When Red is Black Read online

  “You’ve got company?” Yu asked, delicately.

  “A little secretary.” Chen added, “I’m working on a difficult translation. She will help me.”

  “A xiaomi!” Yu did not try to disguise the surprise in his voice.

  “Gu insisted on sending her over to help,” he said. Yu might be the only one for whom he did not have to go into detail. “Have you examined the murder scene?”

  “Yes, I did. But there was not much I could see, as I told you. Judging from the time of the murder and the fact that no stranger was seen entering or leaving the building around that time, it looks like the murderer might be one of the shikumen residents. That’s Old Liang’s opinion too.”

  “Have you ruled out every other possibility?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, regarding the residents of the building, what possible motives are there?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that too,” Yu said. “I have checked with Shanghai Literature Publishing House. She did not earn much from her novel. I found a little money in her desk drawers, but also some correspondence with people abroad. I’m not sure whether she was working on another project. Perhaps another controversial book.”

  That would really make this a political case. Was she working on something the government-or someone in the government- might have tried to keep from coming out?

  “As for her contacts abroad, Internal Security must have a file. They can be quite effective in their own way.” Chen would not say more over the phone.

  “They surely can. They beat me to the crime scene and searched her room, but they haven’t told us what they were looking for.”

  “It could be just routine practice for Internal Security if a dissident has been killed. If they left those letters in the drawer, there probably was nothing in them to worry about.”

  “Another thing. I did not find a checkbook in her room,” Yu said. “If the murderer took it, he would have withdrawn the money from her account immediately. So far, there’s no report of an account in her name from which there have been withdrawals.”

  “The murderer might have been too scared to go to the bank, or Yin may have kept all her valuables in a safe deposit box.”

  “Safe deposit?” Yu said. “I’ve only read about them in one of the English mysteries you translated.”

  “Well, you can find everything in Shanghai now. Pay a certain amount, and the bank will keep valuables in a small safe for you.”

  “I’ll check into it. But first I will go to her college this afternoon; there is nothing unusual in her college file though.” Yu added, “I’ll let you know as soon as I find out anything. Thanks, Chief.”

  The rest of Chen’s afternoon was uneventful except for several more phone calls. The first was from Gu.

  “How is everything, Chief Inspector Chen?”

  “It’s going slowly, but steadily. I mean the progress of the translation, if that’s what you are asking about.”

  “Oh, I’m not worried about that. The project is in good hands, I know.” Gu said with a chuckle, “What about White Cloud?”

  “Quite helpful,” Chen said, “but she should concentrate on her studies. I don’t think it’s a good idea for her to come here every day.”

  “If you don’t need her, send her back. I just thought it might be a good idea for her to help you. As for her, she should consider herself lucky to have the opportunity to work with you. There’s a lot she can learn.”

  It was not such a bad idea to have a temporary assistant, Chen thought, in spite of his protestations. A young pretty one too. There was no point in his being too prudish about it. If the water is too clear, there will he no fish left in the pond.

  “By the way, what about having dinner with me at the Dynasty this weekend?” Gu asked. “You may have heard of our sauna room. Now we have a new dish-sauna shrimp. Live river shrimp, of course.”

  “Sauna shrimp! My food finger is already throbbing, but let’s wait until I’ve finished the translation.” For some minutes after Gu’s phone call, Chen tried but failed to figure out what kind of dish sauna shrimp might be.

  The next caller was a surprise. It was Peiqin, Yu’s wife, a wonderful hostess with excellent cooking skills, and equally good taste in classical Chinese literature. Chen had not spoken to her since the apartment had been denied to them. He felt he had let the couple down terribly.

  “Yu is working on the Yin case, as you know. He does not have much time for reading. So I am going to read Death of a Chinese Professor on his behalf. Not just the novel, but other material related to it as well, like interviews or reviews. It may take time to find these things in libraries. I’m wondering whether you know of a shortcut to getting that material.”

