After the third ‘bottoms up,’ Hou appeared to be a little tipsy, at least with his tongue much loosened.

  ‘Chief Inspector Chen, you really should have stayed in the police bureau – I mean, in addition to your current position. I’ve raised the point in my report to the city government.’

  ‘It’s almost an anticlimax,’ Jin said, sipping at a cup of rippling Australian red wine. ‘The murder of Doctor Wu turned out to be unrelated to the first two murders. Not even a copycat murder. And it has been solved so quickly, and so easily, too. Just a visit to the Red Dust Neighborhood Committee. And a couple of phone calls afterward.’

  ‘You’re truly the ace inspector in charge of the investigation, Director Chen,’ Hou said. ‘Now, some good news from the city government, too. They’ve entrusted us with full powers to check the hospital’s surveillance system. They’ll also tell the hospital people concerned that they have to cooperate fully with us. As for the official announcement of the investigation breakthrough, they agree with us that it should wait for a couple of days. Hopefully, we may be able, as Director Chen has said, to bring a close to the whole investigation then.

  ‘What’s more, the mayor told me that under the present circumstances, we can do whatever is needed without having to worry about the proper procedures.’

  ‘Anything is possible?’

  ‘Yes, anything. In the case of Big-headed Wu, for instance, he may have been helped by other family members, and his accomplices must spill the facts completely. We can use whatever methods we think fit, so that the statement, when it comes out, will be really detailed and convincing.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘We’re in the same boat, Director Chen. I remember one of your favorite quotes: “There’re things a man will do, and things a man will not do.”’

  ‘Yes, that’s what Confucius says.’

  ‘I know, and there’re things I will never do in your company, Director Chen.’

  Chen thought he knew what Hou meant by that. The people above wanted Hou not only to work with the former chief inspector but also to watch over him, and to report about his movements, every step of the way.

  ‘So what’s our next step?’

  A slippery piece of sea cucumber was falling from Jin’s chopsticks, diving back into the golden urn of Buddha Jumping Over, the delicious golden soup splashing out.

  ‘You still have nothing new from the hospital?’ Chen asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘So you’ll have to go to the hospital by yourself early tomorrow morning, Hou?’

  Hou looked up, blinking, as if wondering what could have been up Chen’s sleeve.

  ‘There appear to be some pieces still missing from the whole puzzle, not necessarily just concerning the late Doctor Wu,’ Chen said slowly. ‘So I’ll be working on something in the hotel first.’

  ‘You stay and help Director Chen in the hotel, Jin. And you two may come to join me in the hospital whenever you like.’

  Day 6

  The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

  – Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Oh the mellow wine shimmering

  in the luminous stone cup!

  I am going to drink

  on the horse when

  the army Pipa suddenly starts,

  urging me to charge out.

  Oh, do not laugh, my friend,

  if I drop dead

  drunk in the battlefield.

  How many soldiers

  have come back home?

  – Wang Han

  An anonymous post popped up online demanding an independent investigation into the possible origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan. It’s a post that totally stunned the Netcops and the people above them. Usually, the Netcops could have checked out the IP address of a post in no time, but as it turned out, it had been posted by someone in an Internet café just before closing time. The suspect in question had used an ID card which had been reported lost. In accordance with the Internet café’s regulations, all the visitors as well as its staff had to put on their face masks, and the suspect in question wore a pair of dark amber-tinted eye shields as well as a large face mask. So the surveillance cameras drew a blank.

  The netizen declared at the end of the post, ‘I’m not a doctor or virologist. The pandemic broke out first in the Wuhan wet market. It was officially confirmed, though later somewhat retracted. With the Wuhan Virology Lab being so close to the wet market, common people like me cannot but raise common-sense questions. Among them, could some leak from the lab have caused the Covid outbreak in the market? What was the purpose of the virus experiments in the Wuhan lab? Especially the experiments on bats, which have been commonly known as the source of the SARS virus. And why did the Beijing government not allow the international scientists to do an independent investigation in Wuhan? The Chinese scientists concerned vehemently denied the possibility that they bore any responsibility for the virus, but they should have been aware of the disastrous outcome in the event of a virus being leaked out of the lab.

