"When Red is Black" - читать интересную книгу автора (Xiaolong Qiu)

Chapter 3

The bus, full of people packed like sardines, was stuck fast in an early-morning traffic jam. As a low-level cop, Detective Yu had no access to a bureau car, unlike his boss Chief Inspector Chen. This morning, Yu considered himself lucky when he obtained a seat in the overcrowded bus shortly after he boarded. Now, unbuttoning the top button of his uniform, he had plenty of time to think about the new murder case.

Party Secretary Li had called earlier in the morning, informing him that Chief Inspector Chen was on vacation, and that Yu would be in charge of the Yin case. Chen had also phoned, explaining that he was too busy translating a business proposal at home to come to work. Yu would have to investigate the Yin murder by himself.

Information had been gathered about Yin Lige already. He had been given a fat folder full of material from the Shanghai Archives Bureau, as well as from other sources. Detective Yu was not surprised at this evidence of bureaucratic efficiency. A dissident writer like Yin must have been the subject of secret police surveillance for a long time.

The folder contained a picture of Yin, a bamboo-thin, tallish woman in her mid-fifties, her high forehead and oval face deeply lined, sad eyes looking out through a pair of silver-framed eyeglasses. She wore a black Mao jacket and matching black pants. Her photo was like an image copied from an old postcard.

Yin had been a Shanghai College graduate, class of 1964. Because of the enthusiasm she displayed in student political activities, she had been admitted to the Party and, after graduation, assigned a job as a political instructor at the college. Instead of teaching classes, she gave political talks to students. It was then considered a promising assignment; she might rise quickly as a Party official working with intellectuals who forever needed to be reformed ideologically.

When the Cultural Revolution broke out, like other young people she joined a Red Guard organization, following Chairman Mao’s call to sweep away everything old and rotten. She threw herself into criticism of counterrevolutionary or revisionist “monsters,” and emerged as a leading member of the College Revolutionary Committee. Powerful in this new position, she pledged herself to carry on “the continuous revolution under the proletarian dictatorship.” Little did she suspect that she herself was soon to become a target of the continuous revolution.

Toward the end of the sixties, with his former political rivals out of the way, Chairman Mao found that the rebellious Red Guards were blocking the consolidation of his power. So those Red Guards, much to their bewilderment, found themselves in trouble. Yin, too, was criticized and removed from her position on the College Revolutionary Committee. She was sent to a cadre school in the countryside, a new institution invented by Chairman Mao on an early May morning, after which May 7th Cadre Schools appeared throughout the country. For Mao, one of their purposes was to keep politically unreliable elements under control or, at least, out of the way.

The cadre students consisted of two main groups. The first was composed of ex-Party cadres. With their positions now filled by the even more left-wing Maoists, they had to be contained somewhere. The other was made up of intellectuals, such as university professors, writers, and artists, who were included in the cadre rank system. The cadre students were supposed to reform themselves through hard labor in the fields and group political studies.

Yin, a college instructor, and also a Party cadre for a short while, fit into both categories. In the cadre school, she became the head of a group, and there Yin and Yang met for the first time.

Yang, much older than Yin, had been a professor at East China University. He had been in the United States and had returned in the early fifties, but soon he was put on the “use under control” list, labeled a Rightist in the mid-fifties, and a “black monster” in the sixties.

Yin and Yang fell in love despite their age difference, despite the “revolutionary times,” despite the warnings of the cadre school authorities. Because of their untimely affair, they suffered persecution. Yang died not too long afterward.

After the Cultural Revolution, Yin returned to her college, and wrote Death of a Chinese Professor, which was published by Shanghai Literature Publishing House. Although described as a novel, it was largely autobiographical. Initially, as there was nothing really new or unusually tragic in the book, it failed to sell. So many people had died in those years. And some people did not think it was up to her-as an ex-Red Guard-to denounce the Cultural Revolution. It was not until it was translated into English by an exchange scholar at the college that it attracted government attention.

