Chen Qianli had guessed the agents would come today, but he hadn’t expected them to arrive so soon.

Today was the fourteenth of the first lunar month. He had gone out early that morning, threading his way through streets and lanes, pretending to have no idea at all that two shadows trailed behind him. In the old West Gate district, he entered a teahouse, ordered a plate of steamed buns, a plate of shredded dried tofu, and a pot of tea. While the tailing agents weren’t paying attention, he borrowed the newspaper from the table next to his and found the advertisement.

The digits in the advertisement, in order, were three, one, eight, five, three, four, six, six—in Morse code, these eight numbers spelled out the characters for “Hao Han.” Below the advertisement was a phone number; the moment Comrade Hao Han dialed that number, he would place himself in danger.

Back at the house on Menghua Street, he went up to the third floor. The night before, he had forced himself to sleep, right in this side room on the third floor. He stood at the back window looking out; below the back window was a narrow lane, and across it stood a wall enclosing the drying ground of a dye works. Rows of drying racks stood on the square drying ground, rising well above the wall, hung with hundreds upon hundreds of strips of blue cloth fluttering in the sunlight. Chen Qianli calculated the distance—if he stood on the windowsill, he could jump across to the wall opposite, climb over it, and cross the drying ground to leave this house. He set a chair beneath the back window and sat down facing outward, running through everything in his mind once more, confirming that the plan he’d worked out on the ship still had a chance of succeeding.

He knew the agents would come today. Ye Qinian was not Lu Zhongde—he wouldn’t be so easily fooled. The day before, at the wharf, he had put on a performance to make Lu Zhongde believe he hadn’t been exposed; the agents had neither opened fire nor rushed in to make an arrest. But last night, Ye Qinian must have grown more and more uneasy the more he thought about it—today he would still send men to arrest him, or eliminate him outright.

The afternoon before, he’d had Lu Zhongde help arrange this lodging. He knew that as long as he avoided meeting up with Lin Shi and the others, the agents might hold off on arresting them for the time being. Keeping them out in the open was the only way for “Xi Shi” to continue his “work.” Before going to Guangzhou, he’d had Wei Dafu secretly find a place, planning to move everyone there within the next couple of days; before boarding the ship he’d already sent Liang Shichao there to stand by.

That evening he had gone to Chen Qianyuan’s, but he hadn’t gone upstairs, hadn’t even entered the lane. He’d pretended to notice someone tailing him, acted startled, circled around a great deal, and then come back.

Now the agents were here. He heard chaotic footsteps below, something clanging and rolling down the stairs. Just before coming up, he’d taken two battered aluminum pots from the kitchen and set them on the staircase. He was the only one living on the third floor; no one would be coming to visit him. The stairwell was quite dim, and the agents rushing up wouldn’t notice the two pots underfoot.

He pushed open the window, stepped onto the sill, and leapt.

The wall was covered in moss; his hand slipped once, but he still managed to hold on. He climbed over the wall and dropped into a great expanse of blue cloth. Some of it had already dried, some was still half-damp; the air held a faint sour smell. He moved slowly among the cloth panels, knowing this wasn’t over yet. The evening before, the drying ground had brought in a batch of cloth, and an open patch of ground had appeared near the drying-ground gate; from a distance he had seen two men standing at the entrance. Lu Zhongde had found this house, so of course he was familiar with the surrounding terrain.

Chen Qianli crouched down, watching from beneath the cloth. After a while he saw a pair of feet moving, but the second pair had not yet appeared.

Someone was shouting behind him; he couldn’t wait any longer. He began running toward the direction of that pair of feet, weaving through the gaps between the panels, trying not to let the cloth sway too much. Now he could see it—through the blue cloth he could make out a figure, hunched over, gun in hand, glancing left and right, hesitant. He rushed toward him, sweeping up a panel of cloth in passing and flinging it at the figure. He didn’t stop running—he charged straight up to the agent and swung a fist into his throat; before the man could cry out, he threw a second straight punch, striking the hollow between his ribs. He didn’t let the agent simply crumple to the ground, but instead grabbed him by the collar and lowered him down slowly, taking the pistol from his hand.