  ‘The government has failed to give any satisfactory answers to these questions. The CCP’s spokesperson invariably gave a set of rehearsed answers, such as: these questions have no scientific basis, but are driven by the ulterior motives and political bias from the West.

  ‘In short, instead of letting scientists do an independent, thorough investigation about the origin of the Covid in Wuhan, the CCP government simply repeated empty political clichés. Anyone saying anything different has been crushed like an ant.’

  – The Wuhan File

  Hou skipped breakfast in the hotel canteen.

  So did Chen.

  Jin was busy making phone calls home.

  Buried under a sudden avalanche of information, Chen was cudgeling his brain. For once, he lit a cigarette in his room. He had quit smoking for months, but he thought he had a sort of rationalization for smoking today. It was a matter of life and death.

  The hotel was getting packed with more special teams from the city government. Each of them seemed to have their own secret missions. Hurried footsteps could be heard moving along the corridors. Somebody was cursing in a husky voice.

  The door of his room was suddenly opened, and Jin slid in without knocking. Aware of him apparently being lost in thought, she started to hang his clothes properly in the cabinet. Frowning at the smoke rising from his fingers, she refrained from saying anything at first, but she then plucked the cigarette away. It was a tacit understanding between them. She was his ‘little secretary.’ For the other team members, what their intimacy could have meant was not difficult to guess. In their imaginations, anything was possible.

  ‘Here is the material Molong has sent to me – for you. It’s some pictures from the surveillance cameras. I’ve just glanced through them.’

  ‘Surveillance in China is omnipresent and omnipotent,’ Chen commented with a touch of sarcasm. ‘You can certainly say that’s another advantage of Chinese socialism. No human being, no virus, could escape the invisible Heaven and Earth Net.’

  ‘As you have requested, here are the images of the first patient suspected of Covid infection in the hospital. It was later discovered to be a false alarm, due to an inaccurate test. He’s a man in his mid-thirties named Zhou Guoqiang. During his days as a Covid suspect, he went through a horrible “human flesh hunting” experience, with all his movements for the previous two weeks ferreted out by Big Whites, who combed through the state surveillance system. Any places or people in possible close contact with him, however brief, were gathered into a long list. The list was then published in official newspapers.’

  ‘What happened to Zhou then?’

  ‘With all his movements reported in the newspapers, people inevitably started speculating and pointing the finger. For instance, his visits to a foot massage salon. It’s true that the government has issued business licenses to these salons, but it’s also common knowledge that in the so-called private rooms, those young girls sometimes massage more than feet.

  ‘In reaction to the list, which stirred up waves of condemnation in his neighborhood, Zhou put up posts protesting, arguing that the official lists about people’s whereabouts robbed them of their privacy. That infuriated the officials in the city government, who would never tolerate such protests. They then edited the pictures taken in the massage salon, made them more suggestive in the shadowy, dimly lit atmosphere, and posted them online anonymously. That, of course, brought cruel humiliation to Zhou and his family. It was said that he got into a fight with his pregnant wife An because of it.’

  ‘The hospital should have told Hou all this earlier.’

  ‘Cover-up, period.’ She then added in haste, ‘One more thing. According to Molong, something happened to Zhou’s pregnant wife about a couple of weeks later. Her waters broke earlier than expected, but she was barred from admission into Renji Hospital. Not because of Zhou being on some government blacklist, but because she hadn’t had a Covid test done during the previous twenty-four hours. Alas, the situation’s eerily like my father’s.’

  ‘What!’ Chen said.

  But a phone call burst into the heat of their discussion.

  As Chen reached out to pick up the hotel phone, he felt Jin’s warm breath touching his face. It was Hou, who was calling him from the hospital.

