Don’t Cry, Tai Lake

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    “I wanted to find out whether she’s a regular at that church. She hasn’t read the book, but at least she knew that Moore is a Methodist church.” Chen added pensively, “But there’s also a question that I’ve been thinking about. Why are people capable of doing anything just for the sake of money? A partial answer might be the collapse of the ethical system. Chinese people used to believe in Confucianism, and then in Maoism, but what now? Our newspapers are full of ‘new honors and new shames’ in this new materialistic age. But who believes in them anymore?”
    This might well turn into a lengthy philosophical discussion, which was another characteristic of the inscrutable inspector. Huang had heard about this quirk of Chen’s, but he had no idea how to respond. So instead he excused himself on the grounds of having to hurry back to work. No one knew about his collaboration with Chen, so it wouldn’t be a good idea for him to be away for too long.

EIGHT
    AS THE NIGHT TURNED toward the morning, Chen had a weird dream. He saw himself waking up in the morning as a television weatherman, who shut off an alarm clock and went to work. The nightmare repeated itself over and over: the language of a weather forecast, him speaking in the inevitable tone and manner, before the cameras, morning after morning …
    Finally, he awoke for real and in confusion, reached out to the alarm clock on the nightstand. He then lay back on bed, trying to figure out what the dream signified, before he remembered that it was a scene from an American movie, Groundhog Day, that he’d seen a couple of years ago. But why such a dream would come to him this morning, he had no clue.
    Getting out of bed, he walked to the living room and pushed open the window. The lake was enveloped in a morning mist, with a soft, flutelike sound floating over from the opaque mass. What could it be? He listened for two or three minutes without catching the note again.
    He then moved to the adjoining breakfast room and sat down at the glass-topped breakfast table that he had been using as a desk. He didn’t like the view from the study, though the desk in there was larger. He started reading the new material Huang had faxed over the previous night, making notes for himself.
    Around seven thirty, a young attendant delivered breakfast. Placing the tray on the table, along with the morning’s Wuxi Daily, she withdrew without uttering a single word, lest she break his concentration.
    He sipped at the black coffee, which he hoped would help clear his head, taking in the pleasant smell of the fresh-baked goods in the room. He left the croissants and fruit cup untouched, to eat later, during a break, along with a second cup of coffee. It was a sort of routine that he had set up here, a working pattern during his vacation.
    Like the weatherman in the movie, he had been playing a role too much, and now it was beginning to play him, in the ever-recurring pattern from the dream, a dream from which he’d had such a hard time waking up.
    He was playing a role at the center, that of a hardworking Party cadre, the same role that everybody else here was playing.
    Sergeant Huang had agreed to play Dr. Watson to Chen’s Sherlock Holmes, though Huang had been going out of his way to do much more than that.
    The latest information from the young cop highlighted the noose that was being tightened around Jiang’s neck by Internal Security. They had gathered a bunch of new statements from local businessmen, who had sworn that Jiang had blackmailed them with threats that he would expose their problems.
    But Chen didn’t give their statements too much credit. They could have sworn to any wild story suggested by Internal Security. Jiang being a threat to their business practice, they would naturally cooperate, seizing upon it as a god-sent opportunity to get rid of him. It was difficult to rule out the blackmail scenario, but there didn’t seem to be anything firsthand for the police to work with, for instance, a recording of Jiang’s conversations with those businesspeople.
    When he finally put down the folder, Chen tried to shift his mental focus by recreating on a piece of paper the crime scene scenario being pushed by Internal Security. But a number of details didn’t fit. Supposing Liu and Jiang were having a face-to-face negotiation, and a fight broke out. If so, there should have been some signs of struggle at the scene. Liu would have fought back