I may have reported to you earlier about a time-honored tradition in our lane—the Red Dust Evening Talk. A group of middle-aged or elderly people would sit out in the summer evenings, when it was too hot for them to stay inside in their small, crowded rooms. So they gathered in front of the lane, enjoying the cool breeze, telling stories, cracking jokes, gossiping, and whatnot. Fewer and fewer people choose, however, to do so nowadays. A lot of the families have installed air conditioning at home. They do not have to hang out in the open as before. As for young people, they prefer to chat through WeChat or to play games online.

  What’s more, with the majority of the lane residents having already moved away due to the Red Dust redevelopment project, the remaining people are no longer in the mood to do the evening talk, with the continuous commotion of the roaring bulldozers.

  A few days ago, however, some remaining lane residents held one final evening talk in memory of Old Root, a deceased lane resident. They also aimed to bring the lane’s time-honored tradition to a formal closure.

  Who would have thought that X, too, would appear there? Actually, it’s the first time that he’d participated in the Red Dust Evening Talk. Not only that, he also turned into the storyteller for the event.

  That evening, X told a story about the romance between General Cai and Little Phoenix Fairy. The story is quite well known. It was made into a popular movie titled Music Understanding in the early eighties. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with the story in itself. But why had X chosen to narrate that particular story, with an unmistakable emphasis on its relevance to today’s China, particularly with its obvious political allusions?

  In the final analysis, it was a frenzied attack against our Party government in the disguise of a long-forgotten romance set at the beginning of the last century. His tale was full of evil, sinister allusions.

  X was by no means simply retelling a romantic tale that happened a long time ago. He repeatedly mentioned “today’s emperor in the Forbidden City.” And he also mentioned someone thrown into the prison because of his satire against “the contemporary emperor who changed the constitution so that he could rule forever.” It was definitely a vicious jab against the change in our Party constitution regarding the term limit for the supreme Party leader in Beijing.

  At this moment, our Party government is facing many complicated challenges in a fast-changing international situation. We have to keep our vigilance at the highest level. X seized the opportunity to launch an attack against our CCP government. Given X’s anti-Party history, there would be a convincing case to target him as an example to be punished, in the interests of political stability.

  A Revolutionary Salute,

  Sincerely Yan

  P.S. Also, I have to mention something else that is possibly related. Our lane has witnessed several suspicious visitors of late. One could have been a high-ranking police officer, talking with a deplorable lane resident surnamed Zhang. I believe I recognized the officer, whose image was caught on our surveillance camera, even though his face was partially covered with the hood of his rain jacket. So I dug out the surveillance recordings for a much longer period to double-check. Sure enough, he had appeared on an earlier tape. He is the director of the Shanghai Judicial System Reform Office, surnamed Chen.

  We have to ask this question: Could Chen’s visit to the lane be connected to X’s case?

  So that was the version of events that Yan had reported to her Party superior.

  Chen took in a sharp breath. He was scandalized to learn that Yan had submitted such a false report to the higher government authorities, with so many shameless fabrications woven into it.

  But it was not surprising. Yan had simply acted out of self-interest. During the present crisis, she knew only too well that she needed to produce a sensational political case to impress her Party boss. She was to keep her job after the disappearance of the lane.

  In other words, she had to prove her value among the worst of the people whom Yeats described as “full of passionate intensity”—in a moral wasteland. Like Yan, there were quite a number of Chinese people behaving like hollow men, gesticulating in the wind, their minds stuffed full of CCP propaganda. As the great philosopher Kant might have put it, they did not look up at the starry sky above their heads, or the moral law within them, in awe.

  It was a report Yan had worked tirelessly on. Just how grossly inaccurate it was, Chen was not in a position to tell for certain, but he thought he could guess. For instance, X would never have mentioned someone being thrown into prison because of his satire against “the contemporary emperor who changed the constitution so that he could rule forever.” After all, X had been so careful for all those years; it did not make sense that he would do such a thing.

  But how could Chen possibly prove it?

  He kept shaking his head, lost in thought …

  More alarmingly, in spite of all the precautions he had taken, the state surveillance proved to be truly a “Heaven-and-Earth net”—omnipotent, omnipresent. There was no possibility of escaping it.

  It was even worse than in 1984. George Orwell had foreseen what a horror it would be to live under an authoritarian regime, but the dystopian master might have still underestimated the terrible lengths to which the CCP government would choose to go.

  The former Chief Inspector Chen had no choice but to fight back through his own investigation.

  At the present moment, Chen’s top priority was to get X out of his overwhelming political trouble. If the problem was left unsolved, it could escalate beyond control.

  But Chen looked up to see Jin shaking her head, sitting beside him on the green section sofa.

  “Molong has done so much research for us,” Chen said, “with less than a day’s work.”

  “Yes, he’s a very capable man,” she said with a pensive note in her voice, moving to change the topic abruptly. “The meal is quite late, but it is finally ready for you. You really have to excuse my far-from-gourmet cooking skills, Director Chen.”

