The rain finally stopped.
Yan Xiaodao returned home with a heavy heart. He had always disliked exposing his emotions. As he went upstairs, his head and upper body felt as though someone had filled them with lead, while his feet floated weightlessly as though stepping through clouds.
He had no certainty and could not make sense of too many things. That tangled uncertainty was exactly what made him uncomfortable and unhappy. He was the sort of person who liked to see every person and matter around him clearly, understand them thoroughly, and then take care of everything steadily and completely. Yet one day he suddenly discovered that the person beside him whom he cared about not only did not need Yan’s presumptuous protection—the man could overturn the situation and shift heaven and earth with a flick of his fingers. He was so capable he was practically about to fly into the sky, as though he had been playing Yan for a fool!
Beautiful piano music drifted through the villa. How could the combination of an expensive Steinway and the elegant Mr. Ling possibly sound bad? But hearing it now only made Yan Xiaodao feel worse, made the whole thing harder to accept.
Yang Xifeng gave Yan Xiaodao a tense, vigilant look and shook his head, silently mouthing: He never left the room.
Yang Xifeng leaned over and whispered his report. Mr. Ling had told the brothers, “Stop pacing around outside the door. You’re irritating me too. I know Mr. Yan said I’m not allowed out. I’ll sit here and play the piano. All of you disappear.”
The man truly had not moved. The piano had never stopped all evening.
Yan Xiaodao looked toward that familiar seated back. Ling He sat at one end of the piano bench, and the seat beside him for their four-hand duets was still left empty, waiting for Yan.
Unable to suppress his emotions, Yan Xiaodao strode forward with wind in every step and the stormy momentum of someone ready to roll up his sleeves and interrogate the truth. Yet when he reached Ling He’s back and faced that peaceful figure and perfectly steady music, all that force was absorbed and diluted by this soft, boneless counterstroke.
When the piece ended, Yan Xiaodao planted both hands hard on the keyboard, making the low and high registers roar at once. Two waves of sound rose and fell, vibrating complicated, profound patterns between their brows and in their eyes….
“Xiaodao,” Ling He said softly.
From this position, Yan Xiaodao loosely enclosed him from behind. It could be interpreted as an intimate embrace or as restraining Ling He in preparation to attack and strangle him at any moment. The meaning depended entirely on their mood. Ling He did not resist. What else could he do when it was Xiaodao?
Yan Xiaodao rested his chin atop Ling He’s head and used that tiny point of contact no larger than a fingertip to feel the warmth of the man’s long hair. The series of questions he had originally intended to begin with were “Were those tickets sent by you?”, “Did you arrange things inside Red Square?”, and “What exactly are you planning?” Yet all that evasive, circuitous nonsense ultimately pointed toward one question: Did you have something to do with harming Mai Yunliang?
He simply could not ask it because at the most fundamental level he did not believe it. Asking would be wronging Ling He.
After a long silence, Yan Xiaodao changed the question. “Ling He, you’ve always hated Mr. Mai, and you dislike Jian and You’s people even more. Why were you so determined to go to that concert? What did you go there to see Mai Yunliang for?”
Ling He answered simply and directly. “Purely on a whim, Mr. Yan. I didn’t do anything that day.”
Whatever Ling He had done, he refused to admit any of it. There was no point repeatedly interrogating him. Yan Xiaodao was disappointed.
All his thousand words finally became one sincere sentence. “Master Qi is almost back. You still aren’t leaving?”
Ling He showed no fear at all. “The piano Mr. Yan just bought has only been here for two days. It was so expensive. I’d like to enjoy it a little longer.”
Ling He rested both hands on the keys as well. Four hands almost came together but hovered and wandered without actually clasping.
Ling He smiled bitterly and had nothing to say while enormous waves were already raging inside him.
Xiaodao, I really didn’t do anything at Red Square that day. Isn’t the reason I shamelessly keep living under your roof and refuse to leave exactly the same?
I want to stay with you a few more days.
I want to play piano with you.
