When Red is Black

by Qiu Xiaolong

  “I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” she said, “just in time to make lunch for you.”

  “I’m afraid you are doing too much for me. It reminds me of a line by Daifu,” he said, trying to be ironic since he did not know what other pose to strike. “It’s the hardest thing to receive favors from a beauty.”

  “Oh, Chief Inspector Chen, you are as romantic as Daifu!”

  “I’m joking,” he said. “A pack of Chef Kang instant noodles will do for me.”

  “No, that won’t do,” she said, pulling on her street shoes. “Not for Mr. Gu. He will fire me.”

  There appeared to be a small tattoo, like a colorful butterfly, above her slender ankle. He did not remember having seen that in the Dynasty Club. He tried to get back to his translation work. After Li’s phone call, however, there was something else on his mind. He did not agree with Li, yet he kept thinking of the fact that Detective Yu, alone, was handling the murder case of a dissident writer. It seemed to Chen that a number of Chinese writers had been labeled as “dissidents” for reasons that were hardly plausible.

  For example, there were the so-called “misty” poets, a group of young people that had come to the fore in the late seventies. They did not really write about politics; what made them different from the others was their preference for difficult or “misty” images. For one reason or another, they had a hard time having their poems published in the official magazines, so they started publishing an underground magazine. That got the attention of Western sinologists, who praised their works to the skies, focusing on any conceivable political interpretation. Soon the misty poets became internationally known, which was a slap in the face for the Chinese government. As a result, the misty poets were labeled “dissident” poets.

  Might he himself have become a dissident writer had he not been assigned, upon graduation from Beijing Foreign Language University, to a job in the Shanghai Police Bureau? At that time, he had published some poems, and a few critics even described his work as modernist. Police work was a career he had never dreamed of. His mother had termed it fate although, in the Buddhist religion she believed in, there was no particular deity in charge of fate.

  It was almost like a surrealistic poem he had read, in which a boy picked up a stone at random and threw it carelessly into the valley of red dust. There the stone had turned into… Chief Inspector Chen?

  Around one o’clock, he received a phone call from Detective Yu.

  “What’s the news?”

  “We have found her safe deposit box. Two thousand Yuan, and about the same amount in American dollars, were all that was in it.”

  “Well, that’s not very much for a lockbox.”

  “And a manuscript,” Yu said, “that is, something like a manuscript.”

  “What do you mean? Another book?”

  “Perhaps. It is in English.”

  “Is it the translation of her novel?” Chen went on, after a pause, “I don’t see the point of locking it up when the book has already been published.”

  “I don’t know what it is for sure. You know that my command of English is not good. It appears to me to be a poetry translation.”

  “That’s interesting. Had she done any translations from Chinese into English?”

  “I really don’t know. Do you want to take a look at it?” Yu said. “The only words I understand in it are some names, like Li Bai or Du Fu. I don’t think Li Bai and Du Fu are related to the case.”

  “There might be something in it,” Chen said. “You never know.” Poetry had once given him some insight into the complexities of a case involving a missing person.

  “The bank is not far from your place. Let me buy you lunch, Chief. You need to take a break. How about meeting me at the restaurant across the street? Small Family-that’s its name.”

  “Fine,” Chen said. “I know the restaurant.”

  As he had promised Party Secretary Li, he was going to take a look at the Yin investigation.

  Would White Cloud, who had offered to make lunch for him, be disappointed? She’s only here for business reasons, Chen reflected as he got ready to go out. He left a note for her.

  The restaurant opposite the bank seemed to enjoy good business. Yu was in his uniform, so they were able to get a table in the corner that offered some privacy. They each had a bowl of noodles covered with soy-sauce-braised tripe. At the suggestion of the amiable hostess, they also had two appetizers, one of river shrimp fried with red pepper and bread crumbs, and one of soya beans boiled in salt water, plus a bottle of Qingdao beer each, which the hostess offered them with the compliments of the house.

  There were a couple of young waitresses flitting around like butterflies. From their accents, Chen judged them to be non-Shanghainese. During the ongoing economic reform, provincial girls too had come pouring into the city. Private entrepreneurs hired them at low wages. Shanghai had been a city of immigrants as early as the turn of the twentieth century. History was repeating itself.

  The manuscript Yu brought to the restaurant consisted of two folders. In one the manuscript was handwritten; in the other, it was neatly typed. There were no signs of whiteout corrections or of mistakes in the typed manuscript. Apparently it had been done by a computer. The two were practically identical in their content.

  Detective Yu was right. The manuscript consisted of a selection of classical Chinese love poems, including poets like Li Bai, Du Fu, Li Shangyin, Liu Yong, Su Shi, and Li Yu, with focus on the Tang and Song dynasties. The translation appeared fluent as Chen glanced through the first few pages.

  Something else was noticeable: the original form-either a four- or eight-line stanza-disappeared in the English renditions, some of which were informed with a surprisingly modern sensibility:

  A spring silkworm may not stop spinning

  silk until death. A candle’s tears dry

  only when it is burned down to ashes.

