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

by Qiu Xiaolong

  “You’re not retired, Uncle Yu. And you’re so experienced and resourceful.”

  “I’m glad that the information could be of some use to you. If necessary, she’ll testify in court. I will see to it.”

  “Thank you so much. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “You don’t have to. Guess why I wanted to see you,” Old Hunter said, looking into his tea, instead of at Chen. “I still have some connections, in the bureau and elsewhere. I’m a retired nobody, so people are not so guarded talking to me.”

  “Of course, people trust you,” Chen nodded.

  “I’m old. Nothing really matters that much to me now. You’re still young. You are doing the right thing. An honest cop, there are not many like you left nowadays. But there are some people who do not like seeing you do the right thing. Some people high up.”

  So Old Hunter had called him for a reason. He had ruffled feathers at a high level. And people were talking about it. Was it possible that he had already been placed under surveillance?

  “Those people can be dangerous. They’ll have your phone tapped, or your car bugged. They are not amateurs. So take care of yourself.”

  “Thank you, Uncle Yu. I will.”

  “That’s all I can tell you. And I’m glad Guangming’s working with you.”

  “I still believe justice will prevail,” Chen said.

  “So do I,” Old Hunter said, raising his cup. “Let me drink a cup of tea to your success.”

  It could be his last case as a chief inspector, Chen thought somberly, as he made his way out of the crowded City God’s Temple Market, if he insisted on continuing the investigation. If he buckled under the pressure, however, it might still be the last case for him. For he would not be able to call himself either an honest cop or a man with a clear conscience.

  * * * *

  Chapter 27

  W

  hen Chen reached Henan Road he thought he noticed a middle-aged man in a brown T-shirt walking behind him steadily, always at a distance, but never totally out of sight. The pressure of feeling watched, with every movement registered, every step followed, was a new experience. But when he went into a grocery store, the man in the brown T-shirt passed without slowing. Chen heaved a sigh of relief. Maybe he was too nervous. It was already past four. He was in no mood to go back to the bureau. So he decided to go to his mother’s home, which was located in a small, quiet, graveled lane off Jiujiang Road.

  He went out of his way to buy a pound of roast suckling pork in Heavenly Taste, a new privately run delicatessen. The suckling pork skin looked golden and crisp. She would like it. Though in her seventies, she still had good teeth. She had been out of his thoughts for days. He had even forgotten to buy anything for her in Guangzhou. He felt bad; he was her only son.

  As the old house came in view, it struck him as strange, nearly unrecognizable, despite the fact that he had lived there with his mother for years, and in his own apartment for only a few months. The common cement sink by the front door was so damp he spotted green moss sprouting abundantly near the tap. The cracked walls would need extensive repairs and redecoration. The stairway was musty and dark, and the landings were piled with cardboard boxes and wicker baskets. Some might have been there for years.

  His mother was silhouetted against the light falling through the curtain pulled halfway across the attic window.

  “You haven’t called for a few days, son.”

  “Sorry, Mother. I’ve been so busy recently,” he said, “but you’re always in my thoughts. And this room, too.”

  The familiar yet unfamiliar room. The framed photograph of his father in the forties in cap and gown stood on the cracked chest of drawers, an earnest-looking young scholar with a bright future. The photograph shone in the light. She was standing by it.

  She had never really gotten over her husband’s death, he reflected, though she seemed to manage, going to the food market every day, chatting with her neighbors, and doing Taiji practice in the morning. On several occasions he had tried to give her some money, but she declined. She insisted that he should save for himself.

  “Don’t you worry about me,” she said, with the emphasis on the last word. “I’ve got a lot to do. I talk to your uncle on the phone almost every day, and I watch TV in the evening. There are more channels this month.”

  She had accepted only two things from him: the phone and the color TV.

  The phone was not really his. The bureau had bought and installed it for him. When he was about to move out, he had another one set up in the new apartment. Theoretically, Chief Inspector Chen ought to have given up the old one, but he had made a point of having to talk to his mother everyday. She was in her seventies, living all by herself. Party Secretary Li had agreed with a nod; it was like being given a check for three thousand Yuan. The phone set itself was not that expensive, but with so many Shanghai people on the waiting list, installation would have cost a small fortune, not to mention all the official documents required to prove its necessity.

  To her, it would be an invaluable safeguard against loneliness.

