Death of a Red Heroine

Chapter 8

Chief Inspector Chen, too, had had a busy morning. At seven o’clock he’d met with Commissar Zhang in the bureau.

“It’s a difficult case,” Commissar Zhang said, nodding after Chen had briefed him. “But we mustn’t be afraid of hardship or death.”

Don’t be afraid of hardship or death-one of Chairman Mao’s quotations during the Cultural Revolution. Now it reminded Chen of a faded poster torn from the wall of a deserted building. Being a commissar for so many years had turned Zhang into something like an echoing machine. An old politician, out of touch with the times. The Commissar was, however, anything but a blockhead; it was said that he had been one of the most brilliant students at Southwest United University in the forties.

“Yes, you’re right,” Chen said. “I’m going to Guan’s dorm this morning.”

“That’s important. There might be some evidence left in her room,” Commissar Zhang said. “Keep me informed of anything you find there.”

“I will.”

“Have Detective Yu contact me, too.”

“I will tell him.”

“Now what about me?” Zhang said. “I also need to do something, not just be an advice-giving bystander.”

“But we have every aspect of the initial investigation covered at present. Detective Yu’s interviewing Guan’s colleagues, and I’m going to check her room, talk to her neighbors, and afterward, if I have the time, I will visit her mother in the nursing home.”

“Then I’ll go to the nursing home. She’s old, too. We may have things to talk about between us.”

“But you really don’t have to do anything. It is not suitable for a veteran cadre like you to undertake the routine investigations.”

“Don’t tell me that, Comrade Chief Inspector,” Zhang said, getting up with a frown. “Just go to Guan’s dorm now.”

The dormitory, located on Hubei Road, was a building shared by several work units, including that of the First Department Store, which had a few rooms there for its employees. Considering Guan’s political status, she could have gotten something better-a regular apartment like his, Chen thought. Maybe that was what made Guan a model worker.

Hubei was a small street tucked between Zhejiang Road and Fujian Road, not too far away from Fuzhou Road to the north, a main cultural street boasting several well-known bookstores. The location was convenient. The Number 71 bus was only ten minutes’ walk away, on Yan’an Road, and it went directly to the First Department Store.

Chen got off the bus at Zhejiang Road. He decided to walk around the neighborhood, which could speak volumes about the people living there-as in Balzac’s novels. In Shanghai, however, it was not up to the people to decide where they would get a room, but to their work units, Chen realized. Still, he strolled around the area, thinking.

The street was one of the few still covered with cobblestones. There were quite a number of small, squalid lanes and alleys on both sides. Children raced about like scraps of paperblowing in the wind, running out of one lane into another.

Chen took out his notebook. Guan Hongying’s address read: Number 18, Lane 235, Hubei Road. But he was unable to find the lane.

He asked several people, showing them the address. No one seemed to have heard of the lane. Hubei was not a long street. In less than fifteen minutes, he had walked to the end and back. Still no success. So he stepped into a small grocery store on the corner, but the old grocer also shook his head. There were five or six hoodlums lounging by the grocery, young and shabby, with sparse whiskers and shining earrings, who looked at him challengingly.

The day was hot, without a breath of air. He wondered whether he had made a mistake, but a call to Commissar Zhang confirmed that the address was right. Then he dialed Comrade Xu Kexin, a senior librarian of the bureau-better known by his nickname of Mr. Walking Encyclopedia-who had worked in the bureau for over thirty years, and had a phenomenal knowledge of the city’s history.

“I need to ask a favor of you,” he said. “Right now I’m at Hubei Street, between Zhejiang and Fujian Road, looking for Lane 235. The address is correct, but I cannot find that lane.”

“ Hubei Street, hmm,” Xu said. “It was known, before 1949, as a notorious quarter.”

“What?” Chen asked, hearing Xu leafing through pages, “‘Quarter’-what do you mean?”

“Ah yes, a brothel quarter.”

“What’s that got to do with the lane I cannot find?”

“A lot,” Xu said. “These lanes used to have different names. Notorious names, in fact. After liberation in 1949, the government put an end to prostitution, and changed the names of the lanes, but the people there may still use the old names for convenience sake, I believe. Yes, Lane 235, I’ve got it here. This lane was called Qinghe Lane, one of the most infamous in the twenties and thirties, or even earlier. It was where the second-class prostitutes gathered.”

