Marsh Terrace. The alley ran deep; from the ground floors of the houses on both sides drifted the smell of cooking oil, and somewhere a child suddenly made a racket, then fell silent again a moment later.

Yi Junnian looked up at one household’s window. The curtains were drawn, the light on inside, casting the shadow of flowers on the windowsill. A vase of flowers was the safety signal. He turned toward the back of the alley and pushed open a door left ajar. This was the back door, leading into the kitchen; no one was there just now—the tenants on the ground floor had all finished cooking and gone into their rooms.

He went straight up to the second floor and knocked on the door. Ling Wen opened it.

Yi Junnian took off his coat and hung it on the teak coat rack by the door. On the table sat freshly made food: stir-fried bean sprouts with sliced pork, pig’s trotter and soybean soup, and braised turnips.

“Did the neighbors downstairs ask where you’d been lately?” Yi Junnian asked her. Ling Wen was the second landlady here; some years back, Long Dong had rented this alley house and, on an auspicious day, brought her here to live. The two of them were husband and wife—unlike those comrades who lived together only for work purposes, pretending to be married, they adapted to their surroundings more easily. Unlike comrades working in other systems, before the Nationalists revealed their true colors, Long Dong had already gone underground doing intelligence work for the Party. On the eve of the “April 12th” massacre, many comrades, swept up in the high tide of the national revolution, had grown too careless. Although Long Dong’s group had been fairly well concealed, because it hadn’t been entirely isolated from the Party’s public activities, it too was destroyed when the Nationalists carried out their massive “communist elimination.” But the enemy had never discovered this house.

“I told them I’d been staying at a relative’s for a few days,” Ling Wen told Yi Junnian over the meal. “I suspect they might know something. Little Bao downstairs said a stranger had come asking about the house, with Detective Yao from the constabulary accompanying him. Isn’t Detective Yao the one who brought the constables charging into the market that day?”

Anyone who’d read the novel Ling Wen had written, Winter, would think she and Long Dong were inseparable. No one would have guessed he’d leave just like that, without even seeing her one last time. The contact station was exposed, the agents burst quietly into the room—Ling Wen was there at the time, retrieving mail, and was arrested along with it. Fortunately, the coded letter had been destroyed in time. Ling Wen wasn’t on the arrest list; the agents didn’t know she was a member of the group, so after a few months in detention, they released her. By the time she got out, Long Dong was nowhere to be found—everything connected to him had almost entirely vanished.

“I’m afraid that one day you’ll suddenly disappear, like a drop entering the sea.”

“Then you only need to face the sea, and you’ll see me.”

This was a line of dialogue between the two lovers in the novel (she’d given her own name and Long Dong’s to the characters). One morning, in the novel, the character Wen tells the character Dong that she’d had a terrifying dream.

More than a year later, word came that Long Dong had been killed. Ling Wen couldn’t find the organization, and since this house had originally been rented under the two of them as a married couple, it hadn’t been exposed—according to Shanghai’s rental regulations, a landlord could not arbitrarily cancel a tenancy or reclaim the property without cause. The rent kept climbing month after month; she found that as long as she rented out part of the rooms, she could still afford to keep living here. Once Yi Junnian found her and had her resume work, she’d once mentioned wanting to give up the lease, but Yi Junnian disagreed—he said this house had never been used as a contact station, and even very few of their own comrades knew about it. Since the organization didn’t need to spend extra money on it, why not just keep living here? It might come in useful someday. In truth, in her heart she didn’t want to leave either—because of Long Dong.

“What did the people from the constabulary say?” Yi Junnian asked.

“If it were anything important, they’d tell me—I get along well with the neighbors here.”

“That’s because you don’t raise the rent.”

“Of course I can’t raise it—we can’t act like the exploiting class.”

“You, a second landlady who doesn’t act like other second landladies—that’s exactly what would make people suspicious.”

“Still can’t raise the rent though.”

