Death of a Red Heroine [Chief Inspector Chen Cao 01]

by Qiu Xiaolong

  “Caviar. Honestly, I have no idea what it is.”

  Afterward he made a phone call to Peiqin. “Do you know what caviar is?”

  “Yes, I’ve read about it in nineteenth-century Russian novels,” she said, “but I have never tasted it.”

  “Has your restaurant ever served caviar?”

  “You’re kidding, Guangming. Ours is such a shabby place. Only five-star hotels like the Jinjiang might have it.”

  “Is it very expensive?”

  “A tiny dish would cost you several hundred Yuan, I think,” she added. “Why your sudden interest?”

  “Oh, just something about the case.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 11

  C

  hief Inspector Chen woke with a slight suggestion of headache. A shower did not help much. It would be difficult to shake off the feeling during the day. And it happened to be a day in which he had so much work cut out for him.

  He was no workaholic, not in the way some of his colleagues claimed. It was true, however, that often it was only after he had successfully forced himself into working like a devil, that he felt the most energetic.

  He had just received a rare collection of Yan Shu’s poems—a hand-bound rice paper edition, in a deep blue cloth case. An unexpected present from Beijing, in return for the copy of the Wenhui Daily he had sent.

  There was a short note inside the cloth case.

  Chief Inspector Chen:

  Thanks for your poem. I like it very much. Sorry I cannot send you anything of my own in return. I alighted on a collection of Yan Shu’s poems in Liulichang Antique Fair a couple of weeks ago, and I thought you would like it. Also, congratulations on your promotion.

  Ling

  Of course he liked it. He recalled his days of wandering around in the Liulichang Antique Fair, then a poor student from Beijing Foreign Language Institute, examining old books without being able to buy any of them. He had seen something like it only once—in the rare book section of the Beijing Library where Ling had compared his ecstatic sampling to that of the silverfish lost in the pages of the ancient volumes. Such a hand-bound collection could be very expensive, but it was worth it. The feel of the white rice paper was exquisite. It almost conveyed a message from antiquity. Like his, Ling’s note did not say much. The choice of such a book spoke for itself. Ling had not changed. She was still fond of poetry—or of his poetry.

  He should have told Ling about the seminar in October, but he did not want her to think that he had thrown himself into politics. For the moment, however, he did not have to think too much about it. There was nothing like spending a late May morning wandering about in the green ivy-covered world of the celebrated Song dynasty poet.

  He flipped through the pages.

  Helpless the flowers fall,

  The swallows return, seemingly no strangers.

  A brilliant couplet. Often people see something for the first time, but with the feeling of having seen it before, of déjà vu. Such a phenomenon had been attributed to the effects of half-remembered dreams or else to misfiring neurons in the brain. Whatever the interpretation, Chen, too, had a feeling—both strange and familiar—like the swallows in Yan’s lines, of having visited Guan’s world. As he held the book in his hand, the feeling was mixed with the elusive memories of his college years in Beijing. . . .

  It was disturbing. Guan no longer represented an esoteric character. The case had somehow become a personal challenge. People had seen Guan as a national model worker, ever politically correct, an embodiment of the Party’s much propagandized myth. But he did not. There must have been something else, something different in her. Just what it was, he could not say yet, but until he was able to explain it to himself, he would continue to be oppressed by an indefinable uneasiness.

  It was not just because of the caviar.

  He had talked to a lot of people who seemed to have thought well of her. Politically, of course. Personally, they knew practically nothing. It seemed that she had so committed herself to her political role that she could play no other part, personal or otherwise. A point Detective Yu had made.

  She had no time, perhaps. Eight hours a day, six days a week, she had to be busy living up to what was expected of her. She had to attend numerous meetings and to make all the presentations at Party conferences, in addition to the long working hours she put in at the store. Everything was possible, of course, according to Communist Party propaganda. Comrade Lei Feng had represented just such a selfless miracle. There was no mention at all of his personal life in The Diary of Comrade Lei Feng, which had sold millions of copies. It was revealed in the late eighties, however, that the diary was a pure fabrication by a professional writing team commissioned by the Central Party Committee.

  Political correctness was a shell. It should not, could not, spell an absence of personal life. And that could have been said of himself as well, Chief Inspector Chen thought.

  He suspected he needed a respite from the case, at least for a short while. And at once it came to him that what he wanted most—one of his first thoughts on awakening—was to be with Wang Feng. He put his hand on the phone, but he hesitated. It might not be the right time. Then he remembered her call earlier in the week. A ready excuse. A breakfast invitation would commit him to no more than a pleasant morning. A hard-working chief inspector was entitled to the company of a reporter who had written about him.

  “How are you this morning, Wang?”

  “I’m fine. But it’s early, not even seven o’clock.”

  “Well, I woke up thinking of you.”

  “Thank you for telling me this. So you could have called earlier—three o’clock if you happened to roll out of your bed then.”

