Chen Zhaoming did not sleep that night. He sat at his desk, the two torn pages side by side under the dim glow of a green-shaded lamp. The Russian one from Dostoevsky, the English one from Dickens, both annotated in the same sharp, cramped hand. The handwriting was careful, almost calligraphic, as if the writer had learned to form characters from a copybook but had never quite mastered the art of writing quickly. Every stroke was deliberate, every dot and cross an act of will.
He traced the phrase on the Dickens page: "The heart, too, can be mortgaged." He thought of Cao Jinfu's heart—if the man had one at all. Cao had been a petty usurer, a middleman who melted down stolen jewelry and recast it as "antique" pieces for foreign tourists. He had cheated widows out of their wedding bands and sold counterfeit ingots to desperate merchants. But had he ever refused a plea? Had anyone ever come to him begging for mercy, only to be turned away?
Chen made a note: "Motivation: retribution for refusal? Or for compliance?" He underlined compliance. The horse in Raskolnikov's dream died because it could not say no—it was beaten to death for obeying. Cao, on the other hand, had said yes to everything: yes to fraud, yes to bribery, yes to the gold cartel. He had mortgaged his heart long ago. Perhaps the killer saw him not as a villain, but as a coward. And in a city where courage was measured in gold taels, cowardice might be the greater sin.
At dawn, Chen walked to the nearest tea stall and bought a bowl of congee. The vendor, an old woman with a face like wrinkled parchment, ladled the thin gruel into a chipped bowl. "Two hundred yuan," she said, without looking up. Chen handed over a note that had been worth a week's wages three months ago. Now it bought him breakfast and a piece of pickled radish.
He ate standing up, watching the street come alive. A line of women waited outside a rice shop, their baskets empty, their eyes hollow. A group of schoolchildren in patched uniforms sang a nationalist song off-key, their voices thin and reedy. A foreign journalist in a trench coat took photographs of a beggar with no legs, while a policeman looked on, indifferent. The city was a museum of suffering, and everyone was both curator and exhibit.
Chen finished his congee and headed to the Gold Exchange. He had a name now—Shen Asi—and he wanted to trace it through the bullion records. The Exchange was a cavernous hall filled with shouting men and ticking ticker-tape machines. The air was thick with sweat and the metallic tang of coins. He found the registrar, a bald man with gold-rimmed spectacles, who reluctantly pulled out the ledgers for the past year.
Shen Asi's name appeared six times, always as a buyer of small quantities—one or two taels at a time, never more. The purchases were made through a broker named Liu, who operated out of a hole-in-the-wall shop in the Hongkou district. Chen copied the address and left.
Hongkou was a warren of narrow alleys, where laundry lines crisscrossed overhead like spiderwebs and the smell of frying garlic mingled with the stench of open drains. Liu's shop was a wooden shack that also sold incense and funeral paper money. Inside, Liu was a bony man with a perpetual cough, who greeted Chen with the weary resignation of someone accustomed to official visits.
"Shen Asi?" Liu repeated, scratching his chin. "Yes, I remember him. Quiet fellow, always paid in cash. Said he worked as a copyist for a law firm. Came in every two weeks, bought a tael or two. Never haggled, never asked questions."
"Did he ever mention why he was buying gold?"
Liu shrugged. "Same reason everyone buys gold. To hide it from the bank, to keep it under the mattress, to sell it later when the price doubles. He wasn't unique, Inspector. Half my customers are like that. The other half are worse."
"Did he seem distressed? Desperate?"
Liu paused, tapping a yellowed finger on the counter. "Now that you mention it—yes. The last time he came, maybe three weeks ago, his hands were shaking. He said he needed the gold urgently, for a 'family matter.' I didn't press. It's not my place to ask."
Chen thanked Liu and stepped back into the alley. He stood for a moment, letting the noise of the street wash over him. A family matter. He thought of his own family—his wife, gone; his daughter, married to a merchant in Hangzhou whom he had never met. He had no one to buy gold for. No one to save.
