Red Mandarin Dress (25 page)

“Did he tell you her name?”

“He must have, but I don’t remember it now.”

“Do you know anything about the process of setting up the photo? For instance, the choice of the mandarin dress?”

“Well, he raved about an oriental beauty, and about the mandarin dress bringing out the best in her, but she must have had the dress at home. He couldn’t have afforded it. Sorry, I don’t know whose idea it was to choose the dress.”

“Where was the picture taken?”

“She lived in a mansion. So it was probably taken in its back garden. He spent a whole day there, using up five or six rolls of film, and then spent a week in the darkroom, almost like a mole. He was so carried away that he brought all the pictures back home one night, asking me to choose one for him. For the competition.”

“You chose the right one for him.”

“But after it won the award, he began to be worried. Initially, he didn’t want to tell me why. I learned from newspaper clippings hidden in a drawer that the picture had become controversial. Some people were talking about the ‘political message’ in it.”

“Yes, everything could be given political interpretations.”

“And during the Cultural Revolution, he was mass-criticized for the picture. Chairman Mao said that some attack the Party through novels, so the Red Guards claimed that Kong had attacked the Party through the picture. Like other ‘monsters,’ he had to stand with a blackboard hung around his neck, and his name was crossed out on the blackboard.”

“So many people suffered. My father, too, stood bent with such a blackboard.”

“What’s more, some others compelled him to reveal the identity of the woman in the picture, and that upset him enormously.”

“Who put the pressure on him?” he said. “Did he say anything?”

“An organization of Worker Rebels, I think. It was against his professional ethic but the pressure proved too much, and he finally gave up, thinking it was no crime for someone to pose for a picture. After all, there was nothing nude or obscene in it.”

“Did he know anything about what happened to her?”

“He didn’t, not at first. It was only a year or so later that he heard about her death. It had nothing to do with him. So many people died in those days. And perhaps it was not too surprising for someone with a family background like hers, and herself a ‘bourgeois artist.’ Still, the uncertainty weighed like a rock on his mind.”

“He didn’t have to be so hard on himself. People could have learned her identity anyway,” Chen said, thinking that the old photographer could have cared for her. Seeing no point in bringing up the possibility, he changed the subject. “Now, he used five or six rolls for this picture, you have mentioned. Did he keep those other pictures?”

“Yes, he kept them at a risk to himself, hiding them away even from me. Along with a notebook. ‘The portfolio of the red mandarin dress,’ he called it. After his death, I discovered them by chance. I didn’t have the heart to get rid of them—they must have been so special to him.”

Out of the cabinet drawer, she produced a large envelope containing a notebook and a bunch of pictures in a smaller envelope.

“Here they are, Chief Inspector Chen.”

“Thank you so much, Auntie Kong,” he said, rising. “I’ll return them to you after looking through them.”

“Don’t worry. I have no use for them.” She added, “But don’t forget your pledge in the temple.”

“No, I won’t.”

It was a random harvest. He started reading the notebook in a taxi outside Auntie Kong’s building. It contained plenty of working notes. Kong had discovered the model at a concert, spellbound by “her sublime beauty at the soul-stirring climax of the music.” Afterward, a Young Pioneer rushed onstage, holding a bouquet of flowers for her. The boy turned out to be her son, and she hugged him affectionately onstage. For a week after the concert, he spared no effort in persuading her to pose for him. It was a tough job, for she was interested neither in money nor in publicity. He finally succeeded in bringing her around by promising to photograph her together with her son. The picture was taken in the back garden of their mansion.

Chen skipped through the technical notes about light and angles to a page that contained the work address of the model—the Shanghai Music Institute—with an office telephone number beneath it. For some reason, Kong mentioned her name only once in the notebook. Mei.

Then he started examining the pictures. There were a considerable number of them, and like the old photographer, he was “spellbound.”

“Sorry, I’ve just changed my mind,” he said to the taxi driver, looking up. “Please take me to the Shanghai Music Institute.”

