Chapter 34

To draw a somewhat unsuitable comparison, Luo Wenzhou's mental state at this moment was roughly the same as Zhao Haochang's the first time he heard that his secret in the "Fengqing Winery" had been discovered.

Like being struck by lightning, he had been caught red-handed with the goods—the round little white flowers were stretching their stems out in the rain.

Luo Wenzhou stammeringly defended himself. "I… Uh… Well… In fact, I just came to have a look on my way."

Tracing his route, one fears that the mighty Captain Luo had been on his way to abscond to North Korea.

There was no need for Fei Du's ridicule; Luo Wenzhou himself had already realized that this bit of idiocy had a strong "Air of Zhang Donglai" to it.

At this moment, never mind if his skin had been only the thickness of an ordinary human body's, even if he'd borrowed the Great Wall to shield his face, he still wouldn't have been able to block Fei Du's inescapable gaze. Flustered, Luo Wenzhou avoided his line of sight, gabbled some words at random, and intended to grease his steps and slip clean away.

"You two go ahead and chat," said Luo Wenzhou. "I have work tomorrow, I'll be going."

Saying so, he stepped away, ready to charge into the rain, but he had yet to experience the moisture of the great outdoors when the large black umbrella followed him like a shadow.

Fei Du hadn't taken a step. He had only stretched out the arm holding the umbrella; one shoulder was quickly soaked by the rain, forming a faint mist around him.

Then he quietly asked, "So you were the one who left these flowers?"

For seven years Fei Du had come to the cemetery around the anniversary of her death. Sometimes when he had delayed coming a little, he would unexpectedly encounter a bunch of small white flowers, rather lacking in taste. People came and went in the cemetery each day, and the manager was a sloppy incompetent from whom it was impossible to get any answers.

There seemed to be no malice in it, so Fei Du didn't mean to take too much note. He only considered several possibilities, without once thinking that it would be Luo Wenzhou.

Luo Wenzhou very awkwardly assented, and then, dodging around the subject, said, "Since I was already here I figured I'd bring something.—You… Well, didn't you leave already?"

Fei Du fixed him with a look that was even harder to read and asked in turn, "How do you know I already left?"

Luo Wenzhou: "…"

Very good, he felt his mental state limitlessly drawing closer to Zhao Haochang making a slip of the tongue.

Fei Du grandly shoved the heavy umbrella into his hand and bent down to pick up a silk cloth left beside the tombstone. "I forgot to bring this with me."

Entrusted by the young master with the important task of holding the umbrella, Luo Wenzhou couldn't leave but felt awkward staying. He could only follow Fei Du, pretending to glance all around admiring the scenery.

The dignified or serene portraits of the occupants of the tombs neatly lined up all around gave him glances of salutation one after another. The distant curtain of rain had tied the little mountain on the outskirts together with the gray sky. The mountain's squirrels had gone back into their tree hollows and were not at home to callers.—Luo Wenzhou's gaze swirled around for an age without finding anywhere to settle; finally, as he accepted his fate, it returned to the small space under the black umbrella, falling on Fei Du, the only living creature.

Luo Wenzhou discovered in wonder that provided the above-mentioned living creature wasn't spouting off and deprecating justice, righteousness, and the law, he turned out to be a tall and slender, level-shouldered, attractive man. His dark gray shirt was well-fitting and well-ironed. A small part of it was wet, clinging to his waist; in the eyes of someone oriented towards men, it could almost be called sexually appealing, very pleasing to both eye and mind.

Suddenly, Fei Du turned around. Luo Wenzhou had no time to dodge, and their gazes lightly bumped together. Luo Wenzhou's breath caught in spite of himself. But he very quickly came around and pulled back his mind, which had temporarily wandered onto the wrong road. He coughed lightly. "Is it all right if ge says a few words to you?"

Fei Du's face finally displayed the false smile familiar to Luo Wenzhou. "Captain Luo, who are you being so familiar with?"

