The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon

by Liu Zhenyun

  He was stuck. Then it occurred to him that Liu had been waiting for him in the alley near Beethoven Villa, which meant that Liu had followed him there, the same way Yang had tailed the Gansu gang. Where had he picked up the trail? It must have been the snack street along the Tonghui River. Yang deduced that Liu must still be looking for him and might even be at the snack stall that very evening. So that’s where he went. When he got there, he was elated to see Liu in the crowd, looking this way and that way, obviously searching for someone.

  On his part, Liu had decided to try the Tonghui River area again because he’d found Yang there, oblivious to the fact that Yang had also come looking for him after figuring out his possible whereabouts.

  Yang had planned to confront the man who’d picked up the purse and maybe go into business together. There was only a little more than four thousand in the pack he’d taken from Liu, while the purse contained something that could be worth a hundred, even five hundred thousand yuan. He was sure Liu did not know about the purse’s potential; he’d be happy to tell him and they could square everything away. Now there was Liu, who had no idea he was being watched, which led to a change of heart. Yang decided, instead of meeting with Liu, he’d steal the purse back from him. It would be just him and Xing in a deal for all that money. Hiding behind the river bridge, he waited for Liu to return home empty-handed. Liu was too dejected to notice anyone following him.

  Yang had to laugh when they reached the site, a place he’d visited earlier that day. When Liu walked through the gate, Yang scaled the fence and continued to trail him to the dining hall, finally realizing, when he entered his tiny room, that he was not a foreman; he was a cook, and a braggart to boot. Hiding next to a pile of building materials, Yang wanted to wait until Liu was asleep to get the purse; in his view, that was different from stealing. He had stolen Liu’s pack by the post office but this was his purse, which Liu had taken, so he was merely getting his own stuff back. Totally justified.

  To his surprise, Xing and another man barged into Liu’s room a moment after Liu went inside. Obviously, whatever he’d had to do to manage, Xing had also found Liu Yuejin; he had been right to be wary of Xing. Now he was worried that Xing might take the purse from Liu before he had a chance to act; then he began to rue his decision of not talking to Liu earlier. Following the sound of an argument, Xing and the other man came out empty-handed, the other man continuing to argue with Liu from outside. Obviously, they’d failed to retrieve the purse. He sighed from relief and continued his vigil, waiting for Liu to fall asleep. More importantly, as he was hiding in a dead-end corner behind the guard’s room, Liu needed to be careful not to be spotted.

  Finally, around four, when Yang could hear the guard snoring, he sneaked over to Liu’s room, where he pried open a rear window with a wire and climbed in. Liu was asleep and clearly dreaming, for he was cursing someone. With a soft snigger Yang began to search the room, from the drawers, trunk, and under the bed to the vats and bottles on the floor, but no purse. He daringly groped around the head of Liu’s bed—still, nothing. So where had the cook hidden it? Leaning against the bed, Yang was getting anxious, as it was getting light outside; time was running out, so he decided to wake Liu up. Dazed and realizing that it was not a dream, Liu grabbed Yang’s lapel and shouted:

  “Gotcha! Now give me back my pack. There’s sixty thousand yuan in it.”

  Liu grabbed so violently that he scratched Yang’s chest and drew blood. And, if that weren’t enough, the mention of money set Yang off.

  “What money? Are you saying that old fanny pack of yours contained sixty thousand? Don’t bullshit me. Don’t you know how to tell the truth?”

  “I don’t mean real money.” Liu was flustered. “I mean the divorce decree inside.”

  “What divorce decree?”

  Liu knew he was being incoherent, but he couldn’t help it.

  “Not the divorce decree,” he blurted out. “The IOU.”

  That confused Yang even more. “What IOU? I didn’t touch anything but the money, and I didn’t get to keep that. The pack was snatched by a gang from Gansu.”

  Liu fell back down and passed out. Knowing that after all the trouble of trying to find Yang, he didn’t have the bag either was too much for him.

