a flat tummy, and long legs. Since this was the first time our good Kaifang had laid eyes on a naked woman’s body, it had its desired effect, although he was more nervous than anything. She, on the other hand, quickly tired of his faltering. Time, after all, is money in her profession. She sat up.
“Come on,” she said, “what are you waiting for? You can knock off the little-boy act!”
Unfortunately for her, as she sat up her blond wig slipped off and revealed a flattened head with sparse hair, which bowled Kaifang over. Pang Fenghuang’s lovely face beneath a full head of blond hair floated before his eyes. He took a hundred-yuan note out of his pocket, tossed it to the woman, and turned to leave, but not before she jumped to her feet and wrapped herself around him like an octopus.
“You no-account prick!” she cursed. “You’re not getting away that easy, not for a measly hundred yuan!”
She reached down and felt around in his pants while she was cursing, looking for money, of course, but what her hand bumped into was a hard, cold handgun. Knowing he couldn’t let her pull her hand back, he grabbed her wrist for the second time. The beginnings of a scream leaked out of her mouth before she could swallow the rest of it as Kaifang gave her a shove and sent her stumbling back onto the bed.
Kaifang emerged onto the square, where he was hit by a blast of cold air. The alcohol he’d consumed came rushing up into his throat and out onto the ground. The emptying of his stomach served to clear his head, but did nothing to ease the pain in his heart. His mood swung between teeth-clenching anger and heartwarming affection. He hated Fenghuang, and he loved her. When the hatred rose in him, it was swamped by love; when the love ascended, it was beaten back by hatred. During the two days and nights he struggled with these competing feelings, he turned his pistol on himself and contemplated pulling the trigger more than once. Don’t do it, boy! It’s not worth it! Finally, reason won out over emotion.
“She may be a whore,” he said softly to himself, “but I still want her.”
Having made up his mind, once and for all, he returned to the hotel, where he knocked on her door.
“What, you back again?” she said, sounding thoroughly fed up. But he had obviously changed over the past two days. His birthmark was darker, his face thinner, and his brows looked like a pair of caterpillars squirming above his eyes, which were blacker and brighter than before; his glare, so intense it felt as if it were scorching her, and not just her, but her monkey as well, drove the monkey into a corner, where he cowered. “Well, since you’re here,” she said, her tone softer, “you might as well sit down. We can be friends if you’d like, but don’t let me hear any more talk about love.”
“I not only want to talk about love, I want you to be my wife.” With a hard edge to his voice, he continued, “I don’t care if you’ve slept with ten thousand men, or with a monkey, or, for that matter, a tiger or an alligator, I want to marry you.”
That was met with silence. Then, with a laugh, she said:
“Calm down, little Blue Face. You can’t throw a word like love around, and that goes double for marriage.”
“I’m not throwing them around,” he said. “Over the past two days I’ve thought things out carefully. I’m going to give it up, deputy chief, my career as a policeman, everything. I’ll be your gong-beater and become a street performer with you.”
“Enough of that crazy talk. You can’t throw away your future over a woman like me.” Feeling a need to dampen his enthusiasm and lighten the atmosphere, she said, “Tell you what, I’ll marry you if you can turn your blue face white.”
As they say, “Casual words have powerful effects.” Making jokes to a man as deeply in love as he was dangerous business.
Lan Kaifang took sick leave, not caring if his superiors approved or not, and went to Qingdao, where he underwent painful skin graft surgery. When he next showed up at the hotel basement, his face swathed in bandages, Fenghuang was stunned. So was her monkey, possibly recalling the swathed face of Ximen Huan’s killer. He snarled and attacked Kaifang, who knocked him out with a single punch. Then he turned to Fenghuang and, like a man possessed, said:
“I’ve had a skin graft.”
She stood there looking at him as tears welled up in her eyes. He got down on his knees, wrapped his arms around her legs, and laid his head against her belly. She stroked his hair.
“How foolish you are,” she said, nearly sobbing. “How can you be so foolish?”
They embraced, and she gently kissed the side of his face where there was no pain. He picked her up and carried her over to the bed, where they made love.
Blood covered the sheet.
“You’re a virgin!” he said in surprised delight, his tears soaking the bandages covering half his face. “You’re a virgin, my Fenghuang, my love. Why did you say all those things?”
“Who says I’m a virgin?” she said with a pout. “Eight hundred yuan is all it costs to repair a maidenhead.”
“You’re lying again, you little whore, my Fenghuang…” Mindless of the pain, he planted kisses on the body of the prettiest girl in Gaomi County – the whole world, in his eyes.
Fenghuang stroked his body, hard yet pliable, as if put together with branches of a tree, and said, sounding utterly forlorn:
“My god, there’s no way I can get away from you…”
Dear reader, I’d rather not continue with my story, but since I’ve given you a beginning, I need to give you an ending. So here it comes in all its cruelty.
Kaifang returned to 1 Tianhua Lane, his face still swathed in bandages, which threw a scare into Lan Jiefang and Huang Huzhu, who had had all the surprises they could take. Kaifang ignored their questions about his face and said passionately, in obvious high spirits:
“Papa, Aunty, I’m going to marry Fenghuang!”
With a pained furrowing of his brow, my friend Jiefang said decisively:
“No, you’re not!”
“Why?”
“Because I say so!”
“You don’t believe all those scurrilous rumors, do you? You have my word, she’s absolutely chaste… a virgin…”
“My god!” my friend exclaimed plaintively. “You can’t do it, son…”
“Where love and marriage are concerned, Papa,” Kaifang said, his anger rising, “it’s my life and you have nothing to say about it.”
“Maybe I don’t, son, but listen to what your aunt has to say” Jiefang went into his room and shut the door.
“Kaifang, poor Kaifang,” Huang Huzhu said to him tearfully. “Fenghuang is your uncle’s daughter. You and she have the same grandmother.”
At that point Kaifang reached up and ripped the bandages off of his face, taking the new skin off with it and leaving a bloody wound. He ran out of the house and jumped on his motorcycle, speeding away in such a hurry that his wheel banged against the door of a beauty salon, scaring the wits out of the people inside. He lifted the front wheel and sped like a crazed horse straight to the train station square. He never heard the words of the beautician whose shop was next door to the house:
“Everyone in that family is mad!”
Kaifang staggered down the steps of the hotel and crashed through the door. Fenghuang was in bed waiting for him. The monkey attacked him, but this time he forgot all about police procedures, forgot just about everything. He drew his pistol and shot the monkey dead, bringing an end to the reincarnation cycle for a soul that had spun on the wheel of life for half a century.
Fenghuang was struck dumb by what he’d done. He raised his pistol and pointed it at her. Don’t do it, my young friend – he gazed at Fenghuang’s beautiful face, like a precious jade carving – the prettiest face in the world – the pistol drooped of its own weight. He raised it again and ran out the door to the steps leading upstairs – like a ladder leading from hell up to heaven – our young friend’s legs turned rubbery and he fell to his knees. Then he pressed the muzzle of his pistol up against a heart that was already broken – Don’t do it, don’t be foolish – he pulled the trigger. A muffled explosion sent our Kaifang sprawling on the steps, dead.
