This was a rather tasteful Japanese restaurant. You had to take your shoes off at the door, and there was no main dining hall; inside was one miniature private room after another. Fei Du went in alone to answer the invitation. When he opened the door, he nearly didn't recognize Zhou Huaijin.
This genuine heir to the Zhou Clan was wearing what could be called a simple stone-colored coat. There was none of the pomade he'd used before in his hair. There was a giant piece of luggage standing against the wall to one side, looking weatherbeaten. His face still counted as good-looking, but he'd lost weight and looked somewhat skeletal. There was white at the temples of his very trimly cut hair, giving him somewhat the appearance of old age.
If before Zhou Huaijin had looked like the young master of a powerful family, now, with his hair white, wearing different clothes, he'd nearly become a tossed-about, down and out middle-aged man. Clearly the youthful, graceful skin of the wealthy truly was as thin as a cicada's wing.
"I went gray young. Barely past twenty, and my head was grizzled. I always dyed it before, but I haven't been in the mood to fuss with it lately. You must think it's funny, President Fei." Zhou Huaijin smiled at Fei Du. "Please sit. A friend and I privately opened this restaurant many years ago. Even my family didn't know. It's safe to talk here."
Fei Du's gaze swept over an oil painting on the wall. It was a painting of a sunset, a rather common subject, and the painting also conformed to social norms; there was nothing visibly outstanding about it. The colors were rich and warm. While it didn't have any artistic value, it was still very much in accord with common aesthetic sensibilities.
Fei Du politely said a word of praise. "Very tasteful."
"Huaixin painted it. I told him to paint a few landscapes I could hang in a living room or bedroom, and he said he wasn't a decorator… But in the end he held his nose and painted me a few… Unfortunately he didn't have time to come here." Zhou Huaijin looked in the same direction as him, his eyes dimming. "Will you have tea? Or some sake?"
"Tea is fine. They don't let me drink alcohol at home."
Zhou Huaijin wiped his hands and poured tea for Fei Du. "Here.—Back then, I only wanted to leave myself a fallback for when I left the Zhou family one day. It was a great plan, opening a little eatery in a deep alley that only admitted a few tables of customers each day. The customers would be refined and few, the inside of the restaurant would be peaceful and quiet. But it was only a dream. Can a livelihood be that easy? From the time this restaurant opened, up to now, it hasn't made a penny. I have to put up hundreds of thousands each year to prop it up."
Fei Du smiled, not answering. While Zhou Huaijin was an unloved "poor little boy" with no family, he was still a "poor little boy" dressed in gold and silver; the mushrooms in the corners of the Zhou family villa were bigger than the umbrellas in other people's houses.
"All these years, I've hated the Zhou family, but I couldn't give up the wealth and position and kept dithering uselessly.—Such a large family property. President Fei, if it were you, could you stand to give it up?"
"Zhou-xiong," Fei Du said, looking at him, "go ahead and say what you have to say. If you weren't ready, you wouldn't have called me."
Zhou Huaijin met his gaze, soundlessly looking into Fei Du's eyes for a moment. He nodded and rather desolately said, "Wealth and rank are like floating clouds. If I could have put them aside like you, Huaixin wouldn't have died so young. I took the liberty of arranging to meet you because I investigated some things after I left. Though the Zhou family has been discredited domestically, it can still struggle to support itself abroad. But when I've said what I have to say today, I'll have to start from nothing afterwards."
"I'm all ears," Fei Du said.
"I suppose you remember the package of expired medicine left in the safety deposit box when my mother passed away? You're the one who told me to pay close attention to it."
Fei Du nodded—Zhou Huaijin's mother was the same Mrs. Zhou who had killed her husband and changed to another one who was also a scumbag. From Zhou Huaijin's description, the best-by date on her second marriage hadn't been as long as that of soy milk you had to drink as soon as you opened it.
But while a husband and wife could leave each other any time, an alliance that had conspired to kill and rob didn't dare to act so willfully. Therefore, aside from shared stock ownership, Mrs. Zhou must have possessed something else that could deter Zhou Junmao. But when she'd passed away and Zhou Huaijin had opened the safety deposit box she'd kept locked all her life, he'd found that inside it was only a package of expired heart medicine.
