When Red is Black

by Qiu Xiaolong

  Old Liang had seen better days, in the sixties and seventies, when residential registration was a matter of survival in a city with a strict food-ration-coupon policy. Coupons were needed for staples, such as rice, coal, meat, fish, cooking oil, and even cigarettes. What’s more, Chairman Mao’s class-struggle theory was applied to all walks of life. According to Mao, throughout the long period of socialism, class enemies would never stop attempting to sabotage the proletarian dictatorship. So a residential cop had to stay alert at all times. Everyone in the neighborhood had to be viewed as a hidden potential class enemy. Neighborhood security was extremely effective. If someone moved into the lane in the morning without reporting to local authorities, a residential cop would knock at his door the same night.

  But things changed, gradually in the eighties, and dramatically in the nineties. The food-ration-coupon system had been largely shelved, so people no longer depended so much on residential registration cards. Nor was there strict enforcement of the regulation regarding residential permits. Thousands of provincial workers swarmed into Shanghai. The city government was well aware of the problem, but cheap labor was much needed by the construction and service sectors.

  Still. Old Liang must have done a conscientious job. Some of the information Yu had reviewed on the bus undoubtedly had come from this veteran residential cop.

  “Let me give you some general information about Yin, Detective Yu,” Old Liang said, “and about the neighborhood too.”

  “That would be great.”

  “Yin moved into the lane from her college dorm sometime in the mid-eighties. I do not know the exact reasons for the move. Some said that she did not get along with her roommates. Some said that because of the publicity for her novel, the college decided to improve her living conditions. Not much of an improvement, a tingzijian, a tiny cubicle partitioned off from the staircase on the landing, but at least a room for herself, in which she could read and write in privacy. It seemed to be enough for her.”

  “Nobody in the police bureau contacted you about her move into the lane?”

  “I was informed of her political background, but no one gave me any specific instructions. Dealing with a dissident can be sensitive. As a residence cop, all I could do was to maintain high vigilance and collect whatever information I could about her from her neighbors. The neighborhood committee did not try to do anything in particular. Things pertaining to a political dissident would have been too complicated for us. We treated her just like any other resident in the lane.”

  “What was her relationship with her neighbors?”

  “Not good. When she first moved in, her neighbors did not notice anything unusual about her except that, as a university teacher, she had written a book about the Cultural Revolution. Everyone had his or her own experience in that national disaster. No one really wanted to talk about it.

  “As details of her book became known, some people took a sort of interest in her. A heart-breaking story, for she remained single after all these years. Some neighbors were compassionate, but she did not get along well with them. She seemed bent on shutting herself up in the tingzijian room, licking her wounds in secret.”

  “I would say that’s understandable. Her woes were personal, and perhaps too painful for her to talk about.”

  “Yet what is special about living in a shikumen house is the constant contact with your neighbors, every hour, every day,” Old Liang said, taking a sip of his tea. “Some describe Shanghainese as born wheelers and dealers. That’s not true, but people here have always lived in such miniature societies, and learned from this ongoing education in relationship management. As an old saying goes, Close neighbors are more important than distant relatives. But Yin seemed to have purposely distanced herself from her neighbors. As a result, they resented her and treated her as an outsider. Lanlan, one of her neighbors, said something to the point: ‘Her world’s not here.’”

  “Perhaps she was too busy writing to make friends,” Yu said, stealing a glance at his watch. Old Liang resembled his father, Old Hunter, in one aspect: both of them were tireless talkers, and at times wandered from the point. “Did you have any direct contact with her?”

  “Well, I did when she came to register her residence. She was rather unfriendly, even a little hostile, as if I were one of those who had beaten up Yang in those days.”

  “Have you read her novel?”

  “Not the whole book by any means, only some paragraphs quoted in the newspapers and magazines. You know what?” Old Liang went on without waiting for an answer. “Some readers were really pissed off by what she wrote about having been a Red Guard out of proletarian fervor, and doing what she referred to only as ‘some too passionate deeds’ in the name of the revolution.”

