Dark waves crashed violently against dark reefs, shattering into white foam. Above them, the stone building had stood for a century without budging. Known as Tide-Watching Villa, it loomed in the night like a huge, hideous demon—contemptuous of mortals, fearless before gods and Buddhas, facing down the masses of storm clouds rolling in from the horizon and the downpour everyone knew was coming, while peering at the tiny insects scurrying back and forth along the winding road beneath its feet.
The stone building itself was a witness to the old city’s colonial humiliation, when nine foreign powers had carved out concessions on its soil. On this vital Celestial Empire port blessed with magnificent views of the bay, the foreign devils had forcibly erected a Tsarist Russian aristocratic fortress in an ancient Roman-Byzantine style.
The building consisted of two matching fortress towers standing side by side, linked by a stone passageway. It had six levels in all, large rooms enclosing smaller rooms and an extremely complicated interior layout, while the attic was topped by defensive crenellated battlements. The outer granite encased the castle in what seemed like a suit of impenetrable armor, while the lavish murals and enormous domed chandeliers inside filled the fortress with the mysterious solemnity of a religious sanctuary.
You Jinglian’s voyage of escape across the sea had not even begun before his last hope was cut off.
Their secret meeting place had been uncovered by his mortal enemy, who had even blocked his retreat.
The place where evil had once been committed had finally become the place of judgment. Any one of these things alone would have been enough to snap the final straw beneath Lord You’s fragile nerves.
There was a handgun in You Jinglian’s pocket, but by now he had completely forgotten about fighting back. He had never known how to use a gun properly in the first place; violence was entirely beyond him.
Someone had even thoughtfully prepared a silk-upholstered armchair for him, along with a tall tea table and a pot of the Wuyi Da Hong Pao he usually drank. An exquisite comb, a small jeweled mirror, and imported shoe polish had been arranged on the table as well, reminders of Secretary You’s years of carefree luxury, surrounded at home by drivers, cooks, and servants tending to every need. At this moment, every detail of that hospitality became a subtle mockery. They were all pieces of the psychological warfare Boss Ling had spent days carefully planning in order to break his opponent with a single blow.
The iron spiral staircase before him looked terribly familiar.
Hadn’t there been a staircase just like it in that dilapidated inn out in the middle of nowhere all those years ago? Only that staircase had been made of twenty-year-old wood, crudely constructed and long neglected. Whenever someone stepped on it late at night, it produced the ugliest creaking sounds imaginable—like the tolling of a death bell cried by black crows, like the wail of someone trapped in a ghostly maze, or like the tasteless moans of the middle-aged prostitutes in the village who charged fifty yuan for a night…
You Jinglian sat in the chair like a clay statue. Now that the moment had actually arrived, he had become frighteningly calm. Sweat streamed freely down his back, yet not a single hair stirred on his face, as though someone had plastered a mask of yellow mud over an utterly unrepentant expression.
You Jinglian said hoarsely, “Mr. Ling, why… why the hell do you keep hounding me like this? That bastard Chen Jiu who died back then wasn’t a good man to begin with. If the police had caught him, he would have been sentenced to death anyway.”
Ling He picked up the thread with a cold laugh. “Chen Jiu certainly deserved the death penalty. So, Lord You, do you dare walk out of this building right now and announce to the world that fifteen years ago, the lot of you acted on Heaven’s behalf, joined forces to kill the robber, and then very politely swallowed all the stolen money for yourselves? Fifteen million—did you think that was a reward specifically allocated to you for catching a criminal? You really had some nerve.”
You Jinglian had no answer. Guilt made him turn his eyes away. Who did not become greedy when money appeared before them? Back then, he had been the most insignificant and useless young clerk in his department, excluded by his colleagues, mediocre at his work, disliked by his superiors, and unpopular with everyone around him. He would never have climbed even halfway onto the official ladder in his entire life, yet he still daydreamed about a political career. Besides, he had never seen that much money before. The temptation of such an enormous sum…
You Jinglian muttered, “The man who died was just some barefoot peasant thug, a desperate criminal. That short-lived ghost wasn’t your father. You’ve gone to all this trouble, coming after us again and again…”
“Was Chen Jiu the only one who died?” Ling He cut him off as casually as though pressing a mute button. The force of it truly silenced You Jinglian so thoroughly that he did not dare make another unnecessary sound. Ling He said, “Is Lord You pretending to be stupid, or has your memory simply failed you? How did that poor innkeeper’s wife miscarry? How did that entire innocent family die in a fire? Why was the chemical plant razed to the ground and buried beneath concrete? And how exactly did you petty vermin frame Ling Huang?!… One lie forced you to tell more lies to cover it. One life taken and one enormous haul of stolen money seized forced you to destroy still more lives in order to conceal everything. How’s my storytelling, Lord You? Vivid enough?”
