“I don’t know, but I don’t think so.”

“So could Shang have left it to her daughter Qian?”

“Not likely. Like other kids of black family background, Qian denounced Shang, and she didn’t come back home until after Shang’s death. No, Shang had no time to do so before jumping out of the window.”

“So Qian went through a dramatic change – from one radically cut off from her black family to one hopelessly lost in bourgeois carnival passion?”

“She was a girl traumatized at a young age, plagued by those stories about Shang’s ‘shameless sex saga,’ ” Diao said. “I don’t want to be too hard on her.”

“I couldn’t agree more. Qian, too, suffered a lot. But her death too was quite suspicious, I’ve heard.”

“Her death was an accident – almost at the end of the Cultural Revolution. I don’t see anything suspicious about it.”

“I see,” Chen said, picking up a pork-stuffed sesame cake, a surprisingly ordinary snack that tasted more agreeable than the exotic delicacies. “You must have talked to Jiao too.”

“She knew little about her mother, let alone her grandmother. An ill-fated girl.”

Diao must have contacted Jiao a couple of years earlier and was unaware of the subsequent change in her life.

“She’s doing fine now, I think,” Chen said. “Now, tell me more about what happened to Qian after Shang’s death.”

“Qian was driven out of her apartment -”

“Immediately?”

“No, two or three months after Shang’s death.”

“So, hypothetically, she could have looked around the apartment for something left behind by Shang.”

“Well, Shang could have left something behind, but the place had been turned upside down by the special group -”

Once again the waitress entered, serving the celebrated duck soup. The table now appeared overcrowded, several dishes untouched or hardly touched.

“The emperor’s way. You have to have a table full of dishes. Symbolically complete,” the waitress said, smiling before retracing her light-footed steps, “like the complete banquet of the Manchurian and Han.”

“That’s why people want to be an emperor, paying for a banquet they cannot finish,” Diao said, putting a spoonful of the soup into his mouth. “The soup is hot.”

“One can see meaning in anything from the perspective one chooses. For a different question, was there anyone else close to Shang in her last years?”

“No. There’s a superstitious belief about an emperor-favored woman being different, almost divine, through the cloud and rain. In ancient China, the imperial concubines or palace ladies had to remain single all their lives, even after the demise of the emperor. Untouchable, forbidden too, like part of the Forbidden City. People could have heard of her relationship with Mao. They may have known better than to get involved with her.”

“But I don’t necessarily mean in that sense – not necessarily men.”

“She didn’t have any close friends, not with such a well-guarded secret.” Diao added broodingly, “Well, except perhaps for that maid of hers, who had been with Shang before her first marriage and stayed with her until the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution.”

“Yes, there are stories about exemplary relationships between master and servants, mistress and maid, in classical Chinese literature. Like in the play Seeking and Saving the Only Heir of the Zhao. It even inspired Brecht, as I recall. So do you think Shang could have trusted her?”

“You’re no literary novice, Mr. Chen,” Diao said, casting him a sharp look.

“I’m a novice beside you,” Chen said, regretting that a moment of unrestrained bookishness had given him away.

“If it was something concerning Mao, I don’t think Shang would have given it to the maid. The maid, because of her class status, could have easily denounced Shang in those years.”

“But did you hear anything about the maid after Shang’s death?”

“In my research about Jiao’s childhood, I learned that nobody visited the girl in the orphanage except an unidentified old woman who came a couple of times. I’m not sure if it’s the maid, who must have been old then,” Diao said, visibly more and more uncomfortable with the direction of the talk. He must have started to suspect Chen’s purpose. He glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry, I have to go back to babysitting, Mr. Chen. This lunch has taken much longer than I expected. You may call me if you have other questions.”

It was almost three. A long, protracted lunch. Chen also rose, shaking hands with Diao, watching him leave.

Afterward, Chen sat alone in the private room for several minutes, facing the littered table, on which a number of dishes remained untouched.

He then picked up his cell phone and dialed Old Hunter in Shanghai, while meeting the glare of a golden dragon embossed on the vermilion-painted pillar.

IN THE HOT-WATER HOUSE, Old Hunter sat alone, drinking tea in silence, in the afternoon sunlight.

The hot-water house was far less than a tea house, with the sort of dual function of providing hot water to the neighborhood and tea to occasional customers. There were only a couple of rough wooden tables behind the stove. There were several cheap snack booths nearby. In the past, people sometimes came to the hot-water house with baked cakes and steamed buns, spent a penny or two for a cup of tea, then would talk and enjoy themselves like lords.

But Shanghai was rapidly turning into a city of contrasts and contradictions. Across the street stood expensive new apartment buildings, but here beside the hot-water house, it remained pretty much a slum. In fact, no tea-drinking customers came in for hours.

It suited Old Hunter well, though. He didn’t have to play a role. An old, non – Big Buck tea drinker, that’s what he was, even bringing in his own tea. All he needed to pay for was the hot water. He could sit there for hours, talking about the tea to the proprietor, or, like that afternoon, drinking tea alone without a single waiter walking around with a long-billed kettle, ready to serve.

The tea was getting cold but was still black as hell. He had put in a large handful of oolong, trying to revive himself with extra-strong tea. It was because of the scene he had caught at Jiao’s window last night and had continued watching, sitting there across the street, late into the night. As a result, the next day, he was feeling as groggy as a sick cat.

He was old, he admitted, spitting out the bitter tea leaves, but the case – though not his case – was special to him. He thought about his interview yesterday of Bei, the security guard at the Jiao’s apartment complex.

The meeting with Bei had yielded little. Like him, Bei was a retiree, working at a post-retirement job to supplement his scant pension. Unlike Old Hunter’s, Bei’s job paid little, and the security guard had to stand at the complex entrance, rain or shine, six days a week. To their pleasant surprise, the retirees shared a passion for tea. So they went to a better place, the celebrated Lake Pavilion Tea house at the City God’s Temple Market, where Old Hunter tapped Bei for information about Jiao over the exquisite Yixing tea set on the mahogany table. Bei started talking without reservation.

According to Bei, Jiao had few visitors here. It was a well-guarded subdivision, where visitors had to call up from the entrance, so Bei was quite sure about that. Nor could Bei remember having seen her in the company of any man. Then he recalled that about half a year earlier, Jiao had had an unusual visitor, a poor old woman dressed in rags – a rare sight for the complex – who claimed to come from Jiao’s old neighborhood. She was not educated, not even that coherent, and Bei questioned her long and carefully. When he finally called up, Jiao hurried out to usher the visitor in. After two or three hours, Jiao accompanied the visitor out, calling her granny and hailing a taxi for her. The old woman never appeared again.