The Mao Case

the conversation around to a question he wanted to ask. She stood up
     quietly, waving a finger at him as she headed for a shaded corner of the garden.
    It was Wang, chairman of the Writers’ Association in Beijing. Wang told Chen that Diao, the author of
Rain and Cloud in Shanghai
,
     had attended a literary conference in Qinghai, but at the end of the meeting, Diao had gone somewhere else instead of returning
     to Shanghai. At
Chen’s request, Wang promised to continue his efforts to find out the exact whereabouts of Diao.
    Closing the phone, Chen looked around to see Jiao squatting in the corner, plucking weeds and twigs with her bare hands, her
     overalls daubed with paint and her bare feet dotted with soil, like a hardworking gardener. Or like someone living in the
     mansion, taking care of her own garden.
    It was a poignant image: a blossoming girl silhouetted against the ruins of an old garden, her bare shoulders dazzlingly white
     in the afternoon sunlight, the sky dappled with drifting clouds like sails, the smell of the grass rising in a fresh breeze.
    She was vivacious, and smart too, in spite of her lack of good education. He wished he could come to know her better, watching
     the curve of her slender bottom as she leaned over her work. But it was a Mao case, he told himself again, and he had only
     about one week left — the deadline set by Internal Security. He had to “approach” her more effectively.
    He got up and moved over, squatting beside her, joining in the work. There was a bunch of uprooted weeds by her feet.
    “Sorry about the phone call. I was enjoying our talk.”
    “So was I.”
    “There’s no party here this evening, Jiao?”
    “No.”
    “I would love to stay longer,” he said, glancing at his watch, “but I have some urgent business to take care of. But it won’t
     take long. If you don’t have anything this evening, how about continuing our talk over dinner?”
    “Well, that would be nice, but —”
    “Then let’s do it,” he said, his eyes holding hers momentarily. “There is a restaurant not far from here. It used to be Madam
     Chiang’s residence.”
    “You’re so into the past. The food is not that great, I’ve heard, and the restaurant is expensive. Still, many people want
     to go there.”
    “They want to imagine themselves as President Chiang Kai-shek or
Madam Chiang — for an hour or so — over a cup of sparkling wine. Illusion cannot be too expensive.”
    “Oh horror!”
    “What do you mean, Jiao?”
    “Why can’t people be themselves?”
    “In Buddhist scripture, everything is appearance, including one’s self,” Chen said, rising. “The restaurant is very close.
     You can walk there. So I’ll see you this evening.”
    Striding out of the premises, he saw a middle-aged man loitering outside the small café, looking stealthily across the street.
     Possibly an Internal Security man, Chen thought, though he hadn’t seen him before. If so, Internal Security would soon witness
     him and Jiao sitting together at a candlelight dinner and report back that the romantic chief inspector was making his “approach.”
    After all, it was like a couplet in the
Dream of the Red Chamber
, “When the true is false, the false is true. Where there is nothing, there is everything.”
    Jiao saw in Xie’s painting something not only invisible to others but also closely connected to Xie’s life. Chen thought of
     the book Ling had sent him; in it, critics claimed to have discovered evidence of Eliot’s personal crisis in the manuscript
     of
The Waste Land
— his future as a poet uncertain, his marriage on rocks, and his wife a neurotic drag. According to them, the water in the
     poem could signify what the poet didn’t have in his life, metaphysically as well as physically —
    He was struck by an idea — not exactly new, since it had actually crossed his mind the night that he was assigned the Mao Case.
     That night, in the midst of a confusion of ideas, he had thought of the connection between Li Shangyin’s life and his poetry.
     That was why he scribbled the word
poetry
on the matchbox before falling asleep. Only he had forgotten its relevance to the Mao Case by the next morning.
    It was the possibility of learning something through Mao’s poetry. Not just as a critic, but as a detective. In spite of all
     the revolutionary messages in Mao’s poems, some of the lines must have come from his personal experience and impulses, consciously
     or