The Guisheng was a new ship of the Jardine Matheson Company, launched last year from a shipyard in Glasgow, England. This vessel could reach a speed of sixteen knots per hour, making the journey from Guangzhou to Shanghai in only sixty hours—two and a half days—the fastest on this route. Today was the thirteenth day of the first lunar month; the ship had already been at sea for more than fifty hours.

That day at noon, the first thing Lao Xiao said upon waking was: what day of the new year is it today?

It was the tenth. He let out a breath of relief, having thought he’d been unconscious for a very long time.

“What happened to Comrade Ling Wen?”

He was not yet fully alert, his eyes somewhat unfocused, seeming to struggle amid his labored breathing to recall something.

“She’s disappeared,” Chen Qianli said quietly. “That very day. You told her to come to the station the next day—what was it you wanted to tell her?”

Lao Xiao closed his eyes again, the corners of his mouth twisting in pain. After a moment, he let out a long sigh. “Lin Shi didn’t come. She didn’t come either. This matter is too important—even if I die, I have to get it done before I go.”

Chen Qianli knew they did not have much time; he needed to understand the whole situation quickly. He caught Mo Shaoqiu’s eye; Mo Shaoqiu rose and lifted the curtain, stepping outside.

In the shanty, Chen Qianli quietly spoke a passphrase—one he had used before when making contact with Lin Shi, designed personally by Comrade Shao Shan.

As he had expected, Lao Xiao recognized the passphrase. The instant he finished the last line, Lao Xiao’s eyes lit up, and with great difficulty he turned his head, looking at him deeply.

Lao Xiao said he had been entrusted by Comrade Shao Shan to personally deliver a verbal message to Lin Shi. The message contained an advertisement that had to be published in the newspaper on the fourteenth day of the first lunar month. Besides the morning paper, if anything went wrong, it also had to be published in that afternoon’s evening edition. He recited the advertisement’s wording word for word, twice over, and told Chen Qianli that the advertisement was in fact a contact signal, and that the other party was Comrade Hao Han. A phone number was to be appended to the advertisement; once Comrade Hao Han saw the advertisement, he would call that number, and whoever answered would inform Hao Han of the meeting place and time, then immediately assist his evacuation from Shanghai once contact was made.

At present, Comrade Hao Han had already swiftly gone underground, cutting off all work contacts. Since his last telegram exchange with Ruijin, he had gone into hiding, and no one could reach him until the pre-arranged contact signal appeared in the newspaper.

But the series of misfortunes Lao Xiao had encountered after arriving in Guangzhou had ultimately forced him to entrust this task to Yi Junnian.

In fact, it was at that very moment that Chen Qianli realized Yi Junnian might be compromised. Somewhere in the back of his mind lay an old matter, a puzzle he would give everything he had to solve, the answer to a question—a question for which Ye Tao had given her life.

Lao Xiao exerted every last bit of strength to remain lucid; he spoke in broken fragments, pausing between sentences to catch a few breaths before continuing, repeating himself several times on certain crucial details, afraid that in his dizziness he might get something wrong. Chen Qianli remained utterly silent throughout, neither urging him on nor asking questions. He knew that for Lao Xiao, in his current state, to get through all of this must have taken an enormous act of will.

Afterward, Chen Qianli and Liang Shichao had gone to Haoxian Street, made some inquiries on Weixin North Road, and then gone to Yuehua Theater. From the theater they had returned to the transportation station, where Mo Shaoqiu had spent the entire afternoon trying to secure the two fastest boat tickets available. Once they had the tickets, they boarded the ship that same night. The boat set sail at midnight.

The second-class double cabin was located above the deck, with bunk beds; Liang Shichao lay buried in sleep on the upper bunk. Though a native of Guangdong, he had grown up in the mountains of northern Guangdong and was no sailor; the night’s rough seas had left him dizzy, and he’d fallen fast asleep as soon as he climbed up.

Sending Liang Shichao and Ling Wen to Guangzhou had been Lin Shi’s idea, but at the time, Chen Qianli had had a faint sense that letting Yi Junnian and Ling Wen travel together might reveal the answer to a riddle that had lingered in his mind for years. Back then, Ye Tao had died in the pursuit of that very answer, shot down by the enemy. At the time he had not yet truly begun his work, had not yet fully understood communism, had not understood the complexity of secret work. Nor had he understood why delivering a single message could matter so much, could be worth giving one’s life for.

She had been twenty-three that year. He remembered it clearly—it was on her birthday, the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, that he had arrived in Nanjing. Nearly a year apart, and he had seen her again, along with her father, his own teacher, Ye Qinian.

