When Red is Black

slippers which she must have brought with her. Quite a considerate girl too: she’d realized it would be best to walk about without making noise.
     
    He started working on the laptop. The keyboard action was much lighter than the typewriter’s, like her soft-footed step.
     
    Every movement of hers seemed still to be registering on his subconscious, even when she was busy in the kitchen area. It was hard for him not to think of her as the K girl he had met in the private karaoke room at the Dynasty Club, or to remember the way Gu had referred to her as a little secretary—though, in a different environment, people could appear to be very different.
     
    She’s a temporary assistant for a project, he reminded himself.
     
    In one of the Zen lessons he had read, the master said solemnly, It is not the banner moving, nor the wind blowing, but your own heart jumping.
     
    As he reentered into the computer what he had previously translated on the typewriter, he took a sip of the coffee, which was fragrant, strong, though now lukewarm. She brought over the coffee pot again to refill his cup.
     
    “I have something else for you to do today,” he said, giving her the list he had prepared the previous night. “Please go to the Shanghai Library and borrow these books for me.”
     
    It was not exactly an excuse to send her away. These books should be able to tell him something about the splendors of old Shanghai. He needed to know more about the history of the city.
     
    “I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” she said, “just in time to make lunch for you.”
     
    “I’m afraid you are doing too much for me. It reminds me of a line by Daifu,” he said, trying to be ironic since he did not know what other pose to strike. “It’s the hardest thing to receive favors from a beauty.”
     
    “Oh, Chief Inspector Chen, you are as romantic as Daifu!”
     
    “I’m joking,” he said. “A pack of Chef Kang instant noodles will do for me.”
     
    “No, that won’t do,” she said, pulling on her street shoes. “Not for Mr. Gu. He will fire me.”
     
    There appeared to be a small tattoo, like a colorful butterfly, above her slender ankle. He did not remember having seen that in the Dynasty Club. He tried to get back to his translation work. After Li’s phone call, however, there was something else on his mind. He did not agree with Li, yet he kept thinking of the fact that Detective Yu, alone, was handling the murder case of a dissident writer. It seemed to Chen that a number of Chinese writers had been labeled as “dissidents” for reasons that were hardly plausible.
     
    For example, there were the so-called “misty” poets, a group of young people that had come to the fore in the late seventies. They did not really write about politics; what made them different from the others was their preference for difficult or “misty” images. For one reason or another, they had a hard time having their poems published in the official magazines, so they started publishing an underground magazine. That got the attention of Western sinologists, who praised their works to the skies, focusing on any conceivable political interpretation. Soon the misty poets became internationally known, which was a slap in the face for the Chinese government. As a result, the misty poets were labeled “dissident” poets.
     
    Might he himself have become a dissident writer had he not been assigned, upon graduation from Beijing Foreign Language University, to a job in the Shanghai Police Bureau? At that time, he had published some poems, and a few critics even described his work as modernist. Police work was a career he had never dreamed of. His mother had termed it fate although, in the Buddhist religion she believed in, there was no particular deity in charge of fate.
     
    It was almost like a surrealistic poem he had read, in which a boy picked up a stone at random and threw it carelessly into the valley of red dust. There the stone had turned into . . . Chief Inspector Chen?
     
    Around one o’clock, he received a phone call from Detective Yu.
     
    “What’s the news?”
     
    “We have found her safe deposit box. Two thousand Yuan, and about the same amount in American dollars, were all that was in it.”
     
    “Well, that’s not very much for a lockbox.”
     
    “And a manuscript,” Yu said, “that is, something like a manuscript.”
     
    “What do you mean? Another book?”
     
    “Perhaps. It is in