  Unnerved by the sight of an unconscious Liu, Yang slapped him. “Wake up, I say, wake up. I’ve something more important to talk to you about. Where’s my purse?”

  24

  Qu Li

  Yan Ge and Qu Li had a serious talk. As a younger man, Yan had always thought that the scale of a couple’s fight was determined by the degree of severity—that is, whether they raised their voices or not; whether or not they cursed each other; whether or not they focused on one problem or brought up extraneous issues, the past, or other trivial matters; whether or not they made sweeping generalizations and used one incident to condemn everything; and whether or not the fight turned physical, with kicking, tearing, scratching, and biting, ending with a fierce ultimatum:

  “Damn you, I want a divorce.”

  He and Qu Li had had that kind of fight when they were younger. She’d been a quiet girl, but was every bit as ferocious as anyone else during a fight. He learned that every couple, including all his friends, fought like that, and only after he turned forty did he realize that it was a “low tactic” quarrel. True severity rarely manifested itself on the surface while, in a minor quarrel, a couple usually forgot why they’d fought so violently when it was all over.

  As a couple passed that stage, they no longer fought; instead, they sat down calmly to talk and in great detail go over the problem from beginning to end. The more they analyzed, the deeper their discussion, and the deeper the discussion, the more they trembled from fear. Talking instead of arguing usually produced especially brutal results, like an ocean whose calm surface hides surging currents and threatening eddies.

  But everyone has currents and eddies in their daily life. Surface severity muddies the water, while a calm discussion carries concrete goals, which a fight was meant to achieve. People don’t argue for the sake of arguing; they argue to achieve an objective. Violent arguments are emotionally induced while a calm discussion is goal-oriented. When a goal is involved, everything turns profound and complex, or it changes its nature. If a man lives a pragmatic life, that is proof that he has evolved. Motivation changes everything.

  Yan’s argument with Qu Li was unique. They passed both the violent and the calm surface stages and entered a mixture of the two, a combining of the ocean surface and what lay below, to create a unique whole. When she was agitated, Qu cursed, but she no longer kicked, tore at, scratched, or bit him as she had done back then, for the sake of their feelings for one another. Whenever she got word of one of Yan’s affairs, or learned that he had a new woman, she had raised hell; now, however, she changed her approach by paying close attention and forming a goal. By maneuvering behind his back, she had stealthily skimmed off fifty million over eight years. To him, taking the money was not nearly as serious as her collusion with the deceased assistant general manager to make the video recordings. At the time, he had assumed that the man had taken the videos to blackmail him. What a timely accident!

  Yan was reminded of a day six years earlier, when he was walking along the shore of Beidaihe with Director Jia, who had suddenly muttered, “Everything would be fine if a few people were to die.” Back then Yan had been shocked by the comment; now he understood what Jia meant. The assistant general manager had plotted against Yan, but in the end his plan had come to Yan’s aid, though of course it took him a while to learn that Qu Li, his wife, the woman who slept beside him, had been behind it. She continued to have rows with him over his affairs, but kept quiet about other matters, stealing his money and taping his dealings with Jia. That was the difference between her former and current selves where their arguments were concerned. Put differently, her actions went beyond the normative relationship between husband and wife, which was why their present argument differ
ed from the previous two types. Put yet another way, she was adept at alternating between the two styles of quarrels, covering her clandestine actions with violent outbursts, hiding what she did behind his back with open confrontations, and concealing their conflicting interests with their status as husband and wife. After the photo of Yan and the pop singer made the paper, Yan’s reenactment was, of course, phony, but then so was her on-site investigation. So who could say her illness was not a scam as well?

  In any case, none of this was important any longer; what mattered was how she’d ruined things for him at a critical moment. He was on the brink of finalizing the deal with Jia when her purse was stolen, along with the USB drive, thus introducing uncertainty into the transaction. The thief messed up Yan’s plan, but ultimately the source of the trouble could be traced back to Qu Li.

