The Mao Case

button to start
     recording. It had become hot, almost suffocating, in the closet. He remained still, worried that the man might insist she
     hang the scroll up right now.
    Instead of pushing her, the man started yawning and slumped
across the bed, which then creaked under his weight. Jiao kicked off her shoes, her heels falling on the floor, one after
     another.
    It was still early, but the two on the bed sounded tired. Before too long, hopefully, they would stop talking and fall asleep.
     Then Chen would be able to get out.
    “You’ve got something on your mind,” Jiao said. “Talk to me.”
    “Well, I have overcome so much, sweeping away all my enemies like rolling up a mat. How can I have anything on my mind? Let’s
     forget our worries in the cloud and rain.”
    “No, it’s useless. And it’s too early.”
    “A plum blossom can always come out a second time.”
    The conversation in the bedroom struck Chen as inexplicably stilted. The metaphor of “rolling up a mat” sounded like another
     line by Mao, though Chen wasn’t sure. But he was certain that in erotic literature, a plum flower blossoming a second time
     could refer to a second climax during sexual intercourse.
    Their talk was becoming quiet, indistinct, intelligible only to themselves. Chen had a hard time hearing their murmuring to
     each other, except for occasional exclamations interspersed with moaning and groaning.
    “You are really big, Chairman, big in everything,” she said breathlessly.
    Chen was thunderstruck. She called her bed partner “Chairman.” Nowadays, “Chairman” wasn’t exclusively reserved for Mao, but
     “CEO” or “President” would be far more common for Big Bucks in contemporary China. Chen was able to puzzle out the sentence
     because it was something he had read in the file about Shang — what she had said about Mao after their first night together:
     “Chairman Mao is big — in everything.” It could mean a lot of things. But in the present context, it meant only one thing.
    Was Jiao imitating Shang?
    The groaning and moaning intensified, rising to a crescendo. Chen had never imagined he would ever investigate a case like
     a peeping
Tom in a closet, or to be exact, an eavesdropping Tom. The sound kept breaking in, wave upon wave, whether he liked it or
     not.
    If he tried to slip out now, he might succeed in getting away unnoticed. Lost in sexual rapture, the lovers might hardly pay
     attention to anything else, and there was only a faint night light flickering in the bedroom.
    But he decided to stay. The two might soon fall asleep, and it would be less risky to sneak out then. Besides, he was intrigued
     by their talk in the midst of the grunting and grinding on the wooden-board mattress.
    “Oh, oh, against the gathering dusk stands a pine,”
the man burst out in a loud falsetto,
“sturdy, erect —”
    It befuddled Chen. At the dinner table, the man’s comment about the fish might have been a witty joke. In the midst of sexual
     passion, however, he was quoting Mao again, and that was bizarre —
    Chen finally recognized the Hunan-accented voice as an imitation of Mao.
    Could he be playing a role — that of “Mao?”
    From the moment of his entry into the apartment, the man had been talking and acting like Mao, including his remarks at the
     dinner table about fatty pork being beneficial for the brain, about hot pepper being revolutionary. Those were details from
     the memoirs about Mao. Not to mention all the quotes from Mao, and now the very poem he wrote to Madam Mao, “On the Picture
     of the Fairy Cave in Lu Mountains.” “Mao” must have heard the erotic interpretation and was applying it to that very context.
    The chief inspector had read about sexual fantasies, but what was being staged in the bedroom was far more than that — it was
     elaborate, perverted, absurd.
    Abruptly, something seemed to be going wrong on the bed in the dark.
    “What a fairy cave it is, born out of the nature! / Ineffable — ineffable —”
    “Mao” failed to complete the last line. Could he have forgotten the remaining words in his climb up to the height of sexual
     ecstasy?

    In the ensuing silence, Chen heard Jiao making a muffled sound which went on for two or three minutes before she burst out
     in frustration.
    “What a great pine! A broken one, sapless, lifeless.”
    “Come on,” “Mao” said, “I’ve just overworked myself of late. There are so many things on my hands, you