The Beijing Opera Murder

  The Beijing Opera Murder

  An Inspector Bao Zheng Mystery

  Chris West

  © Chris West 1994.

  Chris West has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published as Death of a Blue Lantern by Collins Crime in 1994.

  This edition published in 2020 by Sharpe Books.

  For Mandy

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Dragon slept, tortured by its dreams.

  But then it began to stir…

  When the Queen sang, her voice soared up then plummeted down like the roller coaster in the Cultural Park. When she spoke, she fired out whole groups of syllables like a machine-gun then took one and teased the audience with it. The General nodded his head, sending long ripples up the pheasant feathers of his headdress. Gongs and clappers rang out as two men with wooden swords thumped onto the stage and began slashing violently at one another.

  Detective Inspector (Second Class) Bao Zheng of the Beijing Xing Zhen Ke (Criminal Investigation Department) made his way up the aisle and squeezed onto the end of one of the long wooden benches that made up the seats of the opera house. Late again!

  Bao only came here once a month, but work always seemed to interfere. Last time he’d had to type up some report. This time the team was back from Huashan and there had been a pointless, meandering discussion about the thefts. This thought made him angry, and he lit a cigarette to calm himself.

  It was Panda brand, for Party members only. Almost everyone else in the opera audience – mainly old men with close-cropped hair, work-wrinkled faces and gap-toothed grins – would be rotting their throats with stuff like Flying Horse. Bao inhaled deeply and reminded himself of his good fortune.

  The on-stage action subsided. The young hero began to sing, accompanied only by the erhu, a two-stringed violin that had been played in Bao’s home province of Shandong for thousands of years. The old General was a fool: only the young Prince could rescue the state from its overwhelmingly superior opponents, and do so by cunning. Use the enemy’s strength against them…

  Everyone in this place was fortunate, Bao thought, to know and love jingju, Beijing Opera, to share and be elevated by the culture from which it came.

  Bao took the last, best drag on the Panda and stubbed it out on the floor. Recently a Party directive had advised members to cut down on smoking for health reasons. But what did Cao Cao, the great soldier-poet, say?

  ‘Drink and sing! How long is life?’

  *

  The players stood on the stage applauding the audience. The audience responded by stampeding for the doors. This was not out of disrespect but from necessity. Last buses ran early; those that had come by bike might have long rides home. Many of them would be required back on factory floors at six o’clock next morning. Bao Zheng, with a flat near Temple of Heaven Park and a desk that he did not need to be manning till half past seven, could take his time, relax and let the piece replay itself in his mind. The Queen had been particularly good, he thought, showing a full range of emotions, not just in the more obvious, attention-grabbing, high-pitched passages… Only when the hall was empty – apart from a drunk who had fallen asleep in the back row and two cleaners swishing brooms by the front exit – did he get up and walk slowly out into Dazhalan, the alley outside.

  The street was busy with shoppers. A few years ago, most would have been in blue denim Mao suits. Now, many people, especially the young, had taken to Western-style jackets and shirts with wide lapels (still in sober colours, even for women’s blouses). The Chairman was still present: a stall was selling T-shirts with his face on, for Western tourists. During Bao’s youth this would have been sacrilege. Now, in 1991, it was good business. Western music blared from a shop. People seemed to be listening to more and more of this horrible stuff. More to Bao’s taste was the crisp, clean smell of dough-sticks being deep-fried on a trolley by a young Mongolian. He reached into his pocket for a two-jiao note.

  The image wouldn’t go away. There had been something strange about that sleeping figure in the last row; something that he, as a policeman, had to investigate. He looked at the queue for the dough-sticks, shook his head and began pushing his way back to the theatre.

  By the time he arrived, the sweepers had built two mountains of rubbish and were working hard on a third. The figure was still leaning against the rear wall, his head at the same slight angle, his hands still by his side, his complexion still as white as the dough on the stick-maker’s stand.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Bao called out.

  No reply. He made his way up the row and shook the man by the shoulders. The head moved stiffly. He took his plastic-covered police ID and held it up to the fellow’s mouth. Not a droplet of breath. He didn’t even try resuscitation.

  For a moment, he thought of phoning the authorities anonymously. He wanted to go home and sleep. Night staff got paid night rates; they could come and sort this out. But his sense of duty, that shadow companion of Cao Cao’s drinking and singing, rebelled – as it always did.

  One, check the body for foul play. Not that that was very likely, in such a public place. Two, search for ‒

  Bao stopped, dumbfounded. At the back of the man’s neck was a small hole surrounded by dry, black blood. This man had been coldly, expertly murdered, right here at the opera.

  Chapter One

  ‘It’s a disgrace!’ said Team-leader Chen, thumping his desk.

  ‘I found the body,’ Bao replied.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘That makes me uniquely placed to solve the crime.’

  ‘You’re part of a team. My team.’ Chen gestured round the grey-walled office at the other policemen present: Inspector (First Class) Zhao, Sergeant Fang, Constables Lu, Tang and Han. ‘You can’t just walk off cases when you feel like it. In all my time in the force ‒’

  ‘These are my orders,’ Bao cut in quickly. ‘To investigate this killing. Starting today.’