"When I went back, I examined that package of medicine over and over for a long time. I really couldn't think what it was good for. I indulged in wild fantasies, thinking that it might be evidence of Zhou Junmao killing Zhou Yahou, even asked someone to determine whether there were bloodstains and DNA on it. But there was nothing there."
"Even if there had been, it still couldn't have been used as evidence. Anyone could have smeared blood on the package of medicine at any time. If it had been evidence collected by the police at the time, it might have had some research value, but now that Zhou Yahou's bones are cold, using that as evidence would be too lax."
"Yes, I even suspected that my mom had kept this thing purely to scare Zhou Junmao—until I inadvertently looked at the barcode on the box of medicine." Zhou Huaijin picked up his phone and opened a picture, showing Fei Du the mysterious package of medicine. "This is it.
"I don't know whether you memorized things like classical poetry or the digits of pi or other things children don't understand when you were little to improve your rote memorization skills. When I was little, my mother made me memorize barcodes. I know that usually goods use EAN barcodes. The first three digits indicate the country it belongs to. President Fei, look, this package of medicine was produced in the US, but the first three digits on the barcode are 480."
"480 isn't the code for the US?"
"It's for the Philippines."
Fei Du enlarged the photograph and examined it closely for a moment. "But this barcode isn't thirteen digits, and there are small spaces printed between the numbers, so I guess it wasn't torn off of some product from the Philippines."
"It wasn't," Zhou Huaijin said. "There are four numbers after the 480, and then a little space—what does a four-digit number make you think of?"
Fei Du frowned. "Anything that can be numbered… How many numbers are in their postal codes?"
"You're right, postal codes in the Philippines have four digits." Zhou Huaijin involuntarily lowered his voice. "The numbers after that don't correspond to any latitude and longitude in the Philippines, so I guessed that they could refer to a street and house number in that postcode—in other words, it wasn't a product bar code, it was an address.
"I went to find that address—it wasn't easy. After all, it had been decades. Some streets had been torn down, some had changed. I changed guides three times. I really spent a lot of time on it, then finally found out where the person who'd lived at that address before had moved to. My mother had probably imagined that as soon as she passed away, Zhou Junmao would treat me unfavorably, and I could take what she had left for me. But she didn't expect that Zhou Junmao wouldn't have tried to harm me, and I'd still be passing my days in the Zhou Clan, making no contribution at all, full of crooked means, not having looked carefully at what she'd left behind." Zhou Huaijin sighed. "But this time you could say my luck was good. The old woman is over seventy, but she's still alive, and her mind is clear. She remembers what happened back then."
Fei Du immediately followed up, "Who did you find when you investigated that address?"
"Her." Zhou Huaijin opened his phone's album and showed Fei Du a picture of himself with an old lady. "This old lady. I had a vague memory of her. When I was very little, she helped with the housekeeping at home. Then one day she suddenly disappeared without a trace. When I found her, I learned that my mom had sent her away."
"What does she have?"
"When Zhou Yahou had his heart attack, a cassette player in the house was playing music. He accidentally pressed the record key in his struggle and recorded the dialogue between Zhou Junmao and Zheng Kaifeng, who came after. My mom secretly took the tape and entrusted it to this old lady. The original is in my bag. You can listen to the audio first."
As he spoke, he pulled up the recorded audio on his phone.
First there were disordered cries on the recording; you could hear how fiercely the person in the recording was struggling, listening to the voice. It was indistinct and extremely disturbing, only stilling after a long time.—Zhou Yahou must already have been dead. After a while there came the sound of footsteps. A man's voice said, "Relax, he's dead."
"That's Zheng Kaifeng," said Zhou Huaijin.
On the recording, Zheng Kaifeng laughed from thirty-eight years ago. "President Zhou, you recoil at the crucial moment. Now that this bastard Zhou Yahou is dead, won't the property and the beauty all be yours? What are you looking so grave for?"
Another man's voice spoke somewhat hesitantly. "I'm thinking whether we've left anything out. If this attracts suspicion and the police are called to investigate, it'll go badly."
"What is there to leave out? Your sister-in-law's gone to watch a movie, the housekeepers are on vacation, and as for the two of us—we went fishing together this afternoon, did you forget? Clean it up, and we'll go!" Zheng Kaifeng gave a deranged laugh. "When I think that all of this will be mine afterwards, I… Ha! This is my fate… Hey, Zhou-ge, I don't care about the rest, but you'll have to give me the little villa."
The footsteps in the recording walked off.