TWENTY-THREE

HIS VISIT TO THE
institute didn’t begin on a promising note.

Comrade Zhao Qiguang, the current Party Secretary of the institute, showed all respect to Chen but could be of little help. Zhao had to check a registry before he was able to tell Chen anything about Mei. According to him, Mei and her husband Ming had both worked at the institute. During the Cultural Revolution, Ming committed suicide, and she died in an accident. Zhao did not know anything about the existence of the picture.

“I came to the institute five or six years ago,” Zhao said, by way of explanation. “People are not so eager to talk about the Cultural Revolution.”

“Yes, the government wants people to look ahead, not backward.”

“You should try to talk to some old people here. They may know something, or they may know somebody who knows,” Zhao said, scribbling several names on a piece of paper. “Good luck.”

But the people who knew Mei had either retired or passed away. After bumping around for quite a while, he stumbled upon Professor Liu Zhengquan of the Instrument Department.

“That’s Mei!” Liu said, studying the picture. “But I’ve never seen the picture before.”

“Can you tell me something about her?”

“The flower of the school, fallen too early to the dust.”

“How did she die?”

“I don’t really remember. She was in her midthirties then. Her son was about ten years old. What a tragedy!”

“What happened to her son?”

“I don’t know.” Liu added, “We were not in the same department. You need to talk to somebody else.”

“Can you recommend someone to me?”

“Well, talk to Xiang Zilong. He’s retired now and lives in Minghang district. Here’s his address. He still keeps a picture of Mei in his wallet, I believe.”

It was a hint about Xiang having been an admirer of Mei, a romantic who still carried a picture of her so many years later.

Chen thanked Liu, looked at his watch, and left for Minghang immediately. There was no time for him to lose.

Minghang had once been an industrial area, quite a distance from the center of the city. Fortunately, there was now a subway that stopped there. He took a taxi and hurried to the subway, and after twenty minutes, he walked out of the terminal at the other end and changed into another taxi.

Shanghai had been expanding rapidly. Minghang, too, represented a scene of numerous new apartment buildings shining and shimmering in the afternoon sunlight. It took the taxi driver quite a while to find Xiang’s building.

Chen climbed up the concrete staircase and knocked at an imitation oak door on the second floor. The door opened cautiously. Chen handed over his business card to a tall, gaunt man in a cotton-padded robe and felt slippers, who examined the card with surprise on his deep-lined face.

“Yes, I am Xiang. So you are a member of Chinese Writers Association?”

The card was his from the Chinese Writers Association, Chen realized. An inexplicable slip.

“Oh, I have mixed my cards. I am Chen Cao, of the Shanghai Police Bureau, and I am also a member of the association.”

“I may have heard of you, Chief Inspector Chen,” Xiang said. “I don’t know what wind has brought you over here today, but come on in, as a poet or as a police officer.”

Xiang moved to pour Chen a cup of tea from a thermos bottle and added some water into his own cup. Xiang walked with a slight suggestion of a limp, Chen observed.

“You sprained your ankle, Professor Xiang?”

“No. Infantile paralysis at the age of three.”

“Sorry for coming to see you without notice. It’s because of an important case. I have to ask you some questions,” Chen said, seating himself at a plastic folding chair by an apparently custom-made, extraordinary long desk, which was the main feature in a living room lined with bookshelves. “Questions about Mei. She was a colleague of yours.”

“Question about Mei? She was indeed a colleague of mine, but so many years ago. Why?”

“The case didn’t—and doesn’t—involve her, but the information about her may throw some light on our investigation. Whatever you say will be confidential.”

“You aren’t going to write about her, are you?”

“Why do you ask?”

“A couple of years ago, someone approached me for information about her. I refused to tell him anything.”

“Who was he?” Chen said. “Do you remember his name?”

“I forget his name, but I don’t think he showed his ID to me. He said he was a writer. Anybody could have claimed to be such.”

“Can you give me a detailed description of this man?”