  Jin left after the late lunch in his apartment.

  Chen sat alone in the living room for a long while, cudgeling his brains, and resisting the temptation to light a cigarette again.

  Yan was an unreliable narrator, no question about it.

  But how unreliable?

  If only the former inspector could get hold of an authentic, reliable account of the tale X had told at the last evening talk in Red Dust Lane, he might be able to do something about it.

  The question was how he could possibly lay his hands on an accurate account of X’s story-telling that evening.

  Chen did not have any clues.

  He made himself a cup of extra-strong black coffee. It was not a day for worrying about the possibility of an upset stomach.

  The coffee made no difference to him, though. His brain seemed to be brimful of sticky white-flour glue.

  With the dusk beginning to spread out against the sky, Chen went outside, thinking hard, but still clueless.

  Different ideas and scenarios crashed in his mind, like ignorant armies fighting in the dark. He knew from experience that taking a walk might help to clear his mind. Especially a leisurely stroll along the Bund.

  Shortly afterward, however, he changed his mind, hailed a taxi, and told the driver about the destination for that evening: “Bund Park.”

  It was not long before he witnessed himself walking into the park again. Bund Park, once so familiar, appeared to be so strange nowadays, with numerous changes greeting him here and there.

  The park turned out to be very commercialized, with a Shanghai branch of the Wei Secret Recipe Restaurant, a Starbucks café, a quaint teahouse, and a number of souvenir stores and stalls, like snails stubbornly stuck along the bank walls. It was politicized too, with the towering, three-gun-like Monument to the People’s Heroes which loomed over the Huangpu River, piercing the darkness of the evening, and the political and commercial neon lights that shimmered and chased each other over a large expanse of the water.

  Vaguely, he recalled a myth he had read long ago—somehow in association with Bund Park this time. In that myth, the moment one’s feet touched the sacred ground, one would be reinvigorated.

  That evening Chen failed to feel any miraculous effect at all.

  But he did sense a mysterious correspondence with the invisible X. Years earlier, X had been studying English in this very park, with Mei sitting on another green bench. That had been the first link in the chain of events caused by their unbalanced Yin and Yang …

  Chen hastened to pull back his train of thought to the present moment. As he knew clearly now, X’s disappearance had been precipitated by his participation in the last Red Dust Evening Talk.

  Or, to be more exact, by Yan’s sinister scheming and reporting in the background.

  Yan’s report was full of lies and fabrications made up for her own ends. What she had done against X could be definitely classified, Chen reflected somberly, as the “banal evil” of Hannah Arendt’s brilliant analysis. Yan identified herself entirely with the system. So she believed that she was justified in doing whatever she wanted in the interests of the Party, without needing to do any independent thinking about anything. In other words, she saw her personal interests as inseparably entwined with those of the Party government.

  Chen heard a siren breaking out of nowhere, ripping the sky as if exploding from the dark river water. X had written several lines, Chen recalled, about a similar scene with Mei standing beside him.

  But Chen found himself getting disorientated again.

  He hastened to drag himself back from his wandering thoughts. After all, the reason he had chosen to revisit the park this evening was a simple one. He hoped that it would help him to achieve a crucial breakthrough in this difficult investigation.

  Failing to find the green bench he used to sit on, Chen perched instead on a gray rock in the midst of a small green bamboo grove. The bamboos rustled in an occasional breeze, the shadows shifting positions and patterns. Otherwise, everything appeared to be wrapped in silence.

  Whistling, he tried to recall what Zhang had told him in the Old Half Place restaurant, reviewing anything and everything in detail, as if rewatching a movie.

  There were seven or eight people at that last evening talk in the lane, Zhang had mentioned, with X in the center of them. Speaking at the evening talk was definitely not something premeditated on X’s part, since he’d agreed only at the last moment, at the insistence of the other lane residents. In fact, they’d suggested the very topic to him too. In other words, X had not prepared to tell that story beforehand. Not at all.

  X could not but have touched on Yuan Shikai’s abortive attempt to restore the monarchy system, in the early days of the Republic, while he was telling the story of the romance between General Cai and Little Phoenix Fairy. That was an integral part of the romance. It could be argued that without the would-be Emperor Yuan scheming in the background, the romance between General Cai and Little Phoenix Fairy would not have taken place.

  After that last evening talk, Yan had interviewed some of the event’s participants, but they had not included Zhang. It was probably because Zhang tried to avoid meeting with her like the plague. Still, Zhang had turned into a suspicious target too, in her report to the higher authorities …

  A cricket started scratching with its wings in the night-mantled grove. The sound was eerily familiar to Chen. Many years ago, still at the height of the Cultural Revolution, a Red Guard cousin of his had given him a cricket nicknamed “Invincible General,” which fought fiercely like a devil. After winning a series of ferocious battles, it was inexplicably killed by a little-known cricket in a purple clay cricket-fighting pot, its leg broken and its belly ripped open by the ferocious opponent. On the same day, his cousin also bit the dust in the “armed struggle of the Cultural Revolution.”

