A Case of Two Cities

when she was panic-stricken at the sight of policemen like those who had taken her father away. Afterward, however, she married a police officer, and now she was becoming something like the officer’s private assistant and acting like a character in those mysteries.
     
    But she did not think she was tragic like those characters in The Dream of the Red Chamber —”her hope as high as the sky, and her fate as thin as the paper.” She considered herself as fairly lucky; Yu working with a secure job at the bureau, and Qinqin studying hard for college. Only all of that could be jeopardized because of those “red rats”—she liked the term coined by Old Hunter. In traditional Chinese culture, red had a lot of connotations. Red was about sensual vanities of the human world, like the red chamber in the novel or the Red Tower in the Xing case. And these red rats were surely sexually depraved. She thought of those pictures of An and her man.
     
    Failing to concentrate on the book anymore, she thought she had an excuse for putting it down. A hot-water woman holding a classic novel would attract attention. Placing the book back into her bag, she decided to look again around the lane. It might once have been a decent neighborhood, but with so many new tall buildings rising around like bamboo shoots after a spring rain, the area had turned into a shabby “forgotten corner.”
     
    Nonetheless, it was a convenient corner. Beside the water shop was a small husband-and-wife grocery store. On the other side of the lane entrance was a public phone booth. Then she noticed something. Opposite the lane entrance across the street, there was a middle-aged peddler perching on a stool, and his goods on the white-cloth-covered ground caught her attention. Snuff bottles. She had read about snuff bottles as far back as in The Dream of the Red Chamber. People today still liked them as inexpensive imitation antiques with the painting on the inside of the glass bottle. It took a lot of training to paint with a miniature brush inserted through the tiny opening. But there were no customers there, like at the water shop. And unlike a water shop, a snuff bottle peddler usually had to station himself near a tourist attraction, like the Bund. How could the poor residents here afford to be interested in those useless bottles? Still, the peddler could be someone living in the neighborhood.
     
    Poking at the fire, she tried to refocus her thoughts on the investigation. So far the only progress made was transcripts of An’s cell phone calls. Old Hunter had moved heaven and earth in his efforts to get them. But no matter how the father and the son cudgeled their collective brains out, the record failed to lead to anything suggestive of a possible breakthrough.
     
    Things seemed to be getting really tough for Chen too. According to Yu, people in the bureau had been looking into the relationship between Chen and An, thereby turning him into a possible suspect. They probably would not be able to bring Chen down so easily, but a subtle suggestion of a scandal could be obnoxious enough.
     
    Indeed, Peiqin found it hard to figure out this chief inspector. A successful survivor in the jungle of politics, he could nonetheless be stubborn, unbelievably bookish, sticking to a cop’s responsibility like his Confucianist father. And as long as Chen persisted in scouting in the woods, Yu had to stay there too.
     
    A little girl came over with two bamboo-slice-covered thermos bottles, making one careful step after another.
     
    “Five pennies in a bottle,” she said to Peiqin. The coins fell from her hand and sparkled in a tin can.
     
    In her childhood, Peiqin had run the same errand for her family, with the bottles in her hands that were covered with frostbite like a map . . .
     
    She then looked up to see an old couple shuffling over from a side lane. They had no kettle or thermos bottle in their hands. The man with a maze of white hair wore a rumpled black jacket, as thin as a bamboo stick, his face wrinkled, weatherbeaten as seen in a postcard of a Shanbei farmer, and the woman was much shorter, rounded like a wine barrel, in something like much-patched-up pajamas. They stepped into the shop, nodding at Peiqin, as if she had been working there all those years. Perhaps because of their cramped living conditions in the lane, the shop had become sort of a daily resort to them. They moved straight to one of the tables and seated themselves side by side