“ Qinghe Lane? Odd-the name does not sound so strange.”

“Well, it was mentioned in the well-known biography of Chiang Kai-shek by Tang Ren, but that may well be fictional rather than factual. At that time, Fuzhou Road, still called Fourth Avenue, was a red-light district, and Fubei Street was part of it. According to some statistics, there were more than seventy thousand prostitutes in Shanghai. In addition to government-licensed prostitutes, there were also a large number of bar girls, hostesses, masseuses, and guides engaged in clandestine or casual prostitution. “

“Yes, I have read that biography,” Chen said, thinking it was time to close the “encyclopedia.”

“All the brothels were closed in the 1951 campaign,” Mr. Encyclopedia droned on. “Officially, at least, there’re no prostitutes under China ’s sun. Those who refused to change were put into reform-through-labor institutes. Most of them turned over a new leaf. I doubt any of them would have chosen to stay in the same neighborhood.”

“I doubt that, too.”

“Some sexual case in the lane?”

“No. Just looking for somebody living there,” Chen said. “Thank you so much for your information.”

Qinghe Lane turned out to be the one next to the grocery store. The lane looked decayed and dismal, with a glass-and-concrete-fronted kiosk attached to the first building, which made the entrance even narrower. Droplets from laundry festooned over a network of bamboo poles overhead presented an Impressionist scene in the May sunlight. It was believed that walking under the women’s lacy underwear like that streaming over the poles would bring bad luck for the day, but with the past associations of the lane in his mind, Chief Inspector Chen found it to be almost nostalgic.

Most of the houses had been built in the twenties or even earlier. Number 18 was actually the first building, the one with the kiosk attached. It had a walled-off courtyard, tiled roofs, and heavy carved beams, its balconies spilling over with laundry dripping on the piles of vegetables and used bicycle parts in the courtyard. On the door of the kiosk was a red plastic sign announcing in bold strokes: Public Phone Service. An old man was sitting inside, surrounded by several phones and phone books, working not only as a phone operator, but probably as a doorman as well.

“Morning,” the old man said.

“Morning,” Chen replied.

Even before the revolution, the house appeared to have been subdivided to accommodate more girls, each room containing one bed, of course, if not much else, with smaller alcoves for maidservants or pimps. That was probably why the house had been turned into a dorm building after 1949. Now each of these rooms was inhabited by a family. What might have originally served as a spacious dining room, where customers ordered banquets to please prostitutes, had been partitioned into several rooms, too. A closer examination revealed many signs of neglect characteristic of such dorm buildings: gaping windows, scaling cement, peeling paint, and the smell from the public bathroom permeating the corridor. Apparently each floor shared only one bathroom. And a quarter of the bathroom had been redesigned with makeshift plastic partitions into a concrete shower area.

Chen was not unfamiliar with this type of dorm. Dormitories in Shanghai could be classified into two kinds. One was conventional: each room contained nothing but beds or bunks, six or eight of them, each resident occupying no more than one bunk’s space. For these residents, most likely bachelors or bachelor girls waiting for their work units to assign them rooms so that they could get married, such a dorm space was just a temporary solution. Chen, in the days before he had become a chief inspector, had thought about getting a dorm bunk for himself, for it could well be that such a gesture would bring pressure to bear upon the housing committee. He had even checked into it, but Party Secretary Li’s promise had changed his mind. The second kind was an extension of the first. Due to the severe housing problem, those on the waiting list could find themselves reaching their mid-or-late thirties, still with no hope of having an apartment assigned to them. As a sort of compromise, a dorm room instead of a bunk space would be assigned to those who could not afford to wait any longer. They remained, theoretically, on the waiting list though their chances would be greatly reduced.

Guan’s room, apparently of the second kind, was on the second floor, the last one at the end of the corridor, across from the public bathroom. It was not one of the most desirable locations, but easy access to the bathroom might count as a bonus. Guan, too, had to share it with other families on the same floor. Eleven of them in all. The corridor was lined with piles of coal, cabbages, pots and pans, and coal stoves outside the doors.

