Chapter 8

Standing by a Mercedes, Chen saw Catherine Rohn stepping out of the hotel’s revolving door wearing a white dress, like an apple tree blossoming in the April sunlight of Shanghai. She looked refreshed and she broke into a smile at the sight of him.

“This is Comrade Zhou Jing, our bureau’s driver,” Chen introduced her. “He will be with us for the day.”

“Nice to meet you, Comrade Zhou,” she said in Chinese.

“Welcome, Inspector Rohn,” Zhou said, looking over his shoulder with a broad grin. “People call me Little Zhou.”

“They call me Catherine.”

“Little Zhou is the best driver in our bureau.” Chen took his seat beside her.

“This is the best car,” Zhou said. “And we are doing our best, Inspector Rohn, or Chief Inspector Chen would not be with you today.”

“Really!”

“He’s our ace inspector, the rising star in the bureau, you know.”

“I know,” she said.

“Don’t exaggerate like that, Little Zhou.” Chen said. “Keep your eyes on the road.”

“Don’t worry. I’m familiar with the area. So I’m taking a short cut.”

Chen started speaking in English to her. “Any new information on your side?”

“Ed Spencer, my boss, checked the grocery store where Feng did his shopping. Feng does not drive. Nor has he any friends in D.C. Going to a couple of Chinese stores within walking distance is about all he does there. It is an old store, with no recorded connection to the secret societies. The receipt showed that Feng had visited the store on the day he phoned the warning. He bought noodles and rented several Chinese videotapes. On the way home, he also stepped into a Chinese gift and herb store, and a Chinese barbershop. So the warning could have been put into his grocery bag in these places too.”

“I’ve discussed the new development with Party Secretary Li. It is important, we believe, to find out how the gangsters discovered his whereabouts.”

“Beats me. Our special group consists only of Ed and me. Our translator, Shao, is an old CIA hand,” she said. “I don’t think there was a leak on our side.”

“The decision to let Wen go to the United States was made at a very high level of our government. Neither Party Secretary Li nor I had heard anything about Feng or Wen until the day before your arrival,” Chen countered.

“It was a blow to Feng’s confidence in our program. He called his wife without telling us first. Ed is about to relocate him.”

“I would like to make a suggestion, Inspector Rohn. Keep him where he is. Put more men around him for his protection. The gang may try to contact him again.”

“It may be dangerous for him.”

“If they had intended to take his life, they would have done so instead of warning him first. I believe they just want to prevent him from speaking out against Jia. They will make no attempt on his life unless they have no other choice.”

“You have a point, Chief Inspector Chen. I will discuss it with my boss.”

Due to Little Zhou’s short cut, they soon reached Shandong Road, where Wen Lihua, Wen Liping’s brother, lived with his family. It was a small street lined with old rundown houses from the turn of the century. The street in the Huangpu District had been part of the French concession but, in recent years, as it was surrounded with new buildings, it had become an eyesore. The street entrance was crammed with illegally parked bikes, cars, and illegally stored rusty steel and iron parts from a neighborhood factory. Little Zhou had a hard time maneuvering the car to a stop in front of a two-story house. On the discolored, cracked front door the faded number hardly showed.

The staircase was dark, steep, narrow, dust-covered, dim even during the day. The boards creaked under their feet, suggesting several steps were in bad repair. Most of the paint on the banister had long since peeled off. Catherine climbed up cautiously in her heels, and almost stumbled.

“Sorry,” Chen said, grasping her elbow.

“No, it’s not your fault, Chief Inspector Chen.”

He noticed her wiping her hands on a handkerchief as they reached the second floor. There they saw an oblong room packed with odds and ends: broken wicker chairs, discarded coal stoves, a table with a leg missing, and an antique cabinet that might have served as a cupboard. There was a dining table with several stools in a corner.

“Is this a storage area?” she asked.

“No. It was originally a living room, but now it’s a common room-for three or four families living on the same floor, each getting a portion of the space.”

There were several doors along one side of the common room. Chen knocked on the first one. It was answered by an old woman who shuffled out on bound feet.

“You’re looking for Lihua? He’s in the room at the end.”

The door at the end was opened by someone who had heard their footsteps. A man in his mid-forties, tall, lanky, bald, with thick eyebrows and a mustache, wearing a white T-shirt, khaki shorts, rubber-soled sandals, and a tiny bandage on his forehead. He was Wen Lihua.

They entered a room of fifteen or sixteen square meters. Its furnishing bespoke poverty. An old-fashioned bed sported a blue-painted iron headboard still displaying a plastic poster of Chairman Mao waving his hand on top of Tiananmen Gate; the original design on the headboard was no longer recognizable. In the middle of the room was a red-painted table, which bore a plastic pen holder and a bamboo chopsticks container-an indication of the table’s multiple uses. There were a couple of threadbare armchairs. The only thing relatively new was a silver-plated frame holding a picture of a man, a woman, and a couple of kids huddled together behind a collective smile. The picture must have been taken years earlier when Lihua had still had hair combed over his forehead in a rakish way.

“You know why we are here today, Comrade Wen Lihua?” Chen held out his card.

“Yes. It’s about my sister, but that’s all I know. My boss told me to take the day off to help you.” Lihua gestured them to be seated on the chairs around the table and brought over cups of tea. “What has she done?”

“Your sister has not done anything wrong. She has applied for a passport to join her husband in the United States,” Catherine said in Chinese, holding out her identity card.

“Feng’s in the United States?” Lihua scratched his bald head, then added, “Oh, you speak Chinese.”

“My Chinese is not good,” she said. “Chief Inspector Chen will conduct the interview. Don’t worry about me.”

“Inspector Rohn has come here to help,” Chen said. “Your sister has disappeared. We wonder whether she has contacted you.”

“Disappeared! No, she has not contacted me. This is the first time I’ve heard that Feng is there or that she plans to join him.”

“You may not have heard from her recently,” Chen said. “But anything you know about her will help us.”

Catherine took out a mini tape recorder.

“Believe it or not, I have not talked to her for several years,” Lihua sighed deep into his cup. “And she is my only sister.”

Chen offered him a cigarette. “Please go ahead.”

“Where shall I start?”

“Wherever you please.”

“Well, our parents had only the two of us, me and my sister. My mother passed away early. Father brought us up-in this very room. I’m ordinary. Nothing worth talking about. Not now, not then. But she was so different. So pretty, and gifted too. All her elementary-school teachers predicted a bright future for her in socialist China. She sang like a lark, danced like a cloud. People used to say she must have been born under a peach tree.”

“Born under a peach tree?” Catherine asked.

Chen explained, “We describe a girl as beautiful as a peach blossom. There is also a superstitious belief that someone born under a peach tree will grow up to be a beauty.”

“Whether born under a peach tree or not,” Lihua continued with another sigh wreathed in cigarette smoke, “she was born in the wrong year. The Cultural Revolution broke out when she was in sixth grade. She became a Red Guard cadre as well as a leading member of the district song-and-dance ensemble. Schools and companies invited her to appear and sing the revolutionary songs and dance the loyal character dance.”