Death of a Red Heroine

would never give you a break all night. What is worse, some snore thunderously. So instead of sharing the room with a stranger, Guan and I decided it might be a good idea to share a room between ourselves.”
    “So the two of you stayed in the same hotel room during the trip?”
    “Yes, we did.”
    “So you knew her inside out,” Chen cut in, “knowing that she would keep her mouth shut when you were in no mood to listen, and that she slept sweetly, never snoring or tossing about in bed. Vice versa, of course.”
    “No, Comrade Chief Inspector,” Wu said, tapping his cigarette lightly over the ashtray. “It’s not what you might think.”
    “What do we think?” Yu detected the first slight sign of discomfort in Wu’s voice. “Tell me, Comrade Wu Xiaoming.”
    “Well, it was all Guan’s idea,” Wu said. “To be honest, there’s a more important reason why she wanted us to register as a couple. It was to save money. The travel agency gave a huge discount to couples. A promotional gimmick. Buy one and get the second at half price.”
    “But the fact was that you shared the room,” Yu said, “as man and woman.”
    “Yes, as man and woman, but not as what you are implying.”
    “You stayed with a young, pretty woman in the same hotel room for a whole week,” Yu said, “without having sex with her. Is that what you’re telling us?”
    “It surely reminds me of Liu Xiawei,” Chen cut in. “Oh, what a perfect gentleman!”
    “Who is Mr. Liu Xiawei?” Yu said.
    “A legendary figure during the Spring and Autumn War Period, about two thousand years ago. Liu once held a naked woman in his arms for a night, it is said, without having sex with her. Confucius had a very high opinion of Liu, for it’s against Confucian rules to have sex with any woman except one’s wife.”
    “You don’t have to tell me these stories,” Wu said. “Believe it or not, what I’m telling you is the truth. Nothing but the truth.”
    “How could the travel agency have permitted you to share a room?” Yu said. “They are very strict about that. You must show your marriage license, I mean. Or they will lose their own business license.”
    “Guan insisted on it, so I managed to get some identification materials for us.”
    “How did you manage that?”
    “I took a piece of paper with the company’s letterhead on it. I typed a short statement to the effect that we were married. That’s all. We did not have to show a marriage license. Those travel agencies are after profits, so such a statement is enough for them.”
    “It is a crime to fabricate a legal document.”
    “Come on, Comrade Detective Yu. Just a few words on an office letterhead, and you call it a legal document? A lot of people do it every day.”
    “It’s nonetheless illegal,” Chen said.
    “You can talk to my boss if you want. I did play a little trick, using a piece of paper with the official letterhead. It’s wrong, I admit. But you cannot arrest me for that, can you?”
    “Guan was a national model worker, a Party member with high political consciousness, and an attendant at our Party’s Tenth National Congress,” Yu said. “And you want us to believe she did it just to save a couple of hundred Yuan?”
    “And at the cost of sharing herself, an unmarried woman,”
    Chen added, “with a married man for a whole week.” “I’ve been trying my best to cooperate with you, comrades,”
    Wu said, “but if all you want is to bluff, show me your warrant. You can take me to the bureau.”
    “It’s an important case, Comrade Wu Xiaoming,” Chen said, “We have to investigate everyone related to Guan.”
    “But that’s all I can tell you. I took a trip to the mountains in her company. It did not mean anything. Not in the nineties.”
    “It’s definitely more than that,” Yu said. “Now, what is your explanation for your phone call to her on the night she was murdered?”
    “The night she was murdered?”
    “Yes, May tenth.”
    “May tenth, uh, let me think. Sorry, I cannot remember anything about the phone call. Every day I make a lot of calls, sometimes more than twenty or thirty. I cannot remember a particular call on a particular day.”
    “We’ve checked with the Shanghai Telecommunications Bureau. The record shows that the last call Guan got was from your number. At nine thirty P.M. on May tenth.”
    “Well, it’s possible, I think. We did talk about taking another set of pictures. So I might have called