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night?”
    “Fine. We were together, weren’t we?”
    “No, I mean what happened after we left—between you and Wang?”
    “Nothing. We danced a few more dances, and then she left.”
    “What a shame, old pal,” Lu said. “You’re a chief inspector for nothing. You cannot detect even the most obvious signal.”
    “What signal?”
    “When we left, she agreed to stay on—alone with you. She really meant for the night. An absolutely unmistakable signal. She’s crazy about you.”
    “Well, I’m not so sure,” Chen said. “Let’s talk about something else. How are things with you.”
    “Yes, Ruru wants me to thank you again. You’re our lucky star. Everything is in good shape. All the documents are signed. I’ve already moved in. Our own restaurant. I just need to change its sign. A big neon sign in both Chinese and English.”
    “Hold on—Chinese and Russian, right?”
    “Who speaks Russian nowadays? But in addition to our food, we will have something else genuinely Russian, I tell you, and you can eat them, too.” Lu chuckled mysteriously. “With your generous loan, we’ll celebrate the grand opening next Monday. A booming success.”
    “You’re so sure about it.”
    “Well, I have a trump card. Everybody will be amazed.”
    “What is it?”
    “Come and see for yourself. And eat to your heart’s content.”
    “Sure. I won’t miss your Russian cabbage soup for anything, Overseas Chinese.”
    “So you’re a gourmet too. See you.”
    Other than that, however, they did not have too much in common, Chief Inspector Chen reflected with a smile, putting down the phone. It was in their high-school years that Lu had gotten his nickname. Not just because Lu wore a Western-style jacket during the Cultural Revolution. More because Lu’s father had owned a fur store before 1949, and was thus a capitalist. That had made Lu a “black kid.” In the late sixties, “Overseas Chinese” was by no means a positive term, for it could be used to depict somebody as politically unreliable, connected with the Western world, or associated with an extravagant bourgeois life style. But Lu took an obstinate pride in cultivating his “decadent” image—brewing coffee, baking apple pie, tossing fruit salad, and of course, wearing a Western-style suit at the dinner table. Lu befriended Chen, whose father was a “bourgeois professor,” another “black kid.” Birds of a feather, comforting each other. Lu made a habit of treating Chen whenever he made a successful cooking experiment at home. After graduating from high school, as an educated youth Lu had been sent to the countryside and spent ten years being reformed by the poor and lower-middle-class peasants. He only returned to Shanghai in the early eighties. When Chen, too, moved back from Beijing, they met with the realization that they were different, and yet all those years they had stayed friends, and they came to appreciate each other’s differences while sharing their common delight in gourmet food.
Twenty years has passed like a dream.
It is a wonder that we are still here, together.
    Two lines from Chen Yuyi, a Song dynasty poet, came to Chief Inspector Chen, but he was not sure whether he had omitted one or two words.

Chapter 4
    A fter a nongourmet lunch in the bureau canteen, Chen went out to buy a collection of poems by Chen Yuyi.
    Several new privately run bookstores had just appeared on Fuzhou Road, fairly close to the bureau. Small stores, but with excellent service. Around the corner of Shandong Road, Chen saw a tall apartment building, seemingly the first finished in a series of the new developments. On the other side of the street there was still a rambling cluster of low houses, remnants of the early twenties, showing no signs of change to come in the near future. It was there, in the mixture of the old and the new, that he stepped into a family bookstore. The shop was tiny but impressively stacked with old and new books. He heard a baby’s