“In his early or midthirties. Well-mannered, but rather elusive in his speech. That’s about all I remember.” Xing took a sip of his tea. “With this city lost in collective nostalgia, stories about once illustrious families are popular, like
The Ill-Fated Beauty of Shanghai.
Why should I let anyone exploit her memory?”

“You did the right thing, Professor Xiang. It would be horrible for a so-called writer to profit from her suffering.”

“No, no one can drag her memory through the humiliating mire again.”

There was a slight tremor in Xiang’s voice. For an admirer of her, there was nothing too surprising about his reaction. But “humiliating mire” indicated he knew something.

“I give you my word, Professor Xiang. I’m not here for the sake of a story.”

“You have mentioned a case. . . .” Xiang sounded uncertain.

“At this moment, I can’t go into details. Suffice it to say that several people have died, and that more will be killed if the murderer is not stopped.” Chen took out the magazine together with the other pictures. “You may have seen this magazine.”

“Oh, these other pictures too,” Xiang said, beginning to examine them. His face pale and earnest, he rose and strode to one of the bookshelves and took out a copy of
China Photography.
“I have kept it all these years.”

There was a bookmark with a red tassel sticking out of the magazine, marking the page of the picture. The bookmark was a new one, representing the Oriental Pearl, a high-rise landmark east of the river built in the nineties.

“It was such a long time ago,” Chen said. “There must be a story about it.”

“Yes, a long story. How old were you at the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution?”

“Still in elementary school.”

“Then you have to know something about the background.”

“Of course. But please tell me from the very beginning, Professor Xiang.”

“For me, it started in the early sixties. I was then just assigned to the music institute, where Mei had already worked for about two years. So beautiful, and talented too, she was the queen there. Now don’t get me wrong, Chief Inspector Chen. For me, she was an inspiration more than anything else. I was frustrated at being unable to practice the classics—nothing was permitted but two or three revolutionary songs. But for her presence, which lit up the whole rehearsal room, I would have given up.”

“As you have mentioned,” Chen said, “she was the queen. There must have been a lot of people that admired her—and approached her, too. Have you heard or known about any such stories?”

“What do you mean?” Xiang said, literally glaring at him.

“For the investigation, I have to ask all kinds of questions. It doesn’t mean anything disrespectful to her, Professor Xiang.”

“No, I have not heard any story. A woman of her family background had to live with her tail tucked in, so to speak. Any peach-colored gossip could be disastrous. It was then a Communist-Puritan period—you were perhaps too young to understand. There was not a single romantic love song in the whole country.”

“Chairman Mao wanted people to devote themselves to the socialist revolution. No room for romantic love—” Chen broke off, unexpectedly reminded of something similar in his paper, except that there it was Confucianism. “Her husband also worked at the institute, didn’t he?”

“Her husband, Ming Deren, taught there too. Nothing so special about him. Their marriage had been—at least partially, I think—an arranged one. Before 1949, his father was a successful investment banker, and hers was only a struggling attorney. The Ming Mansion was one of the most extravagant in the city.”

“Yes, I’ve heard of the mansion. Did they have any problems in their marriage?” Chen wondered why Xiang brought up the topic of arranged marriage.

“Not that I know of, but people thought he was no match for her.”

“I see,” Chen said, realizing that for Xiang, no one could have been worthy of her. “Now, how did you come to know about the picture? She must have told you or shown you the magazine.”

“No. We shared an office, and I happened to overhear her phone conversation with the photographer. So I bought a copy of the magazine.”

“About the mandarin dress in the picture—had you seen her wearing it?”

“No, I didn’t. Neither before nor after the picture. She had several mandarin dresses, which she occasionally wore for performances, but not the one in the picture.”

“So she got into trouble because of the picture?”

“I don’t know. Shortly afterward, the Cultural Revolution broke out. Her father-in-law passed away and her husband committed suicide, which was condemned as a serious crime against the Party. She was turned into a ‘black family member of a current counterrevolutionary’ and driven out of the mansion into the attic above the garage. The mansion was taken over by a dozen ‘red families.’ She suffered the worst humiliating persecution.”