On one of the doors was a piece of cardboard with the character Guan written on it. Outside the door stood a small dust-covered coal stove with a pile of pressed coal-cylinders beside it. Chen opened the door with a master key. The doormat inside was littered with mail-more than a week’s newspapers, a postcard from Beijing signed by someone called Zhang Yonghua, and an electricity bill which, ironically, still bore the pre-1949 address-Qinghe Lane.

It was a tiny room.

The bed was made, the ashtray empty, and the window closed. There was nothing to indicate that Guan had entertained any guest before her death. Nor did it look like a place in which someone had been murdered. The room appeared too tidy, too clean. The furniture was presumably her parents’, old and heavy, but still in usable condition, consisting of a single bed, a chest, a large wardrobe, a small bookshelf, a sofa with a faded red cover, and a stool that might have served as nightstand. A thirteen-inch TV stood on the wardrobe. On the bookshelf were dictionaries, a set of Selected Works of Mao Zedong, a set of Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, and a variety of political pamphlets and magazines. The bed was not only old, it was narrow and shabby. Chen touched it. There was no squeak of bedsprings, no mattress under the sheet, just the hardboard. There was a pair of red slippers under the bed, as if anchoring the emptiness of the silent room.

On the wall above the headboard was a framed photograph of Guan making a presentation at the third National Model Workers Conference in the People’s Great Conference Hall. In the background of the picture sat the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party applauding with some other high ranking cadres. There was also a huge portrait of Comrade Deng Xiaoping on the other wall above the sofa.

In the wastebasket, he saw nothing but several balls of tissues. On top of the chest was a bottle of vitamin pills, the cap still unbroken. Several lipsticks. Bottles of imported perfumes. A tiny plastic-framed mirror. He checked the drawers of the chest. The top drawer contained cash receipts from stores, some blank envelopes, and a movie magazine. The second drawer held several photo albums. The contents of the third was more mixed. An imitation leather trinket box holding an assortment of costume jewelry. Some more expensive lotions and perfumes, perhaps samples from the store. He also found a gold choker with a crescent-shaped pendant, a Citizen watch with clear stones around the face, and a necklace made of some exotic animal bone.

In the cupboard fastened on the wall, he saw several glasses and mugs, but only a couple of black bowls with a small bunch of bamboo chopsticks. It was understandable, Chen reflected. It was not a place to which to invite people. She could have offered a cup of tea at the most.

He opened one door of the wardrobe, which revealed several shelves of tightly packed clothes: a dark-brown winter overcoat, several white blouses, wool sweaters, and three pairs of trousers hung in a corner, all of them demure and rather dull in color. They were not necessarily inexpensive but seemed conservative for a young woman. On the floor stood a pair of high-heeled black shoes, a pair of oxfords with rubber spikes, and a pair of galoshes.

When he opened the other door, however, it revealed a surprise. On the top shelf lay some new, well-made clothes, of fine material and popular design. Chief Inspector Chen did not know much about the fashion world, but he knew they were expensive from the well-known brands or the shop tags still attached to them. Underneath was a large collection of underwear that women’s magazines would probably term “romantic,” or even “erotic,” some of the sexiest pieces he had ever seen, with the lace being a main ingredient rather than a trimming.

He was unable to reconcile the striking contrast between the two sides of the wardrobe.

She had been a single woman, not dating anyone at the time of her death.

Then he moved back to the chest, took the photo albums out of the drawer, and put them on the table, next to a tall glass of water containing a bouquet of wilted flowers, a pen holder, a small paper bag of black pepper, and a bottle of Crystal pure water. It seemed that the table had served as her dining table, desk, and kitchen counter-all in one.

There were four albums. In the first, most of the pictures were black-and-white. A few showed a chubby girl with a ponytail. A girl of seven or eight, grinning for the camera, or blowing out candles on a cake. In one, she stood between a man and woman on the Bund, the man’s image blurred but the woman’s fairly clear. Presumably her parents. It took four or five album pages for her to start wearing a Red Scarf-a Young Pioneer saluting the raising of the five-starred flag at her school. The pictures were arranged chronologically.