  In the Chinese original, Chen remembered, this was a well-known couplet about a lover’s self-consuming passion. This was not the time, however, for him to study the manuscript at length. Nevertheless, he did not think this translation could have been Yin’s work.

  “Yes, it’s a poetry translation.”

  “I don’t know why she valued it so much.”

  “It must have been done by somebody else-by Yang, probably,” Chen said. “Hold on-yes, I have found an Afterword here, written by Yin. Yes, it is Yang’s work, it says. She only edited the collection.”

  “Please take it. Read it when you have time. Maybe you will spot something. Please, boss?”

  Chen agreed, then asked “Have any new leads turned up in your interviews?”

  “No, not really. I have been interviewing the residents of the building all morning. That hypothesis is not very convincing.”

  “You mean the theory that she was murdered by one of the shikumen residents?”

  “Yes. I’ve studied the list of suspects prepared by Old Liang. Yin was not popular there, either because of some trivial dispute in some cases, or because of her conduct long ago in the Cultural Revolution, but neither of these is a strong enough motive for murder.”

  “Alternatively, the murderer could have intended to burglarize her room, but panicked when she came back early and interrupted him. You discussed this with Old Liang, I remember.”

  “That’s possible. But was she a likely burglary target? Everybody knew she was not a rich businesswoman. And the contents of her safe deposit box have proven that.”

  “Well, she had made a trip to Hong Kong. Someone might have imagined she was wealthy just on the basis of that.”

  “As for her Hong Kong visit,” Yu said, “I contacted Internal Security, hoping they could give me some information. You know what? They shut the door right in my face.”

  “Well, Internal Security. What can I possibly say?” Chen commented as he peeled the shrimp with his fingers. “It’s not easy for anyone to get them to cooperate. “

  “They are the cops
of the cops. I understand. But in such a case, they should help-in the interests of the Party or whatever. Their attitude does not make sense,” Yu said, as he put a green soya bean into his mouth, “unless they have something to hide from us.”

  “I hope not, but what they do often makes sense only to themselves. You never know; they may have their own interests in the case,” Chen said. “Have I ever told you about my earliest encounter with them?”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “It was in my college years in Beijing. I published a few poems, and made several pen pals. One day, one of them invited me to his home, and a guest there brought an American poet with him. On that day we talked of nothing but poetry, but the next day Party Secretary Fuyan of the English department summoned me to his office.”

  “What did he say to you, Chief?”

  ‘“You are young and inexperienced, and we trust you, but you have to be more careful. Don’t be so naive as to believe that the Americans like our literature for literature’s sake,’” Chen repeated. “I was confounded. Then I realized he must be referring to the poetry discussion the day before. How could people have reported it so quickly? Years later, I found out that it was the work of Internal Security. I was lucky because the university dean did not want the image of the university tarnished by having one of his students put on the blacklist, so he worked out a deal with Internal Security.”

  “That’s outrageous! Their arms reach everywhere.”

  “So don’t worry about their refusal to cooperate. We may still be able to find out something indirectly. Let me make a couple of phone calls.”

  “That would be great.”

  The noodles arrived, the soup almost red with dried pepper, strewn with chopped green onion, the tripe done to just the right degree, quite chewy, a welcome contrast to the crisp texture of the noodles. It was a pleasant surprise for such a small family restaurant. The hostess stood beside their table, beaming, as if waiting for their approval.

  “Wonderful food,” Chen said, “and wonderful service, too.”

  “We hope you will come back, Boss,” the hostess said with a bright smile, bowing slightly before she moved on to another table.

  That was another new term of address. Not that new, perhaps. Before 1949, people had used this term, and it was staging a comeback.

  “It’s their own business,” Yu said, “a private business. Of course they want to please their customers, who are their bosses.”

  “That’s true.”

  “By the way,” Yu asked, the noodles hanging like a waterfall from his chopsticks, “is Old Half Place also a good restaurant?”

  “A very good one, especially known for the noodles they serve early in the morning. Why?”

  “Mr. Ren, a resident who is on the suspect list, told me that he goes there two or three times a week, and he calls himself a ‘frugal gourmet.’”

  “Frugal gourmet. Great, I like it,” Chen said. “Yes, Old Half Place has a lot of regular customers early in the morning, every morning. It’s almost like their ritual.”

  “Why?”

  “You have asked the right man. I happen to have read about this restaurant. The chef there plunges noodles into boiling water in an extremely large pot, so the noodles acquire a special crisp texture. But the water soon turns thick with starch and then the noodles lose this texture. It’s not easy to change the water in such a large pot. Instead, the chef just adds more cold water, but that’s not really good. Gourmets believe that the noodles boiled in the early morning taste much better.”

  “Heavens, can there be so much to learn about a bowl of noodles?”

  Chen was amused at the shocked expression on his partner’s face. “And the xiao pork is a must too. The pork sort of melts in the noodle soup, and then on your tongue. It comes in a separate side dish. Very special, and inexpensive too. You ought to go there this weekend.”

  “You should have interviewed Mr. Ren, Chief. There would have been a lot for you to say to each other.”

  “A frugal gourmet,” Chen repeated, putting the last shrimp into his mouth. “I don’t know what sort of man Mr. Ren is, but, according to your description, he no longer lives in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution.”

