“Wang didn’t want me to know, but does he know that the gallery is mine?” Zhuang asked with a smile. “In fact, his wife and your shimu are like sisters, and she keeps me up to date on what he’s doing.” He took out his pipe, added some tobacco, and puffed away.
“Where did you get that?” Zhao asked. “It looks old, maybe an antique.”
Zhuang just smiled.
“What about Mao’s calligraphy in Gong Jingyuan’s collection? Still no news?”
“I was going to talk to you about that. Once we get it, we’ll be ready to open. We’ll hold a press conference