  And the TV, too. He had bought it at the “state price” on sale—affordable at his salary level. He was a chief inspector, not just anybody, and the store manager knew him well, too. And why not? During the Cultural Revolution, his father’s home had been ransacked by the Red Guards. In the early eighties, when his father’s losses were estimated, the figure was also calculated at the state price, that of fifteen years earlier. His mother’s five-karat diamond wedding ring, appraised according to the state price, had been valued at less than one-third of the cost of a color TV.

  “Have some tea?” his mother asked.

  “Fine.”

  “A dish of Suzhou sugar-frosted haw to go with the tea?”

  “Fantastic.”

  He took the cup and saucer from his mother. In amazement, he watched her taking the jasmine blossom from her hair and putting it in her own cup. He had never seen anybody drinking jasmine tea made this way. The petals floated on the dark green water in her cup.

  “At my age, I can indulge myself a little, I think. Only twenty cents for the flower.”

  “Fresh jasmine flower tea,” he said. “What a wonderful idea!”

  He was glad she had not put the flower in his teacup.

  He suspected she had never stopped worrying about money. Her husband, though a well-known scholar, had left practically nothing, except the books she could not bring herself to sell. A celebrity’s widow, she considered herself above peddling. But her pension would hardly cover her most basic needs. The jasmine flower, perhaps two or three days old, was about to be discarded anyway. She had made a virtue out of necessity. Next time he would bring her half a pound of genuine jasmine tea, he promised himself. The famous Cloud and Mist tea, from the Yellow Mountains.

  She put down her cup and leaned back on the rocking rattan chair. “Well,” she said. “Tell me how things are with you.”

  “Everything’s fine,” he said.

  “What about the most important thing in your life?”

  It was a question he knew too well. She referred to his dating a girl, marrying her, and having a child. He always claimed to be too busy, which happened to be true.

  “There are so many things happening at the bureau, Mother.”

  “So you have no time even to think about it. Is that right?” she said, familiar with his answer.

  He nodded, like a filial son, despite the Confucian saying, “There are three things that make a man unfilial, and to have no offspring is the most serious.”

  “What about Wang Feng?”

  “She is going to join her husband in Japan.” He added, “And I’m helping her get the visa.”

  “Well—”she said, with no disappointment in her voice, “it might not be a bad thing for you, son. In fact, I’m glad. She is married—at least in name, I know. Not to break up someone’s marriage is a worthy deed. Buddha will bless you for it. But since you parted with th
at girl in Beijing, Wang seemed to be the only one you really cared for.”

  “Let’s not talk about it, okay?”

  “Remember Yan Hong, the anchorwoman? She’s really famous on the Oriental channel now. Everybody says how wonderful she is. A golden voice, and a golden heart, too. I ran across her in the First Department Store last week. She used to call you in the evening—I recognized her voice—but you did not return her calls. Now she’s a happy mother with a chubby son, but she still called me ‘aunt.’“

  “Our relationship was totally professional.”

  “Come on,” she said, sniffing at the jasmine blossom in her tea, “you’ve withdrawn into a shell.”

  “I wish I had a shell. It might protect me. For the last two weeks, I have had so many matters to deal with. Today is the first time I could steal a couple of hours,” he said, trying to change the subject. “So I’ve come here.”

  “Don’t worry about me, “she said, “and don’t change the subject either. With your current pay and position, you should not have too much difficulty finding someone.”

  “I give you my word, Mother,” he said, “I will find a wonderful daughter-in-law for you in the near future.”

  “Not for me, but for yourself.”

  “Yes, you’re right.”

  “You have time to have supper with me, I hope?”

  “As long as you don’t make anything special for me.”

  “No, I won’t.” She stood up. “I’ll just need to warm up a few leftover dishes.”

  Not too many dishes, he suspected, looking into the small bamboo food cabinet on the wall. She could not afford a refrigerator.

  The small cabinet held only one tiny dish of cabbage pickles, a bottle of fermented bean curd, and half a dish of green bean sprouts. But a bowl of watery rice porridge and pickle tasted quite palatable after a week of exotic delicacies in Ouyang’s company.

  “Don’t worry, mother,” he said, adding a tiny bit of the bean curd to his porridge. “I’m going to attend a Central Party Institute seminar in October, and after that I’ll have more time for myself.”

  “And are you going to be a cop all your life?” she said.

  He could not help staring at her. That was not a question he was prepared for. Not this evening. He was startled by its bitterness. She had not been pleased with his career, he knew. She had hoped that her son would become an academic like his father. But being a police officer had not been a matter of his choice. It surprised him that she should have brought up the subject now that he had become a chief inspector.

  “I have been doing fine, really,” he said, patting her thin, blue-veined hand. “Nowadays, I have my own office in the bureau, and a lot of responsibility, too.”

