A Case of Two Cities

arrived at the room in question, the door was locked, with no light coming out of it. At Lou’s insistence, the night manager took out a key, opened the door, and turned on the light.
     
    The light outlined a sordid scene. On a sofa bed lay two naked bodies, their legs still entwined like fried dough sticks. A middle-aged man with gray-streaked hair and long hairy limbs slept next to a young girl, thin, ill-developed, perhaps only seventeen or eighteen, with slack breasts and a broad patch of black hair over her groin. The room stank of sex and other suspicious odors. The glaring light failed to wake them up.
     
    Walking over to the bed with a frown, Lou shoved the man on the shoulder. When the man showed no sign of response, Lou leaned down and was shocked to find him dead. The girl slept on, a luscious smile playing on her lips, her hand resting on his cold belly.
     
    A more stunning discovery came to Lou. The dead man was none other than Detective Hua Ting, the head of the special case squad of the Fujian Police. Impulsively, Lou grabbed a blanket to cover the body before he pulled back the dead man’s eyelid—a bloodshot eye stared back at him with an unfathomable message. The corneas were not exactly opaque, which suggested that the death was recent. He turned to pick up Hua’s clothing, which was scattered on the ground, and felt something bulging in the pants pocket. It was a pack of cigarettes, Flying Horse.
     
    Across the room, the girl finally stirred and awoke. Opening her eyes, she appeared terrified. She jumped up, fell down, and tossed her head from side to side, her naked body twitching like a rice-paddy eel. Lou then realized that he should take pictures of the crime scene.
     
    “Don’t move,” he shouted, holding the camera while she broke into a hysterical fit of screaming and squirming. The pictures might truly be stuff for the Fujian Star. He would never do that, though. Hua had been one of his trainers upon his entrance into the police.
     
    “The eighteenth level down in hell, rats and snakes,” she sobbed, like she was still struggling in a nightmare, her eyes vacant. “Old Third, I want to cut your damned bird to a thousand pieces. A small sip, like a teardrop. Never seen him. Never known him.”
     
    Getting anything coherent from her was out of the question. Lou had to call the bureau. This was a scandalous case, and the bureau might be anxious to control the damage to its public image, especially since corrupt cops had started to appear on Chinese TV series. No one seemed to be immune, incorrigible, in the age of Inebriating Money and Intoxicating Gold, even a veteran officer like Hua. Lou decided to make a phone call to the bureau head, Ren Jiaye. It was a long call, and Lou came to an abrupt stop toward the end of his report.
     
    “What’s wrong?” Ren asked.
     
    Something disturbed him. Lou recalled the case assigned to Hua— “China’s number one corruption case,” as described in the People’s Daily. It was an investigation of Xing Xing, a high-ranking Fujian Party cadre and business tycoon with an empire of smuggling operations under him, run through his connections at all government levels. To be exact, it was an investigation of the corrupt officials connected with Xing since Xing had fled the country. But it was only a hunch of the moment, Lou thought, and he did not mention it to the bureau head.
     
    Finishing his report, Lou hung up with the bureau and dug out Hua’s home number. He hesitated. He started pacing about the room, the girl sobbing like a broken electronic flute, and Pang still standing like a terra cotta figure in a Tang tomb.
     
    Lou tried to rehearse what he was going to say to Hua’s widow, but it was a daunting task. He finally decided to wait until the next morning. To his surprise, a group from Internal Security, headed by Commander Zhu Longhua, arrived at the scene in less than twenty minutes. The appearance of Internal Security, trusted by the Party authorities in circumstances of “highly political sensitivity,” made sense—the dead was a cop possibly involved in a sex scandal—but their speediness was amazing, especially since it was already after midnight. Internal Security lost no time taking over. Without even listening to his report about the crime scene, they ordered Lou out as they started searching, questioning, and shooting pictures in the room.
     
    Shoved out of the room by Internal Security, Lou and Pang were