Qiu Xiaolong - When Red is Black

In spite of his failure to see any relevance to the murder case, Chen did not put the manuscript down. He could see why Yin had cherished the manuscript. It contained wonderful love poems, as Yin had said in the Afterword, which also evoked the most memorable days of their lives. In the cadre school, they would have pored over those poems together, in English and in Chinese, holding hands. On such a night, they might have felt as if the poem of Su Dongpo had been written for them, and that they themselves were united forever through its lines:

The Afterword was written in a clever way. Yin did not try to say too much, but merely presented the scenes in which she and Yang had read and discussed those poems at the cadre school. She ended, however, with a scene in which she stood alone, reading a poem written by Li Yu, which had once been recited to her by Yang, deep in the night:

The manuscript had enormous sentimental value. Chen touched it gently. No wonder Yin had kept it in a bank safety deposit box.

Now he stood up and moved to the window, looking out at the street waking under his gaze. Across the road, he saw a Young Pioneer hurrying out the door, tying his red scarf with one hand, holding a fried rice cake in the other, a heavy satchel on his back-it appeared, for a fleeting moment, as if he was Chen himself, hurrying to school, thirty years ago. The chief inspector collected himself and turned back to the desk littered with dictionaries and papers.

Now he had something else for White Cloud to do in the Shanghai Library. Some of the poems translated by Yang might have appeared in English study journals, although Chen was not sure when that might have occurred-perhaps before the Anti-Rightist movement in the mid-fifties. If so, some annotation there might throw light on the mysterious abbreviations in the manuscript. They might not turn out to be important or relevant, but he was curious. In addition, the library must have some catalogs from Chinese and foreign publishers. He could try to contact some of them, to see whether they might be interested in publishing the collection. There was no hurry, but it gave him comfort to think that he was attempting to do something for the dead.

In that way, Chen could also keep White Cloud busy, and away from his room. Then he felt he would be able to settle down to working on his translation. And he did just that, productively, for a couple of hours, before she arrived for the day. The laptop helped.

When sunlight came streaming through the window, and White Cloud entered the room, carrying a paper bag of fried mini-buns, he had already finished several pages. He explained her new assignment: To find poems in magazines translated by Yang, and to identify publishers that might be interested in publishing a collection of such poems. Also, he had an elusive feeling this might uncover something else, even though he did not know what. It was a long shot. He himself would probably not go to the library on the basis of that sort of hunch, but having White Cloud available made it possible.

“I have to assist Detective Yu, as you know, anyway I can,” Chen explained to her, “but I do not have time to do so and to work on the translation for Mr. Gu too. So you are really helping a lot.”

“A little secretary is supposed to do whatever her boss wants her to,” she said with a sly smile. “Anything. You don’t have to explain. Mr. Gu has emphasized it many times. But what about your lunch?”

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “It may take you several hours. Take your time at the library.”

Surprisingly, he received no phone calls that morning. The translation progressed smoothly. A sparrow twittered outside his window in the cold wind despite the barrenness of the twigs. He forgot about his lunch, for he was transported back into the glitter and glamour of the city in the thirties. Like visitors to the New World would someday be, he was “drunk with money, dazzled with gold.”

When the phone finally rang, waking him from the scene of a French girl dancing a modern dance, her bare feet flashing like snow on a red-carpeted stage inside a postmodern shikumen house, he felt disoriented as he abruptly returned to reality. The caller was Yu. He had not made much progress in the investigation, he reported. Chen was not surprised. Not that he did not have a high opinion of Yu’s ability. Investigations took time.

“I don’t know if the interviews will lead to anything,” Yu said.

“We may at least learn something more about Yin.”

“That’s another thing. Her neighbors seem to have known very little about her. She was a writer, she had published a book about the Cultural Revolution. That’s about it. Otherwise, she was an outsider in the building.”

“What about her colleagues?”

“I’ve talked to her department head. I got nothing really informative from him. As for the file provided by her school authorities, it contains little except a bunch of official clichés.”

“Anybody would be nervous discussing a dissident writer,” Chen said. “The less said, the better. It’s understandable.”

“But to substantiate the insider-murderer theory, and to rule out people who knew her at the college, I would have liked to have interviewed some of her colleagues.”

“My guess is that they will not say much either, but it’s too early to exclude any possibilities.”

At the end of the conversation, the clock said one thirty.

But for the translation project, Chen thought as he made a cup of soybean milk for himself, it might have been a good idea for him to visit some of the scholars who had known Yin or Yang. Instead, he picked up the phone and dialed Professor Zhou Longxiang, who had worked at the same college as Yin. Chen had once consulted Zhou about classical Chinese poetry, and had since kept in touch.

Professor Zhou, apparently lonesome after his retirement, was glad of Chen’s call. He launched into a lecture about the death of poetry for fifteen minutes before Chen was able to bring the conversation to the subject of Yin. At once Zhou’s voice showed irritation. “She was a shameless opportunist, that Yin Lige. I should not speak ill of the dead, I know, but when she was a Red Guard, she showed no mercy at all toward others.”

“Perhaps she was too young then.”

“That’s no excuse. What a disaster of a woman! She brought nothing but trouble to people close to her. Including Yang, who was a fine scholar.”

“That’s a very interesting point, Professor Zhou,” Chen said. “As you are not superstitious, please enlighten me.”

“It’s simple. But for the affair with her, he would not have been subject of criticism meetings at the cadre school,” Zhou said. “Karma. By her actions during the Cultural Revolution, she brought her troubles upon herself.”