The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon

by Liu Zhenyun

  Yan had dealt with every vendor in the lane, all but the one from Anhui who sold boiled corn. An easily frightened man, he trembled when he talked and posed a threat to Yan’s scheme, which was why he needed to find a replacement, someone who looked like the corn vendor. Since there were plenty of men who looked like him at the work site, Yan came to see Ren Baoliang for help. The explanation wore him out, but Ren at least understood what Yan wanted, though he was not completely convinced.

  “Won’t it be a waste of effort if she doesn’t read the paper?”

  “Someone will tell her if she doesn’t see it herself. She’s surrounded by fat, petty people.”

  Ren knew all about Yan’s theory of fat, petty people.

  “Why go to all that trouble?” he asked with a sigh. “If it was me, I’d have divorced her long ago and put an end to it.”

  “It’s not as simple as you think.” Yan glared at Ren. “If a divorce were possible, don’t you think I’d have done that long ago?” He added, “Haven’t you seen how it’s done on TV? They set up a fake scene when an official goes to inspect a place, just like I plan to do with my wife. That fits a range of problems.”

  Now Ren was resigned to the fact that they would have to put on a show. Still, he scratched his head and said:

  “But you’ve come to the wrong place for play-acting. I’ve got hundreds of workers here, but they have trouble taking care of real life. They don’t have time for acting.”

  Yan’s cell rang. He looked at the screen and decided not to get it. Instead, he studied Ren’s face.

  “I think you’ll do.”

  Ren jumped, as if he’d been insulted.

  “How did I give you that impression? You could skin me and I’d still be the most honest, trustworthy person in the world.” He changed the subject. “Let’s talk about serious matters, Mr. Yan. We’re six months behind in payment, and you really need to take care of that. I could postpone payment for the material, but the workers haven’t been paid for six months, and they’re beginning to cause trouble.” He gestured to stress how serious it had gotten: “My car tires have been slashed five times this month.”

  Ren drove a secondhand VW Santana.

  “I am talking about serious matters.” Yan stopped Ren from going off track. “How will you get your money if my wife kills me?”

  That got Ren’s attention; he was about to respond when the gate to his yard was flung open with a clatter and in walked Liu Yuejin. Neither greeting nor looking at them, he walked straight to the date tree, took out a rope, and tossed one end over a branch. Ren and Yan were shocked.

  “What are you doing, Liu Yuejin?” Ren shouted.

  “I’ve been working here for six months and haven’t been paid yet.” Liu put his head through the noose. “My wife and child are gone, so there’s no reason to go on living.”

  Liu had just seen Han Shengli off with two hundred yuan, grocery money for the dining hall, which, as he told Han, he’d have to make up when he went to the market later. In fact, Liu had already skimmed enough to get the two hundred yuan, but he made up the story because he didn’t want to pay Han back.

  Han had acted differently that day; before leaving, he told Liu he’d give him two days to come up with the remaining thirty-four hundred. If he failed, Han would have to get rough with him. He didn’t appear to be joking.

  Liu had more than three thousand yuan, but that was his emergency fund, which he wouldn’t touch unless absolutely necessary. He needed at least five thousand to feel comfortable.

  After Han left, Liu could not stop worrying. His son, Liu Pengju, had just called from Henan, reminding Liu of his tuition, 2,760 yuan and fifty-three fen, which also had to be paid in two days, or his son would be kicked out of school. Liu owed Han money, his son needed money, and Ren Baoliang owed him wages; the logical step, of course, was to ask Ren for his pay, with the call from his son serving as the perfect excuse. On the other hand, he knew that Ren had no money, which was why he had to resort to an unusual measure to squeeze it out of him.

  Lucky for him there was a precedent: just the month before, Lao Zhang had resigned to go back to Anhui for some family matters. When Ren refused to pay him, he climbed onto a tower crane and threatened to jump, drawing the attention of several hundred onlookers, as well as firefighters and the police.