Yi Junnian nodded, cursing affectionately: “That little rascal Little Bao, so polite to the neighbors.” He was talking about the tenant downstairs, Wu Sibao, who used to be a groom at the racecourse, until a foreign gentleman on the racecourse board took a liking to him and picked him to be his chauffeur. Little Bao had seized this opportunity and gotten quite well established around the racecourse district—people on the street outside called him “Marsh Terrace’s Little Bao.”

“They’re all like that—rabbits don’t eat the grass by their own burrow, as the saying goes.”

“I met with the visitor from the higher-ups this afternoon,” Yi Junnian said, ladling soup into his bowl.

“Isn’t that a bit risky?” They’d just been released; according to the usual principles of underground work, the Party organization should observe a quiet period before re-contacting these people.

“Maybe it’s because the mission is urgent—that’s probably why the meeting was called on such short notice in the first place. The key thing is, the comrade sent by the higher-ups to convey the mission never showed his face either.” Yi Junnian stirred his soup with a spoon a couple of times, then set the bowl down. “Lao Fang is dead too.”

Ling Wen felt deeply sorrowful. Beyond that, she also felt a quiet guilt. In the detention house, she had, in the end, made up her mind to write that coded letter. Reusing the secret mailbox after being arrested—that had been a very unwise thing to do. The moment the letter was handed to Miss Tao, she’d begun to regret it. She kept wondering whether she had made a grave mistake, felt that Lao Fang’s death might be connected to that letter.

“In secret work, you have to think things through beforehand—no use dwelling on it now.” Yi Junnian said this offhandedly, his mind seemingly on something else. He was often like this, and Ling Wen was used to it, didn’t find it strange. Both of them were people who could work things out clearly in their heads; she just couldn’t do it that way. If she wanted to think something through seriously, she always wanted to pick up a pen and write it down. People are different—even when thinking equally hard, Lao Yi always seemed absent-minded, so sometimes she felt that when Yi Junnian didn’t want to answer a question, he would deliberately look distracted.

Because of Yi Junnian, she’d been able to reconnect with the Party organization. Like Long Dong, Yi Junnian too commanded a secret intelligence network. Lao Fang often used to say, Lao Yi’s planted his antenna right in the enemy’s heart—with an Yi Junnian on our side, security work is half as worrying. The municipal Party bureau, the police department, the constabulary—Lao Yi could get information out of all of them. Often, in the middle of the night, Lao Yi would rush over to her place, hand her a cigarette or a wax pill, tell her someone was in danger, and ask her to get the intelligence out that very night. At times like that, she always felt proud of the work she and her group comrades were doing.

“What’s this?”

Yi Junnian, finished eating, sat on the sofa smoking. He picked up a small slip of paper from beside the tea tray and stared at it for a while. Ling Wen, a rag in hand, leaned over to look too.

“Just some random doodling.”

She had a habit of jotting things down on scraps of paper—fully-formed ideas she’d record in a small notebook, but scattered, fragmentary thoughts she’d write on little slips. A sheet of manuscript paper cut into a small stack, kept in her pocket. The slip had “insider” and “dice” written on it, along with some messily-drawn shapes no one could make out.

“You have to break this habit,” Yi Junnian said. “It’s dangerous.”

He struck a match and burned the slip in the ashtray.

“I think there really is an insider. Can’t we find a clue from within the enemy’s ranks?”

Yi Junnian took a deep drag on his cigarette and said slowly: “I’ll look into it. If my suspicion is correct, this insider must be extremely well-hidden—even within the enemy’s own ranks, hardly anyone would know.”

“Do you have a suspect in mind?”

“Don’t jump to suspect a comrade lightly,” Yi Junnian said, looking at her sternly. “We’ve had bitter lessons from carelessly branding comrades as insiders.”

“If we don’t root him out, the organization will suffer even greater damage.”

This remark struck at what was weighing on Yi Junnian’s mind. Judging from how the contact had gone today, the higher-ups must be suspicious too.

