Red Mandarin Dress Read online

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  FICTION

  Death of a Red Heroine

  A Loyal Character Dancer

  When Red Is Black

  A Case of Two Cities

  POETRY TRANSLATION

  Treasury of Chinese Love Poems

  Evoking Tang: An Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry

  POETRY

  Lines Around China

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Sceptre

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette Livre UK company

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  RED MANDARIN DRESS. Copyright © 2007 by Qiu Xiaolong. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  The texts quoted in chapter 19 were translated by James Legge, slightly modified by the author.

  Epub ISBN 978 1 848 94655 2

  Book ISBN 978 0 34093 518 7

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NWl 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To my elder brother, Xiaowei—

  but for luck, what happened to him during the

  Cultural Revolution could have happened to me.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As with other books, I have a long list of people to thank for their help, among whom, particularly, Lin Huiying, a celebrated mandarin dress designer in Shanghai, for her expert lessons; Patricia Mirrlees, a friend I met twenty years ago in Beijing, for her continuing support after all these years; and Keith Kahla, my editor at St. Martin’s Press, for his extraordinary work.

  PROLOGUE

  RUNNING ALONG WEST HUAIHAI Road, his breath foggy under the fading stars, Worker Master Huang counted himself as one of the earliest birds in Shanghai. In his mid-seventies, he still ran with vigorous steps. After all, health could be more valuable than anything else, he thought proudly, wiping away the sweat on his forehead. For those sickly Big Bucks, what could all the gold and silver mountains in their backyards possibly mean?

  But there was little else for a retired worker like Huang to pride himself on now, in the mid-nineties, as the materialistic transformation was sweeping over the city.

  Huang had seen better days. A model worker in the sixties, a Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team member during the Cultural Revolution, a neighborhood security in the eighties—in short, a onetime “worker master” of the politically glorious working class in China.

  Now he was nobody. A retiree of a nearly bankrupt state-run steel mill, he had a hard time making ends meet on his ever-shrinking pension. Even the title “Worker Master” sounded ironically rusty in the Party newspapers.

  “Socialist China gone to capitalist dogs.” The refrain from recent doggerel came back to his mind, as if in a counter rhythm to his steps. Everything was changing fast, beyond comprehension.

  His jogging was changing too. In the past, running in the starlit solitude, few vehicles visible, he had enjoyed the feeling of the city pulsing along with him. Now at this early hour, he was aware of cars driving around, occasionally honking too, and of a crane cranking in a new construction site one block ahead. It was said to be an upper-class apartment complex for the newly rich.

  Not too far away, his old shikumen-style house, where he had been living along with a dozen working-class families, was about to be pulled down for a commercial high-rise. Soon the residents were going to be relocated to Pudong, an area that was once farmland east of the Huangpu River. After that there would be no possibility of a morning jog along this familiar street, in the center of the city. Nor could he enjoy a bowl of soy soup served by the Worker and Farmer Eatery around the corner. The steaming hot soup flavored with chopped green onion, dried shrimp, minced fried dough, and purple seaweed—so delicious, yet only five cents. The cheap eatery, once advocated “for its dedication to the working-class people,” had disappeared, and now in its place stood a Starbucks coffee shop.

  Perhaps he was too old to understand the change. Huang sighed, his steps growing heavy, his eyelids twitching ominously. Near the intersection of Huaihai and Donghu Roads, the sight of the safety island further slowed him down. It had looked like a flower bed in the spring, but now so barren, brown with bare twigs trembling in the wind—bleak, like his mind.

  There he glimpsed an alien object, red and white, in the pale ring of the island lamplight—possibly something dropped from a farm truck on its way to the nearby food market. The white part looked like a long lotus root, sticking out of a sack made of what might be old red flags. He had heard stories about farmers putting everything to use, even those five-starred flags. He had also heard that lotus root slices filled with sticky rice had recently become popular in high-end restaurants.

  Taking two steps toward the island, he came to a halt, shocked.

  What he had taken as a white lotus root turned into a shapely human leg glistening with dewdrops. Nor was it a sack, but a red mandarin dress that encased the body of a young woman, probably in her early twenties. Her face already appeared waxy.

  Squatting down, he tried to examine the body. The dress was lifted up, high above her waist, her thighs and groin shining obscenely under the ghastly light. The dress slits torn, several double-fish-shaped bosom buttons unbuttoned, her breast peeping out. Barefoot and bare-legged, she wore nothing under the tight-fitting dress.

  He touched the girl’s ankle. Cold. No pulse. Her pink-painted toenails still somehow petallike. How long she had been lying there dead? He pulled the dress down over her thighs. The dress itself, sort of a stylish one, seemed inexplicable. Originally worn by the Manchurian, a ruling ethnic minority group during the Qing dynasty, hence it became so trendy in the thirties that people took it as the national dress without caring about its ethnic origin. After its disappearance during the Cultural Revolution as a symbol of the bourgeois lifestyle, it had staged a surprising comeback among the rich in recent years. But he had never seen anyone wearing it like that—without panties or shoes.