This long-absent taunt finally broke through the tense atmosphere. Luo Wenzhou inexplicably breathed in relief. He pointed to some small steps beneath a tombstone. "Let's wait. We have to go down the mountain on the way back. With the rain this heavy, it could easily be dangerous."

Fei Du noncommittally sat down on the steps.

Holding up the carbon fiber umbrella, Luo Wenzhou felt the appearance he presented was of a flourishing mushroom. He turned to bow slightly to the woman on the gravestone, then sat down beside Fei Du.

Fei Du gave people—gave Luo Wenzhou, at least—the feeling that he was like the metal-framed glasses resting on the bridge of his nose, seeming very exquisite, but in fact silently giving off a feeling of inhuman cold.

But now, trapped under an umbrella, he was surprised to find that this person's body temperature wasn't cold at all.

The sudden rain intensified, and the summer heat laid down its arms and went to ground; a damp coolness assaulted the senses, increasingly setting off the warmth of the person next to him.

"I come over here to have a look once in a while." Luo Wenzhou spoke first. "After all, it was the first case I handled that involved a death."

"So it made a deep impression?" said Fei Du.

"Yes." After Luo Wenzhou's terse nod, he was silent for a while. Then he said, "Although it wasn't your mom that left a deep impression."

Fei Du carelessly said, "Captain Luo has seen all kinds of corpses, of course…"

"I could never forget you," said Luo Wenzhou.

Fei Du's words stopped at once; he almost choked at this statement. He turned his head and gave Luo Wenzhou a stunned look, suspecting that he had eaten something funny.

Luo Wenzhou hadn't noticed that he had said something rather open to interpretation. His lightly calloused hands slowly rubbed the carbon fiber umbrella handle, and he stared fixedly at the bluestone slab in front of him, saying, "I remember the weather that day was also pretty bad. Tao Ran and I were phoning our elders to ask for instructions while we rushed desperately towards your house. Because the circumstances were unclear, we were afraid that if it had been a murder as part of a robbery, the killer could still be nearby, and you weren't willing to leave. What kind of danger would a child run into like that?"

Fei Du seemed somewhat moved. He restrained his provoking smile that wasn't quite a smile.

"When we arrived, you were sitting on the stone step at your house's gate just like this," said Luo Wenzhou. "Then you heard footsteps coming and raised your head to look at us. I've never forgotten your expression then."

It had been a gaze so clear it had been nearly wild; it had seemed to be stifling never before uttered cries for help and ardent hopes—even though the boy's manner then had been controlled and introverted.

"It made me remember a story my shifu (2) had told me.

"It was something that happened when he was young. You wouldn't even have been born then.—It was a missing child case; several children went missing in a row, all of them little girls around ten years old. They got out of school and should have gone home, but they never made it home, disappearing without anyone being the wiser. Our criminal investigation techniques were limited then; they basically didn't know what DNA was. To determine the victim's identity, they had to rely on clumsy means like blood groups and special characteristics provided by the victim's family. In the end that case remained unsolved. None of the six missing girls were found. The father of one of the victims couldn't bear the shock. He fell apart, and he was never entirely stable afterwards."

Fei Du didn't interrupt; he sat quietly beside him, listening.

"He came to the bureau a hundred times without any outcome. That wasn't the only case going on; when there were no breakthroughs, everyone's eyes would have to turn away eventually. They sent a criminal policeman who was fairly good at talking to people to deal with that father who wouldn't stop pestering them. That was my shifu. As they had more contact, my shifu took pity on him, sometimes counseled him to go forward; if he really couldn't get past the mental rut of the child, then he should have another one while he was still young. He didn't listen. No one helped him investigate, so he went to investigate himself. Several months later, he popped up one day, cornered my shifu and said that he'd found a suspect."

At this point, Luo Wenzhou paused and turned his head to look at Fei Du's eyes.

