Death of a Red Heroine

sure?”
    “Chief Inspector Chen has made a point of excluding your name from the official file. You will be an understanding woman, he says.”
    “Is that a compliment?” She took a long swallow of the coffee, the cream leaving a white line along her upper lip. “By the way, how is your chief inspector? Still single?”
    “He’s just too busy, I think.”
    “He had an affair in Beijing, I’ve heard. It broke his heart.”
    “Well, that I don’t know,” Yu said. “He has never talked to me about it.”
    “Oh, I don’t know much about it, either. It was such a long time ago,” she said with an unfathomable smile on her lips. “So, where shall we start?”
    “From the very beginning, if you please.”
    “First, let me make a point. The whole thing’s in the past tense. I met Wu about two years ago, and we parted one year later. I want to emphasize this, not because of his possible involvement in a murder case.”
    “Understood,” he said. “Now, how did you get to know him?”
    “He came to me, saying that he wanted to take my picture. For his magazines and newspapers, of course.”
    “Few would turn down such an offer, I bet.”
    “Who would say no to have one’s own picture—free and published?”
    “So the pictures were published?”
    “Yes, the pictures turned out to be of high quality,” she said. “To be fair, Wu’s a gifted photographer. He’s got the eye for it, and the instinct, too. He knows when and where to get the shot. A number of magazines are eager for his work.”
    “What happened afterward?”
    “Well, as it turned out, I was his personal rather than professional target—that’s what he said to me over a lunch. Believe it or not, he posed for me, too. One thing led to another. You know what happens.”
    “A romantic involvement?”
    “Is that a sort of euphemism?”
    “Is it?”
    “Are you trying to ask if we slept together?”
    “Well, was it a serious relationship?”
    “What do you mean by ‘serious relationship’?” she said. “If it means that Wu Xiaoming proposed to me, then it wasn’t, no. But we had some good times together.”
    “People have different definitions,” he said, “but let’s say, did you see each other a lot?”
    “Not a lot. As a senior editor for Red Star , he got assignments from time to time, to go to Beijing or other cities, even abroad on one or two occasions. I am extremely busy with my work, too. But when we had time, we were together. For the first few months he came to my place quite frequently, two or three times a week.”
    “Days or nights?”
    “Both, but he seldom stayed overnight. He had his car—his father’s, you know. It was convenient for him.”
    “Did you ever go to his place?”
    “Only a couple of times. It’s a mansion. You must have been there. You know what it is like.” She continued after a pause, “But when we were together, I wanted to do what we were together for. So what was the point of staying somewhere without any privacy? Even if we could shut ourselves up in one of the rooms, I wouldn’t have been in the mood—with his people walking around there all the time.”
    “You mean his wife?”
    “No, she actually stayed in her room all the time—she’s bedridden. But it’s his father’s house. The old man was in the hospital, but his mother and sisters were there.”
    “So you knew he was a married man from the very beginning.”
    “He did not make a secret of it, but he told me that it had been a mistake. I believe it was true—to some extent.”
    “A mistake,” he said. “Did he explain it to you?”
    “For one thing, his wife’s been sick for several years,” she said, “too sick to have a normal sex life with him.”
    “Anything else?”
    “Marriage in those years could have been a matter of convenience. The educated youths were lonely, and life in the countryside was extremely hard, and they were far, far away from home.”
    “Well, I don’t know about that,” he said, thinking of his years with Peiqin in Yunnan, “but you had no objection to an extramarital relationship?”
    “Come on, Comrade Detective Yu. We’re in a new decade, a new time. Who lives any longer like in the Confucian books? If a marriage is a happy one, no outsider could ever destroy it,” she said, scratching her ankle. “Besides, I never expected him to marry me.”
    Maybe he was an old-fashioned man. Yu certainly felt ancient sitting beside the artist, to whom an affair could be just