Don’t Cry, Tai Lake

The stillness around was breathing with a subtle fragrance from her naked body. Amidst the images rushing up to the monitor, he paused to look at her again. He could hardly remember how she had seemed to him when he first saw her in the small eatery just about a week ago.
    And he tried to visualize the hard battle she’d been fighting here, working at her environmental protection job, day after day, alone by the lake.
    But what had he contributed? As a successful Party member and police officer enjoying all the privileges, and now even standing in for a high-ranking cadre at the center, he had paid little attention to environmental issues. He was simply too busy being Chief Inspector Chen, a rising Party cadre in the system. Pushing a strand of sweat-matted hair from her forehead, he wished he had met her earlier and learned more about her work.
    He then put an intimate touch into the poem, imagining a conversation she’d had with him about the lake.
    Last night, a white water bird
    flew into my dream again,
    like a letter, telling me
    that pollution was under control—
    I awoke to see the night cloud breaking
    through the ether, thinking
    with difficulty, shivering.
    It seems as if the key was heard
    turning only once
    before the door opens, only
    to the anemic stars lost
    in the lake of the waste …
    Finally, he moved back to the beginning of the poem, typed out a tentative title, “Don’t Cry, Tai Lake.” It wasn’t finished, he knew, but he also knew he was going to have a busy day as a cop tomorrow. He set the laptop on the nightstand, held her hand, and finally drifted off to sleep.

EIGHTEEN
    NOT UNTIL SUNDAY MORNING did Detective Yu receive a callback from the message he’d left for Bai.
    “I know you’re a good friend of Mrs. Liu, so I’d like to talk to you,” he said, repeating the message he’d left for her.
    “I would like to talk to you too, Mr. Yu, but I’m going to church right now. And I have to leave for Nanjing this afternoon,” Bai said. “If it’s something really urgent, though, we could meet after the service this morning. I will be at Moore Memorial Church, near the Peace Movie Theater. I may go directly to the train station from there.”
    So that Sunday morning Yu and Peiqin arrived at the church, which had been named to memorialize an American donor in the late eighteenth century.
    It was a gothic building of umber brick on the corner of Xizhuang Road, with a huge cross installed on the top of the bell tower. It might have been something of a landmark in earlier years, but like other old buildings such as the Seventh Heaven, it appeared lost among the new modern and ultramodern high-rises looming around. Still, the church looked as if it had received an extensive face-lift in recent years.
    The service had just started when they got there, but there were a considerable number of people still standing around, greeting each other, and talking outside.
    “I’ve been to the movie theater several times,” Peiqin said, “but I’ve never once stepped into the church.”
    “Neither have I.”
    “Well, better to believe in something than to have nothing to believe in, I would say.”
    “What do you believe in then, Peiqin?”
    “I don’t have any grand theories, but I believe it’s wrong for people to kill other people. That’s why I wanted to come out with you today.”
    “Thank you.”
    They moved inside. The church looked impressive with its rectangular pillars in the hall and the colorful stone balusters in the balcony, and it was packed. According to the brochures they picked at the entrance, it could accommodate about a thousand people, including some in the hall and some in the balcony.
    Yu and Peiqin failed, however, to find seats for themselves, so they had to stand in the back. To their surprise, they saw a large number of young people. Beside them, a fashionable girl in a low-cut yellow summer dress prayed devotedly, clutching a Bible in her hands, her head hung low, her hair dyed golden. She was perhaps in her early twenties.
    They waited patiently, hand in hand, till the end of the service.
    As soon as people began to pour out of the building, Yu pressed a number on his cell phone.
    “Who is it?” Bai said.
    “Oh, it’s Yu. We talked earlier this morning. I’m waiting for you near the entrance.”
    A middle-aged woman came over to them with questions in her eyes. She was in her late forties or early fifties, slightly plump, with a pair of