A guest entered Tiannan Teahouse. Few people knew his name; only a small number knew his surname was Xiao. He and Lin Shi both worked for the Central Transportation Bureau, an extremely secretive unit—even within the Chinese Communist Party itself, very few people knew such an organization existed. When it occasionally had to appear in internal party documents, it used cover names like the “Rural Work Committee” to conceal itself. As a veteran of confidential communications work, he and Lin Shi now both served as inspectors dispatched by the Transportation Bureau to various locations. Lao Xiao was sharp-witted, with extremely quick reactions, and he was also an excellent marksman. He was stationed in Ruijin, ready at any time to accept temporary assignments.
He had completed many difficult tasks, and this time he had run into another problem. Lin Shi had not appeared in Guangzhou as previously arranged. The top-secret verbal message he was to deliver concerned the safety of a Central Committee leading comrade. It had now been eleven days since Comrade Hao Han last made radio contact with Ruijin. The Central Committee was carrying out a planned evacuation from Shanghai, but Comrade Hao Han had run into an unexpected situation—someone had betrayed the organization, a secret agency had been uncovered by the enemy, and several internal and external transportation personnel had been arrested.
Before his emergency transfer, Comrade Hao Han had sent a telegram to Ruijin explaining the situation. The Provisional Central Committee, which had just relocated to Ruijin, decided that Comrade Hao Han must immediately go underground, cut off all work contacts, and wait for the contact signal. That signal would be published in Shen Bao on the fourteenth day of the first lunar month—an advertisement about purchasing old paintings and calligraphy. If anything went wrong, the same advertisement would also be published that afternoon in the Chinese edition of the Evening News, the sole backup contact method.
Such a confidential message, even under normal radio conditions, would not be secure enough. Radios could be monitored, codes could be broken, and coded telegrams passed through layer after layer of couriers could easily leak. Moreover, not long ago, a secret radio station belonging to the Southern Bureau, located in Kowloon, had been compromised. The British police had been cunning, attempting to use that radio station to continue communicating with the Shanghai underground party organization—fortunately, this was discovered in time. That was why Comrade Shao Shan had sought him out, asking him to personally deliver the verbal message to Lin Shi.
He considered the matter carefully and abandoned the idea of using the radio to request instructions from Ruijin. Even going through Mo Shaoqiu to ask the Guangzhou underground party organization to request that the Southern Bureau’s secret radio send a message would take a long time. And it would be just as unsafe. He made his decision: since Lin Shi had not come, he would go to Shanghai himself. He found a small cargo ship departing that very night that could take on a few extra passengers, with several berths still available.
At noon he had gone to the Xingchang Medicine Shop, where Mo Shaoqiu told him the two comrades from Shanghai had not arrived. Past the appointed time, they still had not shown up. He could not keep waiting at the transportation station, so he told Mo Shaoqiu that when they arrived, they should be sent to meet him at Tiannan Teahouse.
The second-floor balcony faced south, overlooking Jianglan Street. Sitting in this spot, one could see everything happening on the street below. To the right, across Yang Lane, was Shibafu Street; though it connected to Jianglan Street, Shibafu ran slightly southeast, and where the three streets met they formed an open space, neither too large nor too small—effectively a small plaza for the surrounding neighborhood. There were sugar-figure makers, olive sellers, comic-book renters, street performers, fortune-tellers who read characters and faces—every kind of person was there, with rickshaws weaving through the gaps in the crowd.
Red lanterns hung in the teahouse; the railings and pillars were wrapped in brass, and the floor was laid with flowered tiles. The tea tables had carved lacquer surfaces, on which sat teapots with two side dishes; some patrons had even gone next door to buy Shuangying Restaurant’s Shuangying chicken. The tea-sipping patrons all sat with their chairs turned sideways, facing toward the stage.
On the north side of the second floor was a small stage, where a female actor playing a young male role was singing about her surname Miao, her courtesy name Lianxian. Lao Xiao had deliberately chosen a seat on the second floor—crowded, chaotic, an easy place to blend in—since the third and fourth floors had few customers at this hour.
Why hadn’t they come? He felt a stirring of unease, watching Jianglan Street, while onstage the song had reached the part about fleeing the Qin, men and women entering the Peach Blossom Spring…
He noticed something off about the arcade across the street. Two or three idle-looking men stood there talking, one of them occasionally glancing up toward the teahouse. Their shoulders were oddly tilted, as if their right shoulders suffered from rheumatism. He knew that was because, beneath their clothes, pistols hung under their right armpits.
Lao Xiao rose without changing his expression, bending slightly as if about to add water to the teapot. He nudged his chair aside gently with his heel, quickly left the table, and headed for the stairs. He did not go down.
