Chapter 36

I loved you. I was a monster, but I loved you.—Lolita (4)

The stone benches were arranged around a long-dried-out lotus pond. Among the mud and withered foliage stood a bronze statue. The bronze statue was in an abstract style; the naked eye basically couldn't distinguish what on earth it had been sculpted to represent. But it had one very brightly polished surface on which distorted reflections could be seen.

Just now, Fei Du had carelessly looked up and met the reflection of a pair of eyes on the sculpture.

The bronze sculpture wasn't a mirror, after all. The light and shade were blurred; the person's age and sex weren't even clear. But for some reason, as soon as he saw those eyes, Fei Du's heart tightened, and the vanilla cream puff he'd just swallowed seemed to stick in his chest. He subconsciously lifted his head and, going off the image on the sculpture, searched all around—

The elderly estate didn't have walls around it. It was a few buildings crowded together into a group, the boundary between them and the rush of traffic vague. There was a nearby bus stop which, because earlier plans had been mishandled, had made inroads into the estate. A number of people were lined up outside the shrubberies, group after group coming and going. The shops along the street did fairly brisk business. It was closing on midday now, and there were already people standing and waiting in front of some small food stands.

The crowds bustled around. There were residents of the small estate who'd come out in their pajamas, there were passersby who had things to do in the surrounding neighborhood, there were owners of private cars who had taken the estate's roads as a shortcut; there were people eating and people standing and waiting, as well as people delivering packages and food coming and going…

The owner of the pair of eyes was on high alert; they had already concealed themselves among the sea of people. Fei Du didn't find a sign of anything suspicious.

He immediately stood up and said to Chenchen, "Come on. We're going home."

Chenchen had absolutely no sense of crisis. She gave a long-drawn-out, disappointed "oh" and looked longingly towards the food shops lined up along the street. She licked the leftover cream from her fingers. Her eyes turned, and she issued a request on strong grounds towards Fei Du. "I still have some spending money. You just treated me to a cream puff, so why don't I treat you? I want a matcha-flavored one, too."

"Another day." Fei Du gently but uncompromisingly pushed at the back of her head. "We're going to eat lunch."

Chenchen was forced to stand up and follow him. "But I don't like eating lunch. There's lots of dishes I don't like to eat."

"Oh, actually, I'm the same." Fei Du very frankly acknowledged his prince's disease in front of the little girl. Then he continued in a different line. "Although it'll be better when you're older. When you're older you can buy whatever you want to eat, and no one will know you're a picky eater."

Chenchen stared at him speechlessly, feeling that these adults were all very shameless. Just then, she suddenly got a clear look at Fei Du's expression and froze on the spot.

Adolescent children are half-grown; they already have some sense of precaution and can basically read adults' facial expressions. Chenchen had thought that Fei Du had just been joking with her; as soon as she looked up, she found that he was frowning slightly, his face excessively serious.

In spite of herself she became nervous at this and reached out a hand to tug at Fei Du's clothing. "Dagege, what's wrong?"

As they spoke, the two of them were passing a residential building. A window on the first floor corridor was just swinging open, its arc unfolding. Fei Du had calmly let the little girl walk in front of him, talking to her with his head lowered. At this point, without warning, he suddenly looked up.

In the bright and clear window he caught a gaze following them like a shadow!

The person was wearing sunglasses and a face mask, firmly covering up their whole face. Fei Du put a hand on Chenchen's shoulder and quickly turned his head. At the same time, about two hundred meters behind them, a person dove into the nearby shrubbery, immediately vanishing without a trace. Fei Du had only had a glimpse of the person's humped back and white hair.

An old man?

Chenchen didn't know what had happened. She watched him on tenterhooks.

Fei Du's chilly gaze went through the lenses perched on his nose, sweeping over the crowd not far from them. He asked, "Does someone usually take you home from school?"

"Y-yes," said Chechen quietly. "When my mom and dad are home, they come to pick me up. If they aren't there, jiejie takes me on the subway. If she's working overtime, then I wait at school for a while. There's a teacher there especially to look after us."

Fei Du nodded thoughtfully and asked, "Have you seen any strange grandpas around?"

Chenchen thought about it for a moment and shook her head at him, full of misgivings.

The two of them quickly entered the residential building's corridor. The old light gray building cut off the gaze from the shadows. Some time after, an old man with a stooped back slowly came out from behind the bus stop's sign.

His face was covered, he wore a giant pair of sunglasses, and he held a cane in his hand, like a person with impaired vision, knocking against the ground to feel his way.

The surrounding people had earbuds stuck in their ears, most of them indifferently fiddling with their phones. They didn't notice his hobbling steps.

The dark lenses were the ideal shield for him; sunlight couldn't pass through, but his greedy gaze could.

His gaze made an arduous journey, piercing through time and space; without moving a muscle, he stared fixedly at the place where the little girl had just been.

