Red Mandarin Dress Read online

  “Who would want to stay in a hotel room here with the earsplitting music and noise coming up all night?” Yu said.

  “Well, it’s in a good location,” Liao said. “Some of the guests may come down to dance, and bring a girl up to their rooms afterward.”

  Both the ballroom and the hotel guests had to come in and out the front entrance on Huashan Road. There was a video camera already installed over the front entrance so they didn’t have to worry about putting up one there.

  When they moved back into the service van, Hong and several officers joined them. They made plans for what they were going to do that evening.

  Hong would go into the second floor ballroom, wearing a pink mandarin dress and carrying a mini cell phone specially programmed. If she touched one button, the cops outside would be on high alert, and another button, the cops outside would rush in. She had practiced Shaolin martial arts at the police academy so she should be able to cope with an unexpected situation, at least long enough to contact her colleagues in time. She was also supposed to call them at regular intervals, though she preferred not to, lest people find it suspicious.

  Sergeant Qi would go in with her, pretending to be a customer who did not know her. He would stay in the ballroom at all times, in constant contact with the other officers, and with the dual responsibility of covering her and looking out for anything suspicious.

  They also had two cops stationed outside the ballroom on the second floor. They would take turns sitting on the sofa close to the entrance, like a customer taking a break there. Their responsibility was to watch for Hong’s exit, either in the company of someone, or alone.

  That evening, the third floor was hardly a possibility. It was inconceivable that the murderer would approach a Russian girl who couldn’t speak Chinese, and who was onstage too. At Li’s insistence, however, they also had a plainclothes officer on the third floor.

  Finally, they put several more people around the building entrance on Huashan Road. One was disguised as a newspaper man selling the evening newspaper, another as a flower girl, and still another, a photographer soliciting tourists for instant pictures there.

  Yu and Liao stayed in the van outside the Joy Gate, each listening with a headset, waiting, like two toy soldiers, motionless, imagining all the disaster scenarios.

  The first half hour passed uneventfully. Still too early, Yu guessed, looking out at the Joy Gate. To his surprise, he saw a young mother kneeling on the sidewalk close to the entrance of the dancehall, shivering in her threadbare clothes, her hair disheveled, holding a seven- or eight-month-old baby in her arms, kowtowing on a written statement spread out on the pavement. Beside the mother and her baby was a broken bowl containing several coins. People went in and out of the Joy Gate without looking at them. Not one of them threw down any money.

  The city was breaking into two, one for the rich, and one for the poor. A tip for a dance could have kept the woman and her baby fed and sheltered for a day. Yu thought about stepping out with some coins in his hand, but a patroller came over and drove the woman away.

  Sergeant Qi kept reporting from inside, “Everything is fine.” Yu could also hear Qi whistling, occasionally, like a pro, with the music rising and falling in the background. “When Are You Coming Again, My Dear,” a melody Yu recognized as one of the most popular ones in the thirties.

  Hong contacted them only once, “I’ve had several invitations.”

  Outside the van, the lights gradually turned on and more customers went into the Joy Gate in high spirits. In the thirties, Shanghai had been called a “nightless city.”

  Around eight forty-five, there came a period of silence. About twenty minutes. Liao checked with Qi, who explained it as a false alarm. Seven or eight minutes ago, Qi lost sight of Hong in the ballroom. He started looking around and saw her sitting with a drink in a recess of the small bar. As he also had to watch the whole scene, he sat himself at a table where he could watch both the bar and the ballroom.

  “Don’t worry,” Qi said. “I am keeping everything in sight.”

  Then came another short period of silence. Yu lit a cigarette for Liao and then another for himself. Li called them, the third time in the evening. The Party Secretary didn’t try to conceal his uneasiness.

  After ten minutes or so, Qi called them, reporting in a panic-stricken voice that the woman in the bar, though in a mandarin dress too, turned out not to be Hong.