  The mysterious coincidences were appearing to be almost supernaturally scary this evening, even in half-forgotten memories.

  Once again, Chen found himself breaking into a cold sweat. Could it be possible that the screeching in the park was echoing from the ghost of the cricket nicknamed “Invincible General”?

  Pulling himself back from the uncanny associations, he strove to concentrate on what Zhang had told him during lunch in the Old Half Place regarding X’s narration of the romance—but he couldn’t recall that Zhang had mentioned anything specific at all, other than that he’d performed it well. It was Zhang himself who’d recapped the basic plot of the tale for him—about how the general and the courtesan had fallen into an amorous entanglement, filled with genuine affection, against the backdrop of an ambitious would-be emperor pushing desperately for the restoration of the monarchy system.

  Zhang had also mentioned that Old Root often spoke highly of X before his death. Coincidentally, the old man had been nice to Chen too—long before Chen had become a chief inspector in the Shanghai Police Bureau. Had Chen been aware that the last ever evening talk would be held in memory of Old Root, he would have chosen to attend it too.

  But for so many years, X had kept a low profile. It did not make sense for him to jump into trouble all of a sudden, not even for an event held in memory of Old Root. X should—and would—have known better.

  But what could Chen do? For the moment, the former chief inspector had nothing to go on.

  Under the CCP’s surveillance and suppression, it wasn’t too surprising that someone like X would be turned into a target by the government. Too many people like him had been asked out for a cup of tea. But in that scenario, he would have come back after receiving a serious warning—and X had been disappeared now for more than a week.

  Perhaps X was in far more serious political trouble. If that was the case, he would be kept in an unknown place, for an unknown period. In the worst-case scenario, he would be disappeared for ever.

  But simply for a patriotic story told in front of Red Dust Lane?

  It was then that a comment Zhang had made began screeching in Chen’s mind like a cricket. It galvanized him.

  I even noticed that one of the audience members took out a phone when X started speaking, possibly to take pictures or record his vivid narration.

  People nowadays did not have to carry around a portable cassette recorder or a Dictaphone. They could easily use their cell phones for the same purpose.

  If a recording did indeed exist, it could prove to be a truly authentic version of X’s narration in the last evening talk. Then Chen would be able to compare it with Yan’s version of events to find out whether X had really said anything politically taboo, as claimed in Yan’s sensational report.

  In Yan’s brainwashed mind, it was probably natural for her to write such a report, regardless of the truth of the matter. In China’s long history, things like this had happened repeatedly. For instance, General Yue Fei of the Song dynasty was executed for something that was “probably true.” So it made sense for Yan, who faced an existential crisis—the loss of her position as the head of the Red Dust Lane neighborhood committee. It concerned her survival. Outside the CCP system, she would be like a dead, stinking fish on dry land.

  If the former chief inspector could get hold of the real recording of the evening talk—

  Then, considering all Mei’s connections with government officials, he might be able to persuade her to deliver the video to someone high up in the city government, someone who would be in a position to help her—and help X.

  Getting hold of the important recording in question became the order of the day for Chen.

  But how?

  It would be better for somebody else to obtain the video at this critical juncture. The former chief inspector could easily arouse suspicion, he reminded himself. In fact, he had already appeared in Yan’s report to her Party boss, considered a suspect hiding in the murky background.

  For X’s sake, as well as Mei’s, Chen had to make sure that any moves on his part would not further the political complications for the two of them. But he also needed to go back to Red Dust Lane and tap Zhang for the crucial information.

  Then it occurred to him that, subconsciously, he already had someone in mind for the job—someone reliable, trustworthy …

  But before he approached Molong for help, he hesitated. And he dropped the idea, albeit reluctantly.

  On the other hand, it was just a matter of time before Jin appeared in the zoom lens of a surveillance monitor somewhere …

  The former chief inspector thought he had no other choice, in spite of his knowledge of the perils he might be involving her in.

  Eventually, he took out his phone, still containing the new SIM card, and dialed the familiar number. And she picked it up on the first ring.

  “Another thing for you, Jin,” he said without preamble. “It concerns X. Possibly in a politically sensitive case.”

  “What do you want me to do, Director Chen?”

  “Contact someone surnamed Zhang in Red Dust Lane. I’m going to give you his contact information now. Full name Zhang Yong, nicknamed Four-eyed Zhang. Address: Shikumen House number forty-eight. The front room in the left wing on the second floor.

  “These are the points I want you to discuss with him. Tell him that you work with me in the same office in the city government, and that I trust you. You’ve come to him on my behalf to find any new information about X. I’m particularly interested in more details about a possible recording of the last evening talk. It’s a very important matter.

  “And Jin, keep this in mind: Big Brother may be watching you every step of the way when you walk into the lane.”

  “Got it. I appreciate your trust in me. I’ll go to the lane right now.”

  “Not right now. Tomorrow morning will do. More likely than not, the old man is already in bed.”