It became his responsibility to keep pouring cold water into the pot whenever the water started boiling. It wasn’t difficult. He just needed to repeat that two or three times, and the noodles would be done.
She pulled out several jars of sauces, which she kept under the table, spooned a little out of each jar, and mixed them together in a bowl. She was absorbed in her work, which appeared to be an improvised concoction. He’d done similar experiments at home, tossing together whatever ingredients were available. In the somberly lit room, he couldn’t make out the labels on the jars, and he couldn’t help shifting his attention to her white thighs, revealed through the robe, which ended just above her knees.
After adding cold water and then repeating the process one more time, he began to ladle out the noodles into two bowls. She then poured the sauce on top of them. In addition, she opened a small plastic package of Wuxi gluten and put pieces of gluten onto the noodles.
So that was their dinner. She sat on the bed, and he on the only chair in the room, the noodles on the table between them.
To his surprise, the noodles were quite delicious. The meal was more agreeable than the banquet at the center. For one thing, he liked noodles. He was a gourmet when he ate out, but not an enthusiastic chef when he had to cook for himself.
It was probably the same for her. He then dismissed the thought almost instantly. She was much younger. An attractive girl like her probably had a lot of men her own age eager to invite her out to candlelight dinners. He felt a twinge of jealousy.
Or was he suddenly feeling so much older?
“Thank you. These are the best noodles I’ve had in a long time.”
“Come on. How can someone who dines with the executives of the center really enjoy a bowl of plain noodles with me?”
“It’s the truth, Shanshan. Noodles shared with you are no longer merely plain noodles.”
“Someone who enjoys the special connections that you do,” she went on, without responding to his comment, “doesn’t have to say such things.”
“What do you mean?”
“Uncle Wang told me that, on the morning I got into trouble at the company, you made some phone calls for me. Shortly after you called, a police officer rushed over, showed you all the respect he would if you were his boss.”
“Oh, that. Yes, as I told you earlier, I did make some phone calls. I was concerned about you. As for the police officer,” he said, trying to think what the old man might have seen from across the road, “we happened to meet when were both getting a haircut in the same barbershop. He knew of my work-I’ve translated some mysteries, you know-so I talked to him about it.”
“According to the police officer who released me, I have a guiren in my life that I didn’t know about. He said to me, ‘But for your guiren, you might have remained in custody for god knows how long.’ I don’t know that many people here. Certainly not anyone that powerful, Chen.”
In traditional Chinese culture, guiren meant someone powerful or influential who helps out in an unexpected way. It was understandable that Huang couldn’t help using such a term, which suggested Chen but didn’t give him away.
“Well, clearly they had no right to detain you. When they realized their mistake, they had to come up with some excuse, which is probably why they credited a guiren.”
He couldn’t tell whether she believed him or not, but her comment gave him an excuse to turn the conversation to the topic he had in mind. He had been unwilling to bring it up that evening.
“Let’s talk business,” she said, stealing the initiative from him. She sat up and drew her legs up under her on the bed, her hands clasped around her knees. “I don’t think you came here for a bowl of noodles.”
“Well,” he said, looking at her, and then past her to the wall behind her, “the partition wall looks as thin as a piece of paper.”
“No one will hear,” she said, lifting up a wisp of black hair that had strayed over her eye, “provided we don’t talk too loud. But why? If it was anything that important, you could have called me and asked me to meet you elsewhere.”
“Here’s a phone for you,” he said in a quiet voice, pushing across the table a newly bought cell phone. It was shining scarlet, which somehow reminded him of her in her trench coat that day in the sampan. “In the future, when you call me, use this phone only.”
“Why?”
“You aren’t only getting prank calls on your cell. It’s been bugged too.”
“You’re really scaring me, Chen. How the devil could you know about all that?”
“Through my connections. Don’t worry about what connections, Shanshan. I just happen to have them. When I made inquires into those nasty calls you’d been getting, I was told about your phone being tapped.” He went on after a short pause. “For instance, they mentioned you had been speaking to someone named Jiang.”
She stared at him in shock, not uttering a word. She hadn’t said anything to him about Jiang. Of course, she didn’t have reason to-not to a tourist she’d just met by chance.
“How could you have-” she started without finishing the sentence, her face instantly bleached of color.
“About the threatening phone calls you’ve been getting, they were all made from a public phone booth. So there’s no way to trace the identity of the caller. If anything, though, it proved that they weren’t merely prank calls. Kids wouldn’t have made such an effort or spent money on a practical joke.”
“But how could someone have stooped so low?”
“It’s someone who is capable of anything. That’s one of reasons I decided to come over the moment I learned about it-without calling you first. But it’s also true, needless to say, that I missed you. As an old proverb goes, One day elapsed without seeing you feels like a separation for three autumns to me.”
“You’re still being poetic with me.”
“Setting sentimentality aside, tell me as much as you can about what has been happening of late-with you, around you, or at your company. I don’t know if I’m in a position to help, but to be able to do anything at all, I need as much information as I can get from you.”
“Why are you going out of your way to help me?”
“You know why,” he said, grasping her hand across the table. “I want to.”
“But I don’t know what you want to know.”
“Let me ask you this first. Now that Liu is dead, is there anything new at your company?”
“There’s been nothing new under the sun. The wastewater keeps flowing into the lake, day and night. Fu, the new general manager, won’t change anything.”
“I heard that Mi was promoted to office manager.”
“You’ve been hearing about things promptly. I only heard about it yesterday.”
“She was only Liu’s little secretary, wasn’t she?”
“Fu’s only been here for four or five years. He needs her help for the transition, I think. After all, there are a lot of things that Mi alone knows.”
“So Fu’s quite young? He must have been promoted very quickly.”
“Fu majored in economics. When he was still a college student, he published an article on the economic reform in the People’s Daily. This made him an instant celebrity, and he was named as a representative to the national Youth League conference. Upon graduation, he was assigned to work as an assistant to Liu. Because of his Youth League background, it didn’t take too long for him to be promoted.”
“So he’s one of the ‘rocket cadres,’” Chen said, nodding. “A lot of young cadres are chosen from the Youth Leagues, they are the so-called young vanguard for the Party. Fu must have worked closely with Liu then.”
“Liu wasn’t an easy one to work with or to share power with. I don’t know much about the politics among the executives at the company, but Fu seems to have remained an outsider. That was just my impression, of course. Luckily, he knew how to play second fiddle.”