  Yu dialed her cell phone, but she didn’t pick up. The noise inside could be too loud for her to hear it ring. Liao tried as well, two or three times more. Still no response. Liao then talked to those stationed outside the building. They reported no sign of her exit, either, declaring they would not have missed her in her pink mandarin dress.

  Yu contacted the sentry outside the ballroom. They sort of assured him, saying neither of them had seen her exit. So she must still be inside. Yu ordered the two stationed outside the ballroom to move in and join Qi.

  In the meantime, Liao hurried to the camera surveillance room, where a cop was with the building security man.

  In less than five minutes, however, Yu saw Liao walking out again, shaking his head in confusion. There was no sign of Hong on the videotape recording of the activities at the front entrance.

  But the people in the ballroom called too, reporting that they had looked into every corner. Hong seemed to have evaporated.

  Something terrible must have happened.

  About thirty-five minutes had passed since Qi had first noticed her absence.

  Yu ordered an instant blockade of the building entrance. It wasn’t the time for them to worry about the public’s reaction. Liao called for emergency reinforcements before announcing evacuation of the ballroom.

  The cops rushed up and checked each and every person leaving the ballroom, but Hong was not among them.

  When the ballroom was finally empty, like a deserted battlefield strewn with cups and bottles, cosmetics on the floor, there was still no sign of her.

  “Where could she be?” Qi said miserably.

  The answer was loud and clear in everyone’s mind.

  “How the devil could he have slipped out,” Liao said, “together with Hong?”

  “Here,” Qi exclaimed, pointing to a door in a cubicle inside the bar. The door was hardly visible to the people in the ballroom unless moving in behind the bar.

  Yu hurried over and pushed open the door, which led out to a corridor. He saw a side elevator in the corridor around the corner.

  “He must have taken her out the side door, to the elevator, and then out of the gate—” Liao said in a husky voice, “but no, not yet, or they should have been seen and stopped by our people.”

  “That’s impossible—” Yu said, but he was seized by a premonition. “Damn. Check all the hotel rooms.”

  The front desk produced a list in no time. There were thirty-two rooms registered for the night. Following the list, the cops started pounding on the doors. At the third door, they got no response from inside. According to the list, it was registered for single occupancy just for the day. The waiter took out the key and opened the door into the room.

  It was the cops’ worst fear. They found no one in the room, only Hong’s clothes scattered about on the floor. The pink mandarin dress, bra, and panties. In a corner, the high-heeled shoes anchored the ominous silence of the room.

  She must have been abducted into the room, where the murderer stripped her like the others, put the red mandarin dress on her, and carried her out.

  Again they reviewed the videotape. This time, they noticed something they had seen, but not suspected earlier. A man in a hotel uniform helped another one walking out in a hurry. Both of them were in identical hotel uniforms and hats. The man looked to be in his mid-thirties or early forties. With his hat pulled low, plus a pair of amber-colored glasses, the video didn’t catch a clear shot of his face. The other one appeared to be female, with a wisp of black hair escaping the hat, perhaps sick, leaning heavily on the
first one’s shoulder.

  The hotel manager hurried over, declaring that the two in the videotape were not hotel employees.

  So the murderer had registered with a fake identity, forced Hong into the room, where he changed her clothes and walked her out. Judging from the tape, she was already nearly unconscious. She must have been overcome without the time to alert her colleagues. Once outside the Joy Gate, he moved her into a car parked nearby or hailed a taxi. The plainclothesman stationed outside, however, didn’t remember having seen two hotel people getting into a car.

  The neighborhood committees and taxi companies were immediately contacted for information about two people in hotel uniforms, one of them probably unconscious.

  Party Secretary Li was swearing on the phones, screaming, striding back and forth like an ant crawling desperately on a hot wok. In spite of his earlier opposition, he ordered citywide surveillance of the families with private garages, for which the police again enlisted help from all the neighborhood committees.

