Silent Reading - Chapter 52: Humbert Humbert Nineteen
Crazy… Crazy, crazy. Had Fei Du suddenly lost his mind and got arrested by Luo Wenzhou himself for recklessly driving in downtown and got locked away in the ‘little dark room’, it would’ve sounded less crazy than this.
Luo Wenzhou’s temples throbbed wildly. His overloaded CPU barely got time to cool down: An offer in April. That means, even for someone as affluent and well-connected as Fei Du, he would have to start preparing all of these since last year.
Why?
Did he just wake up one day and suddenly became madly in love with research? Did he have too much to eat and nothing else to do? Did he do it to get close to Tao Ran? Or was he suddenly sick of this world that stunk of money?
Meanwhile, the crowd still bustled downstairs. A mid-aged woman accidentally dropped her photograph – one that she had been holding in her hand the whole time. She quickly reached for it but a gust of wind blew and carried the dated piece of photo further and further away. It was clearly a minor accident. However, to a brittle-nerved person it was enough to break her. As if sensing a bad omen, the woman stumbled, then knelt on the floor and started wailing.
Her hoarse yet piercing cry climbed up the staircases, penetrated the shut windows in the hallway and stabbed everyone in the heart. Amidst the agitating clamor, a forensic technician rushed toward them and reported: “Captain Luo, the test result came out — the one you sent over yesterday — the blood on the fabric belongs to Qu Tong!”
Luo Wenzhou inhaled deeply. He stared at Fei Du for a while, then walked toward Director Lu’s office in silence.
Twenty minutes later, Fei Du walked into Su Luozhan’s room with two boxes of ice cream in hand. He laid both of them down on the small table and asked: “Ice-cream? Which flavor do you want?”
Su Luozhan hesitated. She looked at him for a moment, then pointed at the strawberry one.
Fei Du gave her the strawberry one and picked up the other for himself. Then he took out a pair of headphones from his pocket, inserted it on his cell phone and turned on a soccer game. Legs crossed and ice-cream at hand, Fei Du paid her no more attention.
The two sat there wordlessly for quite a while. At first, Su Luozhan was very quiet and avoided eye contact. Half way through the ice cream, seeing that the man really had no intention of talking, she finally gave in and peeked at him. Her eyes glanced over Fei Du’s shirt, his cell phone, and finally arrived at his wrist that was resting on the table.
After studying his watch for a while, she lightly tapped on the floor and asked, “Is your watch genuine?”
Fei Du made no response, as if he hasn’t heard her at all.
She waited. Then, after a short pause, she reached one finger across the table and lightly tapped next to his cell phone.
Fei Du finally noticed. He took out one earphone and asked: “Yes?”
The volume of the game was indeed very large. The commentator’s yelling and screaming leak out of the earphone into the quiet room.
Su Luozhan chewed on the corner of the plastic spoon while asking: “What are you here for? Aren’t you going to ask me questions?”
“Oh, my colleagues are busy so they sent me to look over you for a while.” Fei Du seemed reluctant to pause the game. He only spared a casual glance at her before focusing back at the game. His answer was absentminded too.
When others kept asking questions, the girl played the card of ignorance and let nothing out. But when others were completely uninterested, she now seemed a little discontent about being ignored.
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She started peeking at him, at first just occasionally. After finishing the ice-cream, she stared at him altogether, even tried to start a conversation: “You’re a cop too?”
Fei Du answered lazily: “An intern.”
“Are interns rich?” Su Luozhan raised her eyebrow like a grown-up. “Your watch seems expensive. Is it genuine or a replica?”
As if finding her question funny, Fei Du first raised his brow in surprise and then chuckled: “You know what a ‘replica’ is? Girl, who taught you all these?”
Su Luozhan’s face suddenly fell. Clearly he did not take her seriously and treated her like a kid. She was offended.
She remembered him, the man with a plastered left arm. Back in the Su house he was like this too. He didn’t think that she could do any real damage, or do anything at all.
Most people are like this: when they got away with things by playing innocence, it feels great. But the good feeling fades quickly, because the point of “playing a pig to eat a tiger” is at the “eat a tiger” part. No one likes to play a pig forever — especially when others really thought of you as a pig.
Su Luozhan bit on her lip. She carefully assessed whether this man really had zero interest in her or was he only pretending to be. After a long pause, she threw out a bait and answered, half-sincerely: “Those uncles taught me.”
