Enigma of China Read Free Page A

was no point in getting to the hotel before the homicide squad.

TWO
    The Moller Villa Hotel was one of the so-called elite hotels in Shanghai. It stood on the corner of Yan’an and Shanxi Road and was meticulously preserved because of its history.
    Eric Moller, a businessman who had made his fortune through horse- and dog-racing in Shanghai, had the fairy-tale-like mansion built in the thirties. It was designed in accordance with a dream of his young daughter. It turned out to be an architectural fantasy. It sported a northern European style, with Asian elements blended in, such as glazed tiles, colorful bricks, and even a crouching-tiger-shaped attic window, like those commonly seen in Shanghai shikumen. After 1949, it was used as a government office. Eventually the mansion was turned into an elite hotel, at which point it was completely redecorated and refurbished, its interior design and original details painstakingly restored. A new building in the same style was added next to it.
    Chen must have passed by this corner numerous times, but he’d never paid any real attention to it, despite its recent rediscovery in the collective nostalgia that gripped the city.
    Two uniformed security men guarded the entrance, standing alongside a pair of crouching stone lions.
    He walked in and through to building B, located at the back. This was the new building made in fastidious imitation of the original, a three-story red brick villa with arched attic windows. Another uniformed security man sitting at a desk asked Chen to show his ID. The guard looked up at Chen, at the ID picture, then recorded the ID number in a register and made a phone call to someone inside before letting him pass.
    The atmosphere of a fairy castle seemed to be completely lacking.
    “Room 302,” the security man said. “They’re waiting for you.”
    Chen went up to the third floor, which consisted of only six attic rooms, each sporting an art deco window in the original style. He stopped in front of room 302 and knocked on the door. Detective Wei opened the door for him, holding a mobile phone in his hand. There were two others, neither of them from the police department.
    Chen hadn’t worked with Detective Wei before, though they had known each other for a long time. A hard-working cop, practical and experienced, Wei hadn’t had an easy time in his career, and on occasion Wei apparently spoke less than highly of Chen’s work.
    “This is Comrade Jiang Ke, of the Shanghai city government,” Wei said, introducing a wiry man in his late forties or early fifties with a disproportionately wide forehead. “And this is Comrade Liu Dehua, of the Party Discipline Committee.”
    Chen shook hands with both of them. Jiang was the deputy director of the city government, known as a shrewd, scheming man and one of the most powerful confidants of Qiangyu, the first Party secretary of Shanghai. Liu was an elderly-looking man, short, feeble, bald, and with a slight suggestion of a limp. He seemed to be more self-effacing by contrast, possibly because he’d already reached retirement age.
    Behind them was the body of Zhou, which had been taken down from a noose dangling from an exposed ceiling beam. His face looked distorted, his mouth twisted as if in a sinister final question never to be answered, one eye still slightly open. Judging from the rigor mortis in Zhou’s body, Chen guessed the time of death was late last night.
    It was ironic, Chen observed, that in a city in which it was extremely difficult to find an exposed beam from which to hang oneself, Zhou happened to be detained in one of the few rooms with original beams “preserved” in the old style.
    It’s not you that chose the beam, / but the beam chose you. A couple of lines came echoing out of nowhere, but Chen failed to recall the author.
    What thoughts would have come across Zhou’s mind at the sight of the rope dangling in the last minutes of his life? It wasn’t hard to understand the rationale