Red Mandarin Dress

by Unknown

  Chen climbed up the concrete staircase and knocked at an imitation oak door on the second floor. The door opened cautiously. Chen handed over his business card to a tall, gaunt man in a cotton-padded robe and felt slippers, who examined the card with surprise on his deep-lined face.

  “Yes, I am Xiang. So you are a member of Chinese Writers Association?”

  The card was his from the Chinese Writers Association, Chen realized. An inexplicable slip.

  “Oh, I have mixed my cards. I am Chen Cao, of the Shanghai Police Bureau, and I am also a member of the association.”

  “I may have heard of you, Chief Inspector Chen,” Xiang said. “I don’t know what wind has brought you over here today, but come on in, as a poet or as a police officer.”

  Xiang moved to pour Chen a cup of tea from a thermos bottle and added some water into his own cup. Xiang walked with a slight suggestion of a limp, Chen observed.

  “You sprained your ankle, Professor Xiang?”

  “No. Infantile paralysis at the age of three.”

  “Sorry for coming to see you without notice. It’s because of an important case. I have to ask you some questions,” Chen said, seating himself at a plastic folding chair by an apparently custom-made, extraordinary long desk, which was the main feature in a living room lined with bookshelves. “Questions about Mei. She was a colleague of yours.”

  “Question about Mei? She was indeed a colleague of mine, but so many years ago. Why?”

  “The case didn’t—and doesn’t—involve her, but the information about her may throw some light on our investigation. Whatever you say will be confidential.”

  “You aren’t going to write about her, are you?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “A couple of years ago, someone approached me for information about her. I refused to tell him anything.”

  “Who was he?” Chen said. “Do you remember his name?”

  “I forget his name, but I don’t think he showed his ID to me. He said he was a writer. Anybody could have claimed to be such.”

  “Can you give me a detailed description of this man?”

  “In his early or midthirties. Well-mannered, but rather elusive in his speech. That’s about all I remember.” Xing took a sip of his tea. “With this city lost in collective nostalgia, stories about once illustrious families are popular, like The Ill-Fated Beauty of Shanghai. Why should I let anyone exploit her memory?”

  “You did the right thing, Professor Xiang. It would be horrible for a so-called writer to profit from her suffering.”

  “No, no one can drag her memory through the humiliating mire again.”

  There was a slight tremor in Xiang’s voice. For an admirer of her, there was nothing too surprising about his reaction. But “humiliating mire” indicated he knew something.

  “I give you my word, Professor Xiang. I’m not here for the sake of a story.”

  “You have mentioned a case. . . .” Xiang sounded uncertain.

  “At this moment, I can’t go into details. Suffice it to say that several people have died, and that more will be killed if the murderer is not stopped.” Chen took out the magazine together with the other pictures. “You may have seen this magazine.”

  “Oh, these other pictures too,” Xiang said, beginning to examine them. His face pale and earnest, he rose and strode to one of the bookshelves and took out a copy of China Photography. “I have kept it all these years.”

  There was a bookmark with a red tassel sticking out of the magazine, marking the page of the picture. The bookmark was a new one, representing the Oriental Pearl, a high-rise landmark east of the river built in the nineties.

  “It was such a long time ago,” Chen said. “There must be a story about it.”

  “Yes, a long story. How old were you at the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution?”

  “Still in elementary school.”

  “Then you have to know something about the background.”

  “Of course. But please tell me from the very beginning, Professor Xiang.”

  “For me, it started in the early sixties. I was then just assigned to the music institute, where Mei had already worked for about two years. So beautiful, and talented too, she was the queen there. Now don’t get me wrong, Chief Inspector Chen. For me, she was an inspiration more than anything else. I was frustrated at being unable to practice the classics—nothing was permitted but two or three revolutionary songs. But for her presence, which lit up the whole rehearsal room, I would have given up.”

  “As you have mentioned,” Chen said, “she was the queen. There must have been a lot of people that admired her—and approached her, too. Have you heard or known about any such stories?”

  “What do you mean?” Xiang said, literally glaring at him.

  “For the investigation, I have to ask all kinds of questions. It doesn’t mean anything disrespectful to her, Professor Xiang.”

  “No, I have not heard any story. A woman of her family background had to live with her tail tucked in, so to speak. Any peach-colored gossip could be disastrous. It was then a Communist-Puritan period—you were perhaps too young to understand. There was not a single romantic love song in the whole country.”

  “Chairman Mao wanted people to devote themselves to the socialist revolution. No room for romantic love—” Chen broke off, unexpectedly reminded of something similar in his paper, except that there it was Confucianism. “Her husband also worked at the institute, didn’t he?”

  “Her husband, Ming Deren, taught there too. Nothing so special about him. Their marriage had been—at least partially, I think—an arranged one. Before 1949, his father was a successful investment banker, and hers was only a struggling attorney. The Ming Mansion was one of the most extravagant in the city.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of the mansion. Did they have any problems in their marriage?” Chen wondered why Xiang brought up the topic of arranged marriage.

  “Not that I know of, but people thought he was no match for her.”

