Don't Cry Tai Lake (16 page)

To his surprise, the noodles were quite delicious. The meal was more agreeable than the banquet at the center. For one thing, he liked noodles. He was a gourmet when he ate out, but not an enthusiastic chef when he had to cook for himself.

It was probably the same for her. He then dismissed the thought almost instantly. She was much younger. An attractive girl like her probably had a lot of men her own age eager to invite her out to candlelight dinners. He felt a twinge of jealousy.

Or was he suddenly feeling so much older?

“Thank you. These are the best noodles I've had in a long time.”

“Come on. How can someone who dines with the executives of the center really enjoy a bowl of plain noodles with me?”

“It's the truth, Shanshan. Noodles shared with you are no longer merely plain noodles.”

“Someone who enjoys the special connections that you do,” she went on, without responding to his comment, “doesn't have to say such things.”

“What do you mean?”

“Uncle Wang told me that, on the morning I got into trouble at the company, you made some phone calls for me. Shortly after you called, a police officer rushed over, showed you all the respect he would if you were his boss.”

“Oh, that. Yes, as I told you earlier, I did make some phone calls. I was concerned about you. As for the police officer,” he said, trying to think what the old man might have seen from across the road, “we happened to meet when were both getting a haircut in the same barbershop. He knew of my work—I've translated some mysteries, you know—so I talked to him about it.”

“According to the police officer who released me, I have a
guiren
in my life that I didn't know about. He said to me, ‘But for your
guiren,
you might have remained in custody for god knows how long.' I don't know that many people here. Certainly not anyone that powerful, Chen.”

In traditional Chinese culture,
guiren
meant someone powerful or influential who helps out in an unexpected way. It was understandable that Huang couldn't help using such a term, which suggested Chen but didn't give him away.

“Well, clearly they had no right to detain you. When they realized their mistake, they had to come up with some excuse, which is probably why they credited a
guiren
.”

He couldn't tell whether she believed him or not, but her comment gave him an excuse to turn the conversation to the topic he had in mind. He had been unwilling to bring it up that evening.

“Let's talk business,” she said, stealing the initiative from him. She sat up and drew her legs up under her on the bed, her hands clasped around her knees. “I don't think you came here for a bowl of noodles.”

“Well,” he said, looking at her, and then past her to the wall behind her, “the partition wall looks as thin as a piece of paper.”

“No one will hear,” she said, lifting up a wisp of black hair that had strayed over her eye, “provided we don't talk too loud. But why? If it was anything that important, you could have called me and asked me to meet you elsewhere.”

“Here's a phone for you,” he said in a quiet voice, pushing across the table a newly bought cell phone. It was shining scarlet, which somehow reminded him of her in her trench coat that day in the sampan. “In the future, when you call me, use this phone only.”

“Why?”

“You aren't only getting prank calls on your cell. It's been bugged too.”

“You're really scaring me, Chen. How the devil could you know about all that?”

“Through my connections. Don't worry about what connections, Shanshan. I just happen to have them. When I made inquires into those nasty calls you'd been getting, I was told about your phone being tapped.” He went on after a short pause. “For instance, they mentioned you had been speaking to someone named Jiang.”

She stared at him in shock, not uttering a word. She hadn't said anything to him about Jiang. Of course, she didn't have reason to—not to a tourist she'd just met by chance.

“How could you have—” she started without finishing the sentence, her face instantly bleached of color.

“About the threatening phone calls you've been getting, they were all made from a public phone booth. So there's no way to trace the identity of the caller. If anything, though, it proved that they weren't merely prank calls. Kids wouldn't have made such an effort or spent money on a practical joke.”

“But how could someone have stooped so low?”

“It's someone who is capable of anything. That's one of reasons I decided to come over the moment I learned about it—without calling you first. But it's also true, needless to say, that I missed you. As an old proverb goes, One day elapsed without seeing you feels like a separation for three autumns to me.”

“You're still being poetic with me.”

“Setting sentimentality aside, tell me as much as you can about what has been happening of late—with you, around you, or at your company. I don't know if I'm in a position to help, but to be able to do anything at all, I need as much information as I can get from you.”

“Why are you going out of your way to help me?”

“You know why,” he said, grasping her hand across the table. “I want to.”

“But I don't know what you want to know.”

“Let me ask you this first. Now that Liu is dead, is there anything new at your company?”

“There's been nothing new under the sun. The wastewater keeps flowing into the lake, day and night. Fu, the new general manager, won't change anything.”

“I heard that Mi was promoted to office manager.”

“You've been hearing about things promptly. I only heard about it yesterday.”

“She was only Liu's little secretary, wasn't she?”

“Fu's only been here for four or five years. He needs her help for the transition, I think. After all, there are a lot of things that Mi alone knows.”

“So Fu's quite young? He must have been promoted very quickly.”

“Fu majored in economics. When he was still a college student, he published an article on the economic reform in the
People's Daily
. This made him an instant celebrity, and he was named as a representative to the national Youth League conference. Upon graduation, he was assigned to work as an assistant to Liu. Because of his Youth League background, it didn't take too long for him to be promoted.”

“So he's one of the ‘rocket cadres,'” Chen said, nodding. “A lot of young cadres are chosen from the Youth Leagues, they are the so-called young vanguard for the Party. Fu must have worked closely with Liu then.”

“Liu wasn't an easy one to work with or to share power with. I don't know much about the politics among the executives at the company, but Fu seems to have remained an outsider. That was just my impression, of course. Luckily, he knew how to play second fiddle.”

“But he plays first chair now.”

