Red Mandarin Dress (19 page)

Liao nodded without responding immediately, as Party Secretary Li was striding into the office, panting, and declaring in a strident voice, “That’s too much. You have to stop him. Our whole bureau is behind you. Tell me how many people you need, and you will have them.”

Hong, too, came into the office. She took a seat opposite, her hands crossed in her lap. She was outfitted like a “girl,” in a dress with thin straps and high slits. She didn’t use any makeup, her face clear and serene in the morning light.

“I want you to understand that this is voluntary,” Liao started, pushing the newspaper clipping across the desk. “Unlike what you’ve been doing, this is not an assignment. You can say no. Still, you are the one best qualified for the job.”

She took a look at the clipping, pushed the hair off her forehead, and nodded, her black bangs swinging softly over her arched eyebrows.

“If you go to the Joy Gate tonight,” Liao went on, “we’ll be there too. You just let us know the moment he approaches you.”

“How can I tell if it’s him? Those men all play pretty much the same tricks with a girl.”

“I don’t think he’ll try to do anything to you inside the club. He has to get you outside. Once he makes such a move, we’ll stop him. We will be prepared for any possible situation.”

But there was only half a day to get ready, Yu thought. The cops couldn’t really prepare for anything. Perhaps Hong alone had no problem with her role—thanks to her earlier decoy experience.

“Let’s do it,” Li said. “I’ll stay in the office tonight. You keep me informed throughout.”

So they were going to the Joy Gate. Hong took a taxi home to change for the night. Yu and Liao took a minivan with “Heating and Cooling Service” painted on one side, which would serve as a field office. Several cops would soon join them there.

Since the murderer might be connected with people at the Joy Gate, they decided to walk in without revealing their identity and look around like ordinary visitors.

According to a colorful brochure Yu picked up at the entrance, the first three floors of the building were exclusively for dancing, consisting of ballrooms of different sizes and services in terms of “male and female dancing partners,” all at different prices too. In addition to the entrance ticket, there was a so-called fee system that charged by the unit, equivalent to per dance, from 25 to 50 Yuan. That, of course, did not include the tip.

“In addition to those ‘professional dancing partners,’ ” Liao said, “there are also ‘dancing girls,’ who make money not through dancing but mainly through their service afterward.”

It was in the early afternoon, so only the first floor was open for business. The ballroom was lined with tables on both sides and had a stage at the other end. A singer in a florid mandarin dress was performing with a small band. The neon lights produced a nostalgic mirage of money-drunk and gold-charmed dreams. Most of the dancers were middle-aged, and the dancing girls were not too young, either.

“It’s a relatively cheap time period,” Liao said, studying the price list on the brochure.

The people here now would dance until seven. For the evening, the balls would be on the second and the third floors. On the third floor, a group of Russian girls were scheduled to perform onstage that night, so most of the customers would be there enjoying the show. The cops needed only to focus on the second floor. The fourth and fifth floors consisted of hotel rooms.

“Who would want to stay in a hotel room here with the earsplitting music and noise coming up all night?” Yu said.

“Well, it’s in a good location,” Liao said. “Some of the guests may come down to dance, and bring a girl up to their rooms afterward.”

Both the ballroom and the hotel guests had to come in and out the front entrance on Huashan Road. There was a video camera already installed over the front entrance so they didn’t have to worry about putting up one there.

When they moved back into the service van, Hong and several officers joined them. They made plans for what they were going to do that evening.

Hong would go into the second floor ballroom, wearing a pink mandarin dress and carrying a mini cell phone specially programmed. If she touched one button, the cops outside would be on high alert, and another button, the cops outside would rush in. She had practiced
Shaolin
martial arts at the police academy so she should be able to cope with an unexpected situation, at least long enough to contact her colleagues in time. She was also supposed to call them at regular intervals, though she preferred not to, lest people find it suspicious.