Ling He knew far too much.
Who had told this young brat so many details?
Could that old bastard Ling Huang truly still be alive, just as the rumors claimed?
Only then did large beads of sweat erupt across You Jinglian’s forehead. They stained his yellow-mud mask until it seemed to run down his face. He knew he would not escape.
The eloquence he had accumulated over years in office finally found a use. His voice turned hoarse and choked as he pleaded and defended himself. “I—I wasn’t the mastermind. I wasn’t the first person to stab Chen Jiu. I wasn’t the one who struck the fatal blow. And I wasn’t the one who finally hacked him apart and dismembered the body! At—at most I was an accomplice. Even if I were really sentenced, my crimes wouldn’t warrant death!”
A beautiful defense. He had washed himself remarkably clean. Ling He smiled with impeccable manners. “Yes. Lord You is an educated man. You weren’t very brave, so you naturally didn’t dare strike the first blow, and you didn’t deliver the fatal one. Of course you didn’t dare dismember the corpse either. But with your intelligence, the entire chain of schemes—from killing for money to disposing of the corpse and fooling the police in the end—whose idea was it?”
“That was Qi Baoshan’s idea!” You Jinglian’s face blanched, and he immediately dumped the whole bucket of filth onto his sworn brother from back then. “Qi Baoshan is a treacherous, calculating bastard! His brain works better than mine!!”
“Hahahaha…” Ling He laughed loudly and mockingly, his beautiful features throwing off an almost hypnotic brilliance beneath the lights. Then his melodious voice suddenly sank into something deep and resonant. “Lord You, you really are funny. At a time like this, every one of you wishes he’d been mentally disabled, insane, blind, crippled in both hands, and paralyzed in both legs back then, so you could wash your hands clean of every crime and stand completely outside it all. If we asked Master Qi now, I imagine he’d immediately insist he’d been an idiot since childhood!
“What loyal and righteous members of a Peach Garden Brotherhood of Four. Sworn brothers who bowed together and shed blood for one another. When there was money to seize and lives to take, all of you talked about brotherhood while proving yourselves ruthless enough to do anything. Now disaster has come, and all you know how to do is bite one another and flee like rats. The fortune you made was blood money stolen through murder. The methods you used to rise were nothing but buying and selling official rank. The things you did in office were bribery, corruption, and filthy private schemes. Your daily life has been smoke and mirrors, superstition, and corruption. Lord You, do you have enough courage today to stand in front of your wife and son, scrape that mud mask off your face, tear away the red-topped official hat and peacock-feather disguise you wear in the halls of power? Do you possess even the slightest sense of shame or responsibility as a father and as a human being, enough not to make your son suffer in your place for the sins you committed? Your crimes are exposed and all you can do is run. A snake, a rat, a coward without a drop of blood in him. I’m ashamed on behalf of trash like you. The backbone in your body is weaker than your son’s!”
Elio’s Notes: Ling’s “Peach Garden Brotherhood of Four” mocks the famous Oath of the Peach Garden from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, traditionally sworn by Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei—three men, not four.
…
You Jinglian’s entire body convulsed under the verbal assault. He had never even been aboard the Cloudtop, yet now he finally experienced the exquisite pleasure Watanabe Yangshan must have felt when Ling He berated him into a heart attack.
Ling He paused there. He too had spent countless nights tossing and turning, tormented almost beyond endurance by certain memories. His voice turned hoarse. “Lord You, do you really think money alone was enough to help you climb into the position you hold today? I doubt money was sufficient. You gave them people too, didn’t you? You know perfectly well what sins you committed against your conscience back then. How many other people’s children did you ruin? Their innocence, their entire lives…”
Those two sentences were not even especially harsh, yet they struck You Jinglian directly in a vital spot. His blood pressure shot upward, his face flushing red one moment and draining white the next. The long object in Ling He’s hands seemed to pin him in place, but in truth, it was his own mental defenses that had completely collapsed into rubble.
Ling He knew.
That devastatingly beautiful boy he had seen in Yandu all those years ago really had returned for revenge.
No wonder Ling He had pursued him so relentlessly, trying to destroy his entire family and even going after his son. You Jinglian himself had once ruined somebody else’s son! The investigation into the old case was nothing more than an excuse and an opening. Ling He truly was not doing this for the criminal Chen Jiu, perhaps not even for Ling Huang, but for—for…
“I was forced into it too! I wasn’t the one who started any of it! I—I don’t deserve to die! I’ve rendered meritorious service to the state! At the very least, I’m a great benefactor to every ordinary citizen in Linwan New District! I brought in those foreign investment projects. I generated all that money! I laid every single one of those golden eggs!!…”
The final straw You Jinglian could grasp in his mind was actually the idea of bargaining with investigators by boasting about his accomplishments to reduce his sentence.
