Enigma of China(71)

“Whatever you say, Chief Inspector Chen.”

“I had a cup of Shaoxing rice wine during lunch. It was extraordinarily mellow and sweet. I had it with a small dish of peas flavored with aniseed, just like Kong Yiji in a Lu Xun story. It makes me think that the dinner won’t be too bad here.”

“Of course, you are first and foremost a cop,” she said, barely concealing the satirical edge in her voice, “always covering yourself meticulously, while at the same time, an epicurean enjoying yourself at every opportunity.”

Whether he took that as a compliment or something else, she didn’t know, but it put a period to their moment in the secluded garden.

He helped her to her feet.

The trail ahead of them appeared slippery, treacherous, and moss-covered here and there.

An indistinct sound came from behind them, hardly audible, perhaps bubbles from the fish bursting on the surface of the pool.





TWENTY-ONE


CHEN RETURNED TO SHANGHAI the next morning. Once there, one of the first things he did was check his e-mail. In his in-box was a response to his e-mail to Comrade Zhao, the retired secretary of the Central Party Discipline Committee in Beijing.

Thank you for your note. For a retired Party cadre of my age, I’ve been doing fine. I don’t want to get involved in too many things, and of late, I’ve been reading Wang Yangming. Your father was a neo-Confucianist, so you must be familiar with Wang Yangming. I particularly like a poem he wrote in his youth. “The mountains nearby make the moon appear small, / so you think the mountains larger than the moon. / If you have a view stretching out to the horizon, / you’ll see the mountains against the magnificent moon.” While reading the poem, I thought of you. You, too, should have a view reaching all the way to the horizon.

As for the team you mentioned, there’s nothing I can tell you. You’re an experienced police officer and you know better. At your age, Wang Yangming was already playing an important role in maintaining the well-being of his country.

It was an enigmatic e-mail. There was nothing surprising about Comrade Zhao being tight-lipped about the Beijing team. It wasn’t like the retired Party leader, however, to quote a poem in his e-mail.

Despite the fact that his father was a neo-Confucianist, Chen didn’t know much about Wang Yangming. What he did know was that he was an influential Ming dynasty Confucian philosopher who advocated the concept of innate knowing, arguing that every person knows from birth, intuitively but not rationally, the difference between good and evil.

Chen decided to spend some time researching Wang Yangming on the Internet. It turned out that Wang Yangming embodied the Confucianist ideal of a learned person who is both a scholar and an official. In 1519 AD, while serving the governor of Jiangxi province, he suppressed the uprising of Prince Zhu Chenhao, saving the dynasty from a huge disaster.

It was gratifying that Comrade Zhao expected Chen to have a career as prominent as Wang Yangming’s, but why express this now, all of a sudden?

The poem itself didn’t impress Chen. Wang Yangming wasn’t known as a poet, but the context in which Zhao quoted the poem made Chen think. Chen was sure that it meant something.

Writing Zhao for an explanation, however, would be useless.

With the sun obscured by the floating clouds, / I’m worried for not seeing Chang’an.

Chen picked up the phone, thinking for a minute, and then dialed Young Bao at the Writers’ Association.

“I need to ask you a favor, Young Bao.”

“Whatever I can do, Master Chen.”

“You’ve got a friend who works at the Moller Villa Hotel.”

“Yes, a good friend. In fact, I’m going to meet him at the hotel canteen for lunch today.”

“Can you copy a couple of pages from the visitor registry for building B? Specifically, last Monday and Tuesday.”

“That’ll be a piece of cake. He works in building B, and from time to time, he works at the front desk, keeping the register. I’ll call you as soon as I get it.”

That afternoon Chen went to meet with Lieutenant Sheng of Internal Security. The meeting had been requested by Sheng, and the meeting place was the hotel where he was staying. It was the City Hotel, located on Shanxi Road, only a two or three minutes’ walk from the Moller Villa Hotel. Perhaps it was just a coincidence—something that Chen, as a cop, didn’t believe in.

The request was a surprise. Chen had crossed paths with Internal Security on previous occasions, but rarely had it been on friendly terms. In the last analysis, Chen was a cop before all else.

Internal Security had different priorities. For them, the Party’s interests were first and foremost. In the name of the Party, they were capable of doing anything and everything.