A Case of Two Cities

on a bench. It would be understandable for customers to come here in the winter, but in the summer, Peiqin failed to understand.
     
    They must have reached some agreement with the owner of the water shop for them to hang out there. They carried their own tea leaves, took cups from a small cabinet in the shop, filled their cups with hot water without paying a single penny. Then the old woman produced a plastic-wrapped homemade cake and put it on the table.
     
    “Taro, you eat first.”
     
    “You eat first, Chrysanthemum.”
     
    Taro and Chrysanthemum sounded like their intimate nicknames, Peiqin observed. Chrysanthemum broke the cake into two, gave one half to Taro, and dipped hers into the hot tea. She started chewing it with great gusto. Eating, they chatted to each other without paying any attention to Peiqin. She had no objection to their noisy presence.
     
    She wondered whether they had spent all their lives in this shabby lane. Whatever their life story, their little indulgence toward the end of it was no more than cups of tea and hard, cold, homemade cake in this ramshackle place. But Peiqin looked on with admiration rather than anything else. Dramatically as the world might have changed, they seemed to have a world of their own, in which they had each other.
     
    “Holding your hand, I’ll grow old with you. “That was one of her favorite lines in the Book of Song, years earlier, when her father still had had the energy to teach her those classic poems. In the nineties, in one of the popular songs, she had heard a variation, “It’s the most romantic thing to grow old by your side,” with the image of an old couple shuffling into the distance on a karaoke screen, and wealth and fame drifting away like the clouds in the skies.
     
    It might have little to do with being romantic, but it was infinitely touching. Peiqin was sure the old couple was hardly aware of her presence in the store, so she took out the transcript of An’s cell phone calls. She wanted to reread it. Some of the phone conversations were perhaps valuable only in the names they provided as possible leads, yet because of their high status Yu was in no position to question either the people An had spoken with or the people mentioned. Nor were the conversations really incriminating. Everyone involved could say that they knew Ming but had no clue about Ming’s relation to Xing.
     
    But one short phone conversation intrigued Peiqin. It was between An and Bi Keqin, a senior city government official in charge of the textile industry export and import. As with other phone calls, An approached Bi directly about the whereabouts of Ming, but Bi’s answer was a strange one.
     
    “Come on, An. How can I know? It’s like in that Tang dynasty poem. ‘You ask where the tavern is, / and the cowboy points toward apricot blossom village.’”
     
    “Oh, thank you so much, Bi.”
     
    [An turns off the phone.]
     
    It was strange. In Peiqin’s circle, Chen was the only one that quoted poetry in his daily conversation. But she doubted if Chen would have quoted in a short phone conversation. And then An thanked Bi—for what?
     
    Peiqin knew the poem. A Tang dynasty quatrain. The first two lines read: “With the continuous rain on the day of Qingming, / people feel brokenhearted, on the road. “What Bi quoted were the next two lines. In the original, whether “apricot blossom village” was the name of a tavern or the village in which the tavern was located, she failed to recollect.
     
    Then she remembered something. In one of his investigations, Chen had quoted a poem to say what was impossible for him to say under the circumstances. If Chen had done that, so could Bi. So “apricot blossom village” might be a hint.
     
    There was a restaurant called Apricot Blossom Pavilion on Fuzhou Road, but no Apricot Blossom Village. Nor a hotel by that name. With so many new restaurants or hotels in the city, however, she didn’t think she knew every one of them. Especially the expensive ones, since neither she nor Yu had paid much attention to them. Someone else might, she knew. She took a look out of the shop. No one was coming in its direction. She ran across to the phone booth and dialed Overseas Chinese Lu, a card-carrying gourmet owner of Moscow Suburb, and a buddy of Chief Inspector Chen.
     
    “Apricot Blossom Village? Oh yes, it’s an exclusive club. Not a karaoke club, but a real one,” Overseas Chinese Lu said. “Super class with