by Liu Zhenyun
“What do you have mind, Grandpa?”
The man held out three fingers.
“Three hundred?” Xing asked.
“Do you want to know or not?” The hunchback was visibly upset.
So he meant three thousand. Xing realized that the old man could not be bought off easily, but that only meant he had valuable information to sell. After a bit of bargaining, they settled on fifteen hundred, after which the man took Xing into the alley. They turned a corner and arrived at the man’s house in a large compound with a jumble of buildings, where seven or eight families lived. When they reached the innermost yard, the old man pointed to an old bike by a pile of briquettes.
“Left behind by the thief,” the man said. “I have trouble sleeping at night, so I usually go out for a walk. A couple of days ago, I went out and saw someone hiding in the alley. I knew right off he was up to no good. I stayed up after I got home, and half an hour later, I heard people running down the lane. I came out and saw two of them, both thieves, no doubt. I couldn’t catch up with them, but I got this bike.”
“A bike is not a thief, Grandpa.” Xing was disappointed.
The old man smugly retrieved an old newspaper from under the seat and spread it out. In the margin was scribbled, “Lao Li at Shunyi Pig Farm,” with a cell phone number.
“I know who the thief is.” He pointed at the name and announced, “It’s Lao Li from the pig farm.”
Taking the paper from the man, Xing looked closely at the name and the number and decided that Lao Li was not the thief. Who writes his own name and phone number on a sheet of newspaper? He put it back under the seat, figuring there must be some connection between the thief and the information on the paper. Finally he’d regained the trail of clues. More importantly, since Yang Zhi had left his delivery bike in the grass outside the villa, this one had to have been left behind by the other thief, the one who’d picked up the purse.
Overjoyed by the new discovery, Xing took out fifteen hundred and gave it to the man before walking off with the bike. He placed a call to the number on the paper once he was out of the compound, and to his surprise, Lao Li answered the phone. Xing said he wanted to buy a pig and had gotten Li’s number from a friend. Li, sounding hoarse, gave him directions without asking any questions; the pig farm was at Kuliushu in the Shunyi District, not far, but not especially close. Loading the bike into his secondhand Honda, Xing drove to the pig farm with the trunk open. Li turned out to be skinny as a beanpole. When he asked who’d recommended his place, Xing removed the bike from his trunk and asked Li if he recognized it.
“Isn’t that Liu Yuejin’s bike?” Li blurted out.
When Xing asked Liu’s address, a suddenly guarded Li realized that Xing and Liu did not know each other, and that Xing was not there to buy a pig.
“What do you want him for? And how did his bike end up in your hands?”
“I went to a friend’s house last night,” Xing said with a smile. “On my way home, I found this bike under Xiaoyun Bridge and on the back seat was a pack filled with stuff that could be important to him. I searched and found a sheet of newspaper under the seat, and written on the paper were your name and cell phone number. So I came to see you.” He showed Li the paper and went to his car to bring out the bag Yang had left behind when he ran out of the diner. He showed it to Li, who remained suspicious.
“It’s hard to do a good deed these days. People don’t even believe you when you want to help. Why don’t I just leave the bike and the bag with you, and you can give them back.”
That convinced Li, who waved and said:
“You got yourself into this, so you take care it. Liu Yuejin is a cook at a construction site behind the China World Trade Center. The Henan construction team.”
Xing drove back downtown, and as he crossed the Guomao Bridge, he saw a large construction site in the distance. One of the buildings, already over seventy stories high, had a safety warning hanging on the side. To Xing’s surprise, it was Yan Ge’s company. So Yan’s wife’s purse had turned up at his own construction site. Xing had a laugh over that.
Without notifying Yan, Xing drove straight to the site, but was blocked by Lao Deng, who guarded the materials at night and the gate during the day. Deng would have let him through if Xing had been there to see someone else, but not Liu Yuejin. Deng and Liu did not get along, though they never argued or had money problems. Deng simply didn’t like Liu. Worse yet, Deng, an insomniac, was having a terrible day from lack of sleep the night before, when he’d gotten Liu to go to the phone. Xing became the target of his displeasure.