He snapped to attention when he turned to a small picture on the first page of the second album. It must have been taken in the early seventies. Sitting on a rock by a pool, one bare foot dabbling in the water, the other held up above the knee, Guan was piercing the blisters on her sole with a needle. The background showed several young people holding a banner with the words Long March on it, striding proudly toward the Yan’an pagoda in the distance. It was the da chuanlian period of the Cultural Revolution when Red Guards traveled all around the country, spreading Chairman Mao’s ideas on “continuation of the revolution under the proletarian dictatorship.” Yan’an, a county where Mao had stayed before 1949, became a sacred place, to which Red Guards made their pilgrimage. She must have been a kid, newly qualified as a Red Guard, but there she was, wearing a red armband, blistered, but eager to catch up.

In the middle of the second album, she had grown into a young girl with a fine, handsome face, big almond eyes, and thick eyelashes. There was more resemblance to National Model Worker Guan as shown in the newspapers.

The third album consisted of pictures from Guan’s political life. There were a considerable number of them showing her together with various Party leaders at one conference or another. Ironically, these pictures could have served to trace the dramatic changes in China ’s politics, with some leaders vanishing, and some moving to the front, but Guan, unchanged, stood in her familiar pose, in the familiar limelight.

Then came the last album, the thickest: the pictures of Guan’s personal life. There were so many of them, and they were all so different, Chen was impressed. Shots from various angles, in various outfits, and with various backgrounds: reclining in a canoe at dusk, wearing a striped camp shirt with a fitted skirt, her face calm and relaxed; standing on her toes by an imported limousine in sunlight; kneeling on the muddy plank of a little bridge, scratching her bare ankle, bending forward over the railing, the weight of her body resting on her right foot; gazing at the misty horizon through a window, her face framed by her tangled hair, a cloud of velvety cattail blurred in a distant field; perching on the steps of an ancient temple, a transparent plastic raincoat over her shoulders, a silk scarf drawn over her hair, her mouth half-open, as if she were on the verge of saying something…

It was not just that the pictures formed a sharp contrast to her “model worker” image in the previous album. In these pictures, she struck Chief Inspector Chen as more than pretty or vivacious. She looked radiant, lit from within. It seemed there was a message in these pictures. What it was, however, Chen could not decipher.

There were also a couple of more surprising close-ups: in one, she was lying on a love seat, her round shoulders covered only with a white bath towel; in another, she was sitting on a marble table, wearing a terry robe, dangling her bare legs; in yet another, she was kneeling, in a bathing suit, its shoulder straps off, her hair tousled, looking breathless.

Chief Inspector Chen blinked, trying to break the momentary spell of Guan’s image.

Who had taken these pictures, he wondered. Where had she had them developed? Especially the close-ups. State-run studios would have refused to take the order, for some of the pictures could be labeled as “bourgeois decadent.” And at unscrupulous private studios, she might have run a serious risk, for those entrepreneurs could have sold such pictures for money. It could have been politically disastrous if she had been recognized as the national model worker.

An album page was large enough for four standard-sized pictures, but for several pages, each held only one or two. The last few pages were blank.

It was about noon when he returned the albums to the drawer. He did not feel hungry. Through the window he thought he could hear the distant roar of a bulldozer working at a construction site.

Chief Inspector Chen decided to talk to Guan’s neighbors. He first went to the next door along the corridor, a door still decorated with a faded red paper couplet celebrating the Chinese Spring Festival. There was also a plastic yin-yang symbol dangling as a sort of decoration.

The woman who opened the door was small and fair, wearing slacks and a cotton-knit top, a white apron around her waist. She must have been busy cooking, for she wiped one hand on the apron as she held the door open with the other. He guessed she was in her mid-thirties. She had tiny lines around her mouth.

Chen introduced himself, showing his business card to her.

“Come in,” she said, “my name is Yuan Peiyu.”

Another efficiency room. Identical in size and shape to Guan’s, it appeared smaller, with clothes and other diverse objects scattered round. In the middle of the room was a round table bearing row upon row of fresh-made dumplings, together with a pile of dumpling skins and a bowl of pork stuffing. A boy in an imitation army uniform came out from under the table. He was chewing a half-eaten bun, staring up at Chen. The little soldier stretched up a sticky fist and made a gesture of throwing the bun toward Chen like a grenade.

“Bang!”

“Stop! Don’t you see he is a police officer?” said his mother.

“That’s okay,” Chen said. “I’m sorry to bother you, Comrade Yuan. You must have heard of your neighbor’s death. I just want to ask you a few questions.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I cannot help you. I don’t know anything about her.”

“You’ve been neighbors for several years?”

