by Liu Zhenyun
They had become strangers. Why would she help him now? The money was as good as gone. The amount would mean little to Li, but to Liu it meant his survival. He could never tell anyone where the money came from, but the note gave him a sense of security and hope. When the six-year period came to an end, he would have the money, which could be turned into a weapon. When his son asked him:
“Why haven’t you sent me the money? Don’t you have any at all?”
He could then justly respond:
“Money? I don’t have much, but I do have sixty thousand.”
“Then what are you waiting for?” his son would say. “Send me some.”
“It’s in the bank, a CD account,” he’d reply.
Sixty thousand yuan had bolstered his courage and given him something to rely on. Now that it had vanished, what he missed was no longer just money but also the assurance, as if the floorboards had been pulled out from under him.
After a fruitless search for the thief, Liu emerged from the garment market and squatted by the side of the street, his mind a blank. He felt utterly hopeless, just as he had six years before when he’d caught his wife in bed with another man. He returned to the construction site, oblivious as to how he got back, and told no one about the theft, since it served no purpose.
How in the world would he explain to people the cash, the divorce decree, and the IOU? Particularly the IOU, which he’d gotten because he’d been cuckolded. Now that the note was gone, he might as well have been cuckolded for nothing. It was bad enough being robbed; he’d be a laughingstock if he mentioned the IOU, so he had to keep it to himself. In the end, he could only blame himself. He’d been on his way to the post office. Why did he have to be such a busybody and go over to correct the itinerant singer? Nothing would have happened if he’d simply sent the money. Yes, he’d gotten the man to change his tune, but at what cost? He’d lost his pack because the thief’s hands could not resist the temptation, but mainly because Liu wanted to show how keen his ears were. He had it coming.
All these thoughts ran through his head until nightfall, when thoughts of suicide resurfaced and his neck tasted the sweet sensation of a noose. With all the steel girders at the construction site, hanging himself there presented no challenge. Or, if he preferred, there was the dining hall, whose rafters were surely strong enough to bear his weight.
But he didn’t kill himself after all, not because he couldn’t bring himself to do it, but because he suddenly recalled how the thief, after snatching his pack and running off, had turned to look at Liu and smiled before taking off running again. For that smile alone, Liu would have to find the thief and hang him first, after which Liu would have plenty of time to hang himself. Or, if he retrieved his pack, he wouldn’t have to.
It would be like searching for a needle in a haystack. How would Liu Yuejin ever be able to find the thief by himself? It was then that it occurred to him to report the theft to the police.
The fat duty policeman’s head was bathed in sweat even though it wasn’t all that hot. He wrote down everything Liu said about the pack, which contained little. At some point, Liu lost the thread of his narrative, causing confusion on the part of the policeman, who stopped writing as Liu rambled on. He didn’t seem to believe Liu, especially the part about the divorce decree and the IOU. He yawned grandly. Liu was anxious to give more details, but the policeman closed his mouth and stopped him.
“I’ve got it all. Go home and wait for news.”
The policeman might have been able to wait, but not Liu.
“I can’t wait. I’ll be as good as dead if he throws that note away.”
His anxious look seemed to have convinced the policeman, but he said:
“We’ve got three murders to solve, so tell me, which is more urgent?”
Liu opened his mouth but no sound came out. As he left the police station, he knew he could not count on the police. Then he happened to think of Han Shengli, a petty thief who must know other thieves. If he could find Han, maybe the thief and his pack could be retrieved quickly, a shortcut compared to seeking help from the police.
When Han saw him, he thought his earlier threat was working and that Liu was there to pay him back, so he was disappointed to hear about Liu’s lost pack and his request for help. When Liu mentioned the cash it held, Han was especially upset.
“Liu Yuejin, you have a flawed character. You’d rather let someone steal your money than pay me back so I won’t have to hide like a thief from people I owe money to.”
Liu brought up the divorce decree and the IOU, afraid that Han might laugh at him. He didn’t, though no sympathy was forthcoming either.
“Who are you, anyway, Liu Yuejin?” Han stomped his foot and stared at him wide-eyed. “You’re too calculating to be a cook.” He wasn’t done yet. “I knew I could never outwit you. You’re so devious.”
Han was obviously focusing on a different matter, so Liu had to bring him back to his lost pack.
“Shengli, I haven’t always done right by you, and we can talk about that later. Now can we work on finding the pack?”
The urgency did not affect Han; in fact, it gave him the opportunity to posture.
“Sure, I can help you find your pack, but what’s in it for me?”
“I’ll pay you back as soon as we find it.”
“So it’s come to that, but is it really about paying me back?” Han glared at him.
Seeing that Han was taking advantage of the situation, Liu was getting upset, but he needed Han’s help, so he had to swallow his anger. As the saying goes, keep your head down when standing under someone’s eaves.
“I’ll give you five percent of the amount on the IOU.”
Han held up his thumb and index finger to show the figure “8,” a sight that nearly made Liu erupt. He had no choice but to give in to the greedy Han.
“Six percent, if you do a good job.”
“Let’s put it in writing,” Han said.
