At two in the morning, the lights in the police station office were still burning. Xie Jia Hua had only just finished arresting a major criminal that day. A few flecks of blood still stained his sleeve, and several rounds of bandage were wrapped around his bare arm. Sitting at his desk, he drank coffee while leafing through a stack of case files. His brows were tightly furrowed, making his lean, hard face, chiseled as though by blade and axe, look even more severe and forbidding. He was only thirty-three, yet fine lines had already appeared at the corners of his eyes, and his deep-set eyes were faintly bloodshot—the result of years spent with virtually no personal time, investigating cases day and night.
Just as he became absorbed in the files, the brick phone on his desk suddenly rang, startling him. A call this late made his professional instincts assume that another major case or homicide had occurred. He hurriedly answered. “Hello?”
A few sentences came from the other end. Surprised, he pulled the phone away and checked the caller ID, his frown deepening. “What? How is he now? …All right. I’m coming immediately.”
He hurriedly stood, grabbed his coat and car keys, then remembered something after taking a few steps and doubled back. He carefully placed the stack of documents he had just been scrutinizing into a drawer, locked it, and hurried out.
…
His sedan soon stopped outside a bar on a corner of Lockhart Road. It was already late at night, and even the bar street had grown quiet and sparsely populated. Only a few drunks sat by the roadside not far away, shoving one another and swearing. Xie Jia Hua watched them cautiously for a moment, made sure they were merely friends roughhousing rather than actually fighting, then hurried into the little bar.
All the customers had left. The young owner and bartender were separately cleaning the mess from the floor and bar counter. When they saw him enter, both were startled. “A’Ward! So it’s you!”
Xie Jia Hua had met Tang Jia Qi at this bar many years ago and had been a regular here back then. After exchanging a few pleasantries with him, the bartender picked up a filthy brick phone smeared with ketchup and liquor from the counter. “He saved you separately as the first entry under a name beginning with zero, so we called you.”
Xie Jia Hua took the phone and looked. Sure enough, the first entry in the contacts was his own number, saved under the name “0_TheFool.”
The bartender had seen Investigator Lu take the drunken Xie Jia Hua away the previous time and had vaguely guessed that there was something unusual between the two of them. Leaning close to Xie Jia Hua’s ear, he whispered, “He’s been here a few times before, but he’s never gotten drunk. No idea what got into him tonight. He just kept drinking and throwing up, and we couldn’t get him to leave. Hurry up and take him home and coax him a little.”
“Where is he?” Xie Jia Hua looked around.
“Lying on the sofa in back. He’s not making a drunken scene. He just throws up every now and then.”
Xie Jia Hua found Lu Guang Ming dead drunk on a sofa in the corner of the bar. The young Investigator Lu lay flat on his back, eyes open as he calmly stared at the ceiling, legs together and fingers interlaced over his chest. It was an exceedingly quiet and peaceful way to be drunk—if one ignored the foul-smelling filth covering his entire body.
Xie Jia Hua took off his coat and draped it over him, then tugged at him twice but could not get him up. Lu Guang Ming had drunk until even his eyes were glazed and his limbs stiff, his entire body like a pile of rotten wood. Xie Jia Hua simply bent down, exerted some strength, scooped him straight into his arms, and strode quickly toward the door.
The young owner and bartender, who had been about to come over and help support him, stared in astonishment. Only after Xie Jia Hua had carried him steadily out of the bar did the owner sigh in admiration. “As expected of a cop. What incredible arm strength…”
“Hey! You forgot the phone! And his bag!” the bartender cried, hurriedly grabbing the things Lu Guang Ming had left behind and chasing after them.
…
The sedan drove steadily past one of the ICAC’s offices in Kowloon. Xie Jia Hua glanced over while driving and saw that several offices were still lit, apparently proving that the ICAC shared the police force’s habit of staying awake all night investigating cases. Yet the young ICAC officer lying in his back seat had not stayed to fight alongside his colleagues. Instead, he had gone to a bar alone and spent the entire night drinking himself senseless.
Xie Jia Hua glanced at him through the rearview mirror. Lu Guang Ming was still lying there quietly, as though he did not care in the slightest who was taking him where.
Xie Jia Hua thought of the name saved in Lu Guang Ming’s phone: “0_TheFool.” When he was in secondary school, his dream had been to study art, and he knew a little about Western Tarot imagery. In English-language Tarot, the card was called The Fool. In common depictions, the Fool held a rose in his left hand, symbolizing innocence, purity, and passion, while his right hand held a staff with a bundle, symbolizing strength and moving forward beneath a burden. Among the twenty-two Major Arcana cards, it was numbered 0, while also being counted as 22, symbolizing both the beginning and the end of the Tarot and representing limitless possibility.
He couldn’t understand what Lu Guang Ming had been thinking when he saved his name like that. Maybe he was reading too much into it. Perhaps Lu Guang Ming simply wanted to call him an idiot?
…
The car finally stopped in the parking garage beneath Xie Jia Hua’s apartment building. This time he had farther to walk. After wrestling with Lu Guang Ming for a while, he finally managed with some difficulty to hoist him onto his back. He gave the completely unresisting man a shake. “Awake? Carry your own bag.”