Her floral-patterned dress seemed to be pulsating with light, a quartz hairpin setting off her clear, bright little face. In all his field of vision, in all the world, it seemed to be the only light. Its childish and awkward outlines entered his eyes and in an instant burst into flame, leaving a well-arranged and coherent contour on his retinas.

But there was a snake monster guarding the forbidden fruit. Thinking of the gaze of the man beside the little girl, he fearfully retreated towards the shadows again. His terror and longing assembled into a unique trepidation; he thirstily licked his lips and leaned heavily back against a tree trunk, his chest rising and falling violently; he was captivated by this trepidation.

Like a person drowning or poisoned.

In the time it took to eat a cream puff, the elevator had been fixed. Fei Du pressed the button for the twelfth floor and went into the elevator with Chenchen.

Chenchen carefully asked, "Dagege, what happened just now?"

Fei Du paused. He didn't comfort the girl. "I saw a very suspicious person.—In the future, remember to look after yourself when you're alone with a grown-up."

"I know. I'll be in the graduating class when school starts. I'm not a little first grader." Mimicking the tone of an adult, Chenchen counted off on her fingers: "Keep a distance from strangers. Don't eat anything strangers give you. If strangers ask you for something, politely tell them to go to the police…"

"You have to be even more careful around people who aren't strangers." Fei Du tapped on her forehead. "Don't get into a grown-up's car on your own, and don't be alone with a grown-up where there aren't any other people—for example, right now. It's very unsafe for you to be with me. What if I was a bad guy?"

Chenchen covered her forehead, looking at the man who had called himself a bad guy with wide eyes. "Huh?"

"Including the teachers at your school, and also including old grandpas and grandmas who seem like they can't move very well. Have you got that?"

Chenchen gave an involuntary shudder. Just then, the elevator reached the twelfth floor and the grille opened. She said quietly, "Why? Gege, I'm a little scared."

"Being scared is a good thing. Fine things are like porcelain." Fei Du blocked the elevator door with his hand, indicating that the girl should get out first. "For them, the most dangerous thing often isn't the cat running around inside the room."

"Then what is?"

Fei Du looked attentively into the girl's eyes and quietly said, "It's that the porcelain itself doesn't realize it's breakable."

Luo Wenzhou was in front of the power box, a cigarette in his mouth, leaning against the wall and waiting for them.

"Does it take you half a year to buy fuse wire?" Luo Wenzhou got out a flashlight and a screwdriver and put them aside. "If you'd taken any longer, the fish in the refrigerator would have made a break for it."

As if she was looking for a sense of security, Chenchen moved her little legs and quickly ran into the apartment.

Fei Du accepted a screwdriver from Luo Wenzhou's hand and very familiarly opened up the power box. He took out the burnt-out fuse, then went around the two ends of the circuit with fuse wire several times and pinched gently. He didn't need pliers, using only the head of the screwdriver. He blocked off a small section of the fuse, pulled a couple of times to ensure it was securely installed, then replaced the circuit breaker.

There was a beep in the room behind him—the refrigerator and the air-conditioning came back to life at the same time. The whole process hadn't taken more than a minute. Next to him, Luo Wenzhou hadn't had time to light the cigarette in his mouth.

Looking at him, Luo Wenzhou suddenly realized that Fei Du had entirely left the teenage category; he was a man.

Looking at Fei Du, his view was usually split—when they were at bitter odds with each other, Luo Wenzhou felt that Fei Du was a dangerous calamity with a wretched disposition and no regard for law or discipline, who could explode at any time, and as soon as he opened his mouth he was asking for a beating, particularly unreasonable.

But when for once he was calm and good-tempered, he would remember the frail teenager curled up at the gate of the villa. He would sometimes worry about him, sometimes excessively take care of him in spite of himself—it was an older brother's care, without distracting thoughts.

But perhaps because of Fei Du's over-the-line provocation in the stairwell earlier, Luo Wenzhou's split point of view suddenly showed a tendency to come together, error and falsehood canceling each other out, finally producing a sliver of objective clarity—Fei Du wasn't a dangerous anti-social element; neither was he a pitiful little boy. First of all he was a man, and a very attractive young man at that, knowledgeable and tactful, with a brazen false propriety. Written all over him, like someone blocking half their face with a pipa (5), were the words "you're welcome to come to bed any time."

Luo Wenzhou thought that if he weren't Fei Du, if he were only a stranger he'd brushed shoulders with on the street or in a bar, he would be the type to cause more than a few passing thoughts.

But…why did there have to be the precondition of "if he weren't Fei Du?"

Luo Wenzhou fell into deep contemplation of the human condition, even being somewhat absent during the meal.—Tao Ran's dining table wasn't big enough; many of the dishes couldn't be put down. They had to be passed around and divided up. Luo Wenzhou accidentally ladled out a big piece of "plain sugar ham hock" into the small plate by Fei Du's hand; having put it in, he only then remembered that this belonged to "from the knee down"; the young master didn't eat it.

