South Bend County Town was like a face that had been cut with a knife, before the swelling had subsided and the stitches had been removed. It was dying to change its face in one night, in such a hurry it was in rather dire straits.
Everywhere you looked was the turned earth and smoke of construction sites. The roads familiar to the old inhabitants were separated and merged one by one; once you could have used your feet to measure the land, but today you couldn't even clearly roll over it with wheels.
This era was a bulldozer wrecking everything. All the secrets that miserable people thought they had "buried deep" were in fact only covered in a layer of surface soil. A light blow, and their unconcealed ugly shapes would be exposed.
At the moment that this vast and mighty process of tearing down houses had begun to disturb the peaceful life of the little town, Yin Ping had known that there would come a day like this.
The dirt he had used fourteen years ago to cover up wouldn't be enough to do the job; in the end, it was paper couldn't contain a fire.
The red electric bike with the motley paint job speeded along the iced ground. It rolled, scraping the side mirror of a sedan parked by the road. The side mirror fell and shattered, and the electric bike flew up.
Yin Ping climbed to his feet, limping. Without even taking the time to pat the mud off himself, he picked up the handlebars of the fallen electric bike, mounted it, and fled. His torn gloves revealed an expanse of burn scars. The owner of the car with the scraped-off side mirror came out of a little supermarket by the road just then and chased a few steps after him. Seeing the responsible driver leave him in the dust, he hopped and cursed, then took out his phone and called the police.
News of this call propagated throughout the mighty internet; Yin Ping and his red electric bike became a virus whose location had been fixed.
"We've located him," Tao Ran quickly reported to Luo Wenzhou over the phone. "I'm going over there right now."
Luo Wenzhou seemed to want to say something, but Tao Ran interrupted him in a hurry. "Yin Ping is very important, I know, don't worry, I'll definitely bring him back."
Luo Wenzhou said, "Wait, listen to me, call for…"
The word "backup" hadn't gone out over the signal when it was stopped by the phone being hung up.
If Yin Ping was the person who had sold out Gu Zhao back then, then he might be the only break they could find. He was too important; no one had expected him to turn up without warning like this.
Yin Ping could almost hear the sounds of police sirens carried by the northwest wind. He felt like a bug struggling in a spider's web. The winter wind brought tears to his dry eyes. They rolled down and mixed with snot. He remembered a night fourteen years ago, as bone-piercing as this—
Yin Chao and Yin Ping4 were identical twins, like people made in the same mold.
But since they were little, their parents had played favorites. When they talked about them to others, they always said that the one who was good in school was the big brother, and the one who was obedient was the little brother.
"Obedient" was an apt judgement; a dog was also obedient.
When they grew up, their father passed away, and the two of them became the big brother who went out into the world to seek success and the useless little brother who took on his father's job.
They were clearly exactly the same, but it seemed that one of them had stolen the other's luck and talent—even when it came to girlfriends. Yin Chao's seemed to be of a much "higher grade" than his.
But luckily, Yin Chao's marriage later had fallen through, because during the engagement, the girl had been killed on her way home from work. All the luck Yin Chao had "stolen" from him seemed to backfire against him. From then on, the eldest son became a different person. He left his job, didn't take the world by storm; he was idle all day, doing who knew what, and then simply broke off contact with his family.
At holidays, his mother always burned incense, asking for blessings from the gods and praying to the Buddha, waiting for his big brother Yin Chao to drop out of the heavens like a prize.
When things had gone wrong for his big brother, though Yin Ping hadn't said it, he'd felt some satisfaction at his misfortune. His years of suppressed resentment were like grass roots in the wilderness; a spring wind blew over them, and in one night they grew beyond control. Each time he saw his old mother's desolate face, he wanted to asked her in satisfaction—aren't you always talking about Yin Chao? Don't you say every day that he has talent, has courage? His courage is so great he won't even come home. In the end, aren't I, the "useless" one, looking after you in old age, you old fart?