  “Was that the reaction of her neighbors too?”

  “Oh, no. I don’t think too many here have read her book. They may have heard of the book. What I know is from the research I have done.”

  “You have done a lot of work, Old Liang,” Yu said. “Let’s go to her place now.”

  Chapter 4

  Detective Yu stood before the black-painted front door of solid oak and touched the shining brass knocker, which must have been there since the shikumen house had been built.

  “There are two entrances to the house,” Old Liang explained. “The front door can be latched from inside. Normally, it is closed after nine o’clock. There is also a back door opening to the little back lane.”

  The explanation was hardly necessary for Detective Yu, who had not mentioned the fact that he had lived in a similar building for many years, but he was willing to listen. Crossing the courtyard, he stepped into the common kitchen area. Squeezed into that space were the coal stoves of a dozen or more families, as well as their pots and pans, rows of coal briquettes, and pigeonhole cabinets hung on the wall. Yu counted fifteen stoves in all. At the end of the kitchen area was the staircase, which differed from the one in his own house, as an additional room had been partitioned off at the curve in the staircase. A tingzijian, at the landing above the kitchen, between the first and second floors, was commonly regarded as one of the worst rooms in a shikumen building.

  “Let’s climb up to Yin’s room. Be careful, Detective Yu, the steps are very narrow here. Isn’t it a coincidence,” Old Liang continued, “that a number of writers lived in tingzijians in the thirties? ‘Tingzijian literature,’ I remember, referred to the writers working in poverty. There was a well-known ‘tingzijian writer’ in this area before 1949, but I cannot recall his name.”

  Yu, too, failed to recall the name, although he believed he had heard the term. How could those writers have concentrated with people moving up and down all the time, he wondered.

  “You have read quite a lot,” Yu said, convinced the elderly residence cop was not only an energetic talker, but also a digressive one.

  There was a seal on the door. Old Liang was going to tear the paper off when one of the residents called in a wailing voice, “Comrade Old Liang, you have to come and help us. That heartless man has not given a single penny to his family for more than two months.”

  It was a family squabble, Yu guessed. It would furnish him with a timely excuse. “You don’t have to accompany me, Old Liang,” Yu said. “You have so many things to deal with. It may take me some time here. Afterward, it will be important for us to have a meeting with the neighborhood committee. Can you arrange one?”

  “What about twelve o’clock at the office?” Old Liang asked. “Before I leave you, Detective Yu, here is a more detailed report for you, about the crime scene. Three pages in all.”

  Detective Yu started glancing through it as he stood on the landing, watching Old Liang disappear into the midst of the stoves in the common kitchen area.

  In the earlier information he had reviewed on the bus, the crime scene was described in one sentence as “practically destroyed.” Hardly anything had been left untouched in Yin’s room, due to the way the body had been discovered. An assistant who
worked with Doctor Xia had come to collect fingerprints, but he said not much could be isolated from the multiple prints and smears on every surface.

  The report read:

  On the morning of February 7, Lanlan, a resident at the end of the eastern wing on the second floor, returned from the food market at around six forty-five a.m. She went upstairs and passed by Yin’s door. Normally, the door was shut tight. It was known that Yin usually went out to practice tai chi early in the morning, in People’s Park, and she would not come back until after eight. The door was slightly ajar that morning. It was none of her business, but, as it was unusual, Lanlan noticed this. She bent to tie her shoelace, and peeping through the door, she saw something like an overturned chair. She knocked on the door, waited for a minute or two before pushing it open, and found Yin lying on the floor. A white pillow lay beside her face. Sick, passed out, fell from the bed-Lanlan guessed. She rushed in and pressed the indentation above Yin’s upper lip, [CPR in traditional Chinese medicine.] and started shouting for help. Immediately, seven or eight people ran in. One sprinkled cold water on Yin’s face, one felt her pulse, one dashed out to call for an ambulance, before they realized that Yin was not breathing, and noticed that several drawers had been pulled out, and their contents ransacked. Soon more people came crowding into the room. Before anyone suspected foul play, nothing in the room was left untouched.

