Red Mandarin Dress Read online

  “Yes, that’s where she lived.” Uncle Fong remained standing on the floor, looking up. The climb was too difficult for him.

  It was not even an attic. Just a “second floor,” added in a makeshift way over Tian’s bed, which occupied most of the first floor. A grown-up girl, she had to have some space for herself. Yu was unable to stand erect up there, his head touching the ceiling. Nor was there a single window. In the darkness, it took him a minute or two to find a lamp switch, which he turned on. No bed, only a mattress. Beside it squatted a plastic spittoon—possibly her chamber pot. There was also an unpainted wooden box. He opened the lid to see some clothes inside, most of them cheap and old-fashioned.

  It seemed pointless to stay any longer. He climbed down to the side of the bed, raising no questions. How could Fong know anything about the case?

  Yu said good-bye to Uncle Fong and left the lane, feeling depressed by the visit.

  If a girl, in her flowering age, had chosen to live like that, she wouldn’t likely have been an easy target for a sex murderer or triggered a serial killing.

  Instead of going back to the bureau, Yu went to the hotel where Jasmine had worked, which was located in the Old City area. The Seagull wasn’t a fancy hotel, but because of its convenient location and reasonable price, it had become a “hot choice for budget travelers.” In the crowded lobby, Yu saw a group of foreign students carrying huge knapsacks. The front desk manager appeared professional in his scarlet uniform, speaking fluent English to them. He stammered, however, at the police badge Yu produced. He led Yu into an office, closing the door after them.

  “Whatever we talk about here, please don’t let any media people know about the hotel’s connection to the red mandarin dress murders. Or our business will go down the drain. People are superstitious and they won’t stay in a hotel where they think someone has met a violent death.”

  “I understand,” Yu said. “Now tell me what you know about her.”

  “A good girl, hard-working, easy to get along with. We’re all shocked by her death. If anything, perhaps she worked too hard.”

  “I’ve talked to her neighborhood committee. They also told me she worked really hard, and she did not stay much at home. Do you know anything about a possible second job of hers?”

  “That I don’t know. She worked overtime here, for which we paid her time and a half. She worked for housekeeping in the morning and helped at the hotel canteen. She worked extra nights too. She had to pay her father’s medical bills. Ours is a hotel capable of housing foreign tourists, so we would rather have trusted employees working here. Our general manager gave her as many hours as she pleased. People like a young pretty girl.”

  “People like a young pretty girl—what do you mean?”

  “Don’t get me wrong. We do not tolerate any improper service here. A girl of her age could have chosen to work somewhere else—say, a nightclub—for far more money, but she stayed here, working longer hours.”

  “Do you know anything about her personal life? For instance, did she have a boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know,” the manager said, stammering again. “That’s her private life. She worked hard, as I’ve said, and she did not talk much to her colleagues here.”

  “Is it possible that there was anything between her and someone staying at the hotel?”

  “Comrade Detective Yu, ours is not a high-end hotel. And the people staying here are no Big Bucks. They come for a convenient location at a reasonable price, not for . . .companionship.”

  “We have to ask all sorts of questions, Comrade Manager,” Yu said. “Here is my card. If you can think of anything else, please contact me.”

  The visit to the hotel yielded little new information. If anything, it only confirmed his impression that a girl like Jasmine probably wouldn’t have set off a lust killer who happened to cross her path, either by the grubby lane or at the shabby hotel.

  SIX

  PEIQIN, TOO, HAD BEEN giving a lot of thought to the mandarin dress case.

  Not just because there were so many puzzling things about it, but also because it was Yu’s first case as acting squad head.

  As before, she drew a line for herself between what she could and could not do. She didn’t have the resources available to the cops, nor the time and energy. So she chose the red mandarin dress as an entrance point.

  As an accountant, Peiqin didn’t have to work at her office in the restaurant from nine to five every day. So on the way to the restaurant, she stepped into a boutique tailor shop. It wasn’t known for its mandarin dresses, but she was acquainted with an old tailor there. She explained the purpose of her visit and showed him an enlarged picture of the dress.