  It had been six days since they’d lost the drive and, according to Lao Xing, it was nowhere to be found. He had found the thief, who turned out to have lost the purse to another thief, who’d had the purse taken from him by yet a third thief. Yan could not help but be unhappy with Xing; the PI wasn’t clever enough to figure out which thief had the drive, even after he’d located two of them. He’d been right in his evaluation of Xing at their first meeting, but the drive had complicated the situation, turning one matter into something altogether different.

  On the other hand, Yan was getting anxious about Jia’s approaching deadline. Why ten days? He had no idea, except that Jia must have had his reason for setting the deadline; besides, earlier was better than later to Yan. The sooner he retrieved the drive, the sooner he could get his life back. Time waits for no man.

  Qu Li, the cause of all these troubles, had reacted to the loss of the drive with indifference. He had originally thought she wouldn’t mind if they were doomed to suffer the same fate until he discovered that he’d been deceived again. In the past, she’d covered up her stealthy actions with violent rows; now she performed an about-face and hid her vicious scheme under a composed surface. Luckily Yan had her every move relayed to him by Little Bai, through her driver, Lao Wen. That morning, Bai told Yan he’d learned from Wen that Qu Li had told him to buy a plane ticket for Shanghai, with the express instruction not to tell anyone about it. That was how Yan realized that her nonchalance was a front. She’d been waiting for him to find the USB drive, but after six days, she thought it was lost forever and either was ready to sneak away or might have come up with a different plan.

  Yan would not let her get away that easily, not before their business deal was concluded, which hinged upon the recovery of the drive. From his perspective, this was a bad time for her to leave Beijing, even without their arrangement. She might create new complications, but, more importantly, he had accounts to settle with her once they retrieved the drive and concluded the transaction. Given the urgency of finding the drive, he had no time for anything else. But when it was over, he wanted to sit her down and calmly go over things. If she could skim profits and videotape his dealings, how did he know she hadn’t done even more?

  In all honesty, he didn’t care if she left Beijing, but it would be harder to reach her when she was in Shanghai, and besides, she might go somewhere else from there or even go into hiding. How would he find her then? If finding a purse was proving to be so difficult, imagine how much harder it would be to find his wife. He had her whereabouts under control when she was in Beijing, which was why he could no longer worry about exposing Bai or Wen. He walked into the bedroom and told her she was not to leave for Shanghai.

  Momentarily taken aback by his command, she quickly realized that her driver had sold her out, but she did not look terribly perturbed. Putting down her hairbrush, she lit a cigarette.

  “We’re getting a divorce, so we can go our separate ways.”

  “That was then. Now the drive is missing and we’re linked by mutual interest.”

  She picked up her new purse and stood up.

  “You can’t stop me if I want to leave.”

  He had to agree with her. Lao Wen was not enough to keep her under his control; after learning about Wen’s betrayal, she’d no longer use him and could simply go out and hail a cab. She’d vanish in an instant, and that could happen in Beijing; she did not have to go to Shanghai to vanish.

  Yan blocked her way, so agitated he blurted out:

  “You are not going to leave this house.”

  “Get out of my way.” She shoved him aside.

  He refused, and they got into a scuffle, as if they’d returned to their younger days. Her cell phone rang and she pushed him away to take the call. As she listened, her expression changed from shock to calm.

  “Sure, I’ll be there.” Flipping her phone shut, she sat down on the bed and looked at him.

  “I’ll stay in Beijing then. Happy?”

  Yan was surprised, not by her change of plans, but by a call that had changed her mind while he could not. Reminded of how she had been meeting people behind his back, he had to ask:

  “Who was that?”

  “A friend.”

  She went into the bathroom and locked the door, leaving Yan standing by the bed feeling lost.

