The fifth book in the Inspector Chen series, 2007

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

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.

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!”

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 of 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.