When Red is Black

proverb—not letting a single drop of fertilizer fall on another’s field. What did you mean?”
     
    “That’s something Jia said—in connection with a relative of Yang’s, I remember.” Wei hardly tried to conceal the impatience in his voice. “So what?”
     
    “Thank you so much, Comrade Wei. This may be very important for our work. I really appreciate your help.”
     
    “Well, I don’t know much about it. You’d better talk to Jia. He will be back soon.” Wei added, “Oh, one more thing. About a year ago, somebody called to inquire about the publication date of the poetry collection’s second edition. The call was transferred to me, and I did not have any information for him. He might have been a reader interested in the poetry, but I somehow got the feeling that he called for some other reason.”
     
    Yu decided to visit the publishing house.
     
    The Shanghai Literature Publishing House was located on Shaoxing Road. It had been a large private residence in the thirties. There was a new bookstore cafe on the first floor. Detective Yu called Jia and waited for him there.
     
    Jia, a man in his late forties, walked into the cafe in big strides. As Yu broached his topic, Jia eyed him in surprise.
     
    “The second edition has not come out, has it?”
     
    “What do you mean?” Yu said, reminded of the conversation with Wei.
     
    “Then why do you ask, Comrade Detective Yu?”
     
    Yu’s puzzlement was mirrored on Jia’s face. He apparently knew nothing about the murder investigation.
     
    “I don’t know anything about the first edition or the second edition, Comrade Jia. Can you tell me what you know, from the beginning?”
     
    “Well, it was several years ago,” Jia said slowly. “Yin asked me to arrange a meeting here at the publishing house to explain her contract for Yang’s poetry collection to Yang’s grandnephew.”
     
    “Yang’s grandnephew?”
     
    “Yes, a boy named Bao, from Jiangxi Province.”
     
    “Hold on here—a boy, from Jiangxi Province—” Yu interrupted Jia. It fit the description given by the shrimp woman. The time was right, too. It made sense for Yin to have referred to him as her nephew. In view of the difference in their ages, it would have been too much to call him her grandnephew. “Yes, please go on, Comrade Jia.”
     
    “His mother is an ex-educated youth, who married a local farmer and settled in Jiangxi. Bao must have come here to claim the money as the legitimate heir to Yang. After all, Yin had not been married to Yang.”
     
    “That’s true. How did the meeting go?”
     
    “It was not a pleasant one. He did not understand why she got such a large share of the money—too large a portion, to his way of thinking.”
     
    “I do not really understand. Can you tell me a little more?”
     
    “When we publish the work of a dead author, we sometimes engage a special editor. Such an editor would collect the author’s various publications, compare different versions, annotate some of the text, and write an introduction if necessary. As special editor for Yang’s poetry, Yin did a lot of work, searching out poems from old magazines, and retrieving quite a few from his notebooks or scrap paper. It was no exaggeration to say that the collection would not have been published without her hard work. For such a job, we normally pay about fifty percent of the going rate.”
     
    “Fifty percent of what you normally pay an author?”
     
    “Yes. That is, of course, when the author is no longer around and no one else makes claim to the royalties. At that time, it was fifteen Yuan for ten lines, I remember, regardless of the print run. If there’s anything not conventional in our agreement with Yin, it was the additional twenty percent she claimed as a copying fee. We agreed, since it was still less than what we would have paid Yang. The sudden appearance of the grandnephew rattled us. There’s no precedent for a relative like him claiming anything, especially so long after publication. Yin maintained that what she earned was rightfully hers. In a way, she was right. So she refused to pay Bao.
     
    “I talked to my boss. Not that much money was involved. We did not want to cause a scandal. So we paid Bao an amount equivalent to the remaining thirty percent.”
     
    “In other words, you ended up paying the normal rate— 100%—for the book.”
     
    “That’s correct.”
     
    “Did Bao accept the arrangement?”
     
    “He did, but in a