  “I’ve just come up with an idea. The Peach Blossom Restaurant is serving morning tea again. It’s quite close to your home. What about having a cup of tea with me?”

  “Only a cup of tea?”

  “You know it’s more than that—dimson or Guangdong-style morning tea, along with a wide variety of delicacies.”

  “There’s a deadline I’ve got to meet today. I’ll feel drowsy after a full meal, even at ten o’clock in the morning. But you can meet me on the Bund, close to Number Seven dock, opposite the Peace Hotel. I’ll be practicing Taiji.”

  “The Bund, Number Seven dock. I know where it is,” he said. “Can you make it there in fifteen minutes?”

  “I’m still in bed. You really want me to come running to you barefoot?”

  “Why not? See you in half an hour then.” He put down the phone.

  It was an intimate allusion between them. Arising from their first meeting. He was pleased with the way she had said it over the phone.

  He had met Wang about a year earlier. On a Friday afternoon, Party Secretary Li told him to go to the office of the Wenhui Daily, saying that a reporter named Wang Feng would like to interview him there. Why a Wenhui reporter should be interested in seeing a junior police officer, Chen could not figure out.

  The Wenhui building was a twelve-story sandstone edifice located on Tiantong Road, commanding a magnificent view over the Bund. Chen arrived there about two hours late, having been delayed with a traffic violation case. At the entrance, there was an old man sitting at something like a front desk. When Chen handed over his name card, he was told Wang was not in her office. The doorman was positive, however, that she was somewhere in the building. So Chen took a seat in the lobby, waited, and started to read a paperback mystery, The Fallen Curtain. It was not much of a lobby, just a small space for a couple of chairs in front of an old-fashioned elevator. There were not too many people coming and going at the moment. Soon he was lost in Ruth Rendell’s world until a clatter of footsteps caught his attention.

  A tall, slender girl was walking out of the elevator with a pink plastic pail over her bare arm. Wenhui must have a shower room for its staff, he thought. She was in her early twenties, wearing a low-cut T-shirt and shorts. Her wet hair was tied up with a sky-blue kerchief. H
er wooden slippers clapped crisply against the floor. Probably a college student doing an internship, he thought. She certainly scampered like one. And then she stumbled, pitching forward.

  Throwing away the book, he jumped up and caught her in his arms.

  Standing on one slipper, her hand on his shoulder for balance, she reached one bare foot out to the other slipper which had been flung into the corner. She blushed, disengaging herself from his embrace. It took her only a second to regain her balance, but she remained deeply embarrassed.

  She did not have to be, Chen thought with a wry humor, feeling her wet hair brushing against his face, her body smelling of some pleasant soap.

  In traditional Chinese society, however, such physical contact would have been enough to result in a wedding contract. “Once in a man’s arms, always in his arms.”

  “Wang Feng,” the doorman said. “The police officer has been waiting for you.”

  She was the reporter who had summoned him there. And the interview afterward led to something he had not expected.

  Afterward, he had joked about her coming barefoot to him. “Coming barefoot” was an allusion to a story in classical Chinese literature. In 800 B.C., the Duke of Zhou, anxious to meet a wise man who would help him unify the county, ran barefoot out of the hall to greet him. The phrase was later used to exaggerate one’s eagerness to meet a guest.

  It did not apply to them. She had happened to fall, walking out of the bathroom, and he had happened to be there, catching her in his arms. That was all. Now a year later, he was walking toward her again. At the intersection of the Bund and Nanjing road, the top of the Wenhui office building shimmered behind the Peace Hotel.

  The morning’s in the arms of the Bund, her hair dew-sparkled . . .

  The Bund was alive with people, sitting on the concrete benches, standing by the bank, watching the dark yellow tide rolling in, singing snatches of Beijing operas along with the birds in the cages hung on the trees. A light haze of May heat trembled over the colored-stone walk. A long line of tourists stretched out, leading to the cruise ticket offices, near the Bridge Park. At the Lujiazhui ferry, he saw a swarthy sailor coiling the hawsers as a small group of students looked on curiously. The boat appeared crowded, as always, and as the bell rang urgently, men and women hurried to their destination, and then to new destinations. A tunnel project was said to be under construction beneath the river, so people would soon have alternative ways to get across the water. Several petrels glided over the waves, their wings glistening white in the sunlight, as if flying out of a calendar illustration. The river, though still polluted, showed some signs of improvement.

  Exhilaration quickened his steps.

  There were groups of people doing Taiji along the Bund, and he saw Wang in one of them.

  History does not repeat itself.

  One of the first things he noticed was the long green skirt covering her feet. She was striking a sequence of Taiji poses: a white crane flashing its wings, a master strumming the lute, a wild horse shaking its mane, a hunter grasping a bird’s tail. All the poses were in imitation of nature—the essence of Taiji.

