“You have not held the press conference yet, have you?”

“Well, these reporters must have heard about our conclusions one way or another. Their stories may not be so helpful to her posthumous reputation, but I don’t think we have to worry about that.”

“Who can control stories, the stories after one’s life? / The whole village is jumping at the romantic tale of General Cai-except that this story is not so romantic.”

“You are being poetic again, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen,” Li said. “By the way, we don’t have to mention Yang’s novel manuscript. We should not. Internal Security has made a point of this. It’s in the best interest of the Party not to say anything about it.”

That was the real reason for Party Secretary Li’s visit, Chen realized. Li would be in charge of the press conference, and he had to make sure of what would-and would not-be said by the cops in charge of the case.

After Li left, Chen noticed fallen petals from the bouquet on the ground. As with White Cloud, he did not want to judge Yin. In spite of Bao’s statement made in his self-defense, or the reporters’ comments made from their journalistic perspectives, Chen chose to see Yin as a woman who had had complexities forced upon her.

It was true that Yin had a monetary interest in the publication of Yang’s poetry collection. To be fair to her, however, she had put in a lot of work as editor. A labor of love, done in memory of him. Yet she could have earned more by giving private lessons, like many English teachers in the nineties. In the last analysis, she, too, had had to survive in an increasingly materialistic society.

It was also true that Yin had kept Yang’s novel manuscript a secret and that she had no intention of sharing it with Bao, whose position was that he should have inherited it according to law.

But what was the legality of this situation?

A piece of paper called a marriage certificate had been denied to the lovers in those years of the Cultural Revolution.

What would have happened to the manuscript had she handed it over to Bao? He had no idea of its contents or value. He would have tried to make money by selling it to an interested publisher, but he could never have succeeded. He would have ended up by having the manuscript confiscated by Internal Security. So Yin was justified in keeping the manuscript a secret from Bao, and from everybody else. She must have waited for her opportunity, Chen reasoned; then, on her visit to Hong Kong, gotten in touch with a literary agency, reached an agreement, and prepared to take it with her when she went to the United States as a visiting scholar.

That also explained her rental of a safety deposit box at this time. She must have thought of it as a sort of camouflage. She had had to be careful. Internal Security might have heard rumors arising from her trip to Hong Kong.

As for her use of the American publisher’s advance-from Yang’s novel-as her means of financial support in the affidavit, Chen did not see anything improper in this either. In the event the novel was published in the United States, she would surely be overwhelmed by political troubles here. So she had had no choice but to go to the United States for the publication of the novel. For her, that must have been more important than anything else.

And Chen was also more than willing to overlook her “plagiarism.” If she had been unable to publish Yang’s book, she would have made at least part of his writing available to readers. And she must have regarded herself as one with Yang, as in that celebrated poem, “You and I,” quoted in Death of a Chinese Professor. There was no point distinguishing between the two of them when they had already turned into one.

Of course, a lot more could have been involved, a lot more than Chen might ever come to know, or than he might ever want to know. What he chose to think was, perhaps, just one version of the story, seen from one perspective. Perhaps, as in the proverb, When the water is too clear, there will be no fish; as long as things were not too muddy, it was not up to him to investigate.

For the moment, he would choose to believe that it was a tragic love story, one that lightened up the darkest moments in the lives of Yin and Yang. After Yang’s death, Yin had tried hard to continue living in the story, through her writing and through his writing too, but in the end she did not succeed.

Chen produced a photocopy out of his pocket. It was a poem which, for some reason, was not included in Yang’s poetry collection. The poem was titled “Hamlet in China ’:

In his novel, Yang had tried to emulate Pasternak’s narrative structure with twelve poems grouped together at the end of the novel, lines supposedly written by the protagonist, in sequential reflections on his life, crushed in the those years of socialist revolution under Chairman Mao. Chen wondered when Yang had written “Hamlet in China.” Judging from its order in the sequence, it might have been composed during the Cultural Revolution. If so, the stage in question could have referred to the “stage of revolutionary mass criticism,” upon which Yang had stood as a black target, with his “crimes” written on a blackboard hung around his neck. Yang had rendered it in such a universal way, however, that a reader unfamiliar with Yang’s real experience might have come up with a totally different interpretation. It needed such an impersonal distance-which reminded Chen of another great poet-to represent Hamlet in the waste land.

Even today, Chen felt connected to that poem. After all, a role is to be played, whatever meanings or interpretations may be imposed on it, like the role of Chief Inspector Chen.

Surprisingly, the novel manuscript did not have a title. Chen thought he might as well call it Doctor Zhivago in China. Eventually, he would find a way to have the manuscript published. He made a pledge to himself. He did not really consider it a conflict with his political allegiance as a Party cadre. Like Boris Pasternak, Yang had passionately loved his country. The novel was not an attack on China. Rather, it represented an honest, patriotic intellectual’s unwavering pursuit of his ideals in an age when everything in his country had been turned upside-down. It was a novel written with unrivaled passion and masterful technique. China should be proud of such an excellent literary work produced in the darkest moment of its history, Chen concluded.

But there was no need to act in a reckless hurry, nor to take any unnecessary risk. The manuscript had been finished years earlier, and it still retained its power. First-class literature does not suffer with the lapse of time. It should not matter too much if the manuscript were to lie unpublished for a few years more.

Internal Security was still on the alert. They had inquired about how the chief inspector and his partner had come to find the manuscript, and he had simply said that it had taken Detective Yu’s hard work to trace Bao and obtain his confession, and that they had at once marched Bao over to the police bureau with the manuscript. The press conference was scheduled for the next day. They could not afford to delay any longer.