The tenth day of the first lunar month, the Beginning of Spring.

Central Park lay south of the municipal government building. During the Yuan and Ming dynasties, this had been the site of provincial officials’ offices; in the early Qing dynasty, during the Revolt of the Three Feudatories, it had been the residence of the Pacification King of the South. After the rebellion was suppressed, it became the office of the Guangdong Governor. It was Sun Yat-sen who had proposed converting it into a park; the park charged no admission and citizens could come and go freely.

Chen Qianli entered the park from the north gate and walked south along its central axis, dressed in a short jacket, looking no different from the odd-job workers at the various government offices nearby. He seemed to be purely killing time, showing great interest in any sign bearing writing, pausing for a while in front of an Italian sculpture donated by Kang Youwei, and staring for a long time at the stone lions of the Pacification King’s former residence.

In truth, he was deeply troubled, his mind never still, wondering whether he had made a mistake. Perhaps he should not have let Ling Wen and Yi Junnian come to Guangdong—he had trusted his instincts too much, had not thought it through carefully enough. Earlier, he had taken Liang Shichao quietly to Shantou, and things had gone smoothly. Afterward they had gone by way of Hong Kong, planning to take a ship back to Shanghai, but they had heard that something had gone wrong at the Guangzhou transportation station, and that it involved people who had come from the Shanghai underground.

At dawn, they had arrived in Guangzhou by small steam launch. Early that morning, Chen Qianli had had the Guangdong underground comrade who received him notify Mo Shaoqiu; after making contact, Mo Shaoqiu immediately took him to see Lao Xiao. Along the way, Mo Shaoqiu told Chen Qianli: “That morning Lao Xiao came to the transportation station and arranged to meet Ling Wen the next day. But Ling Wen didn’t come. He waited half an hour, then had to leave—you can’t wait too long at the station, that’s the rule. Lao Xiao went to Tiannan Teahouse, saying that if Ling Wen came, she should be sent there to find him. Just past noon, plainclothes agents from the Investigation Squad showed up. We had several lookout posts around the transportation station; day and night, if suspicious people appeared around Jianglan Street, the station would get word quickly. Our man rushed back to report, but before he even made it into the medicine shop, gunfire had already broken out on the street.”

“They struck the teahouse first? They didn’t move on both places at once?” Chen Qianli asked, puzzled.

“We found it strange too. The moment the shots rang out, we heard them at the station. By the time our messenger came in and told us, I immediately had my wife leave the medicine shop first. The station is always prepared for this kind of emergency—there was nothing there that needed to be cleaned up. On the terrace, behind the rain gutter under the eaves, there was an oil-paper package containing a pistol. My wife handed me the gun and left through the back door herself. I went out through the shop entrance and ran to Jianglan Street, standing beneath the overhang to see what was going on. But they never came to the medicine shop, not until evening. Around five or six in the evening, the plainclothes agents broke down the shop door and entered the station.”

Two female students approached from the opposite direction in the alley; once they had passed, Mo Shaoqiu continued:

“Yi Junnian said he and Ling Wen came to the station together. The two of them had just turned out of Shiqifu when things outside the teahouse turned chaotic. They saw the agents chasing Lao Xiao and decided to split up. Yi Junnian went after him himself, telling Ling Wen to hurry to the medicine shop—if the station was fine, she should go in and report; if the station had also been compromised, she should return first and wait for him at the New Asia Hotel. Yi Junnian told Ling Wen they had an important mission and must not take any risks. He found a bicycle and caught up with Lao Xiao on Yang Lane. Lao Xiao had been trapped by two agents, front and back, guns aimed at him. Yi Junnian rode his bicycle straight at them, firing two shots that killed both agents, but Lao Xiao was also hit. Yi Junnian carried him to safety, then went back to find Ling Wen.

“But Ling Wen was nowhere to be found. He went back to the New Asia Hotel and waited until evening—the two of them had tickets for that night’s boat, only a few hours away. Yi Junnian rushed over to tell us this news.”

Mo Shaoqiu led Chen Qianli near the timber yard, and in a shanty by the water, they found Lao Xiao. The shanty stood propped along the bank; Lao Xiao lay on old ship planks laid across the floor, unconscious.

“He drifts in and out. The doctor says he’s not out of danger yet.”

The shanty had been converted from an old wooden boat and itself resembled a ship’s cabin; the door faced the East Moat Canal, on which countless Tanka boats floated. Inside and outside the door were all ship planks, with only a cloth curtain hanging across the doorway. Liang Shichao crouched outside the curtain smoking, while Chen Qianli and Mo Shaoqiu sat on the floor inside.

“There’s been no word at all about Comrade Ling Wen—she’s vanished. The moment my wife heard, she cried. She was so fond of that female comrade, liked her the moment they met. If revolutionary work discipline didn’t forbid it, she’d have pulled her into bed to share stories till dawn. My wife absolutely refuses to believe she’s died a martyr’s death—she even went to the Public Security Bureau to ask around. We have an inside contact there, can’t exactly call him a comrade, but there’s no problem asking about certain things. But the Public Security Bureau had no news at all. The Special Investigation Section hadn’t arrested any female Communist. A murder case? Nothing there either. They said, it’s the New Year, who would kill anyone? Guangzhou’s military and police rarely handle arrests around this time, so it really was strange that the day before yesterday afternoon they suddenly stormed the teahouse to arrest Lao Xiao.”