He intended to go up to the third floor. Before entering the teahouse he had already noticed that the third-floor west window was usually open; below the window was the rooftop of the neighboring building—the Guang’an Pharmacy. Following the pharmacy’s tiled roof to the north end, there was a row of windows in the gable wall, behind which were storerooms—few people would likely ever go in there. He could climb down from the eaves and windowsill without anyone noticing.
The staircase was wooden, and the stairwell was narrow and deep. From below came the sound of heavy footsteps. Standing by the railing, one could see movement in the stairwell—someone on the third floor was leaning over to look down, clearly one of the same group as the loiterers on the street; he recognized the type at a glance. There was no going up to the third floor now. He would have to force his way out.
Beside the stairwell railing stood two large flowerpots, planted with small peach trees, their branches lush and their blossoms in full bloom. Standing on the stairs, one could reach out and slip a small cloth-wrapped bundle into the gap of a flowerpot, so long as one leaned slightly to the right while climbing—no one would notice the movement. He had done exactly that on his way up. The bundle held a pistol, a Browning, with an image of a pistol engraved on the left side of the barrel. He was fond of this gun; people usually called it the “Pistol Brand” pistol, though he often joked that it should really be called the “Handgun Brand” handgun.
He carried the bundle under his arm as he went downstairs, keeping close to the left side of the staircase, his pace unhurried, a faintly smug look on his face, as if he had just shared a joke with a waiter. He let his gaze fall on a spray of peach blossoms poking through the railing, playing the part of an absent-minded customer.
At the bottom of the stairs stood two men, craning their necks up the stairwell, gesturing toward the third floor. They did not seem to be in a hurry—they likely planned to search floor by floor starting from the ground level. These two were only there to control the staircase. One of them was heading up; as he brushed past Lao Xiao, Lao Xiao muttered under his breath, “Full house upstairs, packed shoulder to shoulder.”
He reached the ground floor. A few more steps and he would be at the entrance, but he still did not quicken his pace. A waitress approached carrying a box of pastries—Tiannan Teahouse was a proper teahouse, its waitstaff simply waitstaff, not the kind of “hostesses” found in some Guangzhou teahouses. She passed by. A few more customers arrived at the teahouse entrance. He judged it was now safe to move a bit faster, and just then—
The man on the stairs suddenly shouted, “That’s him!”
Lao Xiao broke into a run. As he ran, he pressed the cloth bundle against his chest with his left hand while his right hand drew the pistol out from inside, tucking it into his lapel, and tossed the cloth wrapping behind him.
The men in the teahouse all rushed out in pursuit, and someone fired a shot into the air. At the sound of gunfire, the people on the street scattered in all directions; craftsmen and peddlers abandoned their stalls and fled beneath the arcades. Those plainclothes men carrying pistols were mostly agents of the Special Investigation Squad—a unit under the Guangzhou Public Security Bureau that Chen Jitang used specifically to hunt down the Communist underground. How had they discovered him? Could the Xingchang Medicine Shop have been exposed?
Lao Xiao ran to the street corner, turned into Yang Lane heading north—north of there was all the small streets and alleys of Xiguan, a maze leading in every direction. He squeezed between two rickshaws and fired two shots into the air. This threw the street into even greater chaos, the crowd scattering in every direction. He blended into the crowd, ducked into a small alley, ran to its eastern end, turned right a few steps, and found another straight alley leading east. This alley, it turned out, was very long, running east with several rightward turns along the way.
At one of these turns, agents blocked his path. Two agents, one in front and one behind, had hidden in doorways, revealing themselves only after he had passed the first one, so that he was now trapped front and back. Lao Xiao stood sideways, glancing first ahead, then behind. Two guns were aimed at him. The alley was narrow; he had no room to maneuver.
Lao Xiao gripped his pistol, tucked beneath his right lapel, but he could only strike down one man with a single shot. He turned sideways, looking at the agents before and behind him, calculating the angle of fire and the time it would take to swing the muzzle from left to right after the first shot—he judged it impossible to take down both at once.
The agent standing to the east noticed something was off about him. “Show your hands. Slowly.”
They aimed their guns at Lao Xiao, watching his right hand closely; the slightest movement and they would fire.
Just then, the sound of a bicycle bell came from the west end of the alley. The ringing was urgent, but the bicycle moved slowly, taking a long while before it finally turned the corner into the crooked lane. Lao Xiao watched the figure on the bicycle; the two agents also could not help but glance in that direction.
Lao Xiao recognized the cyclist. The bicycle drew gradually closer to them. The rider did not look toward Lao Xiao, but smiled and said to one of the agents, “Caught him?”
Before the words had even finished, a shot rang out. The cyclist was Yi Junnian. He shot and killed one agent, and when he turned to look, he saw that both Lao Xiao and the other agent had been shot and had fallen. The two of them had fired at each other almost simultaneously and had both taken hits, both seriously wounded, yet both still alive, struggling on the ground with their guns raised.
Yi Junnian rode up to the agent and fired another shot, then watched him until the agent breathed his last, the anger and confusion in his eyes gradually fading away.
The bullet had struck Lao Xiao in the abdomen. Yi Junnian carried him on his back out of the straight alley, then north, and at the intersection of Shibafu and Xiajiufu, he stopped a rickshaw, had the puller take them to a dock at West Moat Canal, and after getting off, carried Lao Xiao onto a small boat. Lao Xiao had managed to point the way while still supporting himself, but once aboard, the two of them ducked under the canopy, and he let out a breath of relief before finally passing out.
This was a small Tanka fishing boat. The boatwoman rowed with a scull, guiding the small craft along the canal. After some unknown length of time, they moored beside a row of shanties by the water. A man came out of the shanties; seeing that Lao Xiao had not woken, he examined the wound and, realizing there was no way to move him at this point, told Yi Junnian he would go find a doctor, then left at once.
Yi Junnian knew perfectly well that this was a secret liaison point of the Guangzhou underground party, but he was not particularly concerned about it. All he cared about were the few sentences locked in this man Lao Xiao’s memory. He spent the whole afternoon huddled in the boat shed, watching over the unconscious Lao Xiao.
Just the night before, on impulse, he had killed Ling Wen in that house on the back street of Tianguan Alley. If it had only been a matter of Ling Wen discovering something about his past, he might not necessarily have acted so immediately.
Before that, he had even considered that, given time, Ling Wen might gradually forget about Long Dong, and that by then he might well be able to win her over. Failing that, he could send her to the Nanjing Reflection Institute to be locked up for a while. The Special Services Headquarters had certain Communist defectors serving there as instructors, teaching classes, leading discussions, and holding debates for others who were not yet willing to change their allegiance—some people had gradually changed their minds there, and he had hoped Ling Wen would eventually do the same.
But he had had no choice but to act as he did. Otherwise, he would have had no chance to get Lao Xiao to tell him the secret. He could sense by instinct that there was a goldmine buried beneath it—if he could unearth that vein, it might deal a devastating blow to the Communist underground organization. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it would be his greatest success since he had uncovered the Long Dong intelligence network years ago. That earlier success had made him the ace agent of the Special Services Headquarters, earning him the code name “Xi Shi.”
He truly had not anticipated that Ling Wen would remember that photograph. When he had shown her the photo, he had not foreseen that she would one day actually have the chance to visit that house. He could no longer even recall why he had originally shown her that photograph, or why he had told her that was the place where he had secretly joined the Party.
The photograph had been taken after he had sworn the oath. He really had sworn the oath to join the Communist Party there, with Long Dong as his sponsor. But by the time the photograph was taken, he had already killed Long Dong—the photo was taken after the murder. He had accomplished a great feat, though he had not anticipated that a few days later Ye Qinian would have him infiltrate the Shanghai underground party under the identity of Yi Junnian.
He never doubted Teacher Ye’s plans. He was Teacher Ye’s true personal disciple, unlike those who came out of You Tianxiao’s training classes, forever calling him “teacher” this and “teacher” that—he found it faintly ridiculous. As far back as the thirteenth year of the Republic, when the Nationalists and Communists had only just begun cooperating, when the Northern Expedition manifesto had only just been published a few days earlier, when Feng Yuxiang had not yet imprisoned Cao Kun, when Sun Yat-sen had not even dreamed of heading north—Teacher Ye had already told him that war between the Nationalists and Communists was inevitable.
At that time, Teacher Ye was merely a moderately well-known university professor; everyone believed he was an anarchist, an Esperanto scholar. No one guessed that history itself was what filled Teacher Ye’s mind.
Teacher Ye had told him there was one profession that could always keep a man standing at the commanding heights of history. Teacher Ye liked to arrange futures for his students. He said that the coming struggle between the two parties would be extraordinarily brutal, and that when that time came, the Nationalist Party would need a special secret organization, one that commanded a secret force.
The Nationalist Party? It was the first time he realized that Teacher Ye’s anarchist stance was quietly shifting—books by Dai Jitao had begun appearing on Teacher Ye’s desk. Through some means, he soon became acquainted with that author, attending secret gatherings organized by Dai Jitao within the Nationalist Party, where those present unanimously agreed that the Communists must be exterminated root and branch, that there could be no tolerance that would allow the problem to fester. But Teacher Ye had little interest in empty theorizing, nor did he believe that a few propaganda articles could turn the tide—he believed the Nationalist Party needed to establish a secret service organization.
