Red Mandarin Dress (34 page)

“Anything you want, buddy.”

“Do you know the owner of the Old Mansion on Henshan Road?”

“Yes, Big Beard Fang. I know him.”

“Reserve a private room there for me tonight. Make sure that it is one that looks out into the back garden. I have to meet someone there. It’s important. A matter of life and death.” Chen added, “It will probably be a long talk. I’ll pay for everything, overtime and any extra services.”

“No problem. If necessary, the restaurant will stay open all night. I’ll take care of it.”

“Thank you so much. I know I can count on you, Overseas Chinese Lu.”

“It is a matter of life and death after all—as you said.”

“Also, as a gourmet chef, think of some cruel, slow-tormenting dishes.”

“Wow—that sounds more and more exciting. You have the best man for the job, Chief. I’ll come up with a banquet of them. Really cruel and cool. I’ll be there too.”

“I’ll see you at the restaurant, then.”

“Cruel dishes?” Yu said as Chen turned toward him, wiping his forehead with a towel.

“I was unnerved by a cruel course at a banquet recently. Tonight his nerves need to be rattled as well.”

“You were sick?” Yu said, confused again.

“I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.” Chen said, as if in afterthought, “Peiqin talked to an eating girl last week.”

“Yes, I included a cassette tape of it in one of the packages I sent to you.”

“I listened to it. She was so clever, making the eating girl tell a story. That gave me the idea of telling a story to Jia.”

Yu decided to ask no more questions, looking at the clock on the wall. The chief inspector could be annoyingly mysterious. So far he hadn’t said a single word about his disappearance. But Yu had to hurry over to Jia’s office and be waiting outside. Yu couldn’t afford to let him out of sight from now on, not for one minute.

As Yu picked up his jacket and got ready to leave, he got another surprise. There was another knock on the door, and this time it was White Cloud who came in.

“What can I do for you, Chief?” she said to Chen while flashing a smile at Yu.

“Do you still have the red mandarin dress?” Chen said. “The one we chose at the Old City God’s Market.”

“Of course. You bought it for me.”

“Go to the Old Mansion Restaurant this evening and carry the dress with you. Do you know where it is?”

“Yes. On Henshan Road.”

“Good. Can you stay there for the entire evening—or perhaps for all night?”

“Sure, if you want me to—as your little secretary or anything else.” She complied without asking questions, like a “little secretary.”

“No, for a quite different role. I’ll explain it to you there.”

“When do you expect me there?”

“Around five. Oh, you’ll have to go home for your dress first. Sorry, I just thought of the dress part. Overseas Chinese Lu will be there too.”

“Great. So you are like a general in ancient times, making arrangements for a crucial battle in a bathhouse,” she commented, also like a “little secretary,” before she left.

What herbal pills were in Chen’s medical gourd?

“I’ll go to a photo studio first,” Chen said. “This will be our night.”

“You must have figured all this out during the last few days, boss,” Yu said, apologetic for his earlier disappointment in Chen. “You got a lot of work done while you were keeping yourself out of sight.”

“Well, it was done mostly last night. I didn’t sleep a wink, wandering along Henshan Road like a homeless skunk.”

Perhaps Yu would never really figure out his boss. But here was the bottom line: for all his eccentricities, Chen was a conscientious cop.

So it was something to be the partner of Chief Inspector Chen, Yu thought, heading out.

TWENTY-NINE

CHEN HADN
’
T DECIDED EXACTLY
what he was going to do that evening.

Coming out of the photo studio, he walked to the restaurant, thinking in the dusk that was enveloping him.

But there was no choice left for him. He tried to reconvince himself. The best course of action would be to leave Jia untouched until after the trial. It wasn’t wise to arrest him before it for people would take it as dirty political retaliation by the government. But in the meantime, he had to trap Jia for the night, and the way to do that was so unorthodox that he didn’t know how to explain it to Yu. Perhaps it was just like the metaphor made by Comrade Deng Xiaoping about the reform in China: “to waddle across the river by stepping on one stone after another.”

There was no delaying the showdown, however, with or without help from the bureau.