Sergeant Qi would go in with her, pretending to be a customer who did not know her. He would stay in the ballroom at all times, in constant contact with the other officers, and with the dual responsibility of covering her and looking out for anything suspicious.

They also had two cops stationed outside the ballroom on the second floor. They would take turns sitting on the sofa close to the entrance, like a customer taking a break there. Their responsibility was to watch for Hong’s exit, either in the company of someone, or alone.

That evening, the third floor was hardly a possibility. It was inconceivable that the murderer would approach a Russian girl who couldn’t speak Chinese, and who was onstage too. At Li’s insistence, however, they also had a plainclothes officer on the third floor.

Finally, they put several more people around the building entrance on Huashan Road. One was disguised as a newspaper man selling the evening newspaper, another as a flower girl, and still another, a photographer soliciting tourists for instant pictures there.

Yu and Liao stayed in the van outside the Joy Gate, each listening with a headset, waiting, like two toy soldiers, motionless, imagining all the disaster scenarios.

The first half hour passed uneventfully. Still too early, Yu guessed, looking out at the Joy Gate. To his surprise, he saw a young mother kneeling on the sidewalk close to the entrance of the dancehall, shivering in her threadbare clothes, her hair disheveled, holding a seven- or eight-month-old baby in her arms, kowtowing on a written statement spread out on the pavement. Beside the mother and her baby was a broken bowl containing several coins. People went in and out of the Joy Gate without looking at them. Not one of them threw down any money.

The city was breaking into two, one for the rich, and one for the poor. A tip for a dance could have kept the woman and her baby fed and sheltered for a day. Yu thought about stepping out with some coins in his hand, but a patroller came over and drove the woman away.

Sergeant Qi kept reporting from inside, “Everything is fine.” Yu could also hear Qi whistling, occasionally, like a pro, with the music rising and falling in the background. “When Are You Coming Again, My Dear,” a melody Yu recognized as one of the most popular ones in the thirties.

Hong contacted them only once, “I’ve had several invitations.”

Outside the van, the lights gradually turned on and more customers went into the Joy Gate in high spirits. In the thirties, Shanghai had been called a “nightless city.”

Around eight forty-five, there came a period of silence. About twenty minutes. Liao checked with Qi, who explained it as a false alarm. Seven or eight minutes ago, Qi lost sight of Hong in the ballroom. He started looking around and saw her sitting with a drink in a recess of the small bar. As he also had to watch the whole scene, he sat himself at a table where he could watch both the bar and the ballroom.

“Don’t worry,” Qi said. “I am keeping everything in sight.”

Then came another short period of silence. Yu lit a cigarette for Liao and then another for himself. Li called them, the third time in the evening. The Party Secretary didn’t try to conceal his uneasiness.

After ten minutes or so, Qi called them, reporting in a panic-stricken voice that the woman in the bar, though in a mandarin dress too, turned out not to be Hong.

Yu dialed her cell phone, but she didn’t pick up. The noise inside could be too loud for her to hear it ring. Liao tried as well, two or three times more. Still no response. Liao then talked to those stationed outside the building. They reported no sign of her exit, either, declaring they would not have missed her in her pink mandarin dress.

Yu contacted the sentry outside the ballroom. They sort of assured him, saying neither of them had seen her exit. So she must still be inside. Yu ordered the two stationed outside the ballroom to move in and join Qi.

In the meantime, Liao hurried to the camera surveillance room, where a cop was with the building security man.

In less than five minutes, however, Yu saw Liao walking out again, shaking his head in confusion. There was no sign of Hong on the videotape recording of the activities at the front entrance.

But the people in the ballroom called too, reporting that they had looked into every corner. Hong seemed to have evaporated.

Something terrible must have happened.

About thirty-five minutes had passed since Qi had first noticed her absence.

Yu ordered an instant blockade of the building entrance. It wasn’t the time for them to worry about the public’s reaction. Liao called for emergency reinforcements before announcing evacuation of the ballroom.

