as if that meant something. But it was of no use because the cap was being unscrewed almost immediately by Zhang.
“Liu’s chemical company is damned,” Li went on. “Irrecoverably cursed.”
“How?”
“A couple of months ago, thousands and thousands of fish died in the water near that company, turning up their white bellies like so many angry eyes staring at the black night. It was all because of the damned poisonous pollution. The Wuxi Number One Chemical Company is one of the biggest enterprises in the city, and it’s also the worst polluter. In Buddhism, a life is a life, whether an ant or a fish. For inhuman deeds, there’s no escaping retribution. No one escapes.”
“You mean Liu’s murder.”
“Believe it or not, I saw Liu walking by the lake with his little secretary one evening just about one month ago. It wasn’t far from here. All of a sudden, she turned into a white fox spirit looming against the dark night. You know how a bewitching fox spirit brings a curse to the man that’s with her.”
“Liu’s little secretary?” Chen said, playing dumb.
“Mi. I think that’s her name. What a shameless bitch! She slept her way into that position.”
“Come on, I don’t buy that story about the fox spirit. That’s total bull,” Zhang said, noticing Chen’s sudden interest as he raised the empty cup high. “But a bitch she is, no question about it. I, too, happened to see something just about a week ago.”
“Just about a week ago?” Chen waited, but Zhang didn’t go on, staring into the empty cup, as if lost in recollection.
The second bottle of Erguotou was now finished too, Chen noticed. He wondered what kind of a man he appeared to be in Zhang’s eyes. Possibly one interested in the “bitch” of a little secretary, for some untold reason. Nevertheless, Chen ordered another bottle.
“So what did you see, Zhang?” Chen resumed when the old waiter placed the new bottle on the table.
“She was walking with another man-a much younger man-arm in arm, billing and cooing and kissing,” Zhang said, talking a deliberate long sip from his newly filled cup. “It was under the cover of night. Around midnight, I would say.”
“Do you remember what day?”
“I can’t remember the exact date, but it was about a week ago,” Zhang said, then added, “More than a week ago, I believe.”
That was before Liu’s murder, Chen calculated, raising his cup only to put it down again.
“That was not too surprising,” Zhang went on, shaking his head. “She’s still in her early twenties, and Liu was in his mid-fifties. How could he have possibly satisfied her? It would have surprised me if she hadn’t been carrying on with a young stud in secret.”
“It served Liu right, with his heart smoked in the smell of money like the fish head on your plate.”
“No, the dogs ate his heart long, long ago.”
“Another question. I’m not a local, but isn’t there anyone fighting against the pollution here?” Chen said. “I was at an eatery yesterday. Uncle Wang’s, I think. It was not too far away from here. I heard about a young woman engineer who was trying to stand up for environmental protection.”
“Oh, she’s trouble. True, she may have brought some attention to the problem. But then what? It was no use at all. The chemical company keeps on manufacturing as before, at a great cost to the lake. ”
“And she’s an impossible bitch too,” Li said.
Chen wasn’t sure why Li called her a bitch, but he decided not to ask.
“You can’t keep your eyes shut all the time. So drown yourself in the cup, and forget all your worries,” Zhang said, finishing another cup in a single gulp.
“You should go and see Liu’s house. What a magnificent mansion! It’s only three or four blocks away, but you can also see the chemical company dorm. Then you’ll understand why people want to sell their souls for money.”
“Really!” Chen said, his voice rising with a new idea. “Thank you so much for your enlightening talk. But I think I have to leave now. Do you know if there is a cell phone store nearby?”
“Just go straight ahead. Only half a block away. You won’t miss it. Tell them Zhang sent you there.”
“I will. Again, thank you both so much.” He didn’t think he could get much more out of the two, so he rose to pay for the meal. It wasn’t much, but he didn’t want the two of them to go on drinking like that. If they kept getting drunker and louder, they could become a liability.
Before he got to the cell phone store, he came to a halt. He found an envelope-the only paper he had with him-and a pen. Standing against a blossoming dogwood tree, he wrote down a jumble of fragmented lines and images that had come to him unexpectedly.
As before, it could be made into part of a larger whole, but he still didn’t have an exact idea of what it would be. Possibly it would be a “spatial form,” which was a term he had picked up years earlier, where the form replaced traditional narrative sequence with spatial simultaneity and disjunctive arrangement. Those long-forgotten critical details seemed to be coming back to him all of a sudden. So the stanza about the conversation between two drunkards could also fit in. She, too, finally appeared in the poem. As for the line “Who’s the one walking beside you,” it might serve as a refrain, like in the drinking game he’d just witnessed. Also, it sounded like an echo, remotely, from a poem he’d read long ago.
He put the envelope away and resumed walking toward the cell phone store.
TEN
It was only after about three or four blocks that he thought he saw the dorm building for the chemical company with its many clotheslines stretching across the outside.
He took a look around. It wasn’t yet six o’clock. In the space in front of the building, some people sat outside with their dinner in their hands. A middle-aged woman sat on a bamboo chair, soaking her feet in a plastic basin of herbal liquid. There was also a peddler squatting with his goods spread out on a white sheet under a dogwood tree. There was something eerily familiar about the peddler, Chen noticed, thinking he might have seen him somewhere. It wasn’t unimaginable for a peddler to move around in a city of tourists like Wuxi, but this wasn’t a tourist area and
