Xiaolong, Qiu

by [Chief Inspector Chen Cao 05] Red Mandarin Dress [v1. 0] [epub]

  But he noticed a hot towel on a white dish being pushed in through under the door—possibly by the restroom attendant kneeling on the ground. Chen was revolted. Pushing open the door, he put a handful of change on a white bowl on the sink and left.

  When he seated himself on the sofa in the private room, Green Jade leaned over to feed him a fresh tangerine with her slender fingers, the candlelight incessantly flickering from the animal-shaped container.

  “Where are you going to spend the night?” she softly inquired. “It’s so late. The frost thick, the road slippery. Don’t leave. Really, few walk outside.”

  It came almost like an echo from a Song dynasty poem, he recalled, about the rendezvous between the decadent emperor and a delicate courtesan.

  Seeing no response from him, she placed his hand on her bare, smooth thigh.

  “Sorry, I have to leave, Green Jade,” Chen said. “Please give me the bill. It’s been a great night. Thanks.”

  “If you insist,” she said. “You may pay me the tip now.”

  After he paid her three hundred Yuan, she had a waiter send in the bill.

  A glance at the bill showed him the trouble. A cup of fruit juice cost one hundred Yuan. She had two cups. Plus his tea at one hundred twenty. The two fruit platters at two hundred fifty each. The four small dishes of dried fruits on the table came with a price too, with eighty Yuan each. And there was a twenty percent service fee. Altogether, the bill amounted to one thousand, three hundred.

  It was a ripoff. But he was not in a position to protest, not as a chief inspector. As such, he might be able to get away for the night, but the stories about it would cost him much more.

  “What?” she said.

  “I’m so sorry, Green Jade, I don’t have enough cash with me.”

  “Well—how much do you have?”

  “About nine hundred—now six hundred after the tip.”

  “Don’t worry. They won’t kill you if you really don’t have enough money,” she whispered in his ear. “But you have to say you have paid me only one hundred Yuan.”

  That was probably why she had wanted him to pay the tip first. An experienced girl, Chen reflected, seeing a heavy-built man enter the room.

  “He is Manager Zhang,” she introduced.

  “Sorry, it’s the first time for me, Manager Zhang. I don’t have enough money with me.” Chen took out all his money and placed it on the coffee table.

  “How much do you have?” Zhang said without counting the money.

  “About six hundred,” Chen said. “I’ll bring seven hundred next week. I give you my word.”

  “Has he paid you the tip?” Zhang turned to the girl with a frown.

  “Yes, he has. One hundred Yuan.” She added, “He’s been here for about only two or three hours. And I had to be away with Brown Bear for quite a while.”

  “Do you have a card?” Zhang asked.

  “What card?” He wouldn’t give him his business card, whether as cop or as a poet.

  “Credit card,”

  “No, I don’t have one.”

  To Chen’s surprise, Zhang glanced at the money on the table, picked up two twenty Yuan bills, and pushed them back to Chen.

  “It’s the first time for you,” Zhang said. “Those small dishes are on the club tonight. So are the fruit platters. You have to have your taxi money, Big Brother. It’s a cold winter night outside.”

  It was almost anticlimactic. Perhaps it was in the best interest of the business to let a customer leave like this. It wasn’t the time for Chen to find an explanation for his luck.

  “Thank you so much, Manager Zhang.”

  “I have seen many people,” Zhang said. “You are different, I know. If the hill does not turn, the water turns. If the water doesn’t turn, the man turns. Who knows? We may bump into each other one day.”

  Zhang walked him out to the elevator. When the elevator door opened, a late customer emerged. A group of girls hurried to offer their services to the new guest with a silver ring of laughter. Chen saw Green Jade among them, running out barefoot.

  She didn’t look at him.

  “Come again, Big Brother,” Zhang said as the elevator door was closing. “It may be easier for you to get a taxi at the intersection of Henshan and Gaoan Roads.”

  * * * *

  Outside, Chen didn’t get into a taxi.

  It was almost four o’clock. He thought of a proverb: “Full of joy, the night is short.” He wasn’t sure he had enjoyed himself inside the club, but time had passed quickly there.

  It was a cold night, though it was coming to its end. The exciting ideas he had while inside seemed to be somewhat chilled by the wind.

  While some of the details in the case fit, others didn’t.

  The meeting with the retired neighborhood cop in a couple of hours would be crucial.

  Afterward, Chen would check into the background of Mei’s son, starting with the document concerning the sale of the Old Mansion, on which the seller, as the inheritor of the house, had to sign his name and perhaps provide some other information.

  It was already Thursday, a day he couldn’t afford to waste in the wrong direction.

  But for the moment, he was wandering aimlessly. He had to move. It was cold. With most of the lights off, the street presented a vision he hadn’t seen before. He turned into a side street, made another turn, and to his surprise, he emerged within sight of the Old Mansion again. It looked dark, deserted, desolate. A night bird flashed out of nowhere.

