Death of a Red Heroine

by Qiu Xiaolong

  “Would you like a drink?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Just answer a few questions about Guan.”

  “Yes, of course,” she said, settling into another chair.

  She drew back her legs under it, as if intent on hiding her bare feet.

  “How long have you worked with Guan?”

  “About five years.”

  “What do you think of her?

  “She was a celebrated model worker, of course, and a loyal Party member, too.”

  “Could you be a bit more specific?”

  “Well, politically, she was active—and correct—in every movement launched by the Party authorities. Earnest, loyal, passionate. As our department head, she was conscientious and thoroughgoing in her job: The first to arrive, and often the last to leave. I am not going to say that Comrade Guan was too easy to get along with, but how else could she have been, since she was such a political celebrity?”

  “You have mentioned her political activities. Is it possible that through those activities she made some enemies? Did anyone hate her?”

  “No, I don’t think so. She was not responsible for the political movements. No one would blame her for the Cultural Revolution. And to be fair to her, she never pushed things too far. As for someone who might have hated her in her personal life, I’m afraid I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Well—let me put it this way,” Yu said. “What do you think of her as a woman?”

  “It’s difficult for me to say. She was very private. To a fault, I would say.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She never talked about her own life. Believe it or not, she did not have a boyfriend. Nor did she seem to have any close friends, for that matter. That’s something beyond me. She was a national model worker, but that did not mean that she had to live her whole life for politics. Not for a woman. Only in one of those modern Beijing operas, maybe. You remember, like Madam A Qin?”

  Yu nodded, smiling.

  Madam A Qin was a well-known character in Shajiabang, a modern Beijing opera performed during the Cultural Revolution, when any romantic passion—even that between husband and wife—had been considered to detract from people’s political commitment. Madam A Qin thus had the convenience of not living with her husband in the opera.

  “She might have been too busy,” he said.

  “Well, I’m not saying that she did not have a personal life. Rather, she made a point of covering it up. We’re women. We fall in love, get married, and have kids. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “So you’re not sure that she had never had an affair?”

  “I’m telling you everything I know, but I don’t like to gossip about the dead.”

  “Yes, I understand. Thank you so much for your information.”

  As he stood up, he took one more glance around the room, noticing a variety of perfumes, lipsticks, and nail polish on the dresser, some of the brands he had seen on glamorous movie stars in TV commercials. They were obviously beyond her means.

  “There’re all samples,” she said, following his gaze, “from the First Department Store.”

  “Of course,” Yu said, wondering whether Comrade Guan Hongying would have chosen to keep all her cosmetics more discreetly hidden in a drawer. “And good-bye.”

  Detective Yu was not happy about his day’s work. There was not much to talk about with Commissar Zhang, but he had never had much to talk about with the commissar. He called from a public phone booth, but Commissar Zhang was not in the office. Yu did not have to listen to a political lecture delivered by the old commissar, so he went home.

  No one was there. He saw a note on table, saying, “I’m with Qinqin at his school for a meeting. Warm the meal for yourself.”

  Holding a bowl of rice with strips of roast duck, he stepped into the courtyard, where he had a talk with his father, Old Hunter.

  “A cold-blooded rape and murder case,” Old Hunter said, frowning.

  Yu remembered the frustration his father had suffered in the early sixties, dealing with a similar sex murder case, which had taken place in the Baoshan rice paddy. The girl’s body had been found almost immediately. The police arrived on the scene in less than half an hour. One witness had glimpsed the suspect and gave a fairly recognizable description. There were some fresh footprints and a cigarette butt. Old Hunter worked late into the night, month after month, but all the work led to nothing. Several years later, the culprit was caught in the act of selling pictures of Madame Mao as a bewitching second-class actress in the early thirties—a wanton goddess in a low-cut gown. Such a crime at the time was more than enough cause to put him to death. During his examination, he admitted the murder years earlier in Baoshan. The case, as well as the unexpected solution—too late to be of any comfort—had left an indelible impact on Old Hunter.

