Death of a Red Heroine [Chief Inspector Chen Cao 01] (16 page)

“It is
becoming
political,” Chen said.

“Our Party Secretary Li is always right.”

“Let’s put something in the newspaper. A reward for information.”

“That’s worth trying. The
Wenhui Daily
can run the request for help. But what shall it say? This is so sensitive, as Party Secretary Li has told us.”

“Well, we don’t have to mention the case directly. Just ask for information about anything suspicious around the Baili Canal area on the night of May tenth.”

“Yes, we can do that,” Chen said. “And we’ll use some of our special case group funds for the reward. We have left no stone unturned, haven’t we?”

Detective Yu shrugged his shoulders before leaving the cubicle.

Except one, Chief Inspector Chen thought. Guan Hongying’s mother. He had refrained from discussing this with Yu, who did not get along well with the commissar.

The old lady had been visited by Commissar Zhang, who had gotten nothing from her. A late-stage Alzheimer’s patient, she was totally deranged, unable to provide any information. It was not the commissar’s fault. But an Alzheimer’s patient might not be deranged all the time. There were days when the light could miraculously break through the clouds of her mind.

Chen decided to try his luck.

After lunch, he dialed Wang Feng. She was not in the office, so he left a message expressing his thanks to her. Then he left. On his way to the bus stop he bought several copies of the
Wenhui Daily
at the post office on Sichuan Road. Somehow he liked the editor’s note even more than the poem itself. He had not told many of his friends about his promotion to chief inspectorship, so the newspaper would do the job for him. Among those friends he wanted to mail the newspaper to, there was one in Beijing. He felt that he had to say something about his being in this position, an explanation to a dear friend who had not envisioned such a career for him. He thought for a moment, but he ended up scribbling only a sentence underneath the poem. Somewhat ironically self-defensive, and ambiguous, too. It could be about the poem as well as about his work:
If
you work hard enough at something, it begins to make itself part of you, even though you do not really like it and know that part isn’t real.

He cut out the section of the newspaper, put it into an envelope, addressed it, and dropped it into a mailbox.

Then he took a bus to Ankang, the nursing home on Huashan Road.

The nursing home arrangement was not common. It was not culturally correct to keep one’s aged parent in such an institution. Not even in the nineties. Besides, with only two or three nursing homes in Shanghai, few could have managed to move in there, especially in the case of an Alzheimer’s patient. Undoubtedly her mother’s admission had been due to Guan’s social and Party status.

He introduced himself at the front desk of the nursing home, A young nurse told him to wait in the reception room. To be a bad news bearer was anything but pleasant, he reflected, as he waited. The only cold comfort he could find was that Guan’s mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s, might be spared the shock of her daughter’s violent death. The old woman’s life had been a tough one, as he had learned from the file. An arranged marriage in her childhood, and then for years her husband had worked as a high-school teacher in Chengdu, while she was a worker in Shanghai Number 6 Textile Mill. The distance between the two required more than two days’ travel by train. Once a year was all he could have afforded to visit her. In the fifties, job relocation was out of the question for either of them, fobs, like everything else, were assigned once and for all by the local authorities. So all those years she had been a “single mother,” taking care of Guan Hongying in the dorm of Number 6 Textile Mill. Her husband passed away before his retirement. When her daughter got her job and her Party membership, the old woman broke down. Shortly afterward she had been admitted to the nursing home.

At last, the old woman appeared, shuffling, with a striking array of pins in her gray hair. She was thin, sullen-faced, perhaps in her early sixties. Her felt slippers made a strange sound on the floor.

“What do you want?”

Chen exchanged glances with the nurse standing beside the old woman.

“She is not clear here,” the nurse said, pointing at her own head.

“Your daughter wants me to say hi to you,” Chen said.

“I have no daughter. No room for a daughter. My husband lives in the dorm in Chengdu.”

“You have one, aunt. She works in Shanghai First Department Store.”

“First Department Store. Oh yes, I bought a couple of pins there early this morning. Aren’t they beautiful?”

Clearly the old woman was living in another world. She had nothing in her hand, but she was making a gesture of showing something to him.

Whatever might happen, she did not have to accept the disasters of this world. Or was she merely such a scared woman, anticipating such dreadful news, that she had shut herself up?

“Yes, they are beautiful,” he said.

She might have been attractive in her day. Now everything about her was shrunken. Motionless, she sat there, staring vacantly ahead, waiting for him to go. The look of apathy was not unmixed, he reflected, with a touch of apprehension. There was no point trying to gather any information from the old woman.

A worm safe and secure inside its cocoon.

He insisted on helping her back to her room. The room, holding a dozen iron beds, appeared congested. The aisle between them was so narrow that one could only stand sideways. There was a rattan rocker at the foot of her bed, a radio on the night-stand. No air conditioning, though a single ceiling fan for the whole room was working. The last thing he noticed was a dried bun, partly chewed, shriveled, on the windowsill above her bed. A period to a life story. One of the ordinary Chinese people, working hard, getting little, not complaining, and suffering a lot.

