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

by Qiu Xiaolong

  And things must have been even more unbearable for Wan, who had once been such a prestigious Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Worker Team Member.

  Yu phoned Dr. Xia, asking him to recheck the fingerprints, focusing only on Wan’s.

  He made a second phone call to the Shanghai railway station. He thought he remembered that there were regulations regarding sleeping-car tickets. The information he received confirmed his suspicion. According to the railway station, tickets to Shenzhen were very hot, especially sleeping-car tickets. New entrepreneurs flocked to the special economic zone to seek their fortunes. Normally, tickets were sold out on the first day of the fourteen-day advance purchase period. The date on Wan’s ticket was February 18, which meant Wan could not possibly have obtained it after February 7 unless he had paid a ticket scalper a much higher price for it.

  Yu wanted to discuss this with Old Liang, but Liang did not return to the neighborhood committee office for lunch.

  Shortly afterward, Party Secretary Li called. The Party boss sounded very pleased with the latest development, for it meant the conclusion of Yin’s case as a simple homicide, with no suspicion falling on the government.

  “Great job, Comrade Detective Yu,” Li repeated over the phone.

  “This conclusion is too dramatic, too sudden, Party Secretary Li.”

  “I don’t find it surprising,” Li said. “You kept the pressure on, and Wan cracked. With enough fire burning under the pot, the pig’s head will be cooked to your satisfaction. You need not doubt that Wan killed Yin.”

  “But we put pressure on Cai, not on Wan.”

  “Wan stepped forward,” Li said slowly, “because he couldn’t endure the thought of an innocent man being punished in his stead.”

  “There are holes in Wan’s statement, Party Secretary Li. We cannot depend on a so-called confession like this,” Yu said. “At least, I need to get some questions answered first.”

  “We cannot afford to wait too much longer, Comrade Detective Yu. A press conference will be held early next week, Monday or Tuesday, no later than that. It’s time to end all the irresponsible speculation surrounding Yin’s death.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 17

  C

  hen finished the first draft of his translation of the New World proposal into English. He was amazed at his own speed, though the job was still far from complete: he would have to spend more time polishing and revising before it would be presentable.

  It proved to be a good day for the murder investigation, too. Though it came as a surprise that Wan had turned himself in, it looked like a plausible solution as well as an acceptable one.

  Yu was still so full of misgivings that Chen did not even try to share with him some half-formed ideas of his own. After all, a lot of things in the process of writing, or leading to publication, seemingly inexplicable to others, could turn out to be significant, if only to the writer himself.

  In the late eighties, when Chen, a published poet with some renown in literary circles, had suddenly started translating mysteries, no one knew why. But it was because of a Beijing roast duck—at least partially because of it, he recalled. That duck turned out to cost more than he had in his pocket at the end of a wonderful dinner, in the company of a friend who liked his poetry so much that she snatched the bill with her slender fingers. It was a humiliating lesson about money—which, as he happened to discover through that friend, came much quicker from mystery translations than from poetry. But a few years later, when another friend of his published an interview about him in Wenhui Daily, she claimed that he did the translations to “enlarge the horizon of his professional expertise.”

  So those mysterious abbreviations in the margins of Yang’s manuscript could have referred to anything; “ch” might stand for a chicken, for all Chen knew. The uneven quality of Yin’s writing noticed by Peiqin could be just another of the mysteries of a creative mind. Chen had not written novels, but he guessed that a novelist might not be able to keep up the same intensity of creativity in a long work as in a short poem. He could never explain how he was capable of producing a horribly poor poem after penning a fairly decent one.

  So all these hypotheses, including his own theory regarding the murderer’s hiding for fear of recognition, were nothing but hypotheses, which did not weigh much, and were eventually irrelevant, if Wan had committed the murder as he had confessed. His motive might not make sense to someone else; it was enough if it had made sense to him.

  The bottom line was, as Chen had realized from the beginning, there are things a man can do, and things a man cannot do. That was also applicable to being a cop, in the present case.

  He considered giving himself a break that evening, in the company of White Cloud. It might be an opportunity to find out more about Gu, and about the New World project.

  He suggested a dinner at a karaoke club, a different one than the Dynasty as a gesture of his sincerity—he had told her that he liked her singing. White Cloud would not decline such an invitation, he hoped.

  She did not, but she suggested that they go to a high-class bar, the Golden Time Rolling Backward.

  “It’s on Henshan Road. An up-and-coming place.”

  “That will be great,” he said.

  Perhaps she did not like to be reminded of her K-girl status. He liked the name of the bar, which suggested a nostalgic atmosphere in common with the New World.

