Chapter 83: The Enigma (Part Two)

A faint glimmer appeared, a tiny red point, flashed once, then vanished. I truly had to admire Cha Wenbin’s eyes; I never would have noticed it.

When Fatty got down to business, so long as he kept his head, he really did have a knack for it. “It’s the ember of a cigarette. Someone’s smoking over there.”

Someone being there meant our hunch might be right after all. On a freezing winter night, to stay home by the heated bed and instead run out to freeze oneself—if it were me, I would never agree to it.

“It’s the New Year and they still won’t take a holiday. Those fellows have some real energy. How about it, brothers, shall we go take a look?”

Cha Wenbin patted my shoulder. “Let’s go.”

For the few of us, rowing was no easy task, especially since the current was far stronger than we had imagined. In the pitch-dark, we dared not make a sound, so we crossed the river by feel alone. By the time we reached the opposite bank, we had drifted almost a hundred meters off course.

The reeds on the shore were taller than a man. We slipped through them like thieves, inching forward with all the stealth we could muster. When we finally got close, we discovered that the mine entrance had a little hut beside it. Through the window, two or three figures could be seen inside, and a dog was outside as well.

“Go around?” I asked Fatty. Among the three of us, he was the best at this sort of thing.

Crouched in the reeds, Fatty studied the terrain. “No way around it. They’re guarding the only path, and there’s a dog too. The moment we move, they’ll know. Either we rush in and knock the people inside down, or we wait until they’re asleep and then act.”

“People sleep, but dogs might not,” I said. I’d grown up in the countryside; I knew dogs well enough.

“Watch me.” Then Fatty hurled a stone hard at the little hut’s doorway.

Woof—woof woof! The dog immediately noticed the disturbance, but the people inside did not react; they kept on lifting their cups as before.

Fatty picked up a bigger stone. Strong as he was, he threw accurately too. With a solid whack, he struck the dog right on the head, sending it springing upward before it dashed toward us like a bolt of lightning.

Before I could even make out what happened, the dog was already pinned under Fatty’s arm, all four legs flailing wildly. Fatty grabbed the whiskers on its snout and gave them a vicious yank, and half the dog’s beard came off at once.

“If you dare make another peep, I’ll pull the other side off too!”

Then Fatty did something even more outrageous. He picked up an egg-shaped pebble and forced it straight into the dog’s rear end. . . .

The poor beast was released and sent back, moving far faster than when it had come. I suspect that if it had stayed in Fatty’s demon hands for another two minutes, it would have felt its little life was truly over. It shot straight into the hut, and then came a string of pitiful howls.

A moment later, three men came out carrying mining lamps, two of them each holding a long object in their hands.

“Damn it, they’ve got guns!” That was beyond my expectation.

“Don’t panic!” Now it was Cha Wenbin’s turn to shine. Fortunately, the dog was cooperative enough. I could faintly hear someone on the other side saying, “Has this dog gone mad?”

The poor dog kept spinning in place, desperately trying to bite its own tail, but its owner clearly didn’t understand the message. One of the men raised a foot and kicked the unfortunate beast hard, then went back into the hut.

“Heh heh, Fatty, you son of a bitch, that was vicious.”

“I’ve dealt with the dogs in the military district compound the same way. As long as I give a bark, not one of them dares snarl back at me.”

We crouched in the reeds for a full three hours. The dog never once moved from in front of the hut. Only after the lights in the opposite hut began to go out did the three of us make our move.

Then came a wonderfully absurd sight: the moment Fatty rose from the grass, the dog behaved as if it had seen a ghost, bolted at once, and vanished in a flash. That let us pass the first hurdle with ease.

The tunnel entrance was sealed with an iron door. Hanging from it was the fashionable new U-shaped padlock of the time, but that little thing could not stop us.

What were Fatty and I? We were scrap collectors. And scrap collectors inevitably dealt with a certain kind of people: thieves.

Every trade has its masters, and thieves were no exception. Do not look down on them. I knew a fellow from Guangxi who could pry open an anti-theft door in three seconds flat; he was also one of my regular customers. In truth, everyone in that line knew the score: you sell, I buy, we both make a little money, and no one exposes the other. After a while, that man and Fatty became friends, because Fatty said he was righteous.

Back when Guangzhou had only just opened up, countless people from all over the country poured in seeking fortune, and at the same time crime was spreading like wildfire. That fellow had once been an honest man too, making his living by selling locks. Later, he was cheated by a gang from the north. When he reported it to the police, no one cared. Driven to desperation, he simply became a thief.

He stole only from officials and wealthy bosses, never from the poor. From time to time, he would even help out the homeless beneath overpasses, and nursing homes and orphanages were places he often frequented. There was once a sensational theft in Guangzhou: at the home of a bureau-level cadre, more than a million Hong Kong dollars were stolen. In those days, that amount was astronomical. According to Fatty, it was that fellow’s doing. In any case, the matter eventually came to nothing; after all, who could clearly explain where all that money had come from?