  He thought of the poem by Su Shi, “Swallow Pavilion.”

  The night advanced, I awake, / no way to renew my walk / along the old garden: / a tired traveler stranded at the end of the world, / gazing homeward, heartbroken. / The Swallow Pavilion is deserted. / Where is the beauty? / Swallows alone are locked inside, for no purpose. / It is nothing but a dream, / in the past, or at present. / Whoever wakes out of the dream? / There is only a never-ending cycle / of old joy, and new grief. / Someday, someone else, / in view of the yellow tower at night, / may sigh deeply for me.

  It was a sad poem. The pavilion was renowned because of Guan Panpan, a gifted Tang dynasty poet and courtesan who lived there. Guan fell in love with a poet, and after his death, she shut herself up, receiving no visitor or client for the rest of her life. Many years later, Su Shi, a Song dynasty poet, visited the pavilion and wrote the celebrated poem.

  Chen imagined Mei standing in the back garden of the mansion, holding the hand of her little boy, shining like a radiant cloud in her red mandarin dress. ...

  Shivering, he made his way to the food market. Several leaves fell in the fading starlight, dropping to the hard ground with a sound like the falling of the bamboo slips used for divination at an ancient temple, darkly portentous.

  There was no one visible in the market yet. Near the entrance, he was surprised to see a long line of baskets—plastic, bamboo, rattan, wood, straw—of all shapes and sizes, stretching to a concrete counter under a sign that read “yellow croaker,” a fish very popular in Shanghai. Those baskets evidently stood for the wives who would soon come here, securing their positions in the line, their eyes still dreamy with their families’ satisfaction on the dinner table.

  He wondered whether it could be a scene that he had seen before, and he lit himself a cigarette against the wind.

  Bang, bang bang. There came a sudden clatter. He was startled by the sight of a night-shift worker cracking a gigantic frozen bar of fish with a huge hammer. Aware of Chen’s approaching footsteps, the night worker turned around, appearing headless against the upturned collar of his cotton-padded imitation army overcoat. It was a ghastly image in the early morning.

  Chen’s nerves were still bad.

  Soon, however, several middle-aged women entered the market, heading to the line to replace the baskets and bricks that marked their place. The market began to come alive.

  Then a bell sounded, possibly an indication that the market was open for business, and peddlers started app
earing everywhere, all at once. Some put their products on the ground, and some moved in behind stalls rented from the state-run market. It was more and more difficult to draw the line between the socialist and capitalist.

  He saw an old man enter the market wearing a red armband.

  * * * *

  TWENTY-SIX

  T

  HE OLD MAN WEARING the red armband was examining vegetables here, checking fish there, yet was carrying no basket. He must be Fan.

  Not too long ago, Chen had witnessed a similar scene, that of Old Hunter patrolling another market. Fan’s function here was different, however, as “private peddlers” had become the norm in “China’s brand of socialism.” In an age of “everybody looking forward to money,” those peddlers were problematic because of their unbridled deceptive practices. It was no longer simply a matter of putting ice into fish or injecting water into chickens but of painting their product, selling spoiled meat, hawking poisonous fungus. So Fan’s responsibility consisted mainly of controlling those fakes, which were sometimes fatal.

  Chen walked up to the old man, who was questioning a shrimp peddler.

  “You must be Uncle Fan.”

  “Yes. Who are you?”

  “Can I talk to you—alone?” Chen handed over his business card. “It’s important.”

  “Sure,” Fan said, turning to the peddler. “Next time, I won’t let you get away so easily.”

  “Let’s have a pot of tea there,” Chen said, pointing to a small eatery behind the “yellow croaker” counter. “We can sit and talk.”

  “They don’t serve tea, but I’ll ask them to make a pot for us,” Fan said. “Call me Comrade Fan. It’s a form of address no longer popular, but I’ve just gotten used to it. It reminds me of the years of the socialist revolution, when everyone was equal and working toward the same goal.”

  “You are right, Comrade Fan,” Chen said, reminded that comrade was becoming a euphemism for “homosexual” among the young and fashionable in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He wondered whether Fan knew anything about the changing meaning. Linguistic evolution, like that of thirsty illness, was so very reflective of ideological change.

  There was a couplet on both sides of the eatery door, which read vertically, “Breakfast, lunch, dinner—the same. Last year, this year, next year—like that.” Above the couplet was a horizontal comment, “True in your mouth.”

  The taxi money left him by the nightclub manager would probably be enough, Chen calculated, for breakfast here. A waiter recommended the house special: Xi’an mo in mutton soup. Mo was a hard, baked cake, which people could break into small or large pieces as they preferred before having it boiled in the mutton soup. The waiter brought them a pot of hot tea for free.

  “Comrade Fan, let me toast you with tea, though tea is not enough to show my respect.”

