The fifteenth of the first month—the Lantern Festival.

The car drove west, all the way to the area near Xiaozha Town. Along a stretch of the old Puhui Creek channel, the water had been drained; hundreds of river workers could be seen along the way, dredging and excavating the channel. This project, begun the previous December, would upon completion connect the Puhui Creek and Caohejing waterways.

Ningshao Villa lay just south of Xiaozha Town; before the cemetery gate stood a wooden bridge, and beyond it, dense woodland. The car stopped before the bridge, and Ye Qinian got out and crossed alone. Along the paths through the grass, a scattered few visitors had come to sweep graves. The cemetery was divided into four sections—First, Second, Third, and Fourth. Ye Qinian crossed a stretch of lawn; behind the grass, ringed with holly, he came to the grave of Ye Tao and her mother.

Before Ye Tao’s grave lay a small pile of chestnuts, already pecked at by birds, scattered about. Ye Tao had loved eating chestnuts; Ye Qinian seemed to think of something as he stared at the chestnuts for a long while, then bent down and swept the debris off the gravestone into the grass.

Today was Ye Tao’s birthday—who else would still remember this date? He had brought her ashes back from Nanjing to Shanghai to rest beside her mother; no one else knew of it. As for Chen Qianli—what face did he have to come see Ye Tao? It was they who had killed her, he thought—perhaps it was her classmates too, the ones she’d shared snacks with, shared her views on boys with, and shared those misguided ideas that had led her astray.

Ye Qinian had no wish for his men to shoot Chen Qianli down on the spot. He wanted to capture him, to make his revenge long and thorough. They had failed to catch him at Menghua Street. Now he understood—Chen Qianli had received professional training; he had underestimated him. In his memory, Chen Qianli was still that impetuous young student from before.

So the day before, he had left Lai’an Li and gone to Little Peach Spring. It was for this reason that when word of the failure at Menghua Street reached the Zhengyuan Hotel, You Tianxiao had made a hasty decision. At the Maochang coal depot, they had failed again, and lost several operatives besides. You Tianxiao suspected Chen Qianli had bodyguards with him, but after examining the photographs the detective squad had taken at the scene, and visiting the morgue himself, he concluded that those clean, decisive killing blows had all been the work of one man alone.

Fortunately, You Tianxiao had at least managed to bring in Chen Qianyuan. Ye Qinian had him escort Chen Qianyuan and Dong Huiwen back to their residence, and dispatched every operative from the Shanghai station, along with the Longhua detective squad, to set a trap there for Chen Qianli—on the street, in the lanes, in the rooms, on the rooftops, men positioned everywhere this time. He ordered them: they could open fire, but must take a prisoner alive.

A gust of wind blew past; somewhere in the distance, someone wept softly, the sound almost like singing.

Ye Qinian suddenly sensed something behind him and spun around abruptly. A few paces away, Chen Qianli stood with both hands at his sides beneath his overcoat, watching him calmly.

Ningshao Villa was a small cemetery, enclosed on all sides by a wooden fence, with only a single path leading in through the gate.

“What have you done with my men?” Ye Qinian asked, glancing down the winding path toward the cemetery entrance.

Chen Qianli looked around. “The driver’s in the car. Someone’s watching him.”

“You still haven’t broken that habit of showing up uninvited.” That eager young man of years past seemed still to linger somewhere in him, as if time had not quite managed to reshape him entirely.

“You sent men looking for me several times. This time I came myself.”

Two grey-backed thrushes landed in the grass; newcomers to this feeding ground, uninterested in the chestnuts already pecked open by other birds, they went instead for an unbroken one.

“So you brought these chestnuts, did you? So you remembered she liked them.”

Chen Qianli stayed fixed on Ye Qinian, seeming not to have heard what he’d said at all.

“You followed Ye Tao all the way to Nanjing—and now you’ve followed me here, to her grave.”

Chen Qianli answered coolly: “It wasn’t hard to find you. The caretaker keeps a register. Every year, on the Lantern Festival, you come here and leave a little money.”

Ye Qinian gave a cold laugh. “I nearly thought you’d come specially to see Ye Tao. Are you planning to kill me in front of their graves?”

Chen Qianli’s voice was steady: “You don’t deserve to die in front of their graves.”

“This is my daughter!” Ye Qinian suddenly roared. “You used her, and then you killed her!”

Chen Qianli’s voice turned sharp: “It was you who killed Ye Tao. You killed your own daughter!”

A couple walking along the grass path nearby seemed to sense something and hesitated, stopping in their tracks, then turned and took another path instead.

Ye Qinian stared at Chen Qianli, his voice dropping low: “You deceived her, drew her into Zhanyuan to steal intelligence. Once she was discovered, you decided she had no more use to you. She had thrown in her lot with you, and you killed her. Shot from behind, left to die alone in that soldier tunnel.”

