Chapter 46#

Fu Jinchi’s private physician had written a sick leave record, so Yan Zishu settled in and stayed for two days.

His reaction to the drug had been severe — he would wake for a spell, then sleep again, and by the time he opened his eyes for what felt like the fifth or sixth time, the light outside the windows had darkened again.

In the corner, a vintage record player was turning: How many men have lost themselves for a woman’s face… how many birds who once shared a branch have parted on the wind… life is brief — why torment yourself with love… when the one you love is gone, who is there left to hear your complaint…

Yan Zishu lay there and listened idly for a while. Fu Jinchi came through the door at that point, and placed a small velvet box in his hand.

Yan Zishu opened it. A pair of cufflinks — the base cast in a design of winding roses, a red ruby set at the center of each. “What are these?”

Fu Jinchi said: “I’ve been meaning to give them to you for a while. Never quite found the moment — and then forgot.”

Yan Zishu laughed despite himself. “And this is the right moment?”

Fu Jinchi ran the back of one finger across his cheek. “Just catching the tail end of the new year. Consider it a new year’s gift.”

Yan Zishu closed his fingers lightly around Fu Jinchi’s hand.

*

Over these two days, Fu Jinchi seemed to recall his own promises about how a lover should be treated. He looked after Yan Zishu with patient care.

Perhaps because this particular old townhouse held so many layers of memory, he also found more things he was willing to say to Yan Zishu.

Yan Zishu had seen, on the bookshelf, a photograph of his mother in performance costume, from her days as a cabaret singer.

He’d heard she had walked into the sea. Yan Zishu didn’t dare press on the wound; Fu Jinchi, for his part, seemed entirely untroubled.

It seemed to have had something to do with the sustained harassment arranged by Fu Weishan’s mother, and with the broader Fu family being, without exception, something less than decent. In any case, she had found it unbearable and had developed severe depression.

But Yan Zishu had, by now, come to understand something: with Fu Jinchi, if he was deliberately playing the role of someone pitiable, his heart almost certainly felt nothing of the sort. If he appeared outwardly indifferent, that was precisely when the calculation was running deepest, biding its time until the moment to bare teeth.

It occurred to Yan Zishu — Fu Jinchi had once said he was afraid even of cigarettes, in case of exposure to narcotics. That made more sense now. Fu Weishan’s mother’s family had clearly been deeply involved in organized crime. The operations had since been thoroughly dismantled by successive crackdowns, which was presumably why even Yan Zishu hadn’t known much about it.

He had previously understood only in the most cursory way, from the plot, that Fu Weishan’s maternal family held a certain degree of influence.

Looking at it now, that had almost certainly been a sanitized version.

In the plot, Fu Weishan’s mother’s family had simply been described as also in business. Her marriage to Fu Zhizhang had been a match of equals. But in more recent years, the family’s companies had apparently been declining steadily, unable to find capable successors.

Yan Zishu could only guess: perhaps businesses built on criminal foundations didn’t fare well once they tried to go legitimate.

Things one hadn’t lived through couldn’t truly be imagined. He didn’t know how Fu Jinchi had survived the narrow spaces of the life he’d been given.

What he did know now, at least, was this: since the shareholders’ meeting, Fu Jinchi had begun encountering these attacks again — the arrows visible and hidden both.

In a certain sense, Fu Jinchi had brought it on himself. When you poked at a hornet’s nest, you had to be prepared to get stung.

He had returned from Hong Kong City, built client relationships, worked his way into the business, and finally entered the board — each step calculated, each one advancing the position. The earlier moves could be read as minor provocations. But the moment he genuinely threatened Fu Weishan’s interests, he had crossed a line.

On Fu Weishan’s mother’s side, a small number of loyal old hands remained — left as a parting gift to her son, a set of hidden pieces. Now they had been activated, like talismans called upon.

The small-time operators of today couldn’t quite operate the way the street-level enforcers of earlier decades had — not openly, not with the same brutality. But throwing red paint, smashing glass, keying cars: these remained professional services, carried out on moonless nights, and as long as no one was caught in the act, there was very little that could be done.

And that was only today. Who could say what tomorrow might bring?

Most ordinary people were reluctant to — afraid to — provoke someone who operated by the rules of a different game. They feared the retaliation.

The difficulty was that Fu Jinchi himself was also that kind of person.

He didn’t calculate consequences.

*

One afternoon while Fu Jinchi was out, Yan Zishu got out of bed, went to the desk, and stood there with one thing in each hand.

In his left: the small velvet box with the cufflinks — the so-called new year’s gift.

In his right: his USB drive, which contained a tender document that was supposed to be confidential.

For a moment he felt like a set of scales, quietly weighing the two sides.

The atmosphere of these two days had been so unexpectedly warm that Yan Zishu, despite having brought the materials, had not once brought up the bid.

He was like a primary school student who had done poorly on an exam, who came home and was greeted with affection from his parents, and kept finding reasons to not pull out the report card.

But it had to come out eventually. He had to face this.

The gift felt, in equal measure, like a reminder and a prompt: stop avoiding this. The time has come to produce your corresponding side of the exchange.

After all, from the very beginning, theirs had been a relationship built on interests that neither could openly acknowledge.

Before this, Yan Zishu had told Fu Jinchi not to approach Ji Chen, not to obtain the bid documents through Ji Chen. In exchange, he had promised to help Fu Jinchi.

Looking at what had happened since, Fu Jinchi had kept his end.

Fu Jinchi hadn’t asked for anything in return yet. But between adults, many things didn’t need to be stated plainly.

If Yan Zishu failed to produce his side of the exchange, it would amount to unilateral breach — a failure to honor what had been implied.

