But such a speed in itself spoke about the political sensitivity of the video. Otherwise it would not have been blocked so quickly.

So there was nothing else for Chen to do about the video – at least not at the moment. Taking out a cigarette, he put it back into the pack.

He decided to go on with the research around the assignment from Zhao.

It could be a different approach, he contemplated, to start by sorting out what Zhao had said to him in the light of the newly conducted online research.

Among the things highlighted in his mind was Zhao’s mention of Shanshan’s recent trip to the United States. That now made much more sense. The official media had repeatedly tried to blame the people’s complaining about the air pollution on the American propaganda conspiracy, of which Shanshan’s trip could have been easily interpreted as an integrated part.

But with the existence of PM 2.5 in the air finally acknowledged in China, putting Shanshan and America together could backfire, serving as a reminder of the Party propaganda fiasco.

Another highlight concerned Shanshan’s office in Shanghai. The information contained in the folder from Zhao provided no specific clues, except that the office was located at a high-end area in Shanghai, on Huaihai Road close to the New World. An expensive office under her name for more than one year. Why? She was anything but materialistic, as far as he remembered. With such a widespread community complaining and protesting about the pollution, she could have been really busy with a variety of activities as a ‘public intellectual’, working with a considerable number of her associates and visitors at the office, including some influential Big Bucks in the city of Shanghai, as Zhao had emphatically put it.

During all that time, however, she had not tried to contact him – not once. It could have been much easier for her to learn things about him in Shanghai, with news about his work available from time to time in the local newspapers.

Still, he thought he was able to guess the reason why she had chosen not to do so, though there could have been hundreds of other reasons, which remained unknown or inexplicable to the befuddled inspector, and unpleasant for him to speculate on.

He pulled himself together for the other puzzling emphases in Zhao’s talk, particularly about his familiarity as a native Shanghainese with the city and its people, and in addition, with the contaminated Tai Lake as the author of the poem. It did not add up for Zhao to give him the job for those reasons.

Could it be possible that the stakes for the investigation – whatever or whoever got involved – were so high that Zhao had to request his service so obliquely instead of telling him the true reason?

Whatever the scenarios, the inspector had to move ahead, floundering and struggling like the protagonist in the Beijing opera Crossroads, knowing not who’s attacking who in the pitch-black night, flourishing his sword blindly.