The Mao Case

the old Beijing lane. A wooden pillar still stood out, like an angry finger pointing to the summer night
     sky.
    “Is it your father’s car?”
    “No, it’s mine.” She added, “For business.”
    HCC were no longer something simply because of their parents. With their family connections, they themselves had turned into
     high cadres, or into successful entrepreneurs like her, or into both, like her husband.
    He followed her over to the limousine, her high heels clicking on the stone-covered lane, a sliver of the moonlight illuminating
     her fine profile.
    Holding the door for her, the chauffeur bowed obsequiously, white-haired like an owl in the night.

    “Let me take you to your hotel,” she said.
    “No, thanks. It’s just across the lane. I’ll walk there.”
    “Then good night.”
    Watching the car roll out of sight, he recalled that her earlier reference to the “tide” could have come out of a Tang-dynasty
     poem.
The tide always keeps its word / to come. Had I known that, / I would have married a young tide-rider.
    He was no longer a young tide-rider on the materialistic waves today.

EIGHTEEN
    CHIEF INSPECTOR CHEN STARTED his second day in Beijing by making a phone call to Diao. It was quite early in the morning.
    “My name is Chen,” he introduced himself. “I used to be a businessman, but I’m trying my hand at writing. I talked with Chairman
     Wang of the Chinese Writers’ Association. He recommended you to me. So I would like very much to invite you to lunch today.”
    “What a surprise, Mr. Chen! Thank you so much for your kind invitation, I have to say that first. But we’ve never met before,
     have we? Nor have I met Wang before. How can I let you buy lunch for me?”
    “I haven’t read much, Mr. Diao, but I know the story of Cao Xueqin’s friends treating him to Beijing roast duck in exchange
     for a chapter of the
Dream of the Red Chamber
. That’s how I got the idea.”
    “I don’t have any exciting stories for you, I’m afraid, but if you really insist, we may meet for a late lunch today.”
    “Great. One o’clock then. See you at Fangshan Restaurant.”
    Putting down the phone, Chen realized that he had the morning to himself. So he started making plans.

    As he walked out of the hotel, he hailed a taxi, telling the driver to go to the Memorial Hall of Chairman Mao in Tiananmen
     Square. Afterward, he thought, he could take a short cut through the Forbidden City Museum, to the Fangshan Restaurant in
     North Sea Park.
    “You’re lucky. The memorial hall is open this week,” the taxi driver said without looking back. “I took someone there just
     yesterday.”
    “Thanks.”
    “It’s at the center of the Tiananmen Square,” the driver said, taking him for a first-time visitor to Beijing. “The feng shui
     of the memorial hall is absolutely rotten.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Rotten for the dead, wasn’t it? Hardly a month after Mao’s death, his body not even properly placed in the crystal coffin
     yet, Madam Mao was thrown into jail as the head of the Gang of Four. And inauspicious for the square too. You know what happened
     in the square in 1989. There was bloodshed all over it. Sooner or later his body will have to be removed, or it will cause
     trouble again.”
    “You really believe that?”
    “Believe it or not, there’s no escaping retribution! Not even for Mao. He died sonless. One of his sons was killed in the
     Korean War, another suffers from schizophrenia, and still another went missing during the Civil War. It was Mao himself
     who said that, while he was in the Lu Mountains.” The driver added with a sardonic chuckle, “But you never know how many bastards
     he might have left behind.”
    Chen made no comment, trying to look out at the much-changed Chang’an Avenue. They had already passed the Beijing Hotel near
     Dongdan.
    When the taxi came to a stop close to the memorial hall, Chen handed some bills to the driver and said, “Keep the change.
     But tell your feng shui theory to every customer. One of them may turn out to be a cop.”
    “Oh, if that happens, I’ll have a question for that cop. My father — labeled a Rightist simply so his school could meet the
     quota demand — died during the Cultural Revolution, leaving me an orphan without an
education or skills. That’s why I am a taxi driver. So what compensation does the government owe me?”
    In the anti-Rightist movement launched by Mao in mid-fifties, there was a sort of