“I just did what I was supposed to do as the department secretary, never inquisitively or intrusively.”
“Did he have any other secretaries?”
“You mean little secretaries? Not in the office. Some people said that he kept me simply as a cover for other ones. I suppose that’s possible, but I don’t think he had the time for that.”
“But as his secretary, you surely know some of the confidential details about his work.”
“He worked hard and was under a lot of pressure,” she said, discernibly hesitant. “It was not an easy job for him. Nominally, he was the one in charge of land and housing development for the city, but there were so many other officials anxious to have a finger in the pie. He had to walk a tightrope all the time. For instance, there was the scandal of the West Eight Blocks. The head of the Jing’an District practically gave the land away, selling it at an incredibly low price to the developer. The developer got a loan on it for five times the amount he’d paid. Zhou knew about that, but the district head had already gotten approval for the deal from Zhou’s superior. What could Zhou do with those higher-ups who were far more powerful? He didn’t really talk to me about those things, but they weren’t really secrets, not in today’s China.”
“Yes, I have heard of the West Eight Blocks. The head of Jing’an District was shuangguied because of it, but the scandal didn’t touch Zhou. Not at the time.”
“Whatever sort of official Zhou might have been, he was good to me,” she said, her head hanging low. “It’s not fair that Zhou alone was to be punished when it’s really like a chain of crabs bound together on a straw rope-all connected.”
She then went on, repeating what she’d already said, adding nothing new or substantial.
But Chen didn’t believe she was telling him everything. He had to break down her resistance.
“I don’t know how I can help you if you don’t tell me everything,” Chen said, interrupting. He brought out the envelope from Melong and handed it to her. “Take a look.”
Her hand was trembling as she took out the pictures.
“So it was you, Chief Inspector Chen?”
“What do you mean?”
“I was sent copies of these pictures a couple of days ago.”
“Really! I didn’t send those. Do you know who else might have sent them?”
“No, I don’t. It looks like everybody is trying to blackmail or threaten me.”
“Everybody? Tell me about it.”
“The day I got these pictures, Jiang and his people came to talk to me, saying that the consequences would be too much for me if I didn’t cooperate. And then, that evening, Dang also called, telling me I would have to give up.”
“Give what up?”
“I don’t know what he meant. Tell Jiang’s people everything? Give them something that they believed Zhou had given to me? But the message I got was that if I didn’t do what they told me to do, then the pictures would come to light. That’s why I ran away.”
“Can you guess where I found the pictures?” Chen asked deliberately. “On Dang’s computer.”
“What?!”
“He’s after something, but what it is, I don’t know.”
“Zhou had already had his name dragged through the mud. I didn’t want that to happen again, not because of me. He told me he’d kept this property a secret, so I came here.”
“But you can’t hide out for long. What then?”
“I don’t know. I’ll be able to eke out an existence, I think, for two or three months on my savings. The storm may have blown over by then, and I’ll be able to turn a page somewhere else.”
So the pressure Dang and Jiang were putting on her wasn’t to get her to speak out against Zhou but for her to give them something they thought Zhou had entrusted to her.
Her story was so unlikely that Chen believed it was actually true, whether or not she was innocent. But what could Dang be after? For that matter, what could Jiang and his team want so desperately? This opened up totally new possibilities.
“Hidden treasure?” he murmured, almost to himself.
Zhou was said to have amassed a huge fortune, and what had been exposed on the Internet was merely the tip of the iceberg. Dang must believe that Fang knew about it.
Was that what Jiang was after, too? It wasn’t likely. It could be a huge amount but not so much that it would be worth such an effort on the part of the city government. If any more details about such corruption were to leak out, it wouldn’t do the city government any good.
“Those people are capable of anything,” she muttered, though not in response to Chen.
Jiang’s continuous presence at Moller Villa could possibly backfire on him now, with the Beijing team stationed at the same hotel. Even though Fang might not have told him everything, hemming and hawing as she had about details, her fear was genuine. If Zhou had been murdered for something-whatever that might be, Chen had no clue and too little knowledge to speculate-that something was still out there, and Fang wasn’t an unlikely next target on the list. That was the real reason she’d run away.
She hadn’t said that in so many words, but she didn’t have to.
Zhou might have hidden the something away-this crucially important “something”-but could it possibly be in her possession? From what Chen could see, while it might have been a matter of life and death to Zhou, it wasn’t to Fang. There was no point in her holding on to it, particularly at the expense of becoming a fugitive.
At the same time, it had to be something that was a fatal threat to Jiang and his people, and something Zhou believed would provide him protection. Nothing like that had come to the surface yet-not as far as Chen could see.
Then how could he help Fang? With others watching and plotting for reasons unknown-to him, and perhaps to one another-it’d be better not to reveal her whereabouts to any of them. Otherwise, before he was capable of making a move, she’d be snatched out of his hands.
He dipped a piece of stinking tofu in the hot sauce. It was slightly cold yet still crispy, but the hot sauce wasn’t spicy enough, just as Lu Xun had deplored in a story. It was probably titled “In the Tavern.”
Fang’s staying here wouldn’t harm anybody, he decided. Nor would it obstruct the investigation of Zhou’s death. Turning to Fang, he said, “Things are complicated. Because of Zhou’s position and because of his connections, you might as well stay here for a while, for your own safety. You’ll have to avoid contacting others. Do your parents have any idea where you are?”
“No, they don’t. They’re old-fashioned people. They would be upset that I have a villa given to me by Zhou, so I’ve never told them anything about it.”
“That’s good. Don’t contact them, either-not until I tell you it’s okay. It won’t be too long. Soon there may be a drastic change in the situation,” he said, not saying more than was necessary. “In the meantime, if you can think of anything that might have caused Zhou’s death, or about things he might have left behind-anything at all-let me know immediately. You have my cell number. But make sure that you call from a public pay phone, one that’s not near here. You’re right about one thing. Those people are capable of anything.”
TWENTY
It never rains but it pours.
Lianping thought this as she sat in a Shaoxing taxi, toying with the cell phone in her hand.
While on the way to Lanting Park, where she was going to meet Chief Inspector Chen, she’d received an unexpected call from Xiang.
Xiang offered no explanation about why he had left Shanghai so abruptly and had neglected to call her for almost two weeks, except to say that he’d been extremely busy. Not just during the day but also late into the night. It was no secret that a lot of business deals were done at the dinner table, by the karaoke machine, or in the massage room at the baths. These were all characteristic of China’s socialism, and she knew better than to probe or protest. For a young man of the so-called “wealthy second generation,” his devotion to business was commonly seen as a plus.