New Year’s Day morning, Chung Wai Trust Bank on Tianjin Road had its doors open. In accordance with the government’s policy of adopting the new calendar, the bank was open for business as usual on the first day of the “abolished” lunar new year—though customers were unlikely to come at this hour, being busy paying New Year’s visits everywhere.
Just before ten in the morning, a rickshaw stopped in front of the bank, and Chen Qianli got down. The first business of the new year—he handed the puller fifty cents, then turned to lift a small suitcase down from the seat. Today he wore a gray damask silk robe with a sable-claw fur lining, over it a black Ningbo-silk mandarin jacket, and on his head a small sable fur cap.
This outfit he had rented from a used-clothing shop. The shopkeeper hadn’t found it odd—these past years quite a few people had come to him wanting to rent an outfit to pass themselves off as wealthy.
This customer, in truth, would have had enough presence even without dressing the part. And he really did know his goods—he’d flipped through this piece and inspected that one, unimpressed with any of it, until he’d forced the shopkeeper to bring out two truly precious items, and had then chosen the one of the two that was slightly more worn on the inside—that, he’d said, was the one.
Sable-claw fur was no ordinary sable fur—it was the tiny strip of skin beneath the claw’s nail, light, soft, and warm; making a single robe of it would cost several hundred sables’ worth. Never mind the sables themselves—simply sewing those tiny scraps of fur together into a robe without a visible seam was work no craftsman alive today could take on.
Chen Qianli stood by the roadside, set the suitcase down, and pulled a pack of cigarettes from inside his robe. He didn’t normally smoke, but took two puffs this time, then tossed away the half-finished cigarette and turned to climb the steps.
Just as Chen Qianli walked into the bank, not ten minutes later, Ye Qinian left the Cathay Hotel. He had Secretary Ma drive the car on ahead; on this first day of the New Year, he meant to walk for a while. Along Renji Road, it would take about ten minutes to reach Tianjin Road on foot. The whole way, his thoughts were on Chen Qianli—would he manage to see him today? That man was his mortal enemy. Of course he wouldn’t simply put a bullet through him—he meant to torment him slowly, to ask him why he’d been so treacherous, so faithless, all those years ago. He even thought, with a touch of mockery, that if Chen Qianli were like Cui Wentai, coming up to him and saying, I want to meet your big boss—would he really take him to see Mr. Lifu? He hoped Chen Qianli would go on being so obstinately blind, so he’d have the chance to take his revenge to the fullest.
The sun was bright, and for a moment his heart suddenly felt strangely hollow. Special Services Headquarters, the Party-state, the Communist secret plan—these words haunted his mind day and night, but in that brief instant, they all lost their meaning, and even his gnashing hatred seemed to grow terribly distant. If back then Chen Qianli hadn’t been so headstrong, hadn’t had his mind muddled by that ABC of Communism or that Letter From Afar—given time, perhaps he too would not have been so unbending over the matter of Ye Tao. If it had gone that way, then today, on New Year’s Day, with families reunited, perhaps the two of them could have shared a drink together. The thought nearly brought tears to his eyes.
Tianjin Road was a banking street, lined on both sides with banks and money-changers; even on New Year’s Day, cars and rickshaws crowded half the street. Secretary Ma had already parked the car in Fucheng Lane and was not in it. Ye Qinian walked a few more steps, saw the Yuji Money House, and turned to go in. Special Services Headquarters had put up half the capital for Yuji; the shop’s owner was one of their own. Headquarters had planted people in every trade—by now they had built a secret communications network reaching every corner of the country, so that no matter what happened anywhere, they’d know of it first.
Last night at midnight, “Xi Shi” had called. The moment he’d gotten the intelligence, he had worked out his plan lying in bed at the Cathay Hotel. Now Yuji had become the temporary operations headquarters—Fucheng Lane sat diagonally across from Chung Wai Trust Bank, and the window at the back of the money house’s upper floor was the best observation point. Secretary Ma and You Tianxiao were already there.
The men You Tianxiao had brought this time were all sharp; in under ten minutes they’d completed the deployment for the operation, he explained to Ye Qinian.
“Slow is fine, no problem there. But if word leaks out because of you, I’ll have no choice but to hand you over to Internal Investigations for house discipline.”