It’s rare in this life to find one person who truly understands you. If I separate from you, I, Ling He, may never find another person who understands me so completely. I can’t bear to leave either!
Yan Xiaodao withdrew his arms and silently sat beside Ling He. By now the two no longer needed words. Four hands fell onto the keyboard simultaneously and erupted into the passionate, stirring Carmen duet. Yan Xiaodao no longer missed a single note. He played with effortless confidence because even when Ling He was not beside him, Yan repeatedly replayed and practiced the piece inside his mind. The coordination between their four hands had reached seamless perfection. This natural compatibility was maddeningly impossible to deny.
When the piece ended and the moment dispersed, Yan Xiaodao said good night with perfect manners. “Rest early.”
He clipped a cigarette between his fingers and strolled out onto the second-floor terrace. The tall camellias and azaleas were nearly past their season, bright enormous blossoms carpeting the ground, while iris and rose buds were beginning to appear. One wave followed another. There was always some new and lively scenery appearing before anyone expected it.
It was coincidence that on this particular night, deep past midnight, Mr. Yan was wandering outside at all. Usually he slept and woke early, but tonight his thoughts were so heavy and his whole body so tense that his muscles hurt. Moisture hung heavily outdoors. Moonlight spilled over the wooden terrace. Yan slowly walked to the railing, wanting to look down at the fallen blossoms scattered below and the merciless seawater rolling over them.
His villa happened to stand at the edge of the entire residential district, directly facing the sea—a genuine ocean-view villa. Among the houses in the development, this row had been the most expensive, and Master Qi had given his godson the one with the best location. The villa had been cleverly constructed according to the natural terrain atop a rocky rise beside the beach. The outer part of Yan’s terrace actually hung suspended over the dark rock below. Using a principle somewhat like that of a cliffside temple, more than a dozen round timber posts had been driven into cracks in the reef to support the terrace and part of the building itself.
Viewed from the beach, their house stood high above the black rocks, like an elegant viewing pavilion atop a mist-wrapped mountain peak.
Looking outward from the villa revealed only beach and immense rolling water, golden sunlight and red dawn, sea and sky meeting in a single line—beautiful beyond description.
But few people leaned over a railing every day and stared directly beneath it. Mr. Yan was a busy man and had never had time to examine these tiny details. Tonight, he happened to glance downward by pure chance—and his heart suddenly sank. He froze.
At the joint where the railing turned the corner was extremely faint wear, the kind formed when the side or sole of a shoe repeatedly scraped across it. Two tiny splinters of wood had been lifted.
His gaze moved lower. Along the edge of the round timber support below appeared to be another place where something had stepped. The timber itself ran vertically, smooth and difficult to grip, with nowhere convenient for hands or feet. If somebody tried to climb up or down here, Yan Xiaodao imagined, they would need to hook the side of a shoe or sole around the timber, which would naturally leave marks resembling places where “hands” had gripped.
Looking farther down, the light became poor. He could only borrow illumination from a decorative garden lamp hidden among the maple canopy. On the black reef beneath, faint and indistinct, there seemed to be half a footprint.
＊
In that moment, a kind of terror impossible to describe in words passed through him.
Yan Xiaodao strained his eyes at those nearly invisible traces hidden amid the natural landscape. He stared until his eyes hurt, until the eyeballs seemed ready to break through the swollen web of blood vessels surrounding them. Both hands dug into the railing. He could not believe it, and the center of his back began to tremble….
Because the beach and sea were not far away, wind and spray had attacked the reef for years. The stone should have been slippery and covered in dark-green microorganisms and moss, typical coastal ecology. Those prints were shallow. Perhaps a foot had rubbed away a patch of moss when stepping down, revealing a palm-sized area where friction had exposed the surface. After the previous heavy rain, the traces had blurred beneath constant dampness and mist.