“What do you want with him?” He glared at Xing. “You have to talk to the boss if you want to see anyone at the site.”
Instead of showing him where to find Liu, Deng took him to see Ren Baoliang, who was squatting by the date tree in his yard, fuming. He’d just had a row with some troublemakers among the workers over money owed them. He’d have liked to pay them, but had no money, since Yan Ge had yet to pay him. Ren was already unhappy with Liu, had been since the days he was responsible for buying provisions, but mainly after a fall-out two years before, when Liu had spread rumors behind his back. Now he’d asked for a couple of days off, time he spent sneaking around, and Ren could only conclude that he had joined the ranks of the misfits, though he was too preoccupied to worry about Liu. When he saw a stranger coming to see Liu, Ren automatically assumed that Xing was no good either.
“What do you want with him?” Ren asked, without looking up.
Forced by circumstances, Xing claimed Yan as a friend and said he needed to ask Liu about something. Ren’s attitude changed at the mention of Yan Ge, but he wondered how a cook could have anything to do with a friend of Yan’s. He was more cordial now, though he felt a need to complain about Yan.
“It’s been more than six months since anyone was paid. Mr. Yan really shouldn’t keep putting it off. If he does, we could have a repeat of the Anyuan workers’ riot of 1922. I think I’ll go raise hell at his house, like the workers have been doing to me.”
“I’ll be sure to bring that up with Mr. Yan,” Xing said with a smile.
Pleased to hear that, Ren took Xing to see if Liu was in his room. They were greeted by a locked door.
At that moment, Liu was out looking for the thief. Two days had yielded no results. Though he’d devoted much of the previous day to finding his son and his girlfriend, he could justifiably claim he’d spent two days hunting for thieves, since he considered his son one of them. At noon the day before, he’d raced back to Beijing’s West Station after realizing his son had taken all his valuables. If he doesn’t think twice about stealing from his old man, he fumed, what won’t he do out in society? Liu also suspected that the woman was behind it, and he vowed not to let her off easily. At that moment, it was clearly more important to vent his anger against both of them than to get his things back.
The train station was alive with people; the square and the waiting room were so packed he had trouble elbowing his way through the throngs of people. After circling the place eight times and gazing at thousands of faces, he failed to find his son or the girlfriend. Every once in a while, someone would look familiar from a distance, but only then. A few men looked like they could be his son from the rear, but he was disappointed again and again when he checked the faces. They could have gotten on a train back to Henan, or they might not have come to the station at all. His son’s theft had shocked him out of his drunken stupor, and now he was suffering from a head-splitting hangover. But headache or not, he had to find them, so he kept at it till midnight, when all the trains had left the station and the area reverted back to a quiet, deserted place strewn with people who would spend the night sleeping in the square. With a cheerless sigh, he sat down on the steps in front of the entrance.
He was back searching for Yang Zhi the next morning, after weighing the relative importance of finding his son and locating the thief. Put differently, recovering the pack he had lost was more urgent th
an retrieving the purse he had found; or, the money in the pack mattered more than the few hundred his son had taken. Putting his son out of his mind, he went to the post office, the garment market, the bus stop, the subway entrance, and the lane in the eastern suburb. After a whole day, nothing. At night, he returned to the snack stalls along the Tonghui River, where he’d found Yang before. Hoping the man would appear again, he went to the same place. Lamps were, as usual, brightly lit along the river, in which high-rises were reflected—the picture of a flourishing city. After several rounds, he found nothing. Obviously the thief was frightened enough to stay away, and Liu realized that his search was futile. He returned to the work site.
He opened the door of his room, turned on the light and shut the door behind him. It was immediately kicked open with a bang, and in barged two people, Ren Baoliang and Lao Xing, who had been awaiting Liu’s return. Seeing that Xing was Yan Ge’s friend, Ren had invited to him to dinner, during which time he’d again asked why Xing wanted to find Liu. This time Xing revealed that he was searching for the purse for Yan. He was vague on details, but it was enough to convince Ren.
