Death of a Red Heroine [Chief Inspector Chen Cao 01] (20 page)

“Yes, and another thing. According to the records at the department store, her vacation in the mountains lasted about ten days, from the end of September through the first week in October. Detective Yu has contacted all the hotels there. But her name did not appear on any of their records.”

“Are you sure that she went there?”

“Positive. She showed her colleagues some pictures from the mountains. In fact, I’ve seen quite a few in her album.”

“She must have a lot of pictures.”

“For a young pretty woman, not too many,” he said, “but some are really good.”

Indeed, some of the pictures appeared highly professional. Still vivid in his mind, for instance, was the one of Guan leaning against the famous mountain pine, with white clouds woven into her streaming black hair. It would do for the cover of a travel brochure.

“Are there pictures of her with other people?”

“A lot of them, of course. One with Comrade Deng Xiaoping himself.”

“Pictures from that mountain trip?” Wang said, picking up a grape with her slender fingers.

“Well, I’m not sure,” Chen said, “but I don’t think so. That’s something—”

Something worth looking into.

“Supposing Guan made the trip all by herself,” she was peeling the grape. “She could have met some people in the mountains staying in the same hotel, talked about the scenery, taken pictures for each other—”

“And taken pictures together. You’re absolutely right,” he said. “And some of the tourists would have worn their name tags.”

“Name tags—yes, that’s possible,” she said, “if they were traveling in a group.”

“I have looked through all the albums,” he said, stealing a glance at his wristwatch, “but I may do it all over again.”

“And as soon as possible,” she was putting the peeled grape into his saucer.

The grape appeared greenish, almost transparent against her lovely fingers.

He reached across to take her hands on the table. They had a sort of mutual understanding that he appreciated: Chief Inspector Chen had to investigate.

She shook her head, looking as though she was about to say something, but changed her mind.

“What is it?”

“I’m concerned about you.” She withdrew her hand with a small frown.

“Why?”

“Your obsession with the case,” she said softly, standing up from the chair. “An ambitious man is not necessarily obnoxious, but you are going a bit too far, Comrade Chief Inspector.”

“No, I’m not that obsessed with the case,” he said. “In fact, you are just reminding me of two lines—
‘With the green skirt of yours in my mind, everywhere,
/
Everywhere I step over the grass ever so lightly’.”

“You don’t have to cover yourself by quoting those lines,” she said, starting to move toward the staircase. “I know how much your work means to you.”

“Not as much as you think,” he said, imitating the way she shook her head, “certainly not as much as you.”

“How is your mother?” she was changing the subject again.

“Fine. Still waiting for me to grow up, get hitched, make her a grandma.”

“Work on growing up first.”

Wang could be sarcastic at times, but it might just be a defense mechanism. So he laughed.

“I am wondering,” he said, “if we can get together again—this weekend.”

“To talk more about the investigation?” she teased him good-humoredly.

“If you like,” he said. “I also want to have dinner with you at my place.”

“Fine, I’d like that, but not this weekend,” she said. “I’ll check my calendar. I’m not a gourmet cook like your ‘Overseas Chinese’ pal, but I can work up a pretty good Sichuan pickle. How does that sound?”

“It sounds terrific.’

She turned to him with an enigmatic smile, “You don’t have to accompany me to my office.”

So he stood, lit a cigarette, and watched her crossing the street, coming to a stop at the central safety island. There she looked back, the green skirt trailing across the long curve of her legs, and her smile filled him with a surprising sense of completeness. She waved to him before she turned into the side street leading to the
Wenhui
building.

Of late, he had been giving some thought to the future of their relationship.

Politically she would not make an ideal choice. Her future would be affected by her so-called husband’s defection. Even after her divorce, the stain in her file would remain. It would not have mattered that much if Chen had not been a chief inspector. As an “emerging Party member cadre,” he knew the Party authorities were aware of every step he was making. So were some of his colleagues, who would be pleased to see his career tarnished by such a union.

A married woman, though no more than nominally married, was not “culturally desirable,” either.

But what was the point of being a chief inspector if he could not care for a woman he liked?

He threw away his cigarette. One decision he had made: he was walking to Qinghe Lane instead of taking a bus. He wanted to do some thinking.

Crossing the safety island, he stepped over the green grass lightly.

* * * *

Chapter 12

his May morning was bright and despite the early heat the air was fresh.

The traffic wound itself into a terrible snarl along Henan Road. Chief Inspector Chen cut his way through the long line of cars, congratulating himself on his decision to walk. New construction was under way everywhere, and detour signs popped up like mushrooms after a spring rain, adding to the traffic problem. Near the Eastern Bookstore, he noticed another old building being pulled down. In its place, a five-star hotel would soon arise. An imported red convertible rolled by. A young girl sitting by the driver waved her hand at a postman late on his round.

Shanghai was changing rapidly.

So were the people.

So was he, seeing more and more meaning in his police work, though he stepped into a bookstore, and spent several minutes looking for a poetry collection. Chief Inspector Chen was not that obsessed with the case, nor with its political significance for his career.

