Qiu Xiaolong - Death of a Red Heroine

“But I wouldn’t call my boss after ten o’clock. Would a young single woman?”

“Yes, you’re very observant.”

The R.C. member had ears, Chen nodded, and brains, too.

“It’s my responsibility.”

“So you think that she was seeing somebody before her death?”

“It’s possible,” Uncle Bao said after a pause. “As far as I can remember, it was a man who made most of the phone calls to her. He spoke with a strong Beijing accent.”

“Is there any way to trace the phone numbers, Uncle Bao?”

“Not with the phone calls she made. There’s no way of knowing the number she dialed out. But for the calls she got, we may recover some from our record stubs. You see, we put down the number both on the slip and the stub attached to it. So if people lose their slips, we can still recover the numbers.”

“Really! Have you kept all the stubs?”

“Not all of them. Most are useless after several days. But for the past few weeks, I may be able to dig out some for you. It will take some time.”

“That will be great,” Chen said. “Thank you so much, Uncle Bao. Your information is throwing new light on our investigation.”

“You’re most welcome, Comrade Chief Inspector.”

“Another thing. Did she get a phone call on May tenth? That is, the night she was murdered.”

“May tenth was-a Thursday, let me see. I’ll have to check the stubs. The phone station drawer’s too small, so I keep most of the stubs at home.”

“Call me immediately if you find anything,” Chen said. “I don’t know how to express our appreciation.”

“Don’t mention it, Comrade Chief Inspector,” Uncle Bao said. “What’s an R.C. member for?”

At the bus station, Chen turned back and glimpsed the old man busy working in the cubicle again, cradling a phone on his shoulder, nodding, writing on a piece of paper, his other hand holding another piece out the window. A conscientious R.C. member. Most likely a Party member, too.

It was an unexpected lead: Guan might have been seeing somebody before her death.

Why she should have made such a secret of it, he did not know yet. He no longer had any conviction about its being a political case. It was Wang, with the green jade charm dangling from a thin red string round her neck, who had inspired him to pursue this line of investigation. But the moment he squeezed into the bus, he ran out of luck. Wedged among the passengers at the door, he pressed forward only to be crushed against a middle-aged fat woman, her florid blouse soaked in sweat, wet, nearly transparent. He tried his best to keep some distance, but to no avail. What was even worse, with new construction under way everywhere, the condition of the road was not smooth. The incessant bumps made the ordeal almost unbearable. More than once the bus came to an emergency halt, and his fleshy neighbor was thrown off balance, colliding with him. It was no Tuishou. He heard her cursing under her breath, though it was not anybody’s fault.

Finally he gave up. Before the bus reached the bureau, he got off at Shandong Road.

The fresh breeze was heavenly.

Bus Number 71. Possibly the very bus Guan used to take to the department store, and back, day after day.

Not until Chief Inspector Chen returned home, took off his uniform, and lay down on his bed, did he think of something that could have been a cold comfort-for Guan. Though single, Guan had not been too lonely-at least not toward the end of her life. She had someone to call after 10 P.M. He had never tried to call Wang so late in the evening. She lived with her parents. He had only visited her home once. Old, prudish, traditional, her parents were not too friendly because they were aware of his attentions to their married daughter.

What was Wang doing at the moment? He wished he could call her, tell her that success in his career, gratifying as it appeared, was no more than a consolation prize for the absence of personal happiness.

It was a serene summer night. The moonlight was lambent among the shimmering leaves, and a lonely street lamp cast a yellow flickering light on the ground. A violin could be heard from an open window across the street. The melody was familiar, but he could not recall its name. Sleepless, he lit a cigarette.

A young woman, Guan must also have experienced her moments of surging loneliness-sudden sleeplessness, in that small dorm room of hers.

The ending of a poem by Matthew Arnold came swelling to him in the night-air: Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

It was a poem he had translated years earlier. The broken and uneven lines, as well as the abrupt, almost surrealist transitions and juxtapositions, had appealed to him. The translation had appeared in Reading and Understanding, along with a short critical essay by him, claiming it as the saddest Victorian love poem. Whether it was really an echo of the disillusioned Western world, as he had maintained in the essay, however, he was no longer so sure. Any reading, according to Derrida, could be a misreading. Even Chief Inspector Chen could be read in one way or another.

Saturday in late May was once again clear and fine.

The Yus were visiting the Grand View Garden in Qingpu, Shanghai.

Peiqin was in her element, carrying a copy of The Dream of the Red Chamber. It was a dream come true to her.

“Look, that’s the bamboo grove where Xiangyuan takes her nap on the stone bench, and Baoyu stands watching her,” she said, turning the pages to that part of the story.

Qinqin was in high spirits, too, running about, losing and finding himself in a traditional Chinese garden maze.

“Take a picture of me by the vermilion pavilion,” she said.

Yu had the blues, but he was making a gallant effort to conceal his mood. He held up the camera, knowing how much the garden meant to Peiqin. A group of tourists also came to a stop in front of the pavilion, and the guide began elaborating on the ancient architectural wonder. Peiqin listened intently, oblivious to him for the moment. He stood among the crowd, nodding, but pursuing his own thoughts.

He had been under a lot of pressure in the bureau. Commissar Zhang was unpleasant to work with, all the more so after the last group meeting. Chief Inspector Chen was not intolerable, but he obviously had something up his sleeve. The Party Secretary, while gracious to Chen and Zhang, brought all the pressure to bear upon Yu, who was not even the lead investigator for the case. Not to mention the fact that Yu actually had the main responsibility for the other cases in the squad.

Little had come out of his renewed focus on the taxi bureau and travel agencies. The reward offered for information about any suspicious driver seen that night near the canal was a long shot. No response came, as Yu had expected.

There was no progress from Chen either, with respect to his theory about the caviar.

“The garden is a twentieth-century construction of the archetypal idea exhibited in The Dream of the Red Chamber, the classical Chinese novel most celebrated since the mid-nineteenth century.” The guide was speaking glibly, holding a cigarette with a long filter tip as he delivered his introduction. “Not only are the lattice windows, doors, or wood pillars exactly of the same design, the furniture also reflects the conventions of the time. Just look at the bamboo bridge. And the asparagus fern grotto, too. We’re truly living in the novel here.”