Red Mandarin Dress

by Unknown

  There wasn’t any mention of the prize-winning picture of the woman in her mandarin dress, either.

  Getting up from the desk, he fought down the temptation to have another cup of coffee.

  TWENTY-TWO

  IT WAS CLOSE TO one thirty when Chen arrived at Kong’s house on Jungong Road.

  From the discolored wood mailboxes at the foot of the cracked concrete staircase, he supposed that it was one of the “new homes for workers” built in the sixties. It now looked old, shabby, and overcrowded. He found her name on one of the mailboxes.

  He went up and pushed open a door. It turned out to be a three-bedroom apartment shared by three families. What he saw there first was a common kitchen crammed with stoves, which supported his hypothesis. She lived in a single room of the unit.

  He knocked on the door marked 203. A white-haired woman opened the door, staring out through her silver-rimmed glasses.

  “Are you Mrs. Kong?”

  “Everybody calls me Auntie Kong here,” the old woman said, letting him in.

  She wore a cotton-padded coat, cotton-padded pants, and a pair of scarlet jasmine-embroidered slippers. The room was as small as a piece of tofu, stuffed with all sorts of nondescript items. A lone chair, three-legged, leaned against the wall. At the foot of the chair was an old-fashioned rice-pot warmer made of straw, which might serve her as an ottoman. It was cold in the room, in spite of the windows’ being paper-sealed.

  “You may sit on the chair,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said, perching on the edge of the chair gingerly. “Sorry to bother you like this, Auntie Kong.”

  He explained the purpose of his visit, taking out his business card and the magazine.

  She studied the picture in the magazine. The expression on her face was inscrutable. For two or three minutes she didn’t say a word.

  Chen waited, becoming aware of a smell that permeated the room. He noticed a small can boiling above the gas tank in the corner. Possibly the cat’s meal. For most Shanghainese, cats were kept for the purpose of catching rats, as in the classic statement made by Comrade Deng Xiaoping: “It does not matter whether it’s a black or white cat; as long as it catches rats, it’s a good cat.” While the young and fashionable had started introducing the concept of “pet” into the city, in such an old building, a cat still functioned above all else as a rat-catcher. For Auntie Kong, the can of leftover rice flavored with fish bones was perhaps the only cat food she could afford. But cooking in the room could be hazardous for an old woman who lived by herself. The gas tank stood by a tiny wood table with a plastic basin that contained moldering bowls and cups.

  “Yes, that’s a picture my old man took. In the sixties,” she said in a slightly tremulous voice, “but he passed away such a long time ago. How could I remember anything about it?”

  “The picture won him a national award. He must have talked to you about it. Try to recall, Auntie Kong. Anything you can think of may be important to our work.”

  “A national award! It brought him nothing but bad luck. That picture was a curse.”

  “A curse,” Chen echoed. A weird word indeed. And yet a familiar word in the investigation. She must remember something about it. Something ominous. “Please tell me what kind of a curse it was.”

  “Who really wants to talk about those things from the Cultural Revolution?”

  The memories of those years might still be too painful, he understood. Nor was it easy for her to open up to a stranger. But he was determined to be patient.

  “Do you mean the people connected to the picture were cursed, Auntie Kong?”

  “He was criticized because of the picture—for the crime of ‘advocating the bourgeois lifestyle.’ Now, after so many years, please leave him in peace.”

  “It’s a great picture,” he went on imperturbably, taking out another business card—that of the Chinese Writers Association. “I am a poet. To me, it’s a masterpiece. A poem in a picture.”

  “A poem in a picture” had been the highest praise in traditional Chinese criticism, but Chen thought he was sincere in applying the cliché.

  “It may or may not be so. But so what? Look at me. Left all alone here like a dirty, worn-out mop.” She pointed to the propane gas tank. “I can’t even cook in the common kitchen here. Everybody bullies me. Tell them about the so-called masterpiece. What difference will it make?”

  She rose and shuffled to the stove and stirred the food boiling in the can with a chopstick. Abruptly, she turned toward the straw rice pot warmer, cooing as if there was no one else in the room.

  “Black. Lunch is ready.”

  The lid of the warmer lifted and a cat jumped out, rubbing its head against the old woman’s leg.

  Chen rose to leave, reluctantly. She didn’t ask him to stay.

  As he pushed open the door, he cast one more look into the kitchen. There were two ramshackle tables packed in there, littered with unprepared vegetables and leftover dishes and fermented bean curd and unwashed chopsticks and spoons.

  Stepping out of the building, he saw the wooden sign of the neighborhood committee across the lane. He strode over to the office. It was almost a routine practice for a cop.

  In the office, he produced his business card, which, to his surprise, made little impression on a gaunt, gray-haired man surnamed Fei, the head of the committee. Chen talked to him about Auntie Kong, emphasizing that her husband had been an award-winning artist and that the committee should try to help with her living condition.

  “Is Auntie Kong your relative?” Fei said curtly, combing through his hair with his frostbitten fingers.

  “No. I just met her today, but she should have access to the common kitchen.”

