Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

Song Cheng

It makes me uncomfortable. Don’t make me take action.

LuoLuo

Brother Song, let me live my life.

[End of transmission]

This was a highly professional frame-up. Its brilliance lay in that the evidence the police held was just about 100 percent real.

Song Cheng really had been associating with LuoLuo for a while, in secret, and it could indeed be called irregular. The two recordings weren’t faked, although the second had been distorted.

Song Cheng met LuoLuo because of Xu Xueping, director general of Changtong Group, who held intimate financial ties to many nodes of the network of corruption and no doubt considerable knowledge of its background and inner workings. Of course, Song Cheng couldn’t get any information directly from her, but with LuoLuo he had an in.

LuoLuo didn’t provide Song Cheng information out of any inner sense of righteousness. In his eyes, the world was already good for nothing but wiping his ass on. He was in it for revenge.

This hinterland city shrouded in industrial smog and dust might have been ranked at the bottom of the list of similar-sized Chinese cities for average income, but it had some of the most opulent nightclubs in the nation. The young scions of Beijing’s political families had to watch their image in the capital city, unable to indulge their desires like the rich without Party affiliations. Instead, they got in their cars every weekend and zipped four or five hours along the highway to this city, spent two days and one night in hedonistic extravagance, and zipped back to Beijing on Sunday night.

LuoLuo’s Blue Wave was the highest-end of all the nightclubs. Requesting a song cost at least three thousand yuan, and bottles of Martell and Hennessy priced at thousands each sold multiple cases every night. But Blue Wave’s real claim to fame was that it catered exclusively to female guests.

Unlike his fellow dancers, LuoLuo didn’t care about how much his clients paid, but how much that money meant to them. A white-collar foreign worker making just two or three hundred thousand yuan a year (rare paupers in Blue Wave) could give him a few hundred and he’d accept. But Sister Xu wasn’t one. Her fortune of billions had made waves south of the Yangtze the last few years, and likewise she was smashing the opposition in her expansion northward. But after several months spent together, she’d sent LuoLuo off with a mere four hundred thousand.

It had taken a lot to catch Sister Xu’s eye; after she had broken it off, any other dancer would have, in LuoLuo’s words, swigged enough champagne to make his liver hurt. But not LuoLuo, who was now filled with hatred for Xu Xueping. The arrival of a high-ranking Discipline Inspection official gave him hope of revenge, and he used his talents to entangle himself with Sister Xu once more. Normally, Xu Xueping was closemouthed even with LuoLuo, but once they had too many drinks or snorted too many lines, it was a different story. LuoLuo knew how to take the initiative, too; in the darkest hours before dawn, while Sister Xu slept soundly beside him, he’d silently climb out of bed and search her briefcase and drawers, snapping pictures of documents that he and Song Cheng needed.

Most of the video recordings the police used to prove Song Cheng’s association with LuoLuo had been taken in the main dance hall in Blue Wave. The camera liked to start with the pretty young boys dancing enthusiastically on the stage, before shifting to the expensively dressed female guests gathered in the dim areas, pointing at the stage, now and then smiling confidentially. The final shot always captured Song Cheng and LuoLuo, often sitting in some corner in the back, seeming very intimate as they conversed quietly with heads bent close. As the only male guest in the club, Song Cheng was instantly recognizable….

Song Cheng didn’t have anything to say to that. Most of the time, he could only find LuoLuo at Blue Wave. The lighting in the dance hall was always dim, but these recordings were high resolution and clear. They could only have been taken with a high-end low-light camera, not the sort of equipment normal people would have. That meant they’d noticed him from the very beginning, showing Song Cheng how very amateur he had been compared to his opponent.

That day, LuoLuo wanted to report his latest findings. When Song Cheng met him at the nightclub, LuoLuo uncharacteristically asked to talk in the car. Once they were done, he’d told Song that he felt unwell. If he went back to the club now, his boss would make him get on stage for sure. He wanted to rest for a while in Song Cheng’s car.

Song Cheng had thought that LuoLuo’s addiction might have been acting up again, but he didn’t have a choice. He could only drive back to his office to take care of the work he hadn’t finished during the day, parking in front of the department building with LuoLuo waiting in the car. Forty minutes later, when he came back out, someone had already found LuoLuo dead in a car full of propane fumes. Song Cheng had to open the car door from the outside.

Later, a close friend in the police force who’d participated in the investigation told Song that the lock on his car door didn’t show any signs of sabotage, and the evidence elsewhere really was enough to rule out the possibility of another killer. Logically enough, everyone assumed that Song Cheng had killed LuoLuo. But Song Cheng knew the only possible explanation: LuoLuo had brought the two propane canisters into the car himself.

This was too much for Song Cheng to fight against. He gave up his attempts to clear his name: if someone had used his own life and death as a weapon to frame him, he didn’t have a chance of escape.

Really, LuoLuo committing suicide didn’t surprise Song Cheng; his HIV test had returned positive. But someone else must have prompted him to use his death to frame Song Cheng. What would have been in it for him? What would money be worth to him now? Was the money for someone else? Or maybe his recompense wasn’t money. But what was it, then? Was there some temptation or fear even stronger than his hatred of Xu Xueping? Song Cheng would never know now, but here he could see even more clearly his opponent’s capabilities, and his own naïveté.

This was his life as the world knew it: a high-ranked Discipline Inspection cadre living a secret life of corruption and affairs, arrested for murdering his paramour in a lover’s spat. The temperance he’d previously displayed in his heterosexual relationship only became further proof in the public mind. Like a trampled stinkbug, everything he had possessed disappeared without a trace.

Now Song Cheng realized that he’d been so prepared to sacrifice everything for faith and duty only because he hadn’t even understood what sacrificing everything entailed. He’d of course imagined that death would be the bottom line. Only later did he realize that sacrifice could be far, far crueler. The police took him home one time when they searched his house. His wife and daughter were both there. He reached toward his daughter, but the child shrieked in disgust and buried her face in her mother’s arms, shrinking into a corner. He’d seen the look they gave him only once before, one morning when he’d found a mouse in the trap under the wardrobe, and showed it to them….

“Okay, let’s set aside the big bang and the singularity and all the abstract stuff for now.” Bai Bing broke off Song Cheng’s painful reminiscences and hauled the large briefcase onto the table. “Take a look at this.”

SUPERSTRING COMPUTER, ULTIMATE CAPACITY, DIGITAL MIRROR

“This is a superstring computer,” Bai Bing said, patting the briefcase. “I brought it over, or, if you prefer, stole it from the Center for Meteorological Modeling. I’ll depend on it to escape pursuit.”