Chen Qianli felt it was time to shatter this stubborn, deluded old spymaster’s illusions once and for all. “Ye Tao died for her ideals. Going to Nanjing, using your connections to get into Zhanyuan—that was her own request to the party organization. And more importantly—contrary to what you believe—it was she who joined the Communist Party at the Women’s Normal University, and it was she who led me onto the path of revolution.”

Ye Qinian looked at Ye Tao’s headstone, his face expressionless. “You killed her, and then made her into your martyr. But my daughter is a martyr of the Nationalist Party. My daughter. I know this perfectly well!”

“You know it well? Let me tell you what you don’t know.” Chen Qianli glanced around, lowering his voice as well.

“Even after she was exposed, she knew you would never dare tell anyone, would never dare have her arrested openly. She was your daughter—if it became known that she was a Communist intelligence agent, you wouldn’t only lose face, your position at Zhanyuan would be shaken to its foundations, because the men above you would learn that the source of every one of those repeated leaks before operations had been inside your own household, Director Ye.”

“So I invited the wolf into my own home—” Ye Qinian said, consumed with regret.

Chen Qianli understood: the truth could tear apart the armor of self-deception he wore. “But she also had no way to leave Zhanyuan. All the intelligence that had leaked before had come from there; she couldn’t get out of Zhanyuan—you wouldn’t let the guardhouse let her leave. The moment she reached the gate, the guards would stop her and call you. She had no way to leave, didn’t dare leave. She thought that even if she managed to get out the door, you would quietly have someone follow her anyway.”

“I had my own daughter watched? That’s absurd.”

“Ye Tao understood exactly what kind of man her father was. If she’d rashly gone out to contact the party organization, she might have put other comrades at risk.”

“You think you can deceive the world with these fabrications?” Ye Qinian thought to himself—had a father’s instinct, at this critical moment, robbed him of a secret agent’s proper judgment?

“It was the plum rain season then. That year it rained especially hard, especially often, in Nanjing. Everyone wore raincoats, carried umbrellas.”

Chen Qianli seemed to see that afternoon again, seemed to see Ye Tao’s anxious expression. “She came up with an idea. She suspected you might be listening in on her phone calls, so she slipped quietly to the general affairs office—that office was always in contact with the outside, and the switchboard wouldn’t pay it any particular attention. On the phone, she and I worked it out together—she had me go buy two identical double-horse-brand raincoats, the rubberized silk kind, red. Two of them, exactly alike. And two umbrellas, also identical.”

“Are you explaining Zhanyuan’s internal workings to me?” Ye Qinian said, tilting his head back to gaze at the sky, his face showing open mockery, as if none of this held the slightest interest for him.

“The guardhouse called her and let me in. I didn’t go to the confidential office—I hid in the rockery cave instead, leaving the second raincoat and umbrella on the stone steps there. Two or three minutes later I came out of the rockery and left through the gate.”

Ye Qinian finally looked straight at him, his expression twisted with fury. “You really think, after all that, the guards at Zhanyuan would let you come and go as you pleased?”

“Of course it was you who told the guards to let me pass—because you wanted the agents to follow me from behind.”

Ye Qinian, of course, remembered exactly what he’d done back then; he had spent all this time trying to forget it, or trying to rewrite it into something he could bear to face.

“She came out of the confidential office, ran to the rockery, changed into the raincoat, pulled up the hood, took the umbrella—so no one would know she’d left. She went out through the north gate behind the confidential office, so the guards wouldn’t see me leaving Zhanyuan twice.” Every detail of it was still vivid before Chen Qianli’s eyes.

“I’d arranged to meet her on Mafu Street. I saw her from a distance, coming from Jiutiao Lane, and rushed toward her—but then the gunshot rang out. By the time I reached her, the agent lay on the ground, and she herself had been shot too. The bullet had struck her from behind. She said the agent had crouched down to check on her, meaning to finish her off—but when he saw her face, he froze for a moment, and that was when the small pistol in her pocket went off.”

Ye Qinian regretted, now, not having carried a gun himself that day.

“She’d lost consciousness. I carried her on my back and ran north as fast as I could—Danfeng Street, Hongwu Road, Ziwu Road—all the way to Shenze Gate.” Before Chen Qianli’s eyes, the scene from that time rose up again—they had climbed up onto the city wall in the rain, and there were steps leading down from the top of the wall; a few steps down brought you into the soldier tunnel inside the wall, a space large enough to hide several thousand troops.

“She was soaked through, blood and rainwater mixed together. When she woke, she told me she knew now why someone had come to kill her. She said it wasn’t really her they meant to kill—it was aimed at me. You didn’t want people to know your daughter was a Communist, and you thought that if you killed me, you’d cut the connection between Ye Tao and the underground party. You believed she had only joined the Communist Party because of me.”

For just an instant, Ye Qinian seemed like a candle burnt down to nothing, beginning to crumble and collapse in on itself—though he still stood there, his expression had gone utterly hollow.

