Fei Du was always falling asleep without noticing. Sometimes he would intermittently wake up for a while, not knowing what had happened, not knowing what dimension he'd managed to muddle his way into, almost entirely losing his perception of time and space.
This was a very novel sort of experience for him, as if he'd undergone a lengthy hibernation. His brain, wavering between crashing and rebooting, had never been so spacious.
About three days later, he developed some vague concept of his surroundings and dimly remembered that he was in the hospital because of a bomb. He could give the medical personnel simple reactions, and sometimes in the midst of his confusion he could feel that someone had come to visit him—because someone regularly took advantage of not being watched to touch the non-injured and non-intubated places on his body, a conduct really not very much in accord with standards of medical ethics.
However, visits to the ICU were only permitted for half an hour, and only one person could go in at a time. Fei Du spent most of his time unconscious or half-conscious, and he had no concept of time. It was really hard to cooperate with these brief "prison visits." If he could move his eyelids or fingers a little in response when the visitor called to him, it could already be counted as having made a deep connection.
Tao Ran, dressed all over in protective clothing and wearing overshoes, ran out with a rustle and very excitedly said, "I saw his eyelashes move when I called him!"
"Impossible," said Luo Wenzhou, "I just went in and called loud enough to wake up the person in the next bed, and he didn't react at all. You must have made a mistake."
Tao Ran didn't think he sounded at all displeased. "He really did move, and not only once. If the doctor hadn't pushed me out, he may have opened his eyes."
The crippled god Luo was increasingly indignant. "Then it must have been because I called him, and you're just stealing the credit.—Hand me the protective gear, I'm going in there again, I'll have him move again for me…"
At this time, fortunately, Luo Wenzhou's mother Madam Mu Xiaoqing came over and led the two of them away before the medical personnel could shoo them off.
Mu Xiaoqing said to Luo Wenzhou, "What you just said sounded very familiar. When you were still curled up in my belly and hadn't grown into such a big clod, your dad was just the same. He had to have you move for him. If you ignored him, he'd poke you through my belly. I think it's all that prodding that's made your brain so disordered now."
Luo Wenzhou: "…"
Not disputing for the moment any slanderous rumors of the "disordered brain" variety, the relationships in this analogy seemed to be rather ethically dubious.
Next, Madam Mu turned to Tao Ran, and using a kindly "looking after the feeble-minded is everyone's responsibility" tone, said, "So we can't hold it against him as if he were an ordinary person."
Tao Ran: "…"
He only now faintly realized that Luo Wenzhou seemed to be somewhat jealous.
Mu Xiaoqing directed Luo Wenzhou and Tao Ran like laborers, having them take the fruits and beverages in her car and divide them between the nurses' station and the office of the doctor in charge. While they were passing through the waiting room, the TV on the wall was broadcasting the local news—they were reporting on the whole story of Zhou Huaijin's self-kidnapping.
Luo Wenzhou and Tao Ran paused simultaneously. Mu Xiaoqing understood; she took away Luo Wenzhou's cigarettes and left.
"…so you're saying that you decided to plan this when you heard about the car crash? Can I ask why?" asked the reporter who'd been granted sole interview rights.
"Revenge." Dressed in brightly-colored "livery," Zhou Huaijin, without any makeup at all, sat in front of the camera. But his posture was casual, his expression firm, and he still had his wealthy lordling's manners. He said, "Because of some groundless rumors, my father always bore me a grudge. I've had a hard time living in his shadow."
The reported asked, "Did he mistreat you? Was there domestic abuse?"
Zhou Huaijin laughed and very skillfully said, "It's harder to imagine than ordinary domestic abuse. At one time I thought he wanted to kill me. While our relationship was like that in private, we had to show a harmonious surface for outsiders to see. After I became an adult, he still controlled me. If not for his death, I wouldn't have been able to return to the country when I wanted. Otherwise, I can assume the responsibility for saying that my father Zhou Junmao and Zheng Kaifeng engaged in some conduct that I couldn't accept."
"For example?"
"For example, using cross-border enterprises to gain illegal profits, malicious competition, even some major criminal activity," said Zhou Huaijin. "I couldn't endorse that, especially not when I heard that he had an illegitimate son. I was very angry. It may be rather cold-blooded to say this, but when I first heard the news of his death, I didn't feel shock or grief; I started thinking about how I should use it. In the end, I settled on this rather extreme measure to pull away his painted face and frame the supposed illegitimate son for it, hitting two hawks with one arrow—that was my plan."
"You couldn't easily return to the country, so you also had a helper."
"I did. Hu Zhenyu was my schoolmate, and my old friend of many years. He hid that part of his identity when he joined the Zhou Clan. Only people fairly close to us knew about our relationship."
