Death of a Red Heroine

Chapter 21

Commissar Zhang had had a totally rotten day.

Early in the morning, he had gone to the Shanghai Number One Old Cadre Club to choose a gift for a comrade-in-arms’ birthday.

The club had come into being as a byproduct of the cadre retirement policy-an embodiment of the Party’s continuing concern for the revolutionaries of the older generation. The old cadres, though retired, were reassured that they did not have to worry about changes in their living standards. Not every cadre could go there, of course. Only those of a certain rank.

At first, Zhang was quite proud of holding a membership card, which earned him immediate respect, and also a number of privileges then unavailable elsewhere. It had enabled him to buy much-in-demand products at the state price, to book vacations in resorts closed to the general public, to eat in restricted restaurants with security men guarding the entrance, and to enjoy swimming, ball games, and golf at the huge club complex. There was also a small meandering creek where old people could angle away an afternoon, reminiscing about their glory years.

Of late, however, Zhang had not made many visits to the club. There were more and more restrictions on the bureau’s car service. As a retired cadre, he had to submit a written request for a car. The club was quite a distance away, and he was not enthusiastic about being squeezed and bumped all the way there in a bus. That morning he took a taxi.

At the club shop, Zhang searched for a presentable gift at a reasonable price. Everything was too expensive.

“What about a bottle of Maotai in a wooden box?” the club shop assistant suggested.

“How much is it?” Zhang asked.

“Two hundred Yuan.”

“Is that the state price? Last year, I bought one for thirty-five Yuan.”

“There’s no state price anymore, Comrade Commissar. Everything’s at the market price. It’s a market economy for the whole country,” the assistant added, “like it or not.”

It was not the price, or not just the price. It was the assistant’s indifferent attitude that upset Zhang more than anything else. It seemed as if the club had turned into an ordinary grocery store which everybody could visit and Commissar Zhang found himself to be no more than an ordinary old man with little money in his pocket. But then, it should not be too surprising, Zhang thought. Nowadays people valued nothing but money. The economic reforms launched by Comrade Deng Xiaoping had created a world Zhang failed to recognize.

Leaving the shop empty-handed, Zhang ran across Shao Ping, a retired old cadre from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. They grumbled about market prices.

“Now, Comrade Shao, you used to be the Party Secretary of the Economics Institute. Give me a lecture on the current economic reform.”

“I’m confused, too,” Shao said. “Everything’s changing so fast.”

“Is it good to have all this emphasis on money?” Zhang said.

“No, not so good,” Shao said. “But we have to reform our old system, and according to the People’s Daily, a market economy is the direction to go in.”

“But people no longer care about the Party leadership.”

“Or maybe we are just getting too old.”

On the bus, Zhang got an idea that somewhat comforted him. He had been taking a class in traditional Chinese landscape painting since his retirement. He could choose one of his paintings, have it presentably framed, and make a surprising, meaningful gift to his old comrade-in-arms.

However, the special case group meeting turned out to be very unpleasant.

Chief Inspector Chen presided. In spite of Commissar Zhang’s superior cadre rank, it was Chen who had the most important say in the group. And Chen did not seek his advice frequently-not as much as he had promised. Nor had Chen adequately informed him of the developments in the investigation.

Detective Yu’s presence in the meeting room troubled him, too. It was nothing personal, but Zhang believed that the political dimension of the case required a more enthusiastic officer. To his chagrin, Yu had remained in the group, thanks to the unexpected intervention of Chief Inspector Chen. It was an outcome which served to highlight, more than anything else, Commissar Zhang’s insignificance.

The alliance between Chen and Yu put him in a disadvantageous position. But what really worried Zhang was Chief Inspector Chen’s ideological ambiguity. Chen appeared to be a bright young officer, Zhang admitted. Whether he would prove to be a reliable upholder of the cause the old cadres had fought for, however, Zhang was far from certain. He had attempted to read several of Chen’s poems. He did not understand a single line. He had heard people describing Chen as an avant-gardist- influenced by Western modernism. He had also heard that Chen was romantically involved with a young reporter whose husband had defected to Japan.

While Zhang was still musing, Chief Inspector Chen finished his introductory remarks, saying in a serious voice, “It’s an important new direction. We have to go on with our investigation, as Commissar Zhang has told us, unafraid of hardship and death.”

“Hold on, Comrade Chief Inspector,” Zhang said. “Let’s start from the very beginning.”