  From the time recorded on the tape, it was now only about twenty-five minutes after their exit from the Joy Gate. The cops might still be able to intercept the criminal before he reached his secret den or catch him at the moment when he was entering the garage. They believed that he still had to put the red mandarin dress on her.

  The hotel manager called. A waitress reported that a middle-aged man had approached her, asking whether there was a new girl that night, but she could barely give a description of the customer, except that he wore gold-rimmed spectacles with amber-colored lenses. Since he sat at a table, she couldn’t tell his height.

  A neighborhood committee cadre also contacted them. Earlier in the evening, in a shabby side street one block north of the Joy Gate, he had seen a white car—a luxurious model, though he could not tell what brand—parked there. It wasn’t common for such a car to park on that street.

  But for the cops, all these tips were of little use at the moment.

  Time weighed on them, heavier by minute, the more unbearable because they had no information whatsoever, in spite of the fact that the entire city police machine was grinding on.

  Finally, around one a.m., a call came from a patrol officer near the Lianyi cemetery in the Hongqiao suburb.

  The cemetery had been deserted for years. In a recent security report to the bureau, it had turned into a hot spot for grave robbers, and the district police station sent a patrol there from time to time.

  About an hour before, one of the grave robbers stumbled upon something totally unexpected. The body of a young female in a red mandarin dress. Like others in his profession, he was superstitious, so he screamed and scurried and was caught by the patroller. The mention of the red mandarin dress was enough to put the officer on the alert, so he called at once.

  Liao had hardly started the van when a second call came in from the patrolling cop.

  “A hotel uniform was also found there, not too far from the body, and a hotel hat too.” The patroller added, “Come quick. The grave robber has fainted. He believes he has seen a ghost.”

  NINETEEN

  FRIDAY MORNING CHEN FINALLY woke up refreshed and reinvigorated.

  He wondered how he could have slept like that for almost two days. It could have been due to the fabulous bu dinner. Some special herb with a miraculous effect. Manager Pei had real medical knowledge; he must have diagnosed Chen’s problem from Gu’s description and arranged for the particular bu dinner Chen needed. In traditional Chinese medical theory, Chen recalled vaguely, certain herbs could bring out the symptoms, so the body would adjust itself accordingly. Chen had overworked himself, so the special dinner enabled him to sleep soundly, making up for all those years of lost rest. Now yin and yang or other elements in his body would move in harmony again. Whatever the Chinese medical theory and practice, Chen hadn’t felt so good in a long time.

  But he was slightly disturbed too. He’d had a weird dream shortly before dawn. He was sitting in an exotic garden, watching a young woman perform a striptease, dancing, singing like a siren, when he was suddenly seized with a fit of inexplicable abhorrence. He grabbed her, trying to strangle her in the flower bed. Struggling against him, the woman was no other than White Cloud, her dress turning into the red mandarin dress against the green grass.

  The red mandarin dress case was still on his mind, but the appearance of White Cloud in the dream bothered him, not to mention his own behavior. Perhaps it was because of his experience in the Old City God’s Temple Market. Or perhaps it was the bu feast—such an unusual boost to yin or yang that he was aroused. Still, it might be a good sign. He had recovered enough to dream like a young man.

  He decided not to think about it. It was not a morning for dream interpretation. He thought about the case in Shanghai again. It was Friday, he realized. Chen was tempted to call Yu, but he thought the better of it. Once he did so, his vacation here would be, for all practical purposes, finished, though he felt it had only started. He hadn’t even walked around the village a single time. Nor had he done anything about his paper yet.

  He called White Cloud instead. She hadn’t read or heard anything new about the case, and she urged him to enjoy his vacation. She had visited his mother, who was getting along fine at home, so he didn’t have to worry.

  Looking out of the window, he thought that he might take a stroll along the lake.

