When Red is Black - [Chief Inspector Chen Cao 03]

by Qiu Xiaolong

  He decided to move on to the second name on the list. Wan Qianshen was a retired worker who lived alone in the attic. Wan had not been in the shikumen house that morning. It was his habit, too, to perform tai chi exercises on the Bund at that hour.

  Old Liang’s file provided a brief biography of Wan. He had been a steel factory worker “dedicated to the construction of the socialist revolution.” During the Cultural Revolution, Wan had become a member of the prestigious Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Worker Team. At the end of the sixties, when the Red Guard students clamored for more power, Chairman Mao managed to contain these young rebels by sending Worker Teams into the colleges with a new revolutionary theory. According to Mao, the students, having been exposed to western bourgeois ideas, needed reeducation. They were urged to learn from the workers—the most revolutionary proletariat. It was a high political honor to be a Thought Propaganda Worker Team Member in those days. All the students and teachers were required to listen to whatever Wan said. He was a Comrade-Always-Politically-Correct, a model for them.

  With the death of Chairman Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, everything changed, of course. The propaganda teams withdrew from college campuses. Wan, too, came back to the lane toward the end of the seventies. Later, he retired, like any ordinary old man, and in time, like a piece of tarnished silverware, his days of stardom gleamed only in his memory.

  In an increasingly materialistic society, Wan must have come to the belated realization that he had not benefited at all from all his revolutionary activities. Too busy, and too dedicated even to think about himself, he ended up alone, in an attic room. His pension did not catch up with inflation, and the state-run company where he had worked barely covered his medical insurance. So Wan complained constantly, darkly, like his steel-factory chimney, about what the world was coming to. Then fate brought Wan into Yin’s path. According to an ancient proverb, The path where enemies meet one another must be narrow indeed. In their case, it was in this same building, as they climbed up and down the same narrow staircase every day.

  In Death of a Chinese Professor, there were harsh descriptions of the propaganda worker teams. Wan heard about this and bought a copy of the novel. To his outrage, he found the university in question to be the very one where Wan had been stationed, although Yin named no names in the book. Wan flew into a rage and tore the book to pieces in front of her door. Yin fought back, shouting, from behind her closed door, “If you were not a thief, you wouldn’t have to be nervous.”

  Bursting with anger, on the staircase just outside her door, Wan cursed her loudly: “What a stinking bitch! You think China is a country for bourgeois intellectuals. You should go to your grave now with that stubborn granite brain of yours! Heaven be my witness: I will make sure of it.”

  Several neighbors heard him, but no one took him seriously at the time.

  People might say anything in a fit of anger, and soon forget about it. Not so with Wan, Old Liang pointed out. Wan had never since spoken to Yin. He bore a profound hatred for her, one in which, in Wan’s words, “Two cannot share the same piece of sky.”

  What made Wan an even more serious suspect was his unconfirmed alibi for the morning of February 7. He said that he performed tai chi on the Bund that morning, but he could have sneaked downstairs, killed Yin, and either gone back to his room or on to the Bund without having been seen. And he could certainly use any money taken from her drawers, as the state-run steel factory had fallen several months behind in paying pensions to its former employees.

  An interview was arranged between Yu and Wan at the office.

  Wan did not look like a man in his mid-sixties. He had a medium build. He might even be considered tall for his generation. He wore a black wool Mao jacket with matching pants. In a movie from the sixties, Wan would have looked like a mid-rank Party cadre, with his collar buttoned high to his throat and his hair combed back. He appeared to have suffered a minor stroke, as his lips were slightly slanted downward at one corner, which added an impression of inner tension to his expression.

  Wan turned out to be more ready to talk than Yu had expected. Holding a cup of hot tea tightly in his hands, he said “The world is turned upside down, Detective Yu. What the hell are those rotten private enterprisers or entrepreneurs? Black-hearted, black-handed capitalists, making obscene amounts of money at the expense of working-class people. That’s why all the state-run companies are going to the dogs. What has happened to the benefits of our socialist system? Pensions, free medical care. All gone. If Chairman Mao were still alive, he would never have allowed this to happen to our country.”

  A passionate statement, purely proletarian, although not so loyal to present Party policy. Yu thought he could understand the old man’s frustration. For years, the working class had enjoyed political privileges, and at least had felt a sense of pride in their status, based on Chairman Mao’s theory of class struggle in socialist China which deemed the working class to be the most important because it was the most revolutionary. Now the tide had completely turned.

  “Our society is currently in a transitional period, and some temporary phenomena cannot be avoided. You must have read all the Party documents and newspapers, and you don’t need me to explain,” Yu said, before coming to the point. “You must be aware of the purpose of our talk today. Tell me, Comrade Wan, what was your relationship with Yin?”

  “She is dead. I should not say anything against her, but if you think my opinion matters to your investigation, I will not mince my words.”

  “Please go ahead, Comrade Wan. It will be very helpful to our investigation.”

