He wrenched open the lid with a pop, and an overwhelming smell surged out. Jiang wasn’t to blame for the reaction he’d described. For people from Ningbo, however, stinky foods were considered delicacies, and fermented tofu was probably the most popular of them.
Chen stuffed his nose with a paper napkin before inserting a ballpoint pen into the jar. Sure enough, it touched something other than fermented tofu at the bottom. With two fingers, he reached gingerly into the jar and pulled out a tiny package wrapped in layers of plastic sheets.
Except for some bits of tofu that had broken off in the extraction process, the jar soon recovered its tranquility. No one would notice any difference, he thought, screwing the lid back on and wiping his fingers with the paper napkin. He put the package in his briefcase.
Then he opened the front door to find Jiang smoking outside.
“That smell is really horrible, Jiang.”
“I told you,” Jiang said, stepping back into an office still beleaguered by the smell. “You haven’t found anything, have you?”
It was a question with the expected answer implied.
“No. Nothing.”
“I put my lunchbox into and take it out of the refrigerator every day. If there were something there, I would have seen it.”
“Exactly,” Chen said. Jiang must have rehearsed his words while he was outside smoking.
“But some people just want to catch the wind and shadow,” Jiang said, looking worried again.
“Don’t worry too much,” Chen said, handing him a SIM card. “That’s for you. I’ll call you on this number exclusively. But don’t try to call me. I’m constantly changing my number.”
“But what if they continue…”
“Things may change soon, possibly in a couple of days. I’ll keep you posted,” Chen said, “but I think I have to leave now.”
Forty-five minutes later, Chen arrived at a teahouse called Tang Flavor on Hingham Road, close to the subway exit there. He had been to this teahouse before. There were nice private rooms equipped with Wi-Fi.
A waitress came over to him with a menu in her hand.
“I have an appointment with a friend,” he said readily, “but I’m a bit early. I want to sit by myself while I wait. What’s the minimum charge for a two-person private room?”
“Two hundred for three hours.”
“That’s fine,” he said, counting out the money. “For the moment, just a cup of tea. Nothing else. And no interruptions whatsoever.”
“You can also have our Shanghai snacks for free.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just tea for now. Again, no interruptions.”
After the waitress put the tea on the table and withdrew, closing the door after her, he took out his laptop and the plastic-wrapped object from the jar.
He lit a cigarette first, frowning.
TWENTY-SEVEN
IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, Chen stood up to leave the private room at the Tang Flavor teahouse.
How long he’d shut himself up in that room, bent over his laptop, the cup of tea barely touched, he had no idea.
The world is crazier than a crime novel.
What Fei kept in the stinking fermented tofu jar was a flash drive with the contents of the hotel surveillance camera from the day Daniel Martin died. The video showed the people going in and out of that particular hotel room-including Kai, the First Lady of Shanghai. She entered the room in the company of the American, intimately, hand in hand, and then, shortly after the estimated time of the American’s death, left with a middle-aged Chinese man.
A lot of things clicked, connected, once Chen added the video to the e-mails, but at the same time, a lot more still didn’t add up.
Kai had been involved in the death of the American. But why would she get involved in such a thing at the very moment that Lai was advancing to the top of the Party power structure? The American might have somehow become an insufferable threat, but even if he did, she didn’t have to do something like that.
For the first time, Chen could start to piece together the cause of his troubles. He’d known for some time that the stakes of some case or cases were too high for certain people, as he’d told Jiang earlier. That accounted for the desperate urgency with which they’d been trying to get him out of their way. But he hadn’t known which cases.
He hadn’t even heard about the death of the American until after he’d been promoted out of the police department and the Special Case Squad. Now Detective Yu had been suspended while in the middle of a seemingly unrelated investigation.
Emerging from the teahouse, he turned, absentmindedly, toward the subway entrance near Hengshan Road. He’d become gradually familiar with the cobweb of subway lines after losing the use of a bureau car along with his position as chief inspector. In the city, there were more than ten lines woven together, and there were five or six more in partial operation or under construction. Ever-present traffic jams made the subway system the more reliable alternative. For Chen, there was another advantage he’d never known about before: it wouldn’t be easy for someone to follow him through the labyrinth of subway lines. He made a point of standing near the train door and abruptly shoving his way out at the stop, without give any advance signs of his intentions.
That afternoon, he pushed out of the train in just such a manner and climbed up the steps to West Huaihai Road, an area that used to be part of the French concession back in the old days. It remained just as fashionable and wealthy now, a symbol of status in the current materialistic age.
Finding himself at an intersection close to White Cloud’s hair salon, he toyed with idea of going in for a haircut. He took out his cell phone. There were no new messages from her in the last two days. She might have tried to make additional inquiries for him, but it would have been difficult for even a cop to have found out any more. Then he realized he hadn’t even given her his new cell number. She might have tried to call but without success.
He thought, too, that they might be able to check some of the details they hadn’t been able to cover in their hurried phone call that night at her apartment. He decided to give her a call first. It would be too dramatic for him to make another unannounced visit to her salon.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, picking up on the first ring. “I was thinking about calling you, too.”
So she hadn’t tried to call him yet. That’s good, he thought.
“Things aren’t good, Chen,” she went on without waiting for him to say anything. “To put it in a nutshell, it would be advisable for you to take a short vacation, preferably abroad, as Mr. Gu suggested.”
Had she discussed this with Mr. Gu?
“It might not be that easy.”
“Don’t you know some people in the consulate on Wulumuqi Road?”
“Yes, but…” he said, without finishing his sentence.
She was referring to the American consulate. He knew a cultural consul there, though he wondered whether he’d ever told her about that. But it wasn’t the matter of getting a visa from the consulate: his name would already have been put on some sort of alert list at customs.
It was clear, however, that she’d learned more about his troubles and that they were far more serious than she’d initially supposed.
“You have done a lot here, Chen. It’s time for you to start over somewhere else and do something for yourself. You’re still dreaming of an academic career, aren’t you?”
“I’ve thought about it,” he said, not really knowing how to respond. “But what about things here? Take you, for example: you’ve worked hard all these years, and now with the salon and the apartment-”
“I’ve thought about it,” she said, picking at his words irritably. “I don’t like it, not at all-the salon, the apartment, and everything else that might go onto that list. Whatever you have here today can be totally wiped out tomorrow.”