  Such a case was like a tunnel where one could move on and on and on without hope of seeing the light.

  “Well, there could be a political angle, according to our Party secretary.”

  “Look, son,” Old Hunter said, “you don’t have to give me the crap about political significance. An old horse knows the way, as the saying goes. If such a homicide case isn’t solved in the first two or three weeks, the solution probability drops off to zero. Politics or no.”

  “But we have to do something, you know, as a special case group.”

  “A special case group, indeed. If a serial killer were involved, the existence of your group would be more justified.”

  “That’s what I figured, but the people high up won’t give us a break, especially Commissar Zhang.”

  “Don’t talk to me about your commissar either. A pain in the ass for thirty years. I’ve never gotten along with him. As for your chief inspector, I understand why he wants to go on with the investigation. Politics.”

  “He’s so good at politics.”

  “Well, don’t get me wrong,” the old man said. “I’m not against your boss. On the contrary, I believe he is a conscientious young officer in his way. Heaven is above his head, the earth is under his feet—at least he knows that. I’ve spent all these years in the force, and I can judge a man.”

  After their talk, Yu stayed in the courtyard alone, smoking, tapping the ash into the empty rice bowl with roast duck bones forming a cross at the bottom.

  He affixed a second cigarette to the butt of the first when it had been smoked down, and then added another, until it almost looked like an antenna, trembling in its effort to receive some imperceptible information from the evening sky.

  Chapter 8

  Chief Inspector Chen, too, had had a busy morning. At seven o’clock he’d met with Commissar Zhang in the bureau.

  “It’s a difficult case,” Commissar Zhang said, nodding after Chen had briefed him. “But we mustn’t be afraid of hardship or death.”

  Don’t be afraid of hardship or death—one of Chairman Mao’s quotations during the Cultural Revolution. Now it reminded Chen of a faded poster torn from the wall of a deserted building. Being a commissar for so many years had turned Zhang into something like an echoing machine. An old politician, out of touch with the times. The Commissar was, however, anything but a blockhead; it was said that he had been one of the most brilliant students at Southwest United University in the forties.

  “Yes, you’re right,” Chen said. “I’m going to Guan’s dorm this morning.”

  “That’s important. There might be some evidence left in her room,” Commissar Zhang said. “Keep me informed of anything you find there.”

  “I will.”

  “Have Detective Yu contact me, too.”

  “I will tell him.”

  “Now what about me?” Zhang said. “I also need to do something, not just be an advice-giving bystander.”

  “But we have every aspect of the initial investigation covered at present. Detective Yu’s interviewing Guan’s colleagues, and I’m going to check her room
, talk to her neighbors, and afterward, if I have the time, I will visit her mother in the nursing home.”

  “Then I’ll go to the nursing home. She’s old, too. We may have things to talk about between us.”

  “But you really don’t have to do anything. It is not suitable for a veteran cadre like you to undertake the routine investigations.”

  “Don’t tell me that, Comrade Chief Inspector,” Zhang said, getting up with a frown. “Just go to Guan’s dorm now.”

  The dormitory, located on Hubei Road, was a building shared by several work units, including that of the First Department Store, which had a few rooms there for its employees. Considering Guan’s political status, she could have gotten something better—a regular apartment like his, Chen thought. Maybe that was what made Guan a model worker.

  Hubei was a small street tucked between Zhejiang Road and Fujian Road, not too far away from Fuzhou Road to the north, a main cultural street boasting several well-known bookstores. The location was convenient. The Number 71 bus was only ten minutes’ walk away, on Yan’an Road, and it went directly to the First Department Store.

  Chen got off the bus at Zhejiang Road. He decided to walk around the neighborhood, which could speak volumes about the people living there—as in Balzac’s novels. In Shanghai, however, it was not up to the people to decide where they would get a room, but to their work units, Chen realized. Still, he strolled around the area, thinking.

  The street was one of the few still covered with cobblestones. There were quite a number of small, squalid lanes and alleys on both sides. Children raced about like scraps of paper blowing in the wind, running out of one lane into another.