Liu wrote out an IOU to state that Han would get six percent of the amount of cash in the pack if it was found, and so on and so forth. Six percent of sixty thousand came to thirty-six hundred, an amount that made Liu’s heart ache.
“Where did you lose it?” Han asked as he took the note.
“Ciyun Temple, by the post office.”
“Ai-ya! That’s the worst place to lose anything.”
“How come?”
“It’s not my territory. A couple of days ago I worked in someone else’s territory and got a good beating for it, plus a twenty-thousand-yuan fine. The rules among us are stricter than the law.”
“So what do we do?” It was like seeing a cooked duck take wing.
“What else?” Han glared at him again. “All I can do is put you in touch with someone.”
11
Cao Wushang and Baldy Cui
Cao Wushang, originally from Tangshan, Hebei, was a forty-two-year-old man with a long face. Since his arrival in Beijing five years earlier, he’d been a duck butcher at a peddler’s market in the Beijing outskirts, where he had a good-sized pen, more than four hundred square feet, a former car wash with a ready source of water. Though he advertised only local ducks, in fact he slaughtered ducks from all over. Cao was afflicted with several eye ailments—trachoma, glaucoma, and cataracts—making it hard to see clearly beyond ten paces, much the same problem as Liu Yuejin’s uncle, the prison cook Niu Decao. Liu took an immediate liking to the man.
Of course, Cao would have been just another transplant if he’d been known only for duck slaughtering, but over the years he’d become the ringleader of a den of thieves in the Beijing outskirts, elevating his status to that of “Brother Cao,” a moniker that was better known than his real name. Brother Cao had never stolen a thing, as a boy or a man, and now it was too late to take up the profession, since his blurry vision would not let him see where people or things were. And yet, even with his bad eyesight, he controlled a group of men with sharp eyes, quick hands, and fast feet.
While his shed served as a thieves’ training ground and base camp, he spent his uneventful days supervising duck slaughtering; directing the activities of thieves was like a sideline occupation. But not at first. Tangshan was famous for its thieves, some of whom eventually showed up at the duck shed. They often argued over hauls and territory, and Brother Cao mediated a few times, smoothing over potential blood-shedding incidents, which earned him the respect of the thieves, who then came to him whenever there was a dispute.
At some point he became their leader, with expanding territory as thieves from other cities and provinces waged territorial battles with those from Tangshan. These other thieves worked alone or in small groups, shooting in the dark, as it were, without a Brother Cao and his strategic leadership.
So after a few battles, the Tangshan group’s territory grew as other thieves either dispersed or came to join Cao, increasing the size of his gang.
It was at this juncture that Cao revealed his true identity; he was a college graduate who had not started out slaughtering ducks in Tangshan. He’d taught at a suburban high school until his eye ailments made it hard to see the board and his students and he was forced to quit. First he sold fish at a peddler’s market—grass carp, silver carp, and crucian carp, in addition to fathead fish.
Back then he had a mynah bird that had learned to say, with a Tangshan accent, words such as “You’re here,” “Have you eaten yet?” and the Chinese New Year’s greeting, “Happy New Year.” When he started to take the bird along to the market, it picked up curses like “Fuck you,” “Need a fuck?” and “Drop dead.” The bird was attached to Cao, who never shut it up in a cage, but let it fly around the stall, for he knew it would stay close by.
One day when Cao went out of town to buy fish, his wife and the bird stayed at the market. The woman who ran a stir-fry stall with her husband, Lao Zhang, came to buy fish and got into an argument with Cao’s wife over the scale.
“Fuck you!” The bird began to curse when it saw someone arguing with Cao’s wife.
“Need a fuck?”
“Drop dead.”
Zhang’s wife leaped up to hit the bird, but it flew away as she slipped and fell into a muddy puddle by the fish enclosure. Now enraged, she got up, grabbed a chopping board and smashed the enclosure, sending the fish flopping around on the ground. Cao’s wife was incensed. She ran up and pushed Zhang’s wife into the muddy water, then sat astride her and began slapping savagely. Zhang ran over, took Cao’s wife by her hair, and returned the slaps. He also caught the bird with a fish net and snapped off its head. By then Cao had returned with his fish purchase. He was not upset that someone had smashed his fish enclosure or hit his wife, but the death of his bird really set him off. Picking up a liquor bottle, he flung it at Zhang, not to kill him but to vent his anger.
But, even with his poor eyesight, he was not wide of the mark. No, he hit Zhang in the head and sent him to the ground with blood pouring from the wound. Convinced he had killed the man, he fled the market with his family during the commotion and, after making it to Beijing overnight, opened a duck butcher stall in the peddler’s market.
A month later, when he heard that Zhang had not died, even though he’d lost a lot of blood, his family begged him to return to Tangshan. But having spent a month in Beijing, he liked it better than Tangshan. So he sent them back home while he remained in Beijing. And though it was purely accidental that he became the leader of a gang of thieves, ultimately it gave him a sense of accomplishment that was missing from butchering ducks alone.
