.
In the early eighties, when Chen had just left Beijing Foreign Language University for the unexpected position at the Shanghai Police Bureau, he joined a reading group with several other “literature youths.” For Chen, it was a halfhearted effort to keep his literary dream alive, as it was, perhaps, for the others, several college graduates state-assigned to jobs regardless of their personal interests. They met once a month to discuss books as well as their own writings. An and her husband, Han, a newlywed couple, both attended. An was an announcer, and Han, a reporter, for the new Eastern TV Station.
The group met regularly for about a year, before Chen was overwhelmed with writing political speeches for Party Secretary Li. An’s show had begun to attract an audience, and Gong, a leading member of the group, went to Shenzheng to start his private auto parts business. As in an old saying, there’s no banquet that does not come to an end. The reading group eventually dissolved.
Afterward, Chen still saw An on TV, a budding anchorwoman. He heard about some trouble between the couple, allegedly caused by their changing social status. When first assigned to the TV station, there had not been much difference between the two. With Chairman Mao’s teaching still fresh in the national memory, everyone was supposed, in whatever position, to “serve people.” But things began to change. It did not take long for an attractive young anchorwoman to become a star while Han, an inconspicuous reporter, remained in the background. People started addressing him as “An’s husband,” like something moving in her shadow.
But Chen was not that familiar with them. Han was said to be a jealous husband, particularly with the people An was nice to. Then he applied to study in Germany, possibly to better himself and so rise to her level. It turned out to be a disastrous decision. Almost immediately driven out of school because of his linguistic problems, he started working in a Chinese restaurant in Berlin instead of coming back. In the meantime, in addition to her anchorwoman career, An started a public relations company.
As a celebrity her attendance at Xing’s parties was understandable, but her business relationship with Ming was a different story. It might be nothing unusual for a businessman to engage the service of a PR company. But why An’s? Why, with Ming’s construction project hardly in blueprint?
An might well know something about Ming, and about Xing as well.
But would she talk to Chief Inspector Chen?
The reading group long dissolved, their paths hardly crossed anymore. At a city congress conference not too long ago, he had seen her at a distance. She was so busy interviewing more important people, he did not even make an attempt to approach her. Now, out of the blue, he was going to try to get information out of her. It wasn’t hard to predict her reaction.
He pulled together a dossier on her. There was nothing surprising or suspicious about her career as an anchorwoman. In fact, she’d received a long list of awards for her excellent work. It was also commonplace for celebrities to run businesses on the side, like restaurants with large pictures of them on the wall. It did not take much for people to go to a restaurant, but it took a lot to hire a PR company. What could she do for her clients? An anchorwoman with no experience in that business.
There were stories about her from an unofficial source, but such tabloid stuff might not be unusual for celebrities, let alone an attractive woman with an audience of millions. He lit a cigarette, underlining the paragraph about her “special connection” to high-ranking Party cadres. As in the saying, It might be like catching at the wind, clutching at the shadow. But there’s another saying, Chen recalled: No waves will rise without a stir of the wind.
Those stories alone were far from enough to make her talk. He ground out his cigarette in the swan-shaped crystal ashtray.
He realized it was time for lunch. Three hours already gone this morning and he still had no idea how his Chen trail could work. He walked down to the bureau canteen, which was full of people, as always. He ate a bowl of beef noodles with plenty of red pepper and green onion without talking much to anyone. His colleagues all seemed to be aware of how sensitive his investigation was. The noodle soup tasted heavy, hot, and afterward he felt slightly drowsy. But there was no coffee in the bureau to wake him up. His cell phone rang.
“Long time no see, Chief Inspector Chen,” Gu said. “You haven’t come to my place for weeks.”
“Sorry, I’ve been so busy-you know how it is.”
Unlike other businessmen, Gu knew better than to be a nuisance. It bothered Chen that their relationship had become a handle for Dong. Not really Gu’s fault, though: an entrepreneur could not have helped boasting of his official connections and Gu might have been discreet in his way. At least Dong seemed to have learned nothing about Chen’s lucrative translation project with the New World. Gu had claimed that it was a favor by Chen, but with such a large fee for the translation, Chen knew better.
“You are always busy, but so are other celebrities. They still come to my KTV club. Liu Wei, he stars in three TV series, and he visits here every week.”
“Really,” Chen said. Liu was a rising star, notorious for his lusty performance in bedroom scenes. Then something clicked in Chen’s mind. “Do you have a lot of visitors from the TV and movie industry?”
“Yes, quite a few,” Gu said. “How about this Saturday evening? White Cloud will also be there. A nice girl.”
“She’s very nice, but I don’t think I have time this weekend.” Chen said after a short pause, “How about this afternoon? A cup of coffee or tea. Indeed, we haven’t seen each other for a while.”
“What about the Starbucks near the New World?”
“Great. See you there in half an hour.”
Chen left the canteen, and looked around before heading out through the bureau gate. Old Liang, the veteran bureau gatekeeper, saluted him with one hand, the other still grasping a plastic lunch box. The old man had worked dutifully for over forty years, long past his retirement age. The pension fixed in the eighties was not enough to support the retired gatekeeper in the nineties, so the bureau made a special allowance for him to continue to work here.
Chen got onto a bus, which turned out to be a most unpleasant experience. The conductor kept shouting, “Move in! Don’t stand close to the door.” At each new stop, a fresh wave of people broke in, elbowing and pushing him in still farther. The increasing heat mixed with the sweat smell was almost unbearable. The gap between the doing-well and the not-doing-well was visible everywhere. Nowadays, a successful entrepreneur like Gu would have a private car, and a rising Party cadre like Chen would have a company car, but the ordinary people could only take the ever-crowded bus.
A “provincial sister” standing next to Chen, wearing a black dress with thin shoulder straps, soon found her dress crushed out of shape, and started pushing Chen in frustration. At the next stop, though it was still quite a distance from his destination, he squeezed himself out through the walls of passengers, which caused another angry outburst of curses all around. The young girl followed him out, only to find the buttons on her shoulder straps missing. In embarrassment, she started screaming for the bus to stop, her hair disheveled, her dress rumpled. The bus crawled out of sight, leaving her standing there, holding her straps, weeping and whining, her voice seeming to dog him for two or three blocks.