  “I have not read Death of a Chinese Professor.” He had heard of it, but, after reading a review, he had not bothered to obtain the book. Those stories of persecuted intellectuals were nothing new. Chen’s father, a Neo-Confucian scholar, had also died a miserable death during the Cultural Revolution. “I’m afraid I cannot help.”

  “Yin, too, belonged to the Chinese Writers’ Association, Shanghai Branch. Were you ever introduced to her at one of those meetings?”

  “I don’t remember having met her there.” He said, after considering further, “There’s a small library at the Shanghai Writers’ Association. It’s on Julu Road. Members are supposed to bring their works and related reviews to the library. Sometimes the writers forget to do so, and the librarian has to collect them. At the least, there should be a catalog of her publications. The librarian’s name is Kuang Ming. I’ll give him a call. He should be able to help.”

  There was one thing Chief Inspector Chen did not say on the phone. A secret archive would certainly have been kept there with respect to a dissident writer. Peiqin should have no problems finding what she needed.

  “Thank you, Chief Inspector Chen. Come to our restaurant when you have time. Now we have a new chef, Sichuan style. He is quite good.”

  “Thank you, Peiqin, for helping with our work,” he said.

  Afterwards, he thought about the fact that Peiqin had invited him to the restaurant, but not to their home. He had done his best as a member of the bureau housing committee, he thought, but those who had failed to get an apartment would never believe he had done enough, perhaps including Peiqin.

  The third phone call he received was from Overseas Chinese Lu, who had earned his nickname in high school from his enthusiasm for foreign things. He was an old friend who called regularly from his restaurant, Moscow Suburb. Not for the first time, Chen received a passionate invitation to have dinner at the newly expanded restaurant.

  “I phoned your office. They told me you are on vacation. Now you surely have time to dine at our restaurant.”

  “Not this week, Lu. I have to finish a rush translation project for Mr. Gu, of the Dynasty Club, now also the founder of the New World Group. You know him, I think.”

  “Oh, Mr. Gu. He asked you to do a translation for him?”

  “Yes, for a business project of his,” Chen said. “How is your business?”

  “Great. We have unearthed a number of old pictures and posters of Russian girls in old Shanghai. Now they are all over the walls. Impressive pictures. Crowded nightclubs with half-naked Russian girls performing on the stage. It’s like walking back in time into old Shanghai.”

  “That’s exciting.”

  “I’m thinking of putting a stage in our restaurant, too. Peace Hotel has a band. Old men playing jazz, you know. We’ll do much better. A young men’s band, and Russian girls on stage,” Lu added proudly. “Girls both in old pictures, and in real life.”

  “So Moscow Suburb is no longer merely a restaurant, just for gourmets like you.”

  “It still is. But people have money now. They want something more than food. Atmosphere. Culture. History. Added value, whatever it may mean. And only in the middle of all this do they think they are really enjoying their money’s worth.”

&n
bsp; “It must be quite expensive, then.”

  “Well, people are willing to pay the price. There’s a new term- conspicuous consumption. And there’s a new group of people- the middle class. Moscow Suburb has become a status-conscious restaurant. Some come here for that very reason.”

  “Good for you, Overseas Chinese Lu.”

  “So come, my Chief Inspector. I’ve just got some caviar, genuine Russian caviar. An acquired taste, I’m beginning to like it. You remember, I read about it for the first time in a Russian novel. My mouth literally watered. Black pearls indeed. Oh, vodka too. We’ll eat and drink to our hearts’ content.”

  “I have to get back to my work, Overseas Chinese Lu.” Chen had to cut him short. Lu could gush on for hours whenever he spoke on the topic of food. “I will try to make it to your restaurant next week.”

  These phone calls had some things in common, Chen thought afterward. Culinary delight was one. Not just that, either. Lu had also spoken about a nostalgic cultural ambiance for his restaurant. As a result of this conversation, Chen felt hungry but he decided to work on, doggedly, for two or three hours more. It seemed as if he had to prove the truth of what he had told Lu on the phone.