The night was too deep and there was not enough light. He genuinely could not see farther. But common sense suggested more traces from shoe soles crossing the reef should exist below. The natural rock hill was not extremely high, but neither was it low. More importantly, its edges were steep and jagged, an unmodified section of cliff serving as a natural barrier for the villa district. When the place was designed, nobody had expected people to climb up and down here.
If someone really did climb it, Yan Xiaodao estimated the steepness and slipperiness by eye. Even he would probably have to work at it. It would absolutely not be easy.
＊
Under the moonlight, Yan Xiaodao stood alone against the dangerous railing. His face was pale, but the dark brows and brilliant eyes under the weak light stubbornly preserved their natural dignity. He did not twist with rage or lose control.
The five fingers of his right hand still unconsciously tapped rapidly against the railing as though striking piano keys. A bone-deep chill rolled down his back.
His heart felt as though a thin blade had slipped through the softest, most undefended gap between his ribs, silently opening him, splitting him apart, then gently stirring inside until a faint sweet-metallic taste rose into his throat.
Could this be possible…?
Could it?
Right here in his own house, directly beneath his nose.
There had originally been a security camera in the corner of the terrace. Yan Xiaodao did not even need to look. That camera had undoubtedly “coincidentally” broken recently.
Who had spent these days constantly lingering on the terrace to admire the scenery, staying for half a day or an entire day at a time? Who often waited up there for Yan to come home, able to look left and watch his car enter through the electronic gate, or look right and see the reef, beach, and sea?
＊
Yan Xiaodao bit painfully into the knuckles of his right hand, a habitual movement when he was struggling to think. Even now, when he bent and lifted his right elbow, he could still feel the muscles and ligaments tightening around the joint. The injury had healed, but it would require a long time to recover its original crisp strength completely.
But now, if the most important characteristic about a certain person had itself been an invented disguise—nothing but misdirection—then everything that happened before, even the dangers and battles they had gone through together and Yan’s own injury, could all have been part of a trap.
Why would it be like this?
＊
The pure, flawless piano music continued. It wandered gracefully from the room, floated over the sea, and spread across the entire dark beach surging with hidden currents.
The piece did not falter in the slightest. At least to Yan Xiaodao’s novice ear, there was not one startled tremor, one wrong note, one omission. The hands were steady and the heart was steady—steady enough to make the skin crawl.
In the middle, he could hear Bear Two and Third Lady, those two flattering beasts, slipping into the room to curry favor with Mr. Ling. Ling He must have lifted his left hand to pet the dogs. The two idiots grunted comfortably beneath his touch before wandering away, while Ling He’s right hand continued playing with effortless ease. Perhaps a smile was even hanging from his lips. That was the strength of the man’s mind.
Yan Xiaodao could not turn around to search for him. He felt a pair of eyes behind him, eyes that seemed to exist everywhere. If Yan turned now, their gazes would meet and both men would immediately understand. He carefully shifted his feet away from the most crucial part of the scene, slipped one hand into his pocket, and casually swept his gaze over everything within range. The night was growing darker. He would have to wait until morning to examine it properly.
There was no point charging back into the room now, grabbing the person involved by his collar, and demanding answers. Ling He would never admit it.
When the two of them had shared a room on Yilu Island, Yan had used seventy percent of his strength against Ling He in the bathroom and still the man had refused to admit anything. Why would he change his answer now?
Yan Xiaodao had to understand this matter. Either he had caught shadows and misunderstood everything, or he had been played from beginning to end. Until he knew which, he would never be satisfied.
＊
Mr. Yan was not the only person who stayed awake all night. That same night, the special investigation team worked through the darkness reviewing surveillance footage from everywhere, trying to narrow their pool of suspects.
Captain Xue Qian had both legs propped on his office desk as he pounded at a head stuffed solid with conflicting information. He swallowed most of a cup of coffee, pulled out a fresh cigarette, and held it beneath his nose for a deep inhalation. His eyes lit up like a narcotics dog catching the scent of ketamine.