He decided to visit the law firms in the International Settlement, to see if any employed a copyist named Shen. It took him three hours and a dozen dead ends before he found a small practice on Yunnan Road, run by a Mr. Kang, who specialized in property disputes. Kang was a plump, nervous man who dabbed at his forehead with a silk handkerchief even in the cold.
"Ah, Shen Asi," Kang said, his voice quavering. "He worked for me for two years. Excellent penmanship, very reliable. But he stopped coming about a month ago. I assumed he found better work."
"Did he give a reason?"
Kang hesitated. "He said his wife was ill. Consumption, I think. He asked for an advance, but I couldn't—I had my own expenses. He seemed... resigned. Not angry, just tired. He thanked me for the opportunity and left."
Chen asked for Shen's address. Kang found it in an old ledger: a room in a tenement on Zhapu Road, near the railway station. Chen took a rickshaw there, the driver pedaling furiously through the crowded streets.
The tenement was a crumbling four-story building, its facade streaked with soot and pigeon droppings. The staircase was dark and smelled of urine. Chen climbed to the third floor and knocked on a door that had no number. A woman's voice, thin and cracked, answered from inside: "Who is it?"
"Police. I'm looking for Shen Asi."
A long pause. Then the door opened a crack, revealing a gaunt face with hollow cheeks and feverish eyes. She was wrapped in a threadbare quilt, even though the room was stifling from a small charcoal brazier. Chen could see a narrow cot, a stack of papers, and a single chair.
"He's not here," the woman said. "He goes out early and comes back late. He's looking for work."
"Are you his wife?"
She nodded, then coughed—a deep, rattling cough that shook her whole frame. Chen felt a pang of something close to guilt. He asked if he could wait. She shrugged and closed the door, leaving him in the hallway.
He waited for two hours, leaning against the grimy wall, watching the comings and goings of the building's residents: a cobbler with a wooden leg, a prostitute with a painted smile, a family of six sharing a single room. No one looked at him twice. This was a place where people had learned to mind their own business.
Finally, near dusk, a figure limped up the stairs. He was a thin man in a mended coat, carrying a cloth satchel. His face was lined, his eyes deep-set and burning—exactly as Ah Dong had described. He saw Chen and stopped. For a moment, neither spoke.
"Shen Asi?" Chen said.
The man nodded slowly. His gaze was steady, unflinching. "You're the inspector. The one investigating Cao's death."
"I am. How did you know?"
Shen Asi smiled—a tired, humorless smile. "A man who kills a silver merchant doesn't expect to stay anonymous. I knew you would come." He gestured to the door. "My wife is sick. Can we talk outside? I don't want to distress her."
Chen agreed. They descended to the ground floor and stepped into a narrow courtyard, where a single persimmon tree stood bare against the grey sky. Shen Asi leaned against the wall, lighting a cigarette with trembling hands.
"I didn't kill Cao," he said, his voice flat. "But I know who did."
Chen raised an eyebrow. "Who?"
Shen exhaled a cloud of smoke. "A man I met at the law firm. He called himself Jin—a clerk from the Central Bank. He was looking for someone to copy a series of documents for him. I did the work, but I recognized the numbers. They were fake bullion receipts. He was part of a ring that was siphoning gold from the reserves."
"And you reported this?"
"I tried. I wrote to the police, the prosecutors, even the newspaper. No one answered. They were all too busy chasing their own fortunes." Shen's eyes hardened. "So I started keeping records. Names, dates, amounts. I have a list of everyone involved. Cao was one of them."
Chen felt a cold knot forming in his stomach. "You're saying Cao was killed by someone in this ring? To silence him?"
"Or to send a message. Cao had been skimming too much for himself. The others wanted him gone. They made it look like a madman's work—the page from a book, the theatrical staging. But I know the real culprit. It's a man named Lin Baofeng, a deputy director at the Bank. He's the one who orchestrated the whole scheme."