“What did the two of them do after arriving in Guangzhou?” Chen Qianli asked, thinking as he spoke.

“The two of them came to the station. We’d already received word from above that people from the Shanghai underground would be coming. They came to arrange the transportation line properly—we knew the Central Committee had something major underway. Ling Wen gave the recognition signal; between the two of them, she was the one in charge. We discussed all sorts of details—setting new recognition signals, phone numbers, telegraph codes, how to receive them off the boat, where to stay. After we finished, Ling Wen asked about her husband. I’m not familiar with the name Long Dong—I only came to Guangzhou after the station was established—but my wife knew—”

Lao Xiao suddenly started muttering deliriously. Mo Shaoqiu got up, took the towel from his forehead, dipped it in the water basin, wrung it out, folded it, and put it back.

“My wife had met Long Dong, and had read the newspaper coverage of that incident. She said it happened in a house—”

“Where was that house Mrs. Mo mentioned?” The question burst from Chen Qianli.

“Haoxian Street—now called Haoxian Road, but Guangzhou people still like to call it by its old name, Haoxian Street.”

Mo Shaoqiu explained the two street names that sounded the same but were written with different characters.

“But they never went there. Yi Junnian said they had originally planned to visit Haoxian Street after meeting with Lao Xiao the next day.”

Why had Lao Xiao arranged to meet Ling Wen at the station the next day? Chen Qianli pondered silently to himself.

Past the music pavilion was the park’s main gate. Out through the gate and across Park Road was a small lane, and across from the lane’s exit stood the Public Security Bureau.

The Public Security Bureau was on Weixin North Road; on the east side of the road, facing the bureau’s gate, stood a row of small shops. In the early afternoon, the eateries had all put out their fires, except for one fried rice noodle shop that was the liveliest of the lot. A canopy had been set up out front with a few square tables and benches, teapots of green-glazed coarse porcelain sitting on the tables. Tea cost only five cents, brewed from tea leaves collected from the large teahouses and re-roasted; the pastries were only taro cake. The tea-drinking customers all had their sleeves rolled up, chattering away about a new grand restaurant that had just opened in Xinzhen, backed by Chen Weizhou, Chen Jitang’s elder brother.

“—a huge gambling den, fan-tan there—hit the right number and you can win thousands in silver dollars. The moment the dealer’s counting stick moves, everyone’s eyes at the table don’t dare blink, you could hear a needle drop.”

“You sure can talk big, kid. First thing through the door you buy three thousand in chips—you ever actually gone in there?”

Liang Shichao also ordered a pot of tea, a plate of bean sprout noodles, and two pieces of taro cake, and sat down at an empty table. At the sight of a stranger nearby, the neighboring table’s voices dropped, and someone glanced his way. Liang Shichao pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and passed them around to the next table.

Urged warmly by the group, unable to decline, Liang Shichao moved over to their table. The tea-drinking customers were all local coolies and laborers; none of them could sit around all afternoon—they were just stopping by during breaks between work to sit a while and drink tea. People came and went, and by the time Liang Shichao had finished half his pot of tea, the crowd at the table had already changed.

He picked up some information, and when Chen Qianli arrived, they moved to a different empty table to talk.

“This fried rice noodle shop stays open late—police on night shift often come by. Three years back they found out one of the officers was a Communist, and several people here still remember it. They say the executed Communist officer—the man surnamed Li who runs the tobacco shop next door definitely knew him, he used to come by regularly to buy cigarettes.”

The two left the noodle shop, walked around the area for a while, then returned and quietly slipped into the tobacco shop. An old man sat inside. As soon as Liang Shichao entered he called out, “Uncle Li.” The old man nodded.

The counter was filled with colorful goods; Liang Shichao looked for a long while, chose two packs of “Three Castles,” slipping one into his own pocket and handing the other to Chen Qianli. Paper-wrapped cigarettes sat on the counter, canned ones on the shelf behind. Chen Qianli suddenly noticed, up in a high corner, two green tin cans sitting alone, and something stirred in his heart.

He said to Uncle Li, “You actually have Craven ‘A’ here.”

Liang Shichao was about to translate this into the local dialect, but to his surprise, Uncle Li had understood him perfectly well.

“No one buys it. If you want it, I’ll sell it to you at half price.”

“Fine.” Chen Qianli produced a silver dollar and handed it to the old man.

The cans were covered in dust; Chen Qianli found a rag on the counter and wiped them slowly.

“No one’s bought them—they’ve been sitting here for over three years.”

“Why did you stock them if no one was buying?”

“There was someone who bought them, back then. The man who bought them died.”

As the dust came off, a sphinx emerged on the cans. This was a high-end cigarette, shipped in by ocean liner from England—one can cost a full silver dollar. In a small shop like this, even customers who could afford the price would rarely be willing to spend it.