“Absolutely not, Teacher.”
The money house was full of subordinates from the detective squad; these men had no idea the real commanding unit behind this operation was Special Services Headquarters. Under these circumstances, he had to avoid addressing him as Director Ye.
“What’s the situation at the bank?”
“Our people are spread out at every point. No movement at the bank so far.”
“No arrests without my order.”
“Yes, Teacher.”
Ye Qinian went up to the second floor; the owner of Yuji, knowing Director Ye from headquarters was coming to command the operation on site, had already set out a low table with tea things on the second floor. Ye Qinian sat down by the window and looked over toward the Chung Wai Trust Bank building.
The bank building stood at the intersection, five stories tall, with a basement level below—the vault was down there, its walls cast in steel plate, the vault door itself made of steel forty centimeters thick.
When the building was constructed, they had deliberately designed the street corner at an angle, with the bank’s main entrance facing that direction too—Ye Qinian thought, they must have consulted some feng shui master when they built it.
You Tianxiao came upstairs and told Ye Qinian: “They’re here.”
“How many people?”
“One car, three people. There’s Lin Shi—that’s ‘Old Kai’—Ling Wen, and our ‘Xi Shi’ is in the car too.”
Chen Qianli hadn’t come; Ye Qinian felt a faint stab of disappointment.
Last night, New Year’s Eve, Cui Wentai hadn’t slept well at all—as if he’d been keeping the traditional New Year’s vigil himself. Chen Qianli had said the comrades taking part in the bank operation the next day couldn’t go home that night, and had them all sleep in the clinic’s sickroom instead. This meant he’d had no way to meet Director Ye in person.
No one had anticipated this—not him, not Captain You, not even Director Ye.
There had been two shifty-looking fellows outside the clinic, most likely plainclothes detectives, but he didn’t dare just hand over important intelligence to them, did he? Even if they really were Captain You’s men, Captain You hadn’t briefed them about him, so they probably wouldn’t easily believe he was one of their own! And even if they did believe he was on their side, if something went wrong, who was to say they wouldn’t have a couple of drinks later and forget all about it?
Besides, even if they got it done properly, who would get the credit for it? It wasn’t as if Cui Wentai were doing this for the Nationalist cause anyway. Even setting aside the reward, right now he still had to actually manage to pull it off. With so many people at the clinic, everyone suspicious of a mole inside, if he slipped out in the middle of the night and came back, and someone saw him, that would spell real trouble.
He held out until midnight, and once he saw everyone else was fast asleep, he finally made up his mind, crept quietly to the consulting room, and called the Cathay Hotel.
He had on nothing but the thin cotton jacket he slept in; the driver’s wool overcoat hung on a hook behind the door, but he didn’t dare put it on, afraid of the noise it might make. Even so, holding the phone, shivering and breaking out in a cold sweat, his back was soaked through in no time.
He didn’t dare wait for the Cathay’s switchboard operator to wake Director Ye, and only had her pass along two lines. First: “Old Kai” was Lin Shi. Second: tomorrow morning at ten-thirty, going to the bank to open the safety-deposit box.
After hanging up, he got another fright. The clinic had originally been a lane house; the back rooms upstairs served as sickrooms, and there was a short corridor connecting the consulting room to the sickroom—stairs on one side of the corridor, the sickroom on the other. The corridor had no light on; just as he was creeping stealthily back toward his room, he ran straight into Yi Junnian, smoking at the top of the stairs.
Yi Junnian said nothing at all, just looked at him coldly, not even asking him to explain why he was up wandering around in the middle of the night. Of course, he could always have said he’d gone to use the toilet.
By morning he discovered that several people had already left. At the breakfast table there were only Lin Shi, Ling Wen, Dr. Qin, and himself—even Liang Shichao, who’d been staying at the clinic, was nowhere to be seen.
Back in his room, the more Cui Wentai thought about it, the more uneasy he grew. What if Director Ye hadn’t gotten the message, and let Lin Shi and the gold slip away? That was a responsibility he couldn’t bear. He’d already sold himself out, and now he’d botched even that half-baked job—this whole deal would turn out to be a losing proposition. If Director Ye got angry, said he was a fake defector, a real Communist after all, he might just have him done in.