  “Judging from its long sleeves and low slits, it’s quite old-fashioned, possibly a style from the early sixties,” the white-haired-and-browed tailor said, adjusting the glasses along the ridge of his angular nose. “I doubt it’s mass-produced nowadays. Look at the craftsmanship. The double-fish-shaped cloth buttons. It probably takes a day to make them.”

  “Do you think it was made in the sixties?”

  “I cannot tell that from a picture. Altogether, I’ve only made about half a dozen of them. I am no expert, but if a customer gave me the material and the design, I think I could do the job.”

  “One more question: do you know any other store that could have made it?”

  “Quite a number of them. In addition, there are private tailors who work at the customer’s home. No stores for them, you know.”

  So there was another problem. Many private tailors worked like that, moving from one customer family to another. The cops were incapable of investigating all the possibilities.

  Leaving the store, Peiqin decided to go to the Shanghai Library. If she was going to help, she had to proceed in a way different than the cops.

  In the library, she spent about an hour checking through the catalogue and requested a pile of books and magazines.

  It was already past ten when she climbed up into her office at Four Seas Restaurant, carrying a plastic bag of books in her arms. Manager Hua Shan wasn’t there that morning. He had been out for two days, starting his own company, though he still kept his job at Four Seas.

  In spite of its good location, the state-run restaurant was having a hard time. Between socialism and capitalism, as the new saying went, falls a shadow of difference—that between the people working for themselves and the people working for the state. The restaurant had suffered losses for months. Hence, there were talks about introducing management responsibility: the restaurant would remain state-run in name, but the new manager would be responsible for its profit or losses.

  In the midst of a chorus of ladles clanking and clattering on the woks downstairs, she made an effort to focus on the books in the tiny office above the restaurant kitchen.

  What she had told Yu was true. She knew little about the dress. In her school days, she had seen it only in movies. And then in a Cultural Revolution–era photograph of Wang Guangmei, the “ex-first lady” of China, who was forced to display herself in public wearing a torn scarlet mandarin dress and a chunk of white Ping-Pong balls in imitation of oversized pearls—both the dress and jewelry serving as evidence of her decadent bourgeois lifestyle.

  Looking at the materials spread out on the desk, Peiqin was at a loss. She leafed through one book after another until a black and white picture caught her eye: a picture of Ailing, a Shanghai novelist rediscovered in the nineties, wearing a florid mandarin dress in the thirties. In a recent TV show, Peiqin recalled, a young girl strolled musingly along Huanghe Road, as if stepping about on the clouds of fashionable nostalgia, and pointed at a building behind her. “Perhaps it is here, from this quaint building, Ailing would walk out, blossoming in a mandarin dress she herself had designed. What a romantic city!”

  A self-proclaimed fashion critic, Ailing had drawn a series of sketches of Shanghai-style clothing, which was reprinted at the end of the book. But Peiqin became more interested in
the personal story of Ailing. Ailing started publishing early and became well-known for her stories about Shanghai. She endured a heartbreaking marriage with a talented womanizer, who later made a small fortune by writing about their ill-starred marriage. After 1949, she went to the United States, where she married an aged, impoverished American writer. As in a Tang dynasty poem, “Everything turns out sad for a poor couple.” The biographer diagnosed her marriage as self-deconstructive. After the death of her second husband, she shut herself up in her apartment in San Francisco, where she died alone. No one was aware of it until several days later.

  Peiqin read the tragic story, hoping to gain insight from a historical perspective into the popularity of the mandarin dress. By the end of two hours’ reading, however, she had learned little. If anything, her research only confirmed her earlier impression that it was a dress for well-to-do or well-educated women. For someone like Ailing, but not for a working woman like Peiqin. Tapping on the book, she absentmindedly noticed a tiny hole in her black wool sock.