Ye Tao had said she was glad to have taken that bullet for him; she couldn’t bear to imagine it striking him instead. Chen Qianli seemed to hear again the sound of his own heartbeat from that moment. He’d found a patch of dry ground and laid her down there. He wanted to go find a doctor, but Ye Tao stopped him—she had something to tell him.

She told him she was an intelligence agent of the Chinese Communist underground, sent to infiltrate Zhanyuan under orders. She said: though you must have guessed by now, I should still tell you formally. She had always wanted to bring him into the party; she’d already had him do a great deal of peripheral work, though each time she’d called him to Zhanyuan, it had been to carry out some task for the party—he simply hadn’t known it. That very day, she had originally planned to bring him along to the underground party’s secret office; she had requested permission from her superiors, and after this period of testing, the leadership had agreed that Chen Qianli could be admitted into the party.

That place was on Mafu Street—wasn’t that where he always went to buy her osmanthus-sugar taro soup? she said, smiling. They had arranged, once outside Zhanyuan, to meet up on Mafu Street. In her unconsciousness, she didn’t know that Chen Qianli, carrying her on his back, had run straight on, far past Mafu Street. She told him to go there at once, to report to the organization—she had found the answer: Ouyang Min was the traitor.

He didn’t want to leave her, but he had to go. He climbed down from the wall and ran south again with everything he had. But Mafu Street was surrounded by agents on every side. The whole of Zhanyuan had turned out; checkpoints had been set up on the streets, men in rubber raincoats everywhere.

He watched from the rain for a while, then had no choice but to turn back. He ran with everything he had once more, trying to find a doctor, but the streets had begun to fill with soldiers and police; police cars screamed past.

The Party Affairs Investigation Section announced to the public that the confidential office’s female staffer Ye Tao had been kidnapped by the Chinese Communists; a citywide search was underway, and before long his portrait had gone up on walls across the city.

He couldn’t get out of that district at all, and in the end climbed over a wall into someone’s courtyard, hiding behind a loquat tree in the corner against the wall. The tree hung heavy with loquats, some ripe past their peak, some pecked open by birds; in the pouring rain, he caught the thick, sweet-sour scent of them.

To this day he couldn’t forget that smell, couldn’t forget that overwhelming anguish and grief. He wanted to burst out and tell the agents that Ye Tao lay dying on the city wall, but he couldn’t—because Ye Tao had told him he must go to Mafu Street, must report that answer to the party organization.

It wasn’t until that night that he finally found a way into Mafu Street, and made contact with the underground party. The organization immediately sent men with him back to Shenze Gate, quietly—but that stretch of the city wall had already been sealed off. The agents had found Ye Tao.

Chen Qianli looked at the man before him, the father who had killed his own daughter. “I wanted to find a doctor, but the streets had been sealed off by the men you sent out. You sent men to shoot Ye Tao, and you also cut off the one thread of hope to save her.”

He let out a long breath, gazing up at the sky above the cemetery; the light had shifted without his noticing, thick clouds gathering, as if rain were coming. He fixed his eyes on Ye Tao’s headstone—on it were carved, simply, only her name and the dates of her birth and death, plain as her face had been in life. Calm, trustworthy, unafraid of death.

From the grave back to the riverbank, Ye Qinian had no idea how he’d made the walk; his face had gone utterly bloodless, his whole body as if the bones had been drawn out of it. A cold wind swept across the ground, and the fallen leaves in the cemetery whirled up into the air.

Seeing another person now in the car, Ye Qinian showed no surprise. Without looking back at Chen Qianli, he opened the rear door and got in. Sitting in the front passenger seat was Li Han, holding a gun on Secretary Ma.

Chen Qianli slipped his hands into the pockets of his overcoat, swept his eyes around once more, and got into the car as well.

Once inside, Ye Qinian seemed to recover a little of his composure; he straightened his back and said to Chen Qianli: “I know what you want. Make a call from Caohejing township, and I can have them release your people.”

From the front seat, Secretary Ma, panicking, turned back and shouted: “Director, tell them to release us first!”

Li Han jabbed the muzzle of his gun hard into Secretary Ma’s ribs.

After a moment’s standoff, Ye Qinian said: “Release your people, and then kill us? Chen Qianli isn’t that kind of man.”

“Chen Qianli is not Ye Qinian.”

The moment was fleeting; action was urgently needed. To finally complete the mission of moving Comrade Hao Han to safety, he held back the impulse to cut down this chief of secret agents on the spot.

Caohejing was a small town, its center a single straight street lined with bamboo-goods shops, rice shops, and firewood dealers.

Ye Qinian had originally meant to tell Chen Qianli to go to the town office to make the call, but Chen Qianli had already scouted the surrounding area beforehand, and found a tobacco-and-paper shop beside a tofu shop that had a public telephone inside.

On the phone, Ye Qinian told You Tianxiao to pull back every man he’d stationed at the Chen Qianyuan residence.