  The team-leader gestured at the pile of papers in front of him. ‘The Huashan operation is of great importance. Your role in it is essential.’

  Bao grinned to hide his embarrassment. His role was ‘coordinator’, a grand title which actually meant he stayed at HQ checking background information and answering a phone. This phone was reasonably busy, now that there was a reward for information leading to a successful conviction of the Huashan thief, but the quality of information had so far been very poor. Meanwhile, the real detective work was going on at the site, an archaeological dig sixty miles north west of the capital, from which a number of artefacts had disappeared. Bao hadn’t even been there. His ‘essential’ role required little intelligence and even less initiative.

  It was the sort of job he’d been getting for the last couple of years. Due to his age, he kept telling himself. Now he’d hit forty, it was younger, better connected men (and the occasional woman) on fast-track promotion schemes who were getting the interesting work.

  ‘Thank you, Comrade Chen,’ he said cautiously. ‘But given the steady progress being made by the team, I feel I can safely delegate my work here to one of our junior team members. It wi
ll be good experience for them.’

  Chen nodded. ‘Steady progress. Yes, I believe that sums up the situation well.’

  ‘I’ll be working from here, too. So I can be called upon if absolutely necessary.’

  Chen nodded again, then picked up a sheet of paper. ‘It says here I’m to second a junior to you from our team.’

  Bao stayed silent. Chen couldn’t object. Orders were orders.

  The team-leader took off his glasses and gave them a clean, something he often did when embarrassed. ‘Take Lu,’ he said finally. The two other constables, older more experienced men, showed no emotion, though Bao guessed they would be amused.

  ‘I shall insist that you are both back on my case within a fortnight,’ Chen went on.

  Bao nodded assent. Team-leader Chen had lost enough face already. If the murder were a relatively simple affair, he should have it cleared up in that time. If not, then he could make a direct appeal to the Unit Party Secretary, ‘Hawk’ Wei. Not something he relished, but if it were necessary …

  Bao retired to his own office, where he took his pile of Huashan papers, carried them across to a corner and dumped them there. As he turned to face an empty desk he felt a rush of excitement. A case of his own again!

  *

  The two men stood in the mortuary, Bao in his neatly pressed olive-green police uniform with bright gold and blue epaulettes and yellow ribands, Dr Zhang in a grey overall smeared with blood. Beside them, the victim lay under a plastic sheet.

  ‘The weapon was a small, sharp knife,’ said Zhang. ‘The killer knew what he was doing. One insertion, severing the medulla. Death was almost instantaneous. No shouts or screams, and very little blood.’

  ‘Much force needed?’

  Zhang shook his head. ‘No. Just skill.’

  ‘Any information from the nature of the wound?’

  ‘Not much. The killer was sitting on the victim’s left, obviously. Probably about average height, right-handed and reasonably strong. But this is about finesse, not force.’

  Bao nodded. ‘Time of death?’

  ‘Around seven-thirty.’

  ‘Not later?’

  ‘I don’t think so. We can’t be a hundred per cent accurate.’

  Bao had guessed as much – rigor mortis takes at least an hour to set in – but would like to have been proven wrong. ‘So he must have sat there, dead, through most of the performance.’

  ‘That’s one piece of good fortune for him,’ said Zhang jokily: not everybody liked traditional opera.

  Bao ignored the comment. ‘It’s dark in those back seats. It’s noisy during fight scenes. I suppose that’s a better place to kill someone than the open street. But it’s still a very strange place for a murder.’

  ‘Do we have a name for him yet?’

  The victim had not been carrying any ID, only a dirty handkerchief and a Martial Arts magazine.

  ‘I’m afraid not. We’ve taken fingerprints, but the computers have encountered unexpected problems.’

  ‘Why am I surprised to hear that?’ said Bao. The correct attitude to technology was to welcome it unreservedly. But Bao couldn’t bring himself to trust it. Computers, the new switchboard system, the new radios they had recently been issued with – all ‘encountered unexpected problems’. Patience was expected. Why?

  Maybe that was his age again. Aiya, couldn’t we stay young forever?

  The inspector pulled back the cover and stared at the corpse’s scarred, moustachioed face. Late twenties. Good-looking, Bao reckoned, though he didn’t really know what women liked. Not your standard operagoer, but so what? Beijing Opera was still a people’s art-form. Anyone could attend; all sorts did.

  But this one nameless, lifeless individual – why had he come? To meet someone? To escape from someone? Or was this a pointless, random killing, of the kind Bao read about happening in the West?

  *

  Constable Lu sat in the office, which was now otherwise empty, as the rest of the team had returned to Huashan. Most of the morning, he had been typing a report on a machine that built up characters stroke by stroke. He felt he was due a rest. His boss was next door, on the phone. Lu took out his latest mini-computer game, turned the sound off and began to play.