  “Come down from there, Lao Zhang,” Ren shouted. “I know what you want.”

  Zhang came down and Ren paid his wages, so now Liu Yuejin wanted to copy Zhang’s ruse to get his. A decade-long friendship with Ren caused him to hesitate at first, but he was forced to go through with the ruse, partly because of his urgent need for money and partly because of their falling-out over shopping for the dining hall. But he did himself no favor by this tactic, since Ren knew exactly what he was up to.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Yuejin?” Ren shouted angrily. “What’s your family got to do with me? It’s been six years since your wife ran off with another man.” Ren pointed at Yan. “Know who this is? It’s Mr. Yan, our CEO. He built half the houses in Beijing. You work for me and I work for him.”

  “Did you see that, Mr. Yan?” Ren said with a flick of his hand. “You have to take care of the workers’ pay. This goes on every day.”

  Yan, who had remained quiet the whole time, clapped his hands softly when he saw the two men arguing.

  “What a great show!” He turned to Ren. “Did you set this up? You could be a director, and you’re telling me you can’t act?”

  Ren was so outraged he flung his boxed lunch to the ground, sending chestnuts and chicken pieces all over the place. “You keep saying that, Mr. Yan, and I’ll go hang myself, too.”

  Then, pointing at the high-rise that was by then nearly sixty stories high, he went up and gave Liu a kick.

  “You want to die? Then go jump off that building.”

  Yan stepped in and stopped Ren.

  “No need to look for anyone else.” He pointed to Liu. “He’s the one.”

  6

  Qu Li

  On this afternoon, Liu Yuejin, dressed in someone else’s clothes, squatted at an intersection to boil corn, pretending to be someone he’d never met. Yan Ge had told him that the man from Anhui was about the same height, weight, and appearance, though it didn’t really matter if there were differences. This was all created to deceive one woman with a photo, and no one could tell the difference between the two corn vendors; the other man was about the size of a pea in the photo, so all they needed was overall similarity. They were the ones Yan Ge’s wife would likely question. Besides, the focus of the photo was not the corn vendor, but the yam vendor and the mutton vendor next to him. Having a fake corn vendor, like drawing a tiger based on a cat, was for reassurance.

  This was Liu’s first time playing someone else, for which Yan paid him five hundred. Pocketing the money, Liu was immediately in character.

  “Didn’t you say the man’s from Anhui?” he asked Yan. “I’m from Henan. What if she hears the difference when I talk?”

  Yan was caught off guard. Liu was right about the accent. Why hadn’t he thought of that? But then he realized Liu’s mistake; the man didn’t talk in the photo. Yan was the only one who knew he was from Anhui; Qu Li wouldn’t know. Relieved, he said to Liu:

  “Just speak in your Henan dialect. Don’t worry about it. The key is not to get nervous.” He added, “You’re not the protagonist, but still you need to be careful. My wife is like a weasel that can smell a rat. That’s why I need you.”

  Liu nodded. Putting the Anhui accent aside, he asked another question: “What did the photo-taker want, money?” He pointed at the photo and then jabbed the other side of the paper with his finger. “He’s putting you through a lot of trouble.”

  Yan sighed.

  “Money and something else, resentment. Resenting someone who has a better life.”

  Liu nodded.

  A newly constructed shopping center lay in the background of the photo. Yan Ge pointed to the top
of the building and said, “If we’d put a sniper there, bang, he’d be dead by now.”

  Liu had another question, same as Ren’s: why couldn’t Yan, a CEO, no less, simply come clean with his wife? He liked someone else. What was wrong with that? If his wife knew, she knew, and he could get a divorce and marry the singer. There’d be no need to sneak around. Why go through all that trouble to re-enact a scene in order to deceive her? In this regard, Yan Ge was no match for Li Gengsheng, the phony liquor maker at Pacific Distillery, who wasn’t at all shy about stealing Liu’s wife. Liu didn’t bring up the last point, figuring that everyone has his own issues. In fact, he even felt sorry for Yan, who had wife trouble even though he was a wealthy CEO. They were in the same boat—maybe not the same boat, but neither wanted the truth to come out.

