B City

B City is the station where Rong Jinzhen learns that his train has arrived, and the city where the loss of his leather briefcase triggers an enormous search. The pursuit extends from railway stations to rubbish tips and residents’ homes, involving thousands of people, yet the briefcase’s disappearance remains entangled with the more consequential disappearance of Rong Jinzhen himself. B City’s scale makes it a place of scrutiny and concealment: a city in which many can be searched, but a person—or a missing object—can still evade explanation.

Arrival and the missing briefcase

In the middle of the night, the train wakes Rong Jinzhen as it pulls into a station. His first instinct is to reach beneath his bunk for the safety-deposit box chained to the leg of the tea table. Finding it still there, he lies back and listens among the scattered footsteps and the station announcements. The announcement identifies B City as their arrival point; A City is the next stop. He calculates that he has three hours left before home and falls asleep again, imagining the short remaining journey.

The train’s progress soon becomes a source of dread rather than reassurance. Rong Jinzhen has nearly made it home when he discovers that his leather briefcase is gone. The distinction matters: the safety-deposit box remains where he left it, but the briefcase has disappeared. The account treats the theft not as the work of some grand enemy but as an ordinary, damnable theft, while its timing makes the loss feel almost like calamity at the threshold of home. As the train hurries toward A City, Rong Jinzhen grows weaker and more confused, caught in a web of suspicion that seems to carry him away from home and toward catastrophe.

A city searched at extraordinary scale

The Intelligence Service orders the train doors locked when it reaches its destination, but the search is already shadowed by the likelihood that the thief has left the train. The suspected thief is believed to have disembarked in B City after taking the briefcase. That early departure turns the city into the central terrain of the investigation: the train can be held, but the person sought may already be absorbed into an urban crowd.

The Special Investigative Team’s records describe an operation spread across institutions and places rather than confined to the train. The listed terrain includes both A City’s and B City’s train stations, B City’s nine rubbish tips, and the homes of its residents. More than 3,700 men are directly assigned to the work, including Rong Jinzhen and Vasili. Investigators scrutinize all 2,141 passengers aboard the train and its 43 employees, while more than 600 plainclothes military men are in B City. The figures convey the extraordinary reach of the operation, but also the difficulty of turning reach into certainty: a whole city can be placed under attention without yielding a clear account of who took the briefcase or where it went.

The search imposes costs beyond the investigators’ labor. The train is delayed for five hours and thirty minutes, and B City’s intelligence services spend 484 hours on the case, an expenditure given as ten days and four hours. The city is rendered as a vast investigative field, measured in personnel, hours, stations, refuse sites, and homes. Yet the scale of these measures cannot restore what Rong Jinzhen has lost or guarantee that the missing object will be recovered intact.

Disappearance and uncertain traces

Rong Jinzhen disappears in B City on the same evening as a torrential downpour. No one knows precisely when he leaves his room, or whether he goes out during the storm or after it. The uncertainty is central to the event: his departure has no witnessed moment that can settle what happened. The account says that people know he will not return, likening the loss to a bird leaving its nest or a star torn from its orbit.

His disappearance further confuses the briefcase case. One interpretation is that it represents a second stage in a planned operation, which would make the thief’s identity seem more mysterious and sinister. More people instead believe that Rong Jinzhen has lost hope and cannot bear the fear and pain of the missing notebook. For him, ciphers and the notebook are bound together; as prospects of recovery fade, the notebook itself seems increasingly likely to be ruined by water. Those around him fear that suicide may no longer be unthinkable, but the account does not confirm that this is what happens.

A later find on the eastern side of the river running through B City adds a stark, incomplete trace: a leather shoe picked up near an oil refinery. Vasili immediately recognizes it as Rong Jinzhen’s, identifying it by its stretched mouth, which he attributes to the recent frantic running in search of the notebook. The shoe confirms a connection to Rong Jinzhen’s disappearance but does not explain his fate. B City’s final significance lies in that gap between exhaustive pursuit and unresolved outcome: the notebook will eventually be found, while Rong Jinzhen disappears without a trace.