“Mao” jerked up and jumped off Jiao. Swinging, he snatched up something from the nightstand and hurled it at Chen. But for Chen’s lurch, it might have hit its target. Instead, it missed and smashed against the window, breaking through the glass with a loud crash.
Chen was shocked at the sight of “Mao” – it was none other than Hua, the real estate tycoon he had seen earlier that afternoon at the cocktail party. There Hua had spoken with a strong Beijing accent.
Struggling to regain his balance, Chen countered by lashing out with the knife in his hand. Hua dodged violently, his body hitting Mao’s picture above the headboard.
What happened next came close to an absurd slow-motion scene in a horror movie. It appeared as if the picture of Mao had come to life. It groaned, shivered, and crashed hard on Hua’s head, with all the weight of its heavy metal frame.
“Mao -” Hua swayed, stared in disbelief, slumped back on the bed, and lost consciousness.
Chen rushed over in two strides and shoved Hua’s body off of Jiao. She lay still on the rumpled sheet, her body spread-eagled, cold, and ghastly against the flickering night-light. He touched her throat. No pulse.
How long it had been, he had no idea, suffering a sudden, overwhelming nausea in his whole being.
He was reaching for the cell phone when Hua’s body jolted up in a ferocious motion before rolling off the bed with a thud, again cracking against the fractured Mao portrait on the floor.
His fingers touching the phone seemed to signal the abrupt footsteps running outside along the corridor, and then conjured up a loud pounding on the door.
“Open the door! Police Patrol.”
It was Old Hunter, who was inserting a key into the lock.
THIRTY
“OH – CHIEF INSPECTOR CHEN!” Old Hunter bumped in, panting. “I was patrolling on the street when I heard a crash and saw a black object flying out of the window. Is something wrong -”
He cut himself short at the sight of the naked body on the bed – Jiao, lying stiff, still – and then the other one, a naked man on the floor, sprawling over a splintered portrait of Mao.
The utter disarray of the room was presented in ghastly somberness, with only the tiny night-light flickering in the corner. The clothes of the two bodies were scattered around. There was a chunk of plaster on the bedsheet that had fallen from the wall above the headboard. A pocketknife glittered beside the rumpled pillow. A broom lay not too far away, sticking out of an open closet, pointing to the bed.
How did Chen come to be in the midst of all that?
Chen looked distraught, his eyes bloodshot, his hair disheveled, and his T-shirt and pants crumpled and soiled, as if he had been just released from a prison cell. Old Hunter knew that Chen had just come back that morning on the night train from Beijing.
However, nothing about the eccentric chief inspector would be surprising.
“I’m calling for an ambulance,” Chen said, producing his cell phone.
Feeling for a pulse on her ankle, Old Hunter said, shaking his head, “It’s too late, Chief. Who’s the man?”
“His name is Hua. They had a fight. She started shouting, and he tried to stop her -”
“So he strangled her -” Old Hunter didn’t finish the sentence, wondering where Chen had been at the time. He checked to see if the man on the floor was breathing. There was a thin trail of blood congealing along his temple, but he breathed evenly. “He’s alive.”
“I let myself into the apartment and was looking around. Then they came back unexpectedly – no, Jiao arrived first, and then Hua, possibly through a secret door. So I had to hide in the closet. I couldn’t see and I could hardly hear.”
Old Hunter turned on the lamp on the nightstand. The light glared on her white body, which had a purplish bruise around her shoulders and neck. Her breasts were flat and appeared unbruised, yet bore something like a bite mark. There were no other outward signs of sex – no semen around the genitals, thighs, or in the black pubic hair. Her large eyes remained open, staring. The corneas were not yet cloudy, a sign of a recent death. Her fingernails had hardly lost their pinkish color.
Chen picked up her crumpled dress and covered her in silence.
Technically, they should wait for the arrival of the detectives from the homicide squad or Internal Security before touching anything, Old Hunter thought, shifting his glance toward the closet.
“I should have come -” Again he left the sentence unfinished. A couple of minutes earlier? He was outside on the street, unaware of the situation here. As in an old saying, the water’s too far away for the fire close at hand. Still, he didn’t want to sound too critical of Chen. It could have been hard for Chen to judge the situation in the room while hiding in the closet. “But you subdued him.”
“When I became aware that something was terribly wrong, I jumped out of the closet. He hurled the cinerary casket of Shang at me. It was empty except for a picture of Shang inside. Then, in an effort to dodge my attack, he caused the Mao portrait to fall and hit him on the head with the full weight of the metal frame.”
“Mao’s spirit worked,” Old Hunter murmured, shuddering at the realization. He didn’t really believe in the supernatural, but there was something so unbelievable about the case. It was almost like those Suzhou operas. “Hua killed Shang’s granddaughter under his portrait, and Mao knocked him out. Mao’s not dead.”
“Mao’s not dead – you can say that again.”
“But how did Jiao and Hua get together?”
“Here’s what I think,” Chen said. “Hua learned about her family history while she was working as a receptionist at his company. He then overwhelmed her with his Big Buck advances, buying her the apartment and everything else, cutting a ‘little concubine’ deal with her. He did all that, however, not because of her, but because of Shang, her grandmother.”
“I’m totally lost, Chen. It’s even more mind-boggling than a Suzhou opera ghost story. Shang died so many years ago. Is Hua such a crazy fan of hers?”
“No, he fell for Jiao because of Shang’s affair with Mao. I should have made that clear.”
“So – Hua fucking Jiao was like a parallel of Mao fucking Shang. Is that what you mean?”
“It’s more than that. By sleeping with Jiao – Shang’s granddaughter – Hua turns himself into Mao. He started talking like Mao, thinking like Mao, living like Mao, and fucking like Mao too.”
“But Hua is a Big Buck. He could have girls like Jiao and live like an emperor – like Mao too. Why all the bother, Chief?”
“Being Mao gave Hua a meaning he had never known before. In terms of the cultural unconscious, it’s the emperor archetype – Son of Heaven, with the divine mandate and power, all the emperor’s men and women. That’s why Hua was so panic-stricken about the possibility of losing Jiao, a woman he didn’t really care for. Consciously, she was nothing to him. But in his subconscious, Jiao was everything.”
“Leaving your psychological jargon aside, he’s devil-possessed. He has fucked his brains out! He must have watched too many movies about Mao and the emperors. He’s totally crazy.”
“It’s sheer craziness, but for such a split personality, it makes sense. Jiao provided the mechanism for him to switch into Mao, so he couldn’t afford to let anyone know about their relationship. That led to a hell of secrecy: adjoining apartments, a secret door from his apartment into hers – somewhere in the living room, I believe – and financial transactions too. After she quit her job, he no longer was seen in her company, but he kept seeing her in secret. That’s how you caught a glimpse of them by the window the other night.”
“I’m still confounded, Chief. That bastard is crazy – why would Jiao have played Shang for him?”