The Mao Case by Qiu Xiaolong Read Free Book Online

job. He didn’t know what to say, but he had another idea. He might send a present to Ling rather than a card, just as she had. A message in the absence of a message.
    Yet another knock came at the door. This time it was only Shen’s introduction letter with his signature plus a red seal at the bottom. Shen recommended Chen warmly, raving about his business career and literary interests. As represented in the letter, Chen was ready to settle down to work on a literary project about Shanghai in the thirties.
    His cover story was another weird coincidence. Chen recalled Ouyang, a friend he had met in Guangzhou, saying something similar except that Ouyang was a real businessman, who never made enough money to work on a literary project.

FIVE
    IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON, Chen arrived at Shaoxing Road, a quiet street lined with old magnificent buildings behind high walls.
    It was an area he was relatively familiar with because of a publishing house located nearby. Still, behind the high walls, behind the shuttered windows, the houses seemed to be hinting at mysterious, inexplicable stories within.
    Instead of heading directly to Xie Mansion, he went across the street, into a miniature café. It must have been converted from a residential room and had only three or four tables inside. A narrow bar sporting several coffee makers and wine racks took up one third of the space. He cast a curious look toward the partition at the back of the room. The proprietor apparently lived in the space behind the partition wall.
    He chose a table by the window. For the party in the late afternoon, Chen had put on a pair of rimless glasses, changed his hairstyle, and donned an expensive suit of light material. The people there probably wouldn’t recognize him except for the one from Internal Security. While Chen was known in his own circle, he thought those at the party would be a different lot, and he looked at his window reflection with a touch of ironical amusement. Clothing makes, if not a man, at least the role for a man.
    A young girl emerged from behind a door in the partition wall, through which Chen caught a glimpse of a back door that led into a lane. She looked like a middle school student, helping the family business, serving coffee to his table with a sweet smile. The coffee was expensive, but it tasted fresh and strong.
    Sipping at the coffee, he dialed the Shanghai Writers’ Association. A young secretary answered the phone. She was quite cooperative but knew little about Diao, the author of Cloud and Rain in Shanghai . Diao was not a member of the association and had become known to the association only after the book’s publication. She checked through files and said that Diao might have been invited to a literary meeting somewhere, but she didn’t exactly know where. Diao wasn’t in Shanghai, of that much she was sure.
    Chen followed up by making a long-distance call to Wang, the chairman of the Chinese Writers’ Association in Beijing, asking him to find out the whereabouts of Diao. Wang promised to call back as soon as he learned anything.
    Placing the phone by the coffee cup, Chen took out the file on Xie, turning to the part about the history of the mansion.
    A lot had happened to the prestigious buildings in this area. In the early fifties, high-ranking Party officials had moved in, driving out most of the former residents, only a few of whom remained. Things got much worse at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. At the time, a large house could be forcefully seized by dozens of working-class families, each of them occupying one room — a “revolutionary activity” that abolished the remaining privileges of the pre-1949 society. In the early nineties, a number of those old buildings were pulled down to make way for new construction. It was a miracle that Xie kept his house intact for all these years, and according to the legend told and retold in that social circle, it was achieved through a sacrifice made by