by [Chief Inspector Chen Cao 05] Red Mandarin Dress [v1. 0] [epub]
There might be another reason, Chen suspected, for Liao’s manner. Shen’s coming to the bureau at Chen’s request could have rubbed Liao the wrong way. It wasn’t necessary, however, to explain the bureau politics to the elderly scholar.
“Don’t worry about Liao. He can occasionally be as stubborn as a mule, and as stupid too,” Chen said, pouring a cup of tea for Shen as the waiter started serving cold dishes. “Please give me an introduction into the history of the mandarin dress. I am all ears.”
Shen, helping himself to a spoon of white jade tofu flavored with green onion and sesame oil and nodding in approval, started. “Now, why is it called mandarin dress? There are a number of theories about it. For one, the Manchurians, both male and female, wore gowns of bright colors. It is also said that in the early period of the Qing dynasty, the Manchurians divided their people into eight groups, or qi, each sporting a flag of a special color and design. Qi is the same as in Qipao—mandarin dress, you know. It was not until the twenties and thirties, however, that the dress suddenly turned into a nationwide hit, shedding its ethnic suggestion. It then enjoyed great popularity until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. In the mid-eighties, it was reembraced, and now it’s internationally popular. Hollywood stars wear mandarin dresses to the Oscar ceremonies. People believe that it hugs a woman’s body subtly, bringing out her curves like no other dress. ...”
It was a long introduction but Chen listened with great interest. The mandarin dress being an unmistakable signature of the murderer, a cop couldn’t be too knowledgeable about it.
“About the mandarin dress Liao showed me: it was made years earlier, probably more than ten years ago,” Shen said, producing several pictures, “based on the color of the thread—already yellow with time. When you consider the material, the special damask with its exquisite print pattern, it possibly goes back even earlier. The sixties, I would say. The same with the tiny steel press buttons. Tailors only used them during that time period or earlier. Since the early eighties, they’ve used plastic zippers instead, which are more comfortable and tighter fitting. The style of the dress also belongs to that period. Look at the whole-piece sleeves. Fashionable people now prefer separate-piece sleeves, which bring out the curves more eloquently. They are also much easier to make—”
Shen’s lecture was interrupted by the arrival of their main dishes. Among them, there was a glass bowl containing live shrimp immersed in white liquor. The drunken shrimp were still jumping, though less and less energetically.
“A fashionable dish,” Shen said, “sort of rediscovered too.”
For a man his age, Shen showed quite a good appetite. He chop-sticked a twitching shrimp into his mouth and Chen followed suit. The shrimp tasted slightly sweet, but he didn’t like the slippery sensation on his tongue.
“Now I have to say a word about its tailoring,” Shen went on, puckering his lips. “A hundred percent handmade. Only an old, experienced Ningbo tailor could have produced such a dress. It took at least a week to finish. Today you may see a mandarin dress displayed in a high-end store, shiny and splendid with a staggering price tag, but the quality is just a joke. All machine made and not at all comparable to the one Liao showed me.”
“So it was made at least ten years ago, and the material and the style date back even earlier—the sixties or fifties,” Chen said, writing it down in his notebook. “In other words, the criminal had to special order material from an earlier period, and then custom-tailor it in a special way.”
“That’s beyond me,” Shen said. “But there’s something else in the way the victim wore the dress. The essence of mandarin dress aesthetics is subtle suggestiveness. The dress slits, for instance, reveal a woman’s legs, but not too much. A partial glimpse of her thighs could stir up the imagination most effectively.”
“So it’s like classical Chinese poetry,” Chen cut in. “Imagination rises out of what the poet does not say, or not directly.”
“Exactly. You know the difference. For example, a tall, buxom American star may wear a so-called modified mandarin dress, backless and extremely short in the skirt part. I, for one, would have lost all my sense of imagination at the sight of her bare back covered with speckles, and her legs and thighs shaven like mammoth tusks.”
“You are still so good with your Imagist touch, Master Shen.”
“To put it in another way, it is a dress that allows the wearer’s inner grace to shine through. Sensual, subtle, svelte. It’s not a costume that becomes everyone.”
“Yes, there is quite a lot of knowledge in that,” Chen echoed.
“The length of the side slits is another point of subtlety. For a woman of a good family, the slits are usually modest, suggesting her refined sense of decorum. Strictly speaking, when wearing a mandarin dress, a woman walks with small steps, without showing any dramatic body movement. A fashionable girl, however, may have to have higher slits for dancing or strutting around. As for a girl in the entertainment business, she would choose one with the highest slits possible, showing her legs and thighs seductively, and sometimes her buttocks too. It’s sort of the mandarin dress semiotics. In the thirties, a potential customer on Fourth Street would have approached her.”