  After a while, he looked once more at the pictures White Cloud had taken for him. He failed to see the glitter and glamour of the thirties. Perhaps that was due to the dirt and dust accumulated through the years of the construction of socialism. It might be too cynical of him, as a Party cadre, to think so, but that’s what he thought.

  Finally, he took the remaining food, put it into the microwave, and finished it without really tasting it.

  Perhaps he ought to consult some books about old Shanghai. Not books written in the sixties, which he had read as a child, but those from an earlier time. He took out a piece of paper and wrote something down before he brewed himself a pot of coffee. Not a good idea at this hour, he knew. Inhaling the fragrance, he realized that he had been becoming more dependent on caffeine. For the moment, however, he did not want to worry about it. He had to pull himself together.

  He worked late that night.

  He felt tired, yet all of a sudden, more than anything else, lonely.

  Several lines a friend had once quoted to him came to mind. Trying each of the chilly boughs, / the wild goose chooses not to perch, / with the maple leaves falling, freezing, / over the Wu River. These were lines from a poem by Su Dongpo. It was said to be a political commentary, but it was often read as a metaphor about the difficulty of choosing a bough to perch upon, whatever the reason might be. In fact, the friend had quoted it in defense of her personal life.

  And then his thought jumped to a familiar sound, like the wild goose amidst falling maple leaves. A cricket was screeching outside the window.

  There was no accounting for a cricket scraping its wings so energetically, unless, as he had learned as a boy, the cricket was singing in triumph over a beaten opponent.

  But what was the good of being a cricket, victorious or not, if you were always goaded by a golden rush in a boy’s hand, circling round and round the world of a small earthen pot?

  Chapter 6

  After consulting Old Liang’s list of the suspects who lived in the shikumen building, Yu started his investigation early the next morning at the neighborhood committee office. On the desk was a new folder that contained information about each suspect, probably derived from the records maintained by the veteran residence cop.

  The first person on the list was Lanlan, the discoverer of the murder. Technically, she had had the opportunity and means to commit the crime and it appeared to Old Liang that she had a motive too.

  Lanlan was a woman who liked nothing better than to mix with her neighbors; she was capable of becoming intimate with people she had known for only three minutes. She had suffered a terrible loss of face with Yin, who rejected her repeated attempts at friendship. Lanlan finally gave up with a bitter statement to the neighbors: “It was like pressing your hot face to her cold ass. What’s the point?”

  But this would not have been sufficient to cause an explosion unless a fuse had been lit, which, in a shikumen house, more often than not came from the constant squabbles about the common space. Because of overcrowded living conditions, each of the families tried hard to occupy as much space as possible-”in a fair way.” Old Liang provided an example. Yin had a coal briquette stove as well as a small table in the common kitchen area. It was her space, inherited from the previous tingzijian occupant; she took it even though she hardly cooked. Like her predecessor, she also kept a smaller gasoline stove outside her door on the staircase landing. Like all the others, she would not give up an inch she could claim as hers. This must have vexed some of her neighbors.

  One night, Lanlan came home in a hurry and stumbled over the gasoline stove. There was a kettle of hot water on the stove; the hot water spilled and scalded her ankle. It was not exactly Yin’s fault. The stove had been there for years. Lanlan should have turned on the light, or moved less rapidly. Anyway, accidents happen, but she cursed like a fury outside Yin’s door.

  “What a white tiger star you are! You bring misfortune to everyone close to you. Heaven has eyes, and you will bring bad luck down upon yourself, too.”

  Yin must have been aware of the reference-white tiger star- but she knew better than to emerge from her room to shout back.

  Lanlan, however, was even more enraged to be ignored like that. She voiced her complaints in neighborhood resident meetings. A lot of people heard them, and some were astonished by the animosity she had displayed toward Yin. But that was still far from being a murder motive, in Yu’s estimation. Besides, the incident had happened a couple of years earlier.

