OLD HUNTER WAS GREATLY intrigued by Chen’s invitation to a tea house on Hengshan Road.

The chief inspector knew about his passion for tea but didn’t know much about tea itself, Old Hunter contemplated as he caught sight of the magnificent tea house Tang Flavor. Such a fashionable place would charge for service, for atmosphere, for so-called culture, but not for tea itself.

A slender waitress in a florid mandarin dress with high slits hurried over in her high heels, leading him to an antique-looking private room where a mahogany table was already set up with an array of delicate tea cups, as small and exquisite as peeled lychee.

Chen hadn’t arrived yet, so Old Hunter had a cup for himself. The tea tasted watery, disappointingly ordinary.

As the old saying goes, one does not come to the Three-Treasure Temple without praying for something. So what was Chen going to talk to him about? A special case, presumably. If so, Chen shouldn’t discuss it with him but with his son, Detective Yu, who had been Chen’s partner for years. The two were good friends.

Old Hunter had also been in close contact with Chen, of whom he had a high opinion. A capable and honest cop, Chen was a rarity in an age of wide-spread corruption. Yu was really lucky to work with a boss and partner like him.

Still, there was something elusive about Chen – he was stubborn, scrupulous, and smart, yet shrewd and occasionally sly in his way. His promotion to chief inspector when only in his thirties spoke for itself. A hard-working cop himself all his life, Old Hunter was only a sergeant when he retired.

Old Hunter still had connections in the bureau, so he also knew Chen had received a phone call during the political studies meeting, a message from Beijing regarding his HCC girlfriend. Chen had supposedly looked devastated. The next day, he took a sudden leave of absence. The gossip about that spread through the bureau fast.

As Old Hunter was about to sip at his second cup of tea, the waitress returned, leading Chen into the room.

“Sorry, I must have kept you waiting,” Chen said, taking a cup of tea from Old Hunter. “Thank you.”

“No, that’s my job,” the waitress said, taking over the teapot in haste. She added hot water to the purple sand teapot before pouring the tea in a graceful arc into the tiny teacups. Instead of serving them the tea, however, she poured it out into the pottery basin beside her. “That was to warm up your teacups,” she explained, her fingers dazzlingly white against the cup. “It’s the beginning of our tea ceremony. Tea has to be enjoyed in a leisurely way.”

Old Hunter had heard of the so-called Japanese tea ceremony, but he made a point of having nothing to do with anything coming from Japan. His uncle had been killed in the Anti-Japanese War, and the memory still rankled. When the tea was finally served in a tiny cup, he drained it in one gulp – in his way. She hastened to serve the second cup.

He noticed Chen was drumming his fingertips on the table, absent-mindedly. Possibly a sign of acknowledgement, but also one of impatience. The way the tea was served, with the waitress standing and waiting, they wouldn’t be able to talk.

“In Japan, tea drinking is advocated as a sort of cultivated art. That’s bull. You enjoy the tea, not all the fuss about it,” Old Hunter said. “It’s like in an old proverb: an idiot returns the invaluable pearl but keeps the gaudy box.”

“You’re quite right, especially with a collection of old sayings to back you up.” Chen nodded, turning to the waitress with a smile. “We will enjoy the tea for ourselves. You don’t have to stay with us and serve.”

“That’s the way it is done in our tea house,” she said, blushing in embarrassment. “It is very fashionable nowadays.”

“We’re old-fashioned. You cannot carve anything fashionable out of a piece of rotten wood,” he concluded. “Thank you.”

“Sorry,” Chen said after the waitress left. “This is the only tea house I could think of – with a private room where we could talk, I mean.”

“I see,” Old Hunter said. “What’s new under the sun, Chief?”

“Oh, we haven’t talked for a long time.”

That was an excuse, Old Hunter knew, so he asked casually, “So you’re enjoying your vacation?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“In this world of ours, eight or nine times out of ten, things will not work out in accordance to your life’s plan, but as the ancient proverb tells us, who knows if it’s fortune or misfortune when the old man of Sai loses his horse? A vacation will do you good, Chief. You’ve worked too hard.”

“I wish I could tell you more about fortune or misfortune,” Chen responded elusively, “but I’m not taking vacation for personal reasons.”

“I understand. You know what? For the last few months, I’ve been enjoying the Suzhou opera version of the Romance of Three Kingdoms. The lines at the end are simply fantastic. ‘So many things, past and present, are told by others like stories over a cup of tea.’ ”

“You do have a passion for Suzhou opera,” Chen said. “Time really flies. When I first read Romance of Three Kingdoms, I was still an elementary school student. There was a lot I didn’t understand in the novel. For example, the episode about Cao Cao building his tombs in secrecy.”

“Yes, I remember – he built several tombs and killed all the workers afterward. So no one knew the location of the real tomb. And Cao Cao was not the only one. There was also the First Emperor of Qing, who had human beings as well as terracotta soldiers buried with him in different tombs.”

“Indeed, knowledge of the emperor’s secret could be deadly.”

Old Hunter put down the teacup, detecting a strange note in the younger cop, who wouldn’t have invited him out simply for a leisurely talk about the emperors and their tombs.

“So is that what worries you, Chief?”

Chen nodded without responding to the question and raised a teacup. “Look at the phrase on the cup. ‘A long, eternal life!’ Originally, that was a chant for the emperors. During the Cultural Revolution, the first English sentence I learned was ‘A long, eternal life to Chairman Mao!’ Exactly the same phrase as was used with regard to the emperors for thousands of years. Mao surely knew that, but did he object to it?”

Old Hunter began to suspect that there was a secret investigation concerning Mao. He had worked with Chen, though not as his partner, and they trusted each other. Chen would usually have come to the point directly. But anything involving Mao would make the situation different. Chen had to be cautious – and not just for himself. Whatever the situation, Old Hunter had to assure Chen of his support.

“You hit the nail on the head, Chief. Mao was a modern emperor, for all his talk about Marxism and communism. During the Cultural Revolution, whatever he said – a sentence, a phrase – was called ‘the supreme decree,’ and we had to celebrate by beating drums and marching under the scorching sun through the streets. And you couldn’t complain about the heat. Once I even suffered sunstroke. In ancient times, an emperor was compared to the sun, but Mao simply was the sun. One politburo member was thrown in jail for the crime of slander against Mao, because he wrote an article about the black spots on the sun.”

“You know a lot about those years, but it may not be fair to judge Mao on something like that, considering the long feudalistic history in China,” Chen said.

“I don’t know about the so-called feudalistic history – not a familiar term to me. An emperor is an emperor, that’s all I know.” Old Hunter took a slow sip at his tea, the tea leaves unfurling unexpectedly, like tadpoles in the white cup. “Now, let me tell you about a case I had toward the end of the Cultural Revolution.

“In Suzhou opera, a story has to be told from the very beginning. To understand the things that happened during the Cultural Revolution, you have to learn about it from the beginning.”