“Yes, about five years.”

“Then you must have had some contact with each other, cooking together on the corridor, or washing clothes in the common sink.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what. She left home at seven in the morning, and came back at seven-sometimes much later. The moment she got back, she shut the door tight. She never invited us in, nor visited us. She did her laundry in the store, with all the washing machines on display there. Free, and perhaps free detergent too. She ate at the store canteen. Once or twice a month, she would cook at home, a packet of instant noodles or something like that, though she kept her stove in the corridor all the time. Her sacred right to the public space.”

“So you’ve never talked to her at all?”

“When we saw each other, she nodded to me. That’s about all.” Yuan added. “A celebrity. She would not mix with us. So what’s the point of pressing our hot faces up to her cold ass?”

“Maybe she was just too busy.”

“She was somebody, and we’re nobody. She made great contributions to the Party! We can hardly make ends meet.”

Surprised at the resentment shown by Guan’s neighbor, Chen said, “No matter in what position we work, we’re all working for our socialist China.”

“Working for socialist China?” her voice rose querulously. “Last month I was laid off from the state-run factory. I need to feed my son; his father died several years ago. So making dumplings all day is what I do now, from seven to seven, if you want to call that working for socialist China. And I have to sell them at the food market at six in the morning.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Comrade Yuan,” he said. “Right now China is in a transitional period, but things will get better.”

“It’s not your fault. Why should you feel sorry? Just spare me a political lecture about it. Comrade Guan Hongying did not want to make friends with us. Period.”

“Well, she must have had some friends coming to visit her here.”

“Maybe or maybe not, but that’s her business, not mine.”

“I understand, Comrade Yuan,” he said, “but I still want to ask you some other questions. Did you notice anything unusual about Guan in the last couple of months?”

“I’m no detective, so I do not know what’s usual or unusual.”

“One more question,” he said. ‘Did you see her on the evening of May tenth?”

“May tenth, let me think,” she said. “I don’t remember seeing her at all that day. I was at my son’s school for a meeting in the evening. Then we went to bed early. As I’ve told you, I have to get up to sell the dumplings early in the morning.”

“Perhaps you’d like to think about it. You can get in touch with me if anything comes to you,” he said. “Again, I’m sorry about the situation in your factory, but let’s hope for the best.”

“Thank you.” She added, as if apologizing in her turn now, “There may be one thing, now that I think about it. For the last couple of months, sometimes she came back quite late, at twelve o’clock or even later. Since I was laid off I have been worried too much to sleep soundly, so once or twice I heard her coming back at such hours. But then, she could have been really busy, such a national model worker.”

“Yes, probably,” he said, “but we will check into that.”

“That’s about all I know,” she said.

Chief Inspector Chen thanked her and left.

He next approached Guan’s neighbor across the corridor, beside the public bathroom. He was raising his hand toward the tiny doorbell when the door was flung open. A young girl dashed out toward the stairs, and a middle-aged woman stood furiously in the doorway, with her hands firmly on her hips. “You, too, have to come and bully me. Little bitch. May Heaven let you die a thousand-stab death.” Then she saw him, and stared at him with angry, pop-eyed intensity.

He immediately adopted the stance of a senior police officer with no time to waste, producing his official identity card and flashing it at her with a gesture often shown on TV.

It caused her to lose some of her animosity.

“I have to ask you some questions,” he said. “Questions about Guan Hongying, your neighbor.”

“She’s dead, I know,” she said. “My name is Su Nanhua. Sorry about the scene you have just witnessed. My daughter’s seeing a young gangster and will not listen to me. It’s really driving me crazy.”

What Chen got after fifteen minutes’ talk was almost the same version as Yuan’s, except Su was even more biased. According to her, Guan had kept very much to herself all those years. That would have been odd in a young woman, though not for such a celebrity.

“You mean that she lived here all these years and you did not get a single chance to get acquainted?”

“Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?” she said. “But it’s true.”

“And she never talked to you?”

“Well, she did and she didn’t. ‘It’s fine today.’ ‘Have you had your dinner?’ So on and so forth. Nothing but those meaningless words.”

“Now what about the evening of May tenth, Comrade Su?” he said. “Did you see her or speak to her that evening?”