Before his sight turned bad, Cao had been a voracious reader and a good student, slowly developing a motivation for something better. When reading Records of the Grand Historian, he felt a kindred spirit with Zhang Liang, and when reading Annals of the Three Kingdoms, he found similarities with Kong Ming, and in The Water Margins with Wu Yong, also a rural teacher. He would close his book and sigh deeply, ruing the day of his belated birth that made him miss out on such great opportunities.
His pupils were imps who sometimes seemed to understand him and sometimes not. Later, when he became a fishmonger, he finally found “someone” to talk to when he bought a mynah bird. In the end, it was the fight with Lao Zhang that necessitated his move to Beijing, where he became the leader of thieves, finally putting his talents to good use.
Only people born in tumultuous times have the potential to accomplish something spectacular. Cao had to settle for presiding over petty thieves to strive for a different kind of accomplishment. The thieves stole money, but money was not what drew Cao to be their leader.
Liu Yuejin took a liking to Cao Wushang when they first met, for Liu’s uncle also had eye problems, the only difference being that acquaintances of his uncle’s never thought twice about coming up to bitch-slap him. In contrast, Cao always had people serving as his eyes when he walked down the street. After the duck stall closed for the day, he played mahjong with the thieves. It took him forever to read each tile up close, a habit that would have displeased players at other boards. With him, however, the mahjong partners actually fought to show who could be more patient or obliging.
“No hurry, Brother Cao,” they’d say.
When all is said and done, it was because of a mynah bird that Cao got to where he was now. So after everything settled, he bought another bird, but this time, to prevent the bird from learning curse words, he sealed its ears with wax after teaching it a few phrases. And the bird never left the cage. Not being able to hear what people said, it repeated the only three phrases it knew: “Let’s talk it out,” “Peace is priceless,” and “It’s not too easy.”
In his early days, Cao had learned calligraphy and was quite good at it. So he wrote a couplet that he put up on either side of the shed entrance.
A single lamp can extinguish a thousand years of darkness.
A wise person can expel ten thousand years of foolishness.
Unable to comprehend the profundity of the couplets, none of the thieves made a comment, good or bad, and the couplet stayed.
Han Shengli, with Liu Yuejin in tow, wove his way through the market and arrived at the shed, where Cao, who was reclining on an old-fashioned armchair, was reading a paper with a magnifier, stopping to wipe away tears with a tissue every few lines. In the corner a chubby young fellow was slaughtering a duck, his every move showing that he was new at the job. Turning his face away, he laid the knife against the duck’s neck and, as the bird struggled, sent blood spurting all over the place, except into the intended plastic basin. The duck flapped around, spraying its blood onto the wall, so flustering the fellow that he reached out to push the duck’s head down, only to see the blood spurt in a new direction, onto Cao’s newspaper and hand. A bald fellow at the rear of the shed, watching a TV show with long-legged models, quit the show, walked up, and gave the chubby youngster a kick.
“Now you see, you little prick? If you can’t even kill a duck, how are you going to work on the street?”
Cao calmly laid down his paper and wiped the blood off his hands with the tissue.
“It’s not such a bad thing that he wants to go out,” Cao said to Baldy before turning to chubby:
“What’s out on the street, Hong Liang?” he asked amicably.
It took Hong Liang some time to come up with an answer. “People.”
“That’s what your mama told you.” Cao sighed. “Let me tell you, there’s nothing on the street but wolves.”
“They’ll eat you up the moment you’re out,” Baldy said.
Effectively silenced, Hong went to select his next victim in the cage, so scaring the ducks they began quacking all at the same time.
“Brother Cao.” Not daring to barge in, Han Shengli called out, “Is this a good time?” keeping his hands on the doorframe.
Cao could not see all the way to the door and didn’t recognize Han’s voice. He turned to the door.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Shengli, from Henan.”
“Ah, it’s you
, Shengli.” Cao seemed to recall who he was.
“I came to tell you something, Brother Cao. One of my relatives had his bag taken near Ciyun Temple, and I know those are your people.”
Not liking what he heard, Brother Cao frowned.
“They’re not really my people. Same hometown. I know some of them, that’s all.”
He picked up another newspaper and, ignoring his visitors, recommenced reading with his magnifying glass, leaving Han Shengli and Liu Yuejin standing there, feeling awkward. The slaughtered duck was still flapping on the ground when Baldy tossed it into a feather-shedding roller that was filled with steaming hot water. He pulled back the electric brake and the roller began to move.
Baldy clapped his hands and walked up to the door.
“How much was in the bag?”
“Forty-one hundred.”
“It’s not the money,” Liu shouted from behind Han. “There’s an important document in it.” He added, “The thief had a dark mole on his face.”
“You’ll have to pay a thousand earnest money,” Baldy said, ignoring the additional information.
Han looked at Liu, who was tongue-tied, as he hadn’t expected to pay in order to get his bag back. Knowing it must be how they did things, he didn’t dare ask questions as he began pulling money out of his pocket. Nothing but fives and tens that totaled slightly over a hundred.
“Do you really want to find your bag?” Baldy frowned.
“It’s all I have, Brother Cui. I’ll borrow some money and bring it over.”
At that moment, Cao looked toward the door, but before he could say a word, the mynah bird that had been asleep in the cage woke up and said: