Looking up, he found the smoggy sky over Puxi, west of the river, more somber than over Pudong, east of the river.

He made a pot of extra strong black coffee, poured out a cup for himself, and gazed out the window for several minutes absentmindedly.

A black bird came circling out of nowhere, flapping its wings furiously above the window. In the folk superstition, it might have served as another ominous sign – for the assignment from Zhao?

For the serial murder investigation?

Or for both of them?

He remained inexplicably disturbed, though he did not believe in signs.

Then he turned on the computer and started research on the Internet about the air pollution.

The issue of horrible air quality in China had a fairly long history, but for so many years after 1949 people had paid no attention to it because of their living in a ‘closed China’ under Mao, and ‘everything’s all right’ in the Party-controlled media. After the ending of the Cultural Revolution, the economic reform launched by Deng Xiaoping began to bring about dramatic changes for the country. China witnessed itself relentlessly consumed in construction and urbanization at a breakneck speed, and the air problem grew worse and worse, what with modern and ultramodern high-rises shooting up like bamboo roots after a spring rain, looming here and there and blocking out the sky, with a growing number of cars and air conditioning everywhere, with the ever-increasing-and-worsening carbon emission like the genie out of the bottle, and with industrial pollution further deteriorating and expanding.

He was getting depressed with his reading, heaving a long sigh, when the cellphone started to shriek, all of a sudden, like a siren breaking into the dark recesses of his thoughts.

The phone screen presented a chart showing PM 2.5 at an alarmingly high level, and a message underneath warning people of all ages not to go out unless absolutely necessary.

Staring at the message for a minute or two, he plunged himself back into the cyber maze of information. This time, he thought of something mentioned by Zhao at the hotel, and tried something new, putting various combinations of key words into the new search effort. As he put in ‘air pollution’ together with ‘America’, a number of articles popped up.

As it turned out, one of the earliest acknowledgements of the serious problem came out of the American Embassy in Beijing, at least according to an article that explored the issue from the very beginning.