  World Cup Football. Select two teams. China versus Brazil. Two sets of bandy-legged players began waddling across the little screen, passing a square ball to one another. Goal! China one, Brazil nil. Too easy – take it up a level. Damn! One all.

  ‘Working hard, Lu?’

  ‘Aiya! Yes, sir. Well, no, sir. I just started a minute ago, sir.’

  Bao knew he should get angry, but there was something about Lu that reminded the inspector of himself at nineteen. Not the youngster’s slow-wittedness nor his privileged background, but a simplicity of outlook, a lack of guile.

  ‘Who was that on the line, sir?’

  ‘Technical,’ Bao replied. ‘They’ve got us a name for our murder victim. Xun Yaochang. I want you to check the records here. I’ll go and do his hukou.’

  Lu grinned. Hukou records, the stuff of day-to-day surveillance kept at outlying police stations, were boring. Criminal files were a lot more exciting.

  ‘I want a report by three-thirty.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The young man jumped to his feet and lolloped out into the corridor.

  Bao went back to his office, lit a Panda, tilted his chair back and gazed round at the bulging metal filing-cabinets, the dusty wall-map of the capital, the narrow window, the grey stone floor and, right opposite him, his calligraphy scroll. This featured two characters in bold, free-flowing Zen style: Zheng Yi, justice. He had made them himself, in the correct manner, meditating in silence on their meaning then picking up a weasel-hair brush and dashing them down in an instant. He was proud of them. They were solid but infused with life, just as justice itself should be. His thoughts went back to Nanping Village, and his father, a peasant with a passion for education, giving him the characters to study. Along with the works of Marx, Lenin and Mao, Liu Shaoqi’s How to be a Good Communist, and the classics of literature like Journey to the West and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

  He exhaled and watched the smoke curl up towards the striplight. Was he being selfish, taking this case and letting his colleagues battle on with the seemingly insoluble business at Huashan? ‘Bourgeois individualism,’ his father would have called it, the sin of putting one’s own desires above the general good. His eyes returned to the scroll. But what crime could be worse than the taking of life?

  *

  A group of ‘little generals’ – boys in oversize People’s Liberation Army caps and tunics that came down to their ankles – watched as the rider drew up outside Chongwen District Number Two Police Station and parked his motorbike under a torn canvas awning. The lads tried to guess the status of the new arrival, as Bao wore no badge of rank.

  ‘He’s just a sergeant,’ said one. ‘Look at that Happiness bike. If he were anyone senior, he’d have a Japanese one.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s in disguise,’ said another. ‘The head of the Ke Ge Bo, on a top-secret mission.’

  ‘You shouldn’t call it that,’ said a third, whose father was a Model Worker. ‘The Internal Security Bureau is essential to prevent sabotage and counter-revolutionary activity.’

  The object of this discussion paused to look at the poster on the notice board by the station entrance, a cartoon account of a recently solved fraud case, whose last frame showed the criminal kneeling on the ground, blindfolded, about to be executed. Then he carried on up the steps.

  ‘Hukou office is on the left,’ the duty sergeant told him. ‘Second door down.’

  Bao found a young constable in shirtsleeves filling in forms by the light of a bare bulb. Precipices of paper rose up on all four walls. These were hukou files, on everyone who lived in Number Two area. They contained their work record, their family background, any reported anti-social behaviour, any close contact with outsiders and their visits (if any) to other parts of th
e country. There would be no exceptions, for without a hukou file nobody could get ration tickets for cooking oil, soap, clothing, noodles or rice.

  ‘I want information on someone called Xun Yaochang,’ said Bao. ‘He was murdered last night.’

  The constable showed no emotion, just checked the character Xun in a directory, crossed to the far corner and pulled out a file. Bao blew dust off it and sat in a corner reading.

  Xun had come to Beijing five years ago, from somewhere in Hebei Province that Bao had never heard of. (Who was informing the victim’s parents of the death? he wondered.) Many other young men from around China were now doing the same, heading for the cities in search of opportunity. Some were finding it. For Xun, things had not gone so well. He had an address in the worst part of the district, a patchy work record and a list of complaints by neighbours – drunkenness, playing loud music, repeated refusals to participate in voluntary campaigns. He had had ‘dealings with the police’, but these were not specified. Lu, no doubt, would find detail on these.

  Bao wondered if Xun had arrived with the intention of living this life, or if he had come with better plans and slowly sunk into it.

  ‘Did he sign for his ration tickets? he asked. ‘I’d like to see his signature.’

  ‘Signatures are at the back.’

  Bao turned there.

  ‘He’s very irregular.’

  ‘I’m afraid… we don’t get signatures every week. We’d have queues going round the block if we did.’

  Bao nodded. This was not correct procedure, but the station staff were no doubt overworked. It was not his place to criticize them.

  Xun had signed his name in characters that were not the product of an illiterate or stupid man. The guy liked opera, Bao reflected. The bright kid who misses out somehow and turns to crime instead?

  He made a note of Xun’s address and that of the head of his Neighbourhood Committee, and handed the file back to the constable, who dropped it into a cardboard box.