Luo Wenzhou's movements paused. He had yet to speak when Fei Du, poking gently with the tips of his chopsticks, exchanged a look with the pig's leg; then, with a distasteful look on his face, he picked it up and put it into his own bowl, his expression resembling the patriotic cat Luo Yiguo smelling imported cat food.

Luo Wenzhou: "…"

Of course. All this garbage about "from the knee down" and "sore throat" was just something this bastard had made up.

Outside of the crowd from the City Bureau, Fei Du and Chang Ning both belonged to the outgoing and well-spoken category; they quickly entered into the atmosphere, not seeming at all like outsiders. Lang Qiao, putting on airs, had brought along two bottles of red wine. Aside from the minor, she poured everyone a glass, and they enthusiastically congratulated Deputy Tao on entering the ranks of the mortgage slaves.

Lang Qiao cleverly noticed the large one-way arrow pointing from Tao Ran to Chang Ning. Right in front of Chang Ning, Lang Qiao recited an extemporaneously composed "In Praise of Deputy Tao"; from Tao Ran's dedication to his profession, his love of life and love of small animals, she went on to enumerate all the unsurpassed struggles Deputy-Captain Tao had undertaken against the ghost-botherer Captain Luo for the sake of protecting the numerous "lackeys." Finally, under Luo Wenzhou's falsely smiling fixed attention, she veered the subject away, out of nowhere fabricating a beautiful woman in pursuit of Tao Ran, scaring Tao Ran into hastily giving a small bow and entreating the patroness not to impugn a person's purity without provocation.

"Tao-ge is truly very patient." Fei Du put in a timely word to alleviate the awkwardness. "In the future, when he has children himself, he'll definitely be a model dad. I caused a lot of trouble for him when I was little."

Face and ears red, Tao Ran repeatedly waved his hand.

Chang Ning looked at him curiously.

Fei Du sipped a mouthful of red wine. "My mom died young, and Tao-ge was the policeman who handled her case. My father had no attention to spare to look after me, and he voluntarily took care of me for a long time.—Actually, I was in my teens then. Even if there'd been no one to look after me, I wouldn't have starved to death on my own. But only with him did I find out what 'living life seriously' was. Jiejie, don't look at the miserable way he scrapes by on his own. When he's taking care of others, there's nothing he won't think of."

Having listened to this crowd marketing Tao Ran one after another, Chang Ning didn't feel anything but how well Deputy Tao got on with others; she couldn't resist turning her head and smiling at him.

Tao Ran's alcohol tolerance wasn't much better than getting knocked down by one glass to start with. Having drunk most of a glass of red wine, he was already dizzy; with the ambivalent smile of his dream partner trained on him, he forfeited his cognitive functions entirely. Hard-pressed, he began to rave. "No, no, it's really…really not like that. I wasn't the only one taking care of little Fei Du, everyone was very concerned about you, even my shifu heard about it afterwards and often asked about you… And who else—Wenzhou, if you didn't see it he wouldn't say, but actually he sneakily went to look at you several times, and that game machine of yours, he gave it to me to…"

Luo Wenzhou, hearing something wrong with his words, hurriedly kicked him under the table, but it was already too late.

Tao Ran's small remaining sense of balance went up in smoke at his kick, and he toppled sideways, knocking over a nearby cardboard box of odds and ends that he hadn't had time to put away yet.

All kinds of professional books, leisure books, folders, and notebooks went clattering to the ground.

Fei Du and Luo Wenzhou, each holding down one corner of the table, were motionless.

Lang Qiao heartlessly jabbed Luo Wenzhou with her elbow. "Is that true? Boss, did you really do that? That's pretty embarrassing…"

Luo Wenzhou: "…"

You know it's embarrassing, and you're still broadcasting it in public!

Under Fei Du's heavy gaze, he braced himself and gave a dry cough; then, in an obvious attempt at a cover-up, he stood and went to gather up the cardboard box Tao Ran had knocked over.

"Good-for-nothing. A drop too much wine and you start blabbing." Luo Wenzhou wrenched the subject away, picking up a yellowed notebook and flipping through it, stirring up dust. "Hey, why do you have shifu's old notebook here?"

Before he'd finished speaking, a portrait sketched in pencil fell out of the notebook. The drawing was of a refined man with regular features, but in his eyes, which looked straight out of the picture, there were faint signs of something heavy being repressed.

There was a date noted on the paper, over twenty years ago. There was also an annotation written in a corner.

"Wu Guangchuan—six girls' bodies not yet found."

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Author's note:

(4) The Lolita quotes that appear here are notably different from the original text, and I felt compelled for the purpose of compromise and to avoid losing anything in translation to retranslate those and supply the original quotes in footnotes; in this case: I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you.

(5) A pear-shaped four-string lute, often associated with beautiful women in poetry.