  They took a taxi to the Golden Time Rolling Backward, which turned out to be an elegant bar that had opened in a grand Victorian mansion; he supposed it had still been a private residence in the thirties. A number of celebrities had lived in European-style mansions in the area then.

  They chose a table next to the tall french window looking out to a well-kept garden just visible in the gathering dusk. The bar, according to White Cloud, was known for its classic elegance. She failed to recall the name of the original owner of the house. “She was a celebrated courtesan who became the concubine of a triad tycoon. He bought this mansion for her,” was all White Cloud could remember.

  Inside, it was fairly dark; the candlelight barely illuminated the somber background. After a minute or two, he managed to make out a black, old-fashioned telephone, a gramophone with a trumpet-shaped speaker on a corner table, an Underwood typewriter in a corner, and an antique grand piano with ivory keys, all of which contributed to the period effect, as well as the dark-colored oak paneling, the antique pictures and posters on the walls, and the carnations in a cut-glass vase on the mantelpiece.

  “Perhaps we should come in the early afternoon, in warmer weather, when the light is better,” he commented. “Then you would be able to take in all the period details. The illusion would be even more vivid and convincing.”

  Still, the whole scene was ingeniously designed. It was as if the life of the city had continued, uninterrupted, from the thirties. The years under Mao’s communist rule seemed to have been wiped out by the pink napkin in the hand of a young waitress, who wore a scarlet qi dress with high slits through which one could see flashes of her white thighs.

  The only difference from an old movie scene was that the customers here this evening were Chinese. Then a middle-aged foreign couple arrived, looked around, and moved to a table in the corner. The woman had on a Chinese-style cotton padded jacket with embroidered buttons. They were the only Western couple there. No one seemed to pay them any special attention.

  Studying the bilingual menu in the candlelight, Chen ordered coffee, and White Cloud, black tea. In addition, she had a bowl of popcorn. It was still too early for dinner. There were several excellent Chinese restaurants in the area. He was not in a hurry to decide whether to dine here. He was not experienced at dining in a Western-style restaurant. White Cloud was so fashion-conscious, he was not confident of making the right choice.

  To his surprise, the black tea came in a tall glass with a Lipton tea bag. The popcorn tasted too sweet and was as tough as rubber. The coffee was fine, but not hot enough. He had no objec
tion to the tea bag, except that it did not appear as authentic as tea served in the Chinese way. Then he tried to mock himself out of such an antiquated idiosyncrasy. This was a modern Western bar, not a traditional Chinese teahouse. Still, he missed the feeling of the tender tea leaf on his tongue. He took another sip of the lukewarm coffee.

  “Americans eat popcorn when they are enjoying themselves,” she said, filling her mouth with a handful.

  “They eat it while at the movies, I’ve heard,” he said.

  What surprised him was not the poor quality of the food they were served, but that people were content in spite of it. It seemed as if the atmosphere more than compensated for anything else. For the first time, he had a feeling that the New World project would work in Shanghai. Whether or not the customers here were exactly the middle-class ones in Gu’s mind, Chinese people wanted to find new ways of enjoying life—”value-adding ways,” the phrase he had read in the introduction to marketing.

  As for the added value, he wondered who was going to define it. It would have to depend on one’s taste. For instance, the passion for “three-inch golden lotus feet,” which had endured for hundreds of years in China, was a matter of fashion. In some men’s imaginations, the deformed, white-cloth-bound feet were transformed into lotus blossoms blooming in the black night. If people chose to look for value, they would find it in one way or another. Chen scribbled a few lines on the paper napkin, lines probably for a poem.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “I’m just making some notes. If I don’t write my ideas down, I may totally forget them by tomorrow.”

  “Tell me about your work in the police bureau, Chief Inspector Chen.” She lifted the tea bag by its paper tag, then let it sink to the bottom of the glass.

  “Detective Yu has been handling a special case that was recently assigned to my squad. I’m on vacation, but we have a daily discussion about developments.”

  “I do not mean just this week,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How could somebody like you have turned out to be a cop? A fine scholar, a good translator, and a first-class poet, and you seem to be doing a great job in the police bureau too.”

  “You are flattering me, White Cloud. I’m just a cop. You cannot always choose to do what you would like, can you?”

  He had not meant this as an allusion to her work in the K club. He regretted having spoken so. He had been asked this question too many times, and his answer came out almost automatically.

  She fell momentarily silent.

  He tried to maneuver the talk in the direction he had intended it to take. “It’s the same with Mr. Gu, perhaps. He probably didn’t expect as a child to grow up to be a millionaire businessman.”

  To his disappointment, she did not know much about Gu. It was all business between Gu and her. As an employer, Gu was not too bad, according to her. He did not take advantage of the girls working for him. Nor was he tight-fisted, at least not with her. As for his connections with the triad world, that was nothing uncommon, she declared. A businessman needed protection.