  He spat on the ground three times, a superstitious ritual against the rotten luck.

  Who could have chosen to dump a body here in the morning? A sex murder, he concluded.

  It occurred to him to report the crime to the police. But it was still too early. There was no public phone service available. Looking around, he saw a light flickering, distantly, across the street. It came from the Shanghai Music Institute. He started shouting for help.

  “Murder! Red mandarin dress murder!”

  ONE

  CHIEF INSPECTOR CHEN CAO, of the Shanghai Police Bureau, was startled out of his dream by an early phone call.

  Rubbing his eyes, as he snatched up the receiver, he saw the clock on the nightstand pointing to seven thirty. He had stayed up late last night writing a letter to a friend in Beijing, quoting a Tang dynasty poet, to say what he found difficult to say in his own words. Afterward, he managed to lose himself in a dream of the heartless Tang willows lined along the deserted bank in a light green mist.

  “Hello, I am Zhong Baoguo, of the Shanghai Legal System Reform Committee. Is this Comrade Chief Inspector Chen?”

  Chen sat up. That particular committee, a new institution under the Shanghai People’s Congress, exercised no direct authority over him, but Zhong, higher in the Party cadre rank, had never contacted him before, let alone called him at home. The fragments o
f the willow-shaded dream were fading quickly.

  It could be one of those “politically sensitive” cases, preferably not discussed at the bureau. Chen detected a bitter taste in his mouth.

  “Have you heard of the West-Nine-Block housing development case?”

  “The West-Nine-Block? Yes, Peng Liangxin’s development—one of the best areas in the center of the city. I have read articles about it.”

  In China’s ongoing reform, some of the most unbelievable business opportunities were in housing development. In the past, with all the land controlled by the state, people had depended on the state housing assignment. Chen, too, had been assigned a room through the bureau quota. But in the early nineties, the government started selling land to emerging entrepreneurs. Peng—nicknamed the Number One Shanghai Big Buck—was one of the earliest and most successful developers. Since Party officials determined the land prices and allocation, corruption swarmed around like flies chasing blood. Through his connections, Peng obtained government approval for the West-Nine-Block development project. There, the old buildings had to be pulled down to make way for the new, and Peng drove out the original residents. It did not take long, however, for people to start complaining about the “black holes” in the business operation, and a scandal broke out.

  But what could Chen do? Obviously, for a huge project like West-Nine-Block, a number of officials were involved. It could turn into a major case with disastrous political impact. Damage control, he guessed, would probably be the assignment waiting for him.

  “Yes, we think you should look into the case. Especially into the attorney, Jia Ming, who represents those residents.”

  “Jia Ming?” Chen was even more puzzled. He did not know any details about the corruption case. He had heard of Jia as a successful attorney, but why should an attorney be the target? “Is he the attorney who defended the case for Hu Ping, the dissident writer?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Director Zhong, I am so sorry. I am afraid I cannot help with your case.” He promptly came up with an excuse, instead of saying a straightforward no. “I have just enrolled in a special MA program at Shanghai University. Classical Chinese literature. The first few weeks are for intensive studies—I’ll have no time for anything else.”

  More than merely an improvised excuse, it was something he had contemplated for some time. Technically, he wasn’t yet enrolled, but he had made preliminary inquiries at the university about it.

  “You are kidding, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen. What about your police work? Classical Chinese literature. Not in the line of your job at all. Are you looking for a new career?”

  “Literature used to be my major—English literature. To be a competent investigator in today’s society, one has to acquire as much knowledge as possible. This program includes psychology and sociology courses.”

  “Well, it’s desirable to enlarge your knowledge horizon, but I just don’t think you have the time in your position.”

  “It’s a sort of special arrangement,” Chen said. “Only a few weeks of intensive study—in classrooms like other students, and then nothing but papers. After that, the curriculum will be arranged in a way compatible with my work schedule.” It was not exactly true. According to the program brochure he had picked up, the intensive weeks did not have to be now.

  “I was hoping I could persuade you. A leading comrade in the city government suggested I talk to you today.”

  “I’ll pay close attention to the case in whatever way possible,” Chen said, meaning it as a face-saving comment for Zhong. He did not want Zhong to talk about the “leading comrade,” whoever he might be.

  “That’s great. I’ll have the case file sent to you,” Zhong said, taking the comment as a concession from the chief inspector.

  Afterward, Chen thought in frustration that he should have said no unequivocally.

  After hanging up with Zhong, Chen realized he needed to find out as much as he could about the West-Nine-Block case. He immediately started making phone calls, and his gut feeling that this was an investigation to avoid proved to be right.