  Then Old Liang arrived with the neighborhood committee members, but this hardly contributed to the preservation of the scene. One member went so far as to put the pillow back on the bed and push in all the drawers.

  One thing was not mentioned in the report. According to Party Secretary Li, shortly after Old Liang got there, Internal Security also arrived at the scene. They conducted a thorough search of the room. They should have observed the proper procedure and worn gloves, but Li had not asked about this. He knew nothing about the objective of their search. With a dissident writer like Yin, however, the involvement of Internal Security was not surprising. Internal Security had requested that the bureau keep them informed about the progress of the investigation.

  Stroking his chin, Yu put the report back in the folder, tore the seal off the door, and entered the room. It was a barren, shabby cubicle. As indicated in the report, there was no sign of a struggle-or, more accurately, no sign of one remained. After a day, and in light of the description he had just read, Detective Yu did not really expect to find much.

  The furniture appeared to be what she had bought when she had moved out of the dorm; it was typical of the eighties, plain, dark brown, utilitarian, but still in usable condition, consisting of a single bed, a desk, a chair, a wardrobe with a tall mirror over it, a sofa with a faded red cover, and a stool that might have served as a nightstand.

  In an ashtray on the desk, he saw several cigarette butts. Brown cigarette butts. An American brand, More. There was also something like a typewriter on the desk. It was not a computer, Yu was sure. Perhaps it was an electric typewriter.

  In a tiny cupboard fastened to the wall, there were several cans of tea leaves, a bottle of Nestlé’s instant coffee, a few rough bowls, a small bunch of bamboo chopsticks in a tree root container, one cup, and one glass. Apparently, she entertained few visitors here.

  The bed had been made, probably by one of her neighbors. There was no mattress under the sheet; she’d slept on the plain hardboard. The faded cotton-padded quilt must have been four or five years old, and had plenty of patches. As he touched the quilt, he felt its stiffness. The pillow, without a cover, was relatively white in contrast to the quilt.

  He turned to the desk drawers. The top drawer contained receipts from various stores, blank envelopes, and a travel magazine. The second drawer held notebooks, a notepad, a pile of paper, and a bunch of letters, several of them bearing addresses in English. The contents of the third appeared more mixed: a small assortment of costume jewelry-perhaps souvenirs from her Hong Kong trip; a Shanghai watch with a leather strap; and a necklace of some exotic animal bone.

  The contents of the wardrobe confirmed his expectation. The clothes were dull in color, conventional in design, and most of them inexpensive, out of fashion. There was a new wool dress, however, that might not have been expensive but was of quite decent quality.

  On the bookshelf were Chinese and English dictionaries; a set of Han History; Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping; copies of Death of a Chinese Professor; and copies of Selected Poems of Yang Bing. In addition, he saw a pile of old magazines, some from the forties and fifties, with bookmarks sticking out of their pages.

  He also found an old-fashioned album with black paper pages bearing tiny aluminum photo holders shaped like stars. On the first few pages, most of the pictures were black and white. A couple of them showed Yin as a little girl with a ponytail. Then color photos appeared showing Yin with a red scarf-a Young Pioneer saluting the five-starred flag on her school campus. In a hand-colored picture, she stood happily in People’s Square, between a white-haired man and a small thin woman: her parents, presumably.

  He turned to a large picture, which must have been taken in 1967 or 1968, in the early years of the Cultural Revolution. Wearing a red armband, Yin stood on a stage delivering a speech, with high-ranking government officials seated in a row behind her in front of a red velvet curtain. She was a Red Guard representative at a national conference of college students but, despite her political importance, she looked more like an inexperienced girl. Hers was not exactly a young face, though animated with youthful passion. She bore a striking resemblance to a Red Guard poster he had seen. The next few pages recorded the most glorious moments of her political career. One photo showed her sitting together with top Party leaders at a conference held within the Forbidden City.