The corners of Fei Du's eyes had thoroughly developed; their shape still vaguely followed the mold of when he had been younger, but what was inside them was not at all the same. At some point his gaze had become indolent, his eyes frequently half-closed. Sometimes he would smile urbanely at someone, but his expression would be unfocused, full of abstraction. Of that stubborn, clear, even somewhat paranoid look from back then, not a trace remained.

All of that seemed only to exist only in Luo Wenzhou's mind, an illusion he had concocted for himself.

As the time he spent staring dumbly at Fei Du drew on too long, Fei Du couldn't resist putting in a word to disgust him. Harboring ill-intent, his gaze swept over Luo Wenzhou's nose bridge and lips. Fei Du lowered his voice and said, "Captain Luo, please don't pretend to be innocent at your age. Don't you know that this conduct of staring into someone's eyes usually means you're asking to be kissed?"

Luo Wenzhou was a veteran of a hundred battles and not at all easy to disgust. He came around at once and unflappably returned fire. "Don't worry. If I was asking anyone, it wouldn't be you, whelp."

The two of them at the same time acutely felt that another battle was fermenting, and this time there was no Tao Ran to intervene. All around them there was only the curtain of rain covering the sky, and the two of them had only one umbrella. There was nowhere to hide. They could only use their intellects, each forebear and retreat a step—they turned their heads away and closed their mouths at the same time.

After a long time, Fei Du's brows lifted lightly. "What does the missing child case have to do with me?" he asked impatiently.

"My shifu described his expression back then. He said the father's eyes were like ice-cold grottoes with two fiercely blazing points of longing in them, burning his soul—when I saw you, for some reason I thought of what he'd said."

Having heard this, Fei Du raised his long, slanting brows high and snorted. "Really. You have problems with your vision, or else your imagination is too abundant. And then what?"

"He identified a middle school teacher with a rather good reputation. That teacher was known far and wide as a good person. He had won a prize for public-spiritedness, and he'd been taken as a model worker," said Luo Wenzhou. "Even though my shifu thought he had lost his mind a little, he still went to investigate according to what the father said."

"Privately?" said Fei Du.

"He was a teacher. If rumors got out, even if he was innocent, he'd never hear the end of it, so my shifu only dared to investigate privately. He investigated for a long time without finding anything to the purpose. My shifu's suspicion that the father had a mental problem became even stronger. Then two of them parted on bad terms and my shifu left it alone. But not long after that…there was a homicide. The father had taken a melon knife and stabbed the teacher he suspected."

Fei Du let out a short, breathy laugh. "Set your mind at ease, I definitely wouldn't stab anybody. Contract killers are more our style."

Luo Wenzhou ignored his provocation. "The scariest thing was that while they were in the process of investigating the victim, they found the clothes of the missing girls in his basement, along with another unconscious girl."

Luo Wenzhou paused slightly, letting out a light and slow breath under the mask of the rain, remembering the old criminal policeman repeatedly urging him, "If someone looks at you like that, it shows that he has expectations of you, and no matter what the outcome, you absolutely cannot fail to live up to those expectations."

Having listened to this story that was like an urban legend, Fei Du wasn't at all stirred. He only curiously asked, "You have a shifu?"

"An elder who took us around when we just started working," said Luo Wenzhou. "I don't know whether Tao Ran ever mentioned him to you.—A few years ago he gave up his life while arresting an offender."

Fei Du hesitated for a while, thinking with his brow knitted. "This was three years ago?"

"How do you know?"

"Because I have no memory of it," said Fei Du. "Three years ago my dad had just had his accident, and I was tied up with all kinds of things. That was the only time I didn't contact Tao Ran at all."

When Luo Wenzhou heard this, some sinew in his heart twinged wrong, and he blurted out a question: "Do you really like Tao Ran?"

Fei Du's posture was very relaxed, legs crossed and fingers laying on his knee. At these words the corners of his eyes curved and he mockingly asked, "What, Tao Ran's all ready to find someone to marry, and you still want to fight it out with me?"