The presence of a stranger in his room unnerved Liu, but Ren went after him before he could say a word.
“We’ve known each other for years, Yuejin, but have you ever told me the truth?”
“What’s this all about?” Liu was bewildered by the presence of the men.
“You told me someone beat you up, so I gave you a few days off to see a doctor. But did you go see a doctor? Or did you go out thieving? You’ve been misappropriating dining hall funds all along, and now you’ve moved into new areas.”
Still confused, Liu looked at Ren and then at Xing.
“I’m from an investigative agency,” Xing spoke up. “I’m helping a friend look for something. Did you find a purse a couple of nights ago?”
Liu’s guard went up at the mention of a purse. It was finally coming to a head; his pack was still nowhere to be found and yet the owner of the purse had found him. It was no longer with him either, however—his son and his girlfriend had taken it—so his first reaction was to feign confusion.
“What purse? You’ve got the wrong man.” He glanced at Ren and then said to Xing, “I lost a pack. I didn’t find a purse.” Then he turned to Ren. “Besides seeing a doctor, I’ve been looking for my pack. I didn’t steal anything.”
Xing waved him off. “No one says you stole anything. The purse isn’t that important. There’s a computer drive in it, and that’s what I want.”
Xing had wanted to offer Liu ten thousand yuan for the drive, but Ren’s presence made it hard to bring that up; besides, Xing had learned a lesson from dealing with Yang Zhi, who, in Xing’s view, might have been alarmed by the mention of money at the restaurant.
On his part, Liu continued to play dumb, for he had no idea what a computer drive was or why Xing wanted it back.
“What’s a computer drive?” Then a crafty thought entered his head. “Is it valuable?”
Ren barged in before Xing could answer:
“It’s valuable, so valuable that even selling you wouldn’t fetch that kind of money.” He pointed to Xing and continued. “He’s been sent by Mr. Yan, so watch what you say.”
Ren’s outburst frightened Liu enough to keep quiet about finding the purse. It also seemed that Yang Zhi had taken it from Yan’s house. Yan was Ren’s boss, so he had to stay out of it.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He pretended to be confused. “You can search my room if you don’t believe me. It’s not that big.”
He went ahead and lifted the lids off all the vats and bottles, upsetting Ren, who was on the verge of erupting again. Xing stopped them both:
“I’d be wasting my time if I did that. There’s nothing of value to you on the drive, just some pictures from Mr. Yan’s childhood, precious records that are useless to anyone else.”
Liu insisted that he hadn’t taken it. Ren set upon him again, not because of the drive or over Liu’s penchant for stealing things, but because it occurred to him that Liu might have been the instigator behind the trouble-making workers, since he had once tried to get paid by pretending to hang himself. Liu was getting red in the face as he defended himself, saying he’d been away from the site in search of his pack, so how could he be saying things behind Ren’s back? Watching the two men argue back and forth, Xing began to wonder where the truth lay and exactly who had the purse and the USB drive. It could be Liu Yuejin or it could be Yang Zhi, who had lied about the purse. Yes, it was probably Yang; why else would he bolt like that the night before, even leaving his own bag behind?
23
Yang Zhi
Liu was jumpy after Xing and Ren left.
He had faked the argument with Ren, which was inconsequential compared to the existence of the pack and the purse. What bothered him was not what he’d encountered in recent days, but a feeling that the nature of the incident was changing from one thing to something completely different. After locking the door, he squatted against it to smoke a cigarette and tried to make sense of recent developments.
So, here it went: six days ago he’d lost a pack, along with a divorce decree and an IOU for sixty thousand yuan, for which he had plans. In his search for the pack he’d found a purse, which was in his possession only briefly. He went looking for the thief who took his pack, while someone began looking for him because he had picked up the purse. These searches were quite different. He was alone in his, with no help, not from the police or from Brother Cao. In the case of Yan Ge’s lost purse, not one, but two people—Ren Baoliang and the guy from the investigative agency—came to see him. Yet there was a similarity: like him with his pack, they were not interested in the purse itself but what was in it.