“Why do you think the enemy released us this time?” he wondered aloud, half to himself, asking Ling Wen without much apparent purpose. He hadn’t found Lao Fang, but he had gone looking for Wei Dafu. That day, after fleeing, Wei Dafu had blended into the crowd at the market, happened to run into an acquaintance, promptly gone up to chat with him as cover, and left the market building that way. Afterward, it seemed Wei Dafu had gone looking for Lao Fang.

“You don’t believe what Wei Dafu said?”

“Maybe, maybe—” Yi Junnian mused, “Do you think—that day at the market, with all that happening, people firing guns, people jumping out windows, people fleeing—claiming it was gambling, yet there was no money on the table—would the special agents believe our story? Even if the organization found connections and got people to intervene to rescue us, if the agents really believed the people in their hands were Communists, would they let us go?”

“Pretending to release us, but monitoring and tailing us?”

“Weren’t you the one suspecting our own ranks have been infiltrated by the enemy?” Yi Junnian looked at her.

“If you don’t believe what Wei Dafu said—” Ling Wen suddenly thought of something, “do you think he betrayed Lao Fang?”

The wind had picked up; the room felt a bit cold in the night air. Yi Junnian sat on the living room sofa; Ling Wen went into the next room to fetch the thermos and made him a cup of tea. As she handed him the cup, she noticed the scar of a burn on his wrist, and reached out to touch it gently. There was a question that had long been on her mind, one she’d never found the chance to ask—

“You mentioned to me that Lao Fang said the person sent by the higher-ups would produce a pair of dice.”

“The special agents seem to know about this,” Ling Wen said slowly, as if sorting through her thoughts. “That Captain You—when he interrogated little Dong—asked specifically about the dice, and he’d already produced a pair of dice himself when he burst in. Didn’t they ask you about it?”

“What do you want to know?” Yi Junnian looked at her seriously.

“When the agents burst in, I saw you holding the dice in your hand, putting them into your own pocket. I was confused for a moment—so the comrade sent by the higher-ups to convey the mission was you all along. Afterward, in the detention house, I kept worrying about you.”

“That’s the biggest problem. They know about the dice, which means they understand the Party organization’s secret arrangements—but in the end they let us go.”

Yi Junnian fell into deep thought. Ling Wen knew that at moments like this, she shouldn’t disturb him—Lao Yi had rich experience in intelligence work, was skilled at spotting the faintest traces, capturing threads from the slightest word or phrase, analyzing step by step until he found the truth.

At times like this, gazing at him, she would find herself feeling, in a daze, that he resembled Long Dong somewhat. Though thinking it over carefully, she felt the two of them weren’t really the same type of person after all. Long Dong was open-hearted and generous; the more urgent the situation, the more relaxed and unrestrained he became. Yi Junnian, though—she remembered once telling him—the moment he ran into an emergency, he’d grow irritable and unsettled; if someone said the wrong thing, interrupted him, he might even lose his temper. It had been on just such an occasion, the first time she’d mentioned Long Dong in front of him, that things had nearly ended badly between them—if there hadn’t been something urgent to attend to right then, he might have stormed off.

That evening she had sat on the sofa holding the photograph, thinking for a long time. That summer, Long Dong had brought back a small Leica camera. The two of them had gone running off to Hongkou Park together; he’d loaded the film and taken several photos of her. Long Dong said that having a few ordinary photos at the start of the roll made for good cover. He’d even gone and negotiated with a Jewish man wearing a felt cap, asking him to take a picture of the two of them. The Jewish man had been standing on the grass, playing and singing, holding an odd three-stringed instrument whose body wasn’t round but shaped like a triangle. The man took their photo, then specially played and sang the tune again for them. Long Dong later told her that instrument was called a ba-la-lai-ka, teaching her the word syllable by syllable, and said the song was called tum-ba-la-lai-ka, meaning to play that instrument. It was a Yiddish folk song, and out there on the open lawn of the park, it had sounded especially melancholy and moving—to this day she could still hum that refrain, “dong-ba-la-dong-ba-la-la.”