  “I see,” Chen said, realizing that for Xiang, no one could have been worthy of her. “Now, how did you come to know about the picture? She must have told you or shown you the magazine.”

  “No. We shared an office, and I happened to overhear her phone conversation with the photographer. So I bought a copy of the magazine.”

  “About the mandarin dress in the picture—had you seen her wearing it?”

  “No, I didn’t. Neither before nor after the picture. She had several mandarin dresses, which she occasionally wore for performances, but not the one in the picture.”

  “So she got into trouble because of the picture?”

  “I don’t know. Shortly afterward, the Cultural Revolution broke out. Her father-in-law passed away and her husband committed suicide, which was condemned as a serious crime against the Party. She was turned into a ‘black family member of a current counterrevolutionary’ and driven out of the mansion into the attic above the garage. The mansion was taken over by a dozen ‘red families.’ She suffered the worst humiliating persecution.”

  “So she died a tragic death because of it?”

  “About the circumstances of her death,” Xiang said, taking a long sip at his tea, as if sipping at his memory, “my recollection may not be so reliable, you know, after all these years.”

  “It happened more than twenty years ago, I understand. You don’t have to worry about the accuracy of the details. Whatever you tell me, I’ll check and double-check,” Chen said, also sipping at the tea. “Look at the picture. It’s like in a proverb, a beauty’s fate as thin as a piece of paper. Something really should be done for her.”

  That clinched it for Xiang.

  “You really mean it?” Xiang said. “Yes, you cops should have done something for her.”

  Chen nodded, saying nothing for fear of interrupting.

  “You have heard of the campaign of Mao Zedong Thought Worker Propaganda Teams and what they did at colleges and universities, haven
’t you?” Xiang went on without waiting for a response. “They stood for political correctness during those years in the Cultural Revolution. A team arrived at our school too, bullying in the name of reeducating the intellectuals. The head of the team soon had a nickname whispered among us—Comrade Revolutionary Activity. It was because he talked all the time about his ‘revolutionary activity’—beating, criticizing, cursing us, the so-called ‘class enemies.’ What could we do except give him a nickname behind his back?”

  “Was she the target of any of his ‘revolutionary activity?’ ”

  “Well, he kept giving ‘political talks’ to her. There were stories about those talks behind closed doors, but to be fair to him, I didn’t notice anything really suspicious. Their talks weren’t too long. Nor was the door closed—not all the time. Still, she cringed like a mouse in front of a cat. I mean, in his company, which she tried her best to avoid.”

  “Did you tell her about your concerns?”

  “No. It would have been a crime to suspect a Mao member like that,” Xiang said with a bitter smile. “Then something happened. Not at the school, but at her home. A chalk-written counterrevolutionary slogan was found on their garden wall. By that time, there were more than ten families living in the house, but the neighborhood committee saw it as an anti-Party attack by another counterrevolutionary in her family. One of her neighbors claimed to have seen her son holding a piece of chalk, and another declared that she was there behind the scenes. So the committee came to our institute. Comrade Revolutionary Activity met them, and they formed a joint investigation group and put the boy into an isolation investigation—they locked him up in the back room of the neighborhood committee until he was ready to confess his crime.”

  “That’s too much,” Chen said. “Did they torture him during the isolation investigation?”

  “What exactly the joint group did there, I don’t know. Comrade Revolutionary Activity spent a lot of his time in her neighborhood—every day. She wasn’t put into isolation interrogation, however, like her late husband had been earlier, and like her son was then. She still came to the institute, looking deeply troubled. Then one afternoon, out of the blue, she ran out of the attic, unclothed, fell stumbling down the staircase, and died then and there. Some said she must have lost her mind. Some said she was taking a bath, jumping out upon the unexpected return of her son.”

  “Was her son released that day?”

  “Yes, he returned that afternoon, but when he reached the door of their attic room, he turned back and rushed down the staircase. According to one of her neighbors, she fell running out after him.”

  “That’s strange. Even if he stumbled upon her in a bath, he didn’t have to run away at that, nor did she have to rush out naked.”

  “She was so attached to her son. She could have forgotten herself in the overwhelming joy.”

  “What did the Mao team member say about her death?”

  “He said that her death was an accident. That’s about it.”

  “Did anyone raise questions about the circumstances of her death?”

  “No, not at the time. I was in trouble for ‘poisoning the students with decadent Western classics.’ Like a clay image crossing the river, I could hardly protect myself,” Xiang said. “After the Cultural Revolution, I thought about approaching the factory where Comrade Revolutionary Activity had come from. He had never explained his activity in her neighborhood. As the head of the Mao team, he was supposed to stay at our school, not her neighborhood. So why was he there? But I hesitated because I didn’t have anything substantial, and because it could drag her memory through the mire again. Also, I heard he had also fallen on hard times, wrecked through a series of mishaps, fired and punished.”

  “Hold on—Comrade Revolutionary Activity. Do you remember his name?”

  “No, but I can find out,” Xiang said. “Are you going to investigate him?”

  “Was there anything else unusual about him?”

