“Thank you, Director Dong. I will keep every word of yours in mind, but I really have to go now.”

Chen rose to leave, thinking of a poem written before a battle by Wang Changling, a Tang dynasty poet:

IN THE FIRST GRAY of the morning, Chen felt as if he were waking out of the ancient battle of iron-clad horses galloping through the ignorant night, and coming back to reality again. As a cop, he could put himself at risk, but not his mother.

There are things a man should do, and there are things a man should not do.

Nothing should happen to his mother. That was the bottom line for the son who, though far from being a Confucianist, remembered that Confucian maxim.

He brushed his teeth vigorously. There was a bitter, ammonia-like taste in his mouth. For years, he had let his mother down, time after time. Through his career choice, his political allegiance, and his personal life. She had dreamed of her son pursuing an academic career like her late husband, staying away from politics, and settling down with a family of his own. She did not care about his Party position. It was only of late-while she was in the hospital-that he and his position proved capable of providing for her, at least materialistically. Now, because of his position, she would not even be able to enjoy her remaining days peacefully, like an ordinary old woman.

According to another Confucian principle, however, one might occasionally find oneself unable to fulfill political and filial duty at the same time. If so, the former should take the priority. And his mother, though not the scholar his late Confucianist father was, would not forgive him for backing away from his investigation because of her.

He had to find a way to pursue the investigation without exposing his mother to danger. But that seemed impossible. His work was no longer a secret to Xing’s circle. His next interview would be like a declaration of war among those officials.

He dug out a copy of Thirty-Six Battle Strategies, a book of war stratagems over a thousand years old. Lighting a cigarette, he searched the table of contents before turning to a chapter entitled “Cutting through Chen Trail in Stealth,” which was about a battle in the early Han dynasty. General Han built a bridge, leading the enemy forces to believe he intended to maneuver his troops across it, but then he took a trail called Chen Cang instead and surprised them.

The chief inspector had to find his own Chen trail. He was going to focus on the people considered unlikely as interviewees. No one would suspect that he was trying to break the case through them. In the meantime, he would start making formal phone calls, scheduling interviews with the officials on his list, but he would not approach them the same way as Dong. They would conclude that Chen was merely putting on a show.

He took out the list before he started to brew a pot of coffee. It was the last spoonful from the jar of Brazilian coffee an American friend had given him. Hongyan zhiji.He whistled wistfully into a bitter smile. He had already kept the coffee for a long period, and eventually, it would have lost all its flavor.

It was a long list. Xing had an incredible reach of social contacts. Some of them, however, were hardly connections. “Nodding acquaintances” would perhaps be a more appropriate phrase. They were the people of little relevance to his business.

As he took a sip of the fresh coffee, going through the list again, a name jumped out as if printed in red.

Qiao Bo.

Qiao had met Xing only once the previous year. Their meeting was mentioned in local newspapers, for Xing donated twenty thousand yuan to Qiao. Not a large sum. Like a single hair from an ox, but it was much reported, as an “entrepreneur’s generous support to a patriotic project.” It was all because of a book entitled China Can Stand Up in Defiance, of which Qiao was the author. Not an academic book, it appealed to popular sentiment and became a national best-seller.

Chen happened to know Qiao, however, against a totally different backdrop. In the early eighties, a self-styled postmodernist poet, Qiao put his works into a manuscript and approached Chen for a preface. His poems attracted a number of young students, but postmodernism was not considered politically acceptable. As a member of the Writers’ Association, Chen declined to write the preface. Qiao later attracted far more attention when he went to jail for his “corrupt bourgeois lifestyle.” Newspapers came up with lurid stories of his seducing girls in his dorm room. According to his roommates, however, it was those girls that went after him-a young, handsome, romantic poet. Nothing but consensual sex. But Qiao was sentenced to seven or eight years.

Chen was then an entrance-level police officer, and there was little he could do about it. Afterward, he heard nothing about Qiao until the early nineties. Out of jail, Qiao became a bookseller. A poet no longer seemed like a prince on a white horse riding into the dreams of young girls. Poetry, if anything, became synonymous with poverty. Selling books in a store converted out of his one single residential room, Qiao wrote China Can Stand Up in Defiance, with a subtitle, The Strategic Choice in the New Global Age. It was a project developed out of his business sensibility, for he sensed a need in the market. The book received favorable reviews, and Qiao knew how to “stir-fry”-how to attract public attention. With the forever-turning wheel of fortune, Qiao came once more into the limelight, only it did not last long this time. When the waves of nationalism gained too much momentum, the Beijing government intervened. The book was not banned, but once all the official media was hushed, it soon fell from the best-seller list. Then numerous new books on similar topics came out, quickly overwhelming Qiao’s.

Xing had met Qiao before the book had fallen out of the market’s favor.

Chen stood up, searched the bookshelf for a long while, and dug out a dust-covered book. It was Qiao’s poetry collection, for which he could have written the preface. He turned over several pages to a love poem and skipped to the last two stanzas: