by Chan Ho-Kei
“Take a look at this.”
Group: Class 3B
Posted by: 3B_Admin
Subject: [Class Admin] Sweater Orders
Time: October 10, 2014 16:02:53
The following people haven’t handed in their order forms yet. Please get in touch with the student aide when you see this.
Au Siu-Man, Mindy Chang, Trixie Tse, Woo Yui-Kar
Nga-Yee’s heart leaped when her sister’s name appeared, but she tried to get a grip on herself and kept reading.
Posted by: AuSiuMan
Subject: Re: [Class Admin] Sweater Orders
Time: October 10, 2014 20:01:41
No sweater for me, thanks.
I’ll get my form back to you Monday.
“Siu-Man—Siu-Man posted that?” Nga-Yee choked up. It was like seeing something her sister had left behind.
“Yes. This is her class discussion group.” N didn’t seem to notice how agitated she was, and he went on rather mechanically. “Enoch Secondary flaunts its use of IT, but it doesn’t actually have an IT team on staff. All its software is developed and maintained by an external vendor. The school administrator who manages the system is an idiot. Probably the school couldn’t be bothered to hire a specialist, so it put one of the clerks in charge. Only students and teachers ought to be able to see this group, but I hacked into it a few days ago, and now I have full access, including the back end.”
N scrolled, and Nga-Yee felt a jolt as her sister’s words disappeared. Yet another sudden departure. The screen now showed a densely packed spreadsheet.
“This shows all the data for this chat group, including deleted messages, who logged in when, posters’ IP addresses and user agents, and so forth. A quick look through will tell us what sorts of phones most people had. Look, your sister’s is here too.”
He moved the mouse to highlight a line:
Mozilla/5/0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.4; zh-tw; SonyST2LI Build/11.0.A.0.16)
AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.20
“I know from this that your sister posted using a Sony Android, model ST2li.” He picked up Siu-Man’s red cell phone and waved it at Nga-Yee. “If I wanted, I could add in a line of code that wouldn’t affect the front end, so everyone who logs in after this would leave behind a more complete digital footprint. Enoch Secondary’s end-of-semester exams just happen to finish today, and everyone will be coming online in droves to discuss their summer plans. Kids nowadays use their phones more than their computers, so if we’re patient, they’ll take the bait one by one.”
“What if someone doesn’t log on?”
N opened another tab to show a Twitter account with a smiling young woman as its avatar.
“Lots of young people are on social media—Facebook, Weibo, Instagram, and so on. They post everything that’s happened to them, photos, videos, new friendships—all public property. They’d rather collect ‘likes’ than hang on to their privacy. I don’t need to do any hacking to find out their personalities, social groups, lifestyles, even their hobbies.” N clicked on the page. “This account, ‘cute_cute_yiyi,’ belongs to one of your sister’s classmates, who posts on social media every day. She has a lot of garbage tweets and stupid pictures. A lot of people post unboxing videos or images when they get a new toy. For a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old, a new phone—especially one as expensive as an iPhone—would surely be worth bragging about.”
“How did you find this classmate?”
“Before you came by today, I’d been investigating everyone connected to your sister.” N pulled up his browser history to show the last thirty or forty websites he’d visited. “These all have something to do with her classmates. I’d been planning to look into her relationships with them, but now we can zoom in on a single detail: their phones.”
So she could count on him after all, Nga-Yee thought.
“Did you find any classmates she was close to?”
“No. In fact, I hardly found anything to do with her. Her classmates posted a line or two of condolences, and that was it. Not even any photos.”
“Huh?” Nga-Yee was startled by this. “She—she didn’t have a single friend?”
“You’re her big sister, Miss Au. Shouldn’t you know that better than I do?” He shot her a look. “But it’s no accident that I couldn’t find any pictures.”
“Why’s that?”
“If I were her friend, I’d delete every image I had of her. Have you forgotten what happened when that post appeared on Popcorn?”
Nga-Yee froze, realizing what he was getting at. In the days after kidkit727’s accusation went up, pictures of Siu-Man from her classmates’ social media got spread around. When this happened, the school had urged its students to delete any posts or photographs that could be used against Siu-Man.
“Then … how long will it take you to find something?” she asked.
“You mean the suspect with the iPhone?” N stroked his chin. “There are about two hundred people in your sister’s year. I’ll probably be able to capture seventy percent of them through the chat groups. As for the other thirty percent, I’ll have to go through them one by one, focusing on her past and present classmates. It’s a long weekend tomorrow because of the Dragon Boat Festival, so they’ll be free to go online tonight, and I’ll start gathering info from their school server. I should have something for you by tomorrow morning.”
“I’m off work tomorrow. I can stay here and wait for the list of names.”
N looked perturbed by this response. “Hey, Miss Au, are you joking?” He sounded dubious. “I’m used to working alone, and I hate being supervised. I said I’d do this for you, and I won’t go back on my word.”
“No, no. It’s not that I don’t trust you—”
“Then go home and wait a day or two!”
“I only wanted to find out as soon as possible,” she wheedled. “If I went home, I’d just sit around thinking of Siu-Man reading those horrible messages. I don’t know what I’d do with myself.”
N frowned and glared at her. They were both silent for a while. Nga-Yee clutched a corner of her blouse and tried to think of some way she could persuade him to let her stay, but whenever she looked up and met his gaze, she was afraid he’d yell at her as soon as she opened her mouth. No, worse than yelling, he’d bark out a curt refusal.
The next thing N said was completely unexpected.
“Fine, up to you. As long as you don’t bother me. But if you break my train of thought, I’ll kick you out.”
Nga-Yee nodded. She stood and retreated to the sofa. “I’ll sit here and wait.”
N ignored her, reaching for the remote. The speakers began blaring psychedelic rock. Nga-Yee rarely listened to Western music, and she didn’t recognize this rock group. She sat there for a while before she realized that she’d been staring at N. In order to keep from annoying him, she tried to distract herself with a novel she’d borrowed from the library, but she wasn’t in the mood to read, and not a single word entered her brain. The book was Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, set in 1970s California. If she’d gotten past the first few pages, she’d have realized how much N had in common with the main character, a rogue detective named Doc.
She kept flicking through the pages, looking up now and then at the silent N. After forty minutes of this, a familiar tune caught her attention.
“Not this again,” she mumbled. It was the same song N had played loudly to chase her away, when he first refused his services. As the final note faded away, the psychedelic rock number came on again. The album was going to repeat.
Nga-Yee gradually lost herself in its hypnotic rhythm.
“Hey!”
Unexpectedly, N had called out to her. Her attention snapped toward him.
“What? Did you find something?”
“How could I? It’s only been a couple of hours,” he said grumpily. “I was going to ask, are you hungry?”
Nga-Yee glanced at the clock. It was past seven.
She nodded. “Mmm, a little.”
“Good.” He handed her a twenty-dollar note and a ten-dollar coin. “Go get me some takeout from Loi’s.”
She reluctantly accepted the money. She’d thought he was asking out of thoughtfulness, but in hindsight she realized that was naive of her.
“Loi’s—is that the one near Whitty Street?”
“Yes. I’ll have a large wonton noodles, reduced noodles, extra scallions, soup on the side, fried greens, no oyster sauce,” he recited expressionlessly.
What a finicky order just for a bowl of noodles, she grumbled to herself.
Nga-Yee left the apartment, crossed Water Street, and walked slowly down Des Voeux Road West. Second Street was desolate in the twilight, but as soon as she turned onto Des Voeux, the city’s hubbub engulfed her. Office workers hurried home as lovers canoodled at the tram stop, and the restaurants were filled with families having dinner. Supermarkets, discount clothing stores, electronic shops, barbers—the lights blazed away, and although it wasn’t as crowded as Causeway Bay or Mong Kok, there was still plenty of life.
After ten minutes, she arrived at Loi’s, which was less crowded than at lunchtime: there were only a couple of customers ahead of her.
“What would you like, Miss?” the man stirring the wok called out in a resonant voice as soon as she stepped inside.
“A large wonton noodles, reduced noodles, extra scallions, soup on the side, fried greens, no oyster sauce.” She glanced at the handwritten menu on the wall. “And, um, a small wonton noodles.” She’d be living on borrowed money for the rest of the month and so resigned herself to ordering the cheapest item.
“Soup on the side for the small wonton noodles too?”
“Uh—no need.”
“It’s better if you keep them separate, that way the noodles won’t soak up all the liquid,” said the boss, scribbling on his order pad with one hand and taking the money from Nga-Yee with the other. “You’re seven or eight minutes away. That’s enough time for a perfectly good bowl of noodles to be ruined.”
She gaped at him. “How do you know how far I have to walk?”
“This is for N, isn’t it? Not many people ask for extra scallions and fewer noodles.”
“True, not many people are that picky,” she said diplomatically.
“Not at all.” The man chuckled as he started putting her order together. “These days, people always want more noodles. It’s the same price for a reduced portion, so who would ever ask for that? They just throw away their leftovers. But N understands that getting rid of food is an insult to the chef, so he asks for only what he can eat. Not to brag, I might not make these noodles myself, but I get them fresh from an old-school noodle seller on Third Street every day. Same high quality, year after year. As for the wontons, I get the shrimp first thing every morning—”
As he chattered on about the superb wonton noodles, Nga-Yee’s mind wandered. When she was here before, she’d seen the boss greeting N like a regular. If he knew exactly how many minutes she’d walked, he must know where N lived.
“Um, excuse me …” she interrupted. “Do you know N well?”
“Not particularly, though he’s been a regular … six or seven years now.”
“What kind of person is he?” The noodle seller seemed frank, so Nga-Yee thought it would be okay to ask him directly.
He looked her in the eye and smiled. “He’s the most upright guy I’ve ever met.”
Nga-Yee would never have imagined the word “upright” being applied to N. He was clearly a cunning hacker who enjoyed bossing people around and an arrogant asshole who defeated secret society gangsters by being even more despicable than they. There was nothing “right” about him, let alone “upright.” If she had to say something good about him, Nga-Yee would have gone for “reliable”—though she was withholding judgment until he actually got her some results.
The food was ready, packed into five separate containers. The boss handed it over, and Nga-Yee headed back to N’s place.
“Oh!” As she walked up the slope of Water Street, it hit her what the boss had meant by “upright.”
He must have misunderstood, she thought resentfully. A young woman buying dinner for a scruffy bachelor, then trying to find out about his character. She must have looked like she was wondering whether to settle—or at least was contemplating an affair.
No wonder he looked at me like that. That meaningful laugh … Loi and N are friends, so of course he decided to help N out by praising him. When you can’t say anything good about a man, “upright” is a safe choice.
Only now did Nga-Yee realize how rash she’d been, a single woman wanting to spend the night at the home of a disreputable bachelor. She hadn’t had a single friend all through secondary school, let alone anything resembling a date. Even as an adult, she hadn’t had much to do with men. There was no room in her life for love, the way there was for other girls. She’d been so busy taking care of her sister, working, and helping to keep the house together. Then her mother had gotten ill. All the people she cared for had left her one by one. She still didn’t have many friends, just acquaintances from the library, where her coworkers were mostly women and married men. It was lonely.
Don’t think too much, she told herself, shaking her head, trying to forget her impulsiveness and Loi’s insinuations. She had to keep her eye on the goal: finding Siu-Man’s killer. She would pay any price to make that happen. From the moment she’d seen Siu-Man lying in that pool of blood, she’d stopped caring about herself or her future.