These were all things Lao Yi would never do. She was like that—she couldn’t help comparing the two of them from time to time. Sometimes the more she compared them, the more alike they seemed; other times, the more she compared, the less alike. In their work, the two of them were simply too alike. Ling Wen often felt that if the two of them had worked on the same line, they’d have made a seamless team. They both thought about things in a way that was different from everyone else—they’d skip over certain things and go straight to the conclusion. Walking along, they’d suddenly seem to remember something and turn back abruptly—if an agent were tailing them from behind, he’d be spotted. Whenever they met with her somewhere, they’d both leave abruptly when parting, as if a sentence hadn’t even finished before the person vanished like a dream. Even the way the two of them talked was alike—from conveying secret missions to everyday chitchat, there was never any need for transition, and even suddenly lowering their voices came just as naturally to both. Even, several times, Ling Wen had noticed that when arranging contact methods or fabricating cover stories, Yi Junnian could arrive at exactly the same idea Long Dong had years before.

“During interrogation, they asked me about it, so they used the electric shock treatment. Once they used it, I actually felt relieved—it meant they had no other way. Someone put the dice on the table, which means the comrade sent by the higher-ups is among us.”

Yi Junnian looked again at the photograph on the coffee table, wondering—if Long Dong had faced this situation, would he too have made such a snap decision? “When things got chaotic outside, I decided on the spot to take the dice. No one knows who this comrade is, I don’t know either—that’s for the best. I’ll hold onto the dice; if it turns out the enemy understands the situation, I can say I’m the one carrying the dice.

“I believe I can withstand the enemy’s interrogation. Besides, I truly don’t know what the mission actually is. This way, the Party organization’s most important secret stays safe. In the detention house, I didn’t tell them the truth, because I didn’t know whether ‘Lao Kai’ was among those of us arrested, nor did I know whether there was a planted agent among us. I considered every possibility—both could be in prison, both could have escaped, or one inside and one out. Either way, my only choice was to pretend I was the comrade sent by the higher-ups.”

“‘Lao Kai’?”

“The comrade sent by the higher-ups,” Yi Junnian hesitated a moment, “—his code name is ‘Lao Kai.'”

“But when the agents interrogated us, they only ever asked about Haohan,” Ling Wen blurted out.

“That means the enemy knows quite a bit.” Yi Junnian weighed this over and over. “You Tianxiao seems crafty, but really he’s foolish and arrogant, thinking he’s caught onto something. I think the most likely reason the enemy ultimately let us go is that they believe Comrade ‘Lao Kai’ escaped from the arrest scene, while the agent who’d been lying in wait within the Party organization was the one caught.”

Yi Junnian sank into thought again. Anyone could be the one, he thought. He shook his head and said to Ling Wen: “Thinking this way won’t get us anywhere. These comrades Lao Fang gathered—most of them, we don’t really know well. A person’s secrets lie buried deep within their history. The Party organization has been destroyed and rebuilt over and over; among the comrades still fighting on, almost none have worked together from the very beginning.

“In White Area work, especially secret underground work, for the sake of safety, the organizational departments never keep personal history files. If possible, I think we should suggest to the higher-ups that the past history of every comrade who attended this meeting be thoroughly investigated.”

Ling Wen watched him pick up the photograph from the coffee table and suddenly felt a twinge of discomfort—before this, Lao Yi had never once touched that group photo; every time, he’d acted as though he hadn’t seen it. She sometimes felt this was exactly the problem between her and Lao Yi—that Long Dong would forever stand between the two of them.

“You once said Comrade Long Dong evacuated Shanghai because the Party organization suffered serious damage, many comrades were arrested, quite a few killed. Why didn’t the organization have you evacuate together with him?”

“Our place here was never compromised—the enemy never knew about it. My work was internal liaison; I dealt with few people, and after marrying Long Dong, I mainly did internal duties.”

“Was it because of a traitor?”

“The whole system was completely destroyed—it’s very hard to trace exactly how.”

Night deepened. Ling Wen gazed at Long Dong’s photograph on the coffee table, thinking how cruel this struggle was—cruel enough, even, to change some people beyond recognition.