When Red is Black

patches. As he touched the quilt, he felt its stiffness. The pillow, without a cover, was relatively white in contrast to the quilt.
     
    He turned to the desk drawers. The top drawer contained receipts from various stores, blank envelopes, and a travel magazine. The second drawer held notebooks, a notepad, a pile of paper, and a bunch of letters, several of them bearing addresses in English. The contents of the third appeared more mixed: a small assortment of costume jewelry—perhaps souvenirs from her Hong Kong trip; a Shanghai watch with a leather strap; and a necklace of some exotic animal bone.
     
    The contents of the wardrobe confirmed his expectation. The clothes were dull in color, conventional in design, and most of them inexpensive, out of fashion. There was a new wool dress, however, that might not have been expensive but was of quite decent quality.
     
    On the bookshelf were Chinese and English dictionaries; a set of Han History; Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping; copies of Death of a Chinese Professor; and copies of Selected Poems of Yang Bing. In addition, he saw a pile of old magazines, some from the forties and fifties, with bookmarks sticking out of their pages.
     
    He also found an old-fashioned album with black paper pages bearing tiny aluminum photo holders shaped like stars. On the first few pages, most of the pictures were black and white. A couple of them showed Yin as a little girl with a ponytail. Then color photos appeared showing Yin with a red scarf—a Young Pioneer saluting the five-starred flag on her school campus. In a hand-colored picture, she stood happily in People’s Square, between a white-haired man and a small thin woman: her parents, presumably.
     
    He turned to a large picture, which must have been taken in 1967 or 1968, in the early years of the Cultural Revolution. Wearing a red armband, Yin stood on a stage delivering a speech, with high-ranking government officials seated in a row behind her in front of a red velvet curtain. She was a Red Guard representative at a national conference of college students but, despite her political importance, she looked more like an inexperienced girl. Hers was not exactly a young face, though animated with youthful passion. She bore a striking resemblance to a Red Guard poster he had seen. The next few pages recorded the most glorious moments of her political career. One photo showed her sitting together with top Party leaders at a conference held within the Forbidden City.
     
    Then there seemed to be a blank. It was not that pictures were missing from the pages, but that there was an abrupt change from a young Red Guard to a middle-aged woman framed in the doorway of a cadre school. It was as if she had aged twenty years with the turning of a single page.
     
    Closing the album, Detective Yu realized that it was time for his appointment with the neighborhood committee.
     
    That committee had once functioned as an extension of the district police office, responsible for everything outside people’s “work units”: arranging weekly political study, checking the number of the people living in a house, running day-care centers, allocating birth quotas, arbitrating disputes among neighbors and, most important, keeping close watch over the residents. The committee was authorized to report on each and every individual, and that report would be included with the confidential information in a police dossier, enabling the state to maintain effective background surveillance on every person.
     
    In recent years, the neighborhood committee, like other institutions, had undergone dramatic changes, but neighborhood security remained one of its main concerns. The committee must have kept a close eye on someone like Yin. It might also have information about other suspicious people in the house.
     
    To Detective Yu’s surprise, when he reached the office, he saw that a working lunch had been arranged by Old Liang. Six plastic lunch boxes containing three-yellow-chicken meals had been arranged down the center of the long desk; in addition to Yu and Old Liang, there were four committee members present, holding their chopsticks.
     
    “The three-yellow-chicken is not bad—yellow feathers, yellow beak, yellow feet. Pudong-bred, home-raised, a world of difference from those in the modern chicken farms,” Old Liang said, raising his chopsticks.
     
    Comrade Zhong Hanmin, the neighborhood security head, proposed a theory about the murder. It