In the past, as an anarchist, Teacher Ye had also been a man of action. He had traveled to many countries, studying the assassination activities of anarchists as well as the secret police organizations of various governments and colonies. He had come to a conclusion: the future of the world belonged to secret agents.
So Teacher Ye sent him to Guangzhou—he was, after all, a native of Guangdong. Once there, he first tested into a shipping company, then joined the Communist Party’s labor movement training class. Because of his enthusiastic performance, he was drawn into the Workers’ Picket Corps. After the general strike, under Teacher Ye’s arrangement, he successfully tested into the Public Security Bureau, working for a few months at the Hexi substation before being quickly transferred into the Special Investigation Squad. In the summer of the fourteenth year of the Republic, someone assassinated Liao Zhongkai on the streets of Guangzhou—he had always suspected this might have had some connection to Teacher Ye.
At the same time, he still wore his short cotton jacket, sitting in the back corner of the labor union training class, waiting to be discovered. Everything unfolded exactly as Teacher Ye had anticipated, as if following a chess manual move by move. The person who came to find him did not go through his old comrades in the Workers’ Picket Corps, but instead found him at a fried rice noodle shop on Weixin North Road; they became friends and often met for tea. Following Teacher Ye’s method, he would only occasionally slip pieces of intelligence into casual conversation, mixing together the Special Investigation Squad’s routine reports, gossip picked up from the officers’ social club, and rumors from the street, embellishing them as he told them. The Communist underground’s vetting of him took a considerable amount of time—he waited two years before finally meeting Long Dong.
The scull churned the water; amid the rippling waves, a fairly large wooden boat slowly passed by, laden with a full cargo of firewood. Yi Junnian gazed at the firewood and roughly guessed his location. But he had no interest in this sort of scattered underground contact point. He was only interested in the secret held in the mind of the man lying unconscious before him.
The night before, he had left Haoxian Street and gone at once to see the head of the Special Services Headquarters’ Guangzhou station. Before his arrival, Ye Qinian had already telegraphed orders for the station chief to cooperate with his operation. As soon as he arrived, he had someone send a telegram to Director Ye; once approval was granted, he had the Guangzhou station chief mobilize men from the Public Security Bureau’s Investigation Squad. The station chief was only a deputy captain within the Investigation Squad—the captain was one of Chen Jitang’s men, and that “King of the South” was extremely wary of Nanjing’s influence seeping into Guangzhou, so the station chief had his difficulties. Arresting Communists posed no problem at all; staging a fake arrest of Communists was another matter entirely.
“You’ll need to find a few trusted men, have them mixed in among the operatives, and guide everyone through the performance.”
Yi Junnian knew that at the level of regional station chiefs under headquarters, though they had no authority to know about “Xi Shi,” they had all heard something of the name: Director Ye’s treasure, headquarters’ greatest asset. He did not want to send back and forth telegrams over such a small matter, seeking Teacher Ye’s approval. He quietly told the station chief that he was “Xi Shi” (this must absolutely not leak out); if the station chief did as he asked, he himself would take responsibility should anything go wrong; if the station chief did not do as asked and something went wrong, then the station chief himself would bear the responsibility. The station chief reluctantly agreed.
When the moment came, the station chief grew unwilling again. Because Yi Junnian had said he might need to kill one or two Investigation Squad officers in order to win the enemy’s trust.
The station chief thought for a long while before saying, “If word gets out that Special Services Headquarters slaughtered its own men, even Director Ye wouldn’t be able to bear that accusation!”
This was a threat. He said nothing, only looked at the man.
“I had originally planned to send men without my captain knowing. If we not only fail to catch any Communists but also lose two of our own men, that responsibility would be hard to carry. The situation in Guangzhou is different from elsewhere—everyone in the Public Security Bureau, from the director on down, belongs to Chen Jitang. There’s already been talk within the bureau, whispers that I have connections to Special Services Headquarters. If something like this happens again, they’re ruthless people—I can’t guess how the King of the South might deal with me.”
“Then let your own trusted men serve as the wrongfully dead.”
The station chief thought about it for a long while, seeming genuinely unable to bring himself to do it. Yi Junnian, however, thought little of the objection—though this was also a considerable risk for himself: if a single shot failed to kill, and they returned fire, the “Xi Shi” identity he had gained in Guangzhou would be exposed right there in Guangzhou too.
The doctor arrived—a Western-trained physician. The underground party really was formidable, Yi Junnian thought to himself; they had a complete network of people everywhere. The doctor cleaned the wound, extracted the bullet, and gave Lao Xiao an IV. The doctor said the injury was serious; he could not guarantee the patient would wake up—it would all depend on the man himself. In other words, it was in the hands of fate. By this point, Yi Junnian genuinely hoped he would wake up.