But very soon Yin Ping discovered that it didn't matter what his shadowy big brother became; he was still dear to his old mother. It didn't matter that Yin Ping conscientiously went to work every day to support the family. In the eyes of their biased old mother, he was still only an inessential extra child.
Then some freak had taken Yin Chao, and he'd moved back from the city to South Bend Town and rented a house not far from home. On Yin Xiaolong's birthday, in an unprecedented occurrence, he appeared at their dining table; he'd bought a cake and cleaned himself up unusually well.
Yin Chao said that he'd made some money recently and remembered that his mother had once saved an advertisement for a luxury cruise ship. He hadn't shown filial piety towards her in so many years, and at last he had the ability to realize a dream for her. His little nephew was just on winter vacation, so he'd made reservations for his old mother and his brother's whole family to go together.
Winter was the boiler room's busiest period; Yin Ping thought that if he asked for vacation at a time like this, his superior wouldn't think it was justified. But Yin Chao, being deliberately off-handed, said that if he really didn't have the time, there was still nothing he could do; the money had already been spent, 20,000 a person, and there was no getting it back.
The stupid old woman had flown into a rage after hearing the price—his big brother had laid most of a hundred thousand yuan on the table. Was it fitting for a brother not to even be able to get a week's vacation? It was a scandal.
By this point, Yin Ping had already determined that his brother had bad intentions, that he wanted to harm Yin Ping. But while he was enraged, he also thought something was off. At the time, 20,000 yuan really was a great deal for an ordinary person. Would Yin Chao find it worthwhile to spend so much money in order to make him lose his job?
For him to spend so much money could only mean he had designs on Yin Ping's life.
So that night, full of misgivings, Yin Ping had stealthily followed his big brother Yin Chao all the way back to the rental house in town where he was staying.
Yin Chao was frighteningly alert and careful. Yin Ping was nearly discovered over and over. But luckily he was very familiar with South Bend Town.
Then, with his own eyes, he saw some people corner Yin Chao in the yard of the rental house.
Yin Ping didn't even dare to take a deep breath, wishing he could get into the mouse hole in the wall. He didn't know himself what he was afraid of; he only instinctively sensed danger.
Yin Ping heard one of the people say, "Old Cinder, what's this you've bought for your family? A cruise? You want to hide, do you? Let me tell you, even if it was an aircraft carrier, it would still go down. There's not much time, let's be frank. We'll give you the night to think it over—do you want five million in cash, or do you want your mother, your brother, and your nephew's heads?"
Yin Ping didn't understand much of this, but it was still as though he'd fallen through a hole in the ice. He'd always appraised his big brother with the greatest possible malice, but he hadn't expected his big brother to surpass his imagination!
Yin Ping hid for a long time, nearly freezing into a human icicle in the cold deep winter night. When those people had gone far away and a dim light came on in the little house, he came out like a walking corpse.
Yin Chao looked grave and seemed about to go out. He opened the door halfway and saw Yin Ping standing at the gate. He was stunned.
Yin Ping stopped Yin Chao and using both hard and soft tactics forced him to answer that he was acting as an informer for a police officer, that "Old Cinder" was his codename. Yin Chao said that they were investigating a very dangerous case and had alerted the enemy. There was someone within the police force revealing secrets to the suspects, and now they'd somehow found out that Yin Chao was also mixed up with this and had come to him with threats and bribes.
Yin Chao didn't tell him concretely what the case was or which police officer was involved, but from these few words, Yin Ping was already scared out of his mind. He didn't care about anything else. Ignoring right and wrong, he knelt down, begging his big brother to take the money, take the money at once. Yin Chao was terribly upset by his cowardly little brother and told him, "I'd wanted to send you all away temporarily on the cruise. I didn't expect they'd find out about it. Don't panic, I'll think of another way… Stay here for now. I'll go find my partner to talk it over, see if we can find someone trustworthy to protect you."
