The Mao Case

subconsciously,
untold and previously unknown to the public. If Old Hunter could manage to dig out the personal stuff behind Mao’s poem to
     Kaihui, Chen should be able to do a better job, given his training in literary criticism.
    So he really did have some urgent business to take care of, as he had told Jiao, before joining her for dinner. He turned
     onto a side street, taking a short cut to the subway station, where, in a medium-sized bookstore in the underground mall,
     he would start searching for all the books about Mao’s poems, like a devoted Maoist.

EIGHT
    DETECTIVE YU WOKE EARLY Sunday morning and reached for his wife Peiqin, but she wasn’t in bed beside him. Probably shopping, he guessed. She would
     usually go to the market early on Sunday morning.
    He thought he heard a muffled sound outside the door. The building was old and housed many families — it was likely some residents
     were already up and moving. He didn’t get up. Reaching for a cigarette, he went over in his mind what he had done for the
     last few days.
    With the Party’s emphasis on “a harmonious society,” the bureau suddenly had a new focus. Several cases were assigned to the
     special case squad, temporarily under Yu during Chen’s leave. Those cases didn’t seem that special to Yu, but Party Secretary
     Li saw them in a different light. For instance, the squad was told to keep an eye on a “troublemaking” journalist who tried
     to expose the officials involved, directly or even indirectly, in a corruption case. Li’s lecture for the job was delivered
     in the name of “political stability” as a precondition for the “harmonious society,” condemning the journalist’s efforts,
     which could
cause people to lose their faith in the Party. Yu didn’t have his heart in those assignments. Keeping an eye on someone didn’t
     necessarily mean seeing something, or doing something, as he told himself again, taking a long pull at his cigarette.
    His mind wandered off to the unannounced “vacation” for Chief Inspector Chen. It wasn’t the first time Chen had taken such
     a vacation, but it was the first time he had done so without saying anything about it to Yu. On the contrary, Chen had contacted
     Yu’s father, Old Hunter, instead.
    According to the retired officer, Chen’s decision was utterly understandable. Too much risk was involved. “Some knowledge
     can really kill, son.”
    But Yu felt terribly let down. He should have been told about what kind of an assignment it was. He had worked with Chen on
     many cases, weathering storms in the same boat. What was more frustrating was that even Old Hunter begrudged him the necessary
     information, hemming and hawing while trying to enlist him to help. And even that was only because of Yu’s personal connection
     to Hong, the neighborhood committee cop in charge of the Jiling district. Old Hunter had likely already approached Hong without
     success. So it was up to Yu to do a background check on someone named Tan who had once lived in the district. In addition,
     Yu was told to be alert to anything seen or heard at the bureau regarding Internal Security.
    Hong had also been an “educated youth” in Yunnan Province and had joined the Shanghai police force around the same time as
     Yu. They had known each other for more than twenty years. Hong cooperated without asking a single question, but the information
     he provided only mystified Yu.
    In the mid-seventies, Tan, the only son of a capitalist family, tried to sneak across the border to Hong Kong in the company
     of his girlfriend Qian, also of black family background. They were caught making the attempt. Tan was so badly beaten that
     he killed himself, leaving a note in which he shouldered all the responsibility, trying to shelter his girlfriend from the
     consequences of their act. It was an unquestioned
suicide, and an understandable one too. For such a “crime,” Tan could have spent his next twenty or thirty years rotting in
     prison.
    Tan’s parents died shortly thereafter. Qian died a couple of years later. A sad story, but how someone who had died twenty
     years ago could have any bearing on Chen’s assignment today, Yu failed to understand.
    He didn’t stop there, though. He went on to look into the background of Peng, another lover of Qian’s. The initial check yielded
     little. In those years, it was a crime for people to have sex without a marriage license, and Peng was sentenced to five