“We may continue to work on all these possible leads but do we have time, Chief Inspector Chen? Party Secretary Li will hold a press conference early next week. How can we be sure that we will make find the right answers in just a few days?”

“Let me stall him. It’s your case, but it’s also our special squad’s case,” Chen said. “It will be difficult, however, to hold him off for long, if we come up with nothing but some inconsistencies in Wan’s statement. For Li, Wan is ideal, but the culprit does not have to be Wan. Anybody will serve as a murderer, so long as we give him a quick solution.”

“Yes, we have to make progress. Once the real criminal is apprehended, we won’t have to worry about Wan or about Party Secretary Li.”

Finally, Chen put down the antique receiver and went back to the table.

“Sorry, White Cloud,” he said, “we simply cannot have a nice quiet evening.”

“An important man like you cannot expect a quiet evening, but it is nice. I appreciate your taking me out tonight.”

“The pleasure is all mine. Those interruptions aside, I’ve enjoyed the evening-and your company.” He said, turning toward the approaching waitress, “Another double scotch for the lady.”

He did not know whether scotch was a proper choice after dinner, but it was what she had ordered earlier, and on the wine list it appeared to be expensive.

It was late. Some people began to leave, but others were arriving. A couple of new waitresses appeared, perhaps a later shift. Here, the night was still young.

In those myths of the thirties, Shanghai was called a nightless city-a place of red neon and white wine, of intoxicating money and glittering gold.

When he suggested to White Cloud that he take her back home in a taxi, she looked at him before responding in a low, husky voice. Perhaps she had drunk too much wine. “It’s too far from here. The taxi fare will be very expensive. Can’t we go back to your apartment? I’ll have to come over tomorrow morning anyway. I can sleep on the sofa.”

“Don’t worry about the taxi money, White Cloud,” he said hastily. “The police bureau will reimburse me.”

It was out of the question for her to stay overnight at his place. In these new apartment complexes, the arms of the neighborhood committee might not reach as far, but people still watched. Stories traveled up and down in the elevators, if not on the staircases. Chief Inspector Chen could not afford to have such stories circulating about himself.

Nor did he consider himself a Liu Xiahui, a legendary Confucian figure who kept himself under restraint with a naked girl sitting on his lap. Chen doubted he was capable of imitating Liu Xiahui with a pretty young girl, a little secretary, asleep on the sofa in his room.

It was a long drive. She did not speak much. He wondered whether she was slightly disappointed or even displeased with his rejection of her offer. At one point, she leaned against him in the back seat, as if she was slightly drunk, then she straightened up again.

She had the taxi pull up at the street corner. “The road ahead is under repair. I can walk from here to my home. It’s only two or three minutes away.”

“Let me walk you home. It’s late,” he said before turning to the taxi driver. “Wait here for me.”

Even at this late hour, there were still several young men loitering around the corner with lit cigarettes shimmering between their fingers like fireflies. One whistled shrilly as they passed by in the chilly night. They walked into a long, dark alley. Originally it must have been a passageway between two blocks of houses, but people had built illegal makeshift one-story huts or shelters along both sides. The city government did nothing, because those people had to live somewhere. So the passage was squeezed into a much narrower lane, not even wide enough for two people to walk abreast. He followed her in silence, stepping carefully between the coal stoves and piles of winter cabbages stored outside. This was too sharp a contrast to the Golden Time Rolling Backward.

It was no wonder that White Cloud studied at Fudan University while working hard at the Dynasty Club. She had to get a life that was different from her parents’, by whatever means possible.

It was easy to say that poverty was no excuse for what people chose to do with their lives. It was not easy, however, for a young girl to follow the Party’s principles of a simple life and hard work. In fact, few Party members, as far as he knew, still adhered to those principles.

He parted with her before a ramshackle one-story shelter and started back toward the taxi. A minute later, he turned to see her still standing by the door. The hut appeared stunted, its roof looming merely inches above her hair. In the dark night, he was surprised to make out a small pot of flowers blossoming on top of the roof tiles, placed there as a decoration.

As the taxi started winding out of the slum area, he had a weird feeling, as if the city had suddenly turned into two disparate halves. The first city was made up of old shikumen houses, narrow lanes, and slum alleys like the one he was leaving, in which people still had a hard time making ends meet. The second city was composed of trendy places like the bars on Henshan Road, the new high-end apartment complex in Hongqiao, and the would-be New World.

When Gu had first approached him about his ambitious business project, Chen had almost considered the New World and its like as myths, but he was wrong. A myth would not survive if it was not rooted in present realities.

There was also an untold part of that myth, of course: the suffering of the people shut out of it; that was the part familiar to Chief Inspector Chen from his elementary-school textbooks. At that time, all the glitter and glory were represented as decadent, evil, sustained at the cost of the working class. The emphasis was then on what was in back of the glamour, an emphasis that had justified the Communist Revolution.

It had been true to some extent. What had changed was the emphasis. Now it was on the facade, the glitter and glory, an emphasis that justified the reversal of the Communist Revolution, although the Party authorities would have never acknowledged this.

Chen was momentarily confused. History in textbooks was like colored balls in a juggler’s hands.

If truth could not be found in textbooks, then where else could one look?

But what could he do? He was just a cop. He had once beleaguered himself with those questions. He had long since given that up.

Even as a cop, Chief Inspector Chen wondered, when he started thinking about his conversation with Zhuang earlier in the evening, whether he had done a decent job.

Chapter 18

Yu awoke early on Saturday morning. He decided not to get up immediately. This was a decision reached from necessity. In his family’s small room, if one got out of bed, the others had to follow.

Qinqin had stayed up late last night studying. Nowadays, middle-school students worked like crazy, and Peiqin pushed him like crazy too, insisting that Qinqin had to enter a first-class college at all costs. “He must never end up like us.”

She might not have meant anything by it, but this statement did not sound pleasant to Yu, especially as he was unable to do anything to assist Qinqin. Peiqin was the one responsible for helping with their son’s homework; it had already proven too much for Yu.

Qinqin was still sound asleep on the fold-out sofa, his feet hanging over the edge. He had grown into a lean, tall boy. The sofa bed was no longer long enough for him.

Normally, Peiqin would have been up and about by this time, but it was a weekend. She had stayed up late with Qinqin, going over math problems with him. In the morning light, her face looked pale, tired.