So Chen had to start all over again, beginning with his second search of Guan’s dorm room, his attention to those photographs of hers, to the phone records, and then to the trip she had made to the mountains-all those leading to Wu Xiaoming, who was not only the frequent caller, but also Guan’s companion during the trip. After Chen’s speech, Yu briefed them on the interview they had had with Wu Xiaoming the previous day. Neither Chen nor Yu pushed for conclusion, but the direction of the investigation was obvious, and they seemed to take it for granted.

Zhang was astonished. “Wu Xiaoming!”

“Yes, Comrade Wu Bing’s son.”

“You should have shown me the pictures earlier,” Zhang said.

“I thought about it,” Chen explained, “but they might have turned out to be another false lead.”

“So Wu is now your main suspect, I presume?”

“Yes, that’s why I suggested the meeting today.”

“Why didn’t you discuss your interview with me earlier, I mean, before you went to Wu’s residence?”

“We tried to contact you, Comrade Commissar, early yesterday morning,” Yu said, “around seven o’clock.”

“Oh, I was doing my Taiji practice,” Zhang said. “Couldn’t you have waited for a couple of hours?”

“For such an important case?”

“What will be your next step?”

“Detective Yu will go and interview some people connected with Wu,” Chen said. “I am leaving for Guangzhou.”

“For what?”

“To find the tourist guide, Xie Rong-a witness who may know more about what happened between Guan and Wu.”

“What led you to the guide?”

“The travel agency gave her name to me, and then Wei Hong told me about the fight between Xie and Guan in the mountains. “

“Couldn’t that have been just a squabble between a tourist and a guide?”

“Possibly, but not probably. Why did Guan, a national model worker, call another woman a whore?”

“So you think that the trip will lead to a breakthrough?”

“At this point, there are no other clues, so we have to pursue this one.”

“Well, supposing Wu had had an affair with Guan,” Zhang said, “What have you got to connect him with the murder? Nothing. What could Wu Xiaoming’s motive be?”

“What are we detectives for?” Yu said.

“That’s exactly what I want to find out in Guangzhou,” Chen said.

“What about Wu’s alibi for the night of May tenth?” Zhang said.

“Guo Qiang, one of Wu’s friends, provided Wu’s alibi. Guo told Yu that Wu was with him that night, developing film at Guo’s home.”

“So an alibi isn’t an alibi, comrades?”

“Guo’s just trying to cover up for Wu Xiaoming.” Chen added, “Wu has all the equipment at home. Why should he have chosen that night to be with somebody?”

“Come on, Commissar Zhang,” Yu cut in. “Guo is just another HCC, though his father’s not that high, no more than thirteenth level, and retired, too. That could be the very reason that he has to curry favor with Wu. Those HCC are capable of anything. “

“HCC-” Zhang burst out, his temples throbbing and his throat hurting, “high cadres’ children-that’s what you mean, I know, but what’s wrong with these young people?”

“There’re so many stories about those HCC.” Yu was not ready to give in. “Haven’t you heard any of them?”

“A few HCC, as you call them, may have done some things improperly, but it is an outrageous lie that there are so many corrupt HCC, or a whole group of them, in our socialist China. It is utterly irresponsible to base the case upon your own concept of HCC, Comrade Detective Yu.”

“Comrade Commissar Zhang,” Chen said, “I would like to make one point for myself and Comrade Detective Yu. We have nothing but respect for our old high cadres. There is no prejudice whatsoever against the HCC involved in the investigation.”

“But you’re still going to search for your witness in Guangzhou?” Zhang said.

“That is the direction to go in.”

“Now if it proves to be a wrong direction,” Zhang said, “have you considered the possible consequences?”

“We are not issuing a search warrant or arresting anybody right now.”

“Political consequences, I mean. If the word gets around that Wu Bing’s son is a homicide suspect, what will people’s reaction be?”

“Everybody’s equal before the law,” Chen said. “I see nothing wrong with it.”

“If there’s no further evidence, I don’t think your trip to Guangzhou is called for,” Zhang said, standing up. “The budget of our special case group does not allow for it.”

“As for the budget,” Chen said, also rising from the table, “I can draw on my Chief Inspector’s Fund for an annual amount up to three hundred fifty Yuan.”

“Have you discussed your plan with Party Secretary Li?”

“Li is still in Beijing.”

“Why not wait until Li comes back?”

“The case cannot wait. As the head of the special case group, I assume full responsibility.”

“So you must have it your way?”

“I have to go there because there’re no other leads for us. We cannot afford to ignore a single one.”

Afterward, Zhang sat brooding for a while in his own office. It was lunchtime, but he did not feel hungry. He went through the contents of a large envelope marked with the date. In addition to notices for several conventional old cadre meetings, there was also an invitation to a restricted neibu or inside movie at the auditorium of the Shanghai Movie Bureau. He was in no mood for a movie, but he needed something to take his mind off the investigation.