  Yan told Liu not to be nervous; what Liu felt was discomfort, not anxiety. When he put on the Anhui man’s clothes, he could tell they were secondhand, bought at the night market, because of the smell. Who knew how many times they’d changed hands, given the musty underarm odor? But though the clothes smelled bad, the Anhui man was good at his job of boiling corn in the large stainless steel pot sitting atop a coal brazier. Customers showed up the moment Liu set up shop, and many were obviously return customers; selling corn can amount to something, Liu said to himself with admiration for the Anhui man. Yan Ge had told him that the man trembled whenever he had to say something, but in Liu’s view, he had a good work ethic, and that gave Liu the idea to take up corn selling if he ever had a falling-out with Ren Baoliang.

  “Just follow the Anhui man’s example and do what he does,” Yan reminded him when he took over the stall. “Don’t change a thing.”

  But Liu made a change right off—the price. The Anhui man had charged one yuan per ear of sweet corn, and now Liu wanted 1.1 yuan, fully implementing his grocery shopping policy. With one additional mao for each ear of corn, he would have ten extra yuan after a hundred ears. Liu had no intention of working for free.

  “Isn’t it one yuan?” a customer asked. “How come it’s more today?”

  “Huairou had a hailstorm yesterday that destroyed a field of corn, so the price has to rise.”

  “Hey, you’re not the same guy.”

  “The other guy had too much to drink last night. I’m his cousin.”

  After three hours, Yan Ge’s wife had yet to show up to conduct her investigation. It was getting late and she likely wouldn’t come that day, which didn’t matter to Liu, since he’d already been paid five hundred yuan for his performance and five or six extra yuan from selling half the corn in the pot. If he had to play the Anhui guy the next day, he’d be paid again and earn some extra from the corn. If he kept that up, he’d be rich.

  But Liu’s bubble burst, because as he was dreaming about the money, a Mercedes glided up and stopped. A fat woman emerged from one side of the car, followed by Yan Ge from the other side, a sign that the play was about to begin, even without the customary gongs and drums to signal the raising of the curtain. Yan’s wife looked heavy, but Liu could tell she’d been slender when she was younger and wasn’t bad looking. She had a dog on a leash in her left hand and was holding a newspaper in the right, the page with the photo of Yan Ge and the pop singer visible. Liu readied himself for action.

  Qu Li had landed in Beijing at four that afternoon, two hours later than scheduled owing to a thunderstorm in Shanghai, where she’d gone to visit her family, with whom she hadn’t always had a good relationship. As a girl, she’d been close to her father, but not her ill-tempered mother, who beat her daughter whenever she was in a foul mood. Qu had a younger sister, whom the mother scolded but never hit. Obviously, her bad temper was not directed at everyone indiscriminately, and she had the upper hand in a family that was divided into two camps—father and mother.

  People from Shanghai are known for their attachment to their hometown, but Qu Li had decided to go to college in Beijing precisely to break free of her mother’s control. When her father died a year after she got married, she no longer felt the need return to Shanghai and did not visit her mother when she happened to be in the city. But over the past year she’d begun going back, sometimes once a month, a development Yan found puzzling. Who had changed, Qu Li or her mother? It didn’t really matter to him. In fact, he liked it, because that freed him to see any woman he wanted in Beijing when she was away.

  What he didn’t know was that she went to Shanghai not to visit her mother, but to see a psychiatrist, for she was convinced she was suffering from severe depression, something she chose not to tell her husband of twelve years.

  During the first five impoverished years of their marriage, they’d fought a lot. Back then she’d been gentle and quiet, and their fights had been of the cold-war variety. After five years, their fortunes turned, she put on weight, and they no longer fought quietly. That was followed by another cold-war period, though with a difference.

