The Mao Case (20 page)

“What Buddhist spirit!” he sort of echoed, trying to come up with more Buddhist improvisations. “A peck, a drink, everything happens with a cause and consequence.”

“You, too, kowtow to Buddha, don’t you? He might not have been that rich at first, giving me just a little cash each time, but he must have come from a good family, the way he talked and behaved. Good deeds will never go unnoticed. Now he’s so incredibly rich. So is Jiao — all through his help.”

“Can you give me his name and address, Auntie Zhong? I really want to thank him for what he had done for the Shang family.”

“He sows without caring about reaping. In fact, he has never given me his real name.” She said shaking her head resolutely, “I wouldn’t give it to you even if I knew. It’s against his principles.”

“I don’t know how to thank you enough,” he said as he got up, realizing it would be useless to push any further. “Like that noble benefactor, you have done so much for her family. The way of Buddha is truly beyond us. Karma works out in the life of her granddaughter.”

“Yes, may Buddha bless her, and him too. Goodbye, Mr. Yu.” Zhong rose, and opened the door to the dark staircase.

He nearly stumbled again, beginning to grope slowly down, grasping the railing, his stiff legs moving with difficulty. It took him several minutes before he reached the foot of the staircase, the way down being even longer than the way up.

Walking out into the busy and bustling street, he blinked in a burst of afternoon sunshine. It was a random harvest. He lit a cigarette, waving the match. The information from Zhong threw light on some, if not on all, of the mysteries about Jiao’s life. Particularly regarding the self-effaced “incredibly rich” benefactor. Zhong seemed convinced that his fortune had brought about the metamorphosis in Jiao’s life.

Could the benefactor be the man Old Hunter had glimpsed in the company of Jiao the other night? Not likely. The man seemed to be younger, whereas Zhong described the benefactor as being about the same age as Jiao’s parents.

It wasn’t until he was passing by the convenience store again, that he thought of something. In spite of Zhong’s ambiguous response about what she had told Jiao about her benefactor, if the changes in her life had been related to him, Jiao should know him by now.

Jiao didn’t seem to have any friend that age — not from what he had learned from Chen — except Xie. An old-fashioned gentleman, and from a good family too, but Xie was far from rich.

So Old Hunter would get hold of a picture of Xie and with it, go back to Zhong. She might acknowledge the man in the picture even if she didn’t know his name.

He started humming some fragments from a Suzhou opera. “Bursting with anger, I denounce you…”

TWENTY-TWO

CHEN GOT A TEXT
message on his cell phone early the following morning.

“I’ve talked to a friend who works at his residence. She’ll arrange a visit for you today. Her name is Fang, and her number, 8678856.”

The message was unmistakable, even though the sender didn’t leave a name.

He hastened out the hotel, got into a taxi, and headed for Tiananmen Square again.

The traffic wasn’t too bad along Chang’an Boulevard that morning. The taxi driver, for once, was not a talkative one, looking sullenly ahead, his face in the rearview mirror almost as gray as the sky. Chen rolled down the window. A pigeon whistle could be heard trailing high overhead.

It took him only fifteen minutes to arrive at Xinhua Gate, the magnificent front entrance to the Central South Sea, which was located just west of Tiananmen Gate.

Originally, the Central South Sea had been something of an extension of the Forbidden City, with gardens, lakes, villas, woods, halls, and studies for the imperial house hold. After the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, Yuan Shikai, the first president of the Republic of China, took the Central South Sea as his government office site. To Yuan, who later failed to become an emperor himself, the choice was symbolically significant, for the Central South Sea was synonymous with the Forbidden City.

After 1949, the Central South Sea was turned into a residential complex for the top Party leaders, enclosed by high walls, providing all the majestic luxury, privacy, and security imaginable for the residents inside.

That morning, the front of the Central South Sea appeared little changed from the Qing dynasty, presenting the vermilion gate, red walls, and glazed yellow tiles as of old. There were two armed soldiers standing at the front entrance. The half-open gate revealed a large screen bearing Mao’s gilded inscription:
To serve the people
.

Chen dialed the number sent in the text message. “Oh it’s you, Chen,” Fang responded. “Please come to the side entrance.”

So he walked over to a shaded side street, and to the alternative entrance also guarded by an armed soldier. Fang was waiting for him in a booth outside. A handsome woman in her early thirties, with almond-shaped eyes and a straight nose, highly spirited in her army uniform, she stepped out, extending her hand, a wisp of hair straying out of her green cap.

“So you must be Chen. The residence hasn’t been open to the public since 1989. Today you are a special visitor. Ling tells me you’re nostalgic.”

“Thank you so much, Fang, for going out of your way for me,” Chen said, believing Ling hadn’t revealed his real purpose. “It’s one of the places I’ve always wanted to see.”

