Chapter 108

Fei Du gently let go of the door handle, standing silently behind the thin door. He heard deathly silence in the corridor after the name "Gu Zhao," as if the people outside had left.

After a long time, the silent dumbshow was finally interrupted. In a cold, hard voice, Xiao Haiyang repeated, one word at a time, "What—about—it?"

From the other side of the door you could hear his teeth grinding.

Before Luo Wenzhou could speak, Xiao Haiyang aggressively launched a continuous attack towards him. "So the City Bureau's Criminal Investigation Team doesn't only screen you and your relatives, it even has to dig down into your next-door neighbors? Captain Luo, during the Great Qing Dynasty, when the emperor handed out punishment indiscriminately, I think it still didn't reach this point?"

Luo Wenzhou listened, not getting angry at him. His voice sounded smooth, and Fei Du guessed that his expression also hadn't moved a hair.

"Xiao Haiyang," he said, drawing his voice out, "I've provoked you and made you angry. Let's judge matters where they stand. Can we talk sensibly?"

Fei Du oddly rather wanted to smile, the corners of his lips turning up slightly.

Then he heard Luo Wenzhou continue, "I don't care very much about the personalities of the people around me, and I don't require everyone to play a happy family every day. You can get along well, and you can be eccentric and unsociable. It's for the best if you're willing to integrate with everyone, but if you're unwilling to have close relations with comparative strangers, then you can do as you like. Never mind you, our President Fei's bad habits are bigger than he is, and I don't say anything about it to him."

Fei Du: "…"

Hearing this, he knew the fact that he was eavesdropping had been discovered. Fei Du didn't feel like keeping up the cover-up, so he simply opened the door and walked out.

Xiao Haiyang wasn't very canny; taking one look at the suddenly appearing living human, he couldn't hide his shock. He backed up a step on the spot.

But Luo Wenzhou's expression as he looked at Xiao Haiyang became stern. "But I need you to remember where this is. Xiao Haiyang, I need you to concentrate completely, to be able to work for the benefit of all at least during working hours, to handle the cases you're working responsibly, to set aside some of your selfish motives—I don't care what your reasons are, and I don't care what private difficulties you have. The cases that come here are all matters of life and death, with blood and tears behind them. Are you telling me only your private difficulties are worth money, while the injustices and sufferings of others can be casually brushed aside?"

Luo Wenzhou was too skilled at flapping his lips. Xiao Haiyang was left gasping by his speech, his expression unsteady.

"Political Commissar Luo, I must interrupt your ideological work for a moment," Fei Du said, leaning against the wall. "Officer Xiao, to whom did you just reveal the information that Lu Guosheng was the killer?"

Luo Wenzhou hadn't heard the phone call Xiao Haiyang had made in the bathroom. Hearing this, his expression altered. "Xiao Haiyang!"

Since Luo Wenzhou had said the name "Gu Zhao," Xiao Haiyang had been like a string, constantly drawn taught by each sentence Luo Wenzhou spoke. When Fei Du revealed his maneuver, the string finally snapped. He looked up at once, the vacillating expression left by Luo Wenzhou's words turning cold and hard.

"Is your head full of water?" Luo Wenzhou stepped forward and grabbed his collar. "A whole world of criminals are sharpening their brains trying to hunt down information about the course of police investigations, trying to know the enemy in order to know themselves. Are you their man on the inside? Do you know that randomly releasing information before the details of a case have been clarified will spread false rumors among the public, even produce panic? What do you do if new circumstances turn up in the follow-up investigation? Correct your statement? Even the weather report doesn't dare to talk so confidently now. What are you going to do with the City Bureau's credibility?"

Xiao Haiyang struggled with all his force, but his skills were sloppy. He couldn't shake off Luo Wenzhou's hand, so he had to let off a verbal assault. "What credibility do you police have?!"

"We police? Does your fucking salary get blown in by the wind?" Luo Wenzhou frisked him for his phone, putting the lockscreen in front of Xiao Haiyang's face. "Do you want to unlock it yourself, or do you want to put on handcuffs and make me ask a technician to unlock it?"

Like a pitiful rat, Xiao Haiyang was nearly one-handedly lifted by Luo Wenzhou, looking increasingly like his head was too big for his thin neck. His stiff uniform shirt dug into his neck, and he couldn't quite catch his breath, but he continued his impertinent remarks unimpeded. "Go…huff…go ahead, ask whoever you want, as long as I have…time to…"

Before he'd finished, Fei Du reached out and patted the back of Luo Wenzhou's hand, where the veins were standing out. He recited a string of numbers. "That's the password.—Captain Luo, why are your means of resolving problems always so barbarous?"

Xiao Haiyang's expression changed instantly. He reached out to snatch back his phone. Luo Wenzhou passed the phone to Fei Du and uncompromisingly restrained Xiao Haiyang's resistance.

As if it was his own phone, Fei Du nimbly unlocked Xiao Haiyang's phone and opened the call log.

