Don’t Cry, Tai Lake

a small stool with a pronounced stoop, she must have been in her seventies. The booth looked the same as always, though, with the green onion still succulent, and the ginger still golden, spread out on the same narrow wooden board. The one difference after all these years was that the small bunch of green onion that had cost only one cent at that time now cost fifty cents. Peiqin stepped up to the booth and introduced herself.
    “I was a slip of a girl then, Auntie Hui. Once you gave me a bunch of green onion for one cent and a large piece of ginger for free. After that, my mother called me a capable girl for days.”
    “You still remember that after all this time,” Auntie Hui said, her face wreathed in smiles like a dried-up winter melon. “And this is…?”
    “Oh, this is my husband, Yu.”
    Auntie Hui was pleased by the unexpected reunion, and the two spoke of little other than memories of the bygone days. The continued existence of the tiny booth spoke for how little the old woman’s life had improved since then. Peiqin finally brought the conversation around to the question she had in mind.
    “The Fu family lives just opposite here, right?”
    “Yes, three generations of them now.”
    “I’ve just heard that Fu Hao, the eldest grandson, is now the managing director of a large state company in Wuxi.”
    “Yes, I heard about that too,” the old woman said, eyeing Peiqin somewhat warily.
    “Our old neighborhood has produced some successful people,” Peiqin said with a smile.
    The door of the shikumen house opposite opened with a grinding sound, as if echoing from twenty years ago, and a tall, angular man wearing a light gray wool suit and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses walked out.
    Auntie Hui looked up at Peiqin and whispered, “It’s none other than Fu Hao. Do you know him?”
    “No, I moved away many years ago, you know.”
    “We have to get going, Peiqin,” Yu said. “We’ve spent too long here as it is.”
    Peiqin picked up Yu’s cue as he spoke.
    “Yes, let’s go. It’s Saturday. We have to do some shopping,” she said, like an understanding wife. “We’ll come again, Auntie Hui.”
    They sauntered away, hand in hand like a loving couple, which they were. It was as in a popular song, “ It’s the most romantic thing to live, love, and grow old with you, side by side .”
    They followed Fu at a discreet distance, even though Yu didn’t have a plan in mind. It wasn’t something Chen had asked him to do, but he had nothing else planned for that afternoon. Yu redialed Bai, who wasn’t home yet. So it might not be a bad idea, he thought, to continue following Fu for a while.
    They cut across Yanan Road, and then on to Fuzhou Road. Fu walked steadily, heading north, without looking at the bus stop or for a taxi, seemingly unaware of being shadowed. Fu then turned left on Nanjing Road, which, at the intersection with Henan Road, became a pedestrian street thronged with shoppers and tourists.
    No one could move quickly along Nanjing Road. The street was lined along both sides with stores, some of which were very crowded; it would be easy to lose sight of someone. With the two of them following Fu, however, Yu thought they could still manage.
    “We haven’t been to Nanjing Road in months,” Peiqin said.
    “We’re here today, so we might do some shopping,” he said, “if we lose sight of Fu. We shouldn’t worry about it. Chen didn’t say he was a suspect, and sending us out to look into him was probably nothing more than a whimsical hunch of our eccentric chief inspector.”
    But Fu slowed down near the corner of Zhejiang Road and started looking around, as if anxiously awaiting someone. Sure enough, he spotted a slender girl standing near Sheng’s Restaurant and walked over to her. She was smiling and waving her hand at him. However, instead of walking into the restaurant, they went into an old building next to it.
    Yu and Peiqin hurried across the street. To their surprise, the old building was a hotel. They peered inside, but there was no sign of Fu or his companion at the front desk or along the dimly lit corridor. They must have already checked in.
    In front of the hotel, there was a large sign that declared in bold characters: “ Serve the people, hourly rate available, both day time and nighttime, full of leisure, convenience .” The first part sounded like an echo of a saying from Mao, but the part about their business hours was puzzling.
    Yu couldn’t help walking