“You don’t have to thank me,” Fang said in a crisp voice. “Ling called us, speaking to both me and my boss. She’s a friend of mine. She’s told me of you. She asked me to do whatever possible for you. For one thing, I could serve as your guide — that is, if you’d like.”

“I appreciate your offer, but I’d like to take a walk around first. If I need anything, I’ll let you know. Oh, but maybe a map?”

“Some other Party leaders still live here. You are supposed to walk around only the area where Mao used to live. Here is a map, and Ling has something else for you,” she said, giving him a large envelope with the map on top of it.

The bulging shape of the envelope suggested something like a book inside. He thought he could guess what it was. Once again, Ling had helped him, not only with access to the Central South Sea. He didn’t tear open the envelope in the presence of Fang.

So he checked the map and headed for the Harvest Garden, the original name for Mao’s residence. In the Qing dynasty, the Harvest Garden had been used as a scenic imperial study. It was in the shape of a large quadrangle house, with five rooms in a row along each side and a courtyard in the middle.

The Harvest Garden looked deserted that morning. Chen walked in, started looking around here and there. Some of the rooms were locked. He pushed open the door of the bedroom.

What first struck him as unusual in the room was the extraordinarily big bed. Larger than a king-size one, apparently custom-made, but apart from its size, it was simple and plain. About a quarter of the bed was practically covered with books. It appeared as if Mao had slept with books.

Chen reached out and picked one up.
Zizhi Tongjian
, sometimes called the “Mirror of the History.” It was a history book written by Sima Guang, a renowned Confucian scholar in the Song dynasty, intended to mirror history in such a way that emperors could learn lessons by examining it. Mao was said to have read it seven or eight times. Most of the books on the bed turned out to be similar classics and histories.

According to Mao, history is an ever-continuous process of one dynasty succeeding another. Those at the bottom rise in rebellion to overthrow the one at the top, though the successful rebel inevitably turns into the emperor, as corrupt and oppressive as was the predecessor. Being part of modern Chinese history, having actually shaped that part of history which shaped him as well, Mao declared, “All the theories of Marxism can be summed up in one sentence: it is justified to rebel.” As an ambitious and accomplished rebel, marching under the banners of Marxism and communism, Mao put to good use the knowledge he had learned from those history books, some of which Chen was holding in his hands.

And Chen couldn’t help imagining Mao alone in the room, reading late into the night. According to the official publications, Madam Mao didn’t live with Mao. In his last ten years, Mao lived by himself — except for his personal secretaries, nurses, and orderly. Behind the communist-god mask, Mao must have been a solitary man seeing his dream of the grandest empire slipping away, not prepared to lead the country into the twentieth century, yet anxious to prove himself an emperor greater than all those before. So he wielded such terms as “class struggle” and “proletarian dictatorship,” launching one political movement after another, stifling all the opposition voices, until things came to a head during the Cultural Revolution. At night, however, surrounded by the ancient books, paranoid of “capitalist roaders” who would try to usurp his power and “restore capitalism,” Mao suffered from insomnia, hardly able to move because of his failing health…

Chen leaned down, touching the bed. A wooden-board mattress, as he had read in those memoirs, which claimed that Mao, working for the welfare of the Chinese people, cared little about his personal comfort. Chen wondered whether Mao had ever thought of Shang while on this bed.

Chen turned to look at the bathroom. In addition to the standard toilet, there was another one on the floor, shaped like a porcelain basin, over which one had to squat — specially designed for Mao, who must have carried with him to the Forbidden City his habit acquired as a farmer from a Hunan village.

It was another puzzling detail, but not all details would be relevant to his investigation. He hadn’t been able to establish a connection, he thought, between himself as investigator and Mao as a suspect. Instead, he came to find himself in the presence of another man, long dead and mysterious, but not the god Chen remembered from his school years.

Carrying the large envelope in his hand, Chen moved out into the garden. There seemed to be something sacrilegious about reading the book Ling sent him while in Mao’s room. But he wanted to read it here instead of back at the hotel, while looking up at the tilted eaves of the palace shimmering in the summer foliage, as if the location made a difference.

He perched himself on a slab of rock, on which Mao might have sat many a time. A stone
kylin
that had once escorted the emperors here stared at him. Lighting a cigarette, he remembered Mao was a smoker too — a heavier one. Chen hadn’t the slightest desire to imitate Mao.

Sure enough, as he had guessed, the large envelope contained the book written by Mao’s personal doctor. There was another envelope inside, smaller and sealed — probably the love poems written for Ling, long ago. He wasn’t going to read them at the moment. So he opened the book, turning to the introduction. The author claimed to have served as Mao’s personal physician for over twenty years, to know the intimate details of Mao’s life.

