Death of a Red Heroine

slip, a crazy woman cursing in a crowded bus, or a new shirt missing from the wardrobe. This night, something about the Guan case vanquished sleep.
    The night was long.
    What might have crowded into Guan’s mind during such a long night? He thought of a poem by the mid–Tang dynasty poet Wang Changling:
Boudoir-sheltered, the young lady knows no worries,
Fashionably dressed, she looks out of the window in spring.
What a view of green willow shoots—all of a sudden:
She regrets having sent her love away fighting for fame.
    So after the flashlight along the corridor, after the shadows shifting on the sleepless wall, after the cold sweat in the dark, solitary dorm room, Guan, too, could have been thinking of the price paid for fame.
    What’s the difference?
    In the Tang dynasty, more than a thousand years earlier, the girl had been unable to console herself because she had sent her lover far away in pursuit of fame, and in the nineties, Guan couldn’t because she had kept herself too busy pursuing fame.
    What about Chief Inspector Chen himself?
    There was a bitter taste in his mouth.
    Sometime after two, when he had slid into that floating area between sleep and waking, he felt hungry again. The image of the dried bun on the window came back to his mind.
    And another image with it.
    Caviar.
    Only once had he tasted caviar. It was years earlier, at the International Friendship Club in Beijing, where at the time only foreign visitors were admitted and served. He was there with a drunken English professor who insisted on treating him to caviar. Chen had read about it in Russian novels. Actually he did not like it too much, though afterward the fact he had tasted caviar took Overseas Chinese Lu down a peg or two.
    Things had been changing. Nowadays anybody could go to the International Friendship Club. A few new luxurious hotels also served caviar. Guan could have had it in one of those hotels, though not too many people could have afforded to order it—on that particular night.
    It would not be difficult to find out.
    Caviar—he jotted the word on the back of a matchbox.
    Then he felt ready to fall asleep.

Chapter 10
    I t was a humid Friday morning for May.
    Detective Yu had slept fitfully, tossing and turning half of the night. As a result, he was feeling more tired than the night before, with patches of partially forgotten dreams hovering in his mind.
    Peiqin was concerned. She made a bowl of sticky rice dumplings, a favorite breakfast for him, and sat with him at the table. Yu finished the dumplings in silence.
    Finally, as he was ready to leave for the bureau, she said, “You’re burning yourself out, Guangming.”
    “No, it’s just I’ve not slept well,” he said. “Don’t worry about me.”
    When Yu stepped into the bureau meeting room, the restless feeling surged up again. The topic of the meeting, which had been requested by Commissar Zhang, was the progress of the investigation.
    A week had passed since the special case group had taken the case. The team, formed with such a fanfare of political jargon, had made little progress. Detective Yu had been working long hours, making numerous phone calls, interviewing a number of people, discussing all the possible scenarios with Chief Inspector Chen, and making quite a few reports to Commissar Zhang, too. Yet there was no breakthrough in sight. In routine police work when a case went beyond a week without a solid lead, it might as well be thrown into the “open” file. Yu had learned from experience. In other words, it was the time to close the case as unsolved.
    It was not the first time in the bureau’s history that this had happened, nor would it be the last.
    Yu sat beside the window, smoking a cigarette. The streets of Shanghai were spread out beneath his gaze, gray and black roofs with curls of peaceful white smoke undulating into the distance. Yet he seemed to smell crime smoldering in the heart of the city. Skimming a copy of the bureau newsletter, he read of several robberies, each bigger than the other, and seven reports of rape in the last night alone. And then new cases of prostitution, even in the upper area of the city.
    As the other divisions were so short of manpower, a number of cases had been designated as “special” and pushed over to their squad, but they were in no better shape. Qing Xiaotong had come back from his honeymoon, but with that dreamy look in his eyes, not really back to work, and Liu Longxiang was still recovering