He wasn’t surprised that Xie had told her, but he was surprised that she had said “we.”

“Oh, it’s nothing.”

“Nothing to you, but everything to him.”

Their talk was interrupted by the arrival of another girl, Yang.

“Come with me tomorrow evening, Jiao. How can a young girl like you spend so much time in one ancient place? The world outside is young, exciting. They have a home theater, and a better karaoke machine than in the Money Cabinet.”

“Money Cabinet” was the name of the top karaoke club in Shanghai. So it was probably a party at an upstart’s place, more luxuriously equipped than the club.

“But I’m not that keen on the fashionable parties,” Jiao said.

“There’s no party here tomorrow night. If you really don’t like it there, you can leave anytime you like. So why not?”

“I’ll think about it, Yang.”

“What about you, Mr. Chen?” Yang said, pouting her lips provocatively.

“I’m no dancer. Last time, Jiao had to teach me step by step.”

“Then you’re not only responsible for yourself, Jiao. You have to bring Mr. Chen along with you,” Yang said, turning to scamper away. “Bye, Jiao, bye Mr. Chen.”

It was an interesting interruption, as it raised a question he himself had about Jiao. For the Old Dicks, the mansion was symbolic of their youthful dreams, so their frequent visits made sense. They didn’t have anywhere else to go. That wasn’t so with Jiao, surely.

“Yang always talks like that,” Jiao said, her knees drawn up on the chair, her arms wrapped around her legs. “She’s a butterfly, flitting from one party to another. Those parties can be exhausting, you know.”

Perhaps those parties were full of fashionable people and were wilder, longer, like in the TV movies. He didn’t know.

There was another question he refrained from asking. What was Yang’s background? Moving from one party to another, always in stylish clothes, she was surely an “expensive girl.” A couple of times, he had seen a limousine waiting for her outside.

But it wasn’t his business to be concerned about any other girl here.

“Moving from one party to the next,” he repeated. “What’s the point?”

“Well, it depends on your perspective. What is it from the perspective of a butterfly?” she said, a pensive smile playing on her lips. For instance, “you may have noticed the brass foot warmer by the fireplace in the living room. Granny Zhong used it as a trash bin in the old neighborhood. But here, it became a valuable antique, symbolic of old Shanghai when well-to-do ladies put their feet above the warmer in the winter.”

Granny Zhong was someone Jiao had not mentioned before. And where was the old neighborhood? Jiao grew up in an orphanage. Possibly some relatives. Someone of Shang’s generation. He failed to recall anyone with that name from Cloud and Rain in Shanghai. He might have to check it again.

“You have a good point, Jiao. So is painting going to be your career?”

“I don’t know if I have the talent. I’d like to find out, so I’ve been studying with Mr. Xie.”

“Now, I’m just curious: Xie may be well-known in this circle, but he hasn’t had any formal training in painting. So how did you come to study with him?”

“You went to college, but not everyone is as lucky, Mr. Chen. I started working quite young. For me, it was a stroke of unbelievable luck to find a teacher like Xie.”

“That’s an unusual decision for a girl like you.”

“I am learning more than painting here. Mr. Xie is no upstart, and his work captures the spirit of the time.”

He was not clear about what she meant by “the spirit of the time,” but he waited, instead of pressing her for a definition.

“He really captures it all,” she went on wistfully, “in that distinctive frame of his. A frame that puts the picture in perspective.”

It reminded Chen, surprisingly, of a remark made by his late father, who saw Confucianism as a frame that provided an acceptable shape for the working ethical system. Perhaps the same could be said of Maoism, except that it wasn’t really a working frame. Not even for Mao himself, whose own double life might have resulted from its failure.

“You are insightful,” he said, pulling himself back from his wandering thoughts.

“It’s just my way of looking at his paintings – so informed by his aspirations and afflictions through these years.”

He was amazed by her response. Perhaps Jiao was nice to Xie not because of his help as a middleman for the “Mao material,” as Internal Security suspected, but because of her sincere appreciation of Xie’s work.

“According to T. S. Eliot, you have to separate the artist from the art. A poem doesn’t necessarily say anything about a poet, nor does a painting -”

His phone rang, interrupting him before he could bring the conversation around to a question he wanted to ask. She stood up quietly, waving a finger at him as she headed for a shaded corner of the garden.

It was Wang, chairman of the Writers’ Association in Beijing. Wang told Chen that Diao, the author of Rain and Cloud in Shanghai, had attended a literary conference in Qinghai, but at the end of the meeting, Diao had gone somewhere else instead of returning to Shanghai. At Chen’s request, Wang promised to continue his efforts to find out the exact whereabouts of Diao.

Closing the phone, Chen looked around to see Jiao squatting in the corner, plucking weeds and twigs with her bare hands, her overalls daubed with paint and her bare feet dotted with soil, like a hardworking gardener. Or like someone living in the mansion, taking care of her own garden.

It was a poignant image: a blossoming girl silhouetted against the ruins of an old garden, her bare shoulders dazzlingly white in the afternoon sunlight, the sky dappled with drifting clouds like sails, the smell of the grass rising in a fresh breeze.

She was vivacious, and smart too, in spite of her lack of good education. He wished he could come to know her better, watching the curve of her slender bottom as she leaned over her work. But it was a Mao case, he told himself again, and he had only about one week left – the deadline set by Internal Security. He had to “approach” her more effectively.

He got up and moved over, squatting beside her, joining in the work. There was a bunch of uprooted weeds by her feet.

“Sorry about the phone call. I was enjoying our talk.”

“So was I.”

“There’s no party here this evening, Jiao?”

“No.”

“I would love to stay longer,” he said, glancing at his watch, “but I have some urgent business to take care of. But it won’t take long. If you don’t have anything this evening, how about continuing our talk over dinner?”

“Well, that would be nice, but -”

“Then let’s do it,” he said, his eyes holding hers momentarily. “There is a restaurant not far from here. It used to be Madam Chiang’s residence.”

“You’re so into the past. The food is not that great, I’ve heard, and the restaurant is expensive. Still, many people want to go there.”

“They want to imagine themselves as President Chiang Kai-shek or Madam Chiang – for an hour or so – over a cup of sparkling wine. Illusion cannot be too expensive.”

“Oh horror!”

“What do you mean, Jiao?”

“Why can’t people be themselves?”

“In Buddhist scripture, everything is appearance, including one’s self,” Chen said, rising. “The restaurant is very close. You can walk there. So I’ll see you this evening.”

Striding out of the premises, he saw a middle-aged man loitering outside the small café, looking stealthily across the street. Possibly an Internal Security man, Chen thought, though he hadn’t seen him before. If so, Internal Security would soon witness him and Jiao sitting together at a candlelight dinner and report back that the romantic chief inspector was making his “approach.”

After all, it was like a couplet in the Dream of the Red Chamber, “When the true is false, the false is true. Where there is nothing, there is everything.”