The two of them returned to the hotel together. Ba Yunye wasted no time pulling out her “spoils” from the night and handed them to him. “These two people… do you recognize the names? Whose relatives are they?”
Diao Zhuo took her phone and looked up at her with a long, searching gaze. When he had first found her on the street, her silhouette had looked solitary and forlorn — like Jing Ke by the Yi River, armed only with courage and a single-minded resolve. When he had held her tight, her whole body had been rigid, her hands and lips both ice-cold. She never complained or showed weakness, rarely clung or coquetted. Hers was the temperament of someone utterly self-sufficient — someone who shouldered everything alone, as if she had never had a fallback or anyone to lean on.
“Stop looking at me — look at the phone!” She was getting impatient.
“A certain Haozhang… ” Diao Zhuo repeated the name once. “Could the other one be… Song Fan?”
“That was my first instinct too.”
Diao Zhuo thought for a few seconds, glanced at the clock on the wall, and sent a message to a police officer at the Alxa Public Security Bureau — someone who had taken statements from him and Old Wang — asking for Song Fan’s phone number. At this early hour, that officer was most likely still in bed.
Ba Yunye, half-drowsy, made two cups of instant noodles. As she waited, she nearly fell asleep on the spot. Diao Zhuo finished organizing his belongings and gave her a couple of taps on the shoulder. She rubbed her eyes, and on instinct, picked up her chopsticks and swirled the noodles in the broth — then slurped a mouthful. Scalding hot!
“And here you are pulling a surprise visit…” She let out a long breath and shot Diao Zhuo a reproachful look. Without a word, he tore open two bandage strips and pressed them onto the lightly abraded skin on the backs of her hands.
Interrogating people was physically demanding work — a thousand cuts to the enemy meant eight hundred to oneself. Compared to the enormous wave of sleepiness now that she had let her guard down, the small sting on the backs of her hands was nothing at all. She couldn’t help letting out a wide, unguarded yawn. Diao Zhuo saw it — her eyes were bloodshot, the whites of her eyes marked with visible red threads.
He sighed quietly, and something soft stirred in his heart. “Stop being reckless. You can’t go doing things like this on your own from now on.”
“How am I being reckless?”
“All it would take is one of them calling the police, and you’d be in serious trouble.”
“A bunch of street thugs, calling the police?” She scoffed, looking utterly unbothered.
“I planned to surprise you in Lijiang, and instead you gave me the fright of my life.” Diao Zhuo had spent the last few days lying to her about having no holiday leave. He had already bought a ticket to Lijiang — the off-season break from work happened to align with the slow period in her driving business, so the two of them wouldn’t have to keep flirting across the distance anymore. But he had arrived in Lijiang only to learn she had gone back to Pu’er, and on a warpath at that. Without stopping, he had rushed straight on to Pu’er — only for her not to come back all night.
“I was the one who got the fright of my life.” Ba Yunye gave him a sideways look. “Not even a word of warning before coming up behind me like that. For a moment I thought those thugs had hired muscle to come back for revenge. One look at your build, I thought I had a real fight on my hands… Good thing it’s you.”
“Are you finally admitting you couldn’t win against me in a fight?”
“That depends on whether you’d have the heart to actually hit me.” She was undaunted. She fired straight back, and truth be told — she had no idea how many times she had been mouthing off about wanting to fight him, inwardly confident that he would never truly raise a hand against her.
“Actually, settling the score between the two of us doesn’t require fighting at all.”
“Then how?” The direct and unfiltered Ba Yunye still held her ground, fist still clenched. “Don’t think for a second I’m actually afraid of you.”
“Round up all those thugs who harassed your orphanage, split them into two groups, one group each. Whoever knocks their group flat first — wins.” He looked at her steadily, his words carrying a deeper meaning.
She didn’t catch it right away. Her eyes lit up. “That’s a great idea!”
Diao Zhuo was helpless. What he had meant was clear enough — don’t go charging ahead alone next time; at the very least, let him know first.
They talked a while longer, then Diao Zhuo went to shower. Ba Yunye picked up her fork again to eat the noodles and found they had long gone cold. She wasn’t fussy — she boiled another kettle of water, poured it in and stirred. The broth had gone bland, and the noodles were so soggy they had no texture at all. She pushed it aside in mild disgust. Her mind was still tangled up in the mystery of “*Fan,” but the Alxa contact had still not replied.
Diao Zhuo came out of the bathroom. His well-developed upper body pulled a plain white T-shirt taut around him — no patterns, no special design, and yet it looked as if it belonged on a high-end runway model. He sat down beside Ba Yunye and, noticing how unusually pensive she looked, rested his hand gently on her shoulder.
“Get some sleep?” he asked quietly.