  The caller was not her friend, but a stranger, a blackmailer. He told her he had her purse and had seen the USB drive they were looking for. If she wanted it back, she must take three hundred thousand yuan to the western suburb at two a.m. and wait by the Sijiqing Bridge on Fourth Ring Road.

  “Be there or not. It’s your choice.”

  With no time to think, she agreed to go and the caller hung up. She went into the bathroom to check the caller ID and saw that the call had been made from a pay phone.

  The caller was none other than Yang Zhi, who made the call with Liu Yuejin standing next to him. Earlier that day, shortly before daybreak, after Yang managed to rouse the unconscious Liu, he immediately brought up the drive in the purse that Liu had picked up, saying someone would buy it for as much as five hundred thousand yuan. Yang told Liu to produce it and they’d sell it together, splitting the profit. Even if Liu wasn’t lying about the amount in the IOU, he’d get only sixty thousand, while the drive could fetch much more. If they weren’t greedy, they could settle for four hundred thousand, which would then be split between them. Two hundred thousand was a lot more than Liu was hoping to get, and he would never have to worry about retrieving his pack.

  Finally everything clicked; Liu now understood why Yang had showed up in his room. But why had Ren Baoliang and Xing come to see him? He’d lost a pack and found a purse. He’d thought that his was more valuable than the one he found and had even cursed Yang’s poor judgment in purse snatching when he searched the contents. Now it was clear that finding the drive was so much better, like losing a sesame seed and getting a melon, or losing a sheep and getting a horse in return. Who could say what was ill fate and what was good fortune? He was instantly relieved, a sign to Yang that Liu had changed his mind and that something could be done.

  “The purse was mine to begin with,” Yang emphasized.

  Liu nodded, though he disputed Yang’s claim; he was simply agreeing to go along with him. If the drive had been worthless, he’d have handed it over, but now that he knew how valuable it might be, he had to reconsider. If it was worth so much, why not sell it himself and forget about a partner? Liu realized that he could manage alone, whether it fetched four hundred thousand or five hundred thousand. When everything became clear to him, he nodded and decided to play dumb.

  “That sounds wonderful,” he said, sucking his teeth, “but I don’t have the purse.”

  “Where is it?” Yang could not believe his ears.

  “I was trying to catch you, so I left the purse behind, and someone had taken it by the time I came back for it.”

  Now it was Yang’s turn to pass out. When he came to, he told Liu he didn’t believe him.

  “Those two men who were just here?” Liu spread out his hands. “They came for the purse too, but I don’t have it. I’m not a magician.” He add
ed, “They told me they’d pay me for it. If I had it, why wouldn’t I have given it to them?”

  In fact, Xing hadn’t mentioned money. But Yang didn’t know that and was convinced by what Liu had just told him. He didn’t trust Liu, but had searched the place and checked everything inside and outside that small room. Where would a cook put the purse? Besides, a cook like Liu would not say no to money. Yang concluded he’d wasted his time, and since he did not like wasting time, he got up to leave with the idea of finding another solution. Liu stopped him and demanded to have his pack back, or at the very least the 64,100 yuan in it. Yang’s mind was on the drive in the purse while Liu cared only about the IOU in his pack. Yang wanted to leave but Liu would not let him go. They got into a tussle.

  “Let go,” Yang said. “I’ll give you your money when I find the drive and get paid.”

  “Give me back my IOU before you go looking for it.”

  They resumed their struggle when Yang yelled:

  “Stop. I’ve got an idea.”

  “What?” Liu paused.

  Yang studied his face. “You’re a USB drive yourself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said you didn’t pick up the purse, but everyone thinks you did, including the two guys who were here earlier and the family in the villa compound. So whether you did or not, it doesn’t matter, because everyone says you did, and that means we’re rich. The key is you have to stand up and tell them you did.”

  “What does that mean?” Liu was getting even more confused.

  Yang sat Liu down on the bed and explained things to him, their fight forgotten. The drive was gone, but Yang thought Liu could simply buy another one and give it to the owner.