  She was intrigued by the biographer’s analysis on the “selfdeconstructive” tendency of Ailing. Chen, too, was engaged in a so-called deconstructive project, she had heard. She wondered what the term meant.

  There was a knock on the door. She looked up to see Chef Pan standing in the doorway, carrying an earthen pot in his hands.

  “A special pot for you,” he said.

  “Thank you.” She did not have the time to clear away the books displaying an array of mandarin dress pictures.

  “What are you reading, Peiqin?”

  “I’m trying to make a dress for myself. So I’m comparing designs.”

  “You are really a capable woman, Peiqin,” he said, putting the pot on the desk. “And I’ve been meaning to mention something to you. We’ve been losing money for almost half a year. The socialist system has gone to the dogs and people are talking about the new management system.”

  Peiqin took the lid off the pot and smiled. “Wow, wonderful,” she said. “The food, I mean.” It was the chef’s special: the carp head covered in red pepper on a bed of white garlic at the bottom.

  “The pot keeps things warm for a long time. It’s still very hot,” Pan went on, rubbing his hands. “A middle class is rising fast in China. They come to a restaurant for something special, not for homely dishes they can cook themselves. So we need to change too. How about you taking over the management? I’ll back you up. Socialist or capitalist, this restaurant is ours.”

  “Thank you, Pan. I’ll think about it,” she said, “but I may not be qualified for the job.”

  “Do think about it, Peiqin,” he said, backing toward the door. “We never know what we can do until we try.”

  Helping herself to a spoonful of the soup, she thought to herself that she might indeed be able to do a better job for the restaurant—or at least a more conscientious job than the current management was doing. But what about her family? Qinqin was studying hard for the college entrance examination. For his future, a first-class college was a must. Yu, too, had reached a critical stage in his career. She had to take care of things at home.

  After lunch, she found it hard to concentrate on the books again. Downstairs, a squabble seemed to be breaking out in the kitchen. Hua called in, saying that he wouldn’t be coming in that day. Peiqin had another idea about the red mandarin dress, so she decided to take the afternoon off.

  She might be able to learn something about it from the movies. The dress could have some specific meaning that she was not aware of in her lusterless daily life. She walked out, heading toward a DVD store on Sichuan Road. The afternoon had turned cold. She wrapped herself more tightly in the cotton-padded army jacket, one of the few remainders from her army farm days in Yunnan. Ironically, the imitation army jacket, too, seemed to be getting popular again.

  The store was huge, with thousands of VCDs and DVDs displayed in various sections. To her amazement, she saw quite a few new movies that had not been officially released.

  “So how can there be DVDs so quickly?” she asked the storeowner, who was also a customer at her restaurant.

  “Easy. Someone sneaks into a preview with a camcorder,” he said with a broad grin. “We guarantee the quality. You can return the DVD for a full refund.”

  She thanked him and looked around. In the section of Western classics, she came upon a movie entitled Random Harvest, adapted from the novel by James Hilton. It was the first English novel Chen had read in Bund Park, Yu had told her. The Chinese version had a fascinating title: A Pair of Mandarin Ducks’ Dream Re-dreamed. In classical Chinese poetry, a pair of Mandarin ducks stood for inseparable lovers. So this must be a love story. She put the movie into her shopping basket.

  In the domestic section, she picked up A Nurse’s Diary, a movie made in the fifties. She remembered having seen a poster of the young nurse wearing a mandarin dress. Another love story, judging from the glamorous DVD cover. She also chose Golden Lock, a Hong Kong movie based on a novel by Ailing.

  But she failed to find a documentary movie about the dress, nor any movie with a title directly connected to it.

  The moment she got back home, she turned on the DVD player. There were still a couple of hours before she had to worry about dinner. She took off her shoes and socks, stretched herself out on the sofa, and covered her feet with a cushion.

  She watched Random Harvest for only ten minutes. Too old-fashioned Hollywood for her. What would Chen think about the movie, she wondered.

