“You didn’t have to feel guilty at all. Jade Phoenix is now an honorable manager of a Mao restaurant in Beijing and she sits there occasionally. The business is booming and reservations have to be made days beforehand. All the customers go there for a chance to see Jade Phoenix.”

“But it all happened so many years ago. Why this assignment for Chen, all of a sudden?”

“That I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “Some power struggle at the top?”

“No, I don’t think they are going to remove Mao’s portrait from the Gate of Tiananmen Square, not anytime soon.”

“Chen’s not working on some cover-up for him, I hope.”

“But what can I do to help?”

“He’ll come to you when he’s in need. Don’t worry about it, but – I do understand Old Hunter’s concern,” she said, rising abruptly. “Oh, I have to put the chicken in the pot. I’ll be right back.”

She hurried back in a minute, picking up the copy of Cloud and Rain in Shanghai again. “I’m going to reread it closely. Perhaps I can find some clue for your boss.”

“You, too, have a soft spot for our irresistible chief inspector,” he said with mock jealousy. “He also has a personal problem at the moment.”

“What problem?”

“Ling, his HCC girlfriend in Beijing, has married somebody else – people have been gossiping about it at the bureau.”

“Oh that,” she said. “He got a call from Beijing during the bureau political studies meeting a couple of days ago. Somebody overheard the conversation – a few words of it. Chen looked devastated afterward.”

“It might not be that bad for him. He’s a successful cop – and not because of her. In fact, I wondered what he would become if they stayed together. You know what I mean.”

“He’s become a chief inspector on his own merits, no question about it,” Yu readily agreed. “Which is easy for others to see, but not for him.”

“Then now he can turn over a new page. With his HCC girlfriend constantly at the back of his mind, it was impossible for him to see other girls. White Cloud, for instance.”

It was another of her favorite topics. Peiqin appeared to think that the breakup had come as a shock to Chen, but Chen’s relationship with his HCC girlfriend had long been on the rocks. Last year, Chen had passed on an opportunity to go to Beijing, but Yu decided not to mention that to Peiqin at the moment.

“No, not White Cloud,” he said instead. “I don’t think she’s a good one for him, either.”

“You know what I found in a bookstore the other day?” she said, delving into the book box again to pick up a magazine. “A poem written by your chief inspector. For his HCC girlfriend, though it isn’t that explicit. Even then and there, they were already lost in their different interpretations. It’s entitled ‘Li Shangyin’s English Version.’ ” She took off her apron and started reading aloud.

The fragrance of jasmine in your hair / and then in my teacup, that evening,/ when you thought me drunk, an orange /pinwheel turning at the rice-paper window./ The present is, when you think/ of it, already the past. I am / trying to quote a line / from Li Shangyin to say what / cannot be said, but the English version /at hand fails to do justice / to him (the translator, divorced / from his American wife, drunk, found English / beating him like a blind horse), any / more than the micaceous mist / issuing from a Lantian blue jade / to your reflection. // Last night’s star, / last night’s wind – the memory / of trimming a candle, the minute / of a spring silkworm wrapping itself / in a cocoon, when the rain / becomes the mountain, and the mountain / becomes the rain… // It is like a painting /of Li Shangyin going to open / the door, and of the door / opening him to the painting, / that Tang scroll you showed me / in the rare book section / of the Beijing Library, while you / read my ecstasy as empathy / with the silverfish escaping / the sleepy eyes of the full stops, / and I felt a violent wonder / at your bare feet beating / a bolero on the filmy dust / of the ancient floor. Even then / and there, lost in each / other’s interpretations, we agreed.

“I can make neither heads nor tails of it,” Yu said with a puzzled smile. “How can you be so sure it’s a poem written for her?”

“She worked at the Beijing Library. But more importantly, why Li Shangyin? A Tang-dynasty poet, Li was seen as a social climber because he married the daughter of the then prime minister. Unfortunately, the prime minister soon lost his position, which cast a shadow on Li’s official career. He wrote his best lyrical poems in frustration.”

“So that turned out to be good for his poetry, right?”

“You could say so. Chen’s too proud to be seen as a climber.”

“If he had really cared for her, why should it have mattered so much?”

“No one lives in a vacuum, not to mention all of the politics at your bureau.”

She was passionate in Chen’s defense, waving the magazine dramatically, her face flushing like a flower.

“Oh, the chicken soup,” she said, dropping the magazine. “It’s time to turn the fire down low.”

He watched her hurrying out with a touch of amusement. After all, the chicken soup proved to be just as important as Chen to her. But then he started worrying about Chen again. It was an investigation fraught with danger, involving knowledge which could kill, as Old Hunter had warned.

Detective Yu had to do something, whether Chief Inspector Chen included him or not.

CHEN WOKE UP, BLINKING in the glaring sunlight streaming in through the half-drawn curtain. Still lying in bed, he reviewed his unsuccessful “approach” to Jiao in the restaurant the previous night.

In spite of the “romantic” dinner in the well-preserved attic room under the time-sobered beams allegedly from Madam Chiang’s days, with a couple of tiny red paper lanterns dangling overhead, he had learned little that was new. Sitting opposite, in a pink tank top and white pants, her shoulders dazzling against the candlelight, Jiao appeared preoccupied, “the autumn waves” in her eyes reflecting something far away. Tossing a wisp of hair back from her forehead, she brushed off his efforts to bring the talk around to her family background. “No, let’s not talk about it,” she said. A silver knife lay beside her plate, like a footnote, the waiters and waitress coming and going, all dressed in the fashion of the thirties.

Perhaps she had met people like him – more interested in her grandmother than in her. He knew better than to pressure her further. Besides, their conversation was disturbed by a loud Manila band and other louder diners, bantering tales about Madam Chiang, popping off the corks on expensive champagne like in the old days.

At the end of the meal, Jiao let him pay the bill like the ex-businessman he claimed to be. He didn’t really worry about the expense since the staggering bill might function, for once, as proof of his conscientious work. She told the waiter to box the leftovers – “For Mr. Xie, who doesn’t know how to cook.”

It was yet another confirmation of her being considerate of Xie. Parting outside the restaurant, they shook hands, and he had a feeling that her hand lingered in his for a moment. He saw a wistful smile flick across her face, as if touching a string, a peg in a half-forgotten poem.

But that wasn’t enough for Chief Inspector Chen, far from the breakthrough he needed, as he concluded as he got up from the bed.

He checked the cell phone first. No message. The information from Old Hunter so far, including the little indirectly from Detective Yu, didn’t appear promising.

So he decided to sally out onto his second front, a move first contemplated after his talk with Jiao in the garden, supported in his thoughts about Eliot’s poetry, and necessitated by his unsuccessful approach at the restaurant.