  It was a bit cold outside and the lake looked rather deserted this time of the year. There was only one old angler sitting on the waterfront, wrapped up in a worn-out army overcoat. The bamboo basket beside him was empty. He seemed to be lost in meditation, or in a pose of meditation.

  Chen walked on without disturbing him.

  Chen looked up at the mountains silhouetted against the horizon. There seemed to be a cascade murmuring, not too far away. Looking back, he glimpsed, now at distance, a faint flickering light in the hand of the old man.

  Against the woods and hills, the tiny light gleamed and was gone. A rustle of the pines swept through. A long deep sigh of the wind. He was strangely saddened. Then he turned onto a slippery trail, which wound between clumps of larches and ferns. He had to move slowly. It must have rained while he slept. Soon he reached a long carpet of pine needles, which muffled his footsteps. Then the trail widened unexpectedly, leading him to a local market.

  The market was already alive at this hour, and most of the people there were tourists looking for souvenirs. He spent several minutes making his way through the crowd, when he came to a stop at a booth displaying afterworld money, a superstitious product not commonly seen in Shanghai.

  “Dongzhi is approaching,” the peddler said warmly, folding the silver paper into a yuanbao-shaped silver ingot. In the Chinese afterworld, the main currency seemed to still be the silver ingot. “Folks need money to buy winter clothes there.”

  On an impulse, Chen purchased a bunch of the afterworld money. He didn’t believe in it, but his mother did, burning it now and then for the benefit of his late father, particularly during such festivals as Dongzhi or Qingming.

  Back in his hotel room, he picked up the books he’d brought and went to the indoor swimming pool.

  The pool room had a wall set in one-way glass, so the swimmers could enjoy the warm, luxurious privacy while looking out to the view of the lake and hills in the winter. After a vigorous swim, he sat in a reclining chair at poolside and started reading.

  Perhaps because of his English studies at Bund Park, he’d developed the ability to read and concentrate while outside. At that time, there was the ever-changing background of the Bund to distract him. Here, in addition to the view outside, he was enjoying the sight of young girls frolicking in the pool, their luscious bodies flashing in the blue water whenever he looked up from the ancient Confucian classics. It was ironic, for Confucius says, “A gentleman should not look if not in accordance to the rites.”

  In accordance to the rites or not, the background made the reading less boring for him. His late father having be
en a neo-Confucian scholar, and Confucian maxims still part of Chinese daily life, as at the bu banquet, “Confucius says” wasn’t unfamiliar to him. But he had never systematically studied Confucianism, which had been banished from the classroom during his school years. He wished he had talked more to his father, whose early death had cut short the older man’s plan to instill the tradition into his son.

  Chen took out his notebook. Some of his earlier research notes seemed related to Confucian rites. For Confucius, rites are everywhere and ever present. As long as people behave in accordance with the ancient rites, everything will be right, as they had supposedly been in the golden old times. While there appeared to be so many rites regarding so many things, Chen had never learned or heard about any regarding romantic love.

  That morning, checking through the books he had carried there, he failed to find anything. Confucian masters neglected romantic passion, as if it were nonexistent.

  Then Chen extended his search to marriage—hunli literally meant marriage rites in Chinese. Sure enough, he found several paragraphs on the marriage rites, though not a single word touching on passion among young people. To the contrary, young people were not supposed to meet before the wedding, let alone have feelings for each other. Marriage was to be arranged entirely by the parents.

  In the Book of Rites, one of the Confucian canons, there was a straightforward statement on the nature of marriage.

  [The rites of] marriage exist to make a happy connection between two [families of different] names, with a view, in its retrospective character, to secure the services in the ancestral temple, and in its prospective character, to secure the continuance of the family line. Therefore the gentleman sets great store by it. . . .

  The marriage rites consist of six consecutive ritual steps, which are the matchmaker’s visit, inquiries about the girl’s name and birth date, a horoscope for the couple, betrothal gifts, choosing a marriage date, and the bridegroom’s welcoming the bride home on the day of the wedding.