“Yes, the dress etiquette speaks,” Chen said, swallowing another live shrimp without chewing it—a throat-scratching mistake with a terrible aftertaste. Fourth Street was an area where prostitutes had congregated before 1949.
“Also, an elegant lady wears stockings and high heels to match her dress, though not necessarily so formal at home. But look at the picture—no bra, no panties, no shoes, and the dress is rolled up high above her groin. Whoever did this murdered the dress too.” Shen paused for a moment before going on. “She’s a sex victim, I understand, but this dress is too old and rare to have been acquired by accident. Also, it is a fairly conservative dress—a woman doesn’t have sex in it. It doesn’t make sense.”
“A lot of things in this case don’t make sense,” Chen said, clearing his throat.
“I don’t know about the case, Chief Inspector Chen,” Shen said in confusion. “I know only about the dress.”
“Thank you, Shen. Your expertise has surely thrown light into the investigation.”
Chen did not say, however, that it also raised more questions than it resolved. The mandarin dress, if as old as Shen thought, was not popular when it was made. Whoever made it, made it against the fashion of the time. That suggested a possible cause embedded deeper in history, which only led to more questions.
Shen was picking up the last live shrimp with his chopsticks when Chen’s cell phone shrilled. Shen was startled, and the shrimp fell back into the bowl, splashing, jumping high as if having escaped its fate.
The phone call was from a Wenhui reporter, who wanted to find out Chen’s theory on the red mandarin dress case.
“Sorry, I can’t give you any theory. I’m on leave, working on my literature paper.”
The instant he hung up the phone, he regretted having made the statement. It was true, but it could cause speculation.
“Really?” Shen wanted to know, rising slowly. “ ‘The most useless is a scholar,’ like me, but there may not be too many capable cops, like you.”
Chen rose to support him on their way out without making a comment.
Near the exit, there were a couple of large glass tanks containing live shrimp and fish, all of them enjoying a leisurely swim, unaware that their fate might change with the next customer’s order.
* * * *
NINE
O
UTSIDE OF THE RESTAURANT, Shen moved slowly to the curb, then lowered himself into a taxi, his body doubled like a shrimp.
Waving at the taxi, Chen chided himself for the image. Shen was an original poet and an original scholar. Perhaps his academic success came from his Imagist poetics. He didn’t see a dress merely as a piece of clothing but as an image with meanings and associations.
An organic image full of life in itself, which may speak
more than pages of words.
Chen recalled one such image of clothing in Random Harvest, the novel he’d read many years ago, in Bund Park. It was an image from the heroine’s first appearance—”a little fur hat, like a fez.” It was symbolic in the text because the protagonist’s niece also wore a fur hat like a fez on another occasion. A subtle suggestion, as Chen interpreted it, about something similar between the two. When he had read it the first time, fez was an English word he didn’t know. So he looked it up in a dictionary, which defined it as a “red felt headdress, shaped like an inverted flowerpot.”
With his sentimental partiality, it would be hard for a movie to do justice to the original, and he tried not to expect too much from the one Peiqin had sent him. Still, he couldn’t help being disappointed. The film was in black and white and such a headdress didn’t stand out at all.
But what about the red mandarin dress as an image?
He stood transfixed by the question, still waving his hand at the street with the taxi long out of sight.
A good image may have a specific meaning to the author, and to the readers too. In Shen’s poem, passion for his home came out vividly in the “mutilated earthworm.” On the other hand, a bad image may be so specific to the writer that it is incomprehensible to the readers.
The murderer was no author, who worried about his readers’ comprehension. The more puzzling to others, the more satisfactory to himself, and the more successful his performance.
Chen suddenly became aware of something vibrating in his pant pocket. The cell phone. This time, the caller’s ID showed Party Secretary Li.
“I want you to cut short your leave. Don’t worry about your paper, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen. The murderer must be found before he strikes again. You don’t need me to tell you that.”
“I’m paying close attention to the case, Party Secretary Li.”
That much was true, though Chen didn’t acknowledge his effort on the side. He had a feeling that the murderer was not only highly intelligent but also well-connected. For once, Chen had the advantage of staying behind the scene, and he wanted to keep it.
“The city government is concerned about the case. A leading comrade has mentioned your name again this morning.”
“I know. I’ll discuss it with Detective Yu.”
“So come back to the bureau this afternoon.”
“This afternoon. . . .” He was not pleased with Li’s ordering him around, nor ready to go back. “You may not know that I’ve been looking into the West-Nine-Block housing development case. Director Zhong of the Shanghai Legal System Reform Committee wants me to—”
“So your Chinese literature paper is only an excuse,” Li snapped. “You could have told me earlier.”
Another imprudent slip. Chen had assumed that the excuse would put Li off for the moment, but he forgot that Li’s not knowing about Chen’s involvement was too much a loss of face for the Party boss.
