I felt terrible for him. Awkwardly I asked whether he’d sought medical help.
‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘When I was small, my father kicked me and that caused the problem.’
He paced behind my back, laughing crudely. ‘You know, Chen Zhong, that day I desperately wanted to do the same to you.’
That first day at university, Li Liang was the last of our dormitory crew to show up. The Sichuan hall monitor was concerned; he told us that our floor should have another Sichuan student and we should take care of him. That night at twelve, Li Liang knocked lightly on the door and said in a strong Sichuan accent: ‘Fellow students, please open the door. I’m down for this dormitory too.’
Suppressing our mirth at his formal diction, we opened the door to let him in. Li Liang wore a pair of grey trousers and carried an enormous travel bag. His face had a slightly shy expression. Bighead Wang was asleep and snoring like thunder, a fat hand across his stomach. Chen Zhong was wearing just undershorts as he shook Li Liang’s hand. On the 15th of September that year, as far as I remember, there was no war. Nobody famous died. A few babies were born and, on their first sight of the world, began to cry loudly. No one knew how their lives would turn out, but it is said we are all spirits from heaven.
Trying to persuade Li Liang to quit smack was impossible. He was well aware of all the logical arguments, and always circumvented them by cutting directly to the ultimate question: ‘If you only had one month to live, would you do drugs or not?’
I thought about it seriously, then had to admit, yes, I would.
He smiled. ‘In my view, there’s not much difference between one month and ten years. Life shouldn’t be a test that you copy out over and over again. Do you understand?’
‘I’m confused,’ I said. ‘All I know is that smack is bad for you. Haven’t you seen those addicts? They all look like ghouls.’
He dragged me before a mirror and then he said, ‘Look at yourself.’
Yes, he had a point. I was emaciated. My face was pallid, my hair dishevelled. My eyes were red and puffy, and there were hairs growing from my nose. I didn’t know when the corners of my eyes had got those lines. On one side of my nose were two black spots like fly shit.
‘Look at yourself,’ Li Liang said, ‘You look like a ghoul, don’t you?’
When I left, he said to me, ‘Tell Ye Mei. She can have a divorce, but she can’t have a cent of my money.’
‘You should tell her yourself,’ I said. ‘I’ll never see her again after today.’
He studied me coldly then said, ‘Fuck you. She only cares about you now.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Liu Three and Zhou Weidong came to blows. I was having an afternoon nap in the office when through my sleep I heard this huge racket. Pushing open the door, I encountered a crowd of people. Liu Three was pacing tensely, the veins on his temples were pulsing. Several people were trying to restrain Zhou Weidong, as his hands and feet flailed, and saliva sprayed grotesquely from his mouth. He declared that he wanted to have carnal relations with Liu Three’s mother. Fatty Dong threw his weight around and pleaded with Zhou Weidong to calm down. Zhou Weidong wouldn’t listen, which made Fatty furious. He noticed me. ‘These are all in your team, you should be managing this.’
I replied tartly, ‘Isn’t Liu Three your lackey? I’m not getting involved, let them go on fighting.’
Zhou Weidong was one metre seventy-eight of intimidating might, so even two Liu Threes together couldn’t beat him up.
Fatty Dong looked grave. ‘Good, I’ve noted your attitude,’ he said, and clenching his jaw, marched into his office, presumably to write up a report.
I wasn’t scared of Fatty Dong then, because my hands were around his throat. On the day Head Office had issued its suggestions for handling my debt problem, we were having one of our regular meetings. The accountant passed the suggestions to Fatty Dong and the jerk was so enraged it seemed he might have an apoplexy. Throwing caution to the wind, he muttered that Head Office were all idiots, and then quipped sardonically to Liu Three: ‘Seems Head Office encourages the embezzlement of company money. You should borrow a few thousand too, and blow it on whores and gambling.’
‘Write down Boss Dong’s suggestions,’ I told Zhou Weidong.
The guy made a show of noting it down. Fatty Dong realised that he’d forgotten himself and his face turned pale.
Liu Three had been having a hard time lately. The week before I’d asked him to go to Chongqing to settle a bad account. It was a tough assignment and Liu Three pleaded that he didn’t want to go. I said, ‘If you don’t want to go then just hand in your resignation.’ He departed angrily. The value of the Chongqing disputed accounts was in the region of 400,000 or more, and they went back to the dawn of time, 1999. Since then the company had restructured its finance department several times so the accounts were in a real mess. No one could tell which were real and which were false.
Another difficulty was that the client had an unbelievably bad temper. If you said anything he didn’t like, his face immediately clouded over and then he’d explode. Liu Three also had a foul temper. He frequently got his ear bitten off for banging the desk in clients’ offices, and then would go crying to Fatty Dong for help, saying that I’d framed him.
As soon as Liu Three had left in the company car, I called the client and asked him to set up something to make Liu Three look bad.
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I always thought that kid was an ugly bastard.’
When the client had visited Chengdu to experience ‘local culture’ he’d been extremely satisfied with the hospitality he’d received. Later he asked me to help him hook up with a girl he’d met before at the Jinjiang Hotel, called Bai Xiaowen or something. I could tell from his voice that he desperately wanted her in his arms again.
In ‘places of entertainment’ the girls very rarely used their own names, and sure enough I got a friend to investigate, and found there was no such person as Bai Xiaowen. Even her phone number and address were false. When I told him, the guy sounded surprisingly crushed.
‘Big Brother, this was just a one-off transaction,’ I told him. ‘Don’t mistake it for a long-term contract, OK?’
He laughed, and then invited me to Chongqing, saying that the girls there were exceptionally hot. Underneath all the talk, I knew he was looking for a way to keep the disputed thousands. He was always calling to query the account and generally behaving unscrupulously; in short, he was a typical businessman.
When Liu Three returned, I showed him the client’s complaint form and asked him what we should do about it.
He looked at me superciliously and said, ‘You should go to Chongqing yourself and get the money back. Then if you want to fire me or cut my salary I’ll have no objection.’
I’d been to Chongqing numerous times and had plenty of experience of the hot girls, hotpot and hot pepper chicken dishes of Geleshan. Compared with Chengdu, Chongqing was down to earth but coarse, irreverent but edgy. A little while back, I was wandering the streets there when I heard a man and a woman talking.
‘Why are you walking so fast?’ the man said.
The girl replied, ‘I need to have a piss.’
I laughed when I saw the speaker — a fine-figured, beautiful girl.
That night I went to a nightclub and picked a girl who looked like the film star Gong Li. I groped her a few times and she wasn’t happy about it.
‘If you want to screw, then take off your trousers. If you want to sing, then sit still,’ she snapped at me. ‘What are you poking about for?’
I felt ashamed.
This time the client drove to the bus station to meet me. At his side was a girl who resembled a middle school student. I asked whether this was his daughter and he prickled and said it was his new lover. I almost vomited at the thought of that bulging stomach on top of that little girl’s body. This guy also had a violent side: once when we were at the Orchid Song Hall, a girl complained about his bad breath
and he slapped her face and swore at her.
The most obvious change in me since university was that I didn’t get too worked up about things. In our dormitory, we’d come up with a list of the basic requirements to be a ‘real man’. Among these were: A real man must come to a woman’s defence. Big Brother had his own famous saying: Women are to use, not abuse. To hit a woman is unpardonable.
But because of money, I had to call this bastard a brother, and help him get women. When I thought about it, it really was disgraceful.
We had dinner at the Marriott where the abalone alone cost more than 400 yuan. In between courses Old Lai constantly criticised our company. He said our management was weak and our clients suffered. If we continued to provoke him, he wouldn’t do business with us anymore.
I said, ‘OK, if you want to lose 800,000 profit each year, I’ll find someone else.’
He was slightly thrown by my attitude. This was where I was more effective than Liu Three: I didn’t just know how to woo clients; I could menace them too when required. Call them ‘brother’ and needle them at the same time.
