When Red is Black

taste. For instance, the passion for “three-inch golden lotus feet,” which had endured for hundreds of years in China, was a matter of fashion. In some men’s imaginations, the deformed, white-cloth-bound feet were transformed into lotus blossoms blooming in the black night. If people chose to look for value, they would find it in one way or another. Chen scribbled a few lines on the paper napkin, lines probably for a poem.
     
    “What are you thinking about?”
     
    “I’m just making some notes. If I don’t write my ideas down, I may totally forget them by tomorrow.”
     
    “Tell me about your work in the police bureau, Chief Inspector Chen.” She lifted the tea bag by its paper tag, then let it sink to the bottom of the glass.
     
    “Detective Yu has been handling a special case that was recently assigned to my squad. I’m on vacation, but we have a daily discussion about developments.”
     
    “I do not mean just this week,” she said.
     
    “What do you mean?”
     
    “How could somebody like you have turned out to be a cop? A fine scholar, a good translator, and a first-class poet, and you seem to be doing a great job in the police bureau too.”
     
    “You are flattering me, White Cloud. I’m just a cop. You cannot always choose to do what you would like, can you?”
     
    He had not meant this as an allusion to her work in the K club. He regretted having spoken so. He had been asked this question too many times, and his answer came out almost automatically.
     
    She fell momentarily silent.
     
    He tried to maneuver the talk in the direction he had intended it to take. “It’s the same with Mr. Gu, perhaps. He probably didn’t expect as a child to grow up to be a millionaire businessman.”
     
    To his disappointment, she did not know much about Gu. It was all business between Gu and her. As an employer, Gu was not too bad, according to her. He did not take advantage of the girls working for him. Nor was he tight-fisted, at least not with her. As for his connections with the triad world, that was nothing uncommon, she declared. A businessman needed protection.
     
    “Gu has to burn incense, that is, to burn his money to the triad gods, and he is good at what he does. Now he has established connections almost everywhere, in both the white way and the black way.” She added, with her sly smile, “Connections with powerful people like you—”
     
    It was not unpleasant to hear her referring to him as “powerful,” but he cut her short. “Don’t count me in. But have you met any of those really powerful people with him?”
     
    “On a couple of occasions, including several important figures in the city government. One from Beijing as well. I recognized them from their pictures in the newspapers. Do you want to know their names? I can find out.”
     
    “Don’t bother, White Cloud.”
     
    A lambent melody began to waft through the bar. Looking round, he failed to find a karaoke TV set. Then it hit him: karaoke had not existed in the thirties.
     
    “Sorry, there is no karaoke today.”
     
    “Well, I do not enjoy singing that much, Chief Inspector Chen.”
     
    This was not what he had expected. Perhaps she felt the same way he did, preferring not to talk about his job outside the bureau.
     
    The waitress came by again. He ordered a glass of white wine, and she chose a double scotch on the rocks.
     
    Another melody followed. It was an old one, but it belied the period effect—the singer was an American pop star giving a contemporary rendition. For White Cloud, however, it seemed to be even more enjoyable. She was rapt, her face cradled in her hands.
     
    Something soft touched his foot under the table. She had kicked off her shoes, her bare feet were beating out the rhythm, and they were brushing his in her trance. Perhaps.
     
    Sitting so close together at the table, Chen was not unaware of the age difference between them. And of all the other differences, too. They practically belonged to different generations.
     
    To someone like him, whose elementary school years had been in the sixties, a bar or a cafe carried with it associations with bourgeois decadence, decried in all the official textbooks. He might be something of an exception because of his English studies. Still, if he visited a cafe, it was first of all for a cup of good coffee, and occasionally, if time allowed, to spend a couple of hours reading a book over the coffee.
     
    White Cloud, however, had studied