The Interior (Red Princess 2)

Then she said that she’d met a man who’d been in love with Miaoshan. Now for the first time Hulan hedged on the facts, taking them out of order and implying something for which she did not yet have concrete proof. “This man mentioned that Miaoshan had papers that were proof of bribery of an important official. I saw those papers, which did indeed show large amounts of money being deposited in various accounts.”

“Who was receiving the money?”

“I believe it is Governor Sun Gan,” Hulan said. It was true she believed this statement, but she didn’t know it to be a fact. As air came out in a tight hiss through Zai’s teeth, she continued, “I came in today to look up his travel record.” She handed the piece of paper with Sun’s data to Zai. He hesitated, not wanting to touch it. Then, with his forehead deeply creased, he took the paper and read.

“When I saw this I came to you,” Hulan went on. “Doesn’t it seem strange that his trips abroad, especially to the U.S., lasted so long?”

When Zai looked up, it seemed to Hulan that he had aged. They both knew how dangerous this was. Sun was a popular politician, and there had been no mandate from above to bring him down.

“I would like to see his dangan,” Hulan announced. “How is he able to travel so freely? Where does his money come from? Who protects him? How did he get to where he is today? What is the government’s plan for him? There is so much I need to know, so I can decide whether or not to act. Obviously I will be careful,” she added, taking full responsibility if anything should go awry. “Obviously I may be completely wrong.”

“What does this have to do with the death of your friend’s daughter?”

“I don’t know yet, but the leads in that murder have brought me here.”

Zai looked down at Sun’s exit and entry record again. After a moment he looked up, nodded, handed the paper back to Hulan, and walked away. After a few paces he stopped and looked back at her. “Are you coming?”

Once back in the compound, he told her to wait in his office. A half hour later, he rejoined her. In his hands he held a large manila file. He sat down and wordlessly pushed it across the desk. He watched her open it; then he turned away and went back to work of his own.

Hulan began to read. Sun Gan had been born in 1931 of the Western calendar in a village outside Taiyuan. The Communist Party had already been in existence for ten years, and Sun was blessed with a pure peasant background. He was still just a little boy during the Long March but was old enough to remember the atrocities of the Japanese invasion of 1937. By 1944 Shanxi Province was firmly in Japanese-Occupied China. A few Americans came into the territory either as spies or had parachuted in when their planes were shot down during the occasional bombing mission. After the Japanese surrender American marines made up a new presence in Taiyuan.

At thirteen years old Sun Gan had apparently been a bright boy and very involved in his village’s Communist party. (His third uncle had gone off to join Mao’s troops many years before). He also had an affable personality—a trait he still carried to this day, Hulan noted—and had easily become the mascot for a group of American GIs. Hulan suspected that although this camaraderie had been less than innocent—he’d been sent by local cadres to see what he could make of the foreigners and their intentions—it would probably prove to be nearly devastating during the Cultural Revolution. But that, she supposed, was getting ahead of the story.

This early work came with a reward—a position in the People’s Liberation Army. During the winter of 1948, when Sun was only seventeen years old, he participated in the massive and decisive battle of Huai Hua against the Guomindang in neighboring Anhui Province. It was here that Sun performed several heroic acts, which were detailed over several pages. He could have stayed in the army—which would have meant that today he would have been a very high-up general, rich and powerful—but Premier Zhou Enlai had personally asked the young man to go back to Shanxi.

Sun first served the people as a rural cadre in his home village, working as a team leader, then brigade leader on one of the local communes. In 1964 he was elected to the Taiyuan City People’s Assembly. During the weeklong gathering a wide variety of subjects had been covered, including the imperialism of the West, how to increase wheat production, and the importance of advancing industrialization. Even though discussions sometimes grew heated, Sun had kept quiet. Two years later, Mao unleashed the terrors of the Cultural Revolution. For many months Sun’s reticence at the People’s Assembly protected him; he hadn’t said anything, so his words couldn’t come back to haunt him. But eventually some of his subordinates in his home village, where he had risen to brigade party secretary, saw an opportunity and took advantage of it. They remembered that back during the war Sun had been friendly with American servicemen. He had acquired a taste for their

expensive cigarettes, decadent style of dress, and barbaric language. As a result he was made to wear the usual dunce cap, kneel in broken glass, and get castigated in the public square.

But this was nothing! Hulan thought. Given his American connections, this punishment had been extremely lenient. Why? The few village cadres who managed to escape the wrath of the Cultural Revolution were typically the ones who were the most corrupt and wielded the most power. Had Sun been one of these? Had he bought his way out of trouble?