Yin Ping scrambled to hold him back. "Ge, this is the criminal underworld, isn't it? You can't offend the criminal underworld. The police come and go, but these people linger. If just one fish slips through the net, your family won't live in peace! Mom is nearly seventy, and there's Xiaolong… Xiaolong is still little! You can't—"
Yin Chao hastily threw him off. "Don't make trouble. I'll fix it."
Seeing that he'd thrown him off and was about to leave, Yin Ping panicked. He snatched up an ashtray next to him and brought it down fiercely on the back of his brother Yin Chao's head—
He would never forget that scene. It was as though his soul had left his body, and also as though he'd practiced this movement thousands of times. Seeing Yin Chao fall without making a sound, Yin Ping, in his fright, also felt an unspeakable excitement.
It was as though he'd been possessed. He'd stared blankly for a moment. Then, his limbs not following his instructions, he'd heavily hit his own brother on the head a few times, until Yin Chao had entirely stopped breathing…
Then, taking advantage of the dark night and the high wind, he'd dug a hole at the base of the big tree in the little back yard—the tree in the back yard was hundreds of years old, surrounded by a metal railing. It was a protected old tree. There was a local policy that even if houses were being torn down and roads were being repaired, no one would casually touch the tree. It was a natural sheltering umbrella.
Yin Ping was frighteningly calm. He systematically cleaned up the bloodstains and the weapon, then threw the nightmare of his life into the hole. Before he could relax and cover it up with dirt, a phone ringtone suddenly came from Yin Chao's pocket.
Yin Ping was so scared his hands and feet went cold. There was a moment where he thought that the ringing of the phone was calling Yin Chao's soul.
The first time, the phone stopped ringing before he could answer it. It was silent for half a minute, and then it quickly rang a second time.
Moved by mysterious forces, Yin Ping jumped into the hole and took the old cell phone from the dead man's hand. "…hello?"
"Old Cinder!"
"…it's me."
The man on the phone said, "The Louvre, seven-twenty in the evening the day after tomorrow. I have everything ready. Nothing's changed with you, right?"
Yin Ping felt as if something was blocking his windpipe. With difficulty, he squeezed out the word, "…right."
He sat all night in Yin Chao's rental house, staring emptily into space. His hands and feet went numb. He seemed to have been frozen in a nightmare, and this all really did seem like a bad dream.
When he heard the crows crying outside the window, a weak hope rose in Yin Ping's heart, thinking he was about to wake. But suddenly, the sound of motorcycle engines came through the quiet dawn.
Yin Ping gave a start. Right, those people had said that he only had one night.
Did he want the money, or did he want his and his family's lives? The answer couldn't have been simpler.
Dawn hadn't broken yet, and perhaps the people who'd come to find him hadn't been well-acquainted with Yin Chao. They couldn't see the slight differences between the identical twins. When Yin Ping told them the time and location he'd heard over the phone, the person he was talking to smiled, got out a phone, and gave it to him.
There was a smile in the words of the man on the phone. "Actually, I knew the time and place you'd arranged. I just had my subordinates test whether you were telling the truth.—Old brother, you're in good faith, and so am I. How about it, you must know who I am by now? The two of us are in the same boat."
Yin Ping absolutely didn't understand anything he was saying. He could only agree dully. The other person presumably hadn't expected his subordinates to get the wrong person. For a time he didn't suspect his identity at all. He casually told him, "Don't be nervous. I'll tell you what to do, step by step. You can't get it wrong."
How could a well-behaved boiler operator have so much nerve?
Fourteen years afterwards, Yin Ping himself didn't understand it. He wore a human skin, but there seemed to be a monster born from nothing in his heart. It had bitten his own brother to death. For the sake of his life, he could only strengthen his nerve and continue on, carrying the departed spirit beneath the big scholar tree.