  “People don’t burn incense to the Three Treasures Temple without a reason. You are a busy man, Chief Inspector Chen. I don’t think you came to an old retired man like me for nothing.”

  “Yes, I have some questions for you. According to the neighborhood committee here, you alone can help me.”

  “Really! Please tell me how.”

  “We’re engaged in a homicide investigation. I would like to ask you some questions about Mei, who used to live here. She was once the mistress of the Ming Mansion. At that time, you were the neighborhood cop.”

  “Mei—yes, but she died such a long time ago. How could she be involved in your investigation?”

  “At the moment, all I can say is that information about her may really help our work.”

  “Well, I came here as a neighborhood cop two or three years before the Cultural Revolution. How old were you then? Still in elementary school, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Chen nodded, raising his cup.

  “The job of a neighborhood cop may be nothing in the nineties,” Fan said, breaking the mo into smaller bits, as if they were parts of his memory, “but in the early sixties, with Chairman Mao’s call for class struggle resounding all over the country, the job carried a lot of responsibilities. Everyone could be a class enemy secretly bent on sabotaging our socialist society—especially so in this neighborhood. A considerable number of residents were black in their class status. After 1949, some of the families were driven out because of their connection to the Nationalists, and working-class families moved in. Still, there were families with ties both to the old and new regimes, so they kept their mansions here. Like the Mings.”

  “What about the Mings?”

  “They kept theirs because the old man, an influential investment banker, had denounced Chiang Kai-shek in the late forties. So the Communists declared him to be a ‘patriotic democratic personage,’ leaving his fortune untouched. His son was a teacher at the Shanghai Music Institute who married Mei, a violinist who also taught there. They had a son, Xiaozheng. Inside the mansion, they lived in affluence, for which their working-class neighbors grumbled a lot. As a neighborhood cop, I had to pay extra attention to them.

  “Things changed dramatically with the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. The old man died of a heart attack, which actually spared him all the humiliations. But his family was not so fortunate. Mei’s husband was put into isolation interrogation as a British secret agent for the crime of having listened to the BBC. He hung himself.

  “Then their house fell too. People came and took over rooms as their own. The Mings—now only Mei and her son—were pushed out into an attic room above the garage, originally the servants’ quarters.

  “No one did anything about it?” Chen said, but he immediately realized the ridiculousness of his question. His family, too, had been driven out of their three-bedroom apartment at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.

  “Don’t you remember a popular quote from Chairman Mao? ‘There are thousands of arguments for revolution, but the principal one is: it is justified to rise in rebellion.’ It was considered a revolutionary activity to take away property from the rich.”

  “Yes, I remember. Red Guards came to my family too. Sorry for the interruption, Comrade Fan. Please go on.”

  “In the third year of the Cultural Revolution, there appeared on their garden wall a counterrevolutionary slogan—or something that resembled one, consisting of two short phrases. One was ‘Down With,’ and the other was ‘Chairman Mao.’ They were possibly put there by two kids, at different times. They just happened to appear close together on the wall. But something like that was enough to turn the people in the mansion into possible suspects. Because of the class struggle, focus naturally fell on the Ming family, the only one of black class status. And especially on the boy. No one could prove he did it, but no one could prove that he didn’t do it, either.

  “So a joint investigation group was formed, with members from the neighborhood committee and from the Mao Team at Mei’s institute. The boy was locked up in the back room of the neighborhood committee—alone, in so-called isolation interrogation, which was known to be effective in breaking the resistance of a class enemy. In fact, Mei’s husband had committed suicide after a week in isolation interrogation.

  “She was terrified that the son would follow in the footsteps of the father. For days she was begging around like a headless fly. She even came to me. I was helpless. In those years, the local district police station was practically taken over by those rebels. So what could a neighborhood cop do?

  “Then one early afternoon the boy was suddenly released. No real evidence or witness was found against him, it was said. Besides, he had caught a high fever in the back room, and the guard on duty there didn’t want to keep him. So he went straight home, but upon pushing open the door, it looked as if he had seen a ghost. He turned around, fleeing and screaming. His mother rushed out after him—stark naked. She stumbled on the stairs and fell all the way down.

  “He might or might not have heard her fall, but he didn’t go back. He kept running like mad. Out of the house, along the street, all the way back to tha
t back-room office—”

  “That’s strange,” Chen said. “Did you talk to her neighbors about what happened that afternoon?”

  “I did, to several of them,” Fan said. “Particularly to Tofu Zhang, a neighbor in the building, who happened to be home that afternoon. He was still sleeping after working the night shift, when he heard the eerie sound. So he jumped out of bed and saw her running out naked, calling after her son. He didn’t see the boy and guessed that she must have had a nightmare. But then she fell, tumbling, hitting her head against the hard ground. He thought about going out to help, but he hesitated. He was just married, and his jealous wife could have reacted like a tigress to the sight of Zhang together with a naked woman. He thought better of it and closed the door.