“You came all this way to sleep?” She was back to her usual self, slippery and quick-tongued. “You’re just like Meng Xiao’ai!”
Diao Zhuo pressed a hand to his forehead, at a loss for words. She burst out laughing. “I kind of hope Meng Xiao’ai comes to find you a few more times.”
He frowned. “Not enough on my plate already?”
“Each time she comes, you feel like you owe me and come to find me in return. If she comes a few more times, you’ll come find me a few more times…” Ba Yunye stopped herself and felt something off about the logic. She stroked her chin. “Actually no — if she comes too many times, you might end up moved by her relentless devotion. Then it wouldn’t be you coming to find me, it’d be you two clicking perfectly together.”
Where exactly would they be “clicking”? Diao Zhuo reached over and gave her earlobe a gentle squeeze. “Who owes who, exactly?”
“You owe me.” The look of a sharp dealer.
Fine. Whatever Master Ba says goes.
He gave Ba Yunye a pat on the backside. “Since you’re not planning to sleep, take me to see the old site.”
“Let’s go.” Ba Yunye stood up.
While they were waiting for the bus, the officer from Alxa called Diao Zhuo back and sent over the two phone numbers they had on file for Song Fan. He compared them against the number Ba Yunye had obtained.
“It’s Song Fan.” Diao Zhuo told the officer. The officers said they would report the lead and see what else could be dug up.
They talked a little more, then Diao Zhuo hung up. “Song Fan’s death has had a special task force set up on their end. It seems this man really was no simple figure. That said, the police can’t share any specifics just yet.”
“He’s insane! And he deserved every bit of it!” Ba Yunye went off like a firecracker the moment it was lit. She leapt to her feet and let loose. “He was the one saying my sister was a homewrecker back then! And he was the one sending people to make trouble at our orphanage! I just knew he couldn’t have been some bystander passenger who happened to be on that road! What the hell was he up to with all of this? Damn him!”
“Calm down.” Diao Zhuo patted the top of her head, the way you might soothe a ruffled rooster.
The old site was in the outskirts, and it was still a fair distance away with a bus transfer. The two of them swayed gently with the motion of the bus, looking out the window at tiered hillsides covered in rows of lush green tea trees. White clouds drifted above the green ridgelines. Ba Yunye’s hand was interlaced with Diao Zhuo’s, and she said quietly: “It’d be wonderful if Ba Nainai were still here. Unlike me — she was a very cultured old woman. She had studied abroad when she was young, and she knew English. She and you might have actually had something to talk about.”
“How old was she when she passed…”
“Eighty-two.” Ba Yunye said. “She went in her sleep. Very peacefully.”
Diao Zhuo gave a quiet nod. The independence, fortitude, and openness in Ba Yunye’s character — perhaps half of it had come from this admirable old woman.
As they moved further into the outskirts, the passengers on the bus thinned out. By the last stop, there was no one left but the two of them and the driver.
“For a while I kept working my route and quietly searching for the places in the photographs, thinking: if I find them, good; if I don’t, it doesn’t matter. I never expected myself to be getting this close to the truth. I have a feeling there’s something big at the center of all this, but I don’t know where to begin.” Ba Yunye said with a sigh. “If only I were a police officer.”
Diao Zhuo said with conviction: “The Hippo, Zhang Chenguang, Song Fan, and this Li Haozhang — on the surface, they appear to have no connection to one another. But all three photographs are enough to link them all together. It’s been so many years since the accident, and they still haven’t let it go. That alone proves there’s something they either haven’t managed to cover up or haven’t managed to get their hands on yet. If it’s about covering something up — the accident was ruled an incident. In all those years, it has never been reopened or re-investigated. Even with the final message and the personal effects we have, none of it counts as hard evidence.”
At the mention of the Hippo, she ground her back teeth. “God help the Hippo if I ever get my hands on him — I’ll beat him half to death. And if they’re after something they still haven’t obtained… the beryllium deposit survey materials? Even if ordinary people got hold of those, what could we do — grab a hoe and go dig it up ourselves? As far as I know, even if there’s a gold mine buried under your own house, it’s illegal to dig it up and sell it on your own.”
He raised an eyebrow, lightly amused. “And since when do you know anything about law?”
“I have always been a law-abiding citizen!”
The last stop arrived. Ba Yunye got off the bus and led Diao Zhuo onward on foot. On either side stretched terraced tea gardens climbing the hillside — white clouds hanging over the green ridges above, and with each gust of wind, the air seemed laced with the faint fragrance of tea leaves.
The surroundings were deeply familiar to Ba Yunye. “After the move, no one really came here anymore. It’s quiet. I used to think — if I could save up enough money, I’d buy up all of this land and build a villa. Ha. Looking back, what a childish idea that was.”