At the ticket window, he turned in his special old cadre pass with the invitation. Tickets had been reserved for old high cadres like him, one of the few privileges he still enjoyed.

But he saw several young men approaching him near the entrance.

“Do you want a ticket? R-rated.”

“Nudity. Explicit sex. Fifty Yuan.”

“A boost to an old man’s bedroom energy.”

It was not supposed to happen, Zhang thought, that those young rascals, too, held tickets in their hands. The movie was not supposed to be accessible to ordinary people. The bureau should have put some cops at the ticket window.

Zhang hurried in and found himself a seat at the rear, close to the exit. To his surprise, there were not as many people as he had expected, especially in the last few rows. There were only a couple of young people sitting in front of him, whispering and nestling against each other. It was a postmodernist French movie with an inexperienced interpreter doing a miserable simultaneous translation, but with one graphic scene after another, it was not too difficult to guess what was happening to the people in the movie.

He noticed the young couple continuously adjusting their bodies, too, in front of him. It was not difficult for him to guess what they were doing either. Soon Zhang heard the woman moaning, and saw her head sliding down the man’s shoulder, and disappearing out of sight. Or was this a scene from the movie? There were explicit images being juxtaposed on the screen…

When the movie was finally over, the woman got up languidly from the man’s arms, her hair tousled, and buttoned up her silk blouse, her white shoulder flashing in the semi-darkness of the theater.

Commissar Zhang strode out of the theater, indignant. It was hot outside. There were several cars waiting on the street- imported cars, luxury models, shining in the afternoon sun. Butnot for him. A retired old cadre. Marching along Chengdu Road, Zhang sensed the cars rushing past him like stampeding animals.

Back home, he was exhausted and famished. He had had only a bowl of green onion instant noodles in the morning. There was nothing but half a dry loaf left in the refrigerator. He took it out and brewed himself a pot of coffee, using three spoonfuls. That was his dinner: bread that tasted like cardboard and coffee strong enough to dye his hair. Then he took out the case file, though he had already read it several times. After a futile attempt to find something new, he took out the magazines he had borrowed from the club in the morning. To his surprise, there was a poem by Chief Inspector Chen in Qinghai Lake . It was entitled “Night Talk.”

Creamy coffee, cold;

Toy bricks of sugar cubes

Crumbling, a butter blossom still

Reminiscent of natural freedom

On the mutilated cake,

‘The knife aside, like a footnote.

It is said that people can tell the time

By the change of color

In a cat’s eyes-

But you can’t. Doubt, a heap

Of ancient dregs

From the bottle of Great Wall

Rests in the sparkling wine.

Zhang could not understand it. He just knew that some images were vaguely disturbing. So he skipped a couple of stanzas toward the end, to reach the last one.

Nothing appears more accidental

Than the world in words.

A rubric turns by chance

In your hands, and the result,

Like any result, is called history…

Through the window we see no star.

Mind’s square deserted, not a pennant

Left. Only a rag picker of the ages

Passes by, dropping scraps

Of every minute into her basket.

The words “mind’s square” suddenly caught his attention. Could that possibly be an allusion to Tiananmen Square? “Deserted” on a summer night of 1989, with no “pennant” left there. If so, the poem was politically incorrect. And the issue about “history,” too. Chairman Mao had said that people, people alone make the history. How could Chen talk about history as the result of a rubric?

Zhang was not sure of his interpretation. So he started to read all over again. Before long, however, his eyesight grew bleary. He had to give up. There was nothing else for him to do. So he took a shower before going to bed. Standing under the shower head, he still thought that Chen had gone too far.

Zhang decided to sleep on his misgivings, but his brain kept churning. Around eleven thirty, he got out of bed, turned on the lights, and donned his reading glasses.

The apartment was so quiet. His wife had passed away at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Ten years, the living, the not living. It’s more than ten years. Then the telephone on the nightstand rang.

It was a long distance phone call from his daughter in Anhui. “Dad, I’m calling from the local county hospital. Kangkang, our second son, is sick, his temperature is 104. The doctor says that it is pneumonia. Guolian has been laid off. We’ve got no money left.”

“How much?”

“We need a thousand Yuan as a deposit, or they won’t treat him.”

“Give them what you have. Tell the doctors to go ahead. I’ll express mail it to you the first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Thank you, Dad. Sorry to touch you like this.”

“You don’t have to say that.” He added after a pause, “I’m the one to blame for all this-all these years.”

