“An advance for a book? If she has the money already, I don’t think we can do anything about it. The publisher would now have the material – the Mao material.”

“Perhaps not yet, or not entirely. Something might have been arranged, out of consideration for her safety. If such a book were published while she was in China, she could get in trouble. She knows better -”

“Has she applied for a passport?”

“No, not yet. If she did anything too obvious, it wouldn’t do her any good.”

It sounded like a conspiracy scenario to Chen. The minister must have some reason to be concerned, but Chen had many questions.

“Why the sudden attention to this?” Chen resumed after a pause. “Shang died years ago.”

“It’s a long story but, in short, it’s because of two books. The first one is entitled Cloud and Rain in Shanghai. You must have heard of it.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“You are too busy, Chief Inspector Chen. It’s a best seller about Qian, and about Shang too.”

“Really? A best seller?”

“Yes. And then the other book is the memoir by Mao’s personal doctor.”

“That one I’ve heard of, but I haven’t read it.”

“With that book we learned our lesson the hard way. When the doctor applied for a passport so he could go to the States for health reasons, we let him go. His book was then published there. It’s full of fabrications about Mao’s private life. However, readers are so interested in those horrible details that they swallow them without a hiccup. The book is selling like hotcakes all over the world. In some languages, it has been reprinted ten times in one year.”

Chen had heard stories about Mao’s private life. In the years shortly after the Cultural Revolution, when Madam Mao was denounced as a white-bone devil, lurid details about her life as a third-rate movie actress started coming out, with some particulars having direct or indirect connection to Mao. The Beijing authorities soon put an end to the “hearsay.” Since, after all, there’s no separating Madam Mao from Mao.