“I know who he was,” he said to Uncle Li. “He was a police officer, and also a Communist.”

Uncle Li eyed him suspiciously, but thinking that the two cans of cigarettes, sitting there for three years, had finally sold, he felt a certain lightness of heart, and asked Chen Qianli, “You knew him? Are you a Communist too?”

Chen Qianli laughed heartily. “Me? I’m a reporter for the Minguo Daily. Where do you get this cigarette from?”

“Officer Lu. Not a high rank, but he’d smoke nothing else. All these years, he was the only one who ever came to my shop asking for it. He got me to source it—the only place in all of Guangzhou that carried it was the Shamian foreign trading houses. I brought in a few cans every month, sold them all to him.”

“Why didn’t he come for these two?”

“He came by on the afternoon of Dragon Boat Festival to buy some, but the shop was out of stock. I told him to come back the next day. He never came. Two days later, the papers said he was dead.”

“Dragon Boat Festival? Uncle Li, are you sure you’re not misremembering?”

“How could I misremember? It was exactly Dragon Boat Festival—when he came, I was in the middle of putting up the noon-hour talisman on the shop door. My daughter had gone back to her mother’s home the night before carrying zongzi and pork, and the family had taken the children down to the Pearl River to wash in the dragon boat water. The household was busy, no one could get away, so I only went to restock the next morning. Officer Lu came over from across the way, all smiles, spring in his step, with Little Phoenix on his arm. He said he’d come back the next day to pick it up.”

In the eighteenth year of the Republic, Dragon Boat Festival fell on June 11th. The Guangzhou Minguo Daily had reported on the thirteenth that on the night of the ninth, Lu Zhongde, a Communist who had infiltrated the Public Security Bureau, had been shot dead. But on the eleventh, Dragon Boat Festival, this man Uncle Li had seen Lu Zhongde standing alive right in front of him, coming out of the Public Security Bureau, looking as if something good had just happened to him.

If the man announced dead was not actually dead, then someone else must have died in his place, without it being made public. Chen Qianli guessed this person was very likely Long Dong, who was said to have escaped from the scene of the military police’s arrest and had never been seen again since. Though on this point, he might never be able to obtain conclusive proof—unless Ye Tao were somehow to come back to life and retrieve the record of this conspiracy from Ye Qinian’s most secret safe.

Looked at another way: if the enemy had claimed Lu Zhongde was a Communist and had executed him, yet someone later saw Lu Zhongde still alive, appearing as usual in the places he was known to frequent, then why would the enemy have lied? That was worth pondering.

Before his death, Lao Fang had told Chen Qianli that in July of the eighteenth year of the Republic, in order to strengthen the Shanghai underground party’s intelligence work, the organization had transferred Yi Junnian from Guangzhou to Shanghai—precisely within a month after Lu Zhongde had been declared dead in Guangzhou. Yi Junnian was the code name used for his secret work; he did not go by that name in Guangzhou. He had said as much himself to fellow inmates while held together at Longhua Detention House.

Before transferring Yi Junnian to Shanghai, his superiors had given him the contact methods, recognition codes, and this alias, instructing him to make contact in Shanghai with Lao Fang, the underground party’s local head there. As for what name he had used while in Guangzhou, he never mentioned it to anyone—of course he could not, for the sake of work discipline. Revealing his former name might endanger comrades still working within that original system.

But he was fond of smoking, and smoked only one brand—Craven “A.” There was another person in Guangzhou who was fond of the same brand. Chen Qianli thought: a person can, for a certain purpose, transform himself into someone else entirely. Some people are like chameleons, able at any moment to shift identity, stance, appearance, tone of voice, even personality. He can move back and forth between different roles as easily as putting on or taking off a piece of clothing. And yet, even so, such people often retain one or two deeply ingrained habits—perhaps out of arrogance, or perhaps—perhaps deep down, a person always wants to hold on to something, to prove to himself that he is still himself.

Of course, he could not make a judgment based on instinct alone, nor could he rely on a single can of cigarettes. If only he had a photograph of Yi Junnian—then he could have Uncle Li identify whether this was the same man as that Officer Lu from years ago.

Chen Qianli opened the green can, tapped the bottom, drew out a cigarette and handed it to Uncle Li and Liang Shichao, then lit one for himself.

“Officer Lu had Little Phoenix on his arm?”

“The lead actress of the Qunfang Yan troupe, the female lead. That woman—so enchanting—” Uncle Li placed the Craven “A” into a wooden box behind the counter. “I always said, when Officer Lu met her, it was like the leading lady meeting the young scholar—doomed.”

Liang Shichao explained to Chen Qianli that on the Cantonese opera stage, the words for “husband” and “suffering” were homophones in the local dialect. Uncle Li nodded and continued: “And sure enough, he couldn’t escape death in the end. The two of them were so sweet on each other back then—who would have guessed the outcome.”

“So this Little Phoenix—is she still performing?”

“At Yuehua. Leading lady, the pillar of the troupe.”