In the days when Ye Qinian was still just a university professor, an anarchist, an Esperanto scholar, Chen Qianli, like so many young people of the time, had once believed that Teacher Ye held the answers to most of the questions that troubled them. What began as talk among students gradually grew into a kind of legend—about the house on Xinzha Road that belonged to Teacher Ye, about a secret organization said to exist within it. Those were the fiery, revolutionary 1920s, when every young person burned with ambition, eager to join some organization or other.

Only a select few students were fortunate enough to gain entry there. It was Teacher Ye’s home—the upper floor for living, the ground floor for receiving guests, with the study society and the magazine’s editorial office also located downstairs. Later, Chen Qianli mentioned to Teacher Ye the legends circulating in the school hallways; Ye Qinian only smiled and said that mystery, too, was a useful weapon. For a time, he went to Xinzha Road every day, sitting at the long table listening to everyone’s passionate debates, helping with odd jobs for the magazine, delivering letters and distributing documents here and there—he had even once transported explosives (though those anarchist bombs never actually went off anywhere).

It was a long time before he first met Ye Tao. It was a scorching afternoon, slogans plastered across the streets, strikes and shop closures everywhere. She sat in the ground-floor parlor; at first he mistook her for someone from the society, only later learning she was Teacher Ye’s daughter, who had never appeared before because she had been studying at Beijing Women’s Normal University. That summer, the school had been shut down by the Duan Qirui government and the students forcibly dispersed, so she had returned to Shanghai.

Ye Qinian had always been mistaken—it was not, from any angle, Chen Qianli who had led Ye Tao down the path of opposing her father. In fact, the truth was exactly the opposite. It was Ye Tao who had been Chen Qianli’s guide. It was Ye Tao who had told him that behind her father’s nihilism lurked an opportunist, a schemer.

One day, Ye Qinian had called him into his study and told him, solemnly, that from now on he should not go casually to Ye Tao’s room. It was precisely under these circumstances that a certain enchanting confusion finally dispersed—like a gust of wind blowing through, like sunlight melting frost off glass—and he and Ye Tao, the two of them, finally saw clearly into each other’s hearts.

Then, again to his surprise, Ye Tao went to Nanjing. At the time he had not understood why, someone who so disliked what her father was doing, would still allow herself to be drawn into it. It was only much later that he learned the place Ye Tao had gone was the Nationalist Party’s Bureau of Investigation, where, arranged by her father, she had become a confidential clerk in the classified documents office. Of course, at the time, he had not yet realized that it was precisely during those years that Ye Qinian had transformed into an entirely different person. Many people became different people in those years.

At the time he had asked himself over and over: was it all just a dream—Zhaofeng Park, the sunset, the spring lake water, the pair of swans on its surface? Had the words they’d spoken, hands clasped, hearts pounding, been nothing but a momentary impulse before parting? He had always known that between the two of them, Ye Tao was always the one to leave first. Ever since that first meeting at Teacher Ye’s house, she had always been leaving him.

In the upstairs chamber on Xinzha Road, he would sit by the window while she sat before the dressing table, and they would talk—he would see two versions of her, one before him, one in the mirror. He would be completely absorbed in their conversation, and then, mid-sentence, she would suddenly stand up and rush out of the house. He’d heard her mention The Captain’s Daughter and had gone to find the novel himself, only to finish reading it and discuss it with her, and she would say she no longer much cared for that story. They had gone together to attend classes; just as he was beginning to grasp the grammar, she would announce she was leaving the Esperanto class for a Russian tutoring class. While he remained absorbed in To the Youth, she had already begun secretly reading New Youth.

Downstairs on Xinzha Road, Ye Qinian and his friends would argue about Bakunin; he listened, enthralled (these people were so full of passion), while she sat with him in a corner of the room, listening for weeks, only to tell him that Lenin had been right. He always felt, deep down, that somewhere else, something more important must surely be waiting for her.

A year later, he too went to Nanjing. He had prepared himself to face Ye Qinian’s anger, or coldness, or perhaps something more insidious. But since Ye Tao had begun working by her father’s side, Ye Qinian seemed to feel he no longer needed to worry about her at all. Perhaps he thought that in a place full of secret agents and conspiracies, Ye Tao would quickly change her view of the world. Or perhaps, even without letting his guard down, Ye Qinian was simply too busy. During that period, he often flew to Guangzhou, apparently busy arranging some plan or another.