  ‘Anything new, Hou?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing really new, Director Chen. But the emergency room staff told me something about Nurse Huang on the night shift. Huang appeared to be so inexperienced as a nurse that the patients and their families were losing patience with her, and they started complaining, cursing, pushing, and almost coming to blows among each other. That’s why she only worked for one night there.’

  ‘She wasn’t an emergency room nurse to begin with,’ Chen said. ‘It wasn’t her fault. Not to mention the fact that it was such a chaotic mess at the hospital.’

  ‘With so many doctors and nurses exhausted or quarantined, it’s not easy for the hospital to spare a nurse – whether experienced or not – to sit at the emergency room desk and receive the patients,’ Hou said.

  ‘But hold on, Hou. Do you have the video of that night, with Nurse Huang sitting at the entrance of the emergency room?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got it in the surveillance room, but I’ve not started watching it yet.’

  ‘You wait for us there,’ Chen said with a sudden urgency in his voice. ‘We’re coming over now.’

  Jin was taking out his overcoat for him when he said to her, ‘Can you print some pictures of Zhou from Molong’s material? Enlarged pictures. As clear as possible.’

  ‘Yes, I can ask the front desk for help,’ she said, puzzlement written on her face.

  ‘Great. Spare no expense. Indeed, you’re my most capable secretary, Jin.’

  Holding a large envelope of pictures in her hand, Jin followed Chen into the hospital, still confused by him jumping from one idea to another. As in his modernist poetry, perhaps.

  The hospital surveillance room was installed with an impressive array of cameras and monitors, capable of watching from multiple perspectives. Some of them were focusing on one particular area, some of them were shifting from one area to another, and some of them were zooming in on any suspicious images against the somber background of the hospital …

  There were at least sixty or seventy surveillance monitors, with their views flashing on a super-large monitor like a gigantic, surrealistic kaleidoscope, as unbelievable as in a sci-fi movie.

  Hou waved his hand at their arrival and signaled them to sit with him facing a monitor. A surveillance operator was following Hou’s orders, gesticulating, moving the cursor up and down, and scratching his head.

  ‘Replay the section we have just watched – in front of the emergency room that night,’ Hou said to the operator surnamed Fan before he turned to Chen and Jin. ‘Sorry, I watched a small section of it while waiting for you, but so far I’ve found nothing.’

  Fan lost no time in pulling out the section in question. The monitor began to play the part starting from nine forty p.m., four or five minutes before a pregnant woman was rushed on to the scene. So many people were shoving, shouting, and struggling for admission …

  A young nurse – none other than Nurse Huang – was overwhelmed at a small desk in front of the emergency room, her voice barely audible, her face hardly visible, beneath the angry waves of people surrounding her.

  On the monitor, Huang appeared to be very busy registering the patients’ names, taking their temperatures, asking questions and listening to answers, and examining something that looked like a small card on her patients’ phones. As she worked, she kept glancing at a list on the desk.

  Chen called for a pause, raising a question to Fan. ‘What’s that list?’

  Fan zoomed in. It turned out to be a list of things for the hospital staff to do or not to do, a list of rules and regulations formulated by the higher authorities for use during the pandemic.

  Another surveillance operator surnamed Long hurried over to their side and confirmed it. ‘The Covid situation keeps changing. So do the rules and regulations about it. Renji Hospital, like other hospitals in the city, has to follow the zero-Covid policy and reject any patients without valid Covid tests done in the last twenty-four hours. The possibility of cross-infection in the hospital cannot be overlooked, especially in today’s conditions.’

  Chen frowned. The emergency room proved to be ferociously swamped, with surges of patients. He had read about it in The Wuhan File from Pang, and he had heard Molong’s description of what had happened in the emergency room here. But how did the hospital come to reject the patients in an emergency without the green Covid code? On the super-large monitor, a white-haired woman was heard begging not to be dragged out of the hospital. She looked eerily like Molong’s mother …

  Then Chen called for another pause, pointing at the image of a middle-aged man rushing over in an effort to carry a pregnant woman into the emergency room.

