The Mao Case

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.”

    Internal Security might not easily swallow that story, but it was basically true. There wasn’t much they could do about a
     retired cop.
    Chen wasn’t that concerned about himself. He had been authorized