Chen Qianli rented a small room in Popo Alley. During the day he worked as a translator for a publishing house, waiting for Ye Tao to get off work. Sometimes she would call him (there was a public telephone at the tobacco shop at the mouth of the alley), asking him to come to where she worked (it wasn’t long before he learned it was the Nationalist Party’s Bureau of Investigation), and she would also send him on little errands—to a shop to buy pastries, or to the tailor’s to pick up some clothes.

Whenever Ye Qinian was away from Nanjing, Zhanyuan Garden was, for Ye Tao, a place of complete freedom. It was a large garden, said to have once been a princely residence, with a spirit wall at the entrance and a rockery inside. The confidential documents office was located at the very north end of the garden; past the rockery, one could see that row of single-story buildings. When he arrived, he would have the gatekeeper call ahead, and Ye Tao would come out to receive him; sometimes the gatekeeper would even see him in, and eventually the gatekeeper simply let him walk in on his own. In his memory, those few months passed with particular tranquility, and Ye Tao seemed especially happy during that time, as if she had found genuinely meaningful work.

He found that Ye Tao now felt closer to him than before. The two of them were three years apart, but before, Ye Tao had always felt more like an elder sister. A year had passed, and things seemed to have shifted somewhat—perhaps he had simply grown up a bit faster than her during this stage.

They went to Plum Blossom Hill, in the early days of spring, the twisted branches covered in blossoms, the hillside as if draped in pink mist. Their hearts were as one; the whole world seemed to recede into the distance, leaving only the plum trees, the blue sky, and that face before him. Full of joy, they recited Nekrasov together: they say the storm is coming, and I cannot help but smile.

But the world remained, and the environment Ye Tao found herself in was a dangerous one. Zhanyuan Garden was full of sinister-looking men, guard dogs, guns, untouchable documents, and warning signs forbidding entry. From behind the rockery on the north side of the garden, an occasional scream could be heard. Later, on Qixia Mountain, Ye Tao told him that place was the Bureau of Investigation, a world of conspiracy and killing that Ye Qinian had helped to build.

It was not until the final month that he learned what work she was actually doing, though he had guessed at some of it earlier. Looking back now, it seemed she had perhaps been hinting at it all along, quietly revealing the truth to him: what she was really doing was secret work of great significance to her. And in his heart, he understood clearly that what she was doing was very likely working to undermine her father’s efforts. But before she let him know the truth, she had already pointed him toward the direction he should take, helping him understand the kind of cause a person should devote themselves to, in order for life to hold real meaning.

She had never truly left him, even after going to Nanjing—she wrote him letters every few days, letters that continued the exchange of ideas they had begun earlier. He understood now that writing those letters had involved a certain amount of risk on her part—fortunately, working in Zhanyuan Garden, she had ways of keeping the letters from falling into the hands of postal censors. She also had books and magazines sent to him through others—The Communist Manifesto, Letters from Afar, The Bolshevik, and the Nekrasov poetry collection she was fond of.

The day before Dragon Boat Festival, Ye Tao called the tobacco shop in Popo Alley. In those days he rarely saw Ye Tao; she always seemed busy, and even when they did meet, she was very quiet, and if he asked too much, she would suddenly grow angry. On the phone, Ye Tao told him to come to Zhanyuan Garden, but to stop first at the Chengnan Snack Shop by the Qinhuai River and buy her a package of Minnan tangerine cake. Ye Tao had always loved snacks; back in Shanghai he had often run such errands for her, and though after arriving in Nanjing many of her old habits had faded away, her love of snacks remained unchanged. Besides the tangerine cake and the crisp candy from this particular shop, she also loved the sweet osmanthus taro soup sold by a peddler who was always calling out for business around the entrance to Zhanyuan Garden.

He bought the tangerine cake but was stopped at the entrance to Zhanyuan Garden. Zhanyuan looked, on the surface, like an ordinary old residence—the gate on Daoshu Street had peeling paint, but the gatehouse always had one or two burly men in Sun Yat-sen suits sitting inside. Over the past few months, the gatekeepers at both the north and south gates, shift after shift, had all come to recognize him; seeing him arrive, they would immediately call the confidential documents office to find Clerk Ye. Ye Tao told the gatekeeper that today she could not leave the secured area, and had them note it down and let Chen Qianli come in on his own. Behind the gate was a courtyard with a spirit wall; past the wall was a pond with lotus flowers and fish swimming among them, with a stone-pillared walkway raised along the water’s edge, and behind the walkway, a rockery with a cave in it—crawling through the cave and climbing up, one could sit in the small pavilion atop the rockery and gaze out over the Qinhuai River in the distance.

