The Mao Case

collecting the odds and ends left over
     from the thirties, like an Underwood typewriter, silver-plated dinnerware, a pair of trumpet-shaped speakers, several antique
     phones, a brass foot warmer, and the like. After all, these were the things his grandparents and parents had told him about,
     things pictured in the time-yellowed family albums in which he now buried his solitude. And his collection contributed to
     the legend of the mansion.
    In recent years, Xie had started to teach painting at home. He was said to have an unwritten rule for his students: he would
     only accept young, pretty, talented girls. According to some people who had known him for years, the sixty-plus-year-old Xie
     might be fashioning himself after Jia Baoyu in the
Dream of the Red Chamber.
    Jiao went to Xie’s painting classes despite the fact that Xie had hardly received any formal training as a painter, and she
     went to the parties despite the fact that most of the partygoers were old or old-fashioned or both.
    To explain all this, Internal Security had come up with a scenario. Xie must have functioned as a middleman, introducing Jiao
     to the people interested in the Mao materials in her possession. Foreign publishers would be willing to pay a huge advance
     for a book about Mao’s private life, just as they had for the memoir by Mao’s doctor. The parties would have provided opportunities
     for her to meet with those potential buyers.
    The course of action proposed by Internal Security was to raid the house on grounds such as obscene or indecent behaviors,
     or whatever ex
cuse would get Xie into trouble. In their opinion, he would not be a hard nut to crack. Once he spilled, they could take care
     of Jiao.
    But the Beijing authorities didn’t like the proposed “tough measure,” nor were they convinced that such a measure would
     work. Which was why they had called Chen in.
    In the file, Chen didn’t find a copy of the book written by Mao’s personal doctor. It was banned. Nor was there a copy of
     the bestseller
Cloud and Rain in Shanghai.
    He was intrigued by the title of that book. “Cloud and rain” was a stock simile for sexual love in classic Chinese literature,
     evocative of the lovers’ being carried away in a floating soft cloud and of the coming warm rain. It had originated in an
     ode describing the King of Chu’s rendezvous with the Goddess of Wu Mountain, who declared that she would come to him again
     in cloud and rain. But “cloud and rain” was also part of a Chinese proverb:
With a turning of the hand, the cloud, and with another turning of the hand, the rain
, which referred to the continuous, unpredictable changes in politics.
    Could the title have a double meaning?
    He looked at the clock on the nightstand. Ten fifteen. He decided to go out to buy a copy of
Cloud and Rain in Shanghai
at a neighborhood bookstore, which stayed open late, sometimes until midnight.

THREE
    IT WAS A PRIVATELY run bookstore, no more than five minutes’ walk from his home. From across the street, enveloped in the dark, Chen could see
     that the light was still on.
    The bookstore owner, Big-Beard Fei, had started his business in the hopes of making money selling serious books while writing
     his own postmodernist novel. When his hopes were eventually smashed like eggs against a concrete wall, he turned into a practical
     bookseller, running a store full of sensational bestsellers and not-so-sensational junk. On one miniature shelf, however,
     customers might still be able to find some good books — his way of being nostalgic. And he kept the store open late, he declared,
     because of the insomnia caused by the postmodernist novel he had never finished.
    For Chen, the store’s late hours were a blessing. Besides, there was a nice dumpling restaurant just around the corner. Sometimes,
     after buying a couple of books, he would walk to the restaurant and read over a portion of dumplings, steamed or fried, and
     a cup of beer. The waitress wore a bodice like a
dudou
, moving briskly in high-heeled
wooden slippers, as if emerging out of Wei Zhang’s lines: “
Shining brighter than the moon, / she serves by the wine urn, / her wrists dazzlingly white, / like frost, like snow.
” She was nice to him, and to her other customers as well.
    “Welcome,” Fei greeted him with his habitual smile from behind his beer-bottle-bottom-thick glasses, combing his thinning
     hair with a plastic comb.
    They had never talked at length,