Luo Wenzhou was rather helpless; then he shook his head and laughed, suddenly thinking the two of them were a little like survivors of the same disaster, who could smile on meeting and forget their past enmities. He unconsciously felt around for his cigarettes, then forced himself to put them back. Next to him, Fei Du said, "Go ahead and smoke."

"Didn't you have pharyngitis?" asked Luo Wenzhou.

Fei Du shrugged. "No, I was just nitpicking to make you uncomfortable."

Luo Wenzhou: "…"

He was still a scoundrel, after all!

He couldn't resist giving Fei Du a light punch on the shoulder; but Fei Du turned out to be a true gentleman, pursuing the policy of "use your mouth and not your fists." Suffering a surprise attack to his shoulder, his relaxed and elegant posture became unbalanced, his raised leg dropped, and Fei Du hurriedly reached out a hand to support himself, ending up with a handful of mud.

Not only did Luo Wenzhou not apologize, he actually thought it was pretty funny. Next to Fei Du, he heartlessly laughed out loud.

Fei Du: "…"

Barbarian!

The two of them for once managed to coexist in peace for a long time. The force of the rain gradually slackened, and Luo Wenzhou returned the umbrella to Fei Du. "Tao Ran has finished fixing up his new apartment. He'll be moving in this week. In a little while we'll go over there and sit a while."

Fei Du didn't answer. Expressionless, he looked askance at him, and Luo Wenzhou oddly felt that he was like Luo Yiguo, both of them having that "the world is full of mad dogs and I alone am elevated" sort of "scorn for the mortal world." Having found a new source of entertainment, he charged into the drizzle, covering his head, unable to suppress his laughter.

At this stage, it was as if the smoke and dust of their deep resentment had dispersed, and the true state of affairs had come to light.

The tail-end of the follow-up work was proceeding busily but without agitation. It included synthesizing the testimony of Wang Hongliang and other such people, as well as the police thoroughly eliminating any possibility that He Zhongyi had been involved with drugs. In the end they were unable to pinpoint the origin of that mysterious text message, and put it down, along with the two pinhole cameras found nearby, to the "superstar" Zhao Haochang's performance.

Although he steadfastly refused to acknowledge it.

Ma Xiaowei was detained for several days, then sent to a drug rehabilitation center along with Wu Xuechun and some others, preparing to struggle to build a new life.

Luo Wenzhou personally escorted the two of them into a car. Before leaving, Wu Xuechun looked deeply at him, and Luo Wenzhou nodded to her; he also patted Ma Xiaowei on his head, which had been shaved so that it resembled a kiwi fruit. "You've escaped from calamity. Be careful in the future."

The car drove off, and Luo Wenzhou smoked a cigarette by the road, sighing to himself and for the moment swallowing down two thorns that were like fish bones in his throat.—Had Chen Zhen's death really been an accident, as Huang Jinglian had said?

And how had the mistrustful black cab driver, faced with Wang Hongliang's desperately strict precautions, been able to get his slipshod report to the City Bureau?

Hadn't he been afraid that the City Bureau and those people were a snake and a rat sharing the same burrow?

With Chen Zhen's death, there was in the end no way to pursue these issues.

His scalp still carrying the warmth of the young policeman's hand, Ma Xiaowei silently sat in the car, watching the billboards quickly falling back on both sides of the road.

At a red light, an unprepossessing sedan stopped next to them. The car's window glinted, slowly rolling down, and in a crack the width of two fingers, the screen of a phone appeared. There was a privacy screen stuck onto it, so only from Ma Xiaowei's point of view could the words on it be seen clearly. It said: You did well.

Ma Xiaowei's eyes opened wide, and he shuddered. Before he'd had a clear look at the hand holding the phone, the sedan's window had already shut, and it parted ways with them up ahead.

A week later, Fei Du had bid goodbye to his psychiatrist of many years, and Tao Ran finally had a foundation in the city; he had moved into his new apartment, and a big crowd of rowdy friends and colleagues came for a housewarming.