Liang Youhui had never truly been a suspect. The case had reached a dead end because the relationship list they had assembled was simply too long. Checking names one by one consumed enormous manpower and time. Even assigning personnel in pairs was becoming impossible. More importantly, the cameras around the relevant hotel floor and parking garage had somehow malfunctioned specifically at scattered key locations, leaving no record whatsoever of who entered Liang Youhui’s room that night.
Most of the hotel cameras still worked. By Xue Qian’s judgment, whoever tampered with them had planned the job hurriedly and could only target the most important points. If the hotel were imagined as an enormous maze, the correct path had been blacked out at several critical junctions, making it impossible to trace. Had the murderer deliberately disabled the cameras before committing the crime, or had some other person intentionally destroyed surveillance to muddy the water?…
Some guests who registered at the hotel that night may have used false names and false identification, confusing the investigation. The registration list did not reveal the true identity of anyone who may have entered Liang Youhui’s room. By normal standards, a room already booked by Liang Youhui should never have been given to another guest. How could a luxury hotel make such an error and put two sets of customers in one room? What the hell had that entire useless front desk been doing?
When questioning the front-desk staff at the hotel, Xue Qian had wanted to slap someone across the face. Before anything happened, those receptionists spent their shifts loafing around, chatting and scrolling their phones. Once something happened, they shoved responsibility at one another, and nobody admitted ever checking a guest into Liang Youhui’s room. Six-star hotel employees really did carry themselves with six-star arrogance. Before seeing the police credentials, they had treated these plainclothes officers with their little black shoulder bags as beneath notice. Fuck. Did they know cops could not afford six-star hotels? Captain Xue, who had indeed never stayed above four stars on official travel, wanted badly to swing his arm and curse them out.
A field officer strode into the room. “Captain Xue, we found the car!”
Xue Qian said, “…Liang Youhui’s missing Bentley?”
“Yeah, the luxury car. It was found in a northern suburban county quite far from the hotel. It never took an interprovincial highway toward another province, which is why the earlier search missed it. Villagers nearby reported it. There’s blood inside, but whoever drove it is long gone,” the officer replied.
“Test the blood DNA.”
“Hopefully it’s Mai Yunliang’s. We’re guessing it probably is.”
Xue Qian slapped the thick stack of materials in his hand onto the desk. The excitement of an approaching breakthrough swallowed his nervous system again. Biting the cigarette between his teeth, he shouted at everyone in the room. “Search, search, search! Every surveillance camera along the route. Find who drove this car to the final abandonment site!”
The whole city’s cameras could not all be broken.
Now they had a direction. They only needed time and manpower to review the tedious, endless footage along the route, and that took a tremendous amount of time.
“Find some way to narrow the range. Work around all that damned footage.” Xue Qian folded the half-smoked cigarette back and forth a few times and shamelessly stuck it back into his mouth. “Check whether there are any cars in the garage that look similar to Liang Youhui’s Bentley—similar plate, model, or exterior color.”
It was purely a wildly associative idea. Anyone staying at this sort of hotel would be rich or important. Perhaps somebody else owned a Bentley coupe too?
The garage was not large. Feedback came quickly: there were no similar vehicles still there.
“Before the crime, around evening, did any similar car enter the garage? And in the twenty-some hours after the crime, before we locked down the underground parking lot, did any similar vehicle quietly drive out?” the captain continued issuing orders and sending his people to work.
This time Captain Xue’s guess struck something. He simply felt the matter was strange.
The garage cameras were broken, but an intact traffic camera covered the road outside the garage exit. An officer pointed at the recording and enlarged the image repeatedly until it became relatively clear. “Captain Xue, this one. It passed this intersection one hour before the estimated time of death, and it may have entered the garage afterward. Another Bentley, almost the same color as Liang Youhui’s!”
“The driver looks like a woman based on the coat.”
Xue Qian almost wanted to run to that intersection, climb the traffic-light pole, and kiss that precious camera baby for all the time it had saved him. He jabbed the cigarette toward the screen. “Enlarge it, enlarge it. Get technical staff to identify her. Which rich wife is driving?”
