Red Mandarin Dress

bought a DVD, Random Harvest , from the novel you like. Yu told me about your days in the park.”
    “Thank you, Peiqin. It’s so thoughtful of you. I can’t wait to watch it.” Chen added, “When Yu gets home, tell him to call me—oh, and to bring the movie over to me at his convenience.”

SEVEN
    CHEN WOKE UP DISORIENTED , as if still floundering in a sea of thoughts.
    With the second body found in the center of the city, with the media clamoring like cicadas in the early summer, he had to do something to help. He owed that to Yu. And to Hong too, who had kept him updated with the latest developments, smiling a radiant smile in spite of Liao’s grouchiness.
    Having reviewed all the measures taken by his colleagues, however, Chen concluded he could hardly do any more than they, at least not as an “outside consultant.” He was still too much engaged with his paper. Running an investigation could be like writing a paper; ideas come with undivided concentration.
    A bitter taste returned to his mouth. Brushing his teeth vigorously, he was struck with an idea—Peiqin’s idea. He happened to know Shen, the authority on the history of Chinese clothing.
    Shen had been a poet in the forties, writing in a then-fashionable Imagist style. After 1949, he was assigned a job at the Shanghai Museum, where he denounced his earlier poetry as decadent and threw himself into the study of ancient Chinese clothing. Probably a neck-saving choice in the deteriorating political climate of the mid-fifties. As in Tao De Jing , misfortune leads to fortune. Because of his abrupt disappearance from the literary scene, the young Red Guards in the mid-sixties failed to recognize him as a “bourgeois poet,” and he was spared the humiliations and persecutions. In the eighties, he reemerged with a multivolume work on the history of ancient Chinese clothing, which was translated into several foreign languages, and he became an “internationally known authority.” The literary scene was busy with new voices and faces and few remembered him as a poet anymore.
    Chen would not have remembered him either but for a meeting with a British sinologist who raved about Shen’s earlier literary work. Chen was impressed by a short poem about Shen’s early days:
    Pregnant, happy / for the coming baby / who’ll be able to be / a Shanghainese, his wife’s touching / the blue veins streaking / her breasts, like—//the mountain ranges / against the pale clouds the day / he left, his grandmother / stumbling after him / in her bound feet, putting / a chunk of the soil /in his hand, saying, / “It—(a mutilated earthworm / wriggled out of the lump)—will / bring you back.”
    As an executive member of the Writers’ Association, Chen took it upon himself to arrange for a reprint of Shen’s collection. It was not an easy job. The old man was nervous about poetry, like a man once bitten by a snake, and the publisher, hesitant about possible financial loss, was like a man in fear of a snake. Still, the collection came out and was caught up in the city’s collective nostalgia. People were pleased to rediscover a poetic witness of those golden years before the revolution. A young critic pointed out that the American Imagist poets were indebted to classical Chinese poetry and that Shen, labeled an Imagist, was actually restoring the ancient tradition. The article appealed to a group of “new nationalists,” and the collection sold fairly well.
    Chen took out his address book and dialed Shen’s number.
    “A gentleman’s request I cannot refuse,” Shen agreed, quoting from Confucius. “But I have to take a look at the mandarin dress.”
    “No problem. I’m not in the bureau today, but you can talk to Detective Yu, or to Inspector Liao. Either of them will show you the dress.”
    He then informed Yu of Shen’s visit. As Chen expected, Yu was pleased with the unexpected help, promising to show the dress to the historian. At the end of their call, Chen added, “Oh, it’s so thoughtful of Peiqin—she had the copy of Random Harvest specially delivered to me. I’ve been looking for that movie for a long time.”
    “Yes, she’s been watching a lot of DVDs, trying to find clues there.”
    “Anything new?”
    “No, nothing so far, but the DVDs might give her a break from her job.”
    “You’re right about that,” Chen said, though he didn’t really think so. It was like his reading for the last two weeks. Once he took it seriously—as