He guessed the second agent was still standing at the drying-ground gate. The gate was on the right side, so he ran left instead, yanking hard on the cloth panels, sending the drying racks rocking violently. He ran along the aisle between two rows of cloth and quickly made his way to the right side. From the last drying rack to the gate was another seven or eight paces; he burst out from the final row of cloth and charged toward the gate, shouting loudly—don’t move—while his feet never slowed for an instant. His left hand held the gun, aimed at the still-undecided agent. He didn’t fire—he ran right past the man, his right hand flicking the knife in a swift motion, as if casually brushing against the man’s chin, as though his arm had merely swung a little too wide while running and grazed him by accident. Not until he had already leapt out through the gate did the man feel that faint chill at his throat.

He still didn’t stop, running on toward the left side of the lane, then turning right into a straight alley. On the right side of the alley stood a high wall; behind it, voices clamored, but outside the small lane was perfectly quiet. Emerging from the mouth of the alley, he came onto a wider street; he didn’t turn, but instead ducked straight into the alley opposite. At the next mouth of the alley, another wide street opened up, and finally there were a few people about.

Chen Qianli slowed his pace, steadying his breath; his mind began working again, and suddenly an idea struck him. Instead of running toward the road outside, he went to Xueqian Street instead, entering Puyu Li’s crosswise lane from its mouth. He turned into the straight lane, passing through two or three rows of houses, and came out at the mouth of the lane. Outside was Penglai Road; Lu Zhongde’s calligraphy-and-painting shop stood at the left side of the lane entrance. He went into the shop, grabbed Lu Zhongde by the arm, and pulled him toward the back room, saying as he went: “Lao Yi, the agents raided my place—I killed two of them and got out. You’d better get out of here too.”

“How did the agents know about that place?” Lu Zhongde asked warily.

“Last night I went to look for Chen Qianyuan, and two agents were tailing me. They must have found the place that way. Get out of the shop right now.”

“I’m not in a hurry to withdraw. Even if the Menghua Street house is exposed, they won’t find me there—the man who rented it went back to Sichuan for the New Year. Withdrawing means going underground, means having to build a whole new identity from scratch. We have an important mission—there’s no time to prepare all that. We’ll hold on as long as we can.”

Chen Qianli left the calligraphy shop and slipped into the crowd milling around the National Goods Market on Penglai Road. At the tram stop of the French-owned Electric Tram Company on Fangxie Road, he glanced at the utility pole by the platform and found Liang Shichao’s note, pasted beside a missing-person notice. It appeared this spot had originally held a small advertisement—the picture had been torn away for the most part, the medicine bottle no longer visible, only half a bald head remaining. On the note was a phone number; scrawled in pencil in the empty space nearby, in the crooked hand of some child who’d wandered by after school, was a line of abuse: Lu Zhongde is a bastard.

He boarded a No. 5 tram, bought his ticket, had it punched, and squeezed into the crowded third-class trailer car at the back. This foreign-run tram had only first class and third—no second class at all—the foreigners in the concession apparently felt that between themselves and the Chinese, more than one class of distance was called for.

He planned to head first to Zhaojia Creek to warn Lin Shi and Li Han to move at once. He calculated in his head that Qin Chuan’an, Tian Fei, Dong Huiwen, and Chen Qianyuan all lived within the concession—even if Ye Qinian wanted to make arrests, he wouldn’t be able to act that quickly there. He guessed the withdrawal of the Hong Kong and Guangzhou liaison stations might have alerted Ye Qinian. He had managed to deceive Lu Zhongde at Gong He Xiang Wharf, but today’s raid to capture him showed that Ye Qinian had changed his mind. Which meant he could no longer let the other comrades take any more risks.

The conductor called out each stop in French and Chinese in turn; the tram turned west at Slanting Bridge, passing Malu Road, Lu Family Bay, Daputa Bridge, and Pan Family Wooden Bridge, and Chen Qianli got off at the Rue Amiral Bayle stop, right by the bank of Zhaojia Creek. He called Liang Shichao from a tobacco-and-paper shop on the street corner, then walked on along Zhaojia Creek Road.

