Red Mandarin Dress (29 page)

He thought of the poem by Su Shi, “Swallow Pavilion.”

It was a sad poem. The pavilion was renowned because of Guan Pan-pan, a gifted Tang dynasty poet and courtesan who lived there. Guan fell in love with a poet, and after his death, she shut herself up, receiving no visitor or client for the rest of her life. Many years later, Su Shi, a Song dynasty poet, visited the pavilion and wrote the celebrated poem.

Chen imagined Mei standing in the back garden of the mansion, holding the hand of her little boy, shining like a radiant cloud in her red mandarin dress. . . .

Shivering, he made his way to the food market. Several leaves fell in the fading starlight, dropping to the hard ground with a sound like the falling of the bamboo slips used for divination at an ancient temple, darkly portentous.

There was no one visible in the market yet. Near the entrance, he was surprised to see a long line of baskets—plastic, bamboo, rattan, wood, straw—of all shapes and sizes, stretching to a concrete counter under a sign that read “yellow croaker,” a fish very popular in Shanghai. Those baskets evidently stood for the wives who would soon come here, securing their positions in the line, their eyes still dreamy with their families’ satisfaction on the dinner table.

He wondered whether it could be a scene that he had seen before, and he lit himself a cigarette against the wind.

Bang, bang, bang
. There came a sudden clatter. He was startled by the sight of a night-shift worker cracking a gigantic frozen bar of fish with a huge hammer. Aware of Chen’s approaching footsteps, the night worker turned around, appearing headless against the upturned collar of his cotton-padded imitation army overcoat. It was a ghastly image in the early morning.

Chen’s nerves were still bad.

Soon, however, several middle-aged women entered the market, heading to the line to replace the baskets and bricks that marked their place. The market began to come alive.

Then a bell sounded, possibly an indication that the market was open for business, and peddlers started appearing everywhere, all at once. Some put their products on the ground, and some moved in behind stalls rented from the state-run market. It was more and more difficult to draw the line between the socialist and capitalist.

He saw an old man enter the market wearing a red armband.

TWENTY-SIX

THE OLD MAN WEARING
the red armband was examining vegetables here, checking fish there, yet was carrying no basket. He must be Fan.

Not too long ago, Chen had witnessed a similar scene, that of Old Hunter patrolling another market. Fan’s function here was different, however, as “private peddlers” had become the norm in “China’s brand of socialism.” In an age of “everybody looking forward to money,” those peddlers were problematic because of their unbridled deceptive practices. It was no longer simply a matter of putting ice into fish or injecting water into chickens but of painting their product, selling spoiled meat, hawking poisonous fungus. So Fan’s responsibility consisted mainly of controlling those fakes, which were sometimes fatal.

Chen walked up to the old man, who was questioning a shrimp peddler.

“You must be Uncle Fan.”

“Yes. Who are you?”

“Can I talk to you—alone?” Chen handed over his business card. “It’s important.”

“Sure,” Fan said, turning to the peddler. “Next time, I won’t let you get away so easily.”

“Let’s have a pot of tea there,” Chen said, pointing to a small eatery behind the “yellow croaker” counter. “We can sit and talk.”

“They don’t serve tea, but I’ll ask them to make a pot for us,” Fan said. “Call me Comrade Fan. It’s a form of address no longer popular, but I’ve just gotten used to it. It reminds me of the years of the socialist revolution, when everyone was equal and working toward the same goal.”

“You are right, Comrade Fan,” Chen said, reminded that
comrade
was becoming a euphemism for “homosexual” among the young and fashionable in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He wondered whether Fan knew anything about the changing meaning. Linguistic evolution, like that of
thirsty illness
, was so very reflective of ideological change.

There was a couplet on both sides of the eatery door, which read vertically, “Breakfast, lunch, dinner—the same. Last year, this year, next year—like that.” Above the couplet was a horizontal comment, “True in your mouth.”

The taxi money left him by the nightclub manager would probably be enough, Chen calculated, for breakfast here. A waiter recommended the house special: Xi’an
mo
in mutton soup.
Mo
was a hard, baked cake, which people could break into small or large pieces as they preferred before having it boiled in the mutton soup. The waiter brought them a pot of hot tea for free.

“Comrade Fan, let me toast you with tea, though tea is not enough to show my respect.”

“People don’t burn incense to the Three Treasures Temple without a reason. You are a busy man, Chief Inspector Chen. I don’t think you came to an old retired man like me for nothing.”

“Yes, I have some questions for you. According to the neighborhood committee here, you alone can help me.”

“Really! Please tell me how.”

“We’re engaged in a homicide investigation. I would like to ask you some questions about Mei, who used to live here. She was once the mistress of the Ming Mansion. At that time, you were the neighborhood cop.”

“Mei—yes, but she died such a long time ago. How could she be involved in your investigation?”

“At the moment, all I can say is that information about her may really help our work.”

“Well, I came here as a neighborhood cop two or three years before the Cultural Revolution. How old were you then? Still in elementary school, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” Chen nodded, raising his cup.

“The job of a neighborhood cop may be nothing in the nineties,” Fan said, breaking the
mo
into smaller bits, as if they were parts of his memory, “but in the early sixties, with Chairman Mao’s call for class struggle resounding all over the country, the job carried a lot of responsibilities. Everyone could be a class enemy secretly bent on sabotaging our socialist society—especially so in this neighborhood. A considerable number of residents were black in their class status. After 1949, some of the families were driven out because of their connection to the Nationalists, and working-class families moved in. Still, there were families with ties both to the old and new regimes, so they kept their mansions here. Like the Mings.”

“What about the Mings?”