Fei Du paused too. Then, instead of asking who “those uncles” were, he only condoled her in a pitiful and condescending manner: “You will be Okay now, don’t worry.”
Su Luozhan felt as if she punched on a cloud. She pushed: “You mean that I won’t be punished?”
“I meant that no more bad guys will hurt you any more. As for what sentence you will get from this, it depends. But judging from your level of involvement and your age, you probably will not be tried in the criminal court. I’m guessing, probably a couple years in the juvenile detention. ” Fei Du replied. He finally turned off that damn game on the phone at this time. As if finally remembered his ‘policeman’ duties, he continued with a cliché old-people lecture despite those sparkling peach-blossom eyes: “You kids…never learnt to protect yourselves. You were used by the bad guys yet you probably still don’t know what’s going on. Kid, listen to me. What’s happened has already happened. When you get out from here, be a good student and don’t bother yourself with these crazy affairs any more. You still have a whole lifetime ahead of you…”
Meanwhile in front of the monitor screen, Tao Ran had already started and finished a nap while Fei Du and the girl were dawdling. He woke up to the tail-end of Fei Du’s lecture and rubbed his eyes in disbelief: “My my, is this Fei Du… Listen to him! I thought he was possessed by your ghost or something!”
Luo Wenzhou replied with a kick on his chair.
It got Tao Ran on his feet, so he stood up and rubbed his face to wake up. Listening to the verbose and pointless lecture, Tao Ran smiled and said: “You two are on a truce lately. Good.”
Luo Wenzhou: “Why would we fight?”
“God I wish I knew.” Tao Ran grinned. “Time flies since you two had a scene at the entrance of the Huashi Sub Bureau. You were furious, remember? You even asked someone to give him a ticket.”
Luo Wenzhou: “…”
“I told you.” Tao Ran sighed. Still the usual peacemaker that he was, he continued, “Fei Du is a good kid. If you are nice to him, he will be ten times as nice in return. Although he’s quarrelsome at times, he usually doesn’t mean it. Most of the times he is very agreeable. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have let us off the hook so easily on the damaged car.”
Tao Ran was prepared to receive the usual sneer from Luo Wenzhou. However, after an unusually long pause, Luo Wenzhou briefly replied with a “mhmm”.
Tao Ran: “…”
What on earth have happened recently? Why is the world different every time he opened his eyes!
At this time, Suo Luozhan in the screen suddenly got on her feet. Leaning forward with almost her entire upper body on the table, she interrupted Fei Du’s moral lecturing with her body language.
She whispered: “You think I was being used?”
“Xu Wenchao has already been arrested,” said Fei Du sternly. “Although some details still aren’t clear, we should be able to sort them out soon.”
Su Luozhan gave him a mysterious smile.
“Of course, If you are willing to identify him then…” On these words, Fei Du paused deliberately. Then he shook his head, “Forget it. Your testimony won’t count…Can I get you anything else to eat? I can ask someone to buy it.”
Su Luozhan ignored his question and asked: “Why won’t my testimony count?”
“Because you are underaged.” spoke Fei Du airily, “Kids are not able to be real witnesses. Not to mention that this is a very serious case. Even if you identify him, they won’t take it seriously. Even if they do, you won’t be allowed to testify in court. But girl, there is one thing that I have to say: however scared you were, it was not right to hurt your friend. At that time, you were holding a chopper in your hand. Do you know how dangerous it was? What if your hand slips and…”
Su Luozhan suddenly interrupted: “Perhaps my hand DID slip so I wasn’t able to kill her?”
Fei Du looked down at her and seemed to be shocked at those words.
Su Luozhan kept playing with a small lock of hair in her finger. A perplexing grin was on her face. She was like a hunter waiting for her prey to take the bait.
Fei Du’s face turned ‘solemn’. He pushed his cell phone aside and sat up straight to look Su Luozhan in the eye: “I understand that for a traumatized kid, it can be difficult to reconcile with the idea of being the victim of something so terrible. You may try to convince yourself that the bad guys were cool, and the bad guys were strong, and the victims were too weak and they had it coming. You may want to see yourself as part of the perpetrators. You may even try to copy them. But…”
“But the victims did have it coming. They are weak.” Su Luozhan made a face to him, and continued, “Just like lambs, they know nothing but to scream. They are dull, and they are stupid. They fall so quickly to your tricks, and they scream and die so easily. There is no point for them to be living.”
