Judge Dee stood up, cleared his throat, raised a cup and started his prepared speech.

  ‘Welcome to the hostel this evening. As you may have already heard, Her Majesty has entrusted me with the mission of finding the missing Luo Binwang. As an aged, overwhelmed official, I know little about a poet like him. You are all well-known poets, and you must have met and talked with Luo. Therefore, anything you can tell me tonight about Luo will prove to be a tremendous help to me.’

  ‘You’re such a brilliant, resourceful judge, Your Honor,’ the poet surnamed Shangguan responded immediately. ‘Who else is there that Her Majesty can trust like you? For others, it may take months or even longer to get any clues regarding a missing person like Luo. For you, however, gathering evidence is a piece of cake. You have the typical sixth sense that is characteristic of a great poet and a resourceful judge.’

  ‘No, no, it’s far from being that easy, I tell you,’ Judge Dee said. ‘Nor am I a poet like all of you here. It’s true I once dreamed of a career as a poet in my younger days, but soon I knew better. And in the meantime, Her Majesty just kept giving me one assignment after another, you know – assignments that have nothing to do with poetry, and thus I have no time for poetry. As a matter of fact, I have not written a single readable poem for years.

  ‘I’ve invited you all here this evening in the hope that you may help by giving me a comprehensive background picture of Luo. All of you are well-known poets, and so must have been in close contact with Luo in the past. Anything – everything – from you will contribute to the success of the investigation. Particularly your knowledge about the possible places Luo might be hiding in right at this moment.’

  ‘The ringleader of the rebellion, General Xu himself, was killed in the last battle fought by the Wuding River,’ Shangguan replied, the red wine in his white jade cup rippling like blood in the candlelight. ‘I don’t think an old bookworm like Luo Binwang could have possibly escaped alive, Your Honor.’

  ‘I have suggested a similar scenario to Her Majesty, but she’s so anxious to gather talents around her that she will not listen to me,’ Judge Dee said, shaking his head. ‘She is adamant that until his body is discovered – either on the battlefield or elsewhere – I have to continue investigating.’

  Perhaps, as in the old Chinese saying, it takes coincidences to make a story. Their discussion was interrupted by a light knock on the door of the private dining room. The opening door framed a middle-aged official surnamed Yuwen. Agricultural Minister Yuwen was said to have an ambiguous political stance between the two rival factions at the court: the Li group, which was composed of loyalists to the late emperor’s family, and the Wu group, which was composed of loyalists to the empress’s family. Perhaps like Judge Dee himself, in spite of his serving in a fairly high-ranking position under the empress, Yuwen was seen by a number of other scholars as an orthodox Confucianist in his own way.

  Judge Dee did not recollect that he had put Minister Yuwen’s name on the invitation list for this dinner, so he was more than a little surprised at his unexpected guest. It was unconventional for a minister like Yuwen to join with other guests – if not invited – to discuss something like the Luo case. A considerable number of low-ranking officials under Minister Yuwen could have easily provided him with information about the progress of the Luo Binwang case if he wished.

  As a result, Judge Dee could not help thinking: would it be possible that Empress Wu had sent Minister Yuwen over for surveillance of the dinner tonight?

  Judge Dee’s latest proposal at the court to the empress had been commonly seen as a deliberate effort to persuade Wu not to change the dynasty of the Li family to that of the Wu family. They both knew that only too well. In fact, it was entirely possible that the case of Luo’s disappearance had been assigned to him by the empress as part of a conspiracy to push him out of the capital. It could be a calculated move by Her Majesty to remove an obstacle in her path to consolidating her absolute power over the Tang Empire.

  ‘Her Majesty wants me to take on this new job as soon as possible, so I’m leaving early tomorrow morning,’ Judge Dee said. ‘I’m just asking some poet-friends over for a cup before I leave. Hopefully, they may also be able to tell me something about Luo.’

  ‘The Luo case is indeed becoming a sensational one, involving not only a celebrated poet but a number of well-known men of letters too, Your Honor,’ Minister Yuwen said, nodding his head gravely. ‘And people are talking about it as a case symbolic of the mess under Her Majesty in today’s empire. In the interests of maintaining political stability for the empire, it is crucial that there is a quick conclusion to the case. Your work will be vital.’

  If he had been sent by the empress, Minister Yuwen would have been kept well informed of Judge Dee’s whereabouts. So it was little wonder, after all, that he was here, Judge Dee thought.

  ‘You surely have a point, Minister Yuwen. It is indeed a politically significant case. I’ll see what I can do, but I don’t have any clues for the moment, let alone any theories.’

  ‘I’ve heard that a large-scale search for Luo Binwang has yielded no results,’ Yuwen said, seating himself in an unoccupied chair beside Judge Dee. ‘So I will share what I know about Luo myself. Years ago, I happened to be taking the state-level civil service examination with Luo. That year, we stayed at the same hostel in the capital, waiting for the result. I came out successful, and he failed, even though he wrote better poems than I. He is a very proud man in his way, as you may know.

  ‘You certainly could say it was not fair to Luo. I have since paid continuous attention to him – long before the outbreak of the rebellion. He’s a great poet, no question about it. In my opinion, he’s qualified to rank number one of the “Four Most Excellent Poets” of our time.’

