by Liu Zhenyun
No matter what Yan thought, the tonic did help, like a sinking ship being refloated after half the cargo is removed. He felt better and consoled himself that he could take a breather for now; he would worry about tomorrow later. With Director Jia out of the picture, he could find himself another director; all he had to do was pay to re-accumulate the connections. When a cart reaches the foothills a road will open up, and when a boat comes to a bend the river will straighten out. These thoughts lightened his mood considerably, and he wondered if this was how a man became a social outcast.
There was another reason why he accepted the offer—he had made a deal with his wife before coming to the meeting. When he figured out, via Little Bai and Lao Wen, where Qu Li had gone after leaving home, he realized that her disappearance was all tied up with money, which was actually easier to tackle than if it had been another man.
It was much the same as the situation with Jia and Lin, though certainly not simple. When he showed up at the bank, he and his wife went to a coffee shop for a talk, where he learned that she had transferred some money; what he did not learn was how much, where it came from, or where it had gone. Alerted by her action, he pored over his company’s accounts. There he learned from his finance director that his wife had had a hand in every business deal he’d made over the past eight years. Yan had employed an informant; so had she. Hers was the assistant manager who had been killed in an automobile accident two months earlier. The man had helped her take a cut of every transaction, not too big a slice to be noticed, of course, but enough to accumulate quite a sum over time. She had turned out to be both clever and ruthless. She’d been plotting against him all along.
But he couldn’t figure out what exactly had happened eight years earlier to trigger her mutinous plan. A woman? The need for money? Something he’d done in their daily life? Something he’d said? And what had been her relationship with the dead man? Yan Ge trembled at the thought of how complicated the world and people can be. His thoughts went to her incessant trips to Shanghai. What did she do there?
He began to suspect that not only had she faked her depression, but had intentionally put on weight and turned temperamental. Of course not everything was fake, but she could well have been putting on an act the whole time. His investigation showed that the small cuts she’d taken had netted her more than fifty million, an amount that would not have been of great importance to Yan in the past, but now, when his boat was sinking, was a substantial number. When he brought it up, she did not panic, as if she’d known this day would come sooner or later. What surprised him was the no-nonsense tone she adopted.
“Now that it’s come to this, tell me what you plan to do.”
Now that it had come to this, he had to make a deal with her, but it did not progress as smoothly as the one he’d made with Jia and Lin. After a prolonged argument and repeated concessions on his part, they finally reached an agreement: one, she would allow him half of the money to help him out, and he would pay her back once his financial troubles were over; two, the loan would cancel out whatever she had done in the past; three, there would be a promissory note for the loan; four, she wanted the loan processed on the day their divorce was finalized, thus severing all ties.
The deal was humiliating to him, because the money, which had been his to begin with, was converted into a loan. Moreover, he had wanted to “borrow” the whole amount, but she would only lend him half. With all her illegal and immoral, behind-the-back maneuvering, she had the upper hand.
Yan believed in the principle that a divorcing couple’s property should be divided equally, and that they should share responsibility for a debt accumulated jointly. In their case, however, he was to be responsible for the debt, while she was entitled to their money. Twenty-five million, which would have been nothing to him in the past, was a lifesaver at a moment like this, which was why, after a heated argument, he eventually agreed.
In two days, he had made deals with the two most intimate parties in his life; one from his private life, his wife, the other from his social circle, Director Jia and Lao Lin. Twenty-five million plus eighty million meant he would have over a hundred million, enough to save his business; besides, the deals brought things out into the open, and he now knew where everyone stood.
Except for one thing. He woke up that night struck by such a terrifying thought he broke out in a cold sweat. After they were married, Qu Li had suffered several miscarriages; now that seemed suspicious. If she had planned them she must have been preparing to divorce him one day and, more importantly, cruelly refused to have a child with him. Worse yet, she may have wanted to terminate the Yan family line. And there was yet another possibility: she could have aborted a baby by someone else, perhaps by the dead assistant general manager. The more Yan thought about it, the more terrible he felt, until he had to accept the proposition that the people closest to you can be your worse enemies, as was the case with the late employee, whom he had unwisely trusted.
After the two deals were struck, Yan actually felt much better, more reassured; as the ancients said, no extreme lasts forever. All alone now, he was relieved. After reaching an agreement with Lin, Yan had taken him to retrieve the USB drive, which he had stashed not at home, nor at the stud farm, where he spent time with his horses whenever he was especially happy or really upset. In his view, horses were more principled than humans. No, it was somewhere else, at his Beethoven Villa quarters, which had been vacant for quite some time.
But Qu Li had the only keys, after changing the locks when she’d caught Yan with a movie actress in bed two summers before. He had to admit that he was at least partially responsible for her ultimate betrayal. But that was why he’d stashed the drive there, a place neither his wife nor anyone else would think to check. On the day he went to hide it, he entered by prying open a back window, like a common thief. He could not repeat that with Lao Lin, so he picked Qu Li up in his car and the three of them went to the villa together. This was the first husband-and-wife meeting since their deal was struck, and the soon-to-be strangers were actually civil to each other.
