Death of a Red Heroine

more time than usual brushing his teeth, but it was a futile attempt to get rid of the bitter taste in his mouth.
    He did not like the development of the investigation. Nor his plan for the day: to do a day’s research in the Shanghai Library.
    It was evident that Guan Hongying had had an affair with Wu Xiaoming. Though a national model worker, Guan had led a double life under a different name in the mountains. So had Wu. This was far from proving, however, that her death came about as a result of the clandestine affair.
    Whatever complications might be involved, Chen was determined to solve the case. He could not be a chief inspector without taking up the challenge. So he planned to learn more about Wu Xiaoming by examining his work. The approach could be misleading; according to T. S. Eliot’s “impersonal theory,” Chen recollected, what could be learned from a creative artist’s work was nothing but his craftsmanship. Nonetheless, he would give it a shot.
    In the reading room of the Shanghai Library, Chen soon found that there was a lot more for him to do. The list he had received the previous day included only the work published in the Red Star magazine; as for Wu’s publications elsewhere, the list gave only the total number with abbreviated magazine names minus dates. As most of the magazines had no year-end index for photographs, Chen had to go through them issue by issue. The back issues were in the basement of the library, which meant a long wait before he could get what he ordered.
    The librarian was a nice woman, moving about briskly in her high heels, but a stickler for library rules. All she could give him at one time were the issues of one particular magazine for a year. For anything more, he had to write out a new order slip and to wait for another half an hour.
    He sat in the lobby, feeling idle on a supposedly busy day. Every time the librarian came out of the elevator with a bundle of books on a small cart, he would stand up expectantly. But they were other peoples’ books. Waiting there, he felt disturbed, distantly . . .
    How long ago it was—the fragments of the time still book-marked— another summer, another library, another sense of waiting with expectations, different expectations, and the pigeons’ whistles fading in the high, clear Beijing sky. . . . He closed his eyes, trying not to conjure up the past.
    Chief Inspector Chen had to pull himself back to the work of the present.
    At eleven thirty, he concluded that he had accomplished little for a morning; he packed up all his notes and went out for lunch. The Shanghai Library was located on the corner of Nanjing Road and Huangpi Road. There were a number of fancy restaurants in the neighborhood. He walked to the north gate of the People’s Park, where there was a young vendor selling hot dogs and sandwiches from a cart on the sidewalk sporting a Budweiser umbrella, an imported coffee maker, and a radio playing loud rock-and-roll music. The chicken sandwich he bought was not cheap. He washed it down with a paper cup of reheated, lukewarm coffee, not at all like what he had enjoyed with Wang at the River Café.
    When he returned to the library, he phoned Wang at Wenhui. He could hear a couple of phones ringing at the same time in the background as he chatted a little about her heavy responsibility on Sunday as a Wenhui reporter before he switched topics.
    “Wang, I have to ask a favor of you.”
    “People never go to a Buddhist temple without asking for help.”
    “They do not grab Buddha’s legs unless in desperation,” he said, knowing she enjoyed his repartee. A cliché for a cliché.
    “Grab or pull Buddha’s legs?” She giggled.
    He explained the problem he had with his library research.
    “With your connections, maybe you can help. Of course, only as long as you are not too busy at the moment.”
    “I’ll look into it,” she said. “I’m busy, but not that busy.”
    “Not too busy for me, I know.”
    “When do you need it?”
    “Well . . . as soon as possible.”
    “I’ll call you.”
    “I’m in the library. Beep me.”
    He resumed his reading. For the next twenty minutes, however, he did not come across a single issue containing Wu’s work, and he had to wait again. So he started reading something else. A collection of Bian Zilin’s poems. A brilliant Chinese modernist, Bian should have enjoyed much more recognition. There was a short one entitled “Fragment” Chen especially liked—” Looking at