He nudged Young Lover, and the teenager poured me a cup of five-grain alcohol. Her fingers were tapered, her skin white and tender. She looked sixteen at the most; her face was childish and still had an air of shy embarrassment. I couldn’t help feeling very sorry for her.
My own intentions were far from pure. Of the disputed 400,000 we had a fairly strong claim to about 120,000 which we definitely had to get back. As for the remaining 280,000 I wasn’t too bothered whether he gave it back or not, but he at least had to give me some. This guy was more corrupt than anyone, he should be able to guess what I was up to. The posturing was a bluff, to give him some leeway when discussing price. That was all. My ideal sum was 50,000, which would allow him to exchange 280,000 for 50,000. I didn’t like to imagine how many more young girls he could corrupt with those dishonest gains.
After dinner we went on to a teahouse. He sent Young Lover away and said to me lewdly, ‘How about her? Very tender, yeah?’
‘Be careful she’s not underage,’ I said, ‘otherwise you’ll go down for years.’
He laughed and then went straight to the main subject. ‘What are we going to do about that 400,000? You make a suggestion.’
I savoured a mouthful of fragrant maofeng, then smilingly kicked the ball back to him.
‘You first. You’re the one who’s been on me like a dog in heat for over a month. You must have some ideas.’
In recent years I’d fought hundreds of battles — with suppliers, sales agents, advertising companies, insurance companies. I’d honed my negotiating skills, earning a reputation with clients for toughness. Often we’d negotiate for a while and then suddenly they’d exclaim: ‘How did I get screwed by you yet again!’
Actually, there were only two secrets to negotiating success. The first was to let the enemy go first. The second: at all costs disguise the cards in your hand.
My greatest success came when I was discussing replenishing our stock with the spare parts vendor on Scholar’s Cap Street. The boss was a thirty-something woman. After we’d signed the contract she almost cried, saying she’d never met anyone as ruthless as me and she’d need to work for a year to recover her losses. This woman was the voluptuous flower of Scholar’s Cap Street and her husband, twenty years older than her, was one of Chengdu’s first millionaires. I’d looked at her chest, thinking, If you weren’t so loyal to your husband, there’s no way I’d leave you feeling bad.
The client claimed our company’s accounts were a mess and that we’d issued duplicate bills so that the 400,000 was basically fictitious. He asked us to set things straight and write off the debt. I guffawed so violently, I nearly showered his face with tea.
‘Big brother, you must think I’m stupid,’ I said. ‘If it’s really as you say, then why are we sitting here?’
‘OK, so what do you suggest we do?’ he replied.
I produced a thick pile of documents. ‘Here’s all the hard evidence: 400,000 yuan and we want it all.’
He looked furious. ‘If you just want to fuck me and my family, forget it.’
I knew exactly how to play this game.
‘There’s nothing I can do,’ I told him. ‘You see, I’m just an employee. Not a penny of this money goes into my pocket, but I have an obligation to sort this out. You’re my big brother; you should show some understanding for your little brother.’
Now he was clear on my intentions. I drank tea and waited for his reaction. He muttered for a while, then asked me how much.
‘As a minimum you should repay the company 150,000,’ I said. ‘Of the remaining 250,000, whatever you say is OK.’
‘You’re clearly presenting me with a false bill,’ he said. ‘What 250,000? At the most it is six or seven thousand. Let’s have half each, OK?’
In what appeared to be a digression, I told him a story about the time when Old Sun and I went to Wenjiang sauna. Boss Sun decided to see what it was like to be an emperor and called for one tall and one short girl to come to his room. After negotiations he said he’d pay 1,000 all up, which he’d allocate according to the quality of their work. The tall girl was new and not very open. First, she was reluctant to take off her clothes, and then when Old Sun changed girls halfway through, she asked him to change condom. The old guy didn’t have any choice and, despite his curses, put on a new condom. He was about to re-enter the battle scene when he went limp and couldn’t get it up again, even with manual stimulation. He fiddled with it for ages, but there was no way the session could go on, which infuriated him. In the end, he gave the short girl the entire 1,000. The tall girl thought this unfair and told Old Sun. Old Sun said, ‘You did nothing to satisfy me, so why should I help you to make money?’
