Qiu Xiaolong - Red Mandarin Dress

“I’ll let you in on something too, Mr. Jia. About a month ago, somebody in the city government wanted me to look into the housing development case. I said no. Why? I, too, want to have those corrupt officials punished. However, they have kept updating me about the latest developments. A short while ago, I got a phone call about it in this room. A compromise has been reached in Beijing for the trial here, as you may know through your own channels.”

“A compromise indeed! So you know how dirty all this is.” After a pause Jia resumed, “In this case, not only are a number of high-ranking officials involved, but they are also interlocked in a power struggle at the top. You are no novice with politics, Chief Inspector Chen. If Beijing had really wanted to put an end to the case, I wouldn’t have been allowed to move it to the present stage. So do you think they want to see a dramatic twist at this juncture?”

“Yes, I’ve heard of the power struggle in the Forbidden City,” Chen said.

“Under normal circumstances, an attorney has to strive for the best interests of his clients. Some sort of deal is understandable. If the trial was interfered with, however, anything would be possible. Deal or no deal, the case might end up with all those official connections exposed, all the dirty details uncovered. The dogfight in the Forbidden City could come out too. What a political disaster! It is too much of a responsibility for a cop. You have to think about the consequences, Chief Inspector Chen.”

“I’ve thought about them, Mr. Jia. Whatever the scenario, the killing of innocent people has to be stopped. When people read the story together with the pictures, they will judge.”

“Some journalists are well-informed. I, too, know quite a few of them. When they learn about the politics behind the scene, do you think they will still be so enthusiastic about the story?”

“Let me assure you, Mr. Jia. I have some other pictures that will lock in their enthusiasm, in spite of all the politics.”

“What pictures are you talking about?”

“The pictures taken that fatal afternoon. A neighborhood cop, Comrade Fan, came to the scene. Suspecting foul play, he took pictures-at the foot of the staircase, before the medical people came to throw a blanket over her nude body.”

“You mean a picture of her lying on the ground that afternoon-”

“Yes, pictures of her lying there on the hard ground, cold, naked, as you may have imagined the scene in your mind thousands of times.”

“But that’s impossible-I mean those pictures-Fan never told me about them. No, it’s not true. You are bluffing.”

For the first time Jia didn’t bother to speak like an unrelated outsider, denying his part in the story.

“Let me show you one,” Chen said, taking out a picture. “A small one. I’m having all of them developed and enlarged. A number of pictures.”

It was a close-up of her lying on the ground, without a shred of clothes covering her body, an image Jia hadn’t looked back to see that afternoon, but which must have haunted him all these years.

Grasping the picture in his hand, Jia didn’t question its authenticity.

Again the turtle started floundering frantically in the pot, in a desperate effort to climb out, yet slipping off the slippery glass surface, repeatedly. An absurd, doomed effort.

“It is horrible, isn’t it?” Chen said, raising his chopsticks toward the pot.

Indeed it was, that scene under Jia’s gaze, not to mention the thought of its being examined anew by millions of readers.

Unearthing a buried body was considered the most horrendous act in traditional Chinese culture, but displaying a dead naked body could be far worse. That was why Comrade Fan had withheld the pictures all these years. Still, it was likely Chen’s last card.

“If the reporters were to get hold of them, together with those in the garden taken by the old photographer, and with the pictures at the crime scenes of the red mandarin dress case-”

“Stop, Chen. It’s so despicably low,” Jia struggled to say, his voice hissing, as if coming out of the pot too. “It’s beneath you.”

“To solve this case, nothing is really beneath a cop,” Chen said. “Now, let me say something about ‘despicably low.’ Something despicably low I initially encountered while working on my literature paper, as I’ve told you, about the deconstructive turns in classical love stories. As I’ve discovered, it’s at least partially because of the projection of a despicable male fantasy about women and sex-a fantasy archetypal in the unconscious of Chinese culture, or the collective unconscious, which I call the demonization of women in sexual love. It’s not a moment for literary theories, I know, but I want to say that you were possessed of it.”

He lifted the grass lid from the pot, ladling out the soup into a bowl for Jia, and another bowl for himself.

“When you were locked up in the back room of the neighborhood committee, your mother went to Comrade Fan. She was so worried about you. In desperation, she told him she was willing to do anything for your sake. Comrade Fan understood what she meant, but he declined, saying that Tian alone had the power to release you. To his regret, she took his advice. Not for one moment did Fan doubt that her concern for you was the cause of her being with Tian that afternoon. She did all that for you.

“You might have thought about such a possibility, but you couldn’t bring yourself to accept it. In that dark back room, what sustained you was the unsullied memory of her taking your hand in the garden-‘Mother, Let’s Go There.’ The world had collapsed around you, but she’s still yours, yours alone.

“So upon your return, the scene at home was absolutely appalling, an immaculate goddess shattering into a shameless slut in the arms of your persecutor. An unforgivable betrayal of you in your mind. It pushed you over the edge.

“But you’re wrong. According to my investigation, Tian had gone out of his way to assign himself to the institute. Like others, he probably watched her perform and became smitten with passion. The Cultural Revolution gave him the opportunity. He worked his way into the Mao Team to be close to her, but she tried her best to avoid his company in spite of his power. If she had succumbed to his pressure, he wouldn’t have come to your neighborhood and led the joint investigation. He didn’t get his opportunity until you got into trouble. She loved you more than anything else in the world. More than herself. Even under the circumstances, it was to Fan, not to Tian, that she first turned to for help.

“Now, it was only a couple of days later that you were unexpectedly released. If there was anything going on between them, it must have happened during that short period-for your sake. How desperate and painful it must have been for her to give herself to Tian, you can imagine.”

“But she didn’t have to. Nothing would have happened to-” Jia was unable to finish the sentence.

“Nothing would have happened to you? I doubt it. In those years, you could have been sentenced to death for such a ‘political crime.’ An old man was executed in the People’s Square, I remember, for the crime of carrying a Mao statue on his back by wrapping a rope around its neck. It’s symbolic of hanging Chairman Mao, the revolutionary people ruled. She knew better. She understood that Tian was capable of anything.

“But you kept imagining it from your perspective alone, never hers. The scene of her writhing and wallowing under another man crushed you. You were incapable of thinking rationally. That’s how you finally stumbled on an outlet in the serial killings, an outlet for both love and hate-”

Again he was interrupted by the shrill ringing of the cell phone. This time, it was Detective Yu.