The recovery of Rong Jinzhen’s stolen notebook turns a faltering search into a sudden, almost improbable success, but it does not resolve the larger crisis: Rong remains missing, and the person who took the notebook is never found. The sequence moves from official risk-taking to a fragmentary phone call and then to the quiet discovery of an object whose survival matters as much as the information it contains.

A search brought into the open

By the ninth day of the investigation, the missing notebook had yielded no information. The silence had begun to exhaust the investigators’ hopes, and despair was taking hold. Headquarters therefore agreed to publicize the loss rather than continue to keep it secret. The decision changed the terms of the search: the public might help locate the notebook, but the thief would also learn that it was wanted.

The next morning, the B City Daily printed a lost-property notice that was widely circulated. It described the person searching as a scientist and said that the notebook contained information about technological innovations the nation was developing. The notice made the notebook’s importance plain without simply treating it as an ordinary lost possession. Yet publicity carried an obvious danger. The thief might hide the notebook more carefully or destroy it, bringing the investigation to a dead end. The choice to announce the loss was therefore a calculated risk, made after days without a lead.

The incomplete telephone tip

At precisely 22:03 that evening, the Special Investigative Team’s telephone hotline rang. Three people reached for the receiver, but Vasili got to it first. The caller did not speak, and the connection went dead. Vasili returned the receiver, crestfallen; for a moment, the call seemed to have raised hope only to extinguish it.

A minute later, the telephone rang again. Vasili answered first once more and heard a hurried, agitated voice trying to say that the notebook was in a letterbox. When Vasili asked which letterbox, the caller could not finish giving the location, and the line went dead again. The tip was barely usable: B City had only a few hundred letterboxes, but the investigators had no address or further direction. The caller’s failure to complete the message made the lead both frustrating and unexpectedly revealing of the thief’s distress.

The notebook recovered

Despite the missing location, the investigators acted on what they had. Vasili opened the first letterbox he tried and found the notebook inside. The account presents the discovery as an abrupt reversal after nine days of fruitless searching: an incomplete message, rather than a precise report, was enough to put the notebook back in their hands.

The notebook itself was unscathed apart from several pages torn from the back. Under the starlight, it seemed to give off a serene blue glow, an image that sets the recovered object apart from the hurried, practical search around it. Its condition offered relief, but the missing pages left a limit on that relief: the notebook had returned, yet it was not wholly intact. The episode does not establish what the removed pages contained or why they were taken, so their absence remains a material gap rather than a solved clue.

What the recovery does not resolve

The investigators never set anyone to find the thief. The narrative gives two linked reasons: the thief was not a traitor, and Rong Jinzhen had not yet been found. The recovery thus closes one immediate branch of the investigation without closing the search itself. The notebook is located; Rong is still absent. That separation prevents the returned object from becoming a simple happy ending and keeps the event’s attention on the person whose disappearance gave the search its urgency.

The notebook also belongs to a larger record of Rong’s work at Unit 701. According to the account of his papers, he filled twenty-five notebooks during his years there, from 1956 to 1970; most were held under stringent security controls, and even the one notebook in Di Li’s personal possession was not ordinarily available for inspection. This broader context clarifies why a missing notebook could be treated as both a personal object and a matter of national concern. The recovered volume is not described in enough detail to identify it with any particular notebook from that later account, but its return sits within a story in which Rong’s written work is guarded, restricted, and difficult for others to access.

Significance

The episode depends on a contrast between procedure and chance. Headquarters takes the deliberate step of publishing a notice, accepting the possibility that it could make the loss worse; the result arrives not as a clear investigative breakthrough but as two brief calls, the second barely intelligible. Vasili’s first attempt at a letterbox then succeeds without a confirmed location. The account does not explain the discovery as the product of a completed search strategy. Instead, it emphasizes how little information the investigators had and how much turned on acting on the fragment they received.

The recovered notebook also makes the limits of recovery visible. Its pages are mostly intact, but some are missing; the thief remains unidentified; and Rong remains unfound. The object’s return is a real reversal in the investigation, not its conclusion. By ending this episode with the notebook secured but its owner still absent, the narrative distinguishes the retrieval of evidence from the recovery of a person.