“Well, that evening, yes, I did notice something. I was reading the latest issue of Family quite late that evening. I would not have noticed her leaving the dorm, but for the sound of something heavy being dropped just outside my door. So I looked out. There she was, going to the stairs, with her back me, and I did not know what she had dropped. All I could see was that she had a heavy suitcase in one hand. So it could have been the suitcase. She was going downstairs. It was late. I was curious and looked out of the window, but I saw no taxi waiting for her at the curb.”

“So you thought she was taking a trip.”

“I guessed so.”

“What time was it?”

“Around ten thirty.”

“How did you know the time?”

“I watched Hope that evening on TV. Every Thursday evening, in fact. It finishes at ten thirty. Then I started reading the magazine. I had not read much before I heard the thump.”

“Had she talked to you about the trip she was going to take?”

“No, not to me.”

“Was there anything else about that night?”

“No, nothing else.”

“Contact me if you think of anything,” he said, standing up. “You have my number on the card.”

Chen then climbed up to the third floor, to a room almost directly above Guan’s. The door was opened by a white-haired man, probably in his mid-sixties, who had an intelligent face with shrewd eyes and deep-cut furrows around his mouth. Looking at the card Chen handed him, he said, “Comrade Chief Inspector, come in. My name is Qian Yizhi.”

The door opened into a narrow strip of corridor, in which there were a gas stove and a cement sink, and then to another inner door. It was an improvement over his neighbors’ apartments. Entering, Chen was surprised to see an impressive array of magazine photos of Hong Kong and of Taiwanese pop singers like Liu Dehua, Li Min, Zhang Xueyou, and Wang Fei on the walls.

“All my stepdaughter’s favorite pictures,” Qian said, removing a stack of newspapers from a decent-looking armchair. “Please sit down.”

“I’m investigating Guan Hongying’s case,” Chen said. “Any information you can give about her will be appreciated.”

“Not much, I’m afraid,” Qian said. “As a neighbor, she hardly talked to me at all.”

“Yes, I’ve spoken to her neighbors downstairs, and they also considered her too much of a big shot to talk to them.”

“Some of her neighbors believed she put on airs, trying to appear head and shoulders above others, but I don’t think that is true.”

“Why?”

“Well, I’m retired now, but I’ve also been a model teacher for over twenty years. Of course, my model status was only at the district level, by no means as high as hers, but I know what it’s like,” Qian said, stroking his well-shaved chin. “Once you’re a role model, you’re model-shaped.”

“That’s a very original point,” Chen said.

“People said, for instance, I was all patience with my students, but I was not-not all the time. But once you’re a model teacher, you have to be.”

“So it is like a magical mask. When you wear the mask, the mask becomes you.”

“Exactly,” Qian said, “except it’s not necessarily a magic one.”

“Still, she was supposed to be a model neighbor in the dorm, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, but it can be so exhausting to live with your mask on all the time. No one can wear a mask all the time. You want to have a break. Back in the dorm, why should she continue to play her role and serve her neighbors the way she served her customers? She was just too tired to mix with her neighbors, I believe. That could have caused her unpopularity.”

“That is very insightful,” Chen said. “I was puzzled why her neighbors downstairs seemed so biased against her.”

“They do not really have anything against her. They are just not in a good mood. And there’s another important factor. Guan had a room for herself, while theirs was for the whole family.”

“Yes, you’re right again,” he said. “But you have a room for yourself too.”

“No, not really,” Qian said. “My stepdaughter lives with her parents, but she has an eye on this room. That’s why she put up all the Hong Kong star pictures.”

“I see.”

“People living in a dorm are a different lot. In theory, we are staying here just for a short transitional period. So we are not really concerned about relationships with our neighbors. We do not call this home.”

“Yes, it must be so different, living in a dorm.”

“Take the public bathroom for example. Each floor shares one. But if people believe they are going to move away tomorrow, who’s going to take care of it?”

“You’re really putting things into perspective for me, Comrade Qian.”

“It has not been easy for Guan,” Qian said. “A single young woman. Meetings and conferences all day, and back home alone at night-and not to someplace she could really call home.”

“Can you be a bit more specific here?” Chen said. “Is there something particular you have noticed?”