“They kept theirs because the old man, an influential investment banker, had denounced Chiang Kai-shek in the late forties. So the Communists declared him to be a ‘patriotic democratic personage,’ leaving his fortune untouched. His son was a teacher at the Shanghai Music Institute who married Mei, a violinist who also taught there. They had a son, Xiaozheng. Inside the mansion, they lived in affluence, for which their working-class neighbors grumbled a lot. As a neighborhood cop, I had to pay extra attention to them.

“Things changed dramatically with the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. The old man died of a heart attack, which actually spared him all the humiliations. But his family was not so fortunate. Mei’s husband was put into isolation interrogation as a British secret agent for the crime of having listened to the BBC. He hung himself.

“Then their house fell too. People came and took over rooms as their own. The Mings—now only Mei and her son—were pushed out into an attic room above the garage, originally the servants’ quarters.”

“No one did anything about it?” Chen said, but he immediately realized the ridiculousness of his question. His family, too, had been driven out of their three-bedroom apartment at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.

“Don’t you remember a popular quote from Chairman Mao? ‘There are thousands of arguments for revolution, but the principal one is: it is justified to rise in rebellion.’ It was considered a revolutionary activity to take away property from the rich.”

“Yes, I remember. Red Guards came to my family too. Sorry for the interruption, Comrade Fan. Please go on.”

“In the third year of the Cultural Revolution, there appeared on their garden wall a counterrevolutionary slogan—or something that resembled one, consisting of two short phrases. One was ‘Down With,’ and the other was ‘Chairman Mao.’ They were possibly put there by two kids, at different times. They just happened to appear close together on the wall. But something like that was enough to turn the people in the mansion into possible suspects. Because of the class struggle, focus naturally fell on the Ming family, the only one of black class status. And especially on the boy. No one could prove he did it, but no one could prove that he didn’t do it, either.

“So a joint investigation group was formed, with members from the neighborhood committee and from the Mao Team at Mei’s institute. The boy was locked up in the back room of the neighborhood committee—alone, in so-called isolation interrogation, which was known to be effective in breaking the resistance of a class enemy. In fact, Mei’s husband had committed suicide after a week in isolation interrogation.

“She was terrified that the son would follow in the footsteps of the father. For days she was begging around like a headless fly. She even came to me. I was helpless. In those years, the local district police station was practically taken over by those rebels. So what could a neighborhood cop do?

“Then one early afternoon the boy was suddenly released. No real evidence or witness was found against him, it was said. Besides, he had caught a high fever in the back room, and the guard on duty there didn’t want to keep him. So he went straight home, but upon pushing open the door, it looked as if he had seen a ghost. He turned around, fleeing and screaming. His mother rushed out after him—stark naked. She stumbled on the stairs and fell all the way down.

“He might or might not have heard her fall, but he didn’t go back. He kept running like mad. Out of the house, along the street, all the way back to that back-room office—”

“That’s strange,” Chen said. “Did you talk to her neighbors about what happened that afternoon?”

“I did, to several of them,” Fan said. “Particularly to Tofu Zhang, a neighbor in the building, who happened to be home that afternoon. He was still sleeping after working the night shift, when he heard the eerie sound. So he jumped out of bed and saw her running out naked, calling after her son. He didn’t see the boy and guessed that she must have had a nightmare. But then she fell, tumbling, hitting her head against the hard ground. He thought about going out to help, but he hesitated. He was just married, and his jealous wife could have reacted like a tigress to the sight of Zhang together with a naked woman. He thought better of it and closed the door.

“No one came to her side until a couple of hours later. She died that day without regaining consciousness.

“The boy was sick for a week, delirious with a high fever. Some sympathetic neighbors managed to put him in a hospital. When he recovered, he found himself back in the empty attic room, facing his mother’s picture in a black frame. It was hard for him to understand what had happened, but he understood it was useless for him to ask.”

“Did the neighborhood or local police station try to look into the circumstances of her death?” Chen interrupted again.

“No, it was nothing for a woman of her black family background to die those days. An accident, the neighborhood committee concluded. I tried to talk to the boy, but he wouldn’t say anything.”

Comrade Fan sighed, breaking the last piece of
mo
, putting them all back into the bowl, and rubbing his hands.

It was a more detailed account about the circumstances of her death, but it didn’t provide anything really new or substantial.

Chen had a feeling that Fan had something left unsaid. An old, experienced cop like Fan, however, knew what he should and shouldn’t say, and there was little Chen could do about it.

Was it possible that Fan, too, had been a secret admirer? Chen made no immediate comment, finishing his part of the
mo
-breaking. The waiter took their two bowls to the kitchen. An old woman passed by their table, waving a string of beads toward them.

“I’ve heard that she was a stunner in her day,” Chen said. “Did she have some admirer or lover?”

“It’s an interesting question,” Fan said. “But in those days, it was unimaginable for a woman of her black family background to have a secret lover. Even husbands and wives were divorced because of political considerations. ‘A couple are like two birds; when in a disaster, one flies to the east, one to the west.’ ”

“It’s a quote from the
Dream of the Red Chamber
,” Chen said. “You have read a lot.”

“Well, what can a retired old cop do? I read books while babysitting my grandson.”

“Now can you tell me something about her son, Comrade Fan?”

“He moved out of the neighborhood to stay with a relative. After the Cultural Revolution, he studied at a college and got a good job, I heard. That’s about all I know.”

Chen hesitated to talk about the possibility he had been contemplating. He had nothing to support such a wild scenario. At least he should check some documents first.

“What a tragic story,” he said. “Sometimes you can hardly believe that these things happened during the Cultural Revolution.”