Red Mandarin Dress

stay there for the entire evening—or perhaps for all night?”
    “Sure, if you want me to—as your little secretary or anything else.” She complied without asking questions, like a “little secretary.”
    “No, for a quite different role. I’ll explain it to you there.”
    “When do you expect me there?”
    “Around five. Oh, you’ll have to go home for your dress first. Sorry, I just thought of the dress part. Overseas Chinese Lu will be there too.”
    “Great. So you are like a general in ancient times, making arrangements for a crucial battle in a bathhouse,” she commented, also like a “little secretary,” before she left.
    What herbal pills were in Chen’s medical gourd?
    “I’ll go to a photo studio first,” Chen said. “This will be our night.”
    “You must have figured all this out during the last few days, boss,” Yu said, apologetic for his earlier disappointment in Chen. “You got a lot of work done while you were keeping yourself out of sight.”
    “Well, it was done mostly last night. I didn’t sleep a wink, wandering along Henshan Road like a homeless skunk.”
    Perhaps Yu would never really figure out his boss. But here was the bottom line: for all his eccentricities, Chen was a conscientious cop.
    So it was something to be the partner of Chief Inspector Chen, Yu thought, heading out.

TWENTY-NINE
    CHEN HADN ’ T DECIDED EXACTLY what he was going to do that evening.
    Coming out of the photo studio, he walked to the restaurant, thinking in the dusk that was enveloping him.
    But there was no choice left for him. He tried to reconvince himself. The best course of action would be to leave Jia untouched until after the trial. It wasn’t wise to arrest him before it for people would take it as dirty political retaliation by the government. But in the meantime, he had to trap Jia for the night, and the way to do that was so unorthodox that he didn’t know how to explain it to Yu. Perhaps it was just like the metaphor made by Comrade Deng Xiaoping about the reform in China: “to waddle across the river by stepping on one stone after another.”
    There was no delaying the showdown, however, with or without help from the bureau.
    Inspector Liao would distance himself from it—not just out of self-protection, but out of long distrust for the chief inspector too. They had had several head-on collisions. After the death of Hong, Liao hadn’t so much as made a single phone call to Chen.
    As for Party Secretary Li, Chen didn’t want to think about him for the moment. That would be a headache for later.
    And then there was Director Zhong in the background too, with all the plots and counterplots being worked out in the Forbidden City.
    It was more than likely that Jia wouldn’t succumb to his story. An intelligent and experienced attorney, he knew no one could convincingly prove anything against him so long as he didn’t budge.
    As Chen turned into West Jinling Road, he saw an old woman burning afterworld money in an aluminum basin out on the sidewalk. Shivering in her black cotton-padded clothes, she kept throwing the silver paper ingots into the fire, one by one, murmuring, in a desperate effort to communicate with the dead. It was the night of Dongzhi, he realized.
    In the Chinese lunar calendar, Dongzhi comes on the longest night of the year, important in the dialectical movement of the yin and yang system. As yin moves to an extreme position, it turns into the opposite, to yang. So it was conventionally a night for the reunion of the living and the dead.
    In Chen’s childhood, Dongzhi meant a wonderful meal, except that the dishes on the ancestral offering table had to remain untouched until the candles burned out, a sign that the dead had already enjoyed the meal. He thought again of his mother, who must be burning afterworld money, alone, in her attic room.
    But it might not be a coincidence that he was going to meet Jia on Dongzhi night. A sign that things were going to change. The Way can be told, / but not in an ordinary way.
    He came in sight of the Old Mansion.
    A hostess held the door for him respectfully. It was a different girl, one who did not recognize him.
    Both Overseas Chinese Lu and White Cloud were already in the lobby. Lu was in his black three-piece suit with a florid tie and a couple of large diamond rings on his fingers, and she, in the red mandarin dress bought at the Old City God’s Temple Market.
    “The restaurant owner has agreed to cooperate in