Qiu Xiaolong - Death of a Red Heroine

“Oh, I don’t know much about it, either. It was such a long time ago,” she said with an unfathomable smile on her lips. “So, where shall we start?”

“From the very beginning, if you please.”

“First, let me make a point. The whole thing’s in the past tense. I met Wu about two years ago, and we parted one year later. I want to emphasize this, not because of his possible involvement in a murder case.”

“Understood,” he said. “Now, how did you get to know him?”

“He came to me, saying that he wanted to take my picture. For his magazines and newspapers, of course.”

“Few would turn down such an offer, I bet.”

“Who would say no to have one’s own picture-free and published?”

“So the pictures were published?”

“Yes, the pictures turned out to be of high quality,” she said. “To be fair, Wu’s a gifted photographer. He’s got the eye for it, and the instinct, too. He knows when and where to get the shot. A number of magazines are eager for his work.”

“What happened afterward?”

“Well, as it turned out, I was his personal rather than professional target-that’s what he said to me over a lunch. Believe it or not, he posed for me, too. One thing led to another. You know what happens.”

“A romantic involvement?”

“Is that a sort of euphemism?”

“Is it?”

“Are you trying to ask if we slept together?”

“Well, was it a serious relationship?”

“What do you mean by ‘serious relationship’?” she said. “If it means that Wu Xiaoming proposed to me, then it wasn’t, no. But we had some good times together.”

“People have different definitions,” he said, “but let’s say, did you see each other a lot?”

“Not a lot. As a senior editor for Red Star, he got assignments from time to time, to go to Beijing or other cities, even abroad on one or two occasions. I am extremely busy with my work, too. But when we had time, we were together. For the first few months he came to my place quite frequently, two or three times a week.”

“Days or nights?”

“Both, but he seldom stayed overnight. He had his car-his father’s, you know. It was convenient for him.”

“Did you ever go to his place?”

“Only a couple of times. It’s a mansion. You must have been there. You know what it is like.” She continued after a pause, “But when we were together, I wanted to do what we were together for. So what was the point of staying somewhere without any privacy? Even if we could shut ourselves up in one of the rooms, I wouldn’t have been in the mood-with his people walking around there all the time.”

“You mean his wife?”

“No, she actually stayed in her room all the time-she’s bedridden. But it’s his father’s house. The old man was in the hospital, but his mother and sisters were there.”

“So you knew he was a married man from the very beginning.”

“He did not make a secret of it, but he told me that it had been a mistake. I believe it was true-to some extent.”

“A mistake,” he said. “Did he explain it to you?”

“For one thing, his wife’s been sick for several years,” she said, “too sick to have a normal sex life with him.”

“Anything else?”

“Marriage in those years could have been a matter of convenience. The educated youths were lonely, and life in the countryside was extremely hard, and they were far, far away from home.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” he said, thinking of his years with Peiqin in Yunnan, “but you had no objection to an extramarital relationship?”

“Come on, Comrade Detective Yu. We’re in a new decade, a new time. Who lives any longer like in the Confucian books? If a marriage is a happy one, no outsider could ever destroy it,” she said, scratching her ankle. “Besides, I never expected him to marry me.”

Maybe he was an old-fashioned man. Yu certainly felt ancient sitting beside the artist, to whom an affair could be just like the change of her clothes. But he also felt it tempting to imagine the body under her loose coverall. Was it because he had seen it in the picture? And he also noticed the black mole on her nape.

“But if he’s so unhappy with his marriage, what kept him in it?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I don’t think a divorce would do him any good, politically, I mean. I’ve heard that somebody in his wife’s family is still influential.”

“That’s true.”

“I also had the feeling that he cared about her in his way.”

“What made you think so?”

“He talked to me about her. She had come to him in his most miserable days-as an educable educated youth of a capitalist roader family. She took pity on him, and she took good care of him, too. But for her, he once said, he could have fallen into despair.”

“She might have been a beauty in her day,” he said. “We have seen some pictures of her in earlier years.”

“You may not believe it, but part of the reason I came to care for him was that he showed some loyalty to his wife. He was not a man devoid of responsibility.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But I’ve got another question about him. Does he earn a lot from these pictures-not of his wife, of course.”

“As an HCC, he probably has his ways to get his money. Some people would pay him handsomely, for instance, to have a picture published in the Red Star. He does not have to make a living by selling the pictures. As far as I know, he spends generously on himself, and he’s not mean to his friends.”

“What kind of friends?”

“People of similar family background. Birds of a feather, if you want to put it that way.”

“A pack of HCC,” he grumbled. “So what do they do together?”

“They have parties at his place. Wild parties. It’s a shame, they would say, not to have parties in such a mansion.”

“Can you give me the names of his friends?”

“Only those who have given me their cards at those parties,” she said, turning toward a plastic box on the shelf.

“That will be great.”

“Here they are.” She spread out several cards on the table.

He glanced through them. One was Guo Qiang, the man who had confirmed Wu’s alibi for his whereabouts on May tenth. Several cards bore impressive titles under the names.

“Can I borrow them?”

“Sure. I don’t think I’ll need them.”

Taking out a pack of cigarettes, he lit one after she nodded her approval. “Another question, Miss Jiang. Did you know anything about Guan Hongying while you were with Wu? For instance, did you meet her at his mansion, or did he mention her?”

“No, not that I remember,” she said. “But I knew there were some other girls.”

“Was that the reason why you broke things off?”

“Well, you may think so, but no,” she said, taking a cigarette from his pack. “I did not really expect anything out of that relationship. He had his life, and I had mine. We had made it clear to each other. A couple of times I confronted him about his other girlfriends, but he swore that he only took pictures of them.”

“So you believed him?”

“No, I didn’t-but ironically, we parted because of his pictures.”

“Pictures of those girls?”

“Yes, but not like those-artistic work-you have seen in magazines.”

“I understand,” he said, “but how did you find them?”

“By accident. During one of those parties, I was with him in his room when he had to answer a call on the telephone in his study. It was a long conversation, so I looked into his drawer. I discovered a photo album. Pictures of nude girls, you would expect, but much more than that-so obscene-and they were all in a variety of disgusting positions-even in the midst of sexual intercourse. I recognized one of the models. A well-known actress, now living abroad with an American millionaire, I’ve heard. She’s gagged in that picture, lying on her back with her wrists handcuffed, and buried between her breasts was Wu’s head. There were quite a number of such terrible pictures, I did not have the time to look at them all. Wu had printed them out like professional fashion photographs, but there was no use his protesting that they were artistic work.”