  “So it has become your career for life.”

  “Well, that I don’t know.” He added after a pause, “I have been asking myself the same question, but I have not got the answer yet.

  That, at least, was truthful. Occasionally he still wondered what would have become of him had he continued his literature studies. Perhaps he would be an assistant or associate professor at a university, where he could teach and write too, a career he had once dreamed about. In the last few years, however, he had somehow come around to a different perspective. Life was not easy for most people, especially during China’s transitional period between socialist politics and capitalist economics. There might be a lot of things of more importance or at least of more immediate urgency than modernist and postmodernist literary criticism.

  “Son, you still yearn after the other kind of life, don’t you— study, books, all that sort of thing?”

  “I don’t know. Last week I happened to read a critical essay, another interpretation of the poem about a butterfly flying in The Dream of the Red Chamber. The thirty-fifth interpretation, the author claims proudly. But what is all that to our people’s life today?”

  “But—but don’t you want Fudan or Tongji University anymore?”

  “I do, but I don’t see anything wrong with what I’m doing.”

  “Is police work a preferable way of making a living?”

  It was just one way to make a living, he thought. And literature, too, might be just another commodity, like everything else in today’s market. If an academic career provided him with no more than secure tenure and a middle-class living standard, would he feel more rewarded?

  “I don’t mean that, Mother. Still, if I can do something in my work to prevent one human being from being abused and killed by another, that’s worth doing.”

  He did not say anything more. There was no point elaborating on his defense, but he remembered what his father had once said to him. “A man is willing to die for the one who appreciates him, and a woman makes herself beautiful for the one who appreciates her.” Another quotation from Confucius. Chen did not worship Confucius, but some of his sayings seemed to stick with him.

  “You have been doing quite well in Party politics,” she observed.

  “Yes,” he said, “so far I’ve been lucky.”

  But his luck might be changing at that very moment. It was ironic that in the defense of his career choice, he had momentarily forgotten the trouble hanging over his head. He did not want to discuss it with his mother. She had enough worries of her own.

  “Still, I’d like to give you a piece of my mind.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You’ve got luck, and talent, but you don’t have the inner makings for such a career. You’re my only son, I know. So cut your losses. Try something that really appeals to you.”

  “I will think about it, Mother.”

  He had thought about it.

  If you work hard enough at something, it begins to make itself part of you, even though you do not really like it and know that part isn’t real.

  That was the line he had written under the poem “Miracle” to that friend far away in Beijing. It could be about poetry, but also about police work.

  * * * *

  Chapter 28

  I

  t was already nine o’clock when Chief Inspector Chen reached his apartment.

  A message light blinked on his machine. Too many messages in one day. Again he sensed a dull pounding at his temples—a new headache coming on. It could be an omen, a signal for him to stop. But he pushed down the button before he dropped his briefcase.

  “Comrade Chief Inspector Chen, this is Li Guohua speaking. Please give me a call when you return. I’ll be working late in the office tonight. Right now it is ten to five.” It was Party Secretary Li’s voice, formal and serious even when leaving a message.

  He called the bureau; the phone was picked up on the first ring. Li was waiting for him.

  “Come to the office, Chief Inspector Chen. We need to have a talk.”

  “It’ll take me about thirty minutes. Will you be still there?”

  “Yes, I’m waiting for you.”

  “Then I’m on my way.”

  Actually it took more than thirty minutes before he walked into the Party Secretary’s fifth-floor office. Li was having instant beef-flavored noodles. The plastic bowl stood amidst the papers scattered across the mahogany desk. There was a small heap of cigarette butts in an exquisite tray of Fujian quartz with a dragon design.

  “Comrade Party Secretary Li, Chief Inspector Chen Cao reporting, “ Chen said, observing the correct political form.

  “Welcome back, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen.”

  “Thanks.”

  “How’s everything?”

  “Everything is fine,” Chen said. “I tried to report to you this morning, but you were not available. Then I had to be out for the most of the day.”

  “You have been busy investigating the case, I know,” Li said. “Now tell me about it.”

  “We’ve made some real progress.” Chen opened his briefcase. “As Detective Yu may have reported, we targeted Wu Xiaoming as the chief suspect before my trip to Guangzhou. And now we have several other leads and they all fit together.”r />
  “New leads?”

  “Well, one is the last phone call Guan received on May tenth. According to the stub book of the public phone station at Qinghe Lane, it came in around nine thirty, about three or four hours before her death. That call was made by none other than Wu Xiaoming. It’s confirmed.” He put a copy of the record on the desk.