Red Mandarin Dress

Wakening Palace, where Jia Baoyu reads the couplet and gets lost, but I can’t remember the exact lines.”
    “The couplet reads like this,” Chen said. “‘When the fictional is real, the real is fictional; where there’s nothing, there’s everything.’ ” Jia zuo zhenshi zhen ji jia, wu wei youchu you yi wu.
    “Exactly. You must be a well-to-do scholar. A prosperous attorney or something,” the owner said, glancing at the briefcase on the table.
    The Italian leather briefcase was a gift from Gu, who insisted that it became Chief Inspector Chen. Ironically, it could have become him in the eyes of Green Jade too, who also took him as a prosperous “attorney or something” last night.
    “The author of Dream of the Red Chamber was good at making puns,” the restaurant owner said, “even in the names of the characters. The name Jia Baoyu, the hero of the saga, could mean ‘fictional gemstone,’ and there is another family in the book, Zheng, which means ‘real’—”
    At that word, Chen’s heart skipped a beat.
    Ending the conversation abruptly, he went back to the table and pulled up his briefcase. Before his departure for the vacation village, he had stuffed the files on the housing development case into the briefcase along with those on the red mandarin dress case, though he hadn’t planned to study either of them there. In his hurried return to Shanghai, he hadn’t had the time to look at them.
    He took out the folder on the housing development case and started reading the part about Jia.
    It was scanty and simplistic, focusing on Jia’s possible antigovernment motive. It provided little solid information. Only a couple of sentences about his unhappy childhood during the Cultural Revolution, in which he had lost his parents. It didn’t even mention his parents’ names.
    But that seemed to be enough for Director Zhong to conclude that Jia took the case for revenge over the Cultural Revolution.
    Chen moved on to the part about Jia’s personal life in the last few years.
    Again, it was scanty. Perhaps because Jia kept a low profile in spite of his controversial cases. It was said that the US stocks left by his grandfather were worth millions, making Jia one of the most eligible bachelors in the city. So his continuous celibacy was noteworthy. Some even had suspicions about his sexual orientation, though there was nothing to support that. In fact, he’d had a girlfriend—a model—though they had since parted. She was surnamed Xia, about fifteen years younger than he.
    On impulse, Chen snatched up his cell phone and called White Cloud.
    “Do you know someone named Xia in the entertainment business? She was a model before.”
    “Xia—Xia Ji, possibly. I don’t know her personally, but she’s well-known in those circles,” she said. “She no longer works as a model. She’s said to have shares in a bathhouse, Gilded Age. She’s a success story, which is why I’ve heard of her.”
    “A model for the bathhouse business?”
    “Do you really not know?” she asked. “In a massage room there, everything is possible. But she’s a partner in the business.”
    He recalled something about the model girlfriend of Jia’s somewhere. He remembered because of her name, Xiaji, which in Chinese could also mean “summer.” Chen had actually met her on a panel for a contest entitled “Three Beautiful Contest—Heart, Body, and Mind,” a pageant sponsored by the New World Corporation. Chen served as a panelist out of obligation to Gu. As a published poet, he was supposed to be “capable of judging what’s poetic.” Xia was also there as a panelist. They didn’t talk much during the contest, nor had they spoken since.
    “Thank you, White Cloud. I’ll talk to you later,” he said, finishing up the phone call at the sight of Fan returning with an envelope in his hand.
    “Comrade Fan, would you tell me the boy’s name again?”
    “Why? Xiaozheng, or Zheng, so that should be Ming Zheng, or Ming Xiaozheng. I don’t remember which particular written character for ‘zheng.’ As for ‘Xiao,’ the character could have been added to the little boy’s name as a sort of endearment, you know.”
    “Yes, occasionally my mother still calls me ‘Xiao Cao’ too.”
    “What’s your point?”
    “Chinese names are capable of meaning something. For instance, Jia Ming can mean ‘fictional name.’ And Ming Zheng, at least in pronunciation, can mean ‘name real.’ ”
    “What are you driving