  Yuwen then began to share more recent information with Judge Dee and others at the table.

  ‘According to gossip, Luo was said to be seen alive, although severely wounded, after the rebellion’s final battle fought by the Wuding River. Some claimed Luo was seen in a small village near the battlefield. Some maintained it was in a high-end brothel. Others insisted it was at a Buddhist temple. But none of the rumors seemed to be that reliable. The distance between these places appears to be far too great for Luo to have moved between them all in such a short space of time. Unless Luo has wings, which is ridiculous.’

  ‘Yes, for a severely wounded old man, Luo would not have been capable of venturing too far,’ the poet surnamed Zhou cut in. ‘It’s totally out of the question.’

  ‘In any case, soldiers must have combed through all those areas,’ said Ouyang stubbornly, a poet known for his Ci-style work. ‘You can never tell where one may choose to hide. He could have been staying invisible in the most obvious places. Zhuang Zi has a famous saying frequently quoted by people, generation after generation: “A great recluse hides himself in the very center of the city.”’

  ‘What about his old home?’ said another poet surnamed Wei.

  ‘You are familiar with his old home, Wei?’

  ‘I came from a county just a couple of miles from his. So I have heard a thing or two about him. His parents passed away long ago, and he has only one younger sister staying in their old home. He broke contact with her years ago because she insisted he should receive no share of what his parents had left behind. She complained that he had stayed away from home for a long time, failing to take care of their parents. She said he was selfish, egocentric and contemptuous of other people.’

  ‘But he participated in the civil service examination many times,’ Judge Dee said. ‘All the preparations, travel and expenses … It’s little wonder that he could not afford to stay at home for a long period.’

  ‘His old home is too far away from the Wuding River battlefield, though,’ Shangguan chimed in. ‘And it would have been too dangerous for him to travel all the way back there when the fight was over.’

  ‘I’ve read a poem allegedly written by Luo before he joined the rebellion’s army,’ Minister Yuwen said, cutting in again. ‘There’re different stories about the poem. Naturally, the stories are not that reliable, I have to say, and the authorship of the poem may be a bit questionable too. But the mood of the poem fits well with Luo. Here it is, and I read it out for all of you. The title is “Seeing off a friend by Yi River”:

  ‘Here, the brave assassin Jin Ke

  bid farewell to his lord Prince Yan,

  his hair bristling with indignation.

  All the heroic and the gallant deeds

  of the past long gone, the water

  of the Yi River remains bone-chilling.’

  ‘If it’s true, it becomes Luo well,’ Judge Dee said. ‘The poem is about a courageous man, Jin Ke. On the eve of the first emperor of the Qin Empire conquering China, Jin Ke set out to assassinate him. Jin Ke knew it was an impossible mission for him to assassinate the mighty emperor. Nevertheless, as it appeared to him, it was the right thing for him to do. So, once he had bid farewell to his friends and sung a song about the cold water in the Yi River, he set out to do it. He failed in the assassination attempt, but even today people admire his courage. You could probably say Luo also bid a tragic farewell himself in that poem.’

  ‘Yes, the choice of the intertextual leitmotif speaks volumes about the poem. A heroic elegy not just for Jin Ke, but for Luo too,’ Yuwen concurred moodily, ‘before he set out for that last, fatal attempt of his. The river surely marked a point of no return for him. It was sort of his swan song.’

  ‘Luo knew that only too well,’ Zhou said, ‘but he still wanted to join the rebellion.’

  The poem was passed around the people sitting at the dinner table. Someone took in a sharp breath, as if he were about to speak, but no one said anything more in response.

  After all, such a discussion could be a serious political taboo. As in the Chinese proverb, walls have ears.

  Especially with the uninvited Minister Yuwen sitting among the poets at the table. There was not even a wall.

  Later, in his hostel room, Judge Dee combed and re-combed his white-streaked beard with two fingers, lost in thought.

  The discussion with the five poets in the hostel restaurant had hardly yielded anything relevant or fruitful to the investigation, and Judge Dee remained disturbed by the surprising visit made by Minister Yuwen.

  Could it have been a not-too-subtle hint that the empress was keeping all of them under surveillance, so they’d better behave themselves? At the same time, it was also possible that Her Majesty had just wanted to provide Dee with all the information available concerning the investigation, including Luo’s poem about Jin Ke, and had been deadly serious from the outset about him actually finding Luo.

  Or could it be possible that there was something else behind it? Something Her Majesty did not want Judge Dee to know about the investigation into the missing poet. Some kind of hidden agenda.

  Still lost in thought, watching the flickering candlelight by the western window of the hostel room, Judge Dee tried not to dwell too much on the politics behind the case.

  It looked as though it was going to rain soon. A small pool in the back of the hostel appeared to be swelling with the old memories of those bygone days. A couple of half-forgotten lines came back to his mind in the somberness of the room.

  A candle trembling against the night rain,

  you travel across rivers and lakes, year after year …

  The night appeared to be so quiet and peaceful, far away from the sordid politics at the imperial court. Judge Dee turned to stare absentmindedly at a blurred reflection of his worn-out self in the bronze mirror. He knew he would not be able to fall asleep any time soon. It was perhaps just another sign of the onset of old age, he supposed.

