“That’s unbelievable, Chief Inspector Chen, but you’ve solved the case. Congratulations.”
“No, not entirely—”
There came another knock on the door.
TWENTY-SIX
THE DOOR OPENED, AND the waitress stepped into the room, carrying a large silver tray.
“I’m sorry for the interruption, sir. There’s one special course before the hot dishes. We thought you might enjoy that.”
She placed a white plate in front of each of them, and then a large platter in between. Each plate had on it a deshelled steamed blue crab, still in crab shape, with the legs and claws arranged meticulously. The platter contained chunks of liquor-immersed raw crab.
“It’s not river crab season yet,” the waitress said, introducing the course, “so we use live blue crabs flown in special from the sea. The deshelled crab is a favorite among Western customers here. The liquor-immersed crab is a celebrated dish in Shaoxing cuisine. We use live crabs, plus Maotai liquor, and it’s stored at fifty degrees, so there’s no need to worry about the freshness of it.”
“Thank you. Liquor-immersed crab is my mother’s favorite.”
“Why not have it boxed and take it to her?” Lianping asked.
“Good idea. I hardly touch raw seafood myself.” He turned to the waitress, “We’re in no hurry for the hot dishes.”
“We can box the crab for you after you finish dinner. It’s seven now,” the waitress said, “and we’ll wait for your order to start cooking the hot dishes.”
She left, again closing the door after her.
Outside, the glittering splendors began to surge up along the Bund. Across the river, the ceaselessly changing neon lights from the jostling skyscrapers projected intoxicating fantasies of the new century on the shimmering water.
Lianping sighed. “What a feast!”
“I have no idea how long it takes to deshell a crab like that.”
“By the way, do you know the Internet joke about a river crab? ‘River crab’ in Chinese is a homophone for ‘harmony.’ When an online post is banned, people will say it was harmonized, deleted for the sake of harmony of our socialist society. Now they simply say the post has been river-crabbed.”
“The connotations are unmistakably negative, just like they are in the idiomatic expression about the chain of crabs.”
“Mr. Gu certainly went out of his way to have the Shaoxing style meal prepared for you,” she said, picking up a glistening white crab leg with her slender fingers. “But you were saying that there was something else left to resolve in your investigation.”
“Yes, there was another part. Remember the other clue in Detective Wei’s phone call to Party Secretary Li?”
“You mean the visit to Wenhui he planned to make?”
“Yes. From what his wife said, I thought it might have had something to do with the picture that got Zhou into trouble in the first place. That was certainly the focus of Internal Security, and to some extent, of Jiang too. For me, this part is still mostly guesswork.”
“So…”
Chen helped himself to the golden crab roe, which was displayed like a dainty chrysanthemum petal on the white plate. It tasted scrumptious, just as he remembered it from many years ago. It wasn’t an evening, however, for him to savor delicacies.
A shrill siren blared all of a sudden from a distance and reverberated along the darksome water.
“It’s an aspect of the case that is not only informed by a lot of guesswork, but also involves some people that you or I may know. Still, I wanted to tell you about it tonight—and not as a cop.”
“This is intriguing,” she said uncertainly.
“As I may have told you, it can be tiresome to be stuck in one’s professional role all the time. So for the sake of convenience, we might as well switch to something different, more like storytelling.”
“Storytelling?” she said, surprised by his sudden shift in manner. What was the enigmatic chief inspector up to?
“Do you remember what you suggested with regard to the poems you wanted me to write for Wenhui? You suggested that I adopt a persona. A persona that didn’t have to be the writer himself. Adopting such a persona has helped me with a couple of poems. It’s a pity that I don’t have more time for poetry.” He poured himself another cup of the aromatic and heady rice wine, which he drained before he went on. “In a police report, in some situations, people may be referred to as John Doe or Jane Doe. Or in some novels, characters might be referred to by letters such as C or L.”
“So… tell me a story, if you like,” she said, the wine rippling in the small cup in her hand, “Chief Inspector Chen.”