In this complicated frame of mind, she climbed the stairs of 151 Second Street, finding N’s security gate wide open. Pushing open the front door, she wondered if he’d taken advantage of her absence to go missing, but there he was at the desk, completely absorbed in the two monitors. Nothing had changed in the room, apart from the music—he’d put on a different CD.
She set the noodles down on a corner of his desk. He didn’t thank her, just stuck out his palm. She paused for a moment, managed not to roll her eyes, and handed over a two-dollar coin. His order had cost twenty-eight dollars.
Bullshit that he’s “upright,” the little miser, she thought.
She went back to the armchair and gobbled her meal. The noodles, wontons, and soup were all delicious. She was surprised to find herself actually hungry—finding out about Siu-Man’s torment might have killed her appetite for good. It was N who didn’t touch his food, at least to start with—she heard him slurping his noodles only a full half hour later.
The speaker was blaring out a rock song. Nga-Yee’s English was only so-so, and she couldn’t make sense of the odd lyric she picked out: “Jesus,” “crows,” “revolution,” “raccoon.” She got out Inherent Vice and started reading distractedly. Time trickled on. She went to the kitchen for a glass of water and used the bathroom with its tricky latch. Then it was the wee hours of the morning, and still N hadn’t finished. She was slumped across the armchair and armrest, her eyes half shut as she continued reading about Doc’s feud with a cop named Bigfoot.
“Oh, I fell asleep …” Her eyes blinked open, and she realized she’d dozed off in the chair. When she was awake enough to focus on the wall clock, she was startled to see that it was past six in the morning. She’d slept a whole four hours, her book in her arms. The lights, music, and computer had been switched off, and the first rays of the sun were coming in through the window.
She quickly turned to the desk, but the chair was empty. A door on the other side of the room that had been open before was now shut. It must be N’s bedroom. She was about to wake him and demand to know how the investigation was going, but decided that might be a bit too much.
I was just sitting there and still couldn’t stay awake. I can hardly complain if he needs some sleep, she thought, and sat back down.
Her thoughts ran wild again. Once more she imagined what Siu-Man must have looked like reading those messages. The image of her sister with that unsavory guy
flashed through her mind. How many secrets did Siu-Man have? When kidkit727 threatened to “expose” her, was that an empty threat? Did Siu-Man have a different personality away from her family? Aching all over from her night in the armchair and trying to get rid of these unhealthy thoughts, Nga-Yee stood and started pacing around the room.
Stuff was crammed into every corner. Even the positions of the trash bags hadn’t changed from the time of her first visit. Nga-Yee liked things to be tidy, and because her mother was so busy with work, she’d been the one to keep their home spick-and-span. She wasn’t a germaphobe, but mess got to her. N’s apartment was starting to get on her nerves, and the worst offenders were the two large bookshelves in one corner.
What a shame, she thought, looking at the jumble of books. As a lifelong reader and professional librarian, it hurt her to see them being mistreated. Some were upright, some stacked on top of others, and the rest, bent and buckled, jammed into any available space.
She quietly recited the titles to herself, only to find that she couldn’t understand most of them—she, who spent her days surrounded by books. They were mostly in English, with a few in Chinese or Japanese. UNIX: The Complete Reference; POSIX Operating Systems Interface Standard; Network Security: Current Status and Future Directions; Public-Key Cryptography; Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. These might as well have been in an alien language. Even less comprehensible was an old volume with an orange cover, lying horizontally over some other books: Department of Defense Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, with the American crest above it. There was a series with a design of wild animals on their spines, but when she pulled them out, thinking they might be zoology references, she found more alien words: 802.11 Wireless Internet Technology; Managing Unix.Linux in Python; and so on. There was a snake on the last one. Could that be the python?
The whole place was a filthy mess. She looked around the room. The polystyrene containers from yesterday were still on his desk.
N emerged from his bedroom a little over an hour later, at eight precisely. The moment he opened the door, he froze at the sight before him.