Inspector Liao would distance himself from it—not just out of self-protection, but out of long distrust for the chief inspector too. They had had several head-on collisions. After the death of Hong, Liao hadn’t so much as made a single phone call to Chen.

As for Party Secretary Li, Chen didn’t want to think about him for the moment. That would be a headache for later.

And then there was Director Zhong in the background too, with all the plots and counterplots being worked out in the Forbidden City.

It was more than likely that Jia wouldn’t succumb to his story. An intelligent and experienced attorney, he knew no one could convincingly prove anything against him so long as he didn’t budge.

As Chen turned into West Jinling Road, he saw an old woman burning afterworld money in an aluminum basin out on the sidewalk. Shivering in her black cotton-padded clothes, she kept throwing the silver paper ingots into the fire, one by one, murmuring, in a desperate effort to communicate with the dead. It was the night of Dongzhi, he realized.

In the Chinese lunar calendar, Dongzhi comes on the longest night of the year, important in the dialectical movement of the yin and yang system. As yin moves to an extreme position, it turns into the opposite, to yang. So it was conventionally a night for the reunion of the living and the dead.

In Chen’s childhood, Dongzhi meant a wonderful meal, except that the dishes on the ancestral offering table had to remain untouched until the candles burned out, a sign that the dead had already enjoyed the meal. He thought again of his mother, who must be burning afterworld money, alone, in her attic room.

But it might not be a coincidence that he was going to meet Jia on Dongzhi night. A sign that things were going to change.
The Way can be told, / but not in an ordinary way.

He came in sight of the Old Mansion.

A hostess held the door for him respectfully. It was a different girl, one who did not recognize him.

Both Overseas Chinese Lu and White Cloud were already in the lobby. Lu was in his black three-piece suit with a florid tie and a couple of large diamond rings on his fingers, and she, in the red mandarin dress bought at the Old City God’s Temple Market.

“The restaurant owner has agreed to cooperate in every way,” Lu said exultantly. “He’ll let me take care of your room. So I’ll stay here and prepare an unbelievable feast for you.”

“Thank you, Lu,” he said, turning to White Cloud, handing her an envelope. “Thank you so much, White Cloud. Change into a different outfit for now, just like one of the waitresses here. You’ll serve in the private room. Of course, you don’t have to stay there all the time. Bring in whatever Mr. Lu prepares for the evening. At my signal, come in dressed like the woman in the picture.”

“The red mandarin dress,” she said, opening the envelope and examining the pictures inside. “Barefoot, the bosom buttons unbuttoned, and the side slits torn?”

“Yes, exactly like that. Go ahead and tear the side slits.” Chen added, “I’ll buy you another one.”

“Old Heaven,” Lu exclaimed, stealing a glance at the picture in her hand.

Chen then left and moved on to the hotel, which was only a two-or three-minute walk away.

Standing under the hotel arch, he didn’t wait long. In less than five minutes, he saw a white Camry rolling into the driveway. Another car, possibly Yu’s, pulled up behind it, at a distance.

Chen strode out and extended his hand to Jia, who was getting out of the car. He was a tall man in his late thirties, wearing a black suit, his face pale and troubled under the dancing neon light.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice, Mr. Jia. My secretary has reserved a room for us at the Old Mansion. It’s very close. You have heard of the restaurant, haven’t you?”

“The Old Mansion! You’ve spent some time choosing this restaurant for tonight, Chief Inspector Chen.”

It wasn’t a direct answer, but it bespoke his awareness that Chen had made a thorough study of his background.

At the gate of the restaurant, the hostess bowed to them gracefully, like a flower blossoming out of the old painting behind her. “Welcome. You’ll be at home tonight.”

The arrival of several beer girls in the lobby, however, served to highlight the changed times.

“At home,” Jia said sarcastically, observing the sashlike streamers flung slantingly across their shoulders. “Tiger Girl, Qingdao Girl, Baiwei Girl, Sakura Girl.”