Officially, there was nothing wrong with denouncing the Cultural Revolution. The People’s Daily did so, too. It had been, as the People’s Daily declared, a mistake by Chairman Mao, who had meant well. The atrocities committed were like a national skeleton in the closet.

To be aware of the skeleton, at home, was one thing, but it was quite another matter to drag it out for Westerners to see. So Party critics labeled her a “dissident,” which worked like a magical word. The novel was then seen to be a deliberate attack on the Party authorities. The book was secretly banned. To discredit her, what she had done as a Red Guard was “uncovered” in reviews and reminiscences. It was a battle she could not win, and she fell silent.

But all that had happened several years earlier. Her novel, filled with too many specific details, did not attract a large audience abroad. Nor had she produced anything else, except for a collection of Yang’s poetry she had earlier helped edit. Then she was selected for membership in the Chinese Writers’ Association, which was interpreted as a sign of the government’s relenting. Last year, she had been allowed to visit Hong Kong as a novelist. She did not say or do anything too radical there, according to the files.

Closing the folder, Detective Yu failed to see why the government might be implicated in her murder. He could see, however, why the Party authorities were anxious to have the case solved quickly. Anything to do with a dissident writer might attract attention, unpleasant attention, both at home and overseas.

When the bus finally arrived at his destination, Detective Yu found that Treasure Garden Lane, where Yin had lived, was only half a block from the bus stop. It was an old-fashioned, medium-sized lane accessed through a black iron grillwork gate, possibly a leftover from the French Concession years. Its location was unfashionable, and the neighborhood had been going downhill in the last few years. As new buildings appeared elsewhere, the lane had become something of an eyesore.

Yu decided to take a walk around the area first. He would be working with a neighborhood cop, Old Liang, who had been stationed nearby for many years. Old Liang was to meet him at nine thirty in the neighborhood committee office, close to the back entrance of the lane. Yu was fifteen minutes early for their appointment.

The front entrance to the lane was on Jinling Road. At the intersection of Jinling and Fujian Roads, two or three blocks away, he could see the Zhonghui Mansion-the high-rise once owned by Big Brother Du of the Blue Triad-standing on the corner. The back entrance of the lane led into a large food market. There were also two side entrances along Fujian Road, lined with tiny shops and stalls. In addition to the main lane, he saw several sub-lanes crisscrossing each other. Most of the houses were built in the shikumen style, like his own home, a typical Shanghai two-storied house with a stone door frame and a small interior courtyard.

Looking into the lane from the front entrance, Yu saw an elderly woman pushing open the black-painted door of a shikumen house with one hand, carrying a chamber pot in the other. It was an eerily familiar sight, as if he had been transported back to his own lane, except that Treasure Garden Lane was even shabbier, its winding tributary lanes more full of twists and turns. More full of noises too. Near the front entrance, a green-onion-cake peddler hawked his wares loudly, clanging on the large flat pan with a steel ladle. A little girl of five or six stood alone in the middle of the lane crying her heart out, for reasons Yu would never discover. Conducting an investigation here would be difficult, he realized. With the constant flow of people, and all sorts of ceaseless lane activities too, a criminal could have easily sneaked in and out without being noticed.

As Yu turned in the direction of the neighborhood committee office, he saw a short, white-haired man stepping through the doorway, waving his hand energetically.

“Comrade Detective Yu?”

“Comrade Liang?”

“Yes, that’s me. People here just call me Old Liang,” he said in a booming voice. “I am just a residential policeman. We really have to depend on you to investigate, Comrade Detective Yu.”

“Don’t say that, Old Liang,” Yu said. “You have worked here for so many years, it is I who must rely on your help.”

Old Liang was in charge of residential registrations and records for the area. At times, his job was to provide liaison between the neighborhood committee and the district police station. So he had been assigned to work with Detective Yu.

“Things are not like in the past, you know, when the registration rules were really effective.” As he spoke, Old Liang led Yu into a small office, which looked like it must have been partitioned off from the original hallway, and offered him a cup of tea.