  Peng Liangxin, the real estate developer, had started out as a dumpling peddler, but he displayed extraordinary expertise in building a connection network. He knew when and where to push red envelopes of money into the hands of the Party officials. In return, the Party had helped him push himself into a billionaire in only four or five years. He acquired the West-Nine-Block land with numerous bribes and a business plan for improving conditions for the residents there. Then, with the government document granting him the land, he obtained the necessary bank loans to build the development without having to spend a single penny of his own. He bullied the residents out with little or no compensation. The few resisting families he called “nail families,” and he pulled them out forcibly, like nails, by hiring a group of Triad thugs. Several residents were badly beaten in a so-called “demolition campaign.” What’s more, instead of allowing the original residents to move back in as promised in his development proposal, he started selling the new apartments at a much higher price to buyers from Taiwan and Hong Kong. When people protested, he again enlisted the help of the local Triad, as well as that of the government officials. Several residents were jailed as troublemakers interfering with the development plan of the city. But as more and more people joined the protest, the government felt compelled to step in.

  According to one source, Peng got into trouble more or less because of his nickname. There were many rich people in the city, some possibly even richer, but they managed to keep a low profile. Suffering from a swollen head due to his incredibly fast success, he delighted in people calling him the Number One Big Buck in Shanghai. As the gap between the rich and the poor increased, people voiced their frustration with the widespread corruption, and with Peng as a representative of it. As a Chinese proverb says, a bird reaching out its head will be shot.

  The situation grew more complicated when the prominent attorney Jia Ming chose to speak for the residents. With his legal expertise, Jia soon uncovered more abuses in the fraudulent business operation, in which not just Peng but also his government associates were deeply involved. The case started to be widely reported, and the city government began to worry about it getting out of control. Peng was put into custody, and an open and fair trial was promised soon.

  Chen frowned, picking up another fax page from his machine. The new fax claimed that Internal Security agents had been investigating Jia in secret. If they could find a way to get Jia in trouble, the corruption case would fall apart, but their efforts met with no success.

  Chen crumbled the page into a ball and considered himself lucky for having come up with an excuse. At least he could still say he made no commitment because of the special MA program.

  And an opportunity did present itself in the special program designed for rising Party cadres, who were supposedly too busy with more important work and were thus allowed to obtain a higher degree in a much shorter period of time.

  There was also something else in it for Chen. By all appearances, he had been sailing smoothly in his career. He was one of the youngest chief inspectors on the force and the most likely candidate to succeed Party Secretary Li Guohua as the number one Party official at the Shanghai Police Bureau. Still, such a career had not been his choice, not back in his college years. In spite of his success as a police officer—no less surprising to himself than to others—and despite having several “politically important cases” to his credit, he felt increasingly frustrated with his job. A number of the cases had had results contrary to a cop’s expectations.

  Confucius says, There are things a man will do, and things a man will not do. Only there was no easy guideline for him in such a transitional, topsy-turvy age. The program might enable him, he reflected, to think from a different perspective.

  So that morning he decided to visit Professor Bian Longhua of Shanghai University. The program had been an improvised excuse in his talk with Zhong, but it did
not have to be so.

  On the way there, he bought a Jinhua ham wrapped in the special tung paper, following a tradition as early as Confucius’s time. The sage would not have taken money from his students, but he showed no objection to their gifts, such as hams and chickens. Only the ham proved to be too cumbersome for Chen to carry onto a bus, so he was obliged to call for a bureau car. Waiting in the ham store, he made several more phone calls about the housing development case, and the calls made him even more determined to avoid getting involved.

  Little Zhou drove up sooner than Chen expected. A bureau driver who declared himself “Chief Inspector Chen’s man,” Little Zhou would spread the news of Chen’s visit to Bian around. It might be just as well, Chen thought, beginning to mentally rehearse his talk with the professor.

  Bian lived in a three-bedroom apartment in a new complex. It was an expensive location, unusual for an intellectual. Bian himself opened the door for Chen. A medium-built man in his mid-seventies, with silver hair shining against a ruddy complexion, Bian looked quite spirited for his age, and for his life experience. A young “rightist” in the fifties, a middle-aged “historical counterrevolutionary” during the Cultural Revolution, and an old “intellectual model” in the nineties, Bian had clung to his literature studies like a life vest all those years.

  “This is far from enough to show my respect to you, Professor Bian,” Chen said, holding up the ham. He then tried to find a place to put it down, but the new expensive furniture appeared too good for the ham wrapped in the oily tung paper.

  “Thank you, Chief Inspector Chen,” Bian said. “Our dean has talked to me about you. Considering your workload, we have just decided that you don’t have to sit in the classroom like other students, but you still have to turn in your papers on time.”

  “I appreciate the arrangement. Of course I’ll hand in papers like other students.”