Fei Du frowned and stared at Su Luozhan in fury and disbelief: “How could you think this!”
From the moment that he treated her like a stupid child and tried to “enlighten” her, Su Luozhan had a sullen anxiety in her heart. How she wished to break apart that calm and gentle face of his! Now she finally did it. Seeing his calmness shatter brought her some strange pleasure.
“Anyways, I won’t be sentenced, right?” Su Luozhan looked at Fei Du triumphantly. “The lambs are so stupid. They believe everything you say. You talk to them once, and the second time they’ll see you as a friend and they’ll follow you wherever you go… haha, so funny it’s killing me.”
“Su Luozhan,” Fei Du’s lips trembled, “Stop saying this nonsense!”
Su Luozhan didn’t get to see the expressions of Qu Tong’s parents when they received the recording. Just imagining it made her heart itchy. Now, imagining the aguish of this young “police officer” being grafted onto the targets of her psychotic torturing, her eyes lit up with excitement.
“It wasn’t nonsense.” she lightly tapped the ground with her toes, speaking naively, “My mom taught me this. She said that when other animals are in danger, they either fight or flight. Only lambs are different. When lambs get scared they lose their mind and stand still, and they will follow anyone. But my mother was a lamb too, very stupid after all. I read her diary once. When she was my age she was once frightened out of her mind. Since then she never had the guts to leave her signature any more. ”
Fei Du: “… What signature?”
Su Luozhan naughtily put one hand next to hear ear like a phone, and answered: “Because her ‘knight’ was dead, she never dared to do it again.”
“Her knight?”
“Yeah, pretty cheesy, right?” Su Luozhan smirked, “He was just a nicer ‘customer’. My family lived on the hunt. My mother was good at nothing except “catching the lambs”. When she grew old, she couldn’t even do that anymore and I had to support her…Phew, finally she died.”
“… Enough, knock it off.” said Fei Du stressfully, “You can’t…you’re not old enough.”
“Oh but I am. I learnt it when I was seven.” Su Luozhan grinned at him delightfully, “My mother entertained the guests with the lambs I caught. Sometimes she let me go “hunting” with the guests too. When they were finished, they only need to take the lamb home and she will take care of the rest. She learned it from her mother. ”
In front of the monitoring screen, Luo Wenzhou jumped to his feet: “Su Xiaolan’s drunkard mother, search her!”
Lang Qiao barely entered the monitor room. Hearing this command she turned around and dashed out immediately.
Tao Ran was completely awake by now: “What? She’s saying…that…Su Xiaolan’s mother was a procuress in child prostitution, and Wu Guangchuan was just one of her customers? Wait, but why did she refuse to say anything when we asked her, but now telling everything to Fei Du even if he didn’t ask anything at all?”
“You treated her like a suspect. You were the ‘police’.” Luo Wenzhou answered softly, eyes on the screen, “Fei Du treated her like a ‘naive child’. He was the ‘parent’. So she can’t help but send him the ‘recording’.”
“Impossible,” Fei Du shot up so fast that his knee bumped into the table. The table jumped, then landed heavily on the ground. “The killer was Wu Guangchuan, and he was dead by stabbing from the victim’s father. After that no more similar cases… ”
He suddenly stopped. His eyes were wide open as if he was stricken by a horrific thought.
“You never heard of them, that’s all.” Su Luozhan admired his expression, “Anyways, that uncle deserved it. My mother loved him so, but he was no different from the other scumbags. Having my mother was not enough, no. He wanted the other stupid lambs too. Jealousy drove her mad so she invented a ‘fun’ signature. ”
Fei Du: “What about you and Xu Wenchao? Are you in the same kind of rela…”
“Of course not!” Su Luozhan called out angrily, “Who did you think he was? Just a temporary cleaner!”
Fei Du suddenly raised his voice: “Then why did you send the recording to Qu Tong’s home!”
Su Luozhan kept smiling, arms stretched out on the table.
“It’s fun.” she said.
“Boss! Su Xiaolan’s mother was called Su Hui. She was mostly unemployed, an addict, and ran a Majong house. Under her name there is a second-handed truck!”
playing a pig to eat a tiger: Pretending to be silly in order to beat someone smart.
