He took out his cell phone and called Chairman Wang of the Chinese Writers Association. Wang didn’t pick up, so he left a message, emphasizing that, in addition to what they had already discussed, the image of the red mandarin dress could have been controversial in the early sixties.
Encouraged, Chen tried to repeat his experiment, but nothing came of it. He further modified it by lowering himself to the courtyard, where he sat in a lotus position with his legs crossed, reviewing the case from the very beginning-not like a cop, but like a man whose mind was not clogged by police training. Still nothing, though his mind seemed to obtain an intense clarity. He took a case folder out of the briefcase and began reading there, like a monk, as the temple bell began tolling.
Turning over a page, he lit upon something. Jasmine’s bad luck. Buddhists talk about retribution. “Retribution comes, but in time.” In a sort of secular Buddhist version, Chinese believe that people are punished or rewarded for what they do in this life-or even in the previous life.
Tian’s horrible luck might be so accounted for. It was too much, however, with Jasmine. Chen didn’t believe in punishment for a previous life. Nor did he see it as coincidence-that both father and daughter had such bad luck.
He thought of a novel he had read in his middle school years: The Count of Monte Cristo. Behind a series of inexplicable disasters was the mastermind Monte Cristo, working for his relentless revenge.
Was this possible in the case of Jasmine?
With her, and with her father too. A Mao Team member in those years, Tian could have persecuted or hurt someone who later carried out his or her revenge. If so, the style as well as the material of the dress would be accounted for.
But why the long wait-if done out of revenge for something that happened during the Cultural Revolution?
And what about the other girls?
He didn’t have immediate answers. Still, the last question let him see the difference between Jasmine and the other girls in a new light.
Those girls might not have been related to Jasmine at all.
The sound of the bell came again in the wind. He shivered with a vague possibility.
It was time for him to go to the bureau. He would talk to Detective Yu, whose frustration with his unannounced vacation was evident in the messages left on his phone. Whether he would be able to make a satisfactory explanation to his partner, he didn’t know. It didn’t seem a good idea to talk about his nervous breakdown, not even to Yu.
At the temple exit, he got a call from Chairman Wang in response to his message.
“Sorry I didn’t pick up in time, Chief Inspector Chen. I was in the bathroom, but I got your message about the possible controversy. It reminded me of something. Xiong Ming, a retired journalist in Tianjin, has been compiling a dictionary of controversies concerning literature and arts. He’s an old friend of mine, so I contacted him at once. According to him, there was a prize-winning picture of a young woman wearing a mandarin dress and the picture later became controversial. This is his phone number, 02-8625252.”
“Thank you, Chairman Wang. That really helps.”
Chen put another bill into the shining donation box at the exit and dialed Xiong’s number.
After introducing himself, Chen came to the point: “Chairman Wang told me that you have some information about a controversial picture of a woman in a red mandarin dress. You have been working on a dictionary of controversies, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I have,” Xiong said from the other end of the line, in Tianjin. “Nowadays people hardly remember or understand the absurd controversies during those years when everything could be distorted through political interpretations. Do you remember the movie Early Spring in February?”
“Yes, I do. The movie was banned in the early sixties. I was still an elementary school student then, hiding a picture of that beautiful heroine in my drawer.”
“It was controversial because of the so-called bourgeois elegance of the heroine,” Xiong said. “The same with the picture of the woman in a mandarin dress.”
“Can you tell me more about the picture?” Chen said. “Is the mandarin dress a red one?”
“It represents a beautiful woman in a stylish mandarin dress, together with her son, a Young Pioneer wearing a Red Scarf. He is pulling her hand, and pointing toward the distant horizon. The picture is entitled, ‘Mother, Let’s Go There.’ The background is something like a private garden. It is a black and white picture so I’m not sure about the color of the dress, but it’s in a graceful style.”
“How could such a picture have caused a controversy?” Chen said. “It’s not a movie. There is no story in it.”
“Let me ask you a question, Chief Inspector Chen. What was the ideological prototype for women in Mao’s time? Iron girls, masculine, militant, wearing the same shapeless Mao suits as men. No suggestion of the female form or sensuality or romantic passion. So the political climate wasn’t favorable to the implicit message of the picture, particularly when it was nominated for a national prize.”
“What implicit message?”
“For one thing, it represented the ideal mother as feminine, elegant, and bourgeois. In addition, the garden background is quite suggestive too.”
“Can you describe the picture in greater detail?”
“Sorry, that’s about all I remember. I don’t have the picture in front of me. But you can easily find it. It was published in 1963 or 1964 in China Photography. That was the only photography magazine at the time.”
“Thank you, Xiong. Your information may be very important to our work.”
Chen decided to go to the library, which wasn’t too far away.
At the library, with the help of Susu, he got hold of a copy of the particular issue of China Photography in only ten minutes. It would usually take hours to unearth a magazine published in the sixties.
It was a black and white picture, as Xiong had described. The woman wearing the mandarin dress in the picture was a stunner. Chen couldn’t tell the exact color of the dress, but it was apparently not a light color.
She was in a garden, standing barefoot with a tiny brook shimmering behind her, where she might have just dabbled her feet. The boy holding her hand was about seven or eight years old, wearing the Red Scarf of a Young Pioneer. Nobody else was visible in the background.
Chen borrowed a magnifying glass from Susu and made a careful study of the mandarin dress.
It appeared identical in design to those used in the murders-short sleeves and low slits, conventional in its general effect. Even the double-fish-shaped cloth buttons looked the same.
If there was any difference at all, it was that she wore the dress gracefully, with all the buttons buttoned in a demure way. She was barefoot, but standing in the background, in the company of her son, the suggestion more of a young happy mother.
The photographer was named Kong Jianjun. In the index of the magazine Chen found that Kong was also a member of the Shanghai Artists Association.
A siren was coming from the eastern end of Nanjing Road when Chen stepped out, carrying the magazine. He was close to believing that it was Hong-her soul, or whatever it was-that had guided him.
He made a phone call to the Shanghai Artists Association.
“Kong Jianjun passed away several years ago,” a young secretary said in the office. “He was mass-criticized during the Cultural Revolution, I’ve heard.”
“Do you have his home address?”
“The one in our record is old. He had no children-left behind only his wife. She must be in her seventies. I can fax his file to your office.”
“To my home. I’m on vaca-hold on, fax it to this number,” he said, giving her the library fax number.