A Case of Two Cities

“Thank you so much for the lunch. I have heard your name before, Chief Inspector Chen. No free lunch in the way of the world, I know. You are a busy man with a lot of questions. So go ahead.”
     
    “Did Director Jiang use your car last night?”
     
    “No, Jiang didn’t request the car service last night. I was at a wedding. My friend’s daughter got married at Yanyun Pavilion.” Lai took a picture out of his wallet. “Look at the picture. What a grand wedding. Twenty-five tables altogether. And an impressive array of luxury cars. The bride had an uncle coming in a Mercedes, and they insisted on my driving the Lexus there too.”
     
    Chen took a glance at the picture. The date was imprinted on the right corner of it. No mistake about the date. The part about luxury cars also sounded true. It was an age when being rich meant being glorious. For a wedding, people would show off their wealth in whatever way possible.
     
    “Let me ask you a different question. Does Director Jiang use your car all the time?”
     
    “Theoretically, my job is from eight to five, but as you know, there’re a lot of dinner parties in the evening. To be fair to Jiang, he makes a point of discussing his schedule with me. So like today, I took my wife to hospital in the morning. And he gives me twenty extra hours every month. That helps.”
     
    “So he uses your car all the time—late into the night?”
     
    “For really personal business,” Lai said slowly, “Director Jiang does not always request my service. Taxis are available outside that famous subdivision of his—Riverside Villas. It takes too much time for me to get there.”
     
    “I see. Does he ever drive himself?”
     
    “No, he doesn’t. So he doesn’t have the car parked in his subdivision. It saves me one and half hours of taking bus home, the tunnel is usually terrible with traffic congestion.”
     
    But that didn’t necessarily mean Jiang stayed at home last night. In fact, Chen himself didn’t request car service all the time either. For his visit to the bathhouse, for instance, or his date at Golden Island. As a fast-rising Party cadre, he had to be careful about his image. He thought he detected a slightly sarcastic note in Lai’s emphasis on “really personal business.”
     
    “One more question—what is his schedule for the day?”
     
    “He’s going to Qingpu in the afternoon. Then there will be a dinner party there. I don’t think I will make it back until after ten. Is there something you want to talk to him about today?”
     
    “No, I’ve finished all my questions. The last one was really for the duck bones. You’d better keep them in a refrigerator if you’re going back home so late.”
     
    “I see. Yes, there’s a refrigerator in the office.”
     
    “That’ll be great. To make the duck bone soup, you have to cook them over a small fire for two hours at least, I think, until the soup turns milky white. You can add some cucumber slices into the soup with a handful of black peppers,” Chen said, pushing open the door. “It’s been a wonderful lunch, Lai. I don’t think you need to mention it to anybody. Bye.”
     
    “Bye. Chief—” Lai reached out of the car, a piece of duck in his hand and puzzlement in his eyes. It could have appeared like a free lunch to him, an inexplicable one. Chen did not think Lai would talk to Jiang about it.
     
    Chen then hailed a taxi, telling the driver to go to Riverside Villas in Pudong.
     
    “Go through the tunnel?” the driver said.
     
    “Yes,” Chen said. “It’s quicker.”
     
    “Perhaps, if there’s no traffic.”
     
    Pudong had once been a largely rural area east of the Huangpu River, with a few old factories interspersed here and there. In his days of English studies at Bund Park, the view across the river was mostly an expanse of somber-colored farmland. There was a popular saying at the time, he remembered: A bed west of the river is better than a room east of the river. At the end of the eighties, however, the city government began a tremendous effort to turn Pudong into the Wall Street of Asia, declaring it a special zone and offering attractive government policies for foreign investment. The landscape soon underwent a fundamental change; new buildings shot up, and housing prices soared to the skies.
     
    Chen had heard of the Riverside Villas. It was one of the most expensive new residential areas in Shanghai, bordering on the eastern bank of the Huangpu and