There was nothing unusual outside the Maochang coal depot. Workers were moving coal across the bridge, one pulling in front, the other pushing from behind, the handcart loaded with freshly made coal briquettes. The plank bridge had no railings; when the coal cart passed, he had to press himself sideways, barely managing to stand at the edge of the boards.

Inside the storage yard, the conveyor belt creaked and rumbled; the sun shone down on the muddy riverbank, green algae drifting across the surface of the water, a flock of sparrows foraging among the coal piles. Within the barbed-wire enclosure of the coal yard, not a soul was in sight. He circled around the mountain-like heaps of coal; by the west wall of a single-story building, a man stood hunched over, back to him. As Chen Qianli approached, the man, having just finished relieving himself, turned and asked who he was looking for. He said he was looking for Li Han.

The man waved a hand toward the direction of the workers’ shantytown. “Li Han worked the night shift last night, just went home.”

He already knew where Li Han lived. At the northwest corner of the coal yard, a section of the barbed wire had been pulled loose; it lay right against the riverbank, surrounded on all sides by wasteland that outsiders wouldn’t come near. The torn wire had been carefully rolled back, revealing a gap, and beyond the gap was a small path—not deliberately built, but worn into being by years of footsteps. The little path wound its way through weeds that grew thick from the mounds of dirt down into the pits, the mounds hung with drying laundry, the pits serving as garbage dumps. The winding path led to a row of shanties. Most of the coal yard workers lived in these shacks.

There were two rows of shanties, east and west, thrown up haphazardly along the riverbank; a few had brick walls, but most were mud, though all had been whitewashed with lime. The outer row of shanties faced the open wasteland; the ground before them had been leveled and packed with coal cinders and dirt, forming a small common ground for the shanty residents—come summer, they would eat dinner and cool off here in the evenings. This time of year it was cold, and the ground held only laundry drying on lines, along with stray cats and dogs. To the south of this common ground, some twenty meters from the shanties, a well had been dug; women were usually there washing clothes and vegetables.

Li Han lived in the inner row, closer to the riverbank. Between the two rows of shanties ran a long strip of open ground, lined along the walls of each household with washstands and cooking stoves; chili peppers, garlic, and dried string beans hung on the walls, but outside Li Han’s shanty hung a large slab of salted pork.

This slab of salted pork was the safety signal—seeing it, Chen Qianli turned from the wall and walked in. The moment he entered that strip of open ground, a sense of danger suddenly rose within him. Li Han’s shanty door was shut; he knew Li Han rarely closed his door, even when he was off at the coal yard for work. In fact, the residents of these shanties generally left their doors open most of the time—except at night, and even in cold weather they kept them open, since it let more light into the shanty and saved on kerosene.

Chen Qianli hastily backed away several steps and circled around to the back of the shanty. This row of shacks had its rear wall right up against the riverbank, which rose in a steep slope of mud accumulated over many years; between the slope and the back walls of the shanties, only a narrow strip of level ground remained, barely wide enough for a person to stand sideways. He pressed himself against the rear wall and moved forward slowly—one shanty, two, three… he knew Li Han’s shanty was the seventh. The rear walls of the shanties had no windows, so those inside had no need to guard their backs, but the shanty next to Li Han’s had a back window open. He pushed it open and slipped quietly inside.

The moment he entered, he understood what had happened. Agents were at Li Han’s place. Next door, Li Han and Lin Shi were talking in turns—one wanted water, the other needed to relieve himself—and someone was quietly scolding them both. Chen Qianli moved to the door, which was nailed together from long wooden planks with gaps between them, and looked out through a crack. The rear wall of the row of shanties in front was the same as this one—some had back windows open, some didn’t. He suspected there might be men lying in wait behind those windows too.

He had no idea how many people were in the next room, or how many guns. All he could do was wait.

He waited a long time. The sun had begun to slant westward; sunlight filtered in through the gaps in the door boards. Outside on the common ground, children ran past chasing each other, then all fell quiet again.