What influence could such a life have exerted on Guan?

The daughter had taken a different road.

There was something about the case, Chief Inspector Chen felt vaguely, something mystifying him, challenging him, and drawing him in an unknown direction. He decided to walk home. Sometimes he thought better while walking.

He stopped at a traditional Chinese pharmacy and bought a box of Jinsheng pills. A halfhearted believer in Chinese herbal medicine, he assumed that frustration had somehow eroded the balance of his essence. And he needed something extra to bolster his whole system. Chewing at a bitter Jinsheng pill, he thought that a possible alternative approach to the case would be to find out how Guan had become a national model worker. In the literary criticism he had studied, it would be termed the biographical approach. Only its result might not be so reliable, either. Who could have expected that
he
would have become a chief inspector of police?

It was almost seven when he reached home. He turned on the TV and watched for a while. Several Beijing opera players were doing a series of somersaults, flourishing sabers and swords in the dark.
The Cross Road,
a traditional Beijing opera, he recollected, about fighting at night without knowing who’s who.

He dialed Commissar Zhang. A formality, since Chen did not have anything to report.

“Believe in the people. Our strength comes from our close connection to them,” Commissar Zhang concluded their conversation. It was inevitable: Commissar Zhang had to give such an instruction.

Chen got up and went into the kitchen. There was half a pot of steamed rice left in the refrigerator. He took the rice out, added some water, and put it on the gas stove. The kitchen wall no longer appeared immaculately white. It would not take too many weeks to turn it into an oil-and-smoke-stained map. An exhaust fan could solve the problem, but he could not afford one. He looked for some leftovers. There were none. Finally, he dug out a tiny plastic bag of dried mustard, a present from his aunt in Ningbo. He put a few pieces on the rice, and swallowed the watery meal trying not to taste too much of it.

“Chef Kang’s Instant Noodles.” A TV commercial flashed through his mind as he stood by the gas stove. The plastic-bowl-contained-noodles might be a solution, he reflected, putting the dried mustard back. Again, the problem was his tight budget. After the loan to Overseas Chinese Lu, Chief Inspector Chen had to live like Comrade Lei Feng in the early sixties.

At the level of a chief inspector, his monthly pay was 560 Yuan, plus all his bonuses under various titles, which added up to 250 more. His rent was fairly inexpensive. Together with utilities, it was less than 100 Yuan, but he had to spend half of his income on food. As a bachelor, he did not cook much at home; he ate at the bureau canteen.

A great help in the last few years had been the advances he earned from his translations, but at this moment he was not working on anything. He had not had the time, nor the energy— nor even the interest—since he had taken over the Guan case. The case did not make sense, not the sense he found in the mysteries he had been translating. Still, getting another advance was possible. He could promise the editor that he would complete the job by October. He needed such a deadline for himself, too.

Instead he started to summarize on a piece of paper beside the bowl what he had learned so far about the case. All the odds and ends of information he had been collecting and storing during the week, without having them sorted out and pieced together to consider where they could possibly lead, filled a sheet of paper. In the end, however, he tore up the paper in frustration. Perhaps Detective Yu was right. Possibly it was just one of those “insoluble” sexual murder cases. The bureau had had enough of them.

He knew he could not fall asleep. Often insomnia was the effect of little things coming together. A poem rejected without a rejection slip, a crazy woman cursing in a crowded bus, or a new shirt missing from the wardrobe. This night, something about the Guan case vanquished sleep.

The night was long.

What might have crowded into Guan’s mind during such a long night? He thought of a poem by the mid-Tang dynasty poet Wang Changling:

Boudoir-sheltered, the young lady knows no worries,

Fashionably dressed, she looks out of the window in spring.

What a view of green willow shoots
—
all of a sudden:

She regrets having sent her love away fighting for fame.

So after the flashlight along the corridor, after the shadows shifting on the sleepless wall, after the cold sweat in the dark, solitary dorm room, Guan, too, could have been thinking of the price paid for fame.

What’s the difference?

In the Tang dynasty, more than a thousand years earlier, the girl had been unable to console herself because she had sent her lover far away in pursuit of fame, and in the nineties, Guan couldn’t because she had kept herself too busy pursuing fame.

What about Chief Inspector Chen himself?

There was a bitter taste in his mouth.

Sometime after two, when he had slid into that floating area between sleep and waking, he felt hungry again. The image of the dried bun on the window came back to his mind.

And another image with it.

Caviar.

Only once had he tasted caviar. It was years earlier, at the International Friendship Club in Beijing, where at the time only foreign visitors were admitted and served. He was there with a drunken English professor who insisted on treating him to caviar. Chen had read about it in Russian novels. Actually he did not like it too much, though afterward the fact he had tasted caviar took Overseas Chinese Lu down a peg or two.

Things had been changing. Nowadays anybody could go to the International Friendship Club. A few new luxurious hotels also served caviar. Guan could have had it in one of those hotels, though not too many people could have afforded to order it—on that particular night.

It would not be difficult to find out.

Caviar—he jotted the word on the back of a matchbox.