Qiu Xiaolong - Death of a Red Heroine

Chen read through the case report for a second time, and then realized that it was lunchtime. As he stepped out, he found a message for him in the large office. It must have been left before his arrival that morning: Hi, it’s Lu. I’m working at the restaurant. Our restaurant. Moscow Suburb. A gourmet paradise. It’s important I talk to you. Give me a call at 638-0843.

Overseas Chinese Lu talked just like that-excited and ebullient. Chen dialed the number.

“Moscow Suburb.”

“Lu, what’s up?”

“Oh, you. How did it go last night?”

“Fine. We were together, weren’t we?”

“No, I mean what happened after we left-between you and Wang?”

“Nothing. We danced a few more dances, and then she left.”

“What a shame, old pal,” Lu said. “You’re a chief inspector for nothing. You cannot detect even the most obvious signal.”

“What signal?”

“When we left, she agreed to stay on-alone with you. She really meant for the night. An absolutely unmistakable signal. She’s crazy about you.”

“Well, I’m not so sure,” Chen said. “Let’s talk about something else. How are things with you.”

“Yes, Ruru wants me to thank you again. You’re our lucky star. Everything is in good shape. All the documents are signed. I’ve already moved in. Our own restaurant. I just need to change its sign. A big neon sign in both Chinese and English.”

“Hold on-Chinese and Russian, right?”

“Who speaks Russian nowadays? But in addition to our food, we will have something else genuinely Russian, I tell you, and you can eat them, too.” Lu chuckled mysteriously. “With your generous loan, we’ll celebrate the grand opening next Monday. A booming success.”

“You’re so sure about it.”

“Well, I have a trump card. Everybody will be amazed.”

“What is it?”

“Come and see for yourself. And eat to your heart’s content.”

“Sure. I won’t miss your Russian cabbage soup for anything, Overseas Chinese.”

“So you’re a gourmet too. See you.”

Other than that, however, they did not have too much in common, Chief Inspector Chen reflected with a smile, putting down the phone. It was in their high-school years that Lu had gotten his nickname. Not just because Lu wore a Western-style jacket during the Cultural Revolution. More because Lu’s father had owned a fur store before 1949, and was thus a capitalist. That had made Lu a “black kid.” In the late sixties, “Overseas Chinese” was by no means a positive term, for it could be used to depict somebody as politically unreliable, connected with the Western world, or associated with an extravagant bourgeois life style. But Lu took an obstinate pride in cultivating his “decadent” image-brewing coffee, baking apple pie, tossing fruit salad, and of course, wearing a Western-style suit at the dinner table. Lu befriended Chen, whose father was a “bourgeois professor,” another “black kid.” Birds of a feather, comforting each other. Lu made a habit of treating Chen whenever he made a successful cooking experiment at home. After graduating from high school, as an educated youth Lu had been sent to the countryside and spent ten years being reformed by the poor and lower-middle-class peasants. He only returned to Shanghai in the early eighties. When Chen, too, moved back from Beijing, they met with the realization that they were different, and yet all those years they had stayed friends, and they came to appreciate each other’s differences while sharing their common delight in gourmet food. Twenty years has passed like a dream. It is a wonder that we are still here, together.

Two lines from Chen Yuyi, a Song dynasty poet, came to Chief Inspector Chen, but he was not sure whether he had omitted one or two words.

A fter a nongourmet lunch in the bureau canteen, Chen went out to buy a collection of poems by Chen Yuyi.

Several new privately run bookstores had just appeared on Fuzhou Road, fairly close to the bureau. Small stores, but with excellent service. Around the corner of Shandong Road, Chen saw a tall apartment building, seemingly the first finished in a series of the new developments. On the other side of the street there was still a rambling cluster of low houses, remnants of the early twenties, showing no signs of change to come in the near future. It was there, in the mixture of the old and the new, that he stepped into a family bookstore. The shop was tiny but impressively stacked with old and new books. He heard a baby’s babble just behind a bamboo-bead curtain at the back. His search for Chen Yuyi was not successful. In the section of classical Chinese literature, there was an impressive array of martial arts novels by Hong Kong and Taiwan authors, but practically nothing else. When he was about to leave, he lighted on a copy of his late father’s collection of Neo-Confucian studies, half hidden under a bikini-clad girlie poster marked “For Sale.” He took the book to the counter.

“You have an eye for books,” the owner said, holding a bowl of rice covered with green cabbage. “It’s a hundred and twenty Yuan.”

“What?” he gasped.

“It was once criticized as a rightist attack against the Party, out of print even in the fifties.”

“Look,” he said, grasping the book. “My father wrote this book, and the original price was less than two Yuan.”

“Really,” the owner studied him for a moment. “All right, fifty Yuan, with the poster free, for you.”

Chen took the book without accepting the additional offer. There was a tiny scar on the poster girl’s bare shoulder, which somehow reminded him of the picture of the dead girl pulled out of the plastic bag. There were one or two pictures of her in the mortuary, even less covered than the bikini-girl. He remembered having seen a scar somewhere on her body.

Or somebody else’s. He was momentarily confused.

He started leafing through his father’s book on his way back to the bureau, a reading habit his father had disapproved of, but the subject of the book made it difficult for him not to.

Back in the office, Chen tried to make himself a cup of Gongfu tea, another gourmet practice he had learned from Overseas Chinese Lu, so that he could read with more enhanced concentration. He had just put a pinch of tea leaves into a tiny cup when the phone started ringing.

It was Party Secretary Li Guohua. Li was not only the number-one Party official in the bureau, but also Chen’s mentor. Li had introduced Chen to the Party, spared no pains showing him the ropes, and advanced him to his present position. Everybody in the bureau knew Li’s legendary talent for political infighting- an almost infallible instinct for picking the winner in inner-Party conflicts all those years. A young officer at the entrance level in the early fifties, Li had stepped his way through the debris of numerous political movements, rising finally to the top of the bureau. So most people saw it as another master stroke that Li had hand-picked Chen as his potential successor, though some called it a risky investment. Superintendent Zhao, for one, had recommended another candidate for the position of chief inspector.

“Is everything okay with your new apartment, Comrade Chief Inspector?”

“Thank you, Comrade Party Secretary Li. Everything’s fine.”

“That’s good. And the work in the office?”

“Detective Yu got a case yesterday. A female body in a canal in Qingpu County. We’re short of men, so I’m wondering if we should take it.”

“Turn over the case to other people. Yours is a special case squad.”

“But it was Detective Yu who went to examine the scene. We would like to handle a case from the beginning.”

“You may have no time for it. There’s some news I want to tell you. You’re going to attend the seminar sponsored by the Central Party Institute in October.”