Red Mandarin Dress

committee office is just across the lane, so I stepped in and told them of your difficulties.”
    “I guess you tried to oblige me,” she said, “and I am obliged. There is no free white bun falling from the blue sky, I know.”
    The black cat was moving back. She scooped it up and placed it on her lap, but it jumped down, ran onto the windowsill, where it curled itself against the windowpane.
    “No. Don’t worry about it. That’s what a cop should do.”
    “I have just a question for you. You are not going to use the picture at the expense of other people, are you? That was my old man’s worst nightmare.”
    “Let me tell you something, Auntie Kong,” he said, putting his hand on the wall, which felt sticky—perhaps from too much cooking in the room. “Earlier this afternoon, I was in the Jin’an Temple, where I made a pledge to Buddha: to be a good, conscientious cop. Believe it or not, shortly after making the pledge, I learned about the picture.”
    “I believe you, but is the picture really that important to you?”
    “It may throw light onto a homicide investigation, or I wouldn’t have come to you without notice.”
    “A picture taken almost thirty years ago is related to a murder case today?” She was incredulous.
    “At this moment, it is just a possibility, but we can’t afford not to check. Let me assure you: I don’t believe it has anything to do with you or your husband.”
    “If I still remember anything about that picture at all,” she started hesitantly, “it’s because of his passion for it. He used up all his vacation days for the project, working like one possessed. I even suspected that he had fallen for a shameless model.’ ”
    “A good artist has to throw himself totally into a project, I know. It takes a lot of energy to produce such a masterpiece.”
    “Well, she turned out to be a decent woman of a good family. And he joked about my imagination: ‘Me fall for her? No, it would be like a mud-colored toad watering its mouth at an immaculate white swan. I’m so excited because no photographer has approached her yet. For a photographer, it’s like discovering a gold mine.’ ”
    “Did he tell you how he discovered her?”
    “At a concert, I think. A violinist onstage. At first she refused to pose for him. It took him a couple of weeks to bring her around. She finally agreed on the condition that the picture be taken with her son. That gave him new inspiration—a mother and son instead of just a beautiful woman.”
    “She must have loved her son very much.”
    “I thought so too. Looking at the picture, people couldn’t help but be touched.”
    “Did he tell you her name?”
    “He must have, but I don’t remember it now.”
    “Do you know anything about the process of setting up the photo? For instance, the choice of the mandarin dress?”
    “Well, he raved about an oriental beauty, and about the mandarin dress bringing out the best in her, but she must have had the dress at home. He couldn’t have afforded it. Sorry, I don’t know whose idea it was to choose the dress.”
    “Where was the picture taken?”
    “She lived in a mansion. So it was probably taken in its back garden. He spent a whole day there, using up five or six rolls of film, and then spent a week in the darkroom, almost like a mole. He was so carried away that he brought all the pictures back home one night, asking me to choose one for him. For the competition.”
    “You chose the right one for him.”
    “But after it won the award, he began to be worried. Initially, he didn’t want to tell me why. I learned from newspaper clippings hidden in a drawer that the picture had become controversial. Some people were talking about the ‘political message’ in it.”
    “Yes, everything could be given political interpretations.”
    “And during the Cultural Revolution, he was mass-criticized for the picture. Chairman Mao said that some attack the Party through novels, so the Red Guards claimed that Kong had attacked the Party through the picture. Like other ‘monsters,’ he had to stand with a blackboard hung around his neck, and his name was crossed out on the blackboard.”
    “So many people suffered. My father, too, stood bent with such a blackboard.”
    “What’s more, some others compelled him to reveal the identity of the woman in the picture, and that upset him enormously.”
    “Who put the pressure on him?” he said. “Did he say anything?”
    “An organization of Worker