  Then there seemed to be a blank. It was not that pictures were missing from the pages, but that there was an abrupt change from a young Red Guard to a middle-aged woman framed in the doorway of a cadre school. It was as if she had aged twenty years with the turning of a single page.

  Closing the album, Detective Yu realized that it was time for his appointment with the neighborhood committee.

  That committee had once functioned as an extension of the district police office, responsible for everything outside people’s “work units”: arranging weekly political study, checking the number of the people living in a house, running day-care centers, allocating birth quotas, arbitrating disputes among neighbors and, most important, keeping close watch over the residents. The committee was authorized to report on each and every individual, and that report would be included with the confidential information in a police dossier, enabling the state to maintain effective background surveillance on every person.

  In recent years, the neighborhood committee, like other institutions, had undergone dramatic changes, but neighborhood security remained one of its main concerns. The committee must have kept a close eye on someone like Yin. It might also have information about other suspicious people in the house.

  To Detective Yu’s surprise, when he reached the office, he saw that a working lunch had been arranged by Old Liang. Six plastic lunch boxes containing three-yellow-chicken meals had been arranged down the center of the long desk; in addition to Yu and Old Liang, there were four committee members present, holding their chopsticks.

  “The three-yellow-chicken is not bad-yellow feathers, yellow beak, yellow feet. Pudong-bred, home-raised, a world of difference from those in the modern chicken farms,” Old Liang said, raising his chopsticks.

  Comrade Zhong Hanmin, the neighborhood security head, proposed a theory about the murder. It seemed to him that the ransacked drawers in her room pointed to one possibility. “The criminal must have intended to steal from her, but when Yin came back unexpectedly, he panicked,” Zhong said. “I don’t think he is a resident in the building, or even in the lane. Surely he was a stranger who picked her room to rob at random. As an old saying puts it, A rabbit does not browse too close to its den.”

  Such a possibility
was not without supporting circumstances. Provincial workers had been seen wandering about the area for months, but this was not uncommon in the city, as more and more laborers poured in from other provinces.

  It was understandable that Zhong was trying to keep him from focusing on the lane, Detective Yu thought. If the criminal turned out to be one of the lane residents, the local committee would bear some responsibility.

  Comrade Qiao Lianyun, the general director of the committee, was the second to speak. Qiao provided a piece of information that seemed to contradict Zhong’s theory. He based it on information obtained from Peng Ping, nicknamed the “shrimp woman,” as she made a living by peeling shrimp in front of her door, which faced the back door of Yin’s shikumen building and was only three or four feet away from it. The shrimp woman had an arrangement with the food market. The peeled shrimp had to be delivered before eight a.m. Shanghai wives preferred to visit the market early in the morning. As a rule, she started working around six fifteen. She did not remember seeing Yin return from tai chi practice that morning, but she had chatted with Lanlan at around six thirty. Peng insisted that she had never budged that morning until she heard the commotion in Yin’s building and went inside to take a look. Qiao considered her statement reliable because the shrimp woman was known to be honest. Besides, she could hardly have gone anywhere, with her hands covered in shrimp slime. Qiao concluded, “Anyone sneaking out of the back door, however quickly and stealthily, would have been noticed by Peng, especially if it was a stranger scurrying out at an early hour. As for the front door, there were several people in the courtyard that morning who would have seen anyone leaving.”

  Qiao’s argument was backed up by Old Liang, who started by making an analysis of lane security as well as building security. Because of recent cases of theft in the area, the neighborhood committee had taken preventive measures. All lane entrances had been secured with wrought-iron gates, which were locked at eleven thirty at night and opened at five thirty in the morning. Lane residents had to carry their keys.