"Go through his call record," Luo Wenzhou said coldly. "See who he contacted, and have Lang Qiao and the others trace the number. If it's the press, have someone go bring their superior in for a talk…"

Before he'd finished, Fei Du, not taking orders, called back the recently dialed number. "Hello, is this Editor Wang? … I'm not Haiyang, he can't come to the phone right now. Could you please tell me which company you belong to?… Oh, Yan City Mass Media, what a coincidence… No, no other questions. Thank you."

When he was finished speaking, Fei Du hung up, got out his own phone, and sent Assistant Miao a voice message. "Miaomiao, say hello to Yan City Mass Media, tell them not to talk any nonsense. I'm talking about that business of the murdered middle schoolers. Take care of it as fast as possible."

Luo Wenzhou: "…"

Xiao Haiyang: "…"

Assistant Miao's response was quick. She immediately replied, "Got it." Fei Du urbanely returned Xiao Haiyang's phone to him. "I just received a portion of new media stocks and haven't had a chance to restructure yet. It's an emerging industry, and the management is rather messy. You'll have to pardon me."

Xiao Haiyang spent all day living in his own world. Ordinarily, he didn't have any contact at all with Fei Du and thought he was only an idle rich kid. He stared blankly for a good while, then came around, instantly becoming indignant at this corruption. He found the strength somewhere to push Luo Wenzhou away. "You guys have clout, you're powerful, you can do what you want? That's how it was back then, and that's how it is now. As long as you have the power and the ability, you can smooth over a miscarriage of justice as big as the heavens and no one will be able to comment, isn't that right?!"

One of their colleagues from the Criminal Investigation Team came upstairs on some business and got this shout full in the face, at once standing uncomprehendingly stuck in place; passing by would be wrong, but so would not passing by.

Luo Wenzhou waved a hand at him and looked heavily at Xiao Haiyang. "Let's talk somewhere else. Don't make so much noise in a public place."

Xiao Haiyang thought he was going to be taken to an interrogation room; his phone call just now had in fact been pure impulse—it was Luo Wenzhou's "mind your mouths" before he'd ended the meeting that had given him the inspiration.

Xiao Haiyang couldn't describe what his feelings had been when he'd gotten Tao Ran's phone call on the way to work early on the morning that Feng Bin's murder had been discovered and heard the description of the body with its limbs cut off and its eyes dug out—it was that person, the one he'd thought about for a decade and more, who'd vanished without a trace for a decade and more.

Xiao Haiyang simply couldn't control himself. While the whole main Criminal Investigation Team circled a crowd of brats, he would have loved nothing better than to search the whole city, grab Lu Guosheng, excavate that long-unrighted wrong—

"Go on, who's wronged you?" Luo Wenzhou turned to ask him. "Whose injustice has been smoothed over?"

Xiao Haiyang only then came around and discovered that Luo Wenzhou had taken him to a discreet stairwell. The surveillance camera in the corner was turned all the way around as though it had been made to face the wall and examine its conscience, looking very comical.

"Don't mind it," Luo Wenzhou said without looking up when he saw him looking at the camera. "We broke that camera when the bureau was enforcing a smoking ban two years ago, and no one's fixed it yet. You can say anything you like. There won't be a record."

"Lu Guosheng in fact made an appearance a year after the warrant had been issued for his arrest, in a case where a death occurred during a brawl. Forensics found one of Lu Guosheng's fingerprints. This was in Yan City." After a good long silence, Xiao Haiyang came out with this earth-shattering speech.

"Impossible." Luo Wenzhou frowned. "Since Lu Guosheng turned up on the security camera footage in this case, we've gone through all the materials related to him. Such an obvious lead couldn't have been left out!"

Xiao Haiyang sneered. "That's because it was a scandal!"

Luo Wenzhou remembered the disciplinary resolution concerning Gu Zhao on the intranet. He froze.

"The lead very quickly came into the hands of the criminal policeman who'd dealt with the case. There were two people principally responsible for the 327 case. One I think was surnamed Yang; he was on holiday at the time. The other…the other one was him, Gu Zhao."

Luo Wenzhou looked at the anguish he could barely conceal, and his voice softened. "Who is Gu Zhao to you?"

These words were like a slender needle, nimbly piercing through his flesh, directly entering Xiao Haiyang's heart. He took a deep breath, looked up at the wall yellowed by second-hand smoke and the camera facing the wall, his congealed memories beginning to flow. Hundreds of thousand of words came to his lips and he blurted them out, though they were still dry. "My parents started having relationship problems early. They were constantly fighting. As far back as I remember, my father hardly ever came home. He had someone on the outside… The first person who I felt was like a father to me was Uncle Gu."

His mother had worked as a nurse in a hospital, one of those big hospitals where the whole world wanted nothing better than to crowd in to snatch up appointments with specialists, overcrowded year-round. Xiao Haiyang always remembered her looking exhausted after working the night shift. When his mom wasn't home, she'd leave food for him, locking her small son inside the house.