He went to the consulting room and told Qin Chuan’an he needed to call the car-rental company—he hadn’t brought the car back to the garage last night, and if he didn’t check in this morning, the shop manager would be furious.
Qin Chuan’an was busy writing prescriptions. He knew he might have to evacuate at any moment, and there were many long-term patients who came to him regularly for treatment and medicine—he wanted to have prescriptions ready for them in advance. For a few of them, he even planned to recommend other clinics and doctors. He had all their addresses; all he had to do was seal the written prescriptions into envelopes, and if a sudden evacuation came, he could simply drop the stack into a mailbox. He gestured toward the phone with his pen and kept his head down, continuing to write prescriptions.
The call went through; Cui Wentai gave the room number, glanced up at Qin Chuan’an, saw him absorbed in his own work. The phone rang twice in the room; someone picked up—it was Ye Qinian. Cui Wentai had thought he could make up a few coded phrases to get his meaning across, but found himself suddenly at a loss for words, holding the receiver frozen near his mouth.
Cui Wentai glanced sideways at Qin Chuan’an, who was still bent over the table, seemingly paying him no attention.
“Boss, a customer’s booked the car for this morning—going straight to a job. I’ll come back after I finish this one.”
After a pause, the voice on the other end said, “Understood.”
Cui Wentai hesitated, still holding the phone, uncertain; the other end waited a moment, then said, a little impatiently: “Understood. You already called last night.”
The line went dead.
Setting down the phone, Cui Wentai felt no more settled—if anything, more unsettled than ever.
While Cui Wentai was out of the room, Lin Shi took the chance to say to Ling Wen: “I met Comrade Long Dong—in Guangzhou.”
There was still half an hour before they had to leave—usually the most restless stretch of time, especially with Chen Qianli having said that this time, they’d be carrying out the operation under close enemy surveillance. She was trying to steady herself, about to get up and clear the bowls and chopsticks, when Lin Shi’s words caught her completely off guard.
Firecrackers sounded from the lane—Shanghai households, on the morning of New Year’s Day, set off a string of “door-opening firecrackers” the moment they opened their doors.
“I heard from Old Yi that your husband, Comrade Long Dong, died a martyr’s death in Guangzhou—when did that happen?”
“After the Guangzhou Uprising, he was captured at the Soviet consulate and killed by the enemy.”
Lin Shi nodded. “If that’s the case, he’s very likely still alive.”
Having said this, Lin Shi himself felt a strange sensation rise in him. The two of them—one the wife of Long Dong, the other a man who’d once regarded Long Dong as a friend for life—now sat here at the breakfast table, discussing Long Dong’s life or death in an almost flat, matter-of-fact tone. He’s very likely still alive—as if being dead or being alive were both facts one could simply accept, and the only thing worth discussing was which possibility was more likely. But after the failure of the Great Revolution, such situations had truly been all too common.
Once an underground Party organization was destroyed by the enemy, the chain of single-line contact would be cut; if a superior was arrested or killed, whoever was in contact with him below would simply vanish too, with no document left to prove their identity or whereabouts. When a local organization was destroyed, some comrades martyred, some missing, whoever remained and still had a chance to reach the Party would transfer elsewhere to continue working—but often they had to change their names and identities as well.
In the most complicated cases, it often happened that a comrade believed to have died a martyr’s death turned out to still be alive, while one thought to be alive had in fact already died.
All sorts of rumors circulated constantly—some born of comradely feeling, always insisting the dead were still alive; others planted by the enemy’s stupidity or scheming, spreading news of uncertain truth either to claim credit or to set a trap.
“The year after the Guangzhou Uprising failed, around May, the organization transferred me to Guangzhou to assist Comrade Long Dong’s work. That year in Guangzhou, he and I talked a great deal. He showed me a photograph of the two of you. You had a wool cap covering your ears, a big scarf over your shoulders, wearing a pleated skirt, hands tucked in the skirt pockets. He was alive then, alive and well—” Lin Shi still found it strange himself, hearing how flatly he was speaking.
