Qiu Xiaolong - Death of a Red Heroine

The day was hot, without a breath of air. He wondered whether he had made a mistake, but a call to Commissar Zhang confirmed that the address was right. Then he dialed Comrade Xu Kexin, a senior librarian of the bureau-better known by his nickname of Mr. Walking Encyclopedia-who had worked in the bureau for over thirty years, and had a phenomenal knowledge of the city’s history.

“I need to ask a favor of you,” he said. “Right now I’m at Hubei Street, between Zhejiang and Fujian Road, looking for Lane 235. The address is correct, but I cannot find that lane.”

“Hubei Street, hmm,” Xu said. “It was known, before 1949, as a notorious quarter.”

“What?” Chen asked, hearing Xu leafing through pages, “‘Quarter’-what do you mean?”

“Ah yes, a brothel quarter.”

“What’s that got to do with the lane I cannot find?”

“A lot,” Xu said. “These lanes used to have different names. Notorious names, in fact. After liberation in 1949, the government put an end to prostitution, and changed the names of the lanes, but the people there may still use the old names for convenience sake, I believe. Yes, Lane 235, I’ve got it here. This lane was called Qinghe Lane, one of the most infamous in the twen- ties and thirties, or even earlier. It was where the second-class prostitutes gathered.”

“Qinghe Lane? Odd-the name does not sound so strange.”

“Well, it was mentioned in the well-known biography of Chiang Kai-shek by Tang Ren, but that may well be fictional rather than factual. At that time, Fuzhou Road, still called Fourth Avenue, was a red-light district, and Fubei Street was part of it. According to some statistics, there were more than seventy thousand prostitutes in Shanghai. In addition to government-licensed prostitutes, there were also a large number of bar girls, hostesses, masseuses, and guides engaged in clandestine or casual prostitution.”

“Yes, I have read that biography,” Chen said, thinking it was time to close the “encyclopedia.”

“All the brothels were closed in the 1951 campaign,” Mr. Encyclopedia droned on. “Officially, at least, there’re no prostitutes under China’s sun. Those who refused to change were put into reform-through-labor institutes. Most of them turned over a new leaf. I doubt any of them would have chosen to stay in the same neighborhood.”

“I doubt that, too.”

“Some sexual case in the lane?”

“No. Just looking for somebody living there,” Chen said. “Thank you so much for your information.”

Qinghe Lane turned out to be the one next to the grocery store. The lane looked decayed and dismal, with a glass-and-concrete-fronted kiosk attached to the first building, which made the entrance even narrower. Droplets from laundry festooned over a network of bamboo poles overhead presented an Impressionist scene in the May sunlight. It was believed that walking under the women’s lacy underwear like that streaming over the poles would bring bad luck for the day, but with the past associations of the lane in his mind, Chief Inspector Chen found it to be almost nostalgic.

Most of the houses had been built in the twenties or even earlier. Number 18 was actually the first building, the one with the kiosk attached. It had a walled-off courtyard, tiled roofs, and heavy carved beams, its balconies spilling over with laundry dripping on the piles of vegetables and used bicycle parts in the courtyard. On the door of the kiosk was a red plastic sign announcing in bold strokes: PUBLIC PHONE SERVICE. An old man was sitting inside, surrounded by several phones and phone books, working not only as a phone operator, but probably as a doorman as well.

“Morning,” the old man said.

“Morning,” Chen replied.

Even before the revolution, the house appeared to have been subdivided to accommodate more girls, each room containing one bed, of course, if not much else, with smaller alcoves for maidservants or pimps. That was probably why the house had been turned into a dorm building after 1949. Now each of these rooms was inhabited by a family. What might have originally served as a spacious dining room, where customers ordered banquets to please prostitutes, had been partitioned into several rooms, too. A closer examination revealed many signs of neglect characteristic of such dorm buildings: gaping windows, scaling cement, peeling paint, and the smell from the public bathroom permeating the corridor. Apparently each floor shared only one bathroom. And a quarter of the bathroom had been redesigned with makeshift plastic partitions into a concrete shower area.

Chen was not unfamiliar with this type of dorm. Dormitories in Shanghai could be classified into two kinds. One was conventional: each room contained nothing but beds or bunks, six or eight of them, each resident occupying no more than one bunk’s space. For these residents, most likely bachelors or bachelor girls waiting for their work units to assign them rooms so that they could get married, such a dorm space was just a temporary solution. Chen, in the days before he had become a chief inspector, had thought about getting a dorm bunk for himself, for it could well be that such a gesture would bring pressure to bear upon the housing committee. He had even checked into it, but Party Secretary Li’s promise had changed his mind. The second kind was an extension of the first. Due to the severe housing problem, those on the waiting list could find themselves reaching their mid-or-late thirties, still with no hope of having an apartment assigned to them. As a sort of compromise, a dorm room instead of a bunk space would be assigned to those who could not afford to wait any longer. They remained, theoretically, on the waiting list though their chances would be greatly reduced.

Guan’s room, apparently of the second kind, was on the second floor, the last one at the end of the corridor, across from the public bathroom. It was not one of the most desirable locations, but easy access to the bathroom might count as a bonus. Guan, too, had to share it with other families on the same floor. Eleven of them in all. The corridor was lined with piles of coal, cabbages, pots and pans, and coal stoves outside the doors.

On one of the doors was a piece of cardboard with the character GUAN written on it. Outside the door stood a small dust-covered coal stove with a pile of pressed coal-cylinders beside it. Chen opened the door with a master key. The doormat inside was littered with mail-more than a week’s newspapers, a postcard from Beijing signed by someone called Zhang Yonghua, and an electricity bill which, ironically, still bore the pre-1949 address-Qinghe Lane.

It was a tiny room.

The bed was made, the ashtray empty, and the window closed. There was nothing to indicate that Guan had entertained any guest before her death. Nor did it look like a place in which someone had been murdered. The room appeared too tidy, too clean. The furniture was presumably her parents’, old and heavy, but still in usable condition, consisting of a single bed, a chest, a large wardrobe, a small bookshelf, a sofa with a faded red cover, and a stool that might have served as nightstand. A thirteen-inch TV stood on the wardrobe. On the bookshelf were dictionaries, a set of Selected Works of Mao Zedong, a set of Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, and a variety of political pamphlets and magazines. The bed was not only old, it was narrow and shabby. Chen touched it. There was no squeak of bedsprings, no mattress under the sheet, just the hardboard. There was a pair of red slippers under the bed, as if anchoring the emptiness of the silent room.

On the wall above the headboard was a framed photograph of Guan making a presentation at the third National Model Workers Conference in the People’s Great Conference Hall. In the background of the picture sat the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party applauding with some other high ranking cadres. There was also a huge portrait of Comrade Deng Xiaoping on the other wall above the sofa.