Red Mandarin Dress

enthusiasm, in spite of all the politics.”
    “What pictures are you talking about?”
    “The pictures taken that fatal afternoon. A neighborhood cop, Comrade Fan, came to the scene. Suspecting foul play, he took pictures—at the foot of the staircase, before the medical people came to throw a blanket over her nude body.”
    “You mean a picture of her lying on the ground that afternoon—”
    “Yes, pictures of her lying there on the hard ground, cold, naked, as you may have imagined the scene in your mind thousands of times.”
    “But that’s impossible—I mean those pictures—Fan never told me about them. No, it’s not true. You are bluffing.”
    For the first time Jia didn’t bother to speak like an unrelated outsider, denying his part in the story.
    “Let me show you one,” Chen said, taking out a picture. “A small one. I’m having all of them developed and enlarged. A number of pictures.”
    It was a close-up of her lying on the ground, without a shred of clothes covering her body, an image Jia hadn’t looked back to see that afternoon, but which must have haunted him all these years.
    Grasping the picture in his hand, Jia didn’t question its authenticity.
    Again the turtle started floundering frantically in the pot, in a desperate effort to climb out, yet slipping off the slippery glass surface, repeatedly. An absurd, doomed effort.
    “It is horrible, isn’t it?” Chen said, raising his chopsticks toward the pot.
    Indeed it was, that scene under Jia’s gaze, not to mention the thought of its being examined anew by millions of readers.
    Unearthing a buried body was considered the most horrendous act in traditional Chinese culture, but displaying a dead naked body could be far worse. That was why Comrade Fan had withheld the pictures all these years. Still, it was likely Chen’s last card.
    “If the reporters were to get hold of them, together with those in the garden taken by the old photographer, and with the pictures at the crime scenes of the red mandarin dress case—”
    “Stop, Chen. It’s so despicably low,” Jia struggled to say, his voice hissing, as if coming out of the pot too. “It’s beneath you.”
    “To solve this case, nothing is really beneath a cop,” Chen said. “Now, let me say something about ‘despicably low.’ Something despicably low I initially encountered while working on my literature paper, as I’ve told you, about the deconstructive turns in classical love stories. As I’ve discovered, it’s at least partially because of the projection of a despicable male fantasy about women and sex—a fantasy archetypal in the unconscious of Chinese culture, or the collective unconscious, which I call the demonization of women in sexual love. It’s not a moment for literary theories, I know, but I want to say that you were possessed of it.”
    He lifted the grass lid from the pot, ladling out the soup into a bowl for Jia, and another bowl for himself.
    “When you were locked up in the back room of the neighborhood committee, your mother went to Comrade Fan. She was so worried about you. In desperation, she told him she was willing to do anything for your sake. Comrade Fan understood what she meant, but he declined, saying that Tian alone had the power to release you. To his regret, she took his advice. Not for one moment did Fan doubt that her concern for you was the cause of her being with Tian that afternoon. She did all that for you.
    “You might have thought about such a possibility, but you couldn’t bring yourself to accept it. In that dark back room, what sustained you was the unsullied memory of her taking your hand in the garden—‘Mother, Let’s Go There.’ The world had collapsed around you, but she’s still yours, yours alone.
    “So upon your return, the scene at home was absolutely appalling, an immaculate goddess shattering into a shameless slut in the arms of your persecutor. An unforgivable betrayal of you in your mind. It pushed you over the edge.
    “But you’re wrong. According to my investigation, Tian had gone out of his way to assign himself to the institute. Like others, he probably watched her perform and became smitten with passion. The Cultural Revolution gave him the opportunity. He worked his way into the Mao Team to be close to her, but she tried her best to avoid his company in spite of his power. If she had succumbed to his pressure, he wouldn’t have come to your neighborhood and led the joint investigation. He