  It was growing surreally dark outside the time-yellowed paper window, though, and Dee could hear a dog barking like crazy in the pitch-black distance.

  Finally, a faint drowsiness was beginning to creep over him, suggesting he might finally be ready to go to bed, when he heard an unexpected light knock on the door.

  In came Yang, bringing a wet message of the night rain.

  Taking a gulp from the cup of hot tea Judge Dee offered him, Yang launched into a report of the new information he had gathered concerning the Luo case. It was not much, he said, not that relevant, yet there was a lot of new salacious material regarding the empress. This gossip seemed to Dee to be yet more of the particularly serious repercussions of Luo’s ‘Call to Arms’.

  According to the scurrilous gossip Yang had gleaned, the empress was currently enraptured with her discovery of a virile monk named Xue Huaiyi, who was said to boast an enormous penis – as thick, long and hard as a virile man’s arm.

  During the first night they had passionate sex in the royal palace, she climaxed repeatedly, trembling violently, flushing all over …

  In the aftermath of the white clouds turning into hot rain between the two naked, sweat-glistening bodies, Xue was said to have quoted verbatim the empress’s rapturous exclamation after their sordid sex in a secret diary: ‘Finally, I have lived and died once as a woman.’

  And possibly he had written a lot more in this diary too …

  The empress knew better, though, than to get lost for too long in sexual passion. While she kept showering gifts and favors upon the monk Xue, so the gossip went, she also managed to keep him at a certain distance from things at the court.

  Judge Dee thought he had already heard something about this scandal. It was disconcerting, but he did not see its immediate relevance to the investigation.

  And, needless to say, high-ranking officials like Judge Dee knew better than to confront the infamous monk. As in the old saying: if you plan to beat a dog, you must first take the owner of the dog into consideration.

  ‘But what about Luo Binwang?’ Judge Dee asked, switching the topic after a short pause. ‘Anything new you have learned about him?’

  ‘No, not anything concrete, Your Honor. Nothing but unreliable gossip and speculation. According to one explanation, which seems plausible, it is said that Luo was thrown into prison not for slandering Empress Wu but because he refused to write a poem in praise of her. Regardless of the truth, though, that would have happened long before the disastrous rebellion led by General Xu.’

  ‘Gossip is not reliable, not at all. I cannot agree more with you, Yang. Her Majesty surely knows better than to imprison a poet for refusing to write a poem.’

  ‘People also say that Luo wrote a poem in prison, comparing himself to a fly or some such insect.’

  ‘Yes, that may be true. “Ode to a Cicada in Prison.” Wonderful personification.’

  Yang didn’t reply; he was out of his element engaging in the interpretation of poetry, Judge Dee knew.

  After Yang had left his hostel room, Judge Dee stepped out into the courtyard, standing alone in the wind and the darkness.

  He had a vague feeling that there was something he’d missed in the midst of all the possible pieces of a gigantic puzzle, but for the moment he was unable to put his finger on it.

  Outside, the night watchman was making another round, beating the wooden knocker in a monotonous pattern against the night and retreating further into the darkness.

  There was such a lot of work he would have to do, Judge Dee knew, before he could get anywhere in the investigation. Work for which he had neither the time nor the final say – which belonged to Empress Wu alone.

  Judge Dee felt that, all of a sudden, he had become a string-controlled shadow puppet, gesticulating on the cloth screen, speaking not in his voice but in accordance with the role of a character moving on the dimly lit stage.

  Three

  ‘I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.’

  – Lord Byron

  ‘To see a world in a grain of sand

  And a heaven in a wild flower,

  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

  And eternity in an hour.’

  – William Blake

  ‘A man is never happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something that he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with mast and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he is happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over.’

  – Arthur Schopenhauer

  The next morning broke with a messenger galloping over in a great hurry from Jiong. Judge Dee hurried out to meet him. The rider was still panting, out of breath, and carried two copies of Luo’s poems supposedly written for the fishing girl, along with a letter from Jiong himself:

  ‘These are the poems attributed to Luo Binwang which were allegedly written for the fishing girl I told you about. The authorship of the second piece may be open to question, and some of the background information could be nothing but hearsay. But I have checked through a list of Luo’s poems made by a little-known critic. These two poems were written in the same period, though the critic also points out the stylistic differences between them.

  ‘Anyway, Luo’s stay on the boat with the fishing girl has been confirmed. For a short while, either before or after he was thrown into prison.

  ‘According to the critic, the fishing girl in question was also described as a capable chef, specializing in catching the fish or shrimp live out of the river water and cooking it on the boat there and then. It is little wonder that men of letters flocked to the special boat, not just for the delicious food, but also for the delicious girl bustling around the fish, her body still wet from the river, the scanty clothes clinging to her body and hugging her curves. Indeed, such a moment is worth thousands of gold coins.

  ‘It was also said, however, that she knew how to keep the necessary distance from those men flirting around her like insistent butterflies, and that she behaved properly, on the whole, as the chef and sampan owner.