Chapter 12

Part One: Turbulent Waters of Officialdom. Chapter 12: Doubts obscured by history

"Did you find anything useful?" his uncle Zhang Zhifei asked anxiously. "Why were you gone so long?"

Zhang Ke grimaced, thinking, Did you think comforting Tang Xueqian's wife and daughter would be easy? He took out the notebook. "Ye Xinming got there before us. He took what we wanted to find and left only this notebook. It might be even more crucial than what we originally wanted."

They did not dare turn on the light in the car. Zhang Zhifei took the notebook and flipped through a few pages by the dim streetlight. "There's nothing useful here..."

"Uncle, do you know who Zeng Jianhua is?" Zhang Ke asked him.

Zhang Zhifei shook his head. "Never heard of him."

"You don't even know who Zeng Jianhua is, so how can you decide that everything recorded in this notebook is useless?" Zhang Ke took it back. "A lot of things are written only for the writer's own eyes. It would actually be bad if other people could understand them..."

"I have no idea where you get these ideas," Zhang Zhifei said, looking at his cousin's son Zhang Ke as though he were a monster. "That's nothing like the way a normal child thinks!"

Zhang Ke chuckled, climbed into the back seat, and switched on the overhead light. His uncle drove out of the city while he examined the notebook page by page. Although people wrote many things in their work diaries simply for their own reference, and deliberately used coded language for things that could not bear the light of day, the coding systems most people could devise were crude, offered little security, and were easy to crack. Around the entry for the tenth day, he felt an uneven patch beneath his fingers as he held the paper. He looked down, but there was no writing there. He raised it above his head and found traces of writing, indentations left on the page. The overhead light was too weak to make them out.

"Did you find something?" Zhang Zhifei asked, noticing Zhang Ke's strange movements in the rearview mirror.

"Some places were written on in pencil and then erased, but the indentations are still there. It's too dark to read them..."

"Really?" Zhang Zhifei pulled over, took the notebook, and held it above his head near the overhead light. "They really are there. You're something, kid. Let's hurry back and see exactly what it says."

It was nearly midnight when they reached the Old Residence in the Southern Suburbs of Dong She County. They entered the funeral hall on the ground floor of his father's older cousin Zhang Zhiwei's house. It was hung with cloth drapes and banners and covered with images of deities. His great-uncle's body lay on the funeral bed behind the drapes. His grandmother sat chatting with two elderly village women on meditation cushions, while Zhang Zhiwei played cards with three other men keeping vigil in the next room. Zhang Ke did not see his father.

"Where's my dad?" Zhang Ke asked Zhang Zhiwei.

"Your dad's a city official. How could he play our rough-and-ready kind of cards? I told him to go back to your place and get some sleep. Besides, we don't need him keeping vigil..."

Zhang Ke's face turned livid, a fire burning in his chest. In a few days, when Tang Xueqian is fine, let's see what kind of face you put on then.

"Brother, you've gone too far..." Zhang Zhifei was so angry and upset that he did not know what to say.

Zhang Ke and his uncle left the funeral hall and ran into the courtyard, only to hear Zhang Zhiwei deliberately ask his card partners in a bewildered tone behind them, "How have I gone too far?"

Zhang Ke followed his uncle into his courtyard. The lights were on upstairs on both the second and third floors. He went up and saw his father watching a video with his younger cousin Zhang Mei, on one of those old cassette video players. VCD players had only just appeared in 1994, and with so few titles available, no one in China had yet recognized their enormous market potential. VCD players owed their popularity to the rampant flood of pirated VCDs from the southeastern coast in 1995 and 1996, which supplied ample titles for them.

"Did you find anything?" Zhang Zhixing turned his head and asked, noticing the plastic bag in Zhang Ke's hand.

"I thought you were playing cards, so I didn't call," Zhang Zhifei said, then turned to his daughter Zhang Mei. "Mei, go get a pencil."

"We've been on vacation for half a month. Who knows where their pencils are anymore?" Zhang Mei grumbled. When her father glared at her, she obediently went to find one. On the way back, Zhang Ke had located every place with indentations, twenty-one in all. Shading them with a pencil made the writing show up clearly.

"Jiang withdrew 90,000 yuan..."

"Jiang withdrew 110,000 yuan..."

"Jiang withdrew 370,000 yuan..."

"Jiang withdrew 60,000 yuan..."

Zhang Ke quickly added the twenty-one amounts in his head: 4.78 million yuan in total, with the largest withdrawal amounting to 670,000. Good grief, embezzlement in the nineties really was fucking crude, so fucking brazen. They didn't even know to launder the money by buying high and selling low before putting it in their own pockets. Ding Xiangshan was the only reason it had been kept under wraps. Otherwise, even without this notebook, anyone who persisted in investigating could have traced it back to Jiang Mingcheng.

The last three withdrawals totaled 270,000 yuan, matching the three sums Jiang Mingcheng had transferred into Xu Si's account. They were dated November 1993, February 1994, and June 1994, all after Xu Si had joined Xinfeng Group. These were the last three sums that would be used to frame Tang Xueqian. Of course, things had not reached that stage yet. Xu Si and Jiang Mingcheng had not yet volunteered their "confessions" about Tang Xueqian's problems to the Provincial Inspection Team. Judging by the timing, that would happen tomorrow or the day after. Zhang Ke therefore had to keep these things to himself and could not speak of them.

"Does this 'Jiang' mean Jiang Mingcheng?"

Zhang Ke saw his uncle point to the writing and ask his father, but his father picked up the phone and called home instead. "Xiao Zhen, do you remember anyone named Zeng Jianhua? Is there someone by that name at Xinfeng Group...?" For a while, the municipal letters and complaints bureau had received letters reporting Xinfeng Group's management every day. Several inspection teams had been sent in without finding anything, but his mother, who worked at the bureau, remembered the names of the group's managers. After a while, his father put down the phone. "He's Xinfeng Group's finance director. This Jiang should be Jiang Mingcheng. According to this notebook, he took more than four million yuan off the books, but there's no record of what it was used for..."

"Why did this notebook end up in Tang Xueqian's hands? He doesn't seem to have discovered its secret."

"If we find Zeng Jianhua, won't everything become clear?" Zhang Zhixing called his wife again. "Xiao Zhen, find a way to get Zeng Jianhua's address tomorrow. Be careful not to let anyone notice..."

Ding Xiangshan's downfall in 1999 had not been caused by Xinfeng Group's financial problems. After Tang Xueqian went to prison, Xinfeng Group's restructuring had quickly been approved, and none of its earlier problems had ever come to light. Zhang Ke vaguely felt there was something wrong with looking for Zeng Jianhua now, but he could not work out what it was. If Zeng Jianhua had not given such an important notebook to Tang Xueqian, then their most urgent concern now should be recovering it. Yet Ding Xiangshan, Ye Xinming, and the others did not seem to know it existed. If Zeng Jianhua had personally handed it to Tang Xueqian, why had Tang Xueqian not discovered the secret inside?