There was, perhaps, one side of him that had always been bookish, nostalgic, or introspective. Sentimental, or even somewhat sensual in a classic Chinese version—
”fragrance from the red sleeves imbues your reading at night.”
But there was also another side to him. Not so much antiromantic as realistic, though not as ambitious as Wang had accused him of being at the Riverfront Cafe. A line memorized in his college years came back to him:
“The most useless being is a poor bookworm.”
It was by Gao Shi, a well-known general, successful in the mid-Tang dynasty, and a first-class poet at the same time.

General Gao had lived in an era when the once prosperous Tang dynasty was torn by famine, corruption, and wars, so the talented poet-general had taken it upon himself to make a difference—through his political commitment—for the country.

Today, China was once more witnessing a profound change, with significant challenges to the established systems and views. At such a historical juncture, Chen was also inclined to think that he could make a more realistic difference as a chief inspector than just as a poet. A difference, even if not as substantial as General Gao’s, which would be felt in the lives of the people around him. For example, by his investigation of this crime.

In China, and perhaps anywhere else, making such a difference would be more possible from a position of power, Chief Inspector Chen thought, as he inserted the key into the lock of Guan’s dorm room door.

To his dismay, the hopes that led him to make a second visit to Guan’s room were evaporating fast. He stood there under the framed portrait of Comrade Deng Xiaoping, musing. Nothing seemed to have changed in the room. And he could find nothing new in the photos, either, though there were several showing Guan in the mountains. He took these out and arranged them in a line on the table. Vivid images. Sharp colors. Standing by the famous welcoming pine, she smiled into the camera. Looking up at the peak, she lifted up her arms to the white clouds. Sitting on a jutting rock, she dabbled her bare feet in the mountain stream.

There was also one in a hotel room. Perching on the window sill, she was dressed rather scantily, her long, shapely bare legs dangling gracefully beneath a short cotton skirt. The morning sun shone through her thin cotton tunic, rendering it almost transparent, the swell of her breasts, visible beneath the material, suggesting the ellipse of her abdomen. Behind her, the window framed the verdant mountain range.

No mistaking her presence in the mountains. There was not a single picture, however, of her together with somebody else. Could she have been that narcissistic?

The idea that she’d made the trip by herself did not make sense, as Wang had pointed out at the cafe. But supposing she had, there was another question—Who had taken all the pictures of her? For her? Some had been taken at difficult angles, or from a considerable distance. It was hard to believe that she could have managed to have taken them by herself. There was not even a camera left among her few belongings. Nor a single roll of film, used or unused, in the drawers.

Comrade Deng Xiaoping himself appeared to be leaning down out of the picture frame, beneath which he stood, frustrated at Chen’s frustration.

One metaphor Chen had translated in a mystery came to his mind. Policemen were like wind-up toy soldiers, hustling here and bustling there, gesticulating, and chasing around in circles, for days, months, and even years, without getting anything done, and then suddenly they found themselves put aside, shelved, only to be wound up for another time.

Something about this case had been winding him up. It was a nameless impulse, which he suspected might not totally be a policeman’s.

Suddenly he felt hungry. He had had only a cup of black coffee at the Riverside Cafe. So he headed out to the shabby restaurant across the street. Choosing a rickety wooden table on the sidewalk, he once more ordered a portion of fried buns plus a bowl of beef soup. The soup came first with chopped green onion floating on the surface, but like the last time, he had to wait for the buns. The place had only one big flat wok for frying them.

There’s no breakthrough every day for a cop, he thought, and lit a cigarette, inhaling the fragrance of Peony mixed with the fresh air. Looking across the street, he became fascinated by the sight of an old woman standing close to the entrance of the lane. Almost statuesque on her bound feet, she was hawking ices from an ancient wheelbarrow, her shrunken face as weatherbeaten as the Great Wall in a postcard. Sweating, she was swathed in black homespun, like an opaque piece of smoke-darkened glass for watching a summer sun eclipse. She wore a red armband with
Best Socialist Mobile Service Woman
in Chairman Mao’s calligraphy. Perhaps she was not in her right mind, or she would not have worn that antique armband. Fifty or sixty years earlier, however, she could have been one of those pretty girls, standing there, smiling, her bare shoulders shining against the bare wall, soliciting customers under the alluring gas lights, launching a thousand ships into the silent night.

And in time, Guan might have become as old, shrivelled, ravenlike as the peddler, out of touch with the time and tide, unstrung, unnoticed.

Then Chen noticed that there were, indeed, several young people hanging around the dorm building. They seemed to be doing nothing in particular—crossing their arms, whistling off key, looking at the passersby along the road. As his glance fell on the wood-and-glass kiosk attached to the dorm, he realized that they must be waiting for phone calls. Looking into the cubicle, Chen could see the white-haired old man picking up a phone, handing it to a middle-aged woman outside, and putting coins into a small box. Before the woman finished speaking, the old man was picking up another phone, but this time he wrote something down on a slip of paper. He moved out of his cubicle toward the staircase, shouting upwards, a loudspeaker in one hand and the slip of paper in the other. Possibly he’d called the name of some resident upstairs. That must have been an incoming call. Due to the severe shortage of private phones in Shanghai, such public telephone service remained the norm. Most people had to make phone calls in this way.