Once inside, Qu Li went straight to the bedroom while Yan went around the living room collecting the six copies he’d made from six spots under the floorboards. No one would ever have guessed the secret under their feet. Watching Yan pry up the floorboards, Lin had to laugh.
“You’re quite something.”
Yan replaced the board after retrieving the last drive and then walked over to a window and pressed a hidden button. A false panel under the window slid open for him to take out a laptop, which he placed on a coffee table, along with the six USB drives.
“Here they are. All of them.”
“Whether they’re all here or not is up to you,” Lin said unemotionally. “Director Jia often says that being upright is more important than being rich.”
“That’s so true.” Yan was sweating again from all the effort. He wiped his forehead and continued, “I understand.” He looked discomfited, but before he could say anything, they heard a scream from upstairs.
“What’s wrong?”
They ran up to the third-floor bedroom, where they realized they’d had a break-in. Like Qu Li, they were startled, but a quick check around the house showed them that the thief was alone and that he’d fled by leaping out the window. His loot was hidden in the entertainment unit, so they hadn’t lost anything. Yan congratulated himself on hiding the drives under the floorboards and the laptop behind the false panel, both of which a thief would not normally check. Nothing was amiss so long as the drives were not taken; losing the other stuff was no big deal. With the thief’s sack in hand, they went downstairs.
“Could he have heard what we were saying?” Lin was worried.
“Don’t worry,” Yan said. “He was on the third floor.”
Someone was banging on the door. Yan opened it and in stormed the security guards. Before Yan could say a word, one insisted on searching room to room for the thief while the other wanted to call the polic
e. Lin stopped them and spoke up before Yan:
“No need for that.” He pointed to the sack. “It was a dumb thief. After all that, he left his sack behind.”
A light went off in Yan’s head.
“False alarm, no need to call the police. We wouldn’t mind, but your company would surely be unhappy. Weren’t some guards fired after a break-in a while ago? Go on now; it’s late and this has been tough on you.”
Finally understanding what he was getting at, the guards nodded.
“Thank you, Mr. Yan. Thanks so much.”
They backed out of the house, thanking him repeatedly. When they were alone again, Qu Li, dressed in a bathrobe, picked up Lin’s pack of cigarettes and lit one, before sitting down on the sofa.
“Who says we didn’t lose anything? The thief took my purse.”
“It was an expensive purse.” Yan looked surprised. “A limited UK edition.”
“I don’t mind losing the purse, but I’d like to have the contents back.”
“How much money could you have had in your purse?” Yan asked with a dismissive wave. “Consider that the price to pay for peace of mind.”
“You didn’t know this, but there was another USB drive in the purse.”
Yan and Lin were stunned.
“What’s on it?” Yan asked.
Pointing her cigarette at the drives on the coffee table, she said nonchalantly:
“Same as those.”
A second shocker for Yan and Lin, who were speechless. Another light went off in Yan’s head, and he slapped his forehead.
“So this was all your doing!” He looked at his wife in disbelief. “Who are you anyway? After all these years we’ve been together, I don’t think I know who you are.”
“You cheated first.” She blew a smoke ring. “I have to be on guard against insidious people like you.”
Lin turned to her.
“Was it password protected?”
“I should have, in case anything happened to it, but I didn’t because I was afraid someone might do something to me.”
The men were flabbergasted. Yan jumped up to attack her, but Lin stopped him.
“It’s all over now.” Yan’s hands shook in front of Lin, who sighed before breaking into a smile.
“All right, then. Now we’re no longer enemies and must join forces.” He was suddenly suspicious. “With all these houses in the compound, why did the thief pick this one?”
The anxious look on his face told Yan that Lin might be right in suspecting that the theft was a plot related to the matter with Jia. He tensed up. They did not know that it was not a plot and that it had nothing to do with Jia, even though it was no accident that the thief picked Yan’s house. Cao’s people had told the thief, Yang Zhi, which one to break in; they’d had their eye on Yan’s place for quite some time because of Qu Li’s driver, Lao Wen.
Since his affair with the maid had caused a tumult at home, Wen had turned over a new leaf and stopped seeing her, though even if he’d wanted to he could not have, since she was one of two maids fired at the Yan home.
But he could not give up having affairs, and maids were the best he could hope for. He could hardly be blamed; he was still in his forties and his wife no longer wanted sex, so he had to find someone, driven by a different impulse than when he was a younger man. With limited options, he now resorted to prostitutes.
One day, when Qu told him to pick up something at the now vacant villa—they had moved over to the stud farm—Wen decided to satisfy his need for sex by taking along a prostitute. So he cruised the streets in Qu Li’s BMW, stopping at a hair salon, where he chose a masseuse. After settling on a hundred yuan, he drove to the villa, where they did it on the sofa.
