She groaned, wrapping her arms around his neck and her legs around his back. Moving under him, she arched herself up, her fingers long, strong, sliding down his back. The intensity of her arousal sharpened his. After a while, she changed position and lay on top of him. With her long hair cascading over his face, she was provoking sensations he had never known. He lost himself in her hair. She shuddered when she came, panting in short, quick breaths against his face. Her body suddenly grew soft, wet-insubstantial as the clouds after the rain.

They lay quietly in each other’s arms, feeling themselves far above and beyond the city of Shanghai.

Perhaps due to the height of the hotel, he suddenly seemed to see the white clouds pressing through the window, pressing against her sweat-covered body in the soft moonlight.

“We’re turning into clouds and rain,” he said, invoking the ancient metaphor.

She whispered a throaty agreement, curling up with her head on his chest, gazing up at him, her black hair spilling.

Their feet brushed. Touching her arched sole lightly, he felt a grain of sand stuck between her toes. Sand from the city of Shanghai-not from the Central South Sea complex in the Forbidden City.

Their moment was interrupted by the footsteps moving along the corridor. He heard the sound of the hotel people producing a bunch of keys. A key turning-once, only once-at a door across the corridor. The suspense made their sensations even more intense. She nestled against him again. There was something in her features he had never seen before. So clear and serene. The autumn night sky of Beijing, across which the Cow Herd and Spinning Girl gaze at each other, a bridge woven of black magpies across the Milky Way.

They embraced again.

“It’s been worth the wait,” she said quietly afterward. Then she fell asleep beside him, the stars whispering quietly outside the window.

He sat up, took a pad from the nightstand and started writing, the lamplight falling like water on the paper. The stillness around them seemed to be breathing with life. Amidst the images rushing to his pen, he turned to see her peaceful face on the pillow. The innocence of her clear features, of the deep-blue night high above the lights of Shanghai, charged through him in waves of meaning.

He had a feeling that the lines were flowing to him from a superior power. He just happened to be there, with the pen in his hand…

He did not know when he fell asleep.

The ring of the telephone on the night stand startled him.

As he stirred from his dream, blinking, he realized Ling was no longer beside him. The white pillows were rumpled against the headboard, still soft, cloud-like in the first morning light.

The telephone kept on ringing. Shrill and sharp, so early in the morning, like an omen. He snatched it.

“Chief Inspector Chen, it’s all finished.” Yu sounded edgy, as if he too had hardly slept.

“What do you mean-all finished?”

“The whole thing. The trial is over. Wu Xiaoming was sentenced to death, guilty on all the charges against him, and executed last night. About six hours ago. Period.”

Chen glanced at his watch. It was just past six.

“Wu did not try to appeal?”

“It’s a special case. The Party authorities put it that way. No use making any appeal. Wu was well aware of that. His attorney, too. An open secret to everybody. Appeal or no appeal, it would have made no difference.”

“And he was executed last night?”

“Yes, just a few hours after the trial. But don’t start asking me why, Comrade Chief Inspector.”

“Well, what about Guo Qiang?”

“Also executed, at the same time and on the same execution ground.”

“What?” Chen was more than shocked. “Guo had committed no murder.”

“Do you know what the most serious charge against Wu and Guo was?”

“What?”

“Crime and corruption under Western bourgeois influence.”

“Can you try to be a bit more specific, Yu?”

“I can, of course, but you will be able to read all the political humbug in the newspapers. Headlines in red print, I bet. It will be in the Wenhui Daily. Now it’s part of a national campaign against ‘CCB’-corruption and crime under Western bourgeois influence. A political campaign has been launched by the Party Central Committee.”

“So it is a political case after all!”

“Yes, Party Secretary Li is right. It’s a political case, as he said from the very beginning.” Yu made no effort to conceal the bitterness in his voice. “What a great job we have done.”

Chen went downstairs. He saw Ling again in the hotel lobby.

Several members of the American delegation had gathered around the front desk to admire a Suzhou embroidered silk scroll of the Great Wall. Ling was interpreting. She did not notice him at first. In the morning light, she appeared pale, with dark rings visible under her eyes. He did not know when she had left his room.

She was wearing a rose-colored Qi skirt, the slits revealing her slender legs. A small straw purse hung from her shoulder, and a bamboo briefcase was in her hand. An Oriental among the Occidentals. She was about to leave with the American delegation.

As he gazed at her in a flood of morning light, he was awash in gratitude.

She did not disengage herself immediately. As soon as she was free, he asked, “Will you call me when you get back to Beijing?”

“Of course I will.” She added after a pause, “If that’s all right with you.”

“How can you ask that? You have done such a lot for me-”

“No, don’t. You’re under no obligation.”

“Then we’ll see each other in Beijing,” he said, “in October. Maybe earlier.”

“Remember the poem you recited for me in the North Sea Park that afternoon?”

“That afternoon, yes.”

“So it’s just a couple of months.”

A small American woman with a slight limp came shuffling toward her.

“Are we done with what we have come for?”

“Yes, I’m done with what I came for,” she said, looking at him before she turned to join the delegation members.

Outside, it was a bright, shining morning. A gray mini-van awaited the delegation on Nanjing Road. She was the last to get into the van, carrying a leather suitcase for someone. As the car started moving, she rolled down the window and waved her hand at him.

He watched as the van pulled out

I’m done with what I came here for. That was what she had said.

What had he come here for? He wished he could say the same, but he couldn’t.

It had happened. It might never happen again. He did not know. He did know, however, that there was no stepping twice into the same river.

But he had to run back into the hotel. Some representatives were leaving. As the host, he had to say good-bye to them and bestow various gifts on behalf of the Shanghai Police Bureau. Smiling, shaking hands with one representative after another, he realized that his responsibilities at the Guoji Hotel had been designed to get him out of the way.

“The order of the acts has been schemed and plotted, / And nothing can avert the final curtain’s fall.”

By noon, he was free to go downstairs to the newspaper stand in the lobby. There were several people gathering in front of it, reading the newspaper over each other’s shoulders. As he walked toward them, he saw a headline printed in red:

CORRUPTION AND CRIME UNDER WESTERN BOURGEOIS INFLUENCE

There was a full page editorial in the People’s Daily about Wu’s case. What struck Chen as most absurd was that Guan’s name was not even mentioned. She was just one of the unnamed victims. The homicide was treated as an inevitable effect of Western bourgeois influence. Chief Inspector Chen’s name was not mentioned either, which was probably well-meant, as Party Secretary Li had explained. But Commissar Zhang was cited as a representative of the old high cadres determined to push through the investigation. Zhang’s commitment was seen as the Party’s determination. It is not people that make interpretations, but interpretations that make people.