The consequence, most likely, would be that whatever relationship existed between them dissolved.

And on top of that: after the Fu Xiaoyu incident, he had just accumulated a new and substantial debt to Fu Jinchi.

Yan Zishu found himself in a state of some difficulty. Something was becoming harder and harder to untangle.

The door clicked. The subject of his thoughts walked in. Yan Zishu immediately closed his fingers around the USB drive.

Fu Jinchi put his dry-cleaned clothes on the sofa. “Why are you up?”

Yan Zishu made a covering smile: “I’m not paralyzed — I can still stand.”

He added: “I was looking for my tablet. I thought I heard an email notification.”

“You can’t rest for even a moment.” Fu Jinchi went through a pile of things and located the tablet. “Here.”

Yan Zishu seized the opportunity to let go of the USB drive. In his sleep clothes, he settled into the single armchair and did in fact begin going through emails.

His tablet had its own data card and connection. When he opened the mail app as usual, a long column of unread messages was waiting.

Yan Zishu noticed one in particular and clicked it open immediately. It was an investigation report from the credit rating firm.

It wasn’t as though he had done absolutely nothing to prepare for the Treasure Pavilion bid, given how long this had been in motion.

Previously, he had assumed Fu Jinchi planned to leak Yinghan Group’s bid documents to a competitor.

If that had been the case, the worst outcome would simply have been Yinghan losing the bid.

Out of prudence, however, he had gone to the trouble of commissioning a credit firm to investigate the ownership structures of all bidding parties.

Now all of those findings were concentrated in this report.

The screen threw two white rectangles onto his lenses. Yan Zishu read on, and his expression became progressively more grave.

A major government project like the Treasure Pavilion would, like any large prize, draw a wide range of bidders. The serious ones — like Yinghan — were genuine competitors capable of going up against each other on actual merit. Below that, there was a long tail of small art companies, many barely functional, joining the field out of optimism or curiosity, clearly unable to pass the preliminary qualification round.

But among those smaller bidders — Fu Jinchi was the undisclosed controlling shareholder of at least three companies.

Even someone completely unfamiliar with the bidding process and with no particular sensitivity to these things would struggle not to notice something suspicious.

And Yan Zishu, with his knowledge of tender law and procurement regulations, very nearly understood Fu Jinchi’s plan on sight.

Fu Jinchi was apparently not planning to leak Yinghan’s documents to a competitor, as Yan Zishu had originally assumed.

He was planning to act directly, and to establish, conclusively, that Yinghan Group had participated in bid-rigging.

The difference mattered enormously. The first could only raise a rival’s chances of winning. The second was incomparably more serious.

By using several small companies to join the same bid, Fu Jinchi didn’t need any of them to win. He only needed the evaluation committee to notice that these companies’ submissions contained content suspiciously similar to Yinghan’s — shared passages, matching errors, and above all identical pricing figures. When that was discovered, all parties would be disqualified on suspicion of collusion.

It worked the same way as a failing student deliberately copying off someone else’s exam paper to bring them down with him.

Multiple companies conspiring to rig a government bid through methods this obvious would be the sort of thing that made legal affairs news, and invited commentary about idiots and amateurs. If the conduct was deemed sufficiently egregious, it could also put Yinghan on a government blacklist, barring them from public procurement bids for three to five years.

Among the companies involved, Yinghan would be the obvious central figure — the largest direct beneficiary — and would inevitably be identified by outside observers as the ring-leader, with the others serving as smaller accessories.

If Fu Jinchi chose that moment to stir up another wave of public controversy, the share price might end up as green as Third Uncle Fu’s face at the last shareholders’ meeting.

Yan Zishu’s head had well and truly started to hurt. Why did Fu Jinchi have to be this kind of mutually-assured-destruction type of saboteur?

No wonder, in the original plot, a single lost bid had been enough to throw Yinghan Group into a state of crisis. This wasn’t a quiet undercurrent operation. This was a drumroll and a declaration of war.

But if Yan Zishu could find the ownership connections through a standard credit investigation, so could others.

The more alarming possibility: Fu Jinchi might already not particularly care if he was discovered. In which case — was this already his opening statement of hostilities against Fu Weishan?

If that was what it was, he probably wouldn’t be easy to turn back.

*

Yan Zishu sat quietly, looking to all appearances as though he were simply working. Fu Jinchi left him alone.

When the clock ticked past ten, Fu Jinchi came over and asked: “You’re back at work tomorrow, I assume. Do you want to stay here another night, or head back to your own place?”

He was leaning sideways against the doorframe. He didn’t say a few more days or a while longer — just the question, as though it would be perfectly acceptable if Yan Zishu simply stayed.

Yan Zishu, his mind crowded with everything, looked at him for a slow moment, then stood and reached for his clothes. “I’ll go home.”

Fu Jinchi watched him. “Any problems at work?”

Yan Zishu’s pulse ticked up a notch. “Everything’s going smoothly.”

He maintained the performance of calm. In the end, he still didn’t bring up the bid.

There’s still time, he told himself. I’ll think more about it.

Fu Jinchi seemed, fractionally, regretful. Yan Zishu watched him walk toward him.

The thick carpet absorbed every footstep into silence. Fu Jinchi came closer and closer, and then was right in front of him, one arm sliding around his waist, drawing him in, close enough that the distance disappeared. He murmured close to his ear: “Then over the holiday, come and keep me company?”

Yan Zishu was surrounded by Fu Jinchi’s presence — that familiar note of warmth and danger that had become so recognizable — and for a moment he lost his own train of thought.

He reached out. Half-resistant, half-yielding. And held him anyway.

Still in that position, he couldn’t see the expression on Fu Jinchi’s face — something dark, something not entirely at rest.