The new apartment looked quite respectable, but in fact it was pushing thirty. It was an overaged building, attractive on the outside but shabby within.

"Deputy Tao, let me tell you, right where you come in the door, you should put a retro clock, one of those kinds in European train stations. You can see the time, and it'll have a special feel. In that corner there you can hang a terrarium, and in the kitchen you can have a whole new set of kitchen utensils…" Lang Qiao was an armchair interior decorator; from the moment she walked in, she was running around everywhere, setting the world to rights. When she stuck her head into the kitchen and saw Luo Wenzhou with his back to her, holding a pot of well-blended sauce in one hand, Lang Qiao was wholly shocked. "Goodness, boss, why are you here?"

"Who would it be, if not me? Your Deputy Tao? You want noodles for the whole meal?" Luo Wenzhou looked at her distastefully. "Move over. If you're not helping, then don't get in the way."

Lang Qiao hurried out of the way, watching him pour the sauce onto a plate of braised choy sum, the scent immediately steaming up. She swallowed a mouthful of saliva and wanted to pinch a piece to taste but had her paw knocked away by Luo Wenzhou, who seemed to have grown eyes on the back of his head.

"Why do you always go over to the dining hall to eat?" said Lang Qiao.

"What else would I do?" Luo Wenzhou took up a vegetable knife, quickly and evenly cut an onion into thin slices, then tossed all of it into a pot of cooking curry chicken. "Go home by myself and make a sumptuous banquet to eat with the cat? Am I crazy?"

Lang Qiao's eyes lit up. "Right, you have a cat! Boss, you're a very dear colleague; hurry up and let me have a look at your little kitty!"

"Straighten out your tongue when you talk." Luo Wenzhou couldn't stand her pestering; he impatiently put the pot of curry on simmer, then got his phone out of his pocket and opened a pet surveillance app. "Look for yourself. It may not be in its bed. Listen, can your village change its totem? You can't worship something else? Worshipping a cat is so vulgar!"

Lang Qiao devoutly received the phone in both hands. As soon as the camera connected, an enormous cat's face appeared on the screen.

Luo Yiguo loomed at the camera for a while. Then, having seen something, Master Cat leapt onto the windowsill. Right in front of Luo Wenzhou and Lang Qiao, it performed an act of cruel and infeline harm towards a potted spider plant hanging over the windowsill.

With his own eyes, Luo Wenzhou watched it snatch and bite, extend its murderous claws against the spider plant's hanging basket, and pull the flowerpot down to the ground, the beauty of the bone china flowerpot and the plant passing away together.

Lang Qiao: "…"

This cat's style was pretty intense.

She hesitantly handed back the phone. "So… My condolences?"

As a head of household, Luo Wenzhou rather wanted to leave home.

Just then, Tao Ran stuck his head in. "What time did Fei Du say he was coming? Will he be able to find the place?"

Luo Wenzhou looked out of the kitchen window and saw an enormous, garish SUV—the other "Yiguo" had already arrived. His head hurt briefly. "He's downstairs. I see his car."

It was the local custom to bring an article of cookware or a small kitchen appliance as a present when congratulating someone on an advancement. Fei Du, remembering the City Bureau's office smelling strongly of sesame oil, had simply bought a fully automatic espresso machine.

The weight of the big cardboard box, fully a meter high, really wasn't light. For Tao Ran's sake, Fei Du for once did a bit of manual labor, carrying the appliance over his shoulder to the elevator…

He was then faced with an elevator that had gone on strike. He exchanged helpless looks with some dog-walking old men who couldn't manage the stairs.

After quite some time, he belatedly thought of something, got out his phone and called Tao Ran. "Ge, what floor do you live on?"

"The twelfth," said Tao Ran happily over the phone. "The elevator's broken today, you could walk a couple of steps."

Fei Du: "…"

He looked down at the cardboard box, feeling that he seemed to have screwed Luo Wenzhou.

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Author's note:

(2) Something on the order of teacher/mentor, in this context.

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