“I do not mean just this week,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“How could somebody like you have turned out to be a cop? A fine scholar, a good translator, and a first-class poet, and you seem to be doing a great job in the police bureau too.”
“You are flattering me, White Cloud. I’m just a cop. You cannot always choose to do what you would like, can you?”
He had not meant this as an allusion to her work in the K club. He regretted having spoken so. He had been asked this question too many times, and his answer came out almost automatically.
She fell momentarily silent.
He tried to maneuver the talk in the direction he had intended it to take. “It’s the same with Mr. Gu, perhaps. He probably didn’t expect as a child to grow up to be a millionaire businessman.”
To his disappointment, she did not know much about Gu. It was all business between Gu and her. As an employer, Gu was not too bad, according to her. He did not take advantage of the girls working for him. Nor was he tight-fisted, at least not with her. As for his connections with the triad world, that was nothing uncommon, she declared. A businessman needed protection.
“Gu has to burn incense, that is, to burn his money to the triad gods, and he is good at what he does. Now he has established connections almost everywhere, in both the white way and the black way.” She added, with her sly smile, “Connections with powerful people like you-”
It was not unpleasant to hear her referring to him as “powerful,” but he cut her short. “Don’t count me in. But have you met any of those really powerful people with him?”
“On a couple of occasions, including several important figures in the city government. One from Beijing as well. I recognized them from their pictures in the newspapers. Do you want to know their names? I can find out.”
“Don’t bother, White Cloud.”
A lambent melody began to waft through the bar. Looking round, he failed to find a karaoke TV set. Then it hit him: karaoke had not existed in the thirties.
“Sorry, there is no karaoke today.”
“Well, I do not enjoy singing that much, Chief Inspector Chen.”
This was not what he had expected. Perhaps she felt the same way he did, preferring not to talk about his job outside the bureau.
The waitress came by again. He ordered a glass of white wine, and she chose a double scotch on the rocks.
Another melody followed. It was an old one, but it belied the period effect-the singer was an American pop star giving a contemporary rendition. For White Cloud, however, it seemed to be even more enjoyable. She was rapt, her face cradled in her hands.
Something soft touched his foot under the table. She had kicked off her shoes, her bare feet were beating out the rhythm, and they were brushing his in her trance. Perhaps.
Sitting so close together at the table, Chen was not unaware of the age difference between them. And of all the other differences, too. They practically belonged to different generations.
To someone like him, whose elementary school years had been in the sixties, a bar or a cafe carried with it associations with bourgeois decadence, decried in all the official textbooks. He might be something of an exception because of his English studies. Still, if he visited a cafe, it was first of all for a cup of good coffee, and occasionally, if time allowed, to spend a couple of hours reading a book over the coffee.
White Cloud, however, had studied no such textbooks. Perhaps a place like Golden Time Rolling Backward symbolized a cultivated taste a notch above that of the common folk who drank tea with leaves in their cups, a sense of being part of the social elite. Whether she genuinely enjoyed the taste of the Lipton teabag tea or not did not matter that much.
An elderly couple rose from their table. The music was good for dancing. They started doing slow steps in a space in front of the grand piano, a hardwood area large enough for ten or fifteen people. Chen caught White Cloud looking at him expectantly. He was going to reach out to her when she touched his hand, tentatively. Dance could be an excuse, he had read, to hold someone it was otherwise impossible or impropriate to hold.
But why not? It was fun being a Mr. Big Bucks for the evening, with a young pretty girl-a little secretary-stroking his hand across the table. He did not have to be Chief Inspector Chen, a “politically correct” Party cadre every minute of the day. He, too, was doing well. He had a powerful position, and a generous advance payment from a business project.
However, it was not destined to be an evening of Golden Time Rolling Backward for Chief Inspector Chen.
His cell phone rang. It was Zhuang, the senior lecturer White Cloud had interviewed. Chen had left several messages for him, and now Zhuang was finally calling back.
“I’m glad you called me,” Chen said. “I have just one question for you. In your conversation with White Cloud about Yang, you mentioned Doctor Zhivago. Now, was Yang reading the novel, or writing a novel like it, or writing poetry like Doctor Zhivago?”
“Did I say that?”
“Yes, you did. The exact words were, ‘still reading, and writing, something like Doctor Zhivago.’ You don’t have to worry, Comrade Zhuang. The case has nothing whatsoever to do with you, but your information may help our work.”
There was a short silence from the other end of the telephone.
A young man approached their table, holding out his hand to White Cloud in a gesture of invitation. She flashed Chen an apologetic smile. Chen nodded in encouragement as he heard Zhuang continuing in a more subdued voice. “Now that both Yang and Yin are dead, I don’t think that anybody can get into trouble.”
“No. Nobody. So please go ahead and tell me.”
Another short silence ensued.
He took a sip of wine. Not too far away, White Cloud started moving gracefully with the young man in front of the piano. A perfectly matched couple, both of them young, energetic, dancing with a rhythm perhaps slightly too wild for this upscale bar.
Zhuang spoke. “I met Yang in the early sixties, during the so-called Socialism Education Movement, you know, shortly before the Cultural Revolution. The school authorities assigned Yang and me to the same study group. We were both single then, and both listed as special targets for brainwashing, so we were put into a temporary isolation dorm room for ‘intensive education’ at night. Yang said that he did not sleep well, but one night I discovered that he was writing-in a notebook, under the quilt. In English. I asked him what it was about. He said that it was a story of an intellectual, something like Doctor Zhivago.”
“Did you take a look at what he was writing?”
“I did not understand English. Nor did I really want to read a single word of it.”
“Why, Comrade Zhuang?”
“Yang said it was a story of an intellectual, and he was an intellectual himself. That’s it. If the school authorities ever looked into the matter, I could claim that it was his diary-at least so I thought. It was no crime to keep a diary. But if I read it, and it was a book, I would have turned into a counterrevolutionary by withholding the information from the authorities.”
“Yes, I see: you did not want to get him-and yourself too-into trouble. Did Yang tell you anything else about it?”
“It was really naive of him to tell me that he was writing a story. Fortunately, I had no idea then who or what Doctor Zhivago was- perhaps a doctor Yang knew personally. Zhivago surely sounded like a Chinese name. The Chinese translation did not appear-let me think-until the mid-eighties. It had been banned, as you know, as an attack on the great Soviet Revolution. In those years, a Nobel-Prize-winning book had to be counterrevolutionary.”
“I know. I happen to know someone who went to jail because of a copy of Doctor Zhivago. You were lucky that you remained in the dark,” Chen said. “Did you ever talk to Yang about it again?”