When Red is Black

by Qiu Xiaolong

  In addition, there were rules about the shikumen building doors. Both the front and back doors of Yin’s building were locked during the night. The front door, latched from inside, did not open until around seven, and then at around nine thirty in the evening it was closed again. As for the back door, people who went in and out through it, either early in the morning or late in the evening, were supposed to lock it behind them.

  Yu listened, jotting down notes in his notebook, without making any comment. After an hour and a half, the events of the previous morning could be reconstructed as follows:

  Yin was one of the early birds. She left the building on the morning of February 7, at around five fifteen, through the back door. She went to People’s Park to practice tai chi. No one saw her going out that morning, but there was no reason to suspect that she had changed her routine. She had practiced tai chi every morning since she had moved in, and she was known to be punctual.

  On that morning, Lanlan went out at around five thirty. She found the back door locked. She opened and locked it again, and headed for the food market earlier than usual for some fresh seafood because she was expecting a guest from Suzhou that afternoon.

  Shortly afterward, two other shikumen residents went out the back door. One was Mr. Ren, who went to a restaurant for an early breakfast. The other was Wan, who went to perform tai chi on the Bund. Each of them was positive that his departure was between five forty-five and six.

  Around six fifteen, Xiong, a milkwoman who was sitting with her milk bottles by the front entrance, saw Yin coming back. The milkwoman looked at her watch, as Yin usually did not return that early.

  Lanlan arrived with her purchases at around six thirty. This time she left the back door unlocked, as she chatted for a few minutes with the shrimp woman sitting on the corner, and went across the courtyard to unlatch the front door, which was her habit. Around that time, other shikumen residents got up. Some of them came out to wash up in the courtyard sink. There were at least three or four people there that morning, Lanlan remembered.

  The times fit. According to Doctor Xia, Yin had been suffocated to death by some soft object between six fifteen and six thirty. In other words, she had been killed shortly before Lanlan’s discovery of the body.

  Yu started putting some thoughts together in his notebook. There seemed to be two possibilities. In the first scenario, in accordance with Zhong’s theory that the murderer was an outsider, the criminal had followed Yin into her room and committed the crime. But that left several points unaccounted for. The milkwoman saw Yin walking back into the lane by herself. Of course, the criminal might have approached her somewhere in the shadows of the lane unobserved. But then, the murderer had to get out of the building. A stranger would have been noticed by those in the courtyard if he left through the front door, and, if he went out through the back door, someone happening to look in that direction from the courtyard might have seen him, and the shrimp woman sitting outside the back door could not have missed him. But no one had reported having seen a stranger during that period of time.

  Alternatively, Yin might have been murdered by one of the shikumen residents. If so, the doors, as well as the lane gates, presented no problem. Afterward, the murderer simply sneaked back to his own room. As long as he was not seen in the act of entering or leaving Yin’s room, no one would suspect him. This narrowed down the range of possibilities. It seemed Yu need only focus on the building’s residents.

  “I have made a list of possible suspects within the building,” Old Liang whispered in his ear. “And I have also started collecting their fingerprints.”

  “I’m going to study the list,” Yu said, glancing at his watch at the end of the meeting. “Thank you, Old Liang. We’ll start doing interviews tomorrow.”

  If the villain lived in the shikumen, Yu had to find a motive for the crime. Old Liang had hinted at the poor relationship between Yin and her neighbors, but that would not have been enough reason to commit murder. What could have caused a woman to be killed by one of her next-door neighbors?

  When the neighborhood committee meeting was over, Detective Yu decided to walk back to the bureau. It was a long walk. It would take him about forty-five minutes, and he wanted to do some solid thinking on the way. He was not in a hurry to decide on a course of action. He wanted to exclude other possibilities before focusing on the building’s residents.

  He came to a stop at the sight of a public phone near the foreign language bookstore. Stepping into the booth, he made a phone call to the Shanghai Literature Publishing House. He wanted to find how much Yin had earned from publication of her novel. After spending ten minutes searching for the editor responsible for Yin’s book, and almost emptying his pockets of change, he finally located Wei, the editor of Death of a Chinese Professor.

  “I took a huge risk in accepting the manuscript; we might have lost money by publishing it. At the time, no one expected that the book would turn out to be so controversial. Yin made about three thousand Yuan,” Wei said.

  That was not a large sum, even several years ago. Nowadays an eggroll peddler could have earned that much in a couple of months.

  Wei did not know the exact amount of money Yin had received for the English translation, but according to the information he had, it was not a large sum. The novel had been of interest to sinologists, but it was not a popular seller.

  “Besides,” Wei explained, “in the early eighties, China had not entered the international copyright agreement. The American publisher only paid a small one-time fee.”

  But Yu remembered those letters with English addresses, whose dates were much more recent.

  He dialed Chief Inspector Chen’s number.

  Chapter 5

  Chen looked out of the window at the dull gray apartment complex in the morning light, and then down at the file on his desk, the New World proposal, and started typing on his electric typewriter. The project was ambitious. The document was not easy to translate, as it contained many architectural terms interspersed throughout the text. He had done a few technical translations for money, although none had been as lucrative as this one. Normally it took him hours to become familiar with the relevant technical terms before the translation could even begin.