Once she'd left in a hurry and forgotten to put the food in a small bowl. The five-year-old boy had had to move over a little bench and pour the food for himself, wielding an enormous ladle. His hindbrain was perhaps naturally imperfect; he'd accidentally fallen over along with the pot and sat on the ground bawling.

At that time, the doors and walls of old apartments were all thin. The neighbor, who'd come home from work, heard the heartrending cries inside the room, got no answer when he knocked on the door, and thought there had been some accident; he pried open the door and charged in.

For Xiao Haiyang, Gu Zhao, coming in to investigate with the light of the setting sun around him, was like a hero come to rescue him.

"Uncle Gu took care of me for four years, from kindergarten to third grade. Composition topics for students in the lower grades are deficient, it's always something like 'my mom and dad' or 'my dream.' When I wrote about 'dad,' it was always Uncle Gu, and my dream was always to grow up and be a police officer."

Officer Gu was young and promising. He'd just become deputy to the captain of the Criminal Investigation Team. He had busy periods and idle periods, and he was on duty often. Maybe he'd lived alone too long; he loved playing with the child. When Xiao Haiyang's mother wasn't home, he'd go over to Uncle Gu's house with his little backpack on his back to hear him tell stories about arresting bad guys.

After he started elementary school, the children in his class were jealous that he was always first in test scores. Somehow they'd heard that his parents were divorced and had banded together, using some scarcely understood insults picked up from TV, mocking him for having a mother but no father, calling him the child of a "loose woman."

Xiao Haiyang had been inarticulate since he was little. He didn't know how to talk back, so he could only fight…but sadly he had no natural gift for fighting, either. Often he'd be the first to raise a hand and end up held down and beaten by a bunch of brats.

On the way home from school one day, the bad kids had his head pressed to the ground, jeering that he and his mom had been abandoned. Gu Zhao was just riding by on his bike. He sturdily got off his bike, wearing his imposing uniform. He lined up the children bullying Xiao Haiyang and lectured them for ten minutes, warning them, "If you bully my son again, I'll arrest you all and take you to the public security bureau."

"I always fantasized about him marrying my mom and even tried matchmaking them. Two grown-ups, and I made it very embarrassing for them. Later he told me that there are all kinds of people in this world, and he was the kind that would never marry, so he wouldn't have children, either. So I was his son, and I had to study hard, grow up, and make money to be able to support a father."

At this point, Xiao Haiyang noticed that Luo Wenzhou's face was a little blurry. He subconsciously wiped his face and found that he had unknowingly started crying. He was extremely ashamed and resentful. He lowered his head and took off his glasses, fiercely wiping them on his sleeve.

"During the National Road 327 case, I was already in second grade. I had his house keys and came every day to water his plants and read the newspaper he subscribed to. He was unusually busy then, not coming home for ten days or more. Later I saw a report about the 327 case in the newspaper and curiously asked him about it for a very long time." Xiao Haiyang paused. "Things went wrong a year later. One night I was staying at his house. I woke up in the middle of the night and found that the lights were on in the living room. I wanted to get up and get water to drink when I heard him talking quietly on the phone to someone, saying, 'I know this is unthinkable, but Lu Guosheng isn't the only one there.'"

Luo Wenzhou remembered Lao Yang's testament and his heart gave a heavy thump. "What does that mean?"

An eight- or nine-year-old boy's curiosity was at its most exuberant and his imagination at its most abundant, but adults would often overlook his eyes and ears. Xiao Haiyang had been on summer vacation and had had nothing to do and very little homework; he'd started his own furtive little investigation.

"He seemed tired and fretful during that time. At the time, all policemen carried note pads with them. Once Uncle Gu fell asleep, and the corner of his notebook was sticking out of his uniform pocket. I couldn't resist my curiosity and stealthily took it and read through it. I saw that on a day a few months earlier he'd written, 'There was a large-scale drunken brawl at a certain song-and-dance hall in the Flower Market District, suspected to be caused by jealousy among brothel clients, leading to the death of one person. To identify the culprit, forensics collected the fingerprints of everyone involved and the weapons used in the fight. On one beer bottle, they found an unusual fingerprints, which belonged to the wanted criminal Lu Guosheng.'"

Luo Wenzhou said, "You remember everything from so long ago?"

"I have an eidetic memory," Xiao Haiyang said expressionlessly. "What's more, I've repeated this in my mind over and over for years. I review it every day."

Fei Du, who had been standing beside them in silence this whole time, suddenly put in a word. "Gu Zhao said 'Lu Guosheng isn't the only one there.' Where did he mean?"

Xiao Haiyang said, "A large-scale high-quality entertainment center called The Right Bank of the Seine, also called The Louvre."

"The Louvre was once the most luxurious place of entertainment in the city, but there was a great fire there," Fei Du said. "It was said to be a problem with the fire safety. They were fined afterwards and forced to close down. Afterwards it disappeared without a trace."

Luo Wenzhou looked at one and then the other, thinking that neither of them seemed like young men in their early twenties—talking about events that happened over a decade ago, they both sounded like they were enumerating their family treasures.

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