Old Liang had seen better days, in the sixties and seventies, when residential registration was a matter of survival in a city with a strict food-ration-coupon policy. Coupons were needed for staples, such as rice, coal, meat, fish, cooking oil, and even cigarettes. What’s more, Chairman Mao’s class-struggle theory was applied to all walks of life. According to Mao, throughout the long period of socialism, class enemies would never stop attempting to sabotage the proletarian dictatorship. So a residential cop had to stay alert at all times. Everyone in the neighborhood had to be viewed as a hidden potential class enemy. Neighborhood security was extremely effective. If someone moved into the lane in the morning without reporting to local authorities, a residential cop would knock at his door the same night.

But things changed, gradually in the eighties, and dramatically in the nineties. The food-ration-coupon system had been largely shelved, so people no longer depended so much on residential registration cards. Nor was there strict enforcement of the regulation regarding residential permits. Thousands of provincial workers swarmed into Shanghai. The city government was well aware of the problem, but cheap labor was much needed by the construction and service sectors.

Still. Old Liang must have done a conscientious job. Some of the information Yu had reviewed on the bus undoubtedly had come from this veteran residential cop.

“Let me give you some general information about Yin, Detective Yu,” Old Liang said, “and about the neighborhood too.”

“That would be great.”

“Yin moved into the lane from her college dorm sometime in the mid-eighties. I do not know the exact reasons for the move. Some said that she did not get along with her roommates. Some said that because of the publicity for her novel, the college decided to improve her living conditions. Not much of an improvement, a tingzijian, a tiny cubicle partitioned off from the staircase on the landing, but at least a room for herself, in which she could read and write in privacy. It seemed to be enough for her.”

“Nobody in the police bureau contacted you about her move into the lane?”

“I was informed of her political background, but no one gave me any specific instructions. Dealing with a dissident can be sensitive. As a residence cop, all I could do was to maintain high vigilance and collect whatever information I could about her from her neighbors. The neighborhood committee did not try to do anything in particular. Things pertaining to a political dissident would have been too complicated for us. We treated her just like any other resident in the lane.”

“What was her relationship with her neighbors?”

“Not good. When she first moved in, her neighbors did not notice anything unusual about her except that, as a university teacher, she had written a book about the Cultural Revolution. Everyone had his or her own experience in that national disaster. No one really wanted to talk about it.

“As details of her book became known, some people took a sort of interest in her. A heart-breaking story, for she remained single after all these years. Some neighbors were compassionate, but she did not get along well with them. She seemed bent on shutting herself up in the tingzijian room, licking her wounds in secret.”

“I would say that’s understandable. Her woes were personal, and perhaps too painful for her to talk about.”

“Yet what is special about living in a shikumen house is the constant contact with your neighbors, every hour, every day,” Old Liang said, taking a sip of his tea. “Some describe Shanghainese as born wheelers and dealers. That’s not true, but people here have always lived in such miniature societies, and learned from this ongoing education in relationship management. As an old saying goes, Close neighbors are more important than distant relatives. But Yin seemed to have purposely distanced herself from her neighbors. As a result, they resented her and treated her as an outsider. Lanlan, one of her neighbors, said something to the point: ‘Her world’s not here.’”

“Perhaps she was too busy writing to make friends,” Yu said, stealing a glance at his watch. Old Liang resembled his father, Old Hunter, in one aspect: both of them were tireless talkers, and at times wandered from the point. “Did you have any direct contact with her?”

“Well, I did when she came to register her residence. She was rather unfriendly, even a little hostile, as if I were one of those who had beaten up Yang in those days.”

“Have you read her novel?”

“Not the whole book by any means, only some paragraphs quoted in the newspapers and magazines. You know what?” Old Liang went on without waiting for an answer. “Some readers were really pissed off by what she wrote about having been a Red Guard out of proletarian fervor, and doing what she referred to only as ‘some too passionate deeds’ in the name of the revolution.”

“Was that the reaction of her neighbors too?”

“Oh, no. I don’t think too many here have read her book. They may have heard of the book. What I know is from the research I have done.”

“You have done a lot of work, Old Liang,” Yu said. “Let’s go to her place now.”