“Yes. It was clever of him to promote Liu's little secretary as gesture to the men and women in Liu's camp.”

“I think you're right,” Chen said. “Now, on a different topic, tell me what you know about Jiang.”

“Well, he got into trouble for the same reason I did—his environmental protection efforts,” she said, still without withdrawing her hand, “except that he pushed even harder. But as for what he's been doing of late, I have no idea.”

He noticed her emphasis on time with the phrase “of late.” That she didn't know was probably true. Had there been anything of late between the them, Internal Security would have pounced on her and wouldn't have let her go.

“Jiang's an ‘environmental activist.' Anybody labeled as such can easily get into trouble, and not just him. Look at this dorm room. When I was first assigned to work here, Liu promised me an apartment. But as soon as I spoke out, the promised apartment vanished into thin air. It's my fourth year here, and I'm still in the same dorm room.”

“Have you had any contact with Jiang?” he asked, making the question sound casual.

“We're in the same field, so we would discuss problems that we had in common,” she said, without concealing a touch of hesitancy. “But I haven't been in touch with him for quite a while. I did call him the day before yesterday because of something that I heard. He didn't pick up and he didn't call back.”

“You have no idea what's happened to him?”

“No. What?”

“He was taken into custody.”

“Oh—like me?”

“Yes, like you. And now they're checking into the people close to him.”

“They really are capable of anything,” she said, shaking her head. Her hair was still slightly wet and tangled. “I should have studied something different at school.”

“No, that's not true. It's a critical subject area for today's China.” He wondered if she was trying to steer the conversation away from Jiang for some reason. “But back to Jiang. Did he have an argument with Liu?”

“I can't imagine that. They might have met once or twice, but I don't know of anything recent.”

“According to Internal Security, he tried to blackmail Liu recently.”

“No, that's not possible,” she said.

She didn't elaborate. Nor was Chen in a good position to push her, having not yet revealed himself to be a cop.

“Don't call him again. At least, not before telling me first if you think you must,” he said instead. “I'll keep you posted on the latest developments.”

“Things are really serious, aren't they?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“But do you know how serious the environmental crisis is for our country?” She went on heatedly, without waiting for a response: “The government talks a lot about the improvements in human rights. I don't know much about that. But I do know that at the very least people should be able to breathe pure air, drink clean water, eat good food, and see the stars at night. These are the most basic human rights, aren't they? But not in China. Let me give you an example. When the Beijing government called for a ten percent reduction in sulfur dioxide in China's air, I was still in college. Now, five years later, sulfur dioxide pollution has
increased
twenty-five percent. As for water, well, you've seen the lake. And it's not just Tai Lake, of course. Decades of unchecked, unbridled pollution have left much of the water in big lakes and rivers unfit to touch, let alone drink. They have pollution levels of Grade 5 or worse, meaning that the water is unfit even for human contact.”

“Hold on a minute, Shanshan. Are all these figures based on research?”

“Yes. They are no state secret, I can assure you. If you do your research, you can find all of this in the officially published material.”

“It's shocking.” He searched his pockets for a scrap of paper, but without success. “Can I have a piece of paper to write down some of those figures?”

“Why, Chen?”

Chen was thinking of the report he had to turn in to Comrade Secretary Zhao. At the moment, the chief inspector didn't have any solid evidence to support his argument. However, he wasn't going to tell her the real reason, even though he would never do anything to get her into trouble.

“I've been trying to write a poem about the pollution in China, but I'm not an expert like you. Still, I don't want to publish something unsupported by facts.”

“Are you serious?” she said. “That might get you into trouble. Besides, I doubt if such a poem would be publishable.”

He was serious and had, in fact, already written several stanzas.

“I have the connections to get it published, I think. Connections aren't something to be proud of, but they do help get things done.” After a short pause, he went on. “After our conversation in the sampan, I did some serious thinking about the issue. Environmental protection must be an uphill battle. It is as difficult as it is complicated. But what is at the root of the ever-worsening pollution problem? Human greed. Pollution isn't a problem that pertains to our country alone—as the proverb says, crows are black all over the world—but the shape the problem takes here is certainly characteristic of China.”

“Characteristic of China,” she said, looking him in the eye, “as the newspapers say about China's socialism.”

“Because China lacks any history of a sound legal system and because of the general ideological disillusionment, particularly resulting from the disastrous Cultural Revolution, people take whatever they can grasp in their hands, by hook or by crook, in this brazen ultra-acquisitive age. Some economists even declare greed a necessary evil for our economic development. Marx himself said something to that effect too, though he was very critical about it.”

“Wow, you even dragged Marx into it, Chen. But I know the passage you mean. According to Marx, for a three hundred percent profit, a capitalist would do anything, commit any crime, even at risk of being hanged.”

“Exactly. I don't think doing everything possible for profit will lead to anything good—not for the environment or anything else. But the issue is complicated. The Party authorities must be aware of the environmental problem, but, to some extent, the legitimacy of the Party's regime depends on maintaining economic growth, so any regulatory effort that gets in the way of growth will be suppressed.”

“You've hit the nail on the head, Chen!” she said, her eyes bright.

“I've been thinking a lot about all this, Shanshan,” he said earnestly, “because of your company, and because of the poem I'm working on. I've just started, but it could be a longer, more ambitious poem than any I've ever done before.”

“Let me get my folder for you.”

She got down on all fours, reached under the bed, and pulled out a cardboard box, her bare legs sticking out and her elegantly arched soles faintly dabbed with dust. She emerged out from under the bed with a blue folder in her hand and a smudge on her face.