A Case of Two Cities

apparently long untouched, dust-covered, in a corner of the balcony. Once again, a poem came to him out of the unlikely moment, this one by Li Bai, a Tang dynasty poet from hundreds of years earlier.
     
    The moon touching the autumn’s first-born frost,
    she still wears her silk dress
    too flimsy for the night,
    playing the silver lute,
    long and hard,
    in the courtyard,
    unable to bring herself back
    to the empty room.
     
    Chief Inspector Chen was not intent on searching the room one more time. Had there been something important, it must have been taken away. Still, he wanted to hang on there.
     
    He pulled out the small drawer of the nightstand. Among some scrap papers was an address book. Its cover bore the faded emblem of the TV station with the year 1982 printed. He opened it and found it belonged to Han. Most of the addresses and phone numbers must be outdated. On a page he saw a quote from the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities. It was perhaps in their reading-group days. The address book might have been there only for sentimental reasons. Still, he put it in his pocket.
     
    Now, in the room where she had spent her last days, he chose to see her life in a new light. He did not want to see An simply as someone in a corruption case. Her involvement was admittedly a mistake on her part, but could she have done all that because of her loneliness? People had to keep themselves busy with one thing or another, like himself. A public relations company might not have been a bad idea in itself, and it was natural for someone in PR to work with businesspeople like Ming. As for her personal life, Chen thought he was no judge—he knew he wouldn’t like to be judged by others.
     
    What would her life have been like if things had remained as they were in their reading-group days? Both An and Han might have been here, like so many others. A contented wife, opening a colorful career album over the weekend . . .
     
    He pulled himself back from these useless thoughts. Some people had complained in the bureau that Chen wasn’t meant to be a cop—and perhaps he was indeed still too romantic for such a career.
     
    But it was a battle of life and death now. An was not innocent, but she could have lived with her problems. It was his investigation that had led to her death. And the least he could, and should, do was to bring the criminal to justice for her.
     
    Someone had forestalled him. In spite of his precautions, the path had been anticipated and blocked as soon as he had turned mistakenly pleased with his Chen trail—in targeting someone not conspicuous, and in a roundabout way. All his efforts had fallen through and he did not know which link had gone wrong. That was the terrifying part. It appeared he remained in the light, while the enemy remained in the dark, ready to pounce on him.
     
    There were a lot of things he did not know, but he was almost sure—no use pretending to himself—that she had alarmed some people in her effort to find the whereabouts of Ming. She must have made phone calls.
     
    So that would be the direction for him: her telephone records for the last few days. But the case was not assigned to the special case squad. His pushing Sergeant Kuang would be like attempting to cook in somebody else’s kitchen.
     
    What was worse, if he himself was under watch, as he suspected, any steps taken by him could have consequences, not only for him. He thought of what Dong had ominously suggested.
     
    * * * *
     
    That night, he failed to fall asleep for a long while. A cricket chirped intermittently, not too far away, rubbing its wings in a corner of the room. He stared up at the ceiling like one possessed. In his police experience, he had occasionally speculated on the possibility of investigating a victim close to him. An was not exactly close—never had been. Still, she had been nice to him in the reading-group days. More than anything else, he cherished the memories of their literary passion then.
     
    One evening, he recollected, after their reading activity, four of them walked into a shabby ramshackle eatery near the Bund. Han, An, Ding, and he, sitting around a rough wood table. They were poor, ordering plain noodles, sharing a tiny dish of roast Beijing duck, and spending two hours over a poem, to the great annoyance of a white-haired waiter.
     
    Tonight, the same night cloud, the same siren over the river, the same petrel flying, perhaps, as if out of a calendar, in spite of all the