“What the hell is he talking about?” Old Hunter grunted. “The rise and fall of the devil, I say.”
“He’s quoting again,” Chen said, recognizing the lines from another poem written in Mao’s youth, which was perhaps less well known. But Hua’s speech was a passionate defense of Mao – and self-justification, as well.
But it was a defense made in the most grotesque way, with him lying stark naked on his back, mouthing those heroic lines, waving his arm in a style, fashioned after Mao’s – as in the picture beneath him. It was a weird juxtaposition too, not just of Mao and Hua, but of so many things – past and present, personal and not personal. Chen had a hard time fighting off the impulse to kick the hell out of Hua and all that was behind him. It was then that an idea hit the chief inspector.
He flipped out a cigarette for Old Hunter, lit it, and then another one for himself, flicking away the ashes, as if too contemptuous to cast another look at the prostrate figure on the floor.
“The bastard’s utterly lost in the spring and autumn dream of being Mao. But he’s not worth a little finger, a little hair, a little fucking peanut of Mao. He should pee hard, and see his own ludicrous reflection in it.”
“What do you mean?” Hua snarled.
“You’re no match for ordinary cops.” Chen turned round, his finger still tapping the cigarette. “How can a pathetic bastard like you ever delude yourself into being Mao?”
“You were just lucky, you devious son of a bitch, but the other cop had no such luck.”
“But Song didn’t even suspect you,” Chen pressed on, taking a shot in the dark. “You barked up at the wrong tree.”
“He came to me for information about her; he was nosing around. How could I let him get away with that? Any leniency toward your enemy is a crime to your comrade.”
Liu had said that Song was only conducting a routine interview, but Hua panicked. To a cold-blooded man like Hua, like Mao, it was logical to prevent scrutiny by killing Song. Chen surmised that Hua, in order to hang on to his illusion of being Mao, didn’t hesitate to confirm that, if nothing else, at least he could kill as ruthlessly as Mao.
“Any leniency toward your enemy is a crime to your comrade,” Old Hunter repeated, imitating Mao’s Hunan accent with his brows in a knot. “That’s the Mao quotation we used to sing like a morning Prayer at the bureau during the years of the proletarian dictatorship. But I can’t make him out, Chief. This bastard keeps talking and quoting as if he had a tape of the Little Red Book playing in his head.”
“He has played Mao so much, he has become Mao incarnate. When Song’s investigation posed a potential threat to him, he simply had him killed. It was the same way that Mao got rid of his rivals using one ‘Party Line Struggle’ after another.”
“I am Mao!” Hua screamed. “Now do you finally understand?”
“You’re talking in your dreams,” Chen sneered. “How could you even come close to the shadow of Mao? For one thing, Mao had many women devoted to him, heart, body, and soul. ‘Chairman Mao is big – in everything!’ Think about it. Many years after his death, Madam Mao committed suicide for his ‘revolutionary cause.’ You may quote Mao, but do you have anyone loyal to you? Wang Anshi put it so well: ‘Lord of Xiang is a hero after all, / having a beauty die wholeheartedly for him.’ What about you? You couldn’t even win the heart of a little concubine.”
“You bastard,” Hua hissed through his clenched teeth, groaning savagely, his eyes darting back and forth like a trapped animal. “Don’t fart.”
“Don’t fart your Mao fart,” Old Hunter butted in.
“Don’t fart” was a notorious line in a poem published by Mao in his last days, by which time he believed he could put whatever he liked to say into poetry. People joked about it after his death.
“Jiao might have shared the bed with you, but nothing else,” Chen went on. “Like the old saying, she dreamed different dreams on the same bed with you. You didn’t know anything about her.”
“What the hell do you know?”
“A lot, and you’re completely in the dark. Like her passion, her dreams, her future plans, we talked about them for hours in the garden and over a candle light dinner at Madam Chiang’s house. Let me just give you a small example; her sketch of a broom-riding witch over the Forbidden City.” Chen paused in deliberate derision, attempting to drive Hua past mere fury. What was sustaining Hua was only the alter ego of Mao that he’d created and to which he had to cling at any cost. What Chen wanted to find out was if Jiao had given him any inkling of the real Mao material – hidden in the broom head or anywhere else. Pushed hard enough, he might be tempted to divulge that knowledge, like his adamission that he had Song murdered. “It’s so symbolic, surrealistic, with something hidden behind the surface -”
“Shut up, pig! You fell hard for her, really head over heels. You tried so hard to charm her with a candle light dinner, with all your literary mumble and jumble, symbolic or not, but you didn’t get her, not a hair of her. To show her loyalty, she swore to me she would stop seeing you altogether. Oh, to the song of ‘Internationale’ tragic and high, / a hurricane comes for me from the sky!”
His reaction was that of a wounded lover-emperor, proving that he knew nothing about the Mao material, about the broom head.
“If I couldn’t have her, neither could you or anybody else!” Hua went heatedly, spittle flying from his mouth. “You’re too late. She betrayed me and she had to die.”
With the pressure from the investigation and with his insane jealousy, fear that she might leave him for another man drove Hua over the edge. He strangled her not so much to stop her shouting as from a subconscious resolve to let no one else have her. Again, that was Mao’s logic, an emperor’s logic. As in ancient times, the palace ladies had to remain single, “untouched,” even after the emperor’s death.
“You bastard of Mao!” Old Hunter exclaimed.
“Now,” Hua said, raising himself up on one elbow, “let me tell you guys something.
“I succeed, and I’m the emperor,” he said, his face lit with enraged dignity as he suddenly jumped up to his feet, balancing himself and pivoting around, all in a lightning flash of movement, “you fail, and you’re the murderers.”
It was an unexpected move, fast, furious, catching them by surprise. He must have recovered during the phone call and the subsequent talk. Hair flying, he flung himself forward and swung out with his right arm. A tall, stout man, he bulled past them with a momentum that sent Old Hunter reeling backward against the wall. Sprinting to the living room, he swerved in the direction of the long scroll of Li Bai’s poem on the wall.
It was a turn Chen hadn’t anticipated. He thought he glimpsed something like a door behind the scroll, but in the semi-darkness he wasn’t sure. Cursing, he took after Hua, who was dashing like a dart. But then suddenly Hua stumbled and swayed with a blood-chilling yell, having stamped his foot down on the dustpan full of splintered glass Jiao had set down.
Chen took a stride over and clubbed him with the edge of one hand. The blow cracked on Hua’s head, reopening the wound inflicted by the portrait of Mao. Bleeding, Hua went down, banging his head against the corner of the dining table. He stared up, shook violently as if having a nightmare, and lost consciousness again, still making a blurred sound in his throat.
“Idiot!” Old Hunter hurried over and bent back Hua’s arms, hand-cuffing the unconscious man. “Now what, Chief Inspector Chen? Internal Security is coming any minute. What are we supposed to say to them?”
“We’ll play our roles – You’re retired, of course, and happened to be patrolling around the area tonight. When you heard the noise, you rushed up. Naturally, you know nothing about the Mao Case – about the case.”