  ‘Take out the enlarged pictures we have printed in the hotel, Jin. The pictures of the first man to get a false positive,’ Chen said to her, before turning to Fan, ‘and zoom in on the image of the man on the monitor.’

  Not exactly a surprise to Chen, the man on the monitor looked like the man in the pictures, despite the mask and spectacles he was wearing outside the emergency room.

  The image started changing angles and moving on in sequence – thanks to the advanced surveillance technology – to show the man kneeling down and kowtowing at the feet of Nurse Huang. The pregnant woman was stretching out on the bench, her legs still twitching.

  ‘That’s it. The most important missing link!’ Chen exclaimed in spite of himself.

  ‘The most important missing link …’ Hou echoed mechanically before he jumped up like a thunderstruck robot. ‘Old Heaven—’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be damned!’ Jin exclaimed, too, covering her mouth with her hand in haste.

  ‘You must have heard a lot about our legendary Chief Inspector Chen, Fan,’ Hou said to the operator in deadly earnest. ‘Director Chen is now at a higher, more important position in the Party government. For the special investigation team, he’s a most powerful envoy with the “emperor’s sword.” You know what that means, right? Tell all this to the Party secretary of your hospital right now. Don’t try to cover it up, or he’ll immediately know the consequences.’

  ‘Oh, Chief Inspector Chen! Of course I have heard of you. Anything you want me to do, name it,’ Fan said, getting up, saluting him in a fluster.

  ‘Dig out everything about Nurse Huang and what happened at the hospital that night. Quick!’ Chen said. ‘It’s a matter of life and death.’

  ‘Do you know what “the envoy with the emperor’s sword” means?’ Jin also asked Fan, joining in like the capable secretary she was. ‘It means he’s the one with the power to have anyone imprisoned or executed for obstruction of his work, and he does not even have to wait for the approval from the very top in the Forbidden City.’

  In the midst of the consternation gripping the surveillance room, all the related internal videos, records, and information were being retrieved in panic.

  The retrieved scenes were striking horrors, one blow after another, into their hearts – striking with an intensity even unknown to themselves before.

  ‘The pregnant woman looks like An,’ Chen said. ‘No, I’m sure it’s An. Switch on the facial recognition and big data.’

  ‘The kowtowing man is no other than her husband, Zhou. No question about it,’ Jin said, snatching out a couple of enlarged pictures to compare with the man begging so abjectly on the monitor.

  With the cameras pivoting from one angle to another, occasional glimpses of her sweat-and–mask-covered face were viewable, ghastly pale and vaguely recognizable. Her hair disheveled like an overturned bird’s nest, her pants seemed to start dripping red …

  It was then that the hospital Party Secretary Tang, a middle-aged man with gray temples, hurried to join them, and led the three of them out into another meeting room.

  Tang had a young secretary serving eight-treasure tea on the long white-tablecloth-covered mahogany table. Hardly had the secretary withdrawn when Tang declared, ‘The mayor has just called me, saying that we should not withhold any inside information from you. So you’re talking about the night Nurse Huang worked at the entrance of the emergency room, right? A lot of people are complaining about our hospital’s refusal to accept patients in a critical condition, I know. For us, however, there are strict rules and regulations from high above, and we have no choice but to follow them to the letter. Those patients who can’t show a valid Covid green code can never be admitted into hospital. We have to follow the zero-Covid policy under our great leader. It’s a critical phase in our heroic battle against Covid. Period.’

  ‘What does all that mean, Comrade Tang?’ Chen asked in spite of his knowledge of the answer.

  ‘That means people should show a green code on their cell phones, indicating a negative Covid test done within the past twenty-four hours,’ Tang explained. ‘Otherwise, they would never be admitted. The policy is not for Renji Hospital alone. It’s the same for all the hospitals in the city of Shanghai. It’s for the sake of preventing cross-infection. Not to mention the fact that all the hospitals are terrible overburdened.’