The cops rushed up and checked each and every person leaving the ballroom, but Hong was not among them.

When the ballroom was finally empty, like a deserted battlefield strewn with cups and bottles, cosmetics on the floor, there was still no sign of her.

“Where could she be?” Qi said miserably.

The answer was loud and clear in everyone’s mind.

“How the devil could he have slipped out,” Liao said, “together with Hong?”

“Here,” Qi exclaimed, pointing to a door in a cubicle inside the bar. The door was hardly visible to the people in the ballroom unless moving in behind the bar.

Yu hurried over and pushed open the door, which led out to a corridor. He saw a side elevator in the corridor around the corner.

“He must have taken her out the side door, to the elevator, and then out of the gate—” Liao said in a husky voice, “but no, not yet, or they should have been seen and stopped by our people.”

“That’s impossible—” Yu said, but he was seized by a premonition. “Damn. Check all the hotel rooms.”

The front desk produced a list in no time. There were thirty-two rooms registered for the night. Following the list, the cops started pounding on the doors. At the third door, they got no response from inside. According to the list, it was registered for single occupancy just for the day. The waiter took out the key and opened the door into the room.

It was the cops’ worst fear. They found no one in the room, only Hong’s clothes scattered about on the floor. The pink mandarin dress, bra, and panties. In a corner, the high-heeled shoes anchored the ominous silence of the room.

She must have been abducted into the room, where the murderer stripped her like the others, put the red mandarin dress on her, and carried her out.

Again they reviewed the videotape. This time, they noticed something they had seen, but not suspected earlier. A man in a hotel uniform helped another one walking out in a hurry. Both of them were in identical hotel uniforms and hats. The man looked to be in his mid-thirties or early forties. With his hat pulled low, plus a pair of amber-colored glasses, the video didn’t catch a clear shot of his face. The other one appeared to be female, with a wisp of black hair escaping the hat, perhaps sick, leaning heavily on the first one’s shoulder.

The hotel manager hurried over, declaring that the two in the videotape were not hotel employees.

So the murderer had registered with a fake identity, forced Hong into the room, where he changed her clothes and walked her out. Judging from the tape, she was already nearly unconscious. She must have been overcome without the time to alert her colleagues. Once outside the Joy Gate, he moved her into a car parked nearby or hailed a taxi. The plainclothesman stationed outside, however, didn’t remember having seen two hotel people getting into a car.

The neighborhood committees and taxi companies were immediately contacted for information about two people in hotel uniforms, one of them probably unconscious.

Party Secretary Li was swearing on the phones, screaming, striding back and forth like an ant crawling desperately on a hot wok. In spite of his earlier opposition, he ordered citywide surveillance of the families with private garages, for which the police again enlisted help from all the neighborhood committees.

From the time recorded on the tape, it was now only about twenty-five minutes after their exit from the Joy Gate. The cops might still be able to intercept the criminal before he reached his secret den or catch him at the moment when he was entering the garage. They believed that he still had to put the red mandarin dress on her.

The hotel manager called. A waitress reported that a middle-aged man had approached her, asking whether there was a new girl that night, but she could barely give a description of the customer, except that he wore gold-rimmed spectacles with amber-colored lenses. Since he sat at a table, she couldn’t tell his height.

A neighborhood committee cadre also contacted them. Earlier in the evening, in a shabby side street one block north of the Joy Gate, he had seen a white car—a luxurious model, though he could not tell what brand—parked there. It wasn’t common for such a car to park on that street.

But for the cops, all these tips were of little use at the moment.

Time weighed on them, heavier by minute, the more unbearable because they had no information whatsoever, in spite of the fact that the entire city police machine was grinding on.

Finally, around one a.m., a call came from a patrol officer near the Lianyi cemetery in the Hongqiao suburb.

The cemetery had been deserted for years. In a recent security report to the bureau, it had turned into a hot spot for grave robbers, and the district police station sent a patrol there from time to time.