  A Nurse’s Diary was a different story: it was about a group of young people dedicated to building a new socialist China. By today’s standards, it didn’t come close to being a romantic story. The young nurse was too busy making the revolution to have many romantic thoughts. In fact, romantic affairs were far from encouraged at the time. The movie appealed to Peiqin, however, particularly for the idealistic theme song: “‘Little swallow, little swallow, / you come back here every year. / Can you tell me why?’ / The little swallow replies, / ‘The Spring is most beautiful here,’ . . .”

  The most beautiful “here” in the song, she contemplated, must refer to somewhere along the northwest borders, still impoverished, undeveloped, forsaken. No one would ever think of going there today.

  “The Spring is most beautiful here.” On the screen, the slender nurse, played by the actress Linfeng, was humming the song, her face lit up with the passion of the socialist revolution. Years later, Linfeng emigrated to Tokyo, where she was said to be running a Chinese vegetarian restaurant. There she sang the song occasionally for overseas Chinese customers, her figure out of shape and too much makeup on her face. Of course, it would be naïve to expect an actress to keep playing such a role—or showing such a figure—all her life.

  As it turned out, in the movie the dress was worn by the nurse’s mother, a middle-aged lady of the upper class in the old society, still resistant to the socialist revolution. But Peiqin was not exactly disappointed. As in her initial impression, mandarin dresses—in movies and in life—were mostly for those women moving about in fashionable upper-class.

  As she was about to watch Golden Lock, her glance fell on a book she had brought home. The white-haired author looked strangely like her late father. She read the short biographical information beneath the picture on the cover. “Shen Wenchang, a well-known poet before 1949, and after 1949, an internationally known expert on the history of Chinese clothing.”

  She opened the book, but it touched on the mandarin dress in only two short paragraphs. In the notes at the back of the book, she did not find a single scholar dealing exclusively with the mandarin dress. So perhaps the best she could get would be a paragraph here and there.

  The old man must be in his eighties. She put down the book, gazing at the picture. If only she could consult an expert like him, she thought wistfully.

  Around dinnertime, the phone rang. It was Chen, who expressed regret upon learning that Yu was still at work.

  “Yu’s been so busy the last fe
w days that he often comes back late. Don’t worry about him,” she said. “How is your paper going?”

  “Slowly but steadily. I am so sorry about the timing, but it may be the last chance to try my hand at something different,” Chen said. “How are things with you?”

  “Not that busy. I’m just reading some books. Everybody is talking about the red mandarin dress, so I thought I might learn something about it.”

  “You are trying to help again, Peiqin. Have you found anything interesting?”

  “Nothing yet. I’ve just started reading a book on the history of Chinese clothing. The author used to be a poet too.”

  “Shen Wenchang?”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Yes. A great scholar. There’s a new documentary movie about him.”

  “I haven’t seen that movie. Oh, I bought a DVD, Random Harvest, from the novel you like. Yu told me about your days in the park.”

  “Thank you, Peiqin. It’s so thoughtful of you. I can’t wait to watch it.” Chen added, “When Yu gets home, tell him to call me—oh, and to bring the movie over to me at his convenience.”

  SEVEN

  CHEN WOKE UP DISORIENTED, as if still floundering in a sea of thoughts.

  With the second body found in the center of the city, with the media clamoring like cicadas in the early summer, he had to do something to help. He owed that to Yu. And to Hong too, who had kept him updated with the latest developments, smiling a radiant smile in spite of Liao’s grouchiness.

  Having reviewed all the measures taken by his colleagues, however, Chen concluded he could hardly do any more than they, at least not as an “outside consultant.” He was still too much engaged with his paper. Running an investigation could be like writing a paper; ideas come with undivided concentration.

  A bitter taste returned to his mouth. Brushing his teeth vigorously, he was struck with an idea—Peiqin’s idea. He happened to know Shen, the authority on the history of Chinese clothing.