A waitress came over and set down a bamboo-covered thermos bottle and a cup containing a pinch of tea leaves.
“Before-Rain tea, it’s the newest pick of the year and the best tea leaves in the house,” she said, pouring a cup for him.
The tea looked tenderly green. He didn’t pick up the cup immediately. Instead he slowly tapped a finger on the table, thinking about what Shanshan had said about the water. He picked up a newspaper from a rack near the table, but when he saw a picture on the front page of local leaders speaking at an economic conference, he put it back down.
Shanshan’s words had more than impressed him. For many years, environmental protection had been practically irrelevant to the Chinese people. Under Mao’s rule, they were famished, literally starving to death, particularly during the so-called Three Years of Natural Disaster in the late fifties and early sixties, and then again during the Cultural Revolution. People’s top priority had been survival, and that meant feeding themselves with whatever was available. Then under Deng’s rule, China began to catch up to the rest of the world for the first time in many years; as Deng put it, “Development is the one and only truth.” So environmental protection still didn’t move to the top of the nation’s agenda.
It was little wonder that she had had a hard time with her work at the chemical company, or that she had been receiving threatening calls because of it. He wondered whether he should contact the local police. He had her phone number, and they might be able to trace the ominous call. Besides, now there had been a murder at her company.
He pulled out his cell phone and dialed Sergeant Huang of the Wuxi Police Bureau.
“Oh, you should have told me you were coming, Chief Inspector Chen,” Huang exclaimed, not trying to conceal the excitement in his voice. “I could have met you at the railway station.”
“Well, you are the first one I’ve contacted here. My vacation was an unexpected development to me as well.”
“I’m so flattered-I mean, for you to call me first. I’m really glad that you chose to vacation in Wuxi.”
“I got a call from Comrade Secretary Zhao, the retired head of the Central Party Discipline Committee. He was too busy to take a vacation that had been arranged for him, and he wanted me to come here in his place. So here I am, enjoying a cup of Before-Rain tea at Yuantouzhu.”
“That’s fantastic, Chief Inspector Chen. I’ve heard so much about you-and about your connection to Beijing. You worked on a highly sensitive anticorruption case directly under Comrade Secretary Zhao. What a case that was. I’ve studied it several times. I’m a loyal fan of yours. I not only followed your extraordinary police work, but I’ve read all your translations too. It would be a dream come true to meet you.”
“I would like to talk to you as well.”
“Really? I’m nearby right now,” Huang said. “Can I come over?”
“Of course, come and join me for a cup of tea. I’m at the teahouse in the park, close to the bronze turtle statue.” Chen added, “Oh, and not a single word to your colleagues about my vacation here.”
“Not a single word to anyone, I promise, Chief Inspector Chen. I’m on my way.”
In less than twenty minutes, Huang appeared, hurrying over to Chen’s table in big strides, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. He was a dapper, spirited young man with a broad forehead and penetrating eyes. He grinned at the sight of Chen.
“I spotted you from a distance, Chief Inspector Chen,” Huang said. “I’ve seen your picture in the newspaper.”
Chen had another tea set brought to the table and poured a cup for the young cop. Chen then lost no time in bringing the conversation around to the murder of Liu Deming.
To Chen’s pleasant surprise, Huang turned out to be one of the officers working on that very case. He had been at the chemical company discussing the case with his colleagues when he got Chen’s call.
“You’ve heard about it? Of course you have,” Huang said, his face flushed with anticipation. “You’re not really on vacation here, are you?”
Chen kept sipping at his tea without immediately contradicting him. To the local police, his vacation couldn’t help but be suspicious, even before he expressed interest in the murder. He was known for covert investigations in several highly sensitive cases.
“Well, I thought it would be great to come here, and relax for a week or so, with nothing to do. But in just one day, I’ve already found it kind of boring. I’m not complaining, but maybe I have a cop’s lot cut out for me, as both Detective Yu and his wife Peiqin have said before. Then I happened to hear about the case,” Chen said. “I’m not going to try to investigate: it’s not my territory, and I know better. I simply want to kill some time.”
“Sherlock Holmes must have something to do. I totally understand, Chief. Can I just call you Chief, Chief Inspector Chen?”
Whether Huang believed him or not, the young local cop was eager to model himself on those fictional detectives he admired. So he provided a quite detailed introduction to the case, focusing on what he considered strange and suspicious.
The Wuxi Number One Chemical Company’s being the largest in Wuxi and Liu’s being a representative of the People’s Congress of Zhejiang Province combined to make the murder the top priority for the Wuxi Police Bureau. A special team had been formed for the investigation; Huang was the youngest member of the team.
They had started by building a file on Liu Deming. Liu had worked at the company for over twenty years. When he took over the top position of the state-run company several years ago, it was on the brink of bankruptcy. He managed to lead the company out of the financial woods, then make it profitable, and then to successfully expand. Capable and ambitious, Liu had established himself as an important figure in the city-a “red banner” in the economic development of the region.
In recent years, however, Liu had been involved in some controversies. For one thing, the company was in the process of going public, turning into something between state-owned and privately-owned-a new experiment in China’s economic reform. It was the first company attempting to do this in Wuxi, and Liu himself stood to become the largest shareholder, with millions of shares in his own name. He was going to be a capitalist Big Buck, so to speak, though still a Party member and general manager of the company.
No less controversial was the pollution that was the result of his increasing production and maximizing profit by dumping tons and tons of untreated wastewater into the lake. It was an open secret, and his company wasn’t the only one to dump industrial waste wherever it liked. With the deteriorating water quality of the lake, however, local people had begun to complain. The Wuxi Number One Chemical Company was the largest plant by the lake, so it was an easy target. The city authorities had tried to exercise a sort of damage control, hushing up the protest, but with limited success.
On the night of the murder, Liu had been working at his home office-an apartment about five minutes’ walk away from the plant-not at his home, which was about five miles away. It wasn’t uncommon for the busy boss to spend the night at his home office when he was overwhelmed with work. The last several weeks had been a hectic period for the company, with lots of things going on, in particular all the preparations and paperwork for the forthcoming IPO. Not just Liu but several other executives and their secretaries had come in to work on that Sunday. Liu was last seen walking by himself, entering the apartment complex around seven P.M.
The next morning, his secretary, Mi, didn’t see him show up at work. She called his home, home office, and cell phone, with no response at any of them. So thinking that he might have overslept, she walked over to his home office. Liu sometimes had trouble falling asleep, especially when working late, so he took sleeping pills. She saw his shoes outside the door-he always changed into slippers in the apartment. When no one came to open the door after she knocked for several minutes, she called the police.