  “Let me tell you something, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen. The squabbles among neighbors over the common area can be a tough issue for us. As far as I know, the resident in that room before her didn’t have any space in the common kitchen—he was a Party cadre who had practically worked and lived in his factory. Besides, her neighbors still use coal briquette stoves. It’s dangerous for her to move the propane gas tank into the same kitchen.”

  “Well,” Chen said after a thoughtful pause, “can I use your phone?”

  He called the head of the district police station, which functioned like the security boss for the neighborhood committee. After getting through to the director, Chen handed the phone to Fei, who listened with surprise registered on his face.

  “Now I remember you, Chief Inspector Chen,” Fei said in a changed tone. “You’ll have to excuse a man of my age. As a proverb goes, an old man has his eyes only not to recognize Mountain Tai. Sure, I’ve seen you on TV, and heard stories of you, too.”

  “You may have heard stories of me,” Chen said. “According to one of them, I always repay a debt.”

  “You don’t have to say that, Chief Inspector Chen. It’s difficult to deal with disputes among neighbors, but we should try our best. You are right about that. Let’s go there.”

  Chen didn’t bother to guess what the director had said to Fei. They went back together to Auntie Kong’s building.

  All the residents in the unit came out, standing in their doorways, and Fei and Chen stood in the narrow corridor. Fei announced that a decision had been made jointly by the neighborhood committee and the district police station. A small space was to be cleared for Auntie Kong in the common kitchen. Not large, but enough for a propane gas tank. Out of safety considerations, the committee would put up a partition between the gas tank and coal stoves. No one argued or protested.

  After the decision was announced, Chen was about to leave when Auntie Kong sidled up and said, “Comrade Chief Inspector Chen.”

  “Yes, Auntie Kong?”

  “May I have a word with you?”

  “Of course.” He turned to Fei and said, “You may go back first. Thanks for your great help.”

  “So you are somebody,” she said, closing the door when they were back in her room. “For more than ten ye
ars, I’ve had to cook in this room, and you’ve solved the problem for me in half an hour.”

  “That’s nothing. I admire Mr. Kong’s work,” he said. “The neighborhood committee office is just across the lane, so I stepped in and told them of your difficulties.”

  “I guess you tried to oblige me,” she said, “and I am obliged. There is no free white bun falling from the blue sky, I know.”

  The black cat was moving back. She scooped it up and placed it on her lap, but it jumped down, ran onto the windowsill, where it curled itself against the windowpane.

  “No. Don’t worry about it. That’s what a cop should do.”

  “I have just a question for you. You are not going to use the picture at the expense of other people, are you? That was my old man’s worst nightmare.”

  “Let me tell you something, Auntie Kong,” he said, putting his hand on the wall, which felt sticky—perhaps from too much cooking in the room. “Earlier this afternoon, I was in the Jin’an Temple, where I made a pledge to Buddha: to be a good, conscientious cop. Believe it or not, shortly after making the pledge, I learned about the picture.”

  “I believe you, but is the picture really that important to you?”

  “It may throw light onto a homicide investigation, or I wouldn’t have come to you without notice.”

  “A picture taken almost thirty years ago is related to a murder case today?” She was incredulous.

  “At this moment, it is just a possibility, but we can’t afford not to check. Let me assure you: I don’t believe it has anything to do with you or your husband.”

  “If I still remember anything about that picture at all,” she started hesitantly, “it’s because of his passion for it. He used up all his vacation days for the project, working like one possessed. I even suspected that he had fallen for a shameless model.’ ”

  “A good artist has to throw himself totally into a project, I know. It takes a lot of energy to produce such a masterpiece.”

  “Well, she turned out to be a decent woman of a good family. And he joked about my imagination: ‘Me fall for her? No, it would be like a mud-colored toad watering its mouth at an immaculate white swan. I’m so excited because no photographer has approached her yet. For a photographer, it’s like discovering a gold mine.’ ”

  “Did he tell you how he discovered her?”

  “At a concert, I think. A violinist onstage. At first she refused to pose for him. It took him a couple of weeks to bring her around. She finally agreed on the condition that the picture be taken with her son. That gave him new inspiration—a mother and son instead of just a beautiful woman.”

  “She must have loved her son very much.”

  “I thought so too. Looking at the picture, people couldn’t help but be touched.”

  “Did he tell you her name?”

  “He must have, but I don’t remember it now.”

  “Do you know anything about the process of setting up the photo? For instance, the choice of the mandarin dress?”

  “Well, he raved about an oriental beauty, and about the mandarin dress bringing out the best in her, but she must have had the dress at home. He couldn’t have afforded it. Sorry, I don’t know whose idea it was to choose the dress.”

  “Where was the picture taken?”

  “She lived in a mansion. So it was probably taken in its back garden. He spent a whole day there, using up five or six rolls of film, and then spent a week in the darkroom, almost like a mole. He was so carried away that he brought all the pictures back home one night, asking me to choose one for him. For the competition.”

  “You chose the right one for him.”

  “But after it won the award, he began to be worried. Initially, he didn’t want to tell me why. I learned from newspaper clippings hidden in a drawer that the picture had become controversial. Some people were talking about the ‘political message’ in it.”

  “Yes, everything could be given political interpretations.”