The next day, Yin Ping asked for a vacation from work and fobbed off his family with "work is busy, I can't go." After tricking both sides, giving as his reason that free was free, they may as well give it to someone else out of human feeling, and that person could help take care of the family, he found someone to carry his ID, make up the number, give the false appearance that the whole family of four had gone on the cruise, while he himself stealthily went to Yin Chao's house, put on Yin Chao's clothes, and picked up his props. Having dressed himself up like this, he became "Old Cinder."
The huge crisis forced out all of his wit and wisdom. During the fire, Yin Ping even remembered reading in some tabloid the idea that identical twins had different fingerprints and allowed his hands to be burned.
Afterwards, like the person on the phone had said, this business wasn't investigated on a major scale. He was only furtively called in for questioning a few times. The last time he went to the police bureau, he ran into a police officer, and that person smiled meaningfully at him, greeting him, "You're here?"
These words had scared Yin Ping into a cold sweat, and he finally knew what Yin Chao had meant when he'd said that there was someone inside the police revealing secrets—this police officer was the person who'd called him!
Yin Ping had always been greedy for money, but this time he managed to be clever. He didn't covet the five million these people had promised. That night, without anyone knowing, he'd shaved his head and become an ordinary and unremarkable boiler operator, taking Yin Chao's things into the wilderness and burning them, making Old Cinder disappear entirely from the world.
He'd burned his hands again on the boiler, gotten himself covered in soot every day, kept his head down and his shoulders slumped, thoroughly hiding in the identity of a blindly obedient boiler operator.
For fourteen years, he'd fooled the whole world, passed his days perfunctorily, living a flat and impoverished life.
The old died, children grew up, the big scholar tree weathered the elements, thickening by another ring. No one knew there was a body buried at the roots of that tree. As time passed, even Yin Ping himself forgot about it, as though that terrifying interval had been only a delusion. He'd never had a brother he envied and hated; he'd never known that night when it had seemed it would never be light—
But why couldn't fate let him go in the end? Why, after so many years of calm, had renovations and investigations come to South Bend like a demon? Why had the police even come to the door looking for Yin Chao?
Why, when that person had already rotted to mud at the base of the big scholar tree, did his soul still linger?!
Yin Ping's little electric bike, nearly falling apart after the fall, hummed, each soldering point trembling at the unbearable high speed. He passed crowds crying out in fear, ran right over little stalls laid to air out by peddlers, turning a deaf ear to the screams and curses, desperately heading for that place—there was still a row of antiquated houses there, now with the words "to be torn down" written everywhere. Only the old scholar tree that had already been standing there during the Qing Dynasty was calm, looking pityingly upon the people as they came and went.
The sounds of approaching police sirens broke over the horizon. Someone called his name over a loudspeaker. But all that Yin Ping saw was that tree.
There was a moment where he thought that he saw a human figure at the iron railing, the back of its head bashed in, eyes gloomily and hatefully fixed on him—
Tao Ran had seen Yin Ping's back. For some reason, he was on constant alert. He floored the gas pedal, bringing all his ten years of driving experience into play, passing through the twisting little streets. The civil policeman riding a motorcycle next to him waved to him, indicating that he'd go on ahead. Just then, everything changed.
Two pickup trucks suddenly appeared, one on each side of Yin Ping!
Tao Ran didn't have time to think carefully. He swiftly turned the steering wheel, forcing his colleague on the motorcycle behind him, going on himself.
The police car drove between the two pickup trucks. A side mirror scraped against the handlebar of Yin Ping's bike. Then a sharp sound of braking sounded in the little alley. The police car floated in, nearly overturning, quickly throwing Yin Ping's little electric bike into the air. At the same time, the three cars unavoidably collided. Broken glass crashed like a storm. There was a huge sound—
------------
Author's note:
(4) For useful reference: the chao (超) in Yin Chao means "surpassing" while the ping (平) in Yin Ping means "ordinary."