  Suddenly she thought she was ill—psychologically, not physically, always worried about something. She worried about Yan’s fidelity, so she checked his underpants each night. Then she worried about her own sanity. Yet it wasn’t just the two of them that occupied her thoughts; she was also stressed out about the world in general. Whenever something changed around her, be it a new shoe repairman or a new leader for the nation, she felt that the world was out of whack and that everything was wrong, even if it had nothing to do with her. That was no doubt a sign of depression. Other people who suffered the same illness had trouble sleeping and looked sallow from weight loss. In her case, she could never get enough sleep or food. Hamburgers were her choice of comfort food. When something bothered her, she would not stop eating until she was about to burst; she then would go straight to bed.

  So she decided to see a psychiatrist, but not in Beijing. She believed that Shanghai psychiatrists must be better, since more people suffered from depression in her hometown. She wondered if her problem was rooted in her childhood and her mother. Going to Shanghai meant being closer to where it all began, so she flew once a month to see a doctor, but with scant results. She found that, unlike people who were lucky enough to have their issues resolved, her problem seemed to get worse.

  Her psychiatrist was a man in his thirties from Chiang Kai-shek’s hometown. His hairstyle and the movements of his hands led her to believe that he was gay, but that didn’t matter, because he was so adept at psychoanalysis. He explained things clearly and convincingly, proceeding from the surface to the center, from the simple to the complicated, and seeing through symptoms to get at the core issues.

  Of course, he did not hit on the core issue immediately; it took half a year before he nursed it out of her that she had had three miscarriages in twelve years. That revelation cleared up everything. Nodding slightly with his fingers daintily steepled, the psychiatrist said in accented Mandarin, “That’s it.” Her miscarriages were the root cause of her problems, which had nothing to do with her childhood or her mother; all along she’d been thinking about the babies, not worrying about Yan Ge, herself, or the world.

  She checked Yan’s underpants because she did not want him to have a baby with someone else, while the cold war with him and the quarrels with the beauty salons were all transferences of responsibility. Her eating problem, well, that was a sign of capitulation.

  If they were to take it a step further, then the core issue was not the baby, but the fear of childlessness and the lack of an heir for the family inheritance. In other words, money.

  Everything clicked for the doctor now that they’d found the cause of her depression, but not for Qu Li, who actually felt worse for not being able to solve the root problem. Her worries about the world worsened, but they focused on Yan Ge after hearing the doctor’s analysis. She began paying closer attention to his behavior and speech. She was fully aware that her actions might produce an unwanted result, but maybe that was what she needed. With the unintended effect would come a full-blown argument, perhaps even the worse possible outcome—homicide�
��but that would prove it was all someone else’s fault.

  In the past she’d been concerned that Yan was having an affair, but now it was more worrisome if he was not. She might wish for him to have as many women as possible so she could see her hopes fulfilled. Her most recent trip to Shanghai was simply one of habit, not really to see the doctor.

  A close friend had called the day before from Beijing to tell her about the photo with Yan and the pop singer. This friend, also the wife of a wealthy man, and fat to boot, expressed her emotional reaction to the photo with a hint of excitement, which led Qu Li to see through the so-called altruism. The woman had been eagerly waiting for someone she knew to run into trouble, a sign that she too was psychologically ill.

  Unbeknownst to this friend, Qu Li was not upset by the news. She was, rather, enlivened, like a warhorse detecting the smell of the battlefield and blood. She could sense the blood boil and course through her body, though she pretended to be upset on the phone to fool the friend. Biding her time, she wanted to savor the bitterness and pain; the longer a volcano remains dormant, the more splendid the eventual eruption.

  Yan Ge, newspaper in hand, picked her up at the airport, which she knew was a ploy that would let him strike first and give him an edge. After she got in the car and took her dog in her arms, Yan opened the paper to show her the picture.

  “Can you believe this? I didn’t realize who she was when I was buying a yam.”

  His intention was so obvious it outraged her. Despite her decision not to give her friend the satisfaction of having a fight with Yan, despite her plan to wait and be ready, she could not hold back.