When Red is Black

tickets were sold out on the first day of the fourteen-day advance purchase period. The date on Wan’s ticket was February 18, which meant Wan could not possibly have obtained it after February 7 unless he had paid a ticket scalper a much higher price for it.
     
    Yu wanted to discuss this with Old Liang, but Liang did not return to the neighborhood committee office for lunch.
     
    Shortly afterward, Party Secretary Li called. The Party boss sounded very pleased with the latest development, for it meant the conclusion of Yin’s case as a simple homicide, with no suspicion falling on the government.
     
    “Great job, Comrade Detective Yu,” Li repeated over the phone.
     
    “This conclusion is too dramatic, too sudden, Party Secretary Li.”
     
    “I don’t find it surprising,” Li said. “You kept the pressure on, and Wan cracked. With enough fire burning under the pot, the pig’s head will be cooked to your satisfaction. You need not doubt that Wan killed Yin.”
     
    “But we put pressure on Cai, not on Wan.”
     
    “Wan stepped forward,” Li said slowly, “because he couldn’t endure the thought of an innocent man being punished in his stead.”
     
    “There are holes in Wan’s statement, Party Secretary Li. We cannot depend on a so-called confession like this,” Yu said. “At least, I need to get some questions answered first.”
     
    “We cannot afford to wait too much longer, Comrade Detective Yu. A press conference will be held early next week, Monday or Tuesday, no later than that. It’s time to end all the irresponsible speculation surrounding Yin’s death.”
     
    * * * *
     

Chapter 17
     
     
    C
    hen finished the first draft of his translation of the New World proposal into English. He was amazed at his own speed, though the job was still far from complete: he would have to spend more time polishing and revising before it would be presentable.
     
    It proved to be a good day for the murder investigation, too. Though it came as a surprise that Wan had turned himself in, it looked like a plausible solution as well as an acceptable one.
     
    Yu was still so full of misgivings that Chen did not even try to share with him some half-formed ideas of his own. After all, a lot of things in the process of writing, or leading to publication, seemingly inexplicable to others, could turn out to be significant, if only to the writer himself.
     
    In the late eighties, when Chen, a published poet with some renown in literary circles, had suddenly started translating mysteries, no one knew why. But it was because of a Beijing roast duck—at least partially because of it, he recalled. That duck turned out to cost more than he had in his pocket at the end of a wonderful dinner, in the company of a friend who liked his poetry so much that she snatched the bill with her slender fingers. It was a humiliating lesson about money—which, as he happened to discover through that friend, came much quicker from mystery translations than from poetry. But a few years later, when another friend of his published an interview about him in Wenhui Daily, she claimed that he did the translations to “enlarge the horizon of his professional expertise.”
     
    So those mysterious abbreviations in the margins of Yang’s manuscript could have referred to anything; “ch” might stand for a chicken, for all Chen knew. The uneven quality of Yin’s writing noticed by Peiqin could be just another of the mysteries of a creative mind. Chen had not written novels, but he guessed that a novelist might not be able to keep up the same intensity of creativity in a long work as in a short poem. He could never explain how he was capable of producing a horribly poor poem after penning a fairly decent one.
     
    So all these hypotheses, including his own theory regarding the murderer’s hiding for fear of recognition, were nothing but hypotheses, which did not weigh much, and were eventually irrelevant, if Wan had committed the murder as he had confessed. His motive might not make sense to someone else; it was enough if it had made sense to him.
     
    The bottom line was, as Chen had realized from the beginning, there are things a man can do, and things a man cannot do. That was also applicable to being a cop, in the present case.
     
    He considered giving himself a break that evening, in the company of White Cloud. It might be an opportunity to find out more about Gu, and about the New World project.
     
    He suggested a dinner at