At precisely this exciting point, his phone on the desk chimed with a message. Liang Youhui asked: “Good evening, Officer Xue. Have you found my car yet?”
Xue Qian: “We have a lead.”
Liang Youhui: “That’s great. Thank you for your hard work, Officer Xue.”
Xue Qian: “Worried about the car? It’s important evidence. You won’t be taking it back anytime soon.”
Liang Youhui: “I’m not worried about it. No rush. I’m not taking it back. Leaving it with Officer Xue actually makes me feel safer than parking it anywhere else!”
Young Master Liang finished typing and rubbed his fingers together, thinking, What would I be worried about? I just wanted an excuse to message you.
Xue Qian read the small line of text and grunted, “Something wrong with him.” If you do not care and you are not in a hurry, why do you have so much bullshit to say? Your family can afford another one. Young Master, buy seven Bentleys in red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and purple—a complete set of Calabash Brothers. Drive a different one every day and you still will not fucking repeat a color all week.
＊
Yan Xiaodao changed into a white undershirt, sweatpants, and lightweight running shoes. At dawn, when golden light appeared along the horizon, he drove around the residential district and parked at the seaside lot.
The dense fog coated the car with glittering droplets that looked ready to fall, mirroring a mood already sinking into a ravine. Yan’s hair and shoulders quickly became damp with sea moisture. He lowered his head and tried to light a cigarette, but his hand slipped and the cigarette itself was wet…. A last thread of hope and tenderness still remained inside him. Somewhere in his heart was the figure from those two days at his mother’s home in Huima Town, pure and beautiful, pressed heart-to-heart against him with their heartbeats moving in the same rhythm.
He wiped the dew from the tip of his nose and started running along the beach toward the section beneath his own villa’s cliff.
A few people were out running for exercise. Others were digging clams and razor shells from beneath the wet sand in the early morning. Yan Xiaodao ran hard along the beach, his shoes quickly losing their original color, his soles beginning to ache faintly from grit and stones.
“Mr. Yan, morning run!”
He even ran into a neighbor.
“Yeah. Morning.” Yan Xiaodao forced out a distracted smile.
He quickly reached the area beneath the black reef and stopped to look upward, estimating the terrain and distance. Even he was shocked by what he saw…. Mixed emotions filled him until he had nothing to say.
Nothing to say about his own stupidity, arrogance, carelessness, and recklessness.
The steepness. The height.
Using experience, he estimated what route a climber would choose. Some enormous rocks appeared to require genuine free-climbing ability. Another section was a densely interlocked slope of loose stone that looked ready to slide if disturbed even slightly….
Someone capable of doing this was not merely “not crippled.” Fuck, this was practically the martial-arts skill of running over walls and flying over roofs.
＊
Yan Xiaodao was not especially angry. Eight parts of what he felt were disappointment. Apparently, he had not even been worth receiving one basic truthful sentence from the other person.
Two parts were comfort. At least there was no man here whose legs were truly paralyzed. In Yan’s imagination, the bastard was strong and bouncing around perfectly well!
He had fallen for a person and, even at this moment, still liked him deeply. That probably would not change or disappear for a very long time.
Yan Xiaodao did not believe this came from some obsession that “what you cannot have is always best” or the unwillingness of frustrated desire. It was not that. It came from two men passing through danger together and finding their minds aligned—their maturity, judgment, and many beliefs matching without planning. Yan did not think he could achieve that spiritual compatibility with many people. He possessed his own pride and stubborn standards. Until today, Ling He remained the only person he had ever met who made him feel as though they should have known each other years earlier.
He sincerely hoped Ling He would live well. Merely thinking of the man stabbed his heart with pain. One-sided affection truly could chill a person to the bone.
Half an hour later, the extremely efficient Mr. Yan had already reached the old city and entered the best comprehensive orthopedic and sports-injury hospital in town.
Yan Xiaodao went straight to the international department and paid two hundred yuan for an elite specialist appointment. If you were willing to pay, there was always a way to reduce waiting time and improve service. If you wanted a specialist appointment through the ordinary clinic, better come line up at four in the morning.
