‘Yes, you can keep the change.’ He nodded with a smile. It’s just like in a popular Chinese saying: While the government has one regulation, people have ten counter-regulations.

Smiling back, she was about to hand him the SIM card when she said, ‘Why don’t you have another phone? A different one, so you won’t get the two phones confused.’

‘Good idea.’

‘Then another seven hundred yuan. You have both the phone and the SIM card.’

‘One thousand yuan for the two, right?’

It was not a small sum, but he turned over the money. So he got from her a SIM card as well as a white phone, a special one for the investigation, which would not get confused with his regular phone, a black one.

Pocketing the new phone, Inspector Chen headed toward the riverbank.

Not far from the convenience store, there was a park-like area, which was usually crowded with tourists taking or posing for pictures with the Oriental Pearl Tower in the background. For the day with the PM 2.5 level high in the air, however, it looked deserted, with few people visible.

There he came to a stop. Taking another deep breath in spite of himself, he stood leaning against the embankment and looking up.

Across the river, the Bund stretched out, with those magnificent imposing neoclassical buildings sporting time-yellowed art-deco facades, enveloped in the gray air, almost unreal, eerily reminiscent of those black and white movies made in the late twenties in the last century. It represented such a surreal scene as to galvanize him into the realistic role he was supposed to play: that of a police inspector working in secret.

But there were things in Zhao’s talk that both alarmed and confused him about the role. Things that gave conflicting and foreboding signals, different from those in the People’s Daily, which usually interpreted the environmental crisis as a temporary bump in China’s marching forward along the great socialist road.

For a senior Party official on a ‘research tour’, Zhao could have easily had the entire Shanghai Police Bureau at his disposal if he had really wanted to do something about a group of activists. No one would have murmured anything about his ‘research’.

Then why choose Chen for the job, with the insistence on secrecy, and with the deliberate cover of his serving as a ‘tourist guide’ during Zhao’s vacation in Shanghai?

There was also something ambivalent in Zhao’s attitude toward Shanshan and other activists, as if he was not so anxious to crush them in a preemptive strike – at least not until the chief inspector had found out something meaningful about them.

Not informed with Zhao’s real intention, Chen could probably try to play safe by making a show of checking the activists, yet providing some selective information, which Zhao might have already obtained anyway.

But could the inspector really do that?

The river water lapping against the shore, he thought hard with an unlit cigarette in his hand, but his efforts did not yield an easy answer. Instead, he was beginning to have a dull headache.