A Case of Two Cities

impracticable. Chen listened and then glanced at his watch.
     
    “How far is it from the hotel?”
     
    “About fifteen minutes.”
     
    “Let me down here. You’d best not be seen too much in my company. Now about Xing, don’t do anything without consulting me first.”
     
    “I’ll be careful. No one will ever suspect me.”
     
    “Don’t call the hotel. I bought a new cell phone here. Call this number only,” Chen said, writing the number down on a scrap of paper. “Better call me only from a public phone.”
     
    “That sounds more and more exciting, like in a thriller movie, Chen. Any special directions for me to follow?”
     
    “I don’t know. Little Tiger, his next-door neighbor, might be someone worth checking into. As a cop, I don’t believe in coincidence.”
     
    “What do you mean by coincidence?”
     
    “Xing’s connected at the very top,” Chen said. “Drop me here. I’ll take a taxi the rest of the way.”
     
    * * * *
     

16
     
     
    I
    N THE HOTEL ROOM, Bao found himself unable to fall asleep. It was only eight-thirty. He should not have gone to bed so early, but there was nothing else for him to do. Shasha and Zhong were out of the hotel, following Chen’s example. The political study was canceled without anyone consulting Bao. No one paid much attention to him.
     
    He tossed about on the mattress. How could a human body feel comfortable on the steel springs? In Beijing, he slept on zhongbeng, a sort of a mattress woven of twisted palm fiber—hard, airy, reliable—and he fell asleep the moment his head touched the pillow.
     
    What kind of a bed was provided in Chen’s suite? he wondered. Nominally, Bao was the Party secretary. Only it did not work here. His Party position was not mentioned. Thanks to the first letter of his name in the Chinese phonetics, he was put directly under Chen. Other than that, he was treated exactly like other members. It was an unacceptable yet undeniable fact that Bao had to move in this young man’s shadow.
     
    He took out from under the pillow a book of his poems from the seventies. He had intended to give it to an American writer. So far, no one seemed to have read him. Unbelievable. He got up, turned on the TV, and cursed in spite of himself. All the channels were in English. He tried to use the coffeepot for hot water, without success. Chen had shown him how, but it was a different pot, with the instructions in English. He did not want to ask again. Even the interpreter seemed to take him as an old fool.
     
    Everything was weird here: the windows could not be opened. What’s the point? The carpet exotic, sweaty under his bare feet, almost slimy in a sultry evening. In several rooms, smoking was not allowed—in a country of so-called freedom. Absurd to suffer the restrictions in a hotel room that cost more than a hundred dollars a day. More than his monthly income, come to think about it. He ignored the rules. Lighting a cigarette, he dashed the ash into a plastic cup as he slumped into a chair close to the window, resting his foot on the windowsill. In the spiraling smoke, he watched the fragments of his life moving around to form a new, meaningful whole.
     
    Bao’s literary career had started in the early fifties during the nationwide Red Flag Folk Song Campaign, which pushed workers and peasants to the fore as “proletarian writers.” Following Chairman Mao’s doctrines about literature and art serving politics, it was a matter of necessity that proletarian writers should play a principal role. So an old editor of Shanghai Literature came to the Beijing Number One Steel factory, where Bao, a young apprentice then, was cracking a handful of soy-sauce-fried watermelon seeds. As the editor explained the purpose of his visit, Bao burst out laughing.
     
    “What can I say? Nothing an uneducated worker says will ever interest you,” he responded, spitting the husk into his palm. “Look, such a small seed can only grow into a tiny watermelon. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
     
    “Hold on. That’s fantastic, Comrade Bao. That’s brilliant. Thank you so much,” the editor said, scribbling lines in his notebook. “I’ll contact you again.”
     
    Three days later, the editor contacted him again, showing him a copy of Liberation Daily with a short poem published there:
     
    What kind of seeds grow what kind of melons.
    What kind of vines produce what kind of flowers.
    What kind of people do what kind of