The road underfoot was indeed not easy going. After walking alongside her for a while, Diao Zhuo asked: “Have you ever considered — if the troublemakers knew perfectly well that Ba Nainai and my father had no affair, why do they keep coming back to the old orphanage site to this day?”
“Because they have too much time on their hands.”
Diao Zhuo looked straight at her and cut to the heart of it: “Same logic as Zhang Chenguang’s thermos — five thousand yuan per visit, tens of thousands spent over the years. What could there possibly be at that site worth more than that, that keeps drawing these people back?”
Though it wasn’t cold, a chill ran down Ba Yunye’s spine. “To start with, the orphanage wasn’t a public institution — Ba Nainai started it with her own money. She couldn’t have children of her own, never married her whole life, but she adored children. As the number of kids in her care grew, the funding grew tight. To raise us, Ba Nainai sold off almost every valuable possession she had. I never once saw anything particularly expensive inside the orphanage — even the color television and the big refrigerator didn’t arrive until I was in kindergarten. Later, after it was brought under public management, the land at the old site was earmarked for government use, but for some reason construction never started and it just sat there empty. If there’s anything worth money in that place, it’s probably some old tables, chairs, and bed frames — sell them for firewood and you might get… a hundred or two hundred yuan?”
By the end she couldn’t hold it together and laughed out loud.
“That’s not it.” Diao Zhuo dismissed the notion immediately. “Maybe it has something to do with Ba Nainai’s elder sister?”
“After she left for university, there was very little of her personal belongings left with us…” Ba Yunye thought for a moment. “Her books were donated by Ba Nainai to a library. Her computer…”
Diao Zhuo paused. “A computer?”
“Didn’t I mention it to you before? The only one in the whole orphanage. We all desperately wanted to play on it back then — Ba Nainai wouldn’t let us.”
“Where is it now?”
“That… I genuinely don’t know. There were internet cafés outside, so nobody was particularly interested in the old machine in the orphanage that couldn’t even connect to the internet. Maybe Ba Nainai donated it later, or sold it…” Ba Yunye shrugged. “I don’t remember.”
Diao Zhuo said: “If the survey team had discovered a beryllium deposit zone at the time, there would have been a massive amount of interpretation maps, measured cross-section data, and sample photographs. The volume of material would be enormous. Rather than moving it box by box, the most convenient and secure method would have been to scan and save it all digitally. Maybe Ba Nainai’s elder sister’s computer also had a backup copy.”
“So all those times they came to harass us — they were after my elder sister’s computer?” Ba Yunye said, astonished. “But the orphanage has been abandoned for years. Anyone with half a brain should have realized that even if there were a computer, there’s no way it would still be stored there.”
“Think back — before and after the orphanage moved, did you notice any change in the attitude and approach of the people who came to cause trouble?”
“The worst of it was when they threatened to burn the building down. But now that you mention it, I feel like what they really wanted to do was storm every room and search through things. They were terrified of the police — the moment Ba Nainai said she was going to call them, they’d scatter faster than monkeys. After the place was abandoned, they did quiet down a bit. They’d mainly just spray a few words on the door. The main reason I come back here every year is to buy paint and repaint the door and walls. Sometimes I run into them and warn them off. Maybe because I was too lenient with them, they got bolder. Now I’ve made up my mind — whoever comes next, I catch and I beat.”
Zhang Chenguang, who had traveled to Yuzhu Peak time and again without ever reaching the summit. Song Fan, who had died in the Badain Jaran Desert. An unidentified foreign body on Yuzhu Peak. The strange thermos and its curious found-object notice. The Hippo, who had stolen the thermos and vanished. Li Haozhang, who had picked up where Song Fan left off and sent people to harass the orphanage. As Ba Yunye had said, for a non-professional, obtaining survey data on a beryllium deposit zone would have no practical value — so why did they keep coming, one after another? The driving force could only be money. At this point, a suspicion quietly formed in Diao Zhuo’s mind: perhaps their frantic search for the beryllium deposit data was not for the purpose of mining — but for reselling.
Hydrological and geological survey data serving military purposes were classified as state secrets — and strategic resource analysis data in particular were top-secret material, absolutely prohibited from being bought or sold. Only one kind of person would take such an obsessive interest in state secrets of this nature and pursue them relentlessly —
Early in Diao Zhuo’s career, he had heard of a project team manager who had suddenly disappeared. The higher-level leadership had said nothing about it, nor had they filed a police report. Later, rumor among colleagues held that he had not disappeared at all — he had been arrested by the State Security Bureau for engaging in “broker” activities. A “broker,” distinct from a spy, was what those who traded in intelligence across national borders for personal profit were called. Were these people “brokers”? And following that thought — as a fellow survivor of the same accident, what exactly was He Zhengren’s role in all of this?