Qiu Xiaolong - Death of a Red Heroine

Ouyang

Xinhe Road was not one of the main streets. Walking past a run-down Turkish bathhouse with a pasty-faced girl in the doorway and a pretentious coffee shop with several computers on the glass-topped tables beside a sign saying “Electronic Mails,” Chief Inspector Chen reached a tall building at the address given him.

Old and dilapidated, the building was neither an office building, nor was it residential. Yet, there was a doorman sitting there, sorting mail at the entrance desk. He stared up at Chen over his reading glasses. When Chen showed him the address, the doorman pointed at the elevator.

Chen waited for about ten minutes without seeing any sign of the elevator coming down. He was about to climb the stairs when the elevator arrived with a thud. It appeared even more ancient than the building itself, but it carried him to the fifth floor and bobbed to a stop.

As he stepped through the squeaking door, he had a weird feeling of stepping into an old movie from the thirties. Song Girl -he recalled its name. There was a narrow corridor, smelling of dead cigars, lined with a number of suspiciously closed doors, as if General Yan of the movie, still wrapped in scarlet silk pajamas, would pop out of a door in the next minute to take a bouquet of roses from a flower girl. The flower girl had been played by Zhou Xuan, so breathtaking in those days.

Chief Inspector Chen knocked at the door marked 543.

“Who is it?” a young girl’s voice called out.

“Chen Cao, Mr. Ouyang’s friend.”

“Come on in. The door is not locked.”

Pushing the door open, he found himself in a room with a half drawn velvet curtain. The room contained little in the way of furni- ture: a double bed, a large mirror on the wall just above the headboard, a towel-covered sofa, a nightstand, and a couple of chairs.

Propped up on cushions, a young girl was reclining on the sofa, reading a paperback. She wore a blue-striped bathrobe that showed most of her thighs; her bare feet dangled over the sofa arm. On the coffee table was a crystal ashtray with lipstick-marked cigarette butts.

“So you are Chen Cao.”

“Yes, has Ouyang told you about me?”

“Sure, you’re special, he’s told me, but it’s a bit early for me, I am afraid,” she said, moving to a sitting position. “My name is Xie Rong.” She got to her feet, not embarrassed as she straightened her robe.

“I should have called first, but-”

“That’s okay,” she said. “A distinguished customer is always welcome.”

“I don’t know what Ouyang has told you, but let’s have a talk.”

“Take a seat.” She gestured toward the chair beside the bed. He hesitated before sitting. The room smelled of strong spirits, cigarette smoke, cheap cosmetics, and something faintly suggestive of body odor.

Walking barefoot across the carpet, she poured some coffee from an electronic coffee pot, and handed him a cup on a Fuzhou lacquered tray.

“Thanks,” he said. Chief Inspector Chen was in for something he had not expected, or not even imagined, he realized. Maybe that was why Ouyang had left the address with no explanation. A poet searching for a young girl in a large city could have appeared suspiciously “romantic”-enough for Ouyang to bring him and the girl together in a flight of best-seller fantasy. There was no use blaming Ouyang, who had meant well.

“So let’s get on with it.” She climbed onto the bed, sitting there, her arms folded across her knees, studying him intensely, in a posture rather suggestive of a Burmese cat. It was not a repulsive association. In a way, she reminded him of someone.

“A first-timer, eh?” she said, misreading his silence.”Don’t be nervous.”

“No, I’ve come here to-”

“What about something to relax you first? A Japanese massage- a foot massage-to start with?”

“A foot massage-” he echoed. A foot massage. He had read about it in a Japanese novel. One of Mishima’s, perhaps. Something of an existentialist experience, though he had never liked Mishima. But it was a temptation. He would probably never come here again. Whether he was stepping over the line he had drawn for himself, he did not know. It was too late, however, for him to back out-unless he flashed his I.D. and started questioning her as a chief inspector. But would that work? To Xie Rong, as well as to other ordinary Chinese people, HCC like Wu Xiaoming led an existence far above them, and above the law, too. So it was quite likely she would not dare to say anything against Wu. If she refused to answer his questions, Chief Inspector Chen could not do much in Guangzhou. One thing he had learned in the past few days was the unreliability of his local colleagues.

“Why not?” he said, flashing a few bills.

“What a generous tip! Put it on the nightstand. Let’s go to the bathroom.”

“No.” He was still trying to draw a line somewhere. “I’ll take the shower by myself.”

“As you please,” she said casually. “You’re so different.”

She scrambled down, knelt at his feet, and began to unlace his shoes.

“No,” he protested again in embarrassment.

“You have to take your shoes off-that’s only civil.”

Before he could say or do anything, she reached out to unbutton his shirt. Feeling the heat of her breath on his shoulder, he took a step back. She then took a bathrobe from behind the door and threw it to him. He hurried into the bathroom, still wearing his clothes, the robe draped over his shoulder, thinking to himself that he must resemble some character in a movie.

The bathroom was no larger than the one at the Writers’ Home; it contained an oval tiled tub with a rotatable shower head and a large towel on a stainless-steel rack. A mirror hung over a cracked blue porcelain sink. A worn rug was spread out in front of it. There was no lack of hot water, though.

He had agreed to her proposal because he needed time to think, but he knew he could not stay in the bathroom too long. With a few ideas, half-formed in the vapor of shower, he emerged wearing her scruffy flannel bathrobe, the frayed belt brushing against his bare legs.

She was waiting, sitting cross-legged on the bed, painting her toenails a bright vermilion. The window filtered the light onto the plain white coverlet. Then she thrust her legs out in front of her, flexed her toes luxuriantly, lifted one foot above the other, waggled the toes at him, and giggled.

“Ah,” she said, “much better.”

There was a small bikini-girl poster above the sofa, and underneath it was a line in bold characters: TIME IS MONEY! a new political slogan he had seen in Guangzhou.

“Take off your robe,” she said, putting a finishing touch on her toenails with a steady hand. She then capped the polish bottle tightly, and put it aside on the nightstand. To his surprise, she lay down on her back, and waved her feet in the air as if doing synchronized swimming. Her red toenails arced in the air.

“Must I?”

“Must I help you?”

He was flabbergasted as she jumped up and helped him off with the bathrobe. Luckily, he had put his shorts back on. She guided him to the bed where he lay down, and then she turned him over. Lying on his stomach, he was very nervous as he became aware that she, too, had gotten onto the bed.

She put both her hands on a stainless-steel bar suspended from the ceiling. With the bar bearing the weight of her body like a gymnast, she started massaging his back with her toes.

It was a bizarre experience. The first two or three minutes, he was perspiring with trepidation. Any second, she could stamp down violently on his bare back, a complex of vertebrae, discs, ligaments, and nerves. But soon he started to have mixed feelings. Her bare toes and heels pressing upon him elicited sensations of ice and fire all over him. His pleasure was actually heightened by his trepidation.