Instead of reading from the beginning, Chen moved to the index at the end. To his disappointment, there was no listing for Shang. Leafing through the book, he tried to find anything relevant.

The book didn’t focus exclusively on the personal life of Mao. The doctor also wrote about his own life, from an idealistic college student to a sophisticated survivor in those years of power struggle. For common readers, however, the appeal of the book lay in the description of Mao’s life — of an emperor both in and out of the Forbidden City. The chapter Chen was reading happened to be about Mao traveling around luxuriously in a special train. In the train, he actually took a young attendant named Jade Phoenix to bed. She was only sixteen or seventeen at the time. Afterward, he brought her back to the Central South Sea as his personal secretary. She eventually became more powerful than the politburo members, for she alone understood what he mumbled after his stroke, being one of few he could really trust. But she was only one of the many “favored” by Mao, who actually picked up women all over the country, in a variety of circumstances, including at those balls arranged for him in Shanghai and in other cities.

Mao seemed to have a preference for young girls with little education, not intelligent or sophisticated — simply young, warm bodies in a cold night. Shang was different from Mao’s usual type. But then a celebrated actress would have her attractions. It was nothing for an emperor to have dozens of imperial concubines.

The book confirmed what Chen had learned from other sources. Like an emperor, Mao set no store by his women, taking them as nothing but the means to satisfy his “divine” sexual needs.

A blue jay flew by. Chen thought he caught a flash of the afternoon sunlight on its wings.

whatever Mao might have done as the supreme Party leader, what he did to Shang was inexcusable, not to be easily written off, not even from a policeman’s perspective. Chief Inspector Chen was too depressed to think long along these lines.

He took out the smaller envelope, in which Ling might have left a note for him.

To his surprise, he found, instead of his poems, a manila folder marked, “Records of the Special Team from CCPC Cultural Revolution Group: Shang.”

How could Ling have got hold of this crucial information? It must have been at great risk to herself, as in another case years ago.

Only there was no stepping twice into the same river.

He started reading what was in the folder. It consisted of reports submitted by the special group. Most of them were written in the “revolutionary language” of the time, so he had to guess at the meaning couched in the political slogans and jargon.

According to Sima Yun, the head of the group, they were responsible to a “leading comrade” in Beijing, who was working in collaboration with the CCPC Cultural Revolution Group. They were instructed to deal with Shang in whatever way necessary to make her give up something important, possibly related to Mao, which had never been defined or explained to them. So they resorted to beating and torturing her. Shang said that Chairman Mao, had he known, wouldn’t have allowed them to do so. Sima told her that Madam Mao knew, and that was as good as from Mao himself. After that, Shang never said anything about Mao until her suicide. The team was summoned back to Beijing, bringing with them whatever they had found, including several albums.

It confirmed a couple of points on the case that Chen had speculated about.

First, the special team hadn’t been sent directly by Madam Mao, but by someone else. No name was given, but the “leading comrade” wasn’t she, who was only “in collaboration.”

Second, the special team itself wasn’t clear about what to extort from Shang. Except that the Party’s interests were at stake — some Mao material. So they interrogated Shang the hard way.

Rubbing the ridge of his nose, Chen checked another report in the folder, written on a somewhat smaller paper, possibly by another member of the team. To his astonishment, it was written at a much later date — as late as the end of 1974.

Apparently, Beijing remained concerned about the Mao material. In 1974, the year when Tan and Qian were caught in their attempt to flee across the border, some of the original special team members were summoned back to find more information. So the young lovers were brutally interrogated. It was suspected that they intended to smuggle something out, which also was not defined.

According to the statement made by Tan, the pair tried to go to Hong Kong because they saw no future in the mainland. He took all the responsibility. Because of his death, the investigation came to an abrupt end, even though an interview list had been made by the local committee concerning the close contacts of Tan and Qian.

Chen was about to read the last page in the folder when he was startled by an apparition, a grizzled man shuffling over from the far end of the garden, green canvas satchel slung across his shoulder. He checked around, picking up a fallen leaf with his free hand, and putting it into the satchel. He didn’t appear to be a gardener, nor did the satchel look like a proper tool. Chen hastened to put the book and the folder back into the large envelope.

“Who are you?” the gray-haired man demanded with an air of authority. “How did you get in here today?”

“I’m Chen. I’ve always dreamed of coming here — ever since childhood,” Chen said. “A friend of mine works here, so she let me in.”

“So you’ve come to pay homage to Mao? That’s the spirit, young man. People still worship him today, I know. Oh, I’m Bi. I served as Chairman Mao’s bodyguard for twenty years.”

“Oh, it’s a great honor to meet you, Comrade Bi.”

“I’m retired, but I still come here from time to time. Oh, those un-forgettable years by the side of our great leader! He built a socialist new China out of a poor, backward country. Without Chairman Mao, without China.”