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In fact, his own writing career had now reached a critical stage, Chen knew. There were too many books waiting to be read. In the middle of one homicide investigation after another, however, he did not know how he could ever manage to keep up.

He felt an affinity to Yang, a poet as well as a translator. But for the dramatic reversal of politics, what had happened to Yang could have happened to Chen.

Chen did not know that Yang had translated from Chinese into English, an attempt Chen had never made before, except for a few fragmented lines for a friend from the United States. He started to brew a pot of coffee, a Brazilian brand, a gift from her, that faraway friend.

He took out Yang’s poetry translation manuscripts that Yu had given him. Instead of studying the computer printout, he focused on the handwritten manuscript. The two were practically identical. In his research for a paper he had written years earlier about The Waste Land, he had learned that a handwritten manuscript might be a useful entree into the mind of a creative writer.

A general impression he had gotten of Yang’s manuscript was that he had made a conscientious effort to make the text readable to contemporary English readers, but what caught Chen’s attention were some abbreviated notes left in the margins.

“Chapter 3,” “C 11,” “C 8 or C26,” “C 12 if not C 15,” “For the conclusion.”

Apparently, these references had meaning for Yang alone.

Perhaps they indicated the books consulted for the purpose of the translation, Chen speculated. Classical Chinese poems could be open to endless interpretations. As a renowned scholar, Yang might have done a lot of research before settling upon one particular rendition.

But that did not make much sense. For that purpose, Yang should have jotted down page numbers, not chapters. It would have been much easier for him to check his citations afterward.

The collection included a number of poems Chen recognized immediately, even in English, but a few of them offered no clue as to what the original might have been. It was possible that Yang had selected these poems from earlier or less-known collections. That might be an explanation for the abbreviated references. But then, why all the “Cs” instead of editors’ names?

The lack of an introduction or conclusion gave Chen a different idea. He, too, had written conclusions for different projects, in which he sometimes quoted a line or two. Yang might have been in the process of writing a conclusion for his poetry translation, but had died without having finished it.

In spite of his failure to see any relevance to the murder case, Chen did not put the manuscript down. He could see why Yin had cherished the manuscript. It contained wonderful love poems, as Yin had said in the Afterword, which also evoked the most memorable days of their lives. In the cadre school, they would have pored over those poems together, in English and in Chinese, holding hands. On such a night, they might have felt as if the poem of Su Dongpo had been written for them, and that they themselves were united forever through its lines:

The night watchman struck the third watch. Golden waves of the moonlight fading, a jade handle of the Dipper lowering, we calculate with our fingers when the west wind will come, unaware of time flowing away like a river in the dark.

The Afterword was written in a clever way. Yin did not try to say too much, but merely presented the scenes in which she and Yang had read and discussed those poems at the cadre school. She ended, however, with a scene in which she stood alone, reading a poem written by Li Yu, which had once been recited to her by Yang, deep in the night:

When will the endless cycle of the spring flower and the autumn moon come to an end? How much remembrance of things past does a heart know? Last night, in the attic revisited by the eastern wind, it was unbearable to look toward home in the fair moonlight. The carved rails and the marble steps must remain unchanged, but not her beauty. How much sorrow do I have? It is like the spring flood of a long river flowing east!

The manuscript had enormous sentimental value. Chen touched it gently. No wonder Yin had kept it in a bank safety deposit box.

Now he stood up and moved to the window, looking out at the street waking under his gaze. Across the road, he saw a Young Pioneer hurrying out the door, tying his red scarf with one hand, holding a fried rice cake in the other, a heavy satchel on his back-it appeared, for a fleeting moment, as if he was Chen himself, hurrying to school, thirty years ago. The chief inspector collected himself and turned back to the desk littered with dictionaries and papers.

Now he had something else for White Cloud to do in the Shanghai Library. Some of the poems translated by Yang might have appeared in English study journals, although Chen was not sure when that might have occurred-perhaps before the Anti-Rightist movement in the mid-fifties. If so, some annotation there might throw light on the mysterious abbreviations in the manuscript. They might not turn out to be important or relevant, but he was curious. In addition, the library must have some catalogs from Chinese and foreign publishers. He could try to contact some of them, to see whether they might be interested in publishing the collection. There was no hurry, but it gave him comfort to think that he was attempting to do something for the dead.

In that way, Chen could also keep White Cloud busy, and away from his room. Then he felt he would be able to settle down to working on his translation. And he did just that, productively, for a couple of hours, before she arrived for the day. The laptop helped.

When sunlight came streaming through the window, and White Cloud entered the room, carrying a paper bag of fried mini-buns, he had already finished several pages. He explained her new assignment: To find poems in magazines translated by Yang, and to identify publishers that might be interested in publishing a collection of such poems. Also, he had an elusive feeling this might uncover something else, even though he did not know what. It was a long shot. He himself would probably not go to the library on the basis of that sort of hunch, but having White Cloud available made it possible.

“I have to assist Detective Yu, as you know, anyway I can,” Chen explained to her, “but I do not have time to do so and to work on the translation for Mr. Gu too. So you are really helping a lot.”

“A little secretary is supposed to do whatever her boss wants her to,” she said with a sly smile. “Anything. You don’t have to explain. Mr. Gu has emphasized it many times. But what about your lunch?”

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “It may take you several hours. Take your time at the library.”

Surprisingly, he received no phone calls that morning. The translation progressed smoothly. A sparrow twittered outside his window in the cold wind despite the barrenness of the twigs. He forgot about his lunch, for he was transported back into the glitter and glamour of the city in the thirties. Like visitors to the New World would someday be, he was “drunk with money, dazzled with gold.”

When the phone finally rang, waking him from the scene of a French girl dancing a modern dance, her bare feet flashing like snow on a red-carpeted stage inside a postmodern shikumen house, he felt disoriented as he abruptly returned to reality. The caller was Yu. He had not made much progress in the investigation, he reported. Chen was not surprised. Not that he did not have a high opinion of Yu’s ability. Investigations took time.