After Fatty and that gentleman-thief had become acquainted, the other man had shown him a few tricks. Though Fatty could not open the door of an imported sedan, he had no trouble at all with this sort of padlock. He merely found a scrap of wire on the ground by the tunnel entrance and poked at the lock cylinder a couple of times before it opened.

But Fatty had one flaw: he loved to show off. After finishing, he pushed open the iron door and made a gesture to Cha Wenbin and me. “Gentlemen, please.”

From the outside and the inside alike, it was a coal mine, the ground covered in coal slag that crunched underfoot. We had only one flashlight, and in a place like this its beam was pitifully weak. The general layout inside matched Zhou Youcai’s description. The tunnel sloped downward, about a hundred meters deep. At the bottom, someone had already poured concrete, and the wooden boards from back then were nowhere to be seen.

We searched every inch of that palm-sized space and found nothing—no pit where Old Ga had fallen, only coal slag everywhere.

“Could that old man have been lying?”

“No.” Fatty stamped hard twice. “It’s hollow underneath. Look at this cart. It was originally meant for hauling coal, but there’s no coal in it at all—only a lot of yellow mud.”

Hearing that, Cha Wenbin dipped a finger into the mud in the cart, held it under his nose, and rubbed it open to smell it. Then he said with certainty, “That’s right. He should have been telling the truth.”

We scraped and kicked, sweeping the coal slag away from under our feet. After about eight inches of it had been cleared, a wooden board appeared beneath, with another lock on it, and Fatty dealt with that just as easily.

The instant the hatchboard opened, a blast of icy air rushed out, as though we had stepped into an ice cellar. When I shone the flashlight inside, good heavens—it was like peering into a black hole. Not a sound could be made there, only a pitch-black void, with a steel staircase faintly visible descending into the depths.

Fatty grew eager. “Go down?”

Cha Wenbin shook his head. “No. We came too hurriedly, and we don’t know the terrain. We’ll pull back first and come again in a couple of days.”

Fatty muttered, “What a pity...”

“Then you go down alone, and we’ll leave first.”

“Don’t, don’t! You bastard, Xiao Yi, don’t go! Shine some light for me...”

Later, events proved that Cha Wenbin had been right to stop us. If we had plunged down recklessly that night, I’m afraid I would not have had the chance today to sit here and tell you this story.

The world is vast and full of wonders. We still haven’t even figured out the five-thousand-year history of the great Chinese empire, so how could we presume to be all-seeing and all-powerful?

The other side had guns; that was what we feared most. Fatty himself had once owned a pistol—he’d gotten it back when he was mixed up in Xi’an—and later, when he went to Guangzhou, he pawned that gun to pay his travel expenses. Back then the countryside had not yet begun strict firearm bans, so guns were not too hard to come by. I went and got Fatty a Type 53. It was one of the first standard rifles equipped by China at the time, a copy of the Soviet 1944 cavalry carbine. According to Fatty, it wasn’t even as good as the old Japanese Type 38.

That rifle had been handed down from a militia reserve unit and later used as a hunting gun by one of my father’s friends. It was kept in decent condition, though the ammunition was a bit scarce—just a little over twenty rounds. We also prepared some mining lamps, ropes, and folding sapper shovels, and specifically three pairs of tall rubber boots.

The things Cha Wenbin requested were somewhat strange: black dog blood, horsetail mane, aged glutinous rice, and on top of that, a donkey’s hoof, plus peach-wood skewers and an ink line, making him look more like a carpenter than anything else.

Why prepare all this? Everyone understood perfectly well. Although Fatty and I had left the grave-robbing world many years ago, everyone knew what truly lay beneath that wooden board.

But our interest was wholly different from Cha Wenbin’s. What he cared about more was: who was that person?

The next afternoon, after we had finished packing and were just about to leave, a brand-new sedan appeared in front of my house.

I was honestly a little baffled. What sort of family were we? Going back eight generations, we were all damn farmers. The relatives and friends around us were either paupers or even poorer. I had never heard of my father having any wealthy friends. What on earth was going on today? Had the sun risen in the west?

Click. The driver’s door opened, and a woman stepped out, bent at the waist. She wore a mink coat, a small purple hat, and high riding boots, and the first words from her mouth were, “Oh my, I’m exhausted. This countryside place is terribly hard to find.”

If I had only been asked to recognize her by appearance, I might not have dared to. But that unmistakably Shanghainese lilt, the slight upward curve at the corners of her mouth, and those bright, watery eyes, together with that expression of smiling without quite smiling—who else could it be?

“Yuan Xiaobai!” Fatty and I shouted her name at the very same moment.

Saying:

Of all the chapters I have ever written, this one took the longest while containing the least. From noon until now, I have been thinking it over. Alas, a child with no drafts really has it rough.