Afterward, as he was putting on his pants, an argument over the price broke out, since the woman mistook Wen to be the owner of the BMW and the villa, and demanded five hundred. Her greed angered him, but she argued that a hundred was for doing it at the hair salon, but five hundred for doing it elsewhere. Wen could afford five hundred, but was angered by her deception. They got physical.
“I’ll call the police and have you arrested,” Wen threatened, slapping her and pointing to the phone. “Don’t think I won’t.”
Unable to fight Wen by herself, she sobbed and picked up the money before running out, making sure to remember the man and the house. She had a good friend named Su Shunqing, a masseuse who was in a relationship with a restaurant deliveryman, the same one who had stopped Yang Zhi in company with Baldy Cui. The young man, a high school graduate, was a bit of a pedant, and now, with a prostitute as a girlfriend, he liked to compare himself with the Song poet Liu Yong, with the well-known lines, “Where will I awaken after my drinking binge / The willow-lined river bank / An early morning wind blows over the late moon.”
The modern “Liu Yong” always obeyed his girlfriend, never veering an inch from what she wanted. Her profession allowed her to sleep with any man she chose, while he was to remain faithful to her; and she was significantly more high maintenance than girls in other professions. His delivering job did not earn him enough to support her, so he ended up working for Brother Cao as a snitch for extra money.
It so happened that the prostitute beaten by Lao Wen told Su what had happened to her at Beethoven Villa. Su told “Liu Yong,” who worked for a restaurant not far from the compound. In fact, he often made deliveries there. Partly to impress her with his connections, partly to punish the owner of the villa, and partly to earn some extra money, he took notice of the house when he made deliveries.
After two weeks, he went to Cao and told him that the house was vacant but fully furnished; ripe for the picking, it would be a shame to pass up the opportunity. And that was how Yang Zhi ended up burglarizing the place. It had all started with a humiliated prostitute, but the theft seemed so much more complicated to Lin and Yan, who were ignorant of the facts. Put more precisely, it did not matter if it had anything to do with Yan and Jia—they were both now involved in the wake of the theft of the USB drive.
17
Liu Pengju and Mai Dangna
After picking up the purse Yang Zhi left behind, Liu Yuejin took off running, cradling it as if it were spoils. Too ruffled to see where he was going, he ran down several lanes, crossed some streets, and switched buses more than once. He had no recollection of how he made it back to the construction site, feeling as if he’d been chased by hordes.
When he got back, he headed straight for the dining hall, unlocked his little room, went in, and bolted the door behind him before collapsing onto his bed, only then realizing that he was drenched in sweat. He hadn’t felt this tired once over the past five days of searching for his pack; now he was exhausted from finding a purse. Obviously, being a thief isn’t easy.
Then it occurred to him that he’d left his bicycle in the lane across from Beethoven Villa; he didn’t have the nerve to go back for it. It was, after all, an old bike that had recently suffered damage, so it was next to worthless. His only regret was for the second-hand tire that had cost him thirty yuan.
When he finally pulled himself together, he turned on the overhead light, but immediately turned it off and fished a small flashlight out from under his pillow. He turned it on and held it in his mouth to study the purse. It was a shape he’d never seen before, cucumber-like, and the material felt much softer than either plastic or patent. To him, though, it was just a purse and nothing special.
He began to search the contents, believing that he’d had a stroke of good luck, even though he’d spent half the night following Yang Zhi, only to lose him in the end. And he had yet to find his own pack. The purse, which clearly belonged to a wealthy woman, might well contain cash, maybe even a diamond ring, which would surely make up for his lost pack. Why else would Yang pretend to be a delivery man to steal it? It was like losing a goat but getting a horse in return.
So he was sorely disappointed after turning the purse inside out; it contained only a little over five hundred yuan, some
bankcards, women’s cosmetics, and implements like compacts, brow brushes, and tweezers. There were even a couple of sanitary napkins. Bankcards would be nice if he had the passcodes; but even if he did, the owner might have already reported the lost cards, so that trying to use them would be too risky. He was so upset he could hardly breathe, but his anger was directed at Yang Zhi.
“You stupid fuck. You steal poor people’s money, but with the rich you go for women’s stuff. Are you some kind of pervert?”
Then he found a USB drive. Liu knew nothing about computers, so he had no idea what it was for. From its attractive rectangular shape, he thought it might be another feminine item, but for what he did not know. As he was examining the thing, someone banged on his door. Thinking it must be the people who were chasing him, he snapped off the flashlight, slipped the thing into his pocket, and tossed the purse into one of the vats that lined the room. After putting the lid back on the vat, he lay down on the bed and pulled the blanket over him.
“Who is it?” he asked in the voice of someone who had been asleep.
“It’s me. Open the door.”
It was Lao Deng, the man charged with guarding the construction material. Liu felt better knowing it was Deng, but what if he was being forced to bang on the door by those other people?
“Who’s with you?” Liu asked to make sure.
“I’m alone. Is that OK?” Lao Deng replied, sounding slightly pissed. “Were you expecting me to bring you a girl?”