Death of a Red Heroine

between them was so narrow that one could only stand sideways. There was a rattan rocker at the foot of her bed, a radio on the nightstand. No air conditioning, though a single ceiling fan for the whole room was working. The last thing he noticed was a dried bun, partly chewed, shriveled, on the windowsill above her bed. A period to a life story. One of the ordinary Chinese people, working hard, getting little, not complaining, and suffering a lot.
    What influence could such a life have exerted on Guan?
    The daughter had taken a different road.
    There was something about the case, Chief Inspector Chen felt vaguely, something mystifying him, challenging him, and drawing him in an unknown direction. He decided to walk home. Sometimes he thought better while walking.
    He stopped at a traditional Chinese pharmacy and bought a box of Jinsheng pills. A halfhearted believer in Chinese herbal medicine, he assumed that frustration had somehow eroded the balance of his essence. And he needed something extra to bolster his whole system. Chewing at a bitter Jinsheng pill, he thought that a possible alternative approach to the case would be to find out how Guan had become a national model worker. In the literary criticism he had studied, it would be termed the biographical approach. Only its result might not be so reliable, either. Who could have expected that he would have become a chief inspector of police?
    It was almost seven when he reached home. He turned on the TV and watched for a while. Several Beijing opera players were doing a series of somersaults, flourishing sabers and swords in the dark. The Cross Road , a traditional Beijing opera, he recollected, about fighting at night without knowing who’s who.
    He dialed Commissar Zhang. A formality, since Chen did not have anything to report.
    “Believe in the people. Our strength comes from our close connection to them,” Commissar Zhang concluded their conversation. It was inevitable: Commissar Zhang had to give such an instruction.
    Chen got up and went into the kitchen. There was half a pot of steamed rice left in the refrigerator. He took the rice out, added some water, and put it on the gas stove. The kitchen wall no longer appeared immaculately white. It would not take too many weeks to turn it into an oil-and-smoke-stained map. An exhaust fan could solve the problem, but he could not afford one. He looked for some leftovers. There were none. Finally, he dug out a tiny plastic bag of dried mustard, a present from his aunt in Ningbo. He put a few pieces on the rice, and swallowed the watery meal trying not to taste too much of it.
    “Chef Kang’s Instant Noodles.” A TV commercial flashed through his mind as he stood by the gas stove. The plastic-bowl- contained-noodles might be a solution, he reflected, putting the dried mustard back. Again, the problem was his tight budget. After the loan to Overseas Chinese Lu, Chief Inspector Chen had to live like Comrade Lei Feng in the early sixties.
    At the level of a chief inspector, his monthly pay was 560 Yuan, plus all his bonuses under various titles, which added up to 250 more. His rent was fairly inexpensive. Together with utilities, it was less than 100 Yuan, but he had to spend half of his income on food. As a bachelor, he did not cook much at home; he ate at the bureau canteen.
    A great help in the last few years had been the advances he earned from his translations, but at this moment he was not working on anything. He had not had the time, nor the energy— nor even the interest—since he had taken over the Guan case. The case did not make sense, not the sense he found in the mysteries he had been translating. Still, getting another advance was possible. He could promise the editor that he would complete the job by October. He needed such a deadline for himself, too.
    Instead he started to summarize on a piece of paper beside the bowl what he had learned so far about the case. All the odds and ends of information he had been collecting and storing during the week, without having them sorted out and pieced together to consider where they could possibly lead, filled a sheet of paper. In the end, however, he tore up the paper in frustration. Perhaps Detective Yu was right. Possibly it was just one of those “insoluble” sexual murder cases. The bureau had had enough of them.
    He knew he could not fall asleep. Often insomnia was the effect of little things coming together. A poem rejected without a rejection