Death of a Red Heroine Read Free Page B

makings of a successful reporter. But at the moment she did not have her black leather briefcase in her hand. Instead, she held a huge pine nut cake in her arms.
    “Congratulations, Chief Inspector Chen,” she said. “What a spacious apartment!”
    “Thanks,” he said, taking the cake from her.
    He led her around for a five-minute tour. She seemed to like the apartment very much, looking into everything, opening the cupboard doors, and stepping into the bathroom, where she stood on her tiptoes, touching the overhead shower pipe and the new shower head.
    “And a bathroom, too!”
    “Well, like most Shanghai residents, I’ve always dreamed of having an apartment in this area,” he said, giving her a glass of sparkling wine.
    “And you have a wonderful view from the window, “ she said, “almost like a picture.”
    Wang stood leaning against the newly painted window frame, her ankles crossed, holding the glass in her hand.
    “ You are turning it into a painting,” he said.
    In the afternoon light streaming through the plastic blinds, her complexion was matte porcelain. Her eyes were clear, almond-shaped, just long enough to be suggestive of a distinct character. Her black hair cascaded halfway down her back. She wore a white T-shirt and a pleated skirt, with a wide belt of alligator leather that cinched her “emancipated wasp” waist and accentuated her breasts.
    Emancipated wasp. An image invented by Li Yu, the last emperor of the Southern Tang dynasty, also a brilliant poet, who depicted his favorite imperial concubine’s ravishing beauty in several celebrated poems. The poet-emperor was afraid that he might break her in two by holding her too tightly. It was said that the custom of foot-binding also started in Li Yu’s reign. There was no accounting for taste, Chen reflected.
    “What do you mean?” she asked.
    “ ‘Waist so slender, weightless she dances on my palm ,’” he said, changing the reference as he recalled the tragic end of the imperial concubine, who drowned herself in a well when the Southern Tang dynasty fell. “Du Mu’s famous line fails to do justice to you.”
    “More of your bogus compliments copied from the Tang dynasty, my poetic chief inspector?”
    This sounded more like the spirited woman he had first met in the Wenhui building, Chen was happy to note. It had taken quite a long while for her to get over the defection of her husband. A student in Japan, the man had decided not to return home when his visa expired. Wang had taken it hard, naturally.
    “Poetically alone,” he said.
    “With this new apartment, you no longer have an excuse to remain celibate.” She drained the glass with a toss of her long hair.
    “Well, introduce some girls to me.”
    “You need my help?”
    “Why not, if you are willing to help?” He tried to change the subject. “But how are things with you? About your own apartment, I mean. Soon you will get one for yourself, I bet.”
    “If only I were a chief inspector, a rising political star.”
    “Oh, sure,” he said, raising his cup, “many thanks to you.”
    But it was true, or at least to a certain extent.
    They had first met on a professional level. She had been assigned to write about the “people’s policemen,” and his name had been mentioned by Party Secretary Li of the Shanghai Police Bureau. As she talked with Chen in her office, she became more interested in how he spent his evenings than in how he did his day job. Chen had had several translations of Western mystery novels published. The reporter was not a fan of that particular genre, but she saw a fresh perspective for her article. And then the readers, too, responded favorably to the image of a young, well-educated police officer who “works late into night, translating books to enlarge the horizon of his professional expertise, when the city of Shanghai is peacefully asleep.” The article caught the attention of a senior vice minister in Beijing, Comrade Zheng Zuoren, who