“If it hadn’t been for him in Guangzhou, the enemy might have caught me a dozen times over. I really couldn’t learn the local speech. Too dangerous—and eventually, because of that, the higher-ups had no choice but to transfer me out.”
Lin Shi remembered one day in August when Long Dong’s mood had been especially low—the two of them sitting under the arcade drinking congee, thunder and lightning flashing, and soon a downpour began. Long Dong had told him: there hadn’t been time to warn Ling Wen before the enemy stormed the secret office.
Ling Wen’s reaction came slowly—it was only when Lin Shi mentioned the photograph that she gradually grew agitated, nearly moved to tears.
Lin Shi noticed the change in Ling Wen’s mood; he’d only meant to say something unrelated to the operation, to help her relax a little.
But the time to leave had come. Ling Wen rose and asked Lin Shi: “Your wound—will walking be all right?”
“Comrade Lin Shi, you must be a pretty big shot, huh?” Cui Wentai braked, honked, hit the gas, squeezing past a jam of rickshaws at the intersection, and tilted his head back toward the back seat. “Five big yellow fish, my goodness. Must be a big job. I’ve lived half my life and never seen that much money.”
No one answered from the back seat.
Ling Wen sat with her head down, lost in thought; Lin Shi lifted a corner of the window curtain and looked out at the street.
“But this car of mine, it’s actually carried gold bars before too—though I never saw them, mind you.”
Cui Wentai laughed a little. “Last spring I picked up a fare on Xihuade Road—Ningbo people. An old master, two servants. I thought it was strange—the servant had nothing in his hands, the master himself was holding a bundle wrapped in a tablecloth close to his chest, said they were headed to the police station.
“Once they got in the car, something seemed off, so I just casually asked. Sure enough—they said they were going to report something. I asked, what kind of case? They said the servant had been cooking lunch and found seven gold bars at the bottom of the rice vat. Sitting at home, and gold bars drop into your rice vat from the sky—wasn’t that a good thing? I asked, so why report it? The servant said, the young master’s been missing for several days now. Oho, I thought, now this is getting interesting.
“You know why? Because at the time, all of Shanghai was talking about the Wang Jinzhi murder case. Ever heard of it? Wang Jinzhi, head steward on a China Merchants’ steamship, had worked the Yangtze river boats for thirty years, was extremely trustworthy—money houses and gold shops all entrusted gold bars to him to carry from Shanghai to Wuhan, and in decades he never once failed—you could give him any amount of gold and it would arrive safely in Wuhan without fail. But this time, something happened—he was murdered. When they found the body, he had only a few coins on him—not a single gold bar left.”
“Were the stolen gold bars the ones in the rice vat?” Lin Shi asked.
Cui Wentai nodded. “That’s what they thought—and so did I, honestly, I figured it must be that very batch too. So I asked, why would they think the gold in the rice vat had anything to do with Wang Jinzhi’s case? They said, because their young master had gone missing.
“Ah, I see, I thought, then it really would make sense—this family’s young master must not be a good sort, outsiders wouldn’t know, but the family would. Whether your own son is a decent person or not—the father knows.
“So the gold bars in the rice vat must indeed be connected to Wang Jinzhi’s case. This old master was rather timid—the moment he suspected as much, he had to rush straight to the police station to report it. Once they were that convinced, well, I figured it must be true too—and the police, of course, were convinced right away as well.”
“A few days later, I read the papers, and sure enough, it was reported. Guess what happened?” Cui Wentai paused for effect as the car cleared the intersection and turned onto Tianjin Road. “Guess what happened. The papers said, the moment the police got hold of the gold bars, they had people from the money houses and gold shops come look them over—the money houses mark their own bars, and sure enough, these were from the very batch that had been stolen. The police immediately said, the count doesn’t add up, you’re missing half. Since half the stolen goods turned up in your family’s rice vat, you’re responsible for handing over the other half too. You say you don’t know anything about it—well, maybe it was your son, then hand your son over; and if you can’t produce either the gold or the son, we’ll lock you up first. That old master cried out that it was unjust—he’d only meant to do a good deed, and instead found himself facing charges.”
The car pulled up in front of Chung Wai Trust Bank. As they entered the bank’s main door, Ling Wen said, “This Cui Wentai—why’s he so talkative today?”