A Case of Two Cities

she had already shown she trusted him by playing that trick with Bao’s cell phone. They had been collaborating as partners.
     
    They were sitting close. Chief Inspector Chen was not going to be doing anything against the interest of the Chinese government, he thought, as long as he didn’t give out specific details about those high-ranking officials. A general picture of China’s corruption was nothing new, particularly as Xing’s case was being widely reported here. So he told her about the Xing investigation under the committee and brought in his theory about An’s death. She was an attentive audience, responding with occasional questions and suggestions.
     
    “She might have contacted her people after the talk with you,” she said.
     
    “Yes, that’s possible.”
     
    Nor did he try to conceal his own suspicion about the delegation appointment, though he gave her all the official reasons Chairman Wang had given him.
     
    “They wanted to get you out of the way,” she added, thinking, “but only for a couple of weeks?”
     
    It was a question she’d raised on the top of the Arch, where he didn’t have the time to discuss it. She had a point. If people had intended to put him out of the picture, they could have easily done so without bothering to arrange a trip like this.
     
    “I’ve been thinking about that too,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense unless dramatic change was anticipated during this period, but I can’t think of any.”
     
    “Let me ask you another question, Chen. Were you told to do anything about Xing here?”
     
    “No, no one told me, trust me, Catherine,” he said, reaching to take her hand across the table on impulse. “There’s no point sending someone like me for the purpose.”
     
    She nodded, her hand remaining in his.
     
    “Nobody told me anything,” he repeated. “I’ve only groped in the dark.”
     
    “What do you mean?”
     
    “I’m not a cop here. What can I do?” He decided to be vaguely honest. “Groping for information about Xing is about all I can possibly do here.”
     
    “What’s the point?”
     
    “Difficult to say. Perhaps it’s like playing go chess. Occasionally you have to move anyway, though the move itself may seem pointless for the moment.”
     
    So he summarized what he had tried to accomplish without giving specific details or revealing the names of the people involved. After Little Huang’s death, he couldn’t be too careful.
     
    “It could be dangerous,” she said, tightening her grasp. “If your investigation became known—to Xing, and to people in Beijing.”
     
    “I know. But I also remember what my father once told me, ‘A man has to do what he should do, even it is impossible for him to do.’”
     
    The waiter came over to them with the menu. Neither was hungry. But he thought he should order something. He looked at the wine list, which presented all the unfamiliar names.
     
    “You choose,” he said.
     
    She did, pronouncing a wine name he hadn’t heard before, in French or in Italian. She then leaned back and crossed her legs in a leisurely manner. The wine came and she took a small sip, nodding her approval. He was becoming slightly uncomfortable. He wondered whether he would come to be like someone in that TV series, at home in an American bar.
     
    The evening clouds started unfolding in sensual peace, as if being smoothed by long, slender fingers. Among the glasses, among the talk, among the indistinct shadows on the sprinkled street, he felt disoriented.
     
    In a couple of hours, the delegation would be going back to the hotel, but it didn’t matter much if he returned late. Everybody was aware of his passion for Eliot. “Lost in the ‘Waste Land.’” He could joke about his absence.
     
    He didn’t want to spend the evening just talking about a corrupt Chinese official hiding away like a fattened rat. He was sitting with her, their fingers entwined, in a café in the Central West End. In an evening Eliot, or Prufrock, dared not to dream about, with the streets muttering into retreat, against a hundred visions and revisions.
     
    “China man, Chinglish!” Several kids appeared to come out of nowhere, shouting, scuttling along on their scooters, and pointing their fingers at him. The scooters resembled a miraculous vehicle in a children’s book of mythology he had read at their age.
     
    What they had discussed here had already started him thinking in a new direction. Discussion