  “Gu has to burn incense, that is, to burn his money to the triad gods, and he is good at what he does. Now he has established connections almost everywhere, in both the white way and the black way.” She added, with her sly smile, “Connections with powerful people like you—”

  It was not unpleasant to hear her referring to him as “powerful,” but he cut her short. “Don’t count me in. But have you met any of those really powerful people with him?”

  “On a couple of occasions, including several important figures in the city government. One from Beijing as well. I recognized them from their pictures in the newspapers. Do you want to know their names? I can find out.”

  “Don’t bother, White Cloud.”

  A lambent melody began to waft through the bar. Looking round, he failed to find a karaoke TV set. Then it hit him: karaoke had not existed in the thirties.

  “Sorry, there is no karaoke today.”

  “Well, I do not enjoy singing that much, Chief Inspector Chen.”

  This was not what he had expected. Perhaps she felt the same way he did, preferring not to talk about his job outside the bureau.

  The waitress came by again. He ordered a glass of white wine, and she chose a double scotch on the rocks.

  Another melody followed. It was an old one, but it belied the period effect—the singer was an American pop star giving a contemporary rendition. For White Cloud, however, it seemed to be even more enjoyable. She was rapt, her face cradled in her hands.

  Something soft touched his foot under the table. She had kicked off her shoes, her bare feet were beating out the rhythm, and they were brushing his in her trance. Perhaps.

  Sitting so close together at the table, Chen was not unaware of the age difference between them. And of all the other differences, too. They practically belonged to different generations.

  To someone like him, whose elementary school years had been in the sixties, a bar or a cafe carried with it associations with bourgeois decadence, decried in all the official textbooks. He might be something of an exception because of his English studies. Still, if he visited a cafe, it was first of all for a cup of good coffee, and occasionally, if time allowed, to spend a couple of hours reading a book over the coffee.

  White Cloud, however, had studied no such textbooks. Perhaps a place like Golden Time Rolling Backward symbolized a cultivated taste a notch above that of the common folk who drank tea with leaves in their cups, a sense of being part of the social elite. Whether she genuinely enjoyed the taste of the Lipton teabag tea or not did not matter that much.

  An elderly couple rose from their table. The music was good for dancing. They started doing slow steps in a space in front of the grand piano, a hardwood area large enough for ten or fifteen people. Chen caught White Cloud looking at him expectantly. He was going to reach out to her when she touched his hand, tentatively. Dance could be an excuse, he had read, to hold someone it was otherwise impossible or impropriate to hold.

  But why not? It was fun being a Mr. Big Bucks for the evening, with a young pretty girl—a little secretary—stroking his hand across the table. He did not have to be Chief Inspector Chen, a “politically correct” Party cadre every minute of the day. He, too, was doing well. He had a powerful position, and a generous advance payment from a business project.

  However, it was not destined to be an evening of Golden Time Rolling Backward for Chief Inspector Chen.

  His cell phone rang. It was Zhuang, the senior lecturer White Cloud had interviewed. Chen had left several messages for him, and now Zhuang was finally calling back.

  “I’m glad you called me,” Chen said. “I have just one question for you. In your conversation with White Cloud about Yang, you mentioned Doctor Zhivago. Now, was Yang reading the novel, or writing a novel like it, or writing poetry like Doctor Zhivago?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Yes, you did. The exact words were, ‘still reading, and writing, something like Doctor Zhivago.’ You don’t have to worry, Comrade Zhuang. The case has nothing whatsoever to do with you, but your information may help our work.”

  There was a short silence from the other end of the telephone.

  A young man approached their table, holding out his hand to White Cloud in a gesture of invitation. She flashed Chen an apologetic smile. Chen nodded in encouragement as he heard Zhuang continuing in a more subdued voice. “Now that both Yang and Yin are dead, I don’t think that anybody can get into trouble.”

  “No. Nobody. So please go ahead and tell me.”

  Another short silence ensued.

  He took a sip of wine. Not too far away, White Cloud started moving gracefully with the young man in front of the piano. A perfectly matched couple, both of them young, energetic, dancing with a rhythm perhaps slightly too wild for this upscale bar.

  Zhuang spoke. “I met Yang in the early sixties, during the so-called Socialis
m Education Movement, you know, shortly before the Cultural Revolution. The school authorities assigned Yang and me to the same study group. We were both single then, and both listed as special targets for brainwashing, so we were put into a temporary isolation dorm room for ‘intensive education’ at night. Yang said that he did not sleep well, but one night I discovered that he was writing—in a notebook, under the quilt. In English. I asked him what it was about. He said that it was a story of an intellectual, something like Doctor Zhivago.”