The hostess led them across the hall, into an elegant room—possibly a sunroom in its original design, now converted into a private room for special customers. It overlooked the back garden, which appeared enticingly well kept, even in the depths of winter. The table was set for two, the silverware shining under the crystal chandelier like a lost dream. There was also a dainty silver bell placed on the table. Eight miniature dishes were already set on the lazy susan.

White Cloud came in and poured each of them a cup of tea, opening a menu for them. She wore a sleeveless, backless black dress.

“For our most extraordinary story, Mr. Jia,” Chen said, raising the cup.

“A story,” Jia said. “Do you really believe it to be more meaningful than your police work?”

“Meaning exists in your thinking. In my college years, as you may not know, poetry was the only thing meaningful for me.”

“Well, I’m an attorney, one-track-minded.”

“An attorney serves as a good example of this point. What is so meaningful to you in a case may be totally meaningless to others. In our age, meaning depends on an individual perspective.”

“It sounds like a lecture, Chief Inspector Chen.”

“For me, the story has reached a critical point, a matter of life and death,” Chen said. “So I think that the view of the garden may provide a peaceful background.”

“You seem to have a reason for everything.” Jia’s expression didn’t show any change as he cast a sidelong glance out to the garden. “It’s an honor to be invited by you, whether as a writer or a chief inspector.”

“I’m not that hungry yet,” Chen said. “Perhaps we might talk a little first.”

“Fine with me.”

“Great.” Chen said, turning to White Cloud, “we’ll go with the house specials for two. You may leave now.”

“If you need me, ring the silver bell,” she said. “I’ll be standing outside.”

“Now for the story,” Chen said, looking at her retreating figure, her black hair streaming over her bare back. “Let me say this first: it is not finished. For several characters in the story, I haven’t decided their names yet. In the mysteries I have translated, an unidentified person is conveniently called John Doe. For the sake of convenience, I call my protagonist J.”

“Interesting! Like my name in Chinese Pinyin phonetics, it starts with a
J
too.”

Jia was keeping his composure well, even beginning to display a suggestion of defiant humor. It was not the time to push through the window paper, Chen calculated. As in tai chi, an experienced player does not have to push all the way. He took the magazine out and set it on the table.

“Well, the story began with the picture,” Chen said, opening the magazine with a leisurely movement, “at the moment when the picture was taken.”

“Really!” Jia said, raising his voice in spite of himself.

“A story can be told from different perspectives, but it is easier to proceed from a third person, and for us, also in a mixed sense, since part of the story is still going on. What do you think?”

“Whatever you like, you are the narrator. And you majored in literature, I’ve heard. I wonder how you became a cop.”

“Merely circumstance. In the early eighties, college graduates were assigned to their jobs by the state, which you know. Indeed, there was little we could choose for ourselves. In childhood, we all used to dream of a totally different future, didn’t we?” Chen said, pointing at the picture. “It was taken in the early sixties. I was probably a couple of years younger than J, the boy in the picture. Look at him, so happy and proud. And he had every reason to be so, in the company of a beautiful mother who cares so much for him, with the Red Scarf streaming in the sunlight, full of hope for his future in the socialist China.”

“You’re lyrical for a chief inspector. Please go on with your story.”

“It happened in a mansion much like this one, with a garden practically the same, except it’s spring in the picture. Incidentally, this restaurant used to be a residential house too.

“Now, in the early sixties, the political climate was already changing. Mao started talking about the class struggle and the proletarian dictatorship in preparation for the Cultural Revolution. Still, J had a sheltered childhood. His grandfather, a successful banker before 1949, continued to receive dividends that more than ensured an affluent life for the family. The boy’s parents worked at the Shanghai Music Institute, and he was their only child. He was attached to his mother, who was young, beautiful, talented, and equally devoted to him.

“Indeed, she was extraordinary. It was said that a lot of people went to a concert just for a glimpse of her. She kept a sensibly low profile. Still, a photographer discovered her. Not keen on publicity, she agreed to have the picture taken together with her son in the garden. That morning proved to be blissful for J, with her holding his hand affectionately, posing together, and with the photographer raving about the two of them making such a perfect picture. That was the happiest moment in his life. Woven with her radiant smile shining in the sunlight, the moment seemed framed in a golden frame.