  He decided to move on to the second name on the list. Wan Qianshen was a retired worker who lived alone in the attic. Wan had not been in the shikumen house that morning. It was his habit, too, to perform tai chi exercises on the Bund at that hour.

  Old Liang’s file provided a brief biography of Wan. He had been a steel factory worker “dedicated to the construction of the socialist revolution.” During the Cultural Revolution, Wan had become a member of the prestigious Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Worker Team. At the end of the sixties, when the Red Guard students clamored for more power, Chairman Mao managed to contain these young rebels by sending Worker Teams into the colleges with a new revolutionary theory. According to Mao, the students, having been exposed to western bourgeois ideas, needed reeducation. They were urged to learn from the workers-the most revolutionary proletariat. It was a high political honor to be a Thought Propaganda Worker Team Member in those days. All the students and teachers were required to listen to whatever Wan said. He was a Comrade-Always-Politically-Correct, a model for them.

  With the death of Chairman Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, everything changed, of course. The propaganda teams withdrew from college campuses. Wan, too, came back to the lane toward the end of the seventies. Later, he retired, like any ordinary old man, and in time, like a piece of tarnished silverware, his days of stardom gleamed only in his memory.

  In an increasingly materialistic society, Wan must have come to the belated realization that he had not benefited at all from all his revolutionary activities. Too busy, and too dedicated even to think about himself, he ended up alone, in an attic room. His pension did not catch up with inflation, and the state-run company where he had worked barely covered his medical insurance. So Wan complained constantly, darkly, like his steel-factory chimney, about what the world was coming to. Then fate brought Wan into Yin’s path. According to an ancient proverb, The path where enemies meet one another must be narrow indeed. In their case, it was in this same building, as they climbed up and down the same narrow staircase every day.

  In Death of a Chinese Professor, there were harsh descriptions of the propaganda worker teams. Wan heard about this and bought a copy of the novel. To his outrage, he found the university in question to be the very one where Wan had been stationed, although Yin n
amed no names in the book. Wan flew into a rage and tore the book to pieces in front of her door. Yin fought back, shouting, from behind her closed door, “If you were not a thief, you wouldn’t have to be nervous.”

  Bursting with anger, on the staircase just outside her door, Wan cursed her loudly: “What a stinking bitch! You think China is a country for bourgeois intellectuals. You should go to your grave now with that stubborn granite brain of yours! Heaven be my witness: I will make sure of it.”

  Several neighbors heard him, but no one took him seriously at the time.

  People might say anything in a fit of anger, and soon forget about it. Not so with Wan, Old Liang pointed out. Wan had never since spoken to Yin. He bore a profound hatred for her, one in which, in Wan’s words, “Two cannot share the same piece of sky.”

  What made Wan an even more serious suspect was his unconfirmed alibi for the morning of February 7. He said that he performed tai chi on the Bund that morning, but he could have sneaked downstairs, killed Yin, and either gone back to his room or on to the Bund without having been seen. And he could certainly use any money taken from her drawers, as the state-run steel factory had fallen several months behind in paying pensions to its former employees.

  An interview was arranged between Yu and Wan at the office.

  Wan did not look like a man in his mid-sixties. He had a medium build. He might even be considered tall for his generation. He wore a black wool Mao jacket with matching pants. In a movie from the sixties, Wan would have looked like a mid-rank Party cadre, with his collar buttoned high to his throat and his hair combed back. He appeared to have suffered a minor stroke, as his lips were slightly slanted downward at one corner, which added an impression of inner tension to his expression.

  Wan turned out to be more ready to talk than Yu had expected. Holding a cup of hot tea tightly in his hands, he said “The world is turned upside down, Detective Yu. What the hell are those rotten private enterprisers or entrepreneurs? Black-hearted, black-handed capitalists, making obscene amounts of money at the expense of working-class people. That’s why all the state-run companies are going to the dogs. What has happened to the benefits of our socialist system? Pensions, free medical care. All gone. If Chairman Mao were still alive, he would never have allowed this to happen to our country.”