  “Yes, there’s one more thing I noticed. Usually, for one school, the Mao team was made of workers from one factory, but for ours, Comrade Revolutionary Activity, the head of the team, actually came from a different factory.”

  “Yes, that’s something,” Chen said, taking out a small notebook. “Which factory?”

  “Shanghai Number Three Steel Mill.”

  “How old was he then?”

  “In his late thirties or early forties.”

  “I’ll check into it,” Chen said. Still, whatever the Mao team member might have done, he would be in his sixties now, and according to Yu, the suspect in the tape at the Joy Gate was probably in his thirties. “Did people do anything after her death?”

  “I was devastated. I thought about sending a bouquet of flowers to her grave—the least I should do. But her body had been sent to the crematory, and her ashes were disposed of overnight. There was no casket, nor a tombstone. I had done nothing for her during her life, nor after her death. How pathetic a weakling!”

  “You don’t have to be so hard on yourself, Professor Xiang. It was the Cultural Revolution. All are gone and past.”

  “Gone and past,” Xiang said, taking out a record in a new cover. “I did set a classical Chinese poem to music—in memory of her.”

  Chen studied the cover with Yan Jidao’s poem printed in the background. The foreground was a blurred figure dancing in a streaming red dress.

  Waking with a hangover, I look up / to see the high balcony door / locked, the curtain / hung low. Last spring, / the sorrow of separation new, / long I stood, alone, / amidst all the falling petals: / A pair of swallows fluttered / in the drizzle. // I still remember how / Little Ping appeared the first time, / in her silken clothes embroidered / with a double character of heart,/ pouring out her passion / on the strings of a Pipa. / The bright moon illuminated her returning / like a radiant cloud.

  “She would appreciate it—in the afterworld,” Chen said, “if there is one.”

  “I would have dedicated it to her,” Xiang said, with an unexpected touch of embarrassment, “but I have never told my wife about Mei.”

  “Don’t worry. All you’ve told me will be confidential.”

  “She is coming back soon,” Xiang said, putting the record back on to the shelf. “Not that she is an unreasonable woman, you know.”

  “Just one more question, Professor Xiang. You’ve mentioned her son. Have you heard anything about him?”

  “Nothing was found out about the counterrevolutionary slogan. Anyway, he was left an orphan. He went to live with a relative of his. After the Cultural Revolution, he entered college, I heard.”

  “Do you know which college?”

  “No, I don’t. The last time I heard about him was a few years ago. If it’s important, I can make some phone calls.”

  “Would you? I would really appreciate it.”

  “You don’t have to say that, Chief Inspector Chen. At long last, a police officer is doing something for her. So I should appreciate it,” Xiang said in sincerity. “I have but one request. When your investigation is over, can you give me a set of these pictures?”

  “Of course, I’ll have a set delivered to you tomorrow.”

  “Ten years, ten years, / nothingness / between life and death.” Xiang added, changing the subject, “You may find out something more in her neighborhood, I think.”

  “Do you have her address?”

  “It’s the celebrated old mansion on Henshan Road. Close to Baoqing Road. Everybody there can tell you. It’s been turned into a restaurant. I was there and took a business card,” Xiang said, rising to reach a card box. “Here it is. Old Mansion.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  WHEN CHEN ARRIVED AT Henshan Road, it was already past eight o’clock.

  He had a hard time locating the neighborhood committee there, walking back and forth along the street. It was cold. It was crucial to find it, he told himself, fighting down a sudden suggestion of dizziness.

  With the identity of the origin
al red mandarin dress wearer established, he saw a new angle from which to approach the case.

  Despite Xiang’s denial, there was no ruling out the possibility of other admirers, even during the Communist-Puritan age described by Xiang. After all, the retired professor might not be a reliable narrator.

  The Mao team member presented another possibility worth exploring. Comrade Revolutionary Activity could have joined the team to get near her, and that made him a possible suspect in the subsequent tragedy.

  Whatever the possible scenarios, he had to first find out more about Mei through the neighborhood committee.

  The neighborhood office turned out to be tucked in a shabby side street behind Henshan Road. Most of the houses on the street were identical discolored concrete two-stories, largely in disrepair, like rows of matchboxes. There was a wooden sign pointing to a farmer’s market around the corner. The committee office was closed. From a cigarette peddler crouching nearby, he learned the name and address of the committee director.

  “Weng Shanghan. See the window on the second floor overlooking the market?” the peddler said, shivering in the winter wind as he took a cigarette from Chen. “That’s her room.”

  Chen walked over and climbed up the stairs to a room on the second floor. Weng, a short, spirited woman in her midforties, peered out the door with a visible frown. She must have taken him as a new neighbor seeking help. She held a hot water bottle in her hand, walking in her wool stockings across the gray concrete floor. It was a single efficiency room, which was not so convenient for hosting unexpected visitors.

  As it turned out, she was busy folding afterworld money at the foot of the bed, her husband helping her smooth the silver paper. A superstitious practice, which didn’t become the head of the neighborhood committee. But it was for Dongzhi night, he realized. He, too, had brought back silver afterworld money, though he burned his for Hong at the temple instead. Perhaps this explained Weng’s reluctance to receive a visitor.