“Well, it was several months ago. I was unable to fall asleep that night, so I got up and practiced my calligraphy for a couple of hours. But I remained wide awake afterward. Lying on my bed, I heard a strange sound coming from downstairs. The old dorm is hardly soundproof, and you can hear a lot. I listened more closely. It was Guan sobbing-heart-breakingly-at three a.m… She was weeping inconsolably, alone.”

“Alone?”

“I thought so,” Qian said, “I did not hear another voice. She wept for more than half an hour.”

“Did you observe anything else?”

“Not that I can think of-except that she was probably like me, and didn’t sleep too well. Often I could see light coming up through the cracks in the floor.”

“One of her neighbors mentioned that she came back quite late many nights,” Chen said, “Could that be the reason?”

“I’m not sure. Sometimes I heard her footsteps late at night, but I had hardly any contact with her,” Qian said, taking a sip at his cold tea. “I suggest you talk to Zuo Qing. She’s a retired cadre, but keeps herself busy taking care of the utility fees for the building. She’s also a member of the Neighborhood Security or something. She may be able to tell you more. And she also lives on Guan’s floor, just on the other side of the corridor, close to the stairs.”

Chief Inspector Chen went downstairs again.

An elderly woman wearing gold-rimmed glasses opened the door wide and said, “What do you want?”

“I’m sorry to bother you, Comrade Zuo, but I’ve come about Guan Hongying.”

“She’d dead, I’ve heard,” she said. “You’d better come in. I’ve got something on the stove.”

“Thank you,” he said, staring at the coal stove outside the door. There was nothing being cooked on it. As he stepped into the room, she closed the door behind him. His question was almost immediately answered. Inside the door was a gas tank with a flat pan on it, smelling very pleasant.

Zuo was wearing a black skirt and a silvery gray silk blouse with the top button open. Her high-heeled shoes were gray too. Gesturing to him to sit on a scarlet plush-covered sofa by the window, she continued her cooking.

“It’s not easy to get a gas tank,” she said, “and dangerous to put it in the corridor along with other people’s coal stoves.”

“I see,” he said. “Comrade Zuo, I was told that you have done a lot for the dorm building.”

“Well, I do volunteer work for the neighborhood. Someone has to do it.”

“So you must have had a lot of contact with Guan Hongying.”

“No, not a lot. She’s a popular celebrity in her store, but here she was not.”

“Why?”

“Too busy, I would say. The only time there was any conversation between us would be the occasion,” she said, flipping the egg over in the pan, “when she paid her share of the utility bill on the first day of every month. She would hand over the cash in a white envelope, and say some polite phrase while her receipt was prepared.”

“You never talked about anything else?”

“Well, she once mentioned that since she did not cook much in the dorm building, her equal share of the utility bill was not fair. But she did not really argue about it. Never mentioned it again. Whatever was on her mind, she kept to herself.”

“She seemed to be quite secretive.”

“Look, I don’t mean to speak ill of her.”

“I understand, Comrade Zuo,” he said. “Now on the evening of May tenth, the night she was murdered, Guan left the building around ten thirty-according to one of her neighbors. Did you notice anything around the time?”

“As for that night,” she said, “I don’t think I saw or heard her go out. I usually go to bed at ten.”

“Now, you’re also a member of the Neighborhood Security Committee, Comrade Zuo. Did you notice anything suspicious in the dorm or in the lane, during the last few days in Guan’s life?”

She took off her glasses, looked at them, rubbed them on her apron, put them on again, and then shook her head. “I don’t think so, but there’s one thing,” she said. “I’m not sure whether you’d call it suspicious.”

“What’s that?” He took out his notebook.

“About a week ago, I was watching Office Stories. Everybody is watching it, it’s hilarious. But my TV broke down, so I was thinking of going to Xiangxiang’s place. And opening the door, I saw a stranger coming out of a room at the end of the corridor.”

“Out of Guan’s room?”

“I was not sure. There are only three rooms at the end of the corridor, including Guan’s. The Sus happened to be out of town that night, I know. Of course, the stranger could have been Yuan’s guest, but with only one dim light at the landing, and all the stuff stacked in disorder along the corridor, it’s not that easy for a stranger to find his way. It’s a matter of course for the host to accompany the guest to the stairs.”

“A week ago. Then this was after Guan’s death, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, I did not even know that she was dead.”

“But this could be an important lead if he was coming out of Guan’s room, Comrade Zuo,” he said, putting down a few words in his notebook.