Whoever had written the comments on this page seemed to hear Hulan’s questions many years later and had written the answering characters in a finely trained classical hand: “Brigade Leader Sun Gan has a visceral understanding of the old saying which goes, Once you eat from someone, you will have a soft mouth toward that person; once you take from someone, you will have soft hands toward that person. Because Sun has shown himself to be someone who will not accept or pay bribes in any form, nor has he abused his power during this time of darkness, I believe he is a candidate for advancement.”

Within a month Sun had been promoted from rural cadre to national cadre, where he earned ninety yuan a month. The next year he rose to deputy chairman of the City Assembly. In 1978 he was sent to Beijing as a representative for the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Party Congress. In 1979, when China opened up fully to the West again, Sun was on one of the first provincial delegations to travel to the United States. Security was tight, but Sun acquitted himself well, earning the respect of his fellow travelers as well as his hosts. By 1985 Governor Sun—responsible now for his entire province of Shanxi—was flying across the Pacific with some regularity. By 1990 he had an additional office and apartment in the Zhongnanhai compound in Beijing awarded him by the government for his contributions to the country, especially his home province. His continuing travel to the U.S. was not only sanctioned but encouraged. As a bureaucrat in 1995 observed: “Governor Sun Gan has impeccable contacts in the West. With these he has brought prosperity to his home province. We must continue to encourage him, for with his help we will build China into the most powerful country on the planet. By the year 2000 Sun should be permanently in Beijing.” This pronouncement, like the one during the Cultural Revolution, seemed to have two immediate effects.

First was an even more thorough check of his background and personal habits. The dangan noted that while Sun had never married, he was not known to be a homosexual, nor had he engaged in any illicit affairs with the opposite sex. He lived in the governor’s house in Taiyuan, where he kept his staff to a minimum. His maids said that his needs were simple, that he did not abuse his authority, and often made his own bed in the military manner. He did not have a history of drinking or gambling, and was known to be very loyal to the Party. These things continued to make him a good candidate for travel, since he could not be compromised through sex, money, or political persuasion. Attached to this addendum was a list of the banks where Sun kept his money, as well as recent balances. Like Hulan and almost everyone she knew, Sun kept some money in American banks. But Sun was not a Red Prince, and the amounts didn’t seem inordinately excessive. This record, dating from 1995, didn’t reflect the large deposits that Miaoshan’s papers showed, but then the Knight factory had opened just that year. Nevertheless, Hulan jotted down the names of the banks and the account numbers, hoping she could eventually connect them to deposit records.

The second effect, and more obvious to Hulan, was that she could trace her knowledge of Sun to 1995, the year the unnamed bureaucrat had written his recommendation for Sun’s future in the file. As if out of nowhere, Sun had appeared one day in the national press. His every move and comment were covered. He posed for photographers, chatted up perky female reporters, and engaged in public discussions about economic policy, the countryside, and the next century with school children, peasants, even members of the Party Congress. That he had surpassed all expectations and on paper looked to be a good guy didn’t alter the fact that people very high in the government had moved him into position. His success was assured, which was why some bureaucrat had unwittingly allowed Sun a free ride.

Hulan closed the file and pushed it back across the desk. Her mentor looked up from his work. She could see him trying to read her expression, but she kept her face impassive.

18

WHEN HULAN GOT HOME, DAVID WAS SITTING AT THE kitchen table with several three-by-five cards spread out in two rows before him. As she approached, he put a finger on a card and slowly slid it across the table and up into the top row. Then he repeated the process; only this time he moved a card down from the top row to the bottom row. He didn’t look up, not even when she put her hands on his shoulders and began to massage his tense muscles.

“I learned a lot from Miles,” he said. “None of it good.”

She stopped massaging and sat down next to him. “Tell me,” she said, and he did.

With each piece of information he pointed at a matching card. “I’ve been looking at these since I got back, trying to figure out what happened when. Randall Craig said he knew about conditions at the factory; Henry Knight says they’re a complete fabrication; you tell me they may not even be prosecutable in China. Miles practically admitted that he knew that the Knights’ disclosures were false; Henry says that they’re accurate. When Miaoshan died, she had in her possession documents that suggest that Sun may have accepted bribes; he gave me something that might be related. Then there’s Pearl Jenner. She too is a walking contradiction. She knows some things but seems totally ignorant of others. The pieces have to fit together, but I still don’t see how.”

“Maybe you should try a different approach.” Hulan picked up the stack of cards and wrote on a few new ones. When she was done, she laid them out in two columns, leaving an area in the middle empty. On the left were the various crimes; on the right were the names of people that were suspicious. Then she went back to her scribbling.

A moment later she looked back at the two columns and began setting down the new cards. “I am looking for a match, but I also don’t think we can separate crimes and criminals from jurisdiction, because I think they’re interrelated.”

Once her three columns were completed, Hulan surveyed her handiwork.

Miaoshan (murder)