  “And during the Cultural Revolution, he was mass-criticized for the picture. Chairman Mao said that some attack the Party through novels, so the Red Guards claimed that Kong had attacked the Party through the picture. Like other ‘monsters,’ he had to stand with a blackboard hung around his neck, and his name was crossed out on the blackboard.”

  “So many people suffered. My father, too, stood bent with such a blackboard.”

  “What’s more, some others compelled him to reveal the identity of the woman in the picture, and that upset him enormously.”

  “Who put the pressure on him?” he said. “Did he say anything?”

  “An organization of Worker Rebels, I think. It was against his professional ethic but the pressure proved too much, and he finally gave up, thinking it was no crime for someone to pose for a picture. After all, there was nothing nude or obscene in it.”

  “Did he know anything about what happened to her?”

  “He didn’t, not at first. It was only a year or so later that he heard about her death. It had nothing to do with him. So many people died in those days. And perhaps it was not too surprising for someone with a family background like hers, and herself a ‘bourgeois artist.’ Still, the uncertainty weighed like a rock on his mind.”

  “He didn’t have to be so hard on himself. People could have learned her identity anyway,” Chen said, thinking that the old photographer could have cared for her. Seeing no point in bringing up the possibility, he changed the subject. “Now, he used five or six rolls for this picture, you have mentioned. Did he keep those other pictures?”

  “Yes, he kept them at a risk to himself, hiding them away even from me. Along with a notebook. ‘The portfolio of the red mandarin dress,’ he called it. After his death, I discovered them by chance. I didn’t have the heart to get rid of them—they must have been so special to him.”

  Out of the cabinet drawer, she produced a large envelope containing a notebook and a bunch of pictures in a smaller envelope.

  “Here they are, Chief Inspector Chen.”

  “Thank you so much, Auntie Kong,” he said, rising. “I’ll return them to you after looking through them.”

  “Don’t worry. I have no use for them.” She added, “But don’t forget your pledge in the temple.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  It was a random harvest. He started reading the notebook in a taxi outside Auntie Kong’s building. It contained plenty of working notes. Kong had discovered the model at a concert, spellbound by “her sublime beauty at the soul-stirring climax of the music.” Afterward, a Young Pioneer rushed onstage, holding a bouquet of flowers for her. The boy turned out to be her son, and she hugged him affectionately onstage. For a week after the concert, he spared no effort in persuading her to pose for him. It was a tough job, for she was interested neither in money nor in publicity. He finally succeeded in bringing her around by promising to photograph her together with her son. The picture was taken in the back garden of their mansion.

  Chen skipped through the technical notes about light and angles to a page that contained the work address of the model—the Shanghai Music Institute—with an office telephone number beneath it. For some reason, Kong mentioned her name only once in the notebook. Mei.

  Then he started examining the pictures. There were a considerable number of them, and like the old photographer, he was “spellbound.”

  “Sorry, I’ve just changed my mind,” he said to the taxi driver, looking up. “Please take me to the Shanghai Music Institute.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  HIS VISIT TO THE institute didn’t begin on a promising note.

  Comrade Zhao Qiguang, the current Party Secretary of the institute, showed all respect to Chen but could be of little help. Zhao had to check a registry before he was able to tell Chen anything about Mei. According to him, Mei and her husband Ming had both worked at the institute. During the Cultural Revolution, Ming committed suicide, and she died in an accident. Zhao did not know anything about the existence of t
he picture.

  “I came to the institute five or six years ago,” Zhao said, by way of explanation. “People are not so eager to talk about the Cultural Revolution.”

  “Yes, the government wants people to look ahead, not backward.”

  “You should try to talk to some old people here. They may know something, or they may know somebody who knows,” Zhao said, scribbling several names on a piece of paper. “Good luck.”

  But the people who knew Mei had either retired or passed away. After bumping around for quite a while, he stumbled upon Professor Liu Zhengquan of the Instrument Department.

  “That’s Mei!” Liu said, studying the picture. “But I’ve never seen the picture before.”

  “Can you tell me something about her?”

  “The flower of the school, fallen too early to the dust.”

  “How did she die?”

  “I don’t really remember. She was in her midthirties then. Her son was about ten years old. What a tragedy!”

  “What happened to her son?”

  “I don’t know.” Liu added, “We were not in the same department. You need to talk to somebody else.”

  “Can you recommend someone to me?”

  “Well, talk to Xiang Zilong. He’s retired now and lives in Minghang district. Here’s his address. He still keeps a picture of Mei in his wallet, I believe.”

  It was a hint about Xiang having been an admirer of Mei, a romantic who still carried a picture of her so many years later.

  Chen thanked Liu, looked at his watch, and left for Minghang immediately. There was no time for him to lose.

  Minghang had once been an industrial area, quite a distance from the center of the city. Fortunately, there was now a subway that stopped there. He took a taxi and hurried to the subway, and after twenty minutes, he walked out of the terminal at the other end and changed into another taxi.

  Shanghai had been expanding rapidly. Minghang, too, represented a scene of numerous new apartment buildings shining and shimmering in the afternoon sunlight. It took the taxi driver quite a while to find Xiang’s building.