A Case of Two Cities

last thing Lou wanted to. Hua had only a sick, old wife left behind. Their only son, an educated youth, had died in a tractor accident in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Lou wondered if the old woman could survive the blow of losing her husband too.
     
    “I’ll go to the hospital too. After all, Hua was my colleague for many years. It is up to me to accompany him, I think, for the last part of his journey.”
     
    Lou drove at the back of the convoy of vehicles that took Hua’s body to a special army hospital. As before, Lou had to wait outside in the corridor, watching the old cop under the white sheet pulled in, followed by Internal Security. Again, he could do nothing but smoke, affixing a second cigarette to the butt of the first one. All these years, Lou recalled with a bitter taste in his mouth, Hua had smoked Flying Horse, one of the cheapest brands. It spelled a face loss in this gilded age, but Hua had no choice. The medical bill for his wife was no longer covered by the state-run company on the edge of bankruptcy. How could Hua have had the money to be a regular customer in a karaoke club—with Flying Horse in his pocket? Lou added a third cigarette to the first two. It looked almost like an antenna, trembling in a pathetic effort to catch imperceptible information from the surrounding blank walls.
     
    Initial test results came out. The medical examination proved that the girl had had sex earlier that night and the remaining semen detected in her vagina was from Hua. The autopsy had to wait until morning. According to the doctor, an overdose of the Tiger and Dragon Power could have led to a heart attack. Internal Security had found a package of the drug in Hua’s pocket.
     
    That was the last nail knocked into the coffin. Lou staggered. The cell phone started ringing like bells. Calls from people both in and out of the bureau. He was surprised at the speed the news spread around. It was still early. Everyone was shocked, and no one believed that Hua could have done something like that.
     
    Lou even got a long-distance call from Yu Keji, nicknamed Old Hunter, who was a retired Shanghai cop with a national police information network. Perhaps people did not have to be too cautious talking to a retired man. Old Hunter seemed to know a lot about the Xing case assigned to Detective Hua.
     
    “I don’t believe a single word of it, Sergeant Lou. I’ve known Hua for twenty years. All that must have been a setup,” Old Hunter said. “Have you found anything suspicious?”
     
    Lou told the old man what suspicions he had for the night.
     
    “Damned Internal Security must have been part of it. Today’s China is like a rice barn ravaged by those red rats. A good man like Hua tried to do something about it, but what?”
     
    “Yes, those corrupt Party officials, like fattened rats. But why call them red rats?” Lou asked.
     
    “Those Party officials are of course politically red—before their corruptions are exposed. The so-called red spearhead of the proletariat marching along the road of the socialist construction. But they are really barn rats moving all around. The one-party system is like a specially designed barn, where they can run amok without getting caught. Why? Because the barn is theirs. Nothing independent of this system can challenge or question it. Think about the Xing case. To smuggle on such a large scale involves a long chain of numerous links—ministry, customs, police, border inspection, transportation, distribution, and whatnot. And this chain of connection and corruption worked all the way—”
     
    “You are right, Old Hunter.” Lou recalled another nickname for the retired cop—Suzhou Opera Singer, a reference to a popular southern dialect opera known for its singers’ tactics of prolonging a narrative by adding digressions or ancient anecdotes. But it was too late to stop the old man.
     
    “In the Qing dynasty,” Old Hunter went on, “high-ranking Manchurian officials wore red-topped hats. If an official happened to do business on the side, people would call him a red-topped businessman. It was such a notorious term at the time, that few liked to be called so. Nowadays it is taken for granted. And those officials are hardly businessmen. They simply steal or smuggle, like Xing, like rats in their own barn. So how could they let an honest cop get in there?”
     
    “Yes, it’s a warning to those who try to investigate the case in earnest.” Lou