  ***

  When Chen reached his home, he found a short note from White Cloud on the table. “Sorry, I have to leave for school. Lunch is in the refrigerator. If you need me this afternoon, please call me.”

  The meal she had prepared was simple but good. The pork marinated in wine might have come from some deli, but the hot and sour cucumber slices mixed with transparent green bean noodles looked fresh and tasty. There was also an electric pot of rice, still quite warm. That would make a good dinner, Chen decided. Closing the refrigerator door, he tried not to think about the Yin case. At this stage, it was a matter of routine to go on interviewing her neighbors, which was what Yu had been doing, and which, if he had been working on the case, he would be doing too.

  What else could he possibly do?

  He stared at the New World business proposal, and the business proposal stared back at him.

  Chapter 8

  Qinqin had called home, saying that he would sleep over at the apartment of a schoolmate. It was not that often that Yu and Peiqin had a night by themselves. In spite of his frustration with the day’s investigation, Yu decided to turn in early with Peiqin.

  It was a cold night. They sat under the quilt, leaning against the pillows propped up against the hard headboard. It took quite a while for the warmth of their bodies beneath the old cotton-padded quilt to make the cold of the room endurable. His feet brushed hers; her toes were soft, still slightly chilled. He put his arm around her shoulders.

  In the soft light, she looked like the same girl she had been the first time with him in Yunnan, on that cool creaking bamboo bed, in the shadow of the flickering candlelight-except for those tiny fishtail-like lines around her eyes.

  But Peiqin had something else in mind this evening. She wanted to tell him the story of Death of a Chinese Professor. She put the novel on top of the quilt; a bamboo butterfly bookmark stuck out of it.

  Yu did not read much. He had tried several times to get into The Dream of the Red Chamber, Peiqin’s favorite, but he gave up, invariably, after three or four pages. There was no way for him to relate to those characters who had lived in a grand mansion hundreds of years ago. In fact, the only reason that he had made the attempt was because of Peiqin’s passion for the book. As for the books about the Cultural Revolution, he had read only two or three short stories, all of which struck him as totally untrue. If there had been such foresighted heroes to question or challenge Chairman Mao in the early sixties, Yu reflected, the national disaster would not have started in the first place.

  With Yin’s case on his hands, he had thought he had no choice but to read Death of a Chinese Professor from beginning to the end. Fortunately, Peiqin had already undertaken the assignment. She had told him a little about the book and this evening wished to give him a detailed account.

  “What I’m going to recount,” Peiqin said, folding her legs, “is perhaps influenced by my own point of view. I will focus on the role of Yang, since you are familiar with Yin’s history, and then I will dwell on the love affair between the two.”

  “Wherever you want to start, Peiqin,” Yu said, taking her hand in his.

  “Yang was born into a wealthy family in Shanghai. He went to study in the United States in the forties, where he got a Ph.D. in literature, and started publishing his poems in English. In 1949, he hurried home, full of passionate dreams for a new China. He taught English at Eastern China University, translated English novels, and wrote poems in Chinese before he suffered a major setback during the Anti-Rightist Movement in the mid-fifties. Suddenly condemned as a reactionary Rightist, and deserted by his friends and relatives because of his Rightist status, he stopped writing poems, although he continued translating such books as were approved by government, like the works of Charles Dicke
ns and Thackeray, about whom Karl Marx had made favorable comments, or those of Mark Twain and Jack London, some of whose works showed an anti-capitalist tendency. He was then transferred to the Chinese department, in an effort to prevent him from disseminating ‘decadent Western ideas’ in English at a time when most of the Party officials did not understand a single word of English.

  “At the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, Yang turned overnight into a target of revolutionary mass criticism. He was forced to denounce himself. His college years in the States were described as years of espionage training, and his translations of English and American literature as attacks on proletarian literature and art in socialist China. In the early seventies, with more and more new class enemies being discovered in the course of the unprecedented revolution, Yang became a ‘dead tiger’-it was no longer so much fun for revolutionary people to beat him up. Like other ‘bourgeois intellectuals,’ he was then sent to a cadre school in the countryside. It was there that he met Yin.

  “They were both cadre students, but there was a marked difference in their political status. Yang, a Rightist with serious problems in his past, was at the bottom. Yin, a Red Guard who was charged with ‘minor mistakes’ in the Great Revolution, was made a group leader, responsible for supervising members of the group to which Yang belonged.

  “At this time, some still believed in everything Chairman Mao said, even there at the cadre school. A well-known poet wrote in ecstasy about the cure of his insomnia through physical labor in the fields, as a result of following Chairman Mao’s instruction. Some were disillusioned, however, in spite of Mao’s ‘newest and highest directions’ set forth in those endless Party documents. After a day’s hard labor, a few of them started thinking. Theoretically, after having successfully reformed themselves through hard physical labor and political studies, the cadre students should have been able to ‘graduate’ and have new jobs assigned to them. After a couple of years, however, they knew they had been pretty much forgotten. It seemed they were never going to be allowed to go back to the city, even though they were no longer at the center of the revolution.