When Red is Black

earlier, and on the wine list it appeared to be expensive.
     
    It was late. Some people began to leave, but others were arriving. A couple of new waitresses appeared, perhaps a later shift. Here, the night was still young.
     
    In those myths of the thirties, Shanghai was called a nightless city—a place of red neon and white wine, of intoxicating money and glittering gold.
     
    When he suggested to White Cloud that he take her back home in a taxi, she looked at him before responding in a low, husky voice. Perhaps she had drunk too much wine. “It’s too far from here. The taxi fare will be very expensive. Can’t we go back to your apartment? I’ll have to come over tomorrow morning anyway. I can sleep on the sofa.”
     
    “Don’t worry about the taxi money, White Cloud,” he said hastily. “The police bureau will reimburse me.”
     
    It was out of the question for her to stay overnight at his place. In these new apartment complexes, the arms of the neighborhood committee might not reach as far, but people still watched. Stories traveled up and down in the elevators, if not on the staircases. Chief Inspector Chen could not afford to have such stories circulating about himself.
     
    Nor did he consider himself a Liu Xiahui, a legendary Confucian figure who kept himself under restraint with a naked girl sitting on his lap. Chen doubted he was capable of imitating Liu Xiahui with a pretty young girl, a little secretary, asleep on the sofa in his room.
     
    It was a long drive. She did not speak much. He wondered whether she was slightly disappointed or even displeased with his rejection of her offer. At one point, she leaned against him in the back seat, as if she was slightly drunk, then she straightened up again.
     
    She had the taxi pull up at the street corner. “The road ahead is under repair. I can walk from here to my home. It’s only two or three minutes away.”
     
    “Let me walk you home. It’s late,” he said before turning to the taxi driver. “Wait here for me.”
     
    Even at this late hour, there were still several young men loitering around the corner with lit cigarettes shimmering between their fingers like fireflies. One whistled shrilly as they passed by in the chilly night. They walked into a long, dark alley. Originally it must have been a passageway between two blocks of houses, but people had built illegal makeshift one-story huts or shelters along both sides. The city government did nothing, because those people had to live somewhere. So the passage was squeezed into a much narrower lane, not even wide enough for two people to walk abreast. He followed her in silence, stepping carefully between the coal stoves and piles of winter cabbages stored outside. This was too sharp a contrast to the Golden Time Rolling Backward.
     
    It was no wonder that White Cloud studied at Fudan University while working hard at the Dynasty Club. She had to get a life that was different from her parents’, by whatever means possible.
     
    It was easy to say that poverty was no excuse for what people chose to do with their lives. It was not easy, however, for a young girl to follow the Party’s principles of a simple life and hard work. In fact, few Party members, as far as he knew, still adhered to those principles.
     
    He parted with her before a ramshackle one-story shelter and started back toward the taxi. A minute later, he turned to see her still standing by the door. The hut appeared stunted, its roof looming merely inches above her hair. In the dark night, he was surprised to make out a small pot of flowers blossoming on top of the roof tiles, placed there as a decoration.
     
    As the taxi started winding out of the slum area, he had a weird feeling, as if the city had suddenly turned into two disparate halves. The first city was made up of old shikumen houses, narrow lanes, and slum alleys like the one he was leaving, in which people still had a hard time making ends meet. The second city was composed of trendy places like the bars on Henshan Road, the new high-end apartment complex in Hongqiao, and the would-be New World.
     
    When Gu had first approached him about his ambitious business project, Chen had almost considered the New World and its like as myths, but he was wrong. A myth would not survive if it was not rooted in present realities.
     
    There was also an untold part of that myth, of course: the suffering of the people shut out of it; that was the part familiar to Chief