His son had taken the purse but not the computer drive. Liu had found it while searching the contents of the purse and had slipped it into his pocket because it looked interesting. As Xing said, it had no value to Liu, and he ought to turn it over, except that he did not think it was that simple. He knew that Xing was lying about Yan Ge’s childhood photos. Who would go to all that trouble for a few photographs? So it was a pretense to see if Liu had it, and Xing would have something else to say if Liu admitted to finding the purse. Liu’s thoughts turned to the bankcards in the purse; they must be looking for the cards, which were now with his son. Without a password, they were just plastic. He might have given Xing the purse, if he had it, that is. To find the cards he had to first locate his son, who could already be back in Henan. Or maybe they were looking for something other than the cards.
No matter what, Liu knew he first had to find his son, something that would delay his own search. In his mind it was clear which item was more important. No matter what Yan Ge and his people were looking for, in the end it had to do with money. Several millions or hundreds of millions meant nothing to Yan, while sixty thousand was a lifeline to him, which was why he’d nearly hanged himself the day he lost the pack. He couldn’t let the search for the purse interfere with his hunt for his own pack, and that was why he’d played dumb with Xing, with the full awareness that it wouldn’t end there. Now that he was involved, it would only grow bigger and more complicated, so his most urgent task was to get his pack back. But where would he find the thief? He’d found him once; the second time would be harder.
The more he reflected on it the more worried he became. He went to bed but was awake until four in the morning, when he drifted into a troubled sleep with three bad dreams. In the first, he was back in Henan, being chased by a dog, and no matter how hard he ran he could not shake the animal, which followed him up a tree belonging to Second Master. It took a bite out of his leg and he woke up. In the second dream, he was in the water but had forgotten how to swim, so he flailed his arms as his body sank deeper and deeper. None of the people having a meeting on the riverbank saw him struggling in the water, and when he screamed for help, his voice was swallowed up by announcements from loudspeakers. In the third, he
was in Beijing looking for the thief. He searched everywhere, going into small lanes and onto main thoroughfares, until he was bathed in sweat, and still no sign of the thief. When he walked by Tiananmen Square, he spotted Yang Zhi straddling the glazed tiles on the square’s tower. He was grinning and waving at him. “There’s the thief,” Liu shouted, and Yang leaped into the Jinshui River, where he turned into a toad and swam off. Liu was yelling when someone touched him from behind. He turned to look; it was none other than Yang. “I’ve got you!” Liu grabbed the thief. Worried that it was just a dream and that Yang might dream himself away, he held on tight.
“Wake up, hey, wake up,” Yang said. “You’re hurting me.”
Liu woke up and was stunned to see Yang Zhi actually sitting at the foot of his bed. I must be dreaming, Liu said to himself, but he looked around and saw that he was indeed in his own room. He stared blankly at Yang. He’d been looking for the man, how in the world had he shown up like that?
Yang Zhi had been trying to find Liu since the day he bolted from the diner, where Xing had offered him ten thousand yuan for a USB drive. The amount was a sure sign that the drive was worth much more, at least a hundred thousand, five hundred thousand even. He dabbled on a computer when he wasn’t out burglarizing, and he knew a thing or two about computer drives. There might well be something important on it; Lao Xing was offering ten thousand for a drive worth ten or fifty times more.
Who did Xing think he was, a fool? He’d wanted to ask for more, but Xing was obviously not the type to bargain with. He had grabbed Yang’s arm in the subway, which told him that the man could be rough. Besides, without the drive in hand, he was in no position to bargain, so he used the toilet as an excuse and fled the diner, not from Xing but to look for the drive. He’d start over with Xing once he had the drive back. To find it, he had to first locate the foreman who’d picked up the purse in the alley, which was why he became the hunter and Liu Yuejin the hunted. Yang recalled that the man spoke with a Henan accent and had pointed to the construction site by the post office when giving the street singer a hard time. There was more than one site near the post office, so Yang went from site to site, pretending to be selling building materials. When the day was over, he’d checked eight sites without a glimpse of Liu.