  “She was part of the evil black force that has tried to turn back history, back to the twenties, the thirties, to the miserable years when China was downtrodden by imperialists and capitalists, while those bourgeois intellectuals enjoyed the pathetic bones thrown to them by their masters. In her book—you must have read it—working-class people are all described as clowns or thugs, without acknowledging the vital fact that it is we who overthrew the Three Big Mountains—imperialism, feudalism, and capitalism—and built a new socialist China.”

  Yu could see why Wan was even more embittered than most other retirees. Wan must have given many political lectures at the college, and made himself at home with the political terms popular in the seventies. Now, in the nineties, his views had become obsolete.

  “She, too, suffered a lot during the Cultural Revolution,” Yu observed.

  “Anybody else may complain about the Cultural Revolution. Not Yin Lige. What was she? A notorious Red Guard! Why were the propaganda worker teams sent into the schools? To deal with the disastrous mess they left.”

  “Well, the past is past,” Yu said. “Let me ask you another question, Comrade Wan. Did you notice anything unusual about her of late?”

  “No, I didn’t pay any attention to her.”

  “Anything unusual about the building?”

  “No, not that I can remember. I’m a retired old man. It’s up to the neighborhood committee to notice things.”

  “Now, you were not at home the morning Yin was murdered, were you?”

  “No, I was practicing tai chi on the Bund,” Wan said. “The state-run company I worked for can no longer pay our medical bills. We have no choice but to take care of ourselves.”

  “I see. Do you practice tai chi with others?”

  “Oh, yes, with a large number of people. Some practice tai chi with swords, and some practice tai chi with knives, too.”

  “Do you have their names and addresses?” Yu added, “It’s just a formality. I may have to ask one of them to corroborate your presence.”

  “Come on, Comrade Detective Yu,” Wan said. “People practice tai chi on the Bund for twenty or thirty minutes in the morning, and then go home. There’s no point asking each other’s names or addresses. Some people nod to me, but they don’t know my name, and I don’t know theirs. That’s it.”

  What Wan said seemed to make sense, but Yu t
hought he caught a slight hesitancy in the old man’s words. “Well, if you can locate a few tomorrow—one or two names will be enough— please let me know.”

  “I will, if I go to the Bund tomorrow. Now, I have something else to do this morning, if you have no more questions, Comrade Detective Yu.”

  “I’ll talk to you later, then.”

  Yu lit a cigarette, tapped his finger on the desk, checked Wan’s name off, and moved on to the next name. Glancing through the information about Mr. Ren, the third on Old Liang’s list, Yu was about to cross his name off when he thought better of it. Mr. Ren was a “capitalist” in his class status. Before 1949, the shikumen building had been owned by Ren’s father, who was executed as a counterrevolutionary in the early fifties, when the house was confiscated. The Rens then had to squeeze into a small room partitioned off at the end of the south wing. For the Ren family, the following years became a tale of continuous misfortune and mistrust by one political movement after another. During the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Ren was marched through the lane by a group of Red Guards, his head weighed low by a blackboard declaring “Down with the Black Capitalist Ren!” But as in the Taoist classic Tao Te Ching, when one’s fortune hits bottom, it begins to change. With the whole society caught up in a gigantic reform, there was a reshuffling of cards among the residents. Mr. Ren’s son went to study in the United States and started a high-tech company there. On a recent visit back to Treasure Garden Lane, he offered to buy his father an apartment in the best neighborhood in the city, but Mr. Ren declined.

  It seemed to Old Liang, however, that there was something suspicious about Mr. Ren’s choosing to stay in the building. Mr. Ren might have harbored a secret resentment for all he had suffered in those years. As the proverb says, A gentleman may seek revenge even after waiting ten years. So maybe Mr. Ren was trying now to create trouble for the Party authorities, acting out of long-suppressed anger.

  If that were the case, Yin turned out to be a well-chosen target. The murder of a dissident writer might easily bring embarrassing pressure on the government. If the case was not solved, it could tarnish the image of the Party authorities. And then, too, Yin had been a former Red Guard. Symbolically, her death would also provide him with revenge for all his personal miseries.

  Like Wan, Mr. Ren had only an unconfirmed alibi. That morning he had gone to a noodle restaurant called Old Half Place. He had breakfasted in the company of several other customers, he said, although he could not produce a receipt for that particular morning nor the address of these breakfast-mates.

  The theory advanced by Old Liang was an elaborate one, perhaps inspired by the Harbor, one of the revolutionary Beijing operas written in the early seventies, in which a capitalist performed every possible sabotage activity out of his deep hatred for socialist society. But it appeared to Yu that this was stretching too far for a motive in the reality of the nineties.

  Yu decided to interview Mr. Ren, but for a quite different reason. In the material concerning Mr. Ren, there was no mention of any unusual contact or confrontation between him and Yin. Nothing was noted of his relations with his neighbors either. Mr. Ren was like another outsider in the house, which might make him a more objective witness. In fact, the “Mr.” before his surname indicated his marginal status in the shikumen. In the revolutionary years, the most common address had been “Comrade,” although, in recent years, “Mr.” had staged a comeback. It seemed his previous black status had been transmuted into an outmoded honorific title. Political fashions changed; still, people’s memories were long.