  Chen had obtained two weeks’ leave from the Shanghai Police Bureau. Party Secretary Li had agreed, although reluctantly. The Party boss had been promising Chen a vacation for quite a long time, but, for one reason or another, his vacation had never come through. Li was hardly in a position to say no to Chen’s request now, in spite of the urgency of the Yin case.

  Chen had not mentioned the translation when he requested leave. There had been other reasons for him to seek time off. He had been quite upset with the way a recent case had been concluded. He had done what he could as a cop, but all his efforts, while “in the interests of the Party,” seemed to have plunged a poor woman further into misery. Public Security Minister Huang had made a long-distance phone call to him, praising his “excellent work under the leadership of the ministry,” and encouraging him to “make larger strides as an emerging cadre of the new Chinese police force.” Party Secretary Li had not been pleased at this praise for his protégé. Minister Huang’s call to Chen, rather than to Li, might have signified something. Li was quick to read the possible message. The too-swift rise of Chen-at Li’s expense-was unacceptable. Tension rose between the two men.

  There were other things in the bureau that were irritants to Chen. Mountains of political meetings and seas of Party documents. Several cops, including one in his special case squad, had been suspended because of their involvement in a smuggling case. An old Party cadre had raised issues about Chen’s poetry writing once again. It was ironic, as his literary inspiration had almost run dry over the last few months. He’d had neither the time nor the energy. All he had produced were some fragmentary lines. He did not know when he would ever be able to put them together.

  On top of all that, after a long process of meetings and negotiati
ons, had come the withdrawal of the offer to Yu of a modern apartment. Chen took the blow personally. He, too, suspected that the reneging on what had been agreed might have been more complicated than it appeared on the surface. Everybody knew that Detective Yu was Chief Inspector Chen’s man. This was a terrible loss of face for Chen. As the proverb said, You have to think about its master’s face before you kick a dog. It was Chen who had handed the apartment key over to Yu. Party Secretary Li might have been at work behind the scenes, to get back at Chen. Whatever the correct interpretation of these events might be, Chen had concluded that he did not have sufficient authority at the Shanghai Police Bureau yet.

  To take his mind off police work, it would be best to do something different. He was not a man who could relax by doing nothing, as in Laozi’s Tao Te Ching. In a way, Gu’s translation job offered just what he needed, not to mention the monetary incentive.

  The New World project proposal on his desk started with an introduction detailing Shanghai ’s architectural history from the beginning of the century. It did not take him long to realize that the success of the project would depend on a myth-on nostalgia for the glitter and glamour of the thirties, or, to be exact, on the recreation of that myth-blending the past into a delicious brew, a cup of cappuccino, to delight customers in the nineties.

  But then, much about business success had proven mysterious to him. When Kentucky Fried Chicken had first come to Shanghai, he had laughed at the idea. The prices alone would scare away most Shanghainese, he believed, but he had been wrong. Kentucky Fried Chicken enjoyed a huge success. Several branch stores had opened in the city. Last summer, he had wanted to talk with his cousin Shan about his mother’s health problems, and Shan suggested that they meet in “ Kentucky ”: “It’s cool there. So clean and air-conditioned.”

  An advantage of translating rather than writing was that he could keep working on a text mechanically even if its meaning was beyond him, putting words together, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, without worrying about the whole picture for the moment. He had barely finished a half page when there was a light knock at the door. Opening it, he saw a girl standing there, her long hair hanging over her shoulders, a college badge on her scarlet jacket. He recognized her as White Cloud, the “little secretary” promised by Gu.

  “Chief Inspector Chen, I am reporting for work,” she said, in a voice as tender and sweet as freshly peeled litchi.

  She was a delicious girl with a watermelon-seed-shaped face, almond eyes, and cherry lips.

  “General Manager Gu did not have to send you here. He shouldn’t have done so.” Chen did not know what else to say, but he felt he had to make some protest.

  “He is paying me to come here,” she said in mock dismay. “You surely don’t want me to lose my job, do you?”

  She could hardly help with the translation, as her major was Chinese literature, he remembered. What else was there for her to do? There might be phone calls, which a secretary could answer for him. But he thought better of this. He didn’t receive many calls at home, for one thing. And then, a female secretary in his room- what would others imagine? Afterward, he would have to spend more time making explanations than she could possibly save him.

  But she seemed to be quite at ease already, almost at home. Taking off her jacket, she started to wash up the cups and the ashtray on the desk without waiting for his orders.

  Perhaps Gu had given her his orders.

  “What about your schoolwork?”

  “I have only one class this evening.”

  “I cannot think of anything for you to do at this moment. There are magazines on the shelf. You may pick one to read if you like.”

  “That’s very considerate of you, Chief Inspector Chen.”

