Old Ding stood there woodenly for a moment, then sighed and rose shakily to his feet. After carefully stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray, he looked over at his former apprentice, who was staring at the wall, his head cocked to one side, and said, “Then I won't trouble you anymore.”
He turned and hobbled to the door.
“Shifu, where are you going?”
He looked back over his shoulder.
“Little Hu,” he said, “you and I worked together for a while. After I'm gone, if it's not too much trouble, would you check on my wife from time to time? If it is, don't worry about it……”
He reached out and opened the door. A cold wind filling the hallway hit him full in the face. He shivered as he reached out to hold on to the dusty banister and walked off into the dark.
“Wait up, Shifu.” He turned and saw his apprentice standing in the doorway. Light streaming out of the apartment made his face appear to be brushed with gold dust. He heard him say, “I'll take you to see my cousin.”
10
They squeezed into a phone booth, with wind whistling all around them, to call the cousin at home. Whoever answered the phone said he was on duty at the station house. Old Ding's former apprentice said happily:
“Great, Shifu. Do you know why I didn't want to take you to see him? You have no idea how arrogant his wife is. If a poor relation like me goes to their house, her nose is bent out of shape, and her face turns all weird. Like any dog, the bitch sees people like us as her inferior. It's more than I can take. We may be poor in material wealth, but not in our ideals. Isn't that so?”
Old Ding said emotionally:
“Little Hu, I'm sorry to put you through all this.”
“But my cousin's a great guy. A little hen-pecked, that's all.” Then, in a singsong voice, he added, “When a man's wife rules, he sleeps with the mules!”
They stopped first at a sundries shop to buy two cartons of China-brand cigarettes. Old Ding went for his wallet, but his former apprentice pushed his hand away.
“Shifu,” he said, “I'll take care of this. You can't afford it.”
When he saw how much the cigarettes cost, he gritted his teeth and said, no matter how much it pained him:
“I should be paying for this, little Hu.”
“Just leave things to me for now.”
When they walked into the police station, old Ding reached out involuntarily and held on to the hem of his former apprentice's shirt. He felt cold all over, and his palms were sweaty. As it turned out, one of the two duty policemen was the cousin, a young man with slitty eyes and a long neck. He picked up his pen and wrote down everything they told him in a notebook.
“That's it?” he remarked impatiently, tapping the notebook with the tip of his pen.
“That's it…”
“Quite a fertile imagination,” he said coldly, looking at old Ding out of the corner of his eye. “Made quite a bundle, did you?”
He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
“Cousin,” old Ding's apprentice said, smiling broadly as he laid the plastic bag containing the cigarettes in front of the policeman, “won't you please look into this for the shifu here? If those two took sleeping pills, we might still be able to rescue them. Ding Shifu taught me everything I know. He's a provincial model worker who once had his picture taken with Deputy Governor Yu. But when he was laid off recently, this was the only way he knew to put food on the table.”
“And what if they took rat poison?” The cousin looked at his watch, got to his feet, and said to the other duty policeman, who was playing computer games off in the corner, “Little Sun, I'm going over to the lake to look into a possible suicide. You take care of things here.”
After visiting the bathroom and picking up all the equipment he'd need, the cousin went out to the garage and returned with a motorized three-wheeler. Once old Ding and his apprentice were seated, they drove out of the station compound.
It was right around dinnertime, but it felt much later, owing possibly to the chill in the air and the paucity of traffic. With the vehicle's lights flashing and siren blaring, they sped along, with old Ding clinging to the icy railing, his heart in his throat, just waiting for him to open his mouth and spit it out.
They were soon in the outskirts of town, where the road quality began to deteriorate, although the cousin fought the impulse to slow down, as if to demonstrate his driving skills; the three-wheeler was now more like a bucking bronco. Old Ding was bouncing around so badly, his poor tailbone felt as if it were being pricked by needles.
Once they were on the asphalt road skirting the man-made lake, the cousin had no choice but to slow down, since the surface was fraught with serious bumps and hollows. He skillfully negotiated the course, but couldn't avoid all the hazards. Once, the three-wheeler stalled as they came perilously close to flipping over.
“Goddamned corruption road!” he cursed. “They paved it less than a year ago, and look at it now!”
Old Ding and his apprentice climbed down off the three-wheeler and pushed it down the road. When they reached the edge of the cemetery, they had to leave it before going any farther. The headlight pierced the inky darkness and illuminated a narrow strip of the cemetery and surrounding trees.
“Where is it?” the cousin asked coldly.
He tried to answer, but his tongue seemed petrified, and he merely grunted. His apprentice pointed in the direction of the cemetery. “Over there.”
The three-wheeler's headlight lit up the little path through the cemetery, but it was clear that they'd have to walk. So the cousin turned off the light, reached into his backpack and took out a flashlight that ran on three double-? batteries. Flicking it on to light the way down the gray path through the trees, he said impatiently:
“Let's go. You lead the way.”
So old Ding jumped out in front in an instinctive attempt to get on the cousin's good side. He heard his apprentice say from behind:
“Cousin, the vehicle…”
“How's that? Afraid someone might come by and steal it?” He laughed snidely. “Who but a fucking idiot would be out on a cold night like this?”
With the cousin's flashlight jumping from the tips of the trees to the cemetery ahead, old Ding had trouble keeping his footing, like an old horse with failing eyesight. The path threaded its twisting way through the cemetery, the surface covered by a thick carpet of dead leaves that crackled under their feet. The northeast wind had died down; there was a chilled, eerie quality to the air above the extraordinarily quiet cemetery, except for the human footsteps on the crackling leaves, a sound that sent shivers through the heart. Something icy cold fell on old Ding's face, like raindrops, but not really. Then he saw white floating objects in the flashlight's beam.
“It's snowing!” he said with a trace of genuine excitement.
The cousin corrected him in a chiding tone:
“That isn't snow, it's sleet!”
“Cousin,” the apprentice said, “how come you know so much?”
With a contemptuous snort, the cousin said:
“You people think that cops are all stupid, don't you?”
“Not for a minute,” the apprentice said with an ingratiating smile. “There might be stupid cops on the force, but you're certainly not one of them. I heard my aunt say once that you could read more than two hundred characters at the age of five.”
The cousin's flashlight lit up the tip of a tall poplar, startling some crows in a nest. With caws and chirps, two of the birds flew out of the nest and flapped their wings in the beam of light; one banged into the trunk of the tree, the other flew into a magpie's nest, leading to some mighty squawks. Cousin turned off his flashlight and