  Chen took out his notebook. Guan Hongying’s address read: Number 18, Lane 235, Hubei Road. But he was unable to find the lane.

  He asked several people, showing them the address. No one seemed to have heard of the lane. Hubei was not a long street. In less than fifteen minutes, he had walked to the end and back. Still no success. So he stepped into a small grocery store on the corner, but the old grocer also shook his head. There were five or six hoodlums lounging by the grocery, young and shabby, with sparse whiskers and shining earrings, who looked at him challengingly.

  The day was hot, without a breath of air. He wondered whether he had made a mistake, but a call to Commissar Zhang confirmed that the address was right. Then he dialed Comrade Xu Kexin, a senior librarian of the bureau—better known by his nickname of Mr. Walking Encyclopedia—who had worked in the bureau for over thirty years, and had a phenomenal knowledge of the city’s history.

  “I need to ask a favor of you,” he said. “Right now I’m at Hubei Street, between Zhejiang and Fujian Road, looking for Lane 235. The address is correct, but I cannot find that lane.”

  “Hubei Street, hmm,” Xu said. “It was known, before 1949, as a notorious quarter.”

  “What?” Chen asked, hearing Xu leafing through pages, “‘Quarter’—what do you mean?”

  “Ah yes, a brothel quarter.”

  “What’s that got to do with the lane I cannot find?”

  “A lot,” Xu said. “These lanes used to have different names. Notorious names, in fact. After liberation in 1949, the government put an end to prostitution, and changed the names of the lanes, but the people there may still use the old names for convenience sake, I believe. Yes, Lane 235, I’ve got it here. This lane was called Qinghe Lane, one of the most infamous in the twen- ties and thirties, or even earlier. It was where the second-class prostitutes gathered.”

  “Qinghe Lane? Odd—the name does not sound so strange.”

  “Well, it was mentioned in the well-known biography of Chiang Kai-shek by Tang Ren, but that may well be fictional rather than factual. At that time, Fuzhou Road, still called Fourth Avenue, was a red-light district, and Fubei Street was part of it. According to some statistics, there were more than seventy thousand prostitutes in Shanghai. In addition to government-licensed prostitutes, there were also a large number of bar girls, hostesses, masseuses, and guides engaged in clandestine or casual prostitution.”

  “Yes, I have read that biography,” Chen said, thinking it was time to close the “encyclopedia.”

  “All the brothels were closed in the 1951 campaign,” Mr. Encyclopedia droned on. “Officially, at least, there’re no prostitutes under China’s sun. Those who refused to change were put into reform-through-labor institutes. Most of them turned over a new leaf. I doubt any of them would have chosen to stay in the same neighborhood.”

  “I doubt that, too.”

  “Some sexual case in the lane?”

  “No. Just looking for somebody living there,” Chen said. “Thank you so much for your information.”

  Qinghe Lane turned out to be the one next to the grocery store. The lane looked decayed and dismal, with a glass-and-concrete-fronted kiosk attached to the first building, which made the entrance even narrower. Droplets from laundry festooned over a network of bamboo poles overhead presented an Impressionist scene in the May sunlight. It was believed that walking under the women’s lacy underwear like that streaming over the poles would bring bad luck for the day, but with the past associations of the lane in his mind, Chief Inspector Chen found it to be almost nostalgic.

  Most of the houses had been built in the twenties or even earlier. Number 18 was actually the first building, the one with the kiosk attached. It had a walled-off courtyard, tiled roofs, and heavy carved beams, its balconies spilling over with laundry dripping on the piles of vegetables and used bicycle parts in the courtyard. On the door of the kiosk was a red plastic sign announcing in bold strokes: PUBLIC PHONE SERVICE. An old man was sitting inside, surrounded by several phones and phone books, working not only as a phone operator, but probably as a doorman as well.

  “Morning,” the old man said.

  “Morning,” Chen replied.