Next, the screen changed, showing the evidence to the people gathered in front of the television—there was the secret e-mail address Zhou Huaijin and Hu Zhenyu had used to communicate in code, a confirmation for the money Zhou Huaijin had paid to the "kidnappers," his confession about faking the kidnapping, and so on.
"Ordinarily, with this type of sensational criminal case, the reports wouldn't be broadcast until at least a few months had passed," said Tao Ran, "but these are special circumstances. The media and Zhou Huaijin prepared in a rush. It's hard for Zhou Huaijin to say things tactfully without going into his family's rotten business of legitimate and illegitimate sons. I think he's performing so well because he really wants to get revenge for his little brother. He's parading himself in public without any scruples about his image, reducing the resistance quite a lot for us.—Oh, I've already sent up the report in your place. From what Director Lu says, once this blows over, everything will be all right."
But Luo Wenzhou didn't look happy. He reached out a hand towards Tao Ran.
Tao Ran was very understanding. He looked all around and pulled out an illicit carton of cigarettes. Like university students skipping class, the two of them furtively slid out of the hospital's inpatient department, finding a secluded corner.
Luo Wenzhou threw his crutch aside. With his leg held up, he put a cigarette in his mouth. "How's the internal investigation going?"
"No developments." Tao Ran sighed. "We've examined each person from top to bottom, really like criminal suspects. Luckily, since even you've been suspended, everyone knows this thing is serious. They've been fairly cooperative.—But we really haven't been able to find a problem with anyone. By process of elimination, the mole can only be me."
"When Zhou Huaijin was being interrogated, everyone who could see the security camera footage knew what he said." Luo Wenzhou thought about it, then said, "But you told me that before Yang Bo came downstairs, he received the photographs of the guys following him that night. That's rather strange."
In order to standardize management, the City Bureau had replaced its "mobile officing system" aimed at field personnel the year before. After a job file had been created, if you needed to go out into the field, you would log yourself under the relevant heading. If there were any urgent circumstances, these formalities could be completed upon return, though it required a superior's signature. Ordinarily, work like shadowing someone wasn't very urgent, so everyone logged themselves more diligently than they worked.
The tail on Yang Bo had been in four-hour shifts. There had been a duty roster at the start, but when actually doing the work, the members of one group would regularly swap shifts around at random. Luo Wenzhou ordinarily only contacted the person in charge of each small group when he needed something, so without logging into the office system to check, even he wouldn't have known whether the people keeping watch that night were the ones on the duty roster.
But the photographs sent to Yang Bo had contained very accurate information.
Tao Ran nodded. "Right. The only people who would have known who was keeping watch that night were the people in the group, or someone who had logged into the system to check attendance."
"You and I are the only people in the whole Criminal Investigation Team who have the authority to check on field work, and then there's the deputy heads of each department and everyone senior to them." Luo Wenzhou's voice was almost as light as the smoke coming from the cigarette in his fingers. "Either the mole is one of our people, or the system we spent a great deal of money on got hacked and the internet police are all good-for-nothings who didn't notice—which answer do you prefer?"
Tao Ran felt that either of them sounded like a pain in the ass. He rubbed his face wearily. After a while, he forced himself to concentrate and said, "There are two rather good pieces of news. Do you want to hear?"
Luo Wenzhou pointed to his ears.
"With Hu Zhenyu's cooperation, the investigation into the Zhou Clan is currently going much smoother. There may be conclusive evidence of them using those three public welfare funds for false accounting and cross-border money laundering. Aside from that, they're also suspected of spreading rumors, rigging the market, maliciously discrediting their competitors, and bribery."
"We aren't leading the economic investigation." Luo Wenzhou stretched out his arm, tapping cigarette ash into a garbage can. "What else?"
"I haven't finished yet.—Because they've found evidence, we've requested assistance from abroad—do you still remember the mysterious shell company Zheng Kaifeng used to pay his thugs' wages? Under the guise of a 'service fee,' it paid a deposit last year, and recently it paid out the remainder. The time the deposit was paid matches the time Dong Qian began frequently sending and receiving packages, while the remainder was paid the day after Zhou Junmao's car crash."
Luo Wenzhou stared. "How big of a number?"
Tao Ran said, "Added together, it's six figures."
Luo Wenzhou said immediately, "But we haven't found the money."
