The Mao Case by Qiu Xiaolong

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.”
    Jiao saw in Xie’s painting something not only invisible to others but also closely connected to Xie’s life. Chen thought of the book Ling had sent him; in it, critics claimed to have discovered evidence of Eliot’s personal crisis in the manuscript of The Waste Land — his future as a poet uncertain, his marriage on rocks, and his wife a neurotic drag. According to them, the water in the poem could signify what the poet didn’t have in his life, metaphysically as well as physically —
    He was struck by an idea — not exactly new, since it had actually crossed his mind the night that he was assigned the Mao Case. That night, in the midst of a confusion of ideas, he had thought of the connection between Li Shangyin’s life and his poetry. That was why he scribbled the word poetry on the matchbox before falling asleep. Only he had forgotten its relevance to the Mao Case by the next morning.
    It was the possibility of learning something through Mao’s poetry. Not just as a critic, but as a detective. In spite of all the revolutionary messages in Mao’s poems, some of the lines must have come from his personal experience and impulses, consciously or subconsciously, untold and previously unknown to the public. If Old Hunter could manage to dig out the personal stuff behind Mao’s poem to Kaihui, Chen should be able to do a better job, given his training in literary criticism.
    So he really did have some urgent business to take care of, as he had told Jiao, before joining her for dinner. He turned onto a side street, taking a short cut to the subway station, where, in a medium-sized bookstore in the underground mall, he would start searching for all the books about Mao’s poems, like a devoted Maoist.

EIGHT
    DETECTIVE YU WOKE EARLY Sunday morning and reached for his wife Peiqin, but she wasn’t in bed beside him. Probably shopping, he guessed. She would usually go to the market early on Sunday morning.
    He thought he heard a muffled sound outside the door. The building was old and housed many families — it was likely some residents were already up and moving. He didn’t get up. Reaching for a cigarette, he went over in his mind what he had done for the last few days.
    With the Party’s emphasis on “a harmonious society,” the bureau suddenly had a new focus. Several cases were assigned to the special case squad, temporarily under Yu during Chen’s leave. Those cases didn’t seem that special to Yu, but Party Secretary Li saw them in a different light. For instance, the squad was told to keep an eye on a “troublemaking” journalist who tried to expose the officials involved, directly or even indirectly, in a corruption case. Li’s lecture for the job was delivered in the name of “political stability” as a precondition for the “harmonious society,” condemning the journalist’s efforts, which could cause people to lose their faith in the Party. Yu didn’t have his heart in those assignments. Keeping an eye on someone didn’t necessarily mean seeing something, or doing something, as he told himself again, taking a long pull at