  Mr. Ren was a man in his early seventies who looked rather spirited for his age. He wore a Western-style suit with a scarlet silk tie, like a capitalist image from those modern Beijing operas. Surprisingly, he reminded Yu of Peiqin’s father, whom he had seen only in a black-framed photograph.

  “I know why you want to talk with me today, Comrade Detective Yu,” Mr. Ren said in a cultured voice. “Comrade Old Liang has already approached me.”

  “Comrade Old Liang has been a residence cop for many years. Perhaps he is too familiar with Chairman Mao’s words about class struggle and all that. I’m just a cop in charge of the investigation, Comrade Ren. I have to talk to everybody in the building. Any information you can give me about Yin will be really helpful to my work. I appreciate your cooperation.”

  “I can guess what Old Liang has told you,” Mr. Ren said, studying him through his glasses. “In years past, I wore a ‘Black Capitalist’ blackboard around my neck, and Yin wore a Red Guard armband on her arm. So he imagines I must have harbored resentment all these years, until now. But that’s nonsense. For me, a lot of things are long gone—with the wind, the political wind. A man of my age cannot afford to live in the past. She was a Red Guard, but there were millions of them. Most of them suffered too, as she did. There’s no point singling her out.”

  “Let me tell you something, Mr. Ren. I totally understand your point. My wife’s father was also a capitalist. Things were not fair for him in those years, or for her either,” Yu said. “But that does not mean she’s resentful today.”

  “Thank you for telling me this, Comrade Detective Yu.”

  “Now let me ask you a question, the same question I ask everyone in the building. What was your impression of Yin?”

  “There’s not a lot I can tell you, I am afraid. Our paths hardly ever crossed, even though we lived in the same shikumen building.”

  “Never crossed?”

  “In a shikumen house, you either mix with your neighbors all the time, or barely at all. In my case, I used to be so black, politically black, that people avoided me like the plague. I do not blame them. No one wanted to bring down trouble upon themselves. Now that I’m no longer so black, I’ve gotten used to being alone,” Mr. Ren said with a bitter smile. “She kept apart too, for her own reasons. It could not have been easy for her, a single woman, only in her late-forties, to have shut herself up in her memories, like a clam. No light ever came through.”

  “Like a clam; that’s interesting.”

  “Yin was different because she hid herself in a shell of the past, or, to be more exact, like a snail, because her hiding place might have been her unbearable burden too. Most of the neighbors are biased against her because of her standoffishness.”

  “Did you ever talk to her, Mr. Ren?”

  “I did not have anything against her, but I did not go out of my way to talk to her. She did not talk to others either.” Mr. Ren added, after a pause, “If there’s another thing in common between us, neither of us cooked much in the common kitchen. She might have been too busy writing. As for me, I am something of a frugal gourmet.”

  “A frugal gourmet?” Yu said. “Please tell me more.”

  “Well, the Red Guards took away all my personal property at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. This must have happened to your wife’s family too. A few years ago, the government gave me some compensation for my loss. Not much, as the compensation was based on values at the time of confiscation. My children do not need the money, and I can’t take the compensation to my coffin. I have a weakness—I have to confess—for good food, especially for inexpensive Shanghai specialties. So I eat out as much as I can. Besides, it’s too much for an old man, to start a fire in a coal briquette stove every morning.”

  “My wife also starts a fire in a coal briquette stove every morning; I know what you mean. I am curious, Mr. Ren. About a year ago, you could have moved out, but you declined your son’s offer to buy you a new apartment in an upper-class area. Why?”

  “Why should I move? All my life I have lived here, and everything here is tinged with memories. A leaf must fall where its roots lie. My roots are here.”

  “But the new apartment building would be far more comfortable, with gas, bathrooms, and all the other modern conveniences.”

  “I am quite comfortable in my way. For a frugal gourmet, this is a super location, close to a number of wonderful restaurants. In walking distance. Perhaps
that’s something you have already learned. The morning Yin was murdered, I was at a noodle restaurant called Old Half Place. I go there two or three times a week. There is a group of old customers like me. Some go there every morning. Old Half Place is one of the few remaining state-run restaurants that has kept up food quality without raising prices. Delicious and yet inexpensive. You really should go there.”

  “Thanks for the suggestion, Comrade Ren. If you think of anything to tell me about Yin, call me.”

  “I will. Try the noodles there if you have time this weekend.”

  As the old man left the office, Yu looked at his watch and was thinking about telephoning Chief Inspector Chen, another gourmet, though not necessarily a “frugal” one, when Old Liang burst into the office. “The main office of Shanghai People’s Bank has called. Yin Lige had a safe deposit box in the branch in the Huangpu District.”

  That could be important. Yu forgot about his lunch and headed for the bank.

  * * * *

  Chapter 7

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