Fei Du tilted his head. "The little villa? What's the implication there?"
"Zhou Yahou had a secret private villa." Zhou Huaijin put down his phone. "I spent over a week wheedling her and finally got her to talk and tell the truth about Zhou Yahou's extramarital activities that my mother couldn't accept."
Fei Du gently raised his eyebrows. "It sounds like this truth won't be anything pleasant to hear."
"Zhou Yahou liked underaged young girls." Zhou Huaijin lowered his voice and spoke with difficulty. "Especially…especially Eastern girls around thirteen or fourteen. Zhou Yahou had a villa specifically for keeping these…these…"
Fei Du asked, "Where did the girls come from?"
Zhou Huaijin was silent for a while. "From orphanages. Zhou Yahou was very 'benevolent' when he was alive. He funded a number of orphanages throughout East Asia, including in this country. He used them as a pretext so he could pick out the girls he liked."
"Is there evidence?"
"Yes." Zhou Huaijin opened the piece of luggage next to him, pulling out a kraft-paper envelope from inside. There was a stack of old photographs in the envelope.
The old photographs were spread out on the clean, simple table. An unusual floral arrangement hung out of a vase, the swirling shadows of the flowers falling along with Fei Du's gaze on these distorted old photographs.—These were four or five above-the-waist photographs of young girls. They were all very pretty, and they all had some of the fragility of malnutrition. They were dressed up in old-fashioned sexy clothing that would have looked somewhat kitschy to the aesthetic sensibilities of the time. They wore makeup and looked indescribably strange.
"You can give them to the police if you want. Everyone involved is dead, anyway.—The girls' information is on the backs of the photographs. These are Chinese. There are also Korean and Japanese ones. They're all in the trunk. The old lady's job back then was taking care of the girls at Zhou Yahou's villa. He kept the girls until they were around sixteen and had grown to about the height of an adult, and then he'd lose interest and cast them aside, send them to underground human trafficking markets. Generally…generally they died very soon…"
Zhou Huaijin couldn't quite finish speaking. He averted his gaze, covering his mouth with one hand and only going on after a long time. "Sorry… I used to think that Zhou Yahou was my biological father. When it was very hard for me, I took him as my idol… Ahem, it's rather sickening."
"There was no internet forty years ago. There's certainly no way to trace the population files and materials now, and these girls were orphans in the first place. It's very hard…" Fei Du spoke casually as he flipped through the pictures. Suddenly, he saw something; he sat up straight at once and picked up one of the photographs.
On the back of this photograph was written: "Su Hui, Heng'an Orphanage, fifteen years old."
The date was thirty-eight years ago.
Fei Du quickly turned the photograph over and looked closely at the girl's face. He could faintly see something familiar in the outlines of the features. He picked up his phone at once and took a picture.
Luo Wenzhou wasn't far from the little restaurant where they were meeting. He'd stopped the car by the road. He'd just lit a cigarette when he received the photograph Fei Du sent him. When he saw it, he froze, then sent it to a colleague at once. The efficiency of his colleague on the Criminal Investigation Team was very high; he replied ten minutes later.
"Captain Luo, where did you find this photograph? Right, this must be that Su Hui—the grandmother of the suspect Su Luozhan in the case of trafficking young girls. The work all three generations of the Su family did started with her. Su Hui's file shows that she really was an orphan, though the orphanage she stayed at when she was little broke up long ago, and after so many years, just about everyone involved is dead. It's hard to investigate precisely which orphanage it was. There is a record of her going abroad, though she returned a year later. The facial features match, though there's a bit of difference with the age. The age indicated on her ID is two years older. We can't eliminate the possibility that someone lied about her age."
In the restaurant, Fei Du held down Su Hui's photograph and asked Zhou Huaijin, "Can you tell me about this girl?"
"Yes, this girl is very crucial." Zhou Huaijin pointed at the date on the back of the photograph. "This was the last girl. Look, the date marked here is April, and Zhou Yahou died in June of that year. The old lady remembered that this girl stayed at the villa afterwards with Zheng Kaifeng."
Fei Du's brow furrowed. "In the literal sense?"
"In the literal sense," Zhou Huaijin said heavily. "Later my mother found out. She thought it was very sickening and forced Zheng Kaifeng to send the girl back here, and she brought the old lady back to work at the main residence."