Holding his registration slip, Yan crossed the corridor. On this entire orthopedic floor, he seemed to be the only person whose limbs functioned perfectly. He moved swiftly through gaps between people using the most efficient route. Around him were patients on double crutches, arms in slings, or wheelchairs. Yan Xiaodao had pushed Ling He in a wheelchair many times himself….
“Doctor, I just want to ask you something. If someone’s patella is missing, what kinds of conditions could cause that?” Yan Xiaodao asked the experienced-looking senior specialist.
The doctor looked puzzled by the sight of Mr. Yan blowing into the room with four perfectly functional limbs. “There are many possibilities for patellar absence…. Where’s the patient?”
“Sorry, the patient isn’t here.” Yan Xiaodao dropped onto the patient’s stool and stubbornly planted one hand over the prescription pad on the doctor’s desk. “Something like not being able to feel the patella by touch. Missing or atrophied? Or maybe someone was born without it? Is that possible?”
The doctor frowned and tried to reason through it since Mr. Yan had indeed paid for a consultation. “Congenital patellar hypoplasia or atrophy appears in clinical cases fairly often. There can also be skeletal problems caused by injection-drug abuse during childhood or adolescent development. Then there’s…. Are you really certain it’s missing or atrophied? Do you have the patient’s scans?”
Yan Xiaodao froze.
Certain, his ass.
Could he confirm patellar absence or atrophy? He had only felt it with his hands. He did not even possess professional orthopedic knowledge or therapeutic-massage training. Pure arrogance had made him believe his hands could tell! He had never seen any of Ling He’s medical records or X-rays. Watanabe Yangshan and Jian Mingjue were unreliable fools parroting what they heard as well. Who had first decided Mr. Ling was disabled?
The old specialist stared at him as though encountering a bizarre creature. “Exactly. Without scans, how can anyone determine there’s a skeletal problem? If a patient has difficulty walking or cannot bend the knee, it could be muscular, ligament or joint related, even psychological!”
“It’s an intelligence problem. Mine.” Yan Xiaodao looked out the window and supplied the diagnosis calmly.
“…What?” The doctor very much wanted to prescribe Mr. Yan several calming herbal medicines and transfer him to psychiatry.
Yan Xiaodao forced his completely perforated and collapsing psychological defenses to hold together and asked, “Doctor, do you have patients here with patellar atrophy or absence whose circumstances I could understand? Can people with these conditions normally walk? Can rehabilitation restore lower-limb function?”
The doctor casually pointed toward a high-school-aged boy walking down the hall outside and lowered his voice. “See that kid? Congenital patellar hypoplasia. He’s recovered pretty well, hasn’t he? He can walk. The knees are weak and the lower limbs lack normal strength, so of course he can’t move as smoothly as everyone else or participate in intense sports, but after rehabilitation he can still live independently…. The key is that you need to bring the actual patient here and let me examine him!”
“I understand.”
“Thank you, Doctor. Sorry for troubling you.”
“The patient won’t be coming…. He’s perfectly healthy.”
Yan Xiaodao pushed back the stool and stood. A polite, well-bred smile still remained on his face as he took his leave.
＊
Yan Xiaodao truly understood now. Several times he had tactfully offered to take Ling He to famous specialists, and every time Mr. Ling had cleverly dismissed the suggestion in a few sentences. Looking at it now, with Ling He’s pride and refusal to yield, if the man were genuinely crippled he would have traveled heaven and earth, exhausted every famous doctor alive, and spared no effort until he repaired himself. How could someone like Ling He willingly remain in a wheelchair?
Yan Xiaodao had seen old scars around Ling He’s knees, even large needle marks. It was obvious that Ling He had suffered physical abuse or injury during adolescence. Those scars had softened Yan’s heart until they blinded him.
Ling He must once have been disabled. That was how he knew how to imitate it so convincingly.
But the man must have recovered already.