Lu Guang Ming opened his eyes and actually raised one hand slightly to accept his briefcase. That freed Xie Jia Hua to lock the car. Hooking his hands beneath Lu Guang Ming’s backside, he walked steadily toward the elevator. He had thought that after resting for a while, Lu Guang Ming might have sobered up somewhat, but with the briefcase still in hand, Lu Guang Ming suddenly wrapped both arms tightly around Xie Jia Hua’s chest.
“Dad… Mom…” Lu Guang Ming murmured. Warm tears fell onto the back of Xie Jia Hua’s neck. Then he lowered his head and gently kissed away his own tears, kissing the sweat- and tear-damp skin at the back of Xie Jia Hua’s neck as he called, “Brother Jia Qi…”
Xie Jia Hua did not stop. He continued walking steadily forward.
Ten minutes later, he lowered Lu Guang Ming into his bathtub. Lu Guang Ming dropped his briefcase, but his arms remained wrapped around Xie Jia Hua and refused to let go. With Lu Guang Ming clinging to him and pestering him, Xie Jia Hua stripped off his filthy clothes and turned on the shower to rinse him clean. Naked, Lu Guang Ming sat up and pressed himself against Xie Jia Hua, kissing his brows and eyes haphazardly while calling, “Brother Jia Qi…”
Xie Jia Hua turned off the water and tilted his head slightly to avoid the kisses. Calmly, he said, “You’re drunk.”
“I’m not drunk.” Lu Guang Ming’s eyes were brimming with moisture and desire as he tried to entangle himself with him again, but Xie Jia Hua caught his wrist.
“You’re drunk. But you know who I am. Stop pretending.”
Lu Guang Ming froze for a moment. Then, after a brief pause, he narrowed his eyes and smiled until they curved into two crescent moons.
He had spent the whole night drinking in a blur, getting drunk and sobering up, sobering up and getting drunk again. He could no longer tell exactly how drunk he was, nor when he was pretending and when he was being genuine. He had recognized Xie Jia Hua the moment Xie Jia Hua appeared at the bar. Even while calling him Brother Jia Qi, he knew perfectly well that the man he was kissing was Xie Jia Hua. But did that mean all that grief and tears, longing and uncertainty, were fake too?
He did harbor resentment toward his superior, Chief Investigator Xu, but were those three years of respect and obedience fake? When the case finally made a breakthrough, he had hesitated for a long time before ultimately choosing to submit the relevant materials to Chief Investigator Xu. Was that trust, offered with such extreme caution and deliberation, fake too?
Chief Investigator Xu had been right to scold him. He really was a disappointment. For all these years, he had concealed himself behind layers of truth and falsehood, trusting no one and keeping everyone at arm’s length. It must have chilled the hearts of those around him. But how was he supposed to tell what was true and what was false in other people? He had lost both parents as a child. At the welfare home, he encountered a caregiver who molested young children and spent several years in darkness, until Tang Jia Qi came there as a volunteer, noticed something was wrong with him, reported the caregiver, and rescued him. After trauma upon trauma, he became introverted, closed-off, and extreme, arming himself tightly like a hedgehog. Apart from Tang Jia Qi, he had no friends and no family—and even with Tang Jia Qi, he yearned for him deeply while instinctively resisting and avoiding him, right until the day tragedy struck Tang Jia Qi… From then on, he lost the ability to recognize genuine affection.
Heaven had taken away the only person who had ever sincerely cared for him. Everyone else in this world could have been an accomplice in Brother Jia Qi’s death. What reason did he have to trust anyone’s kindness?
For a long time, he had even believed that Xie Jia Hua might be one of the killers, that all that deep affection was merely a disguise concealing his guilt—until the day a drunken Xie Jia Hua fucked him while crying out Tang Jia Qi’s name. His body clearly hurt, yet he smiled happily. Amid those relentless thrusts, he cupped Xie Jia Hua’s face and kissed away the tears on his cheeks—those tears were real. The pain that haunted that heart was, it turned out, truly the same as his own.
What an interesting man Xie Jia Hua was—a Fool standing within arm’s reach of the true culprit yet kept in the dark all along; a soul whose innocence had never been worn away, who had never abandoned the pursuit, who carried a crushing burden and kept moving forward. Even if this man despised him and suspected him, what did it matter? Someone as false and fallen as he was had never had much about him worth liking. At this moment, sharing the pleasure of the flesh was enough.
“Inspector Xie, you’re really no fun.” As he spoke, Lu Guang Ming tried once more to tease Xie Jia Hua’s face, though his wrist was still firmly trapped in Xie Jia Hua’s grip. Far from becoming angry, he giggled. “We’ve slept together several times already. Why act so reserved? Remember? The first time was because you were drunk… Now I’m drunk too, so let’s have another round… We both get to feel good. Isn’t that nice?”
Xie Jia Hua’s expression darkened slightly, but he said nothing. Lu Guang Ming grinned and continued, “You don’t want to? Then how about I fuck you for a change? Hey, when you were with Brother Jia Qi, were you always the one on top? Didn’t he ever fuck you?”
Xie Jia Hua turned on the shower and blasted him squarely in the face!
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