Death of a Red Heroine

satisfaction of seeing his only son married. Wang did not have the heart to say no, so she agreed. In a couple of weeks her father-in-law passed away, and then her husband defected in Japan, refusing to return to China. That was a terrible blow to her. As a wife, she was supposed to know everything about Yang’s movements, but she was totally in the dark. Chen believed the defector would not have discussed it with her in long-distance calls which could be tapped. But some Internal Security officers did not credit this, and she was questioned several times.
    According to a colleague of hers, it would serve Yang right if, having left her in such a situation, she divorced him. But Chen had not discussed this with her. There was no hurry. He knew he liked her, but he had not made up his mind yet. In the meantime, he was happy to be with her whenever he could find the time.
    “You know how to push,” she said, her hand still in his.
    “No, I’ll never push you. It’s just the natural flow. But on second thought,” he said, gazing at her flushed face, “I do want to push you a little. What about a cup of coffee in the Riverside Café?”
    “In full view of the Wenhui Building?”
    “What’s wrong with that?” He could sense her hesitation. There was the possibility of their being seen together by her colleagues passing along the Bund. He himself had heard of gossip about them in the bureau. “Come on, this is the nineties.”
    “You don’t have to push for that,” she said.
    The Riverside Café consisted of several chairs and tables on a large cedar deck jutting out above the river. They climbed a silver-gray wrought-iron spiral staircase and chose a white plastic table under a large flowered umbrella that offered a wonderful view of the river and the colorful vessels coming and going slowly along its eastern bank. A waitress brought them coffee, juice, and a glass bowl of assorted fruit.
    The coffee smelled fresh. So did the juice. She picked up the bottle and raised it to her mouth. Loosening the kerchief that secured her hair, she looked relaxed, her foot hooked over the horizontal bar of the chair.
    He could not help wondering at the change in her face in the sunlight. Every time he met her, he would seem to perceive something different in her. One moment she appeared to be a bluestocking, nibbling at the top of a fountain pen, mature and pensive, with the weight of fast-developing world news on her shoulders; the next moment she would come to him, a young girl in wooden sandals, scampering down the corridor. But on this May morning, she appeared to be a typical Shanghai girl, soft, casual, at ease in the company of the man she liked.
    There was even a light green jade charm dangling on a thin red string over her bosom. Like most Shanghai girls, she, too, wore those small, superstitious trinkets. Then she began chewing a stick of gum, her head leaned back, blowing a bubble into the sunlight.
    He did not feel the need to speak at the moment. Her breath, only inches away, was cool from the minty gum. He had intended to take her hand across the table, but instead, he tapped his finger on the paper napkin in front of her.
    A sense of being up and above the Bund filled him.
    “What’re you thinking about?” he said.
    “What mask are you wearing at this moment—policeman or poet?”
    “You’ve asked that for the second time. Are the two so contradictory?”
    “Or a prosperous businessman from abroad?” she said, giggling. “You’re certainly dressed like one.”
    He was wearing his dark suit, a white shirt, and one of his few ties that looked exotic, a gift from a former schoolmate, an owner of several high-tech companies in Toronto who had told him that the design on the tie represented a romantic scene in a modern Canadian play. There was no point in sitting with her in his police uniform.
    “Or just a lover,” he said impulsively, “head over heels.” He met her gaze, guessing he had made himself as transparent as water. Not the water in the Huangpu River.
    “You’re being impossible,” she said, smiling, “even in the middle of your murder investigation.”
    It did slightly disturb him that he could be so sensitive to her attractiveness when he should have been concentrating on solving the case. When she was alive, Guan Hongying might have been as attractive. Especially in those pictures in the cloud-wrapped mountains, Guan posing in a variety of elegant attire, young, lively,