Red Mandarin Dress

onto the traffic snarl along Yan’an Road, if he failed to avenge her.
    He opened his briefcase for the folder on the red mandarin dress case. While at the vacation village, he managed not to touch it. But now as he took out the folder, to his astonishment, he saw his cell phone lying under it. Turned off, of course, but lying there all the time. Before he had left for vacation, he had decided not to carry it, he remembered clearly. How the phone had gotten into the briefcase, he had no recollection. There might be something in Freud’s argument about forgetting, but he decided not to worry about Freud.
    Checking through his phone messages he found that, in addition to the detailed messages left by Yu, Li and several senior officers had also called, repeatedly, urging him back to work. Even Old Hunter began fidgeting about his absence, leaving a message to the effect. A young cop had laid down her life in an effort to trap a serial murderer who struck out in defiance of the whole police force. It was a crisis beyond any that the bureau had experienced before.
    What’s more, they weren’t able to openly investigate. As in the Chinese proverb, they had to swallow the knocked-out tooth without spitting out the blood. Any public knowledge of the identity of the latest victim—killed in a messed-up decoy attempt—would not only spell the worst humiliation for the police but also send new waves of panic through the public.
    Although the identity of the victim still “remained unknown,” no one in the bureau believed that it would remain so for long. According to a message left by Yu, reporters were already suspicious. For the moment, Yu and his colleagues had even more serious worries. What would happen this week? No one had any doubt about it now. And no one believed that they could stop the killer in less than two days.
    Chen looked at his watch. It was close to ten. He decided not to go to the bureau or even, for the moment, to contact Yu.
    There was one thing in particular about the case that alarmed him. The devilish masterstroke—the whole Joy Gate episode, from the newspaper ad to the backdoor exit—could very possibly have been planned by the murderer from the first day of Hong’s work as a decoy. Everything had been arranged too perfectly. The more Chen thought about it, the more he suspected that the ad in the newspaper hadn’t come out of the blue. More likely, it was a countertrap set with the use of inside information.
    So whatever Chen was going to do, he would keep the bureau out of it. People talked about the chief inspector having lost himself in his literature paper, or having lost his guts in the serial murder case. Let them talk like that. He would continue to stay in the background.
    “Sorry, I’ve changed my mind,” he said to the driver. “Let’s go to the Joy Gate instead.”
    “Joy Gate? The cops raided it last week.”
    It was perhaps a well-meant caution. In his trench coat, with his bag and briefcase, Chen looked like a tourist interested in the must-see attraction of the city.
    “Yes, the Joy Gate.”
    He would do whatever was possible because he felt responsible for her death, more than anyone else in the bureau. If it weren’t for his vacation, he could have led the investigation and prevented her from going to the Joy Gate, or at least stayed with the cops outside.
    He took out the copy of Oriental Morning he had bought at the bus terminal. The newspaper had a picture of her lying spread-eagled in the cemetery, in a torn red mandarin dress, against the ruined tombstones. Underneath the picture was a couplet, “The apparition of her in a red mandarin dress, / Petals on a wet, black bough.”
    It read like a parody of an Imagist poem, but was poetry relevant at a moment when innocent people were dying, one after another?
    Finally emerging out of the traffic congestion, the car came in sight of the refurbished art deco facade of the Joy Gate.
    It might not be the time yet for regular customers to start arriving. There were only two or three people taking pictures in front of the building. Possibly journalists or plainclothes cops. He walked on in, keeping his head low. A middle-aged man sitting at the front desk didn’t even look at him.
    His colleagues would have combed the place already. He didn’t expect to find anything new. Still, he wanted to step inside, as if to establish a bond between the living and the dead.
    Moving up the marble staircase, he saw posters of