“No, he didn’t see clearly – just a glimpse of it. It was in her bedroom, you know. But he was sure it wasn’t a photocopy, which wasn’t available at the time.”

“If possible, I would like to meet with that colleague of Shang’s. It could be crucial to establish the identity of the person Mao wrote the poem for. Of course, we don’t have to get into explicit details in our book.”

“I’m not sure if he’s still in town. I contacted him several years ago, But I’ll try.”

“That would be fantastic. Let’s toast to our collaboration -”

The door opened unexpectedly, however, before either of them heard the turning of the key in the lock.

Long’s wife returned, a short woman with gray hair and black-rimmed glasses, who frowned at the sight of the litter on the table.

“Oh, this is Chief Inspector Chen of the Shanghai Police Bureau, also a leading member of the Shanghai Writers’ Association.” Long introduced him in a sudden stutter suggestive of a henpecked husband. “He brought a whole bamboo basket of crabs. I have kept some for you.”

It was out of the question for them to continue talking about Mao in her presence.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have drunk so much,” she said to Long, pointing at the empty Shaoxing yellow rice wine bottle standing like an inverted exclamation mark on the table. “You are forgetting about your high blood pressure.”

“Chief Inspector Chen and I are working together on a new translation of Mao’s poetry to be published here as well as abroad. So I won’t have to worry about my ‘professional writer’ status anymore.”

“Really!” she said incredulously. “This calls for a celebration. Oh, we will have crabs just like before.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Long. I didn’t know about his high blood pressure, but he is giving me so much help on this book project,” Chen said, rising. “I have to leave now. Next time, I promise we will have nothing but crabs, not a single drop.”

“It’s not your fault, Chief Inspector Chen. I’m glad you have not forgotten him.” She turned to her husband and said in a low voice, “Go and look at your face in the mirror. It’s as red as Mao’s Little Red Book.”

“Look at the table,” Long said a little blurredly, accompanying Chen to the door, “It looks like a battle field deserted by the nationalist troops in 1949. Remember the poem about the liberation of Nanjing?”

Looking back, Chen found the littered table looked somewhat like a deserted battlefield, with broken legs, crushed shells, scarlet and golden ovaries scattered here and there, but he failed to recall the image from that particular poem by Mao.

DETECTIVE YU DECIDED TO interview Peng, Qian’s second lover.

Yu didn’t know the neighborhood officer in charge of Peng’s area that well, so he had to approach Peng by himself, without telling anybody or revealing that he was a cop. It was a necessary move after an encounter Old Hunter had unexpectedly witnessed between Jiao and Peng – a suspicious meeting in a grocery store, where Jiao gave money to Peng.

What was going on between the two?

Peng’s affair with Qian had lasted no more than half a year before he was thrown into jail. When released, he could hardly take care of himself, let alone Jiao. They didn’t have any contact for all those years. She wasn’t his daughter, or even a stepdaughter.

As Old Hunter considered himself more experienced at shadowing a person, he wanted to focus on Jiao. So it was up to Yu to tackle Peng.

Early in the morning, Yu arrived at the market where Peng worked as a pork porter but was told that he had been fired.

“A good-for-nothing guy, capable of soft-rice-eating only,” an ex-coworker of Peng’s said, hacking at a frozen pig head on a stump, spitting on the ground littered with rotten cabbage leaves. “You’ll probably find him eating white rice at home.”

It was a harsh comment, particularly the “soft-rice-eating,” a phrase that usually referred to a parasitic man dependent on a woman. But, if in reference to Peng’s affair with Qian, it was not true. It had happened many years ago, when Qian had little money. As in a saying Old Hunter would quote, it’s easy to throw rocks at one already fallen to the bottom of a well. Yu thanked the ex-coworker, from whom he got Peng’s home address.

Following the directions, Yu changed buses twice before he found himself at a shabby lane near Santou Road.

He saw a heavily built man squatting at the lane’s entrance like a stone lion, half burying his face in a large bowl of noodles, holding a clove of garlic on the edge of the bowl. The noodle-eater wore a faded T-shirt, which was way too small on him, making him look like an overstuffed bag. Yu couldn’t help taking another look at the man, who stared back at Yu, still gobbling loudly.

“So are you Mr. Peng?” Yu said, recognizing him from the picture. He offered the man a cigarette.

“I’m Peng, but without Mr. attached to my name for twenty years. Mr. gives me goose bumps,” Peng said, taking the cigarette. “Oh, China. A smoke costs more than a bowl of noodles. What can I do for you, man?”

“Well,” Yu said. He was going to play a role – just like his boss, who sometimes claimed to be a writer or a journalist when canvassing on a case. “I’m a journalist. I would like to talk with you. Let’s find a place. A nearby restaurant, perhaps?”

“The restaurant across the street will do,” Peng said, holding the noodles bowl in his hand. “You should have come five minutes earlier.”

It was a mom-and-pop place, simple and shabby. At the moment, between breakfast and lunch, there were no customers inside.

The old proprietor looked curiously at the two, who made a sharp contrast. Peng, a down-and-out bum, and Yu, in a light-material blazer Peiqin had prepared for the occasion. She had even ironed it for him.

“You’re familiar with the place, Peng. Go ahead and order.”

Peng ordered four dishes and six bottles of beer, which came close to a banquet at this place. Luckily, nothing on the menu proved to be expensive. Peng shouted out his order loud enough that people outside the restaurant could have heard it too. Possibly it was a message to the neighborhood as well: that he was still somebody, with well-to-do people buying a big meal for him.

“Now,” Peng gave a loud burp after swigging down the first cup of beer, “fire away.”

“I just have a couple of questions about your experience during the Cultural Revolution.”

“I know what you’re driving at.” Peng started gulping down the second cup. “About my damned affair with Qian, right? Let me tell you something, Mr. Journalist. I was only fifteen when I first met her. More than ten years older, she seduced me. If a white voluptuous body, like a bottle of iced beer in the summer, was put in front of you, for free, what would you do?”

“Drink it?” Yu responded sardonically, astonished by the callousness with which Peng spoke about Qian.

“In those years, a young boy like me didn’t know anything. I was a substitute, there to satisfy her lust. She didn’t care for me at all – only for my pathetic resemblance to her dead lover. And after I got out of prison, my best years and opportunities all gone, I couldn’t find a decent job. A wreck with no skills or experience. No future.”

Staring at this middle-aged man, sloppy and sluggish, swigging down beer as if there were no tomorrow, Yu wondered what Qian could have seen in him.

“Things have not been easy for you, Peng, but it’s such a long time ago. You can never know what she really thought at the time, and she paid a terrible price for her actions too. So please, go ahead and tell me the story from the beginning.”

“You mean the story of me and Qian?”

“Yes, the whole story.”

“Come on, I’m not that dumb, Mr. Journalist. The story is worth tons of money. You aren’t going to buy it for a couple of beers.”