A Loyal Character Dancer

They still referred to her as the city woman or the educated youth, though she worked harder than most of the local wives. Normally Wen went to the commune factory in the morning, took care of the family plot in the late afternoon, and then finger-polished those parts she’d brought home at night. Always on the run, her head lowered, Wen had little time or desire to talk to others. As interpreted by Lou, her next-door neighbor, Wen must have been ashamed of Feng, the evil embodiment of the Cultural Revolution. Due to her lack of contacts with others, no one seemed to have noticed anything unusual about her on April fifth.
     
    “That’s my impression, too,” Zhao said. “She seems to have remained an outsider here all these years.”
     
    Wen might have shut herself up right after her marriage, Yu thought, but twenty years was a long time. The fourth interviewee on their list was a woman surnamed Dong in the house opposite Wen’s.
     
    “Her only son left with Feng on the same ship, The Golden Hope, but he has not contacted home since,” Zhao said before knocking at the door.
     
    The person who opened the door for them was a small, white-haired woman with a weatherbeaten, deeply lined face. She stood in the doorway without inviting them in.
     
    “Comrade Dong, we are conducting an investigation into Wen’s disappearance,” Yu said. “Do you have any information about her, specifically with respect to the night of April fifth?”
     
    “Information about that woman? Let me tell you something. He’s a white-eyed wolf, and she’s a jade-faced bitch. Now they’re both in trouble, aren’t they? It serves them right.” Dong drew her lips into a thin, angry line and shut the door in their faces.
     
    Yu turned to Zhao in puzzlement.
     
    “Let’s move on,” Zhao said. “Dong believes Feng influenced her son to leave home. He’s only eighteen. That’s why she calls him a white-eyed wolf—the most cruel one.”
     
    “Why should Dong call Wen a jade-faced bitch?”
     
    “Feng divorced his first wife to marry Wen. She was a knockout when she first arrived. Locals tell all kinds of stories about the marriage.”
     
    “Another question. How could Dong have learned that Feng’s in trouble?”
     
    “I don’t know.” Zhao’s eyes did not meet Yu’s. “People here have relatives or friends in New York. Or they must have heard something after Wen’s disappearance.”
     
    “I see.” Yu did not really see, but he did not think it appropriate to push the matter further at the moment.
     
    Yu tried to shake off the feeling that there might be something else behind Sergeant Zhao’s vagueness. Sending a cop from Shanghai could be taken as a rebuke to the police in Fujian. That he found himself working with an unenthusiastic partner and unfriendly people was not much of a surprise to him, though. Most of his assignments with Chief Inspector Chen had been anything but pleasant.
     
    He doubted whether Chen’s work was going to be easier in Shanghai. It might appear so to others—the Peace Hotel, an unlimited budget, and an attractive American partner, but Yu knew better. Lighting another cigarette, he thought he would have said a definite no to Party Secretary Li. Because this job was not one for a cop. And that, perhaps, was why he would never become a chief inspector.
     
    When they finished their interviews for the day, the village committee office had closed. There was no public phone service in the village. At Zhao’s suggestion, they were about to set off for the hotel, a twenty-minute walk. As they reached the outskirts of the village, Yu approached an old man repairing a bicycle tire under a weatherbeaten sign. “Do you know anybody with a home phone here?”
     
    “There’re two phones in the village. One for the village committee, and the other at Mrs. Miao’s. Her husband has been in the United States for five or six years. What a lucky woman— to have a phone at home!”
     
    “Thanks. We’ll use her phone.”
     
    “You have to pay for it. Other folks use her phone too. For their people overseas. When people call home from abroad, they speak to Miao first.”
     
    “Like the public phone service in Shanghai,” Yu said. “Do you think Wen used Miao’s phone too?”
     
    “Yes, everybody in the village does.”
     
    Yu turned to Zhao with a question in his eyes.
     
    “Sorry,” Zhao said in embarrassment. “I did not know anything about it.”

Chapter