  He did not feel comfortable with someone moving about in back of him. She had started to straighten the books on the shelf. It was hard to drive the associations he had with the phrase a little secretary out of his subconscious. She had on a white sweater with an extraordinarily large collar and sleeves. Very fashionable. He wondered whether there was a special name for the style. Then an idea came to him. He was not that familiar with the architectural styles of the thirties. If she could take a few pictures of a shikumen house, of a lane from the thirties, in the former concession area, it would help him visualize. He asked if she could do that for him.

  “Sure. Can I have your door key?” She added, “In case you are out when I come back.”

  “Okay.”

  She left with a key ring dangling from her finger, apparently quite clear as to where she would take those pictures he had requested. Her retreating figure reminded him of “a traveling cloud,” an image with various connotations in Chinese poetry, but at this moment, he thought of A traveling cloud / that forgets to come back I unaware of the spring drawing to an end, from a poem by Feng Yansi that he had read not too long ago.

  In classical literature, more often than not, the word “cloud” was accompanied by “rain,” evoking sexual love.

  Once again he tried to settle down to his work.

  It was not easy. He had to use a Chinese-English dictionary, and a picture dictionary as well. After an hour or so, he had another idea. Instead of typing on, doggedly, he took out an extra copy of the proposal, and, with a highlighter, underlined the words he was not sure about. That was not difficult, but it was time-consuming, requiring a close reading. Still, he was getting a more general-yet at the same time more concrete-picture of the New World.

  He stopped only once, to make himself a cup of instant coffee, which he drank absentmindedly.

  White Cloud came back around one thirty, with a dozen color pictures she had taken and had developed. One-hour service, perhaps. She also carried a plastic bag in her other hand filled with boxes of barbequed pork, and smoked eel, and a bag of mini-soup buns.

  “Have you had your lunch, Chief Inspector Chen?”

  “No, I haven’t been hungry.”

  “I’m so sorry, I had no time to prepare lunch for you today. This is something I bought from a restaurant.”

  “Thank you! How much do I owe you?”

  “Nothing, Mr. Gu will reimburse me.”

  He did not really like it, the way Gu had given her instructions-and money too.

  “He does not have to pay for my lunch.”

  “Mr. Gu pays me quite handsomely, as you know. Please, help me keep my job.”

  He examined the pictures with approval. They appeared clear, well focused. He picked up the first soup bun. “Well, I can’t complain.”

  “Please eat now,” she said. “The buns are warm.”

  They looked as dainty as quail eggs, almost transparent, the minced pork stuffing mixed with minced crab meat, combining the flavors of land and river. The soup inside burst out at the touch of his lips, hot, and delicious.

  “Be careful,” she said with a giggle, hastily wiping his chin with a pink paper napkin.

  Her fingers wiping the soup from his chin embarrassed him, and he felt obliged to say something. “According to a recipe book I read, the soup bun is special because its stuffing is mixed with pork skin jelly. When steamed, the jelly turns into hot liquid. You have to bite into it very carefully, or the soup will splash out, or even scald your tongue.”

  In spite of his book knowledge, he had made a small soup mess on the desk, and she brought a towel to clean it up with.

  He changed the subject. “You are really helping a lot. But you are a college student, White Cloud. I do not think-”

  “I have to earn my college tuition. Both my parents have been laid off. I have to work, if not as a little secretary for you, then as a K girl at the Dynasty Club, or somewhere else.”

  “It takes somebody like Gu to invent such a position,” he said as he put a chunk of smoked eel into his mouth. The eel was at once crisp and juicy.

  “He can’t get credit for this invention,” she said, as she sucked the soup out of a dainty bun. “Little secretary or xiaomi. Surely you’ve hea
rd the term? Those Mr. Big Bucks must have little secretaries; we are symbols, just like a Mercedes.”

  He was surprised that she spoke so casually, as if the words had no relevance to herself.

  “There’s another new job invention: ‘passion companion.’ A full-page advertisement for this work appeared in Wenhui Daily. I don’t need to explain what it means. Believe it or not, there are high qualifications required for the position. At least a university degree. Able to talk intelligently. Presentable for social occasions, and, of course, for private occasions, too.”

  “I’m too old-fashioned, I’m afraid.”

  “You are special.” She stood up and began to put the leftovers into the refrigerator. “Well, I’d better do something to make sure Mr. Gu gets his money’s worth.”

  “I do have something for you to do: Can you check the definitions of these words for me? It will save me a lot of time. You don’t have to do it right now. In the evening, if you have time, after your class, will be fine. “

  “Sure. I can learn quite a few new words for myself.”

  The telephone started ringing. She picked it up instantly like a secretary. “Chen Residence.”

  “Oh.” There was a pause. “I’m Detective Yu. I want to speak to Chief Inspector Chen.”

  “Hold on.” She turned toward Chen, the receiver covered by her hand, whispering in his ear, “Detective Yu. Do you want to speak to him?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Sorry to bother you, boss,” Yu said in a hesitant voice.

  “Come on, Yu. What can I do for you?” He said to White Cloud in a low voice, “You may leave now. I will call you tomorrow.”

  “You don’t have to. I’ll be here to make breakfast for you,” she said. “See you.”

  “See you. Don’t worry about breakfast.”