So Zhang believed. For whatever had happened to his daughter, he held himself responsible. Often, with unbearable bitterness, at night he would recollect the distant moments of taking her to school, hand in hand, back in the early sixties. A proud child of a revolutionary cadre family, a bright student at school, her future in socialist China was rosy. In 1966, however, all that changed. The Cultural Revolution turned him into a counterrevolutionary, and her into a child of a black capitalist roader family, a target of the Red Guards’ revolutionary criticism. As a politically discriminated-against educable educated youth, she was sent to the poor countryside in Anhui Province, where she worked for no more than ten cents a day. He could never imagine what had happened to her there. Other educated youths received money from their families in Shanghai, or came back for family reunions at the Spring Festival, but she couldn’t. She had no family; he was still in jail. When he was finally released and rehabilitated in the mid-seventies, he could hardly recognize his child, now a sallow, deeply wrinkled woman in black homespun with a baby on her back. She had married a local mine worker- a survivor’s choice, perhaps. In those years, a mine worker’s monthly salary of sixty Yuan could have made a world of difference. There she soon became the mother of three. In the late seventies, she passed up the opportunity to return to Shanghai, for Party policy forbade any ex-educated youth like her from bringing her husband and children to the city with her.

Sometimes he felt that, by torturing herself, she was torturing him.

“Dad, you shouldn’t blame yourself.”

“What else can I do? I have not taken good care of you. Now I’m too old.”

“You don’t sound well. Have you overworked?”

“No, it’s just the last task before my retirement.”

“Then take care.”

“I will.”

“Next time I come to Shanghai, I’ll bring a couple of Luhua hens for you.”

“Don’t bother.”

“The folks here say Luhua hens are good for an old man’s health. I’m raising half a dozen. Genuine Luhua.”

Now she was sounding more and more like her poor and lower-middle-class peasant self again.

A click. He heard her putting down the phone. And the empty silence. She was thousands of miles away. So many years had passed since he talked to the daughter in his heart.

Slowly he moved back to the desk. The file was still lying there, and he turned to the notes he had made during the meeting, going over everything again. Stretching out across the desk to get a cigarette, he found only an empty pack beside the pen holder. He reached into his pocket. The only thing he found, however, was something he did not immediately recognize.

It was a number on a piece of paper crumpled into a small ball. He must have put it there himself-it was in his own handwriting. Why? He was lost. For a moment, he felt he was much closer to Wu Bing, alone, lying unconscious on a hospital bed. All his life, Comrade Wu Bing had fought for the cause of communism. And what then? A vegetable, unable to do anything to protect his son from being targeted as a suspect. His opposition to the direction of the investigation, Zhang hastened to tell himself, did not stem from the kinship he was feeling with Wu Bing. Nor was it the young people coming to the fore, upstarts making tons of money, or Chief Inspector Chen challenging his authority. To build the investigation on such a biased concept about HCC was part of a social trend questioning the correct leadership of the Party.

What if Wu Xiaoming had committed the murder? Whoever had committed the crime should be punished, of course. But then, would that be in the interests of the Party? With such a social trend, news of the investigation would certainly add fuel to the fire.

Zhang could not find an answer.

It had never been difficult, however, for him to find an answer in the early years when he had first joined the Party. In 1944, a promising college student, he went to Yan’an without finishing his studies, experiencing all the hardships of a donkey-back trip. Life there was harsh-sharing a Yan’an cave with four other comrades, working twelve hours a day, and reading by candlelight. After three months, he could barely recognize his reflection in the river. Gaunt, unshaven, undernourished, scarcely any trace left of a young intellectual from the big city. But he believed he had a satisfactory answer in the changed reflection. He knew he was doing the right thing for the country, for the people, for the Party. And for himself, too. Those were the happy years.

In the following years, though Commissar Zhang’s career had not been too smooth, he had never doubted the answer.

But now-

Finally he decided.

He would write a report to Jiang Zhong, an old comrade-in-arms who still held an influential position in Internal Security, thus leaving the question to the higher Party authorities. They should know how to handle a sensitive case like this, whether Wu Xiaoming was guilty-or not. In the best interests of the Party.

He also enclosed a copy of “Night Talk,” underlining some words in the poem. He felt it was his responsibility to share with the higher authorities his concern about Chief Inspector Chen’s ideological ambiguity. In spite of his efforts, he was not sure what Chen had tried to say in the poem, but what really mattered would be the interpretation of the reader. If anyone could associate the “square” in the poem with the one in contemporary politics, then it should not have been written at all. So with the investigation, people’s responses would be a matter of crucial concern for the Party.

Commissar Zhang was not unaware of the possible impact his report might bring to bear on Chief Inspector Chen. But then, it need not necessarily mean the end of the world for a young man.