Qiu Xiaolong - When Red is Black

“What did he tell you about the ticket?”

“That’s more or less what he said.”

“Can I keep the ticket?”

“Sure.” Old Liang looked up at him in surprise. “When you think about it, there’s something else suspicious about him. As a residence cop, I should have noticed it earlier. About half a year ago, Wan started going out early in the morning-allegedly for tai chi exercise on the Bund. Yin also went out for tai chi in the morning. But there’s one marked difference. She practiced not only in the park, but in the lane too, especially on rainy days. Wan has never practiced here. That’s not like a tai chi devotee. No, I don’t think he told us the truth.”

“Well, Wan may not be such a wholehearted exerciser. He only turned to tai chi, he told me, because the state-run company he had worked for can no longer cover its retirees’ medical insurance.”

“That old die-hard still lives in the days of the Mao Zedong Thought Team, and he grumbles all the time. That’s why he committed the murder. Tai chi or whatever is just an excuse. He followed her around, to become familiar with her routine. Then he acted.”

“Did he have to follow her around for months in order to kill her at home early that morning?”

“Is it so impossible?” Old Liang said, becoming impatient with these questions from Detective Yu.

“Let me make a phone call to Dr. Xia first, Old Liang, to ask about the fingerprints.”

“Whatever you want, Comrade Detective Yu.”

Afterward, alone in the office, Detective Yu admitted to himself that it was not absolutely impossible.

Wan’s entire life-or most of it-had been the product of a totally different society. In the sixties and seventies, Chinese workers had been praised to the skies as the masters of society, the makers of history. People like Wan committed themselves unreservedly to Mao’s revolution, believing in their contribution to the greatest social system in human history, which, in turn, promised them a lot too, including retirement benefits: a generous pension, full medical coverage, and the political honor of being retired masters basking in the warm sunlight of communist China. Now these retired workers found themselves, helplessly, at the bottom of the heap. The praise for them as the “leading class” was irrelevant. They had a hard time making the ends meet. What was worse, state-run companies, going downhill, could keep few of their earlier promises.

And things must have been even more unbearable for Wan, who had once been such a prestigious Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Worker Team Member.

Yu phoned Dr. Xia, asking him to recheck the fingerprints, focusing only on Wan’s.

He made a second phone call to the Shanghai railway station. He thought he remembered that there were regulations regarding sleeping-car tickets. The information he received confirmed his suspicion. According to the railway station, tickets to Shenzhen were very hot, especially sleeping-car tickets. New entrepreneurs flocked to the special economic zone to seek their fortunes. Normally, tickets were sold out on the first day of the fourteen-day advance purchase period. The date on Wan’s ticket was February 18, which meant Wan could not possibly have obtained it after February 7 unless he had paid a ticket scalper a much higher price for it.

Yu wanted to discuss this with Old Liang, but Liang did not return to the neighborhood committee office for lunch.

Shortly afterward, Party Secretary Li called. The Party boss sounded very pleased with the latest development, for it meant the conclusion of Yin’s case as a simple homicide, with no suspicion falling on the government.

“Great job, Comrade Detective Yu,” Li repeated over the phone.

“This conclusion is too dramatic, too sudden, Party Secretary Li.”

“I don’t find it surprising,” Li said. “You kept the pressure on, and Wan cracked. With enough fire burning under the pot, the pig’s head will be cooked to your satisfaction. You need not doubt that Wan killed Yin.”

“But we put pressure on Cai, not on Wan.”

“Wan stepped forward,” Li said slowly, “because he couldn’t endure the thought of an innocent man being punished in his stead.”

“There are holes in Wan’s statement, Party Secretary Li. We cannot depend on a so-called confession like this,” Yu said. “At least, I need to get some questions answered first.”

“We cannot afford to wait too much longer, Comrade Detective Yu. A press conference will be held early next week, Monday or Tuesday, no later than that. It’s time to end all the irresponsible speculation surrounding Yin’s death.”

Chen finished the first draft of his translation of the New World proposal into English. He was amazed at his own speed, though the job was still far from complete: he would have to spend more time polishing and revising before it would be presentable.

It proved to be a good day for the murder investigation, too. Though it came as a surprise that Wan had turned himself in, it looked like a plausible solution as well as an acceptable one.

Yu was still so full of misgivings that Chen did not even try to share with him some half-formed ideas of his own. After all, a lot of things in the process of writing, or leading to publication, seemingly inexplicable to others, could turn out to be significant, if only to the writer himself.

In the late eighties, when Chen, a published poet with some renown in literary circles, had suddenly started translating mysteries, no one knew why. But it was because of a Beijing roast duck-at least partially because of it, he recalled. That duck turned out to cost more than he had in his pocket at the end of a wonderful dinner, in the company of a friend who liked his poetry so much that she snatched the bill with her slender fingers. It was a humiliating lesson about money-which, as he happened to discover through that friend, came much quicker from mystery translations than from poetry. But a few years later, when another friend of his published an interview about him in Wenhui Daily, she claimed that he did the translations to “enlarge the horizon of his professional expertise.”

So those mysterious abbreviations in the margins of Yang’s manuscript could have referred to anything; “ch” might stand for a chicken, for all Chen knew. The uneven quality of Yin’s writing noticed by Peiqin could be just another of the mysteries of a creative mind. Chen had not written novels, but he guessed that a novelist might not be able to keep up the same intensity of creativity in a long work as in a short poem. He could never explain how he was capable of producing a horribly poor poem after penning a fairly decent one.

So all these hypotheses, including his own theory regarding the murderer’s hiding for fear of recognition, were nothing but hypotheses, which did not weigh much, and were eventually irrelevant, if Wan had committed the murder as he had confessed. His motive might not make sense to someone else; it was enough if it had made sense to him.

The bottom line was, as Chen had realized from the beginning, there are things a man can do, and things a man cannot do. That was also applicable to being a cop, in the present case.

He considered giving himself a break that evening, in the company of White Cloud. It might be an opportunity to find out more about Gu, and about the New World project.

He suggested a dinner at a karaoke club, a different one than the Dynasty as a gesture of his sincerity-he had told her that he liked her singing. White Cloud would not decline such an invitation, he hoped.

She did not, but she suggested that they go to a high-class bar, the Golden Time Rolling Backward.