Fei Du for some reason wanted to sigh—later this orphaned and helpless victim had grown into an adult and at last fulfilled her heart's desire of rising to the top of that evil "industrial chain," becoming the victimizer.
She was like a girl embraced by a vampire in Western legend; forgetting the killer, she'd become the killer.
"Last time when we parted you said to me that all our family's tragedy came from the question of who my father was. Concerning this, the old lady said that the rumor that I might be Zhou Yahou's child was spread among the domestic staff after Su Hui was sent away. This may sound like a conspiracy theory, but given my understanding of Zheng Kaifeng, he was vicious, greedy, and petty. He'd do anything."
"You mean that because Mrs. Zhou sent Su Hui away, Zheng Kaifeng bore her a grudge and created the malicious rumor that you weren't Zhou Junmao's biological child." Fei Du asked, "Is there any basis for that?"
"There is. You know this field advanced earlier abroad. If Zhou Junmao had doubts about my lineage, why didn't he have a paternity test done later? It's very childish to rely entirely on guesswork."
Fei Du slowly said, "It really is out of keeping with normal practice."
Zhou Huaijin quietly said, "Zhou Junmao left a will abroad before he died. In the appendix concerning the distribution of his property, there was a paternity report, explaining why I wasn't his heir. The results of that paternity test from over twenty years ago are exactly opposed to the one you police ran."
Fei Du said, "You mean that over twenty years ago, when you were a teenager, Zhou Junmao entrusted someone to do a paternity test, but the results were falsified?"
"Sounds familiar, doesn't it? It's exactly the same as my method with Yang Bo." Zhou Huaijin smiled bitterly. "It's truly ridiculous. I went through a lot of twists and turns to find people from the company who performed the paternity test back then. Zhou Junmao entrusted it to Zheng Kaifeng."
This wasn't any kind of glorious business, and the tabloids were always looking to report scandals about wealthy families. Of course Zhou Junmao wouldn't have investigated out in the open. If he'd wanted to perform a paternity test, he would have had to privately ask an intimate confidant.
This intimate confidant had been Zheng Kaifeng, who had killed someone with him. Though evidently the intimacy between him and Zheng Kaifeng had been somewhat one-sided.
"I told you last time that there was a period when I was very afraid and thought that Zhou Junmao wanted to kill me. I only dared to close my eyes and sleep every day by taking Huaixin to my room. I always thought it was because my mom was fading and Zhou Junmao had had enough—until I saw the date on that paternity report. It was just that time."
This would have been twenty-one years ago. Zhou Huaixin had been little, Zhou Huaijin had been in a constant state of anxiety, and at the same time, it was when the Zhou Clan had been making domestic inroads on a large scale.
To pave the way for himself, Zheng Kaifeng had created a car crash, killing their competitor…
Fei Du's fingers tapped from time to time on the rim of the teacup.
Zhou Junmao had returned to the country very rarely; domestic affairs had mostly been handled by Zheng Kaifeng. As soon as Zheng Kaifeng had returned here, he'd ganged up with those people… Had that been when Zheng Kaifeng, a wolf who bit the hand that fed him pretending to be docile, had started planning to bag the Zhou Clan for his own?
Fei Du had in fact wondered before how a company like the Zhou Clan, with basically all of its bankrollers located outside of the country, would have ended up in those people's boat.
Now it seemed that there had been a layer of connection with Su Hui.
Su Hui had used her daughter Su Xiaolan to abduct young girls, sold them, then killed them and disposed of their bodies; who had helped this single mother and her daughter take care of the bodies?
Before the dumping ground at Binhai had been established, had she already been working with those people?
When Zheng Kaifeng had returned to the country many years later and found the already old and faded Su Hui, had he turned around and become one of her "customers," thus meeting the people who dealt with the bodies?
The hidden threads passed through time, tying scattered events together, faintly revealing their shapes.
But there was still a piece missing here. Fei Du could dimly sense that it was a very crucial piece.
"What about Yang Bo?" he asked suddenly. "Have you looked into Zheng Kaifeng and Yang Bo's relationship?"
"I have. Yang Bo's father died thirteen years ago. He was the responsible driver in a car crash…"
Before Zhou Huaijin could finish, Fei Du's phone suddenly began to shake uneasily.
Fei Du picked up at once. "Hello?"
"The hospital," Luo Wenzhou said quickly. "Something's happened to Yin Ping!"