Chen was struck with a feeling of déjà vu. The waitress had recommended almost the same special the other day, but then she couldn’t be expected to remember what each customer had ordered.
“Fine,” Chen said. “I’ll take the rice paddy eels. I’ll have them wok-fried with chopped green onion as a separate cross-bridge dish, as well an order of noodles with stewed pork, and a bowl of white soup.”
“May I recommend a seasonal topping of sliced pork, bamboo, and pickled cabbage? I think you’ll find it has a surprisingly fresh and delicious taste.”
“Very well, I’ll take your recommendation.”
“The chef will start deboning the eels, and once he’s done, it’ll take a short while to cook them in the traditional way. If you’d like, the noodles can be served first, while you wait. The noodles will be from the first pot of the day.”
“Thank you-that’s very thoughtful.”
As before, two tiny saucers of peanuts and pickles were placed on the table, along with a pot of green tea as well. Sipping at the tea, Chen thought of Qian. He considered calling her, and he pulled out his cell phone. But it was too early to call, so he put it away again.
That impossible romantic. That’s what Peiqin had said about him, jokingly.
The noodles were brought out, and the topping of sliced pork, bamboo, and pickled cabbage was as delicious as the waitress had promised.
When he was only halfway through the noodles, the rice paddy eels arrived. “Sizzling oil style,” the waitress said, strewing a handful of green onion on top of the fried eels before pouring hot sesame oil over the dish.
“That’s the way to serve eel,” he said approvingly.
The fried eel surpassed even his most optimistic expectations. He’d become so used to the hormone-injected eel that was found in Shanghai that he must have forgotten how good fresh, traditional eel could taste. He decided to take his time savoring the organic delicacy.
After he finished, Chen felt completely recharged. He paid the tab, leaving a small tip just like the last time. Outside, on Ten Perfections Street, he made a left turn and stepped into the public phone booth at the intersection to make a call.
“Who is it?” A male Beijing-accented voice answered on the first ring. “Qian’s not home.”
Chen was nonplussed. Qian had told him that she lived alone. But he couldn’t rule out her having a visitor-someone on intimate enough terms that he felt he could answer her cell phone.
“I’m just a friend of hers,” he said.
“What’s your name?”
That was a good question. Even Qian herself didn’t know his real name.
“I had noodles with her just the other day. She knows me.”
“What’s your phone number?”
“Oh, it’s nothing important. I just want to say hi,” he said. “Who are you?”
“I’m… her father. She mentioned you. You met just the other day. She said you like Suzhou noodles.”
Something was amiss. Qian’s parents had supposedly refused to set foot into her apartment ever since learning about Sima. Of course, they might have reconciled with their daughter, but it was unlikely that she would have told her father about the private investigator she’d engaged to gather evidence against her man back in Shanghai.
“You’re from Shanghai, aren’t you, Mr. Cao? You can leave your message with me. I’ll give it to her as soon as possible. I’ve got your cell phone number right here.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll just call back.”
He hung up without waiting for any further response from the other end. Something was terribly wrong. He stepped out of the phone booth and walked away briskly, shaken by a deep sense of foreboding.
He didn’t know what to do about this disturbing situation. His mind was completely blank.
He thought he might as well take a short walk, since walking sometimes helped him think. As he walked along Ten Perfections Street, he passed by a local candy shop, which was selling sweet sesame cakes, another favorite from his childhood. Not far away, a rickshaw driver was hawking his services, waving a tourist map in one hand, and a little further down the street, an elderly peddler was displaying colorful paper pinwheels in a holder that looked like a long-handled feather duster.
Chen was in no mood for any of them, nor did his thinking get any clearer as he walked along the busy street. So he gave up and hurried back to his hotel.
Up in his room, he drew himself a bath. Traditionally, a hot bath was how a gourmet would follow up an excellent meal, letting the body relax as the food digested. But Chen had something else in mind. Still at a loss for what to do, he was hoping the hot water would jump-start his brain.
Unsure if he was under close surveillance, he put the CD Qian gave him into a player in the bathroom, to give the impression he was truly indulging himself.
From the speakers, Qian’s soft, sweet voice poured out like rippling water.
Myriads of maple leaves / upon myriads of maple leaves / silhouetted against the bridge, / a few sails return late in the dusk. // How do I miss you? // My thoughts run like / the water in the West River, / flowing eastward, never ending, / day and night.
It was a poem written by the Tang courtesan Yu Xuanji. Her social status in the ninth century was pretty close to the present-day ernai. She got involved in a murder case, quite possibly a crime of passion, and was executed. Centuries later, the Dutch mystery writer Robert van Gulik wrote a novel called Poets and Murder based on the story. But Chen didn’t think van Gulik really appreciated her poetry.
Chen pulled his thoughts back to the present. Who could the man that picked up her cell phone have been? It wasn’t her father, not with that strong Beijing accent, and it wasn’t Sima, whom Chen would have recognized immediately. Was it possible that Qian had talked about Cao, the private detective, to some other man in her life? It seemed unlikely.
The only other conclusion was that the calls made from or to her cell phone were being tapped.
The man said he had Chen’s phone number. His special cell number? He had only given it out to a few: Old Hunter, Peiqin, White Cloud, and Qian.
Panic-stricken, he went over all the calls he’d made and received in the past few days. He had made a point of calling from public phones. Old Hunter was experienced: in spite of the new SIM card, he dialed from public phones. Peiqin had only called him once, and that was to tell him about the ransacking of his mother’s room and her subsequent admission to the hospital. Ultimately, it was a phone call that didn’t really matter, not to anyone who might be listening in, anyway. White Cloud had, as instructed, called him from a public phone, and the only other time they’d spoken on the phone was when he was at her apartment and she had called him there, at her own home number. That left only Qian who called him on his cell the other day, a call that was quite possibly incriminating.
Even though his replacement SIM card wasn’t registered to his name, it was only a matter of time before the “phone police” managed to trace one of his calls to this number. From there, it probably wouldn’t be too difficult to trace any incoming calls.
He jumped out of the tub, dried himself in a hurry, dressed and quickly left the hotel.
He would have to change his phone number again and then let his Shanghai contacts know about the new number in person. It was too risky to call them from his old number.
That meant making another trip back to Shanghai.
But before he left, he had to try to find more out about what was going on with Qian.
She said she lived in an area close to the Temple Market. That was about all he knew, but even if she’d given him her address, it wouldn’t be a good idea for him to go there and ring her doorbell.
At a newsstand on Ten Perfections Street, he bought several new SIM cards, and then stepped into another public phone booth and dialed her cell phone number.