Chen studied Shen's face, searching for signs of deceit. The man seemed sincere, but his story was too neat, too convenient. And there was something in his eyes—a flicker of calculation, a shadow of deeper knowledge.
"Why are you telling me this?" Chen asked.
Shen dropped the cigarette and crushed it with his heel. "Because I want it to stop. They're killing people, Inspector. Not just Cao. They killed a gold dealer named Yang last week—drowned in his own bathtub. They made it look like an accident. But it wasn't. It was the same men."
Chen had not heard of Yang's death. He made a mental note to check the reports. "If you have evidence," he said, "bring it to the station. We can protect you."
Shen laughed—a bitter, hollow sound. "Protect me? Inspector, I have nothing left to protect. My wife will be dead by spring. My savings are gone. I have no money, no status, no future. All I have is this list. And I'm giving it to you because I want you to know the truth—before they kill me too."
He reached into his coat and pulled out a folded envelope, stained with sweat and age. Chen took it, but did not open it.
"One more thing," Shen said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "The killer you're looking for—the one who staged Cao's death with the Dostoevsky page—he's not a hired hand. He's one of them. He's a reader. A man who believes that literature can change the world. He's using the books to tell a story—a story about justice, about the poor rising up against the rich. And he's not finished yet."
Chen felt a chill run down his spine. "How do you know all this?"
Shen smiled again, and this time there was something almost pitying in his expression. "Because I was his copyist. I copied his letters, his notes, his plans. I know his next target, Inspector. He's going to kill a banker named Wang, who runs the gold inspection office. And he's going to do it using a method from a Chinese novel—something about a family of wealth and a tragic fall. He told me once, in passing, that he admired the way the author killed off his characters—slowly, elegantly, with no mercy."
Chen gripped the envelope tightly. "When? When is he going to strike?"
Shen shook his head. "I don't know the exact date. But it will be soon—within the week. He wants to make his move before the gold sales are suspended. He wants the chaos to peak. He wants the city to remember his name."
Before Chen could ask more, Shen turned and limped back into the tenement. Chen stood in the courtyard, the envelope burning in his hand, the cold wind cutting through his coat. He thought of the torn pages, the annotated passages, the elaborate staging. He thought of the horse that could not say no, and the heart that could be mortgaged. And he thought of Shen Asi—a desperate man with a dying wife and a list of names, who seemed to know too much and yet too little.
He walked back to the station in a daze. That night, he opened the envelope and read through the names—thirty-seven of them, all connected to the gold ring. He cross-referenced them with the bank records and found that eleven of the names matched suspicious transactions. One of them was Lin Baofeng. Another was a man named Wang Qiming, the inspection officer Shen had mentioned.
Chen felt the pieces falling into place, but also slipping away. If Shen was telling the truth, then the literary killer was a pawn, a weapon wielded by the ring to eliminate loose ends. But if Shen was lying—if he himself was the killer—then he had just handed Chen a list of victims to keep him busy while he prepared his next move.
He looked at the photograph of his wife, her gentle smile frozen in time. He wondered what she would have done in his place—trust a dying man's confession, or hunt him down on instinct. He knew the answer. She would have trusted her gut. And her gut had always been smarter than his.
Chen put the list in his desk drawer and locked it. He would visit Wang Qiming tomorrow, warn him, watch him. And he would keep Shen Asi under surveillance. If the killer struck again, he would be ready.
But as he lay on his cot that night, staring at the water-stained ceiling, he could not shake the feeling that he was already behind. That somewhere in the city, the reader with the burning eyes was turning another page, writing another chapter, and that no amount of forewarning could stop the story from reaching its bloody climax.
He closed his eyes and saw the horse from Dostoevsky's dream—beaten, broken, but still struggling to rise. He saw the horse's eyes, and they were the same eyes as Shen Asi's. And he knew, with a certainty that made his heart sink, that the killer was not a weapon. He was the author. And Shen Asi was the horse.
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