The final sentence was the moral of the story. Old Lai first started to laugh, but then, after turning it over in his mind, he looked serious and said, ‘You talk too much. If you’re not happy about something, tell me outright. What are you getting at?’
I explained: ‘Doing business is the same as sex. It’s all about satisfying each other’s desires so everyone is happy.’
He looked at me half admiringly, half grudgingly, then said, ‘OK, last offer: 50,000. If you’re still not satisfied then let’s settle it through official channels.’
After we’d settled a price, the rest of the issues were easily dealt with — how to make the payment, how to destroy the evidence. I’d worked all this out long ago, and he didn’t really have much to add.
I felt pleased with myself because recently I’d managed to dredge up a fair amount of money. Twenty thousand from the billboards, and now 50,000 from this. It was enough for a deposit on a house. When I thought about houses though, I felt a bit sad because I didn’t know what Zhao Yue was doing now in our apartment. Perhaps there was someone lying in that place where I used to lie, caressing that lovely body I’d caressed so many times.
Young Lover was waiting impatiently outside; a few times she’d come in and disturbed us, then, seeing that we were still talking business, had left without saying anything. Whether intentionally or not, her eyes frequently met mine, making me a little excited.
The client saw this and said with a big smile, ‘OK, tonight you take her. I haven’t made any other arrangements for you.’
I was surprised by this. Feigning indignation, I said, ‘What kind of person do you take me for? A real man doesn’t take someone’s girl. Even if you threatened to cut off my head, I wouldn’t do this.’
He lit an extra mellow 555 and said smilingly, ‘You don’t need to be so false. You’ve been lusting for her all night — do you think I’m an idiot? Now you’re just pretending to be respectable.’
The client gave me a rundown of Young Lover’s specialities: ‘Her singing voice is voice is very sweet. She’s skilled in many positions, especially cowgirl.’
I looked at Young Lover again, and found her making eyes at me and pouting her lips, like a Japanese cart
oon character.
It was raining lightly on streets that were less crowded than usual. Young Lover opened a small embroidered umbrella, I put my arm around her shoulder, and we slowly walked along. We passed a few drab boutiques. Suddenly she grabbed my hand.
‘Brother Chen, will you buy me a skirt? It won’t be more than 100 yuan.’
I felt pity for her. ‘Go in and choose,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait here.’
She ran in eagerly and within five minutes, she’d tried on four long skirts. Each time she came out to seek my opinion, asking me whether it looked good or not. I nodded silently, thinking about the days when I’d browse the shops on Chunxi Street with Zhao Yue, hand in hand, drawn to the ones with the most people.
‘Does it look good?’ Young Lover asked.
I struggled to blink away tears at the thought of another smiling face: Zhao Yue used to say, ‘Does it look good? What mark would you give it?’
Young Lover came away with two skirts. Grand total: 260 yuan. Back at the hotel, she pressed her lips against my ear and murmured, ‘Brother Chen, you’re really good to me. Today, you can do whatever you like.’
My heart was suddenly consumed by a hatred that I didn’t really understand. I flung her onto the bed and, saying nothing, began to rip violently at her clothes. She pushed me away, apparently terrified, and pleaded with me to be careful of the buttons and zippers.
‘You don’t need to be so impatient. I’ll take them off myself,’ she said.
My physical strength suddenly left me and I lay there like a piece of wood as I thought of Zhao Yue. On our first night together, she had gripped my neck tight, asking me, ‘Do you love me? Do you love me?’
‘Put on your clothes and go home,’ I said.
Young Lover was struck dumb by this and she looked embarrassed. ‘Have I made you angry? Please forgive me. I’m young, I don’t understand a lot.’
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