Don’t Cry, Tai Lake

better not reveal that he was a cop. He took out his cell phone, yet didn’t dial it. Deep down, he felt uneasy about not telling her he was a chief inspector, but he reassured himself that he was doing it for a good reason. And he wondered if the threating calls she had been getting had anything to do with the case.
    He underlined several lines in the fax. There were some other points possibly worth looking into further. The timing of the murder, for one, and he scribbled a couple of words in the margin of the fax, though he was not sure about it.
    Then to his surprise, he felt rather tired, and he rubbed his eyes. It was still quite early in the day. He couldn’t tell if the doctor’s diagnosis had had a psychosomatic effect on him.
    He looked up, shaking his head. A little further to the north, he noticed a fence door had been left unlatched, which was probably unnoticeable from outside. Someone could have stepped out, having forgotten to lock the door behind them. He stood up to peer about, believing he must be close to the tourist area called Frost-Covered Goshawk Islet on his map.
    As he started making his way back, a quietness unexpectedly enveloped him. He thought of several Tang dynasty lines: Only the sound / of a tiny pine nut / is heard dropping here / in the secluded hills … / There, a solitary one, / you must lie awake, thinking .
    He tried to ridicule himself out of the mood. The Tang poem was about a night scene in the hills. Besides, who could be the “solitary one”?
    Shortly after he got back to his villa, a young nurse appeared with freshly brewed medicine in a small thermos bottle.
    “You’d better drink it quickly,” she said with a sweet smile. “A hot fresh dose could make a huge difference. There will be another dose delivered here in the afternoon.”
    Afterward, he was rinsing the bitter herbal taste out of his mouth when a phone call came in from Director Qiao.
    “You have to have lunch with us today, Chief Inspector Chen.”
    “You don’t have to do that, Director Qiao. You’ve already done so much for me.”
    “But we’d like to consult with you over lunch.”
    “About what?”
    “The center has been funded by the state up to now, but we’re considering possible reforms. Unlike hospitals, we don’t have our own way of making money. So we are thinking about opening part of the center to the public. Of course, service to Party cadres like yourself will remain our top priority. Our clinic and its location, however, may prove an attractive alternative to tourists, especially for those from Shanghai. They can stay here, just like staying in a nice, quiet hotel, and at the same time, enjoy a convenient and comfortable physical checkup. Now, you’re from Shanghai, where you are a celebrity. So you would be the very man to bring this message back to Shanghai.”
    There might be something to this logic, Chen thought. The center was huge but far from fully occupied. Watching from his window, he had seen buildings with a considerable number of unlit windows at night. In recent years, state-run institutions like hospitals had resorted to charging their patients ever-increasing fees and getting “red envelopes” from them too, but the center was not in a position to do the same. They had to get by with the limited funds they received from the state.
    But it was none of his business. Nor was Chief Inspector Chen here in Wuxi for business consultation. Still, Director Qiao seemed sincere in his approach, and Chen could not politely refuse.
    He agreed to a late lunch, with the bitter taste of the herbal medicine lingering on his tongue.
    There was still more than an hour before the lunch, so he sat himself in front of the laptop in the study and fumbled for an Internet connection. In spite of the instruction sheet beside the computer, he couldn’t get it to connect. It was an imported laptop loaded with Chinese software. At least he could try to write something. So he hunched down over the keyboard, though nothing came to mind for several minutes.
    He took the laptop into the living room and sat where he could see the lake view outside the tall window. Then he thought of the unfinished poem he had started the day before—about one’s identity in others’ interpretations. The image of Shanshan walking along the lake shore with him started to intrude. What kind of man could he have been in her interpretation or imagination?
    The phone on the table rang. He picked it up, heard