"The deposit wasn't large. It was in a foreign bank account held by a shell company. The person in charge caught wind and fled, but this shell company has sent things to Dong Qian. There must have been contact between them. We haven't been able to track down the remainder yet. We suspect it entered the country through an illegal private bank, and before it could be delivered to Dong Qian, the Zhou brothers were sounding the alarm and plotting kidnappings, getting the police involved in an investigation." Tao Ran said, "The night of Zhou Junmao's car crash, Yang Bo, in his capacity as secretary to the board, called Zhou Junmao's driver to send his regards and chat. The driver says he thinks he let slip what car Zhou Junmao was riding in—also, we found the materials for manufacturing a bomb by hand in the basement of Zheng Kaifeng's Yan City villa."
Luo Wenzhou tapped lightly on his own knee. "What you mean is, Zheng Kaifeng and Yang Bo conspired at Zhou Junmao's car crash, one hiring the assassin, the other supplying inside information. Then, when Zheng Kaifeng knew that this may have been uncovered, he wanted to take Yang Bo and run off in a panic, and in case he was stopped by us, he first placed a bomb under the container, planning to die taking us along?"
"That's our surmise from how it looks now," said Tao Ran. "We're just missing a bit of evidence."
Luo Wenzhou went silent—from Zhou Junmao's car crash to the whole series of bizarre events afterwards, they had been all at sea, both the Criminal Investigation Team and the investigation into the Zhou Clan, all of them at a standstill. But as soon as Zheng Kaifeng died, it was as if the City Bureau's luck had changed; everything became smooth, and they could quickly get at a rough approximation of the truth.
"I have a feeling," said Luo Wenzhou suddenly, "that the key evidence won't be hard to find. This case may be resolved very soon."
Tao Ran stared. He could tell that he was insinuating something.
Luo Wenzhou put out his cigarette. "I've been thinking about something these last few days. I don't know whether it's a coincidence—Fei Du's father is in a vegetative state because of a car crash."
Tao Ran: "…"
He'd been prepared to listen attentively, thinking that Luo Wenzhou, suspended from duty and hospitalized but still not forgetting to worry about work, might have some brilliant idea. He hadn't expected that the moment he changed the subject, it would be to talk about Fei Du.
Tao Ran still hadn't worked out how these two people, who previously had started fighting as soon as they saw each other, had ended up together, and one of them seemed to be about to lose his mind over it—he couldn't stand not talking about Fei Du for three sentences.
"Hold out another couple days." Tao Ran patted his shoulder. "The doctor says in a few days when he wakes up and his condition stabilizes a little more, they can move him to an ordinary hospital room, and you'll be able to look at him as long as you want, all right?"
"Do you have any proper business in your head?" Luo Wenzhou rolled his eyes at him. "I'm being serious with you.—I've had nothing to do in the hospital these last few days, so I went to investigate that reading program you told me about. It used to be broadcast on the radio. I had to slip out a good few times to find the announcer from back then, and he found me a list of what they broadcast."
Tao Ran subconsciously sat up straight.
"Back then, we hadn't noticed the ID 'The Reciter,' because The Reciter didn't turn up around the period when Lao Yang died. You have to go a little while before that, to the time Fei Du's father had his car crash. Then, the book The Reciter chose was Wuthering Heights."
For a time Tao Ran couldn't speak.
A mysterious audiobook program, a listener making meaningful requests, an old criminal policeman's questionable death, one paranoia-raising car crash after another… All of this sounded too mysterious, as if there was some mystical invisible web beneath the peaceful and prosperous earth that you could only touch by penetrating to the deepest places—and because it was too bizarre, even if you saw it with your own eyes, you would still think it was your own mistake.
"If I weren't already overly suspicious because of this," Tao Ran said after a good while, "I might think you had brain damage from the concussion—I'd really love for Fei Du to get up and jump around tomorrow."
Fei Du—only Fei Du could know what had happened in that "Wuthering Heights"—if there really had been such a "Wuthering Heights."
"But he hasn't said a word in all these years. There hasn't been a trace of any unusual behavior," said Tao Ran. "Listen, is that child deeper than the Mariana Trench, or are we insane?"
The "Mariana Trench" cut through the ICU for another two days before finally being "released upon completion of his sentence," taken to a single room where visits were permitted any time.
With his hospital bed moved to and fro, transported here and there, however insufficient Fei Du's energy was, he was still shaken awake.
He struggled to open his eyes. Perhaps because of the medication he was on or simply because he had been lying down too long, everything wavered in front of him. He couldn't see anything clearly. Fei Du was very unaccustomed to letting other people move him around like this. In the suddenly bright surroundings, he frowned fiercely and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to struggle, at least to understand what was going on with himself. Suddenly, something blocked his eyes.
Then warm lips lightly touched his forehead. A sense of familiarity about the sensation made Fei Du calm down.
"I'm here," this person said into his ear. "Everything is all right. Rest now, we'll talk when you wake up."