This was a psychological offensive disguised as an interrogation. How could Ling He truly know who had stabbed how many times, which blow had been fatal, or exactly how many people had become involved? He knew very little himself. Much of it was nothing more than bluff and atmosphere, all meant to extort a confession. He had been guessing, deceiving, threatening, and probing at once. Recording devices had been hidden behind the two wall lamps behind You Jinglian. If he could trick one useful sentence out of the man, that was one sentence gained.
At last, Ling He eased his pace and revealed the ultimate purpose of tonight’s scheme. “Lord You, turn yourself in.”
You Jinglian’s weak backbone jolted violently. That was an escape route he had never once considered. An hour earlier, he had still been dreaming of fleeing to the ends of the earth and spending the rest of his life enjoying a mansion and yacht by the harbor in Victoria. How could he possibly bear to abandon a life of wealth and luxury for prison?
“Secretary You, surrender directly to the investigation team, or go to the police station right now and turn yourself in to Bureau Chief Bao and Captain Xue. Confess and receive leniency.
“Tell them the truth about the old case. Tell them who your accomplices were. The first man to surrender gets credit and a reduced sentence. You weren’t the mastermind, you weren’t the principal killer—you were only an accomplice. As long as you confess, you’ll be handing yourself a gold medal against the death penalty.” Ling He guided You Jinglian’s thoughts into violent turmoil, every sentence leading him onward and attacking his mind.
You Jinglian shook his head neurotically, unwilling. A dignified official like him would one day have his head shaved, wear prison clothes, and become the same kind of creature as a group of coarse, vulgar, low-class convicts. For a lofty lord accustomed to vegetarian cuisine and Buddhist worship, so refined and self-important that he could not even sleep without Hangzhou silk pajamas, how could such humiliation possibly be endured?
“What are you afraid of? What are you hesitating over?” Ling He watched his expression and added another straw with effortless precision. “Lord You, once you leave this building tonight, you have no road left behind you. Use that clever brain of yours and think. How did I learn about this secret meeting place? How could I possibly know that on the seventh day of this month, the four members of your little group would meet here at Tide-Watching Villa? Who tipped me off so I could lay an ambush here and come after all of you? Who has been betraying you all along?… The very person you’re hesitating to expose, the one you keep trying to protect and conceal, is exactly the person who sold you out!”
Ling He really did possess a tip. Someone had informed him in advance and exposed this supposedly top-secret meeting place. Otherwise, how could Ling He have had the opportunity to plan ahead and set his trap?
You Jinglian suddenly understood everything. He cried out, “It—it was him… It’s been him all along…”
“Yes. Him. The ‘Big Brother’ who led your little criminal brotherhood.” Ling He rarely bestowed even this much pity, but he shook his head and sighed for the indecisive fool. “If you still refuse to surrender, he’s going to silence you permanently.”
Both You Jinglian and Ling He could reach the same conclusion: the person who had secretly passed information to Ling was the same person who had tried and failed to have him killed aboard the Cloudtop. Everyone was a piece on this chessboard now, and somebody intended to pull the firewood out from beneath the cauldron, sweep a hand across the board, and send every single piece flying to the floor!
“Big Brother… heh… hahaha…” You Jinglian laughed bitterly, hatred filling his heart. “That vicious bastard has always wanted to silence us… He climbed onto some rich and powerful branch and turned from a crow into a phoenix. He wants to stand forever, wealthy for a thousand years, while making the rest of us carry the blame…”
Bang!
A completely unexpected gunshot exploded through the top-floor hall beneath the towering dome.
The castle’s peculiar architecture sent the shot reverberating through the cylindrical interior, grand and violently unsettling.
The bullet had been aimed directly at You Jinglian. It came at the exact moment he blurted out “Big Brother,” when Ling He had clearly shaken his resolve, persuaded both his reason and his emotions, and nearly gotten him to agree to walk out of Tide-Watching Villa and kneel before Bureau Chief Bao and Captain Xue to surrender. The shot stopped him from saying anything more.
At that critical instant, the nervous trembling You Jinglian had suffered for years whenever he became frightened actually saved his life. The bullet came from an angle, aimed at the left side of his chest to silence him, but his body jerked violently backward and threw off the shot. It grazed across his chest and struck his left arm instead.
Ling He was startled. He immediately searched the shadows for cover, because the shooter turned the gun on his position next. Bullets punched several terrifying holes into the marble-inlaid wall. Whoever was willing to kill people naturally had no concern about damaging a historical monument either.
You Jinglian screamed from the pain and, in the darkness, frightened himself even more with the sound of his own shrieking. He turned and fled downstairs.
Under Ling He’s patient persuasion, the faintest hint of a desire to surrender had only just begun to form inside him. That single gunshot obliterated it completely. He thought Young Master Ling had become impatient and tried to kill him for revenge.
He would not surrender!
And he refused to die!
…