He knew next door was a trap, set specifically for him. They hadn’t caught him at Menghua Street, so Ye Qinian must have guessed he would come here. What worried him now was whether Ye Qinian had seen through the false impression he’d created in front of Lu Zhongde. The agents coming to the coal depot to make an arrest suggested Ye Qinian no longer cared about exposing “Xi Shi.” Li Han had escaped from the market without being caught, and Cui Wentai hadn’t come to the coal yard either—did their coming here to arrest people mean they no longer wanted Lu Zhongde to keep operating undercover within the underground party organization? Had he underestimated Ye Qinian’s judgment? Would the withdrawal of the Guangzhou liaison station make Ye Qinian believe there was nothing more to be dug out of that particular line, and decide to close the net now? This was an intricate, tangled game of chess—he had to guess not only what his opponent would do next, but how his opponent was guessing at his own next move. In any case, he couldn’t let Lu Zhongde suspect for a moment that he’d been exposed.

His chance came. The door next door opened, and someone came out, standing across the common ground, humming a little tune while relieving himself against the wall. Chen Qianli saw his shoulders twitch and gently pushed the door outward, then pulled it back shut. The urinating agent spun around abruptly, glancing suspiciously in this direction. Nothing stirred. The agent relaxed. He did up his buttons and hummed his tune again, turning to head back to Li Han’s shanty.

The door opened and closed again—this time with more force, more noise. This startled the agent badly, and he cried out: “Who’s there?”

A wooden window facing Li Han’s shanty at an angle was pushed open, and two agents stuck their heads out; one shouted sharply: “What’s all the fuss? Get back inside.”

The urinating agent pointed toward Chen Qianli’s direction, and two more agents emerged from Li Han’s shanty; several pistols were now all trained on that door, though no one dared rush in carelessly. After a long moment’s hesitation, one bold soul finally kicked the door open and charged in—only to find the room empty. The back window, however, stood half-open.

“It was just the wind!” the agent cried, still shaken, cursing loudly to steady his nerves.

Now Chen Qianli knew where the agents from the front row of shanties were hiding. He climbed back out the window, moved along the narrow path by the wall, barely a foot wide, and circled around to the east end of the row of shanties, waiting there until everything had gone quiet again. Then he began to run—like a cat, or a leopard, his feet making not the slightest sound. He ran to the door of the shanty where the agents were hiding, not slowing his pace for an instant, using the momentum to slam through the door, charging straight to the back window. Before the two agents could react, the knife in Chen Qianli’s hand had already slashed open one man’s throat; the man stared blankly at Chen Qianli, then at his comrade. After a moment, his legs gave way beneath him and he collapsed. The other man was the one who had just shouted the reprimand; he stared at his fallen comrade on the ground but didn’t dare make a sound, for a sharp knife was pressed to his neck, its tip resting on his throat, and he felt an icy chill there, as if some liquid were seeping outward.

The blade didn’t go in. Chen Qianli said quietly: “Get the people in the house across the way to come out.”

The man didn’t understand.

Chen Qianli tilted his chin toward the window: “Call them out.”

The agent shouted—everyone out, everyone out. Three agents came out from Li Han’s shanty; Chen Qianli didn’t wait, snatching the agent’s pistol and firing—chambering a round, firing, firing again—all in one smooth motion. The three agents fell to the ground. Seeing Chen Qianli open fire, the agent in the room lunged at him from behind; without turning his head, he struck backward with his elbow, then spun and fired once more.

Chen Qianli leapt out through the window and ran toward the opposite shanty. He burst through the door and found a fight already underway inside. Two agents remained in the room; at the sound of gunfire, they froze for an instant. Li Han and Lin Shi seized the moment—Li Han wrapped himself around one agent, rolling with him to the ground, choking his throat in a death grip. Lin Shi grabbed the teapot from the table and swung it down on the other agent’s head, but his injured leg hadn’t fully healed, and the blow failed to knock the man out. Seeing the agent raise his pistol, Lin Shi threw himself bodily forward, and like Li Han, ended up wrestling with the man on the ground.

Chen Qianli sprang across the room in a single bound and kicked backward at the lower back of the agent grappling with Lin Shi. The kick would have been enough to snap the man’s spine, but before the blow landed, the agent fired—the gun pressed between the two grappling bodies, the shot sounding oddly muffled.