Qiu Xiaolong - Death of a Red Heroine

“And are you going to be a cop all your life?” she said.

He could not help staring at her. That was not a question he was prepared for. Not this evening. He was startled by its bitterness. She had not been pleased with his career, he knew. She had hoped that her son would become an academic like his father. But being a police officer had not been a matter of his choice. It surprised him that she should have brought up the subject now that he had become a chief inspector.

“I have been doing fine, really,” he said, patting her thin, blue-veined hand. “Nowadays, I have my own office in the bureau, and a lot of responsibility, too.”

“So it has become your career for life.”

“Well, that I don’t know.” He added after a pause, “I have been asking myself the same question, but I have not got the answer yet.”

That, at least, was truthful. Occasionally he still wondered what would have become of him had he continued his literature studies. Perhaps he would be an assistant or associate professor at a university, where he could teach and write too, a career he had once dreamed about. In the last few years, however, he had somehow come around to a different perspective. Life was not easy for most people, especially during China’s transitional period between socialist politics and capitalist economics. There might be a lot of things of more importance or at least of more immediate urgency than modernist and postmodernist literary criticism.

“Son, you still yearn after the other kind of life, don’t you- study, books, all that sort of thing?”

“I don’t know. Last week I happened to read a critical essay, another interpretation of the poem about a butterfly flying in The Dream of the Red Chamber. The thirty-fifth interpretation, the author claims proudly. But what is all that to our people’s life today?”

“But-but don’t you want Fudan or Tongji University anymore?”

“I do, but I don’t see anything wrong with what I’m doing.”

“Is police work a preferable way of making a living?”

It was just one way to make a living, he thought. And literature, too, might be just another commodity, like everything else in today’s market. If an academic career provided him with no more than secure tenure and a middle-class living standard, would he feel more rewarded?

“I don’t mean that, Mother. Still, if I can do something in my work to prevent one human being from being abused and killed by another, that’s worth doing.”

He did not say anything more. There was no point elaborating on his defense, but he remembered what his father had once said to him. “A man is willing to die for the one who appreciates him, and a woman makes herself beautiful for the one who appreciates her.” Another quotation from Confucius. Chen did not worship Confucius, but some of his sayings seemed to stick with him.

“You have been doing quite well in Party politics,” she observed.

“Yes,” he said, “so far I’ve been lucky.”

But his luck might be changing at that very moment. It was ironic that in the defense of his career choice, he had momentarily forgotten the trouble hanging over his head. He did not want to discuss it with his mother. She had enough worries of her own.

“Still, I’d like to give you a piece of my mind.”

“Go ahead.”

“You’ve got luck, and talent, but you don’t have the inner makings for such a career. You’re my only son, I know. So cut your losses. Try something that really appeals to you.”

“I will think about it, Mother.”

He had thought about it.

If you work hard enough at something, it begins to make itself part of you, even though you do not really like it and know that part isn’t real.

That was the line he had written under the poem “Miracle” to that friend far away in Beijing. It could be about poetry, but also about police work.

It was already nine o’clock when Chief Inspector Chen reached his apartment.

A message light blinked on his machine. Too many messages in one day. Again he sensed a dull pounding at his temples-a new headache coming on. It could be an omen, a signal for him to stop. But he pushed down the button before he dropped his briefcase.

“Comrade Chief Inspector Chen, this is Li Guohua speaking. Please give me a call when you return. I’ll be working late in the office tonight. Right now it is ten to five.” It was Party Secretary Li’s voice, formal and serious even when leaving a message.

He called the bureau; the phone was picked up on the first ring. Li was waiting for him.

“Come to the office, Chief Inspector Chen. We need to have a talk.”

“It’ll take me about thirty minutes. Will you be still there?”

“Yes, I’m waiting for you.”

“Then I’m on my way.”

Actually it took more than thirty minutes before he walked into the Party Secretary’s fifth-floor office. Li was having instant beef-flavored noodles. The plastic bowl stood amidst the papers scattered across the mahogany desk. There was a small heap of cigarette butts in an exquisite tray of Fujian quartz with a dragon design.

“Comrade Party Secretary Li, Chief Inspector Chen Cao reporting,” Chen said, observing the correct political form.

“Welcome back, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen.”

“Thanks.”

“How’s everything?”

“Everything is fine,” Chen said. “I tried to report to you this morning, but you were not available. Then I had to be out for the most of the day.”

“You have been busy investigating the case, I know,” Li said. “Now tell me about it.”

“We’ve made some real progress.” Chen opened his briefcase. “As Detective Yu may have reported, we targeted Wu Xiaoming as the chief suspect before my trip to Guangzhou. And now we have several other leads and they all fit together.”

“New leads?”

“Well, one is the last phone call Guan received on May tenth. According to the stub book of the public phone station at Qinghe Lane, it came in around nine thirty, about three or four hours before her death. That call was made by none other than Wu Xiaoming. It’s confirmed.” He put a copy of the record on the desk.

“It’s not just this one particular call. For more than half a year, Wu made a considerable number of calls to her-three or four a week, on the average, some quite late at night. And Guan called him. Their relationship was apparently something more than what Wu admitted.”

“That might mean something,” Li said, “but Wu Xiaoming had been Guan’s photographer. So he could have contacted her from time to time-in a professional way.”

“No, it’s much more than that. We’ve also got a couple of witnesses. One of them is a night peddler on the corner of Hubei Road. She said that on several occasions shortly before Guan’s death, she saw Guan returning in a luxurious white car, in the company of a man, late in the night. Wu drives a white Lexus, his father’s car.”

“But it could have been a taxi.”

“I don’t think so. The peddler saw no taxi sign atop the car. She also saw Guan lean into the car and kiss the driver.”

“Really!” Li said, throwing the empty plastic bowl into the trash can. “Still, other people have white cars, too. There’re so many upstarts in Shanghai now.”

“We’ve also found, among other things, that Wu made a trip to the Yellow Mountains in Guan’s company last October. They used assumed names and fabricated documents, registering as a married couple so that they could share a hotel room. We have several witnesses who can testify to this.”

“Wu shared the same hotel room with Guan?”

“Exactly. What’s more, Wu took some nude pictures of Guan there, and then there was a violent quarrel between them.”