Chen Qianli had come often enough by now to know that behind the rockery at the north end of the garden lay the so-called secured zone, where every step might be watched, where people and objects could not come and go freely. But he was “Clerk Ye’s” boyfriend—the boyfriend of Director Ye’s eldest daughter—and most people, even seeing him, pretended not to notice. Chen Qianli found Ye Tao in that row of single-story buildings that housed the confidential documents office. She ate a piece of tangerine cake and said, why is this tangerine cake so dry today? How long has it been sitting here? She tossed it aside angrily and ignored him for a long while, the two other women in the confidential documents office smiling at him sympathetically. After a while, Ye Tao called to him again: “Go buy me a bowl of sweet osmanthus taro soup at the gate.”

When he’d first come in, Chen Qianli hadn’t noticed any peddler calling out wares at the entrance to Zhanyuan Garden. But he said nothing—every time Ye Tao sent him to buy sweet osmanthus taro soup at the gate, that peddler would always turn out to be there.

“If you don’t see him, run ahead to Mafu Street—he’s usually around those spots.”

He came out carrying the thermos, and the gatekeeper smiled at him. Once outside Zhanyuan, sure enough, he saw the peddler’s stand there. The peddler lifted the lid and set it aside, ladled a few scoops of the bright red, fragrant taro paste from the large pot, poured it into the thermos, sprinkled in a bit of osmanthus flower, then wiped the lid with a cloth, put it back on, and collected his payment. Chen Qianli brought the taro soup into the confidential documents office; Ye Tao took a sip, and only then did a satisfied smile appear on her face.

Several days later he learned that beneath the lid of the thermos there had been a note containing urgent intelligence. Without even realizing it, he had delivered the intelligence out of the compound. Ye Qinian had broken up a Communist underground organization in Guangzhou and arrested Ouyang Min, the head of the Guangdong underground party. Because the intelligence had been sent out in time, all the higher-level party organizations connected to Ouyang Min had managed to evacuate.

It was several days later, when he learned of this, that Ye Tao had already been gravely wounded. She told Chen Qianli she was a member of the Communist Party—she had never told him before because she had been sent by the party organization to work undercover in the Bureau of Investigation and had to keep it secret, but now she could tell him.

She said she had always intended to bring him into the Party, but she no longer had the time. She hoped that he would become a firm and steadfast Communist fighter in the future. She told him that because she had gotten word out in time about Ouyang Min’s arrest, the organization had swiftly arranged for those on the arrest list to evacuate their posts ahead of the agents. Ye Qinian, as a result, suspected there was a leak somewhere within the Bureau of Investigation.

She should have lain low for a period of time, but she had had no choice but to open Ye Qinian’s safe once again. Because her superiors had asked her a question: had Ouyang Min turned traitor? So she had to find the answer. Ye Tao had once dreamed with him of the future—in just a few more days, they were to leave Zhanyuan Garden together, leave Nanjing. She would lead him to a place filled with light and hope.

Ye Tao found the answer, but she was killed while delivering the message. Before she died, she had him carry a single sentence back to the party organization: Ouyang Min had betrayed them. But precisely because she had been discovered by the enemy while delivering that intelligence, there existed another possibility: that the enemy had deliberately misled her with false information. Later, news came from Guangzhou that Ouyang Min himself had died—the enemy had executed him by firing squad. On the day of his execution, all his fellow inmates had watched him being led out of his cell. Afterward, the organization had sent people to investigate, even risking a visit to the Public Security Bureau to make inquiries, but they had come away with nothing.

He had never believed there was anything wrong with the intelligence she had delivered—Ye Tao had given her life to obtain it. For three years now, this question had lingered in his mind; he often turned the problem around and asked himself: if Ouyang Min really had turned traitor, why would Ye Qinian have had him killed? Killing him might simply have been to silence him, to cover up some conspiracy.

So what kind of conspiracy would have been worth it, in Ye Qinian’s eyes, to kill a traitor like Ouyang Min? A traitor like Ouyang Min should have been valuable in Ye Qinian’s eyes. He had been the head of the Communist underground organization, with extensive working connections within the organization, knowing many people, privy to many secrets. There would have been much he might not have thought to reveal in the first few rounds of interrogation—though when he first turned, he would surely have been eager to tell the enemy everything he knew, there would always be things he’d overlooked. Even after he’d been squeezed dry like a tube of toothpaste, reduced to an empty wrapper, they could still have had him write shameless statements to be published in the papers. Special Services Headquarters even had a department specifically devoted to what they called “psychological warfare,” fabricating and spreading rumors everywhere. So why the rush to kill him?

Now he knew.