  Even before the revolution, the house appeared to have been subdivided to accommodate more girls, each room containing one bed, of course, if not much else, with smaller alcoves for maidservants or pimps. That was probably why the house had been turned into a dorm building after 1949. Now each of these rooms was inhabited by a family. What might have originally served as a spacious dining room, where customers ordered banquets to please prostitutes, had been partitioned into several rooms, too. A closer examination revealed many signs of neglect characteristic of such dorm buildings: gaping windows, scaling cement, peeling paint, and the smell from the public bathroom permeating the corridor. Apparently each floor shared only one bathroom. And a quarter of the bathroom had been redesigned with makeshift plastic partitions into a concrete shower area.

  Chen was not unfamiliar with this type of dorm. Dormitories in Shanghai could be classified into two kinds. One was conventional: each room contained nothing but beds or bunks, six or eight of them, each resident occupying no more than one bunk’s space. For these residents, most likely bachelors or bachelor girls waiting for their work units to assign them rooms so that they could get married, such a dorm space was just a temporary solution. Chen, in the days before he had become a chief inspector, had thought about getting a dorm bunk for himself, for it could well be that such a gesture would bring pressure to bear upon the housing committee. He had even checked into it, but Party Secretary Li’s promise had changed his mind. The second kind was an extension of the first. Due to the severe housing problem, those on the waiting list could find themselves reaching their mid-or-late thirties, still with no hope of having an apartment assigned to them. As a sort of compromise, a dorm room instead of a bunk space would be assigned to those who could not afford to wait any longer. They remained, theoretically, on the waiting list though their chances would be greatly reduced.

  Guan’s room, apparently of the second kind, was on the second floor, the last one at the end of the corridor, across from the public bathroom. It was not one of the most desirable locations, but easy access to the bathroom might count as a bonus. Guan, too, had to share it with other families o
n the same floor. Eleven of them in all. The corridor was lined with piles of coal, cabbages, pots and pans, and coal stoves outside the doors.

  On one of the doors was a piece of cardboard with the character GUAN written on it. Outside the door stood a small dust-covered coal stove with a pile of pressed coal-cylinders beside it. Chen opened the door with a master key. The doormat inside was littered with mail—more than a week’s newspapers, a postcard from Beijing signed by someone called Zhang Yonghua, and an electricity bill which, ironically, still bore the pre-1949 address—Qinghe Lane.

  It was a tiny room.

  The bed was made, the ashtray empty, and the window closed. There was nothing to indicate that Guan had entertained any guest before her death. Nor did it look like a place in which someone had been murdered. The room appeared too tidy, too clean. The furniture was presumably her parents’, old and heavy, but still in usable condition, consisting of a single bed, a chest, a large wardrobe, a small bookshelf, a sofa with a faded red cover, and a stool that might have served as nightstand. A thirteen-inch TV stood on the wardrobe. On the bookshelf were dictionaries, a set of Selected Works of Mao Zedong, a set of Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, and a variety of political pamphlets and magazines. The bed was not only old, it was narrow and shabby. Chen touched it. There was no squeak of bedsprings, no mattress under the sheet, just the hardboard. There was a pair of red slippers under the bed, as if anchoring the emptiness of the silent room.

  On the wall above the headboard was a framed photograph of Guan making a presentation at the third National Model Workers Conference in the People’s Great Conference Hall. In the background of the picture sat the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party applauding with some other high ranking cadres. There was also a huge portrait of Comrade Deng Xiaoping on the other wall above the sofa.

  In the wastebasket, he saw nothing but several balls of tissues. On top of the chest was a bottle of vitamin pills, the cap still unbroken. Several lipsticks. Bottles of imported perfumes. A tiny plastic-framed mirror. He checked the drawers of the chest. The top drawer contained cash receipts from stores, some blank envelopes, and a movie magazine. The second drawer held several photo albums. The contents of the third was more mixed. An imitation leather trinket box holding an assortment of costume jewelry. Some more expensive lotions and perfumes, perhaps samples from the store. He also found a gold choker with a crescent-shaped pendant, a Citizen watch with clear stones around the face, and a necklace made of some exotic animal bone.