“No, it’s not an excuse. I mean the paper. I do have to turn in the paper on time. As for the housing development case, you may have heard of its political sensitivity. As yet, I have done nothing about it— there was nothing to report.”
Indeed, a power struggle was being staged at the very top, Chen had learned, in the Forbidden City. Now that several high-ranking Shanghai cadres were implicated in the scandal, someone in Beijing wanted to exploit it for ulterior motives.
“You are too big a clay image for our small temple, Chief Inspector Chen.”
“No, you don’t have to say that, Secretary Li. I’m going to discuss the red mandarin dress case with Detective Yu. I give you my word.”
So instead of going back to the library after finishing his talk with Li, Chen called Yu.
“Sorry, Chief. I had to run out this morning. I missed Mr. Shen.”
“Don’t worry about that. We just had lunch together and Shen gave me quite a lecture about the mandarin dress.”
“Where are you?”
“Close to the Shanghai Library.”
“Do you have some time this afternoon? I’d like to talk.”
“Yes, so would I.”
“Great. Where shall we meet?”
“Well—” It was not practical to discuss a murder case in the library. Looking around, Chen saw a pottery bar around the corner with only a young couple sitting inside.
“What about the pottery bar on the corner of Fengyang Road, opposite the library?”
“Oh, it’s so fashionable, the pottery bar. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Chen walked into the bar, which had an L-shaped interior. The long side wasn’t that different from a café, and the short side was like a workshop with large desks, piles of clay, and a stove on the end. A customer could try his hand at pottery while enjoying a cup of coffee. Perhaps because of the time of the day, there were only the two young people in the workshop and Chen alone in the café section. The price could have been another reason. A cup of coffee here cost much more than at an ordinary café.
As he took a sip at the hot coffee, the sight of the young lovers bending over their project brought to mind a scene from a Hollywood movie, and then an image in a classical Chinese ci by a thirteenth-century woman poet, Guan Daoshen.
You and I are so crazy / about each other, / as if lost in the potters fire. / Out of a chunk / of clay, shape a you, / shape a me. Crush us / both into clay again, mix / it with water, reshape / a you, reshape a me. / So, I have you in my body, and you have me in yours too.
In the workshop, the girl started smearing the boy’s face with her clay-covered hand, her laughter sounding like silver bells, though Chen failed to make out the endearments whispered between the two. A touching image, just like in the poem. He contented himself with black coffee, attempting to digest the information from Shen.
He thought about Shen’s Imagist approach to the mandarin dress. It was possible that the dress’s meaning was not exclusive to the “author,” but that meaning was difficult for the cops to figure out because the dress had been made in accordance to a model, or an original image, such a long time ago.
Peiqin had been searching movies for something like an archetype.
Perhaps he could do more than she in that aspect. Not because of his abilities but because of his connections.
He took out his address book, looking for the number of Chairman Wang of the Chinese Writers’ Association, who also served as the First Associate Party Secretary of the Chinese Artists’ Association, whose members including fashion designers, photographers, and directors. Not too long ago, Chen had helped Wang in his way.
“Have you heard or read about the red mandarin case in Shanghai, Chairman Wang?” Chen said directly as soon as the long-distance call got through.
“Yes, I read about it here in a Beijing newspaper.”
“I have a favor to ask of you. Supposing the dress is an image some people may have seen, can you try to gather information about it from your members? Send a fax of the mandarin dress to the branch offices all over the country. Any information will help.”
“I’ll contact all the people I know, Chief Inspector Chen, but who has not seen a mandarin dress or two, in pictures or in movies or in real life? It’s neither here nor there.”
“There are three things unusual about the dress. First, as you may have read in the newspaper, the red mandarin dress is of high quality and craftsmanship, but in a old fashion, possibly from the fifties or sixties. Secondly, the woman wearing the mandarin dress was barefoot, and finally, she had a possible connection to a flower bed or a park.”
“That may narrow down the range,” Wang said. “I’ll have my secretary contact every provincial branch, but I can’t promise you anything.”
“I really appreciate your help, Chairman Wang. You are going out of your way for me, I know.”
“You would do the same for me,” Wang said, “like last time.”
Not like last time, Chen groaned. That was a real headache, even thinking about it.
Closing the phone, he was about to light a cigarette when he saw Yu enter the bar, walking in big strides.
“A quiet place, Chief,” Yu said, seeing they were the only ones in the café section.
“Any new developments?” Chen asked, pushing the menu toward his partner. “Anything from the neighborhood committees?”
“No, nothing substantial or useful.”
A waitress came over to their table, eyeing the two curiously. Stiff in his cotton-padded uniform, his hair rumpled and his shoes dust-covered, Yu cut a contrasting figure to Chen, who looked more like a regular customer at such a café, in his black blazer and khaki pants, a leather briefcase beside him. The young lovers in the pottery section were standing up to leave, a decision possibly prompted by the arrival of a cop.