  A mixed feeling came over him as he stood gazing at her. Nothing was wrong with Taiji itself. It was an ancient cultural heritage following the Taoist philosophy of subduing the hard by being soft, the yin-yang principle. As a means to keep fit, Chen himself had practiced it, but he was troubled by the fact that she was the only young woman in the group, her black hair held back by a blue cotton scarf.

  “Hi,” he greeted her.

  “What are you staring at?” Wang said, walking toward him. She was wearing white casual shoes.

  “For a second, you were walking to me out of a Tang poem.”

  “Oh, here you go again with your quotations and interpretations. Am I seeing a poetry critic or a police officer this morning?”

  “Well, it is not we who make the interpretation,” Chen said, “but the interpretation makes us—a critic or a cop.”

  “Let me see,” she said, breaking into a smile. “It’s just like Tuishou practice, isn’t it? It’s not that we push Tuishou, but the practice pushes us.”

  “You’re no stranger to deconstruction.”

  “And you’re good at spouting poetically deconstructive nonsense. “

  That was just another reason her company was always so enjoyable. She was not bookish, but she had read across a wide range of subjects, even the latest ones.

  “Well, I used to be quite good at Taiji. At Tuishou too.”

  “No kidding?”

  “It’s years ago. I may have forgotten some techniques, but try me.”

  Tuishou—or push-hand sparring exercise—was a special form of Taiji. Two people standing opposite each other, palms to palms, pushing and being pushed in a slow, spontaneous flow of rhythmic harmony. There were several people doing that near the Taiji group.

  “It’s easy. Just keep your arms in constant contact,” she said, taking up his hands, pedantically, “and make sure that you push neither too little nor too much. Harmonious, natural, spontaneous. Tuishou values dissolving an oncoming force before striking a blow.”

  She was a good instructor, but it did not take her long to find out that he was actually the more experienced. He could have pushed her off balance in the first few rounds, but he found this experience, with his palms pressed against hers, their bodies moving together in an effortless effort, too intimate to bring to a quick stop.

  And it was really intimate—her face, her arms, her body, her gestures, the way she moved and was moved, her eyes shining into his eyes.

  He did not want to push her too hard. But she was getting impatient, throwing more force into it. He rotated his left forearm to ward off her attack by turning his body slightly to the side. With a subtle technique of neutralizing her force, he drew in his chest, shifting his weight onto his right leg and pressing her left arm downward. She leaned forward too much.

  He took the opportunity of pushing her back. She lost her balance, staggering forward. He reached out to take her in his arms. She was blushing deeply, trying to disengage herself.

  Since their first meeting, he had been resisting the temptation to hold her in his arms again—this time not by accident. Initially he was not sure what she might think of him. Perhaps he had a touch of an inferiority complex. What reason was there for him to believe that a pretty, promising reporter, almost ten years younger, would be interested in an entry-level cop? Then he learned that she had been married, a fact he had since been trying to overlook, for she had been married—he had kept telling himself—only nominally. Two or three months before their first meeting, her boyfriend, Yang Kejia, was about to leave for an approved study program in Japan. His father, lying in the hospital, gasped out his last wish to the two young people: that they would go to the city hall for a marriage license, even though the wedding could be postponed until after Yang’s return from Japan. It was a matter of Confucian significance that he leave this world with the satisfaction of seeing his only son married. Wang did not have the heart to say no, so she agreed. In a couple of weeks her father-in-law passed away, and then her husband defected in Japan, refusing to return to China. That was a terrible blow to her. As a wife, she was supposed to know everything about Yang’s movements, but she was totally in the dark. Chen believed the defector would not have discussed it with her in long-distance calls which could be tapped. But some Internal Security officers did not credit this, and she was questioned several times.

  According to a colleague of hers, it would serve Yang right if, having left her in such a situation, she divorced him. But Chen had not discussed this with her. There was no hurry. He knew he liked her, but he had not made up his mind yet. In the meantime, he was happy to be with her whenever he could find the time.

  “You know how to push,” she said, her hand still in his.

  “No, I’ll never push you. It’s just the natural flow. But on second thought,” he said, gazing at her flushed face, “
I do want to push you a little. What about a cup of coffee in the Riverside Cafe?”

  “In full view of the Wenhui Building?”

  “What’s wrong with that?” He could sense her hesitation. There was the possibility of their being seen together by her colleagues passing along the Bund. He himself had heard of gossip about them in the bureau. “Come on, this is the nineties.”

  “You don’t have to push for that,” she said.

  The Riverside Cafe consisted of several chairs and tables on a large cedar deck jutting out above the river. They climbed a silver-gray wrought-iron spiral staircase and chose a white plastic table under a large flowered umbrella that offered a wonderful view of the river and the colorful vessels coming and going slowly along its eastern bank. A waitress brought them coffee, juice, and a glass bowl of assorted fruit.