A little girl came over with two bamboo-slice-covered thermos bottles, making one careful step after another.
“Five pennies in a bottle,” she said to Peiqin. The coins fell from her hand and sparkled in a tin can.
In her childhood, Peiqin had run the same errand for her family, with the bottles in her hands that were covered with frostbite like a map…
She then looked up to see an old couple shuffling over from a side lane. They had no kettle or thermos bottle in their hands. The man with a maze of white hair wore a rumpled black jacket, as thin as a bamboo stick, his face wrinkled, weatherbeaten as seen in a postcard of a Shanbei farmer, and the woman was much shorter, rounded like a wine barrel, in something like much-patched-up pajamas. They stepped into the shop, nodding at Peiqin, as if she had been working there all those years. Perhaps because of their cramped living conditions in the lane, the shop had become sort of a daily resort to them. They moved straight to one of the tables and seated themselves side by side on a bench. It would be understandable for customers to come here in the winter, but in the summer, Peiqin failed to understand.
They must have reached some agreement with the owner of the water shop for them to hang out there. They carried their own tea leaves, took cups from a small cabinet in the shop, filled their cups with hot water without paying a single penny. Then the old woman produced a plastic-wrapped homemade cake and put it on the table.
“Taro, you eat first.”
“You eat first, Chrysanthemum.”
Taro and Chrysanthemum sounded like their intimate nicknames, Peiqin observed. Chrysanthemum broke the cake into two, gave one half to Taro, and dipped hers into the hot tea. She started chewing it with great gusto. Eating, they chatted to each other without paying any attention to Peiqin. She had no objection to their noisy presence.
She wondered whether they had spent all their lives in this shabby lane. Whatever their life story, their little indulgence toward the end of it was no more than cups of tea and hard, cold, homemade cake in this ramshackle place. But Peiqin looked on with admiration rather than anything else. Dramatically as the world might have changed, they seemed to have a world of their own, in which they had each other.
“Holding your hand, I’ll grow old with you. “That was one of her favorite lines in the Book of Song, years earlier, when her father still had had the energy to teach her those classic poems. In the nineties, in one of the popular songs, she had heard a variation, “It’s the most romantic thing to grow old by your side,” with the image of an old couple shuffling into the distance on a karaoke screen, and wealth and fame drifting away like the clouds in the skies.
It might have little to do with being romantic, but it was infinitely touching. Peiqin was sure the old couple was hardly aware of her presence in the store, so she took out the transcript of An’s cell phone calls. She wanted to reread it. Some of the phone conversations were perhaps valuable only in the names they provided as possible leads, yet because of their high status Yu was in no position to question either the people An had spoken with or the people mentioned. Nor were the conversations really incriminating. Everyone involved could say that they knew Ming but had no clue about Ming’s relation to Xing.
But one short phone conversation intrigued Peiqin. It was between An and Bi Keqin, a senior city government official in charge of the textile industry export and import. As with other phone calls, An approached Bi directly about the whereabouts of Ming, but Bi’s answer was a strange one.
“Come on, An. How can I know? It’s like in that Tang dynasty poem. ‘You ask where the tavern is, / and the cowboy points toward apricot blossom village.’”
“Oh, thank you so much, Bi.”
[An turns off the phone.]
It was strange. In Peiqin’s circle, Chen was the only one that quoted poetry in his daily conversation. But she doubted if Chen would have quoted in a short phone conversation. And then An thanked Bi-for what?
Peiqin knew the poem. A Tang dynasty quatrain. The first two lines read: “With the continuous rain on the day of Qingming, / people feel brokenhearted, on the road. “What Bi quoted were the next two lines. In the original, whether “apricot blossom village” was the name of a tavern or the village in which the tavern was located, she failed to recollect.
Then she remembered something. In one of his investigations, Chen had quoted a poem to say what was impossible for him to say under the circumstances. If Chen had done that, so could Bi. So “apricot blossom village” might be a hint.
There was a restaurant called Apricot Blossom Pavilion on Fuzhou Road, but no Apricot Blossom Village. Nor a hotel by that name. With so many new restaurants or hotels in the city, however, she didn’t think she knew every one of them. Especially the expensive ones, since neither she nor Yu had paid much attention to them. Someone else might, she knew. She took a look out of the shop. No one was coming in its direction. She ran across to the phone booth and dialed Overseas Chinese Lu, a card-carrying gourmet owner of Moscow Suburb, and a buddy of Chief Inspector Chen.
“ Apricot Blossom Village? Oh yes, it’s an exclusive club. Not a karaoke club, but a real one,” Overseas Chinese Lu said. “Super class with the most wealthy members. The chef there used to work in the Forbidden City for Chairman Mao. Mao’s Pork is his famous special. The nutrition goes directly to the brains. Mao had to eat a large bowl of it before finding his inspiration for a national movement. You have to taste it to believe it. The pork simply melts on your tongue, and then in your brains. Also the South Central Sea Carp. The fried fish is served on the table hot with its eyes still rolling, its tail still twitching-”
“Have you been there?” She had to cut him short, knowing Overseas Chinese Lu would hardly stop once on the topic of food.
“Only one time. Obscenely expensive. Most of the people going there are club members, those new upstarts showing off or those high officials squandering money out of the government’s pockets.”
“Thanks, I think that’s all I need to know,” she said.
At least it was a possibility. For people like Ming or Xing, nothing could have been too expensive.
When she ran back to the shop, the old couple inside started talking to her.
“How much does Chang pay you?” Chrysanthemum said.
“Not much,” Peiqin said. “Better than nothing. A beggar cannot complain.”
“Don’t be too disappointed. No more than fifty yuan business a day here, I would say,” Taro said. “With more and more families having propane gas tanks at home, people do not come to the water shop like before.”
“You are right,” Peiqin said. So far she had made only ten cents. “Old Chang could turn it into a teahouse.”
“Not in our location. Poor people can’t afford it, and rich people won’t come,” Taro said. “Chang hangs on to it because people say a subway station may be built here. In that event, a store will be worth more in terms of government compensation.”
“Chang makes most of his money with the mahjong table,” Chrysanthemum said. “He charges a different price for a cup of tea.”
“I see,” Peiqin said, nodding. Mahjong had been a popular game for years. It was not exactly gambling, but it was no fun without small money put on the table. Since 1949, mahjong had been banned. Of late, however, the city government had legalized the game-on the condition that no money was visible on the table. So that’s why the screen was in the shabby water shop.
In the midst of her off-and-on talk with the old couple, Peiqin kept a lookout at the lane.