Mo Du (默读) - Silent Reading

Verhovensky XV

Fat little Zhang Yifan looked foolishly at Luo Wenzhou.

Luo Wenzhou put the envelopes on the table. He laughed angrily. “You want to buy off a police officer with 300,000? Isn’t that pretty ridiculous?”

Zhang Yifan didn’t hear this as a joke; he actually took it for real. His round little face showed a trace of the panic of someone who had come to his wits’ end. He haltingly said, “But… this is really all that I have…”

“Where did you learn this from? Encounter any trouble, and you pull out two cards to deal with it.” Luo Wenzhou’s smile gradually became cold. He looked sternly at the boy. “You think you can resolve a murder with money? What wretched teacher taught you this? Tell me, and I’ll have them out of education tomorrow!”

At home, Zhang Yifan was afraid of his dad. Outside, he was also afraid of stern and powerful men like his father. He was scared silent as a cicada in winter by Luo Wenzhou, not making a sound.

“If Xia Xiaonan killed someone, it doesn’t matter whether she did it with her own hands or colluded with someone else. She still has to pay the price. Covering up from the police where a criminal who’s been wanted for fifteen years has gone, colluding with a wanted criminal, harming a classmate—what kind of resentment warrants such deranged behavior?”

With every sentence Luo Wenzhou spoke, the boy’s face grew whiter.

“Never mind killing someone, there’s also dismemberment—“

That day at the City Bureau, the police had only questioned them; they hadn’t told the students the details of Feng Bin’s death. The teacher and parents of course wouldn’t have mentioned such bloody things either. Zhang Yifan had been locked up since coming home and hadn’t yet returned to school. Suddenly hearing the word “dismemberment,” he was so scared he jumped up off the couch. “Dismemberment? Feng Bin was… was…”

Luo Wenzhou very much wanted to describe how Feng Bin had looked in death, but when the words reached his lips, he looked at that still childish face and swallowed them down. He only asked, “Why did you want to run away? Who egged you on? Who wanted to hurt Feng Bin?”

“No-no one! No one wanted to hurt him!” Zhang Yifan shook his head over and over again. As if he’d learned his lines a thousand times over, he blurted out, “We went to celebrate Christmas…”

Fei Du put his cup on the table and quietly interrupted Zhang Yifan.

“Christmas?” he asked. “What’s special about Christmas?”

Zhang Yifan was like a squirrel with its neck squeezed. His pupils contracted, and he curled up. A frightening silence spread through the exquisitely-decorated living room of his home.

After a good while, the boy could hold back no longer. He began to sob unrestrainedly. 

“I’ll call your parents.” Luo Wenzhou reached out to pick up his phone from the table. “What are they doing attending a dinner party? Are they dining with the Chairman?”

Zhang Yifan threw himself at him immediately, holding Luo Wenzhou back with both hands.

His palms were soaked with sweat, sticking to the back of Luo Wenzhou’s hand. They were ice-cold.

Luo Wenzhou felt that his ten fingers together didn’t feel like those of a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old strapping young man but instead like those of a weak and clumsy lost child. Because he lacked strength, he couldn’t even trust his own fingers; he instinctively used his whole hand when grabbing things, as if that was the only way he could get a firm grip.