“Thank you, Comrade Chief Inspector,” she said, flattered by his attention. “I checked into it myself. At that time I did not think about it in connection with Guan’s case. Just that it was suspicious, I thought, since it was after eleven o’clock. So I asked Yuan the next day, and she said that she had had no guests that night.”

“Now what about the public bathroom at the end of the corridor,” he said. “He could have been coming out of there, couldn’t he?”

“That’s not likely,” she said. “His host would have to accompany him there, or he would not be able to find it.”

“Yes, you have a point. What did this man look like?”

“Tall, decent looking. But the light’s so dim I could not see clearly.”

“How old do you think he was?”

“Well, mid-thirties, I should think, perhaps forty. Difficult to tell.”

“Anything else about his appearance?”

“He seemed neatly dressed; I may have mentioned it.”

“So you think he could have been coming out of Guan’s room?”

“Yes,” she said, “but I’m not sure.”

“Thank you, Comrade Zuo. We’ll investigate,” he said. “If you can think of anything else, give me a call.”

“Yes, I’ll do that, Comrade Chief Inspector,” she said. “Let us know when you solve the case.”

“We will, and good-bye.”

Walking down the stairs, Chen shrugged his shoulders slightly. He had been to the public bathroom himself without being accompanied by anybody.

At the bus stop on Zhejiang road, he stood for quite a long time. He was trying to sort out what he had accomplished in the day’s work. There was not much. Nothing he had found so far presented a solid lead. If there was anything he had not expected, it would be Guan’s fancy clothes and intimate pictures. But then-that was not too surprising, either. An attractive young woman, even if she was a national model worker, was entitled to some feminine indulgence-in her private life.

Guan’s unpopularity among her neighbors was even less surprising. That a national model worker would be unpopular in the nineties was a sociological phenomenon, rather than anything else. So, too, in the dorm building. It would have been too difficult to be a model neighbor there, to be popular with her neighbors. Her life was not an ordinary one. So she did not fit into their circle, nor did she care for it.

There was only one thing he had confirmed: on the night of May tenth, Guan Hongying had left the dorm before eleven o’clock. She had a heavy suitcase in her hand; she’d been going somewhere.

Another thing not confirmed, but only a hypothesis: She could not have been romantically involved at the time of her death. There was no privacy possible in such a dorm building, no way of secretly dating someone. If there had been anything going on behind her closed door, her dorm neighbors would have known it, and in less than five minutes, the news would have spread like wildfire.

It would also have taken a lot of courage for a man to come to her room. To the hardboard bed.

The bus was nowhere in sight yet. It could be very slow during this time of the day. He crossed to the small restaurant opposite the lane entrance. Despite its unsightly appearance, a lot of people were there, both inside the restaurant and outside it. A fat man in a brown corduroy jacket was rising from a table outside on the pavement. Chief Inspector Chen took his seat and ordered a portion of fried buns. It was a perfect place from which to keep his eyes out for a bus arriving, and at the same time, he could watch the lane entrance. He had to wait for quite a few minutes. When the buns came, they were delicious, but hot. Putting down the chopsticks, he had to blow on them repeatedly. Then the bus rolled into sight. He rushed across the street and boarded it with the last bun in his hand. It then occurred to him that he should have made inquiries at the restaurant. Guan might have sat there with somebody.

“Keep your oily hand away from me,” a woman standing next to him said indignantly.

“Some people can be so unethical,” another passenger commented, “despite an impressive uniform.”

“Sorry,” he said, aware of his unpopularity in his police uniform. There was no point in picking a quarrel. To hold a pork-stuffed bun in an overcrowded bus was a lousy idea, he admitted to himself.

At the next stop, he got off. He did not mind walking for a short distance. At least he didn’t have to overhear the other passengers’ negative comments. There was no way to prevent people from making such comments about one.

Guan, a national model worker, was by no means an exception. Not so far as her neighbors’ comments went.

Who can control stories, the stories after one’s life?

The whole village is jumping at the romantic tale of General Cai.

In this poem by Lu You, the “romantic tale” refers to a totally fictitious romance between General Cai and Zhao Wuniang of the late Han dynasty. The village audience would have been interested in hearing the story, regardless of its historical authenticity.

There is no helping what other people will say, Chief Inspector Chen thought.