Death of a Red Heroine

seeds.
    Life’s not fair to everybody, a fact Detective Yu had long accepted. Family background, for one thing, made a huge difference everywhere, though nowhere so much as in China in the nineties.
    But now Wu Xiaoming had committed a murder. Of that, Yu was convinced
    Staring up at the ceiling, Yu thought he could see exactly what had happened on the night of May tenth: Wu made the phone call, Guan came to his house, they had caviar and sex, then Wu strangled her, put her body in a plastic garbage bag, took it to the canal, and dumped it there . . .
    “Your chief inspector has a lot on his mind,” Peiqin said, cuddling against him.
    “Oh, you’re still awake?” he said, startled. “Yes, he does. The case is tough, involving some important people.”
    “Perhaps something else.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I’m a woman,” she said, her lips curving into a suggestion of smile. “You men do not notice things written on each other’s faces. A handsome chief inspector, and a well-published poet, too—he must be a highly eligible bachelor, but he looks lonely.”
    “You, too, have a soft spot for him?”
    “No. I already have such a wonderful husband.”
    He hugged her again.
    Before he fell asleep, he heard a faint sound near the door. He lay listening for a moment, and he remembered that several live crabs remained unsteamed in the pail there. They were no longer crawling on the sesame-covered bottom of the wooden pail. What he heard was the bubbles of crab froth, bubbles with which they moistened each other in the dark.

Chapter 20
    E arly the following morning, Detective Yu and Chief Inspector Chen arrived at the Shanghai office of Red Star. The magazine was housed in a Victorian building at the intersection between Wulumuqi and Huaihai Roads, one of the best locations in Shanghai. No wonder, Yu thought, considering its political influence. Red Star was the voice of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Every staff member working there seemed highly conscious of the prestige of his position.
    Sitting at a marble reception desk was a young girl in a neat polka-dot dress. Intent on her laptop, she did not stop vigorously punching at the keys on their arrival. The two police officers’ introductions made little impression on her. She told them that Wu was not in the office, without asking why they wanted to see him.
    “You must know where the Zhou Mansion is—the Wu Mansion nowadays, needless to say,” she said. “Wu is working at home today.”
    “Working at home?” Yu said.
    “At our magazine, it is not unusual.”
    “Everything at Red Star is unusual.”
    “Better call him first,” she said. “If you want, you can use our phone here.”
    “No, thanks,” Yu said. “We have our car phone.”
    Outside, there was no car waiting for them, let alone a car phone.
    “I could not stand it,” Yu grumbled. “She gave herself such airs.”
    “You’re right,” Chen said, “Better not to call Wu beforehand, so we can take him by surprise.”
    “Well, a surprised snake will bite back,” Yu said. “The Wu mansion on Henshan Road is not too far away. We can walk there.”
    They soon came to the midsection of Henshan Road, where the Wu Mansion stood looming behind high walls. Originally it had been owned by a tycoon surnamed Zhou. When the Communists took over in 1949, the Zhou family fled to Taiwan, and Wu Bing’s family moved in.
    The mansion and the area of Henshan Road around it was in a part of Shanghai Yu had never come to know, even though he had lived in the city for so long. Yu had been born and brought up in the lower end of Huangpu District, an area mainly inhabited by mid- and low-income families. When Old Hunter moved there in the early fifties, an era of communist egalitarianism, it was a district considered as good as any other in Shanghai. Like the other kids there, running in and out of those small lanes, playing games on the narrow cobblestone paths, Yu believed that he had everything possible in his neighborhood, though he knew that there were other better ones in Shanghai, where the streets were broader and the houses larger.
    In his high-school years, often after a day’s class of Chairman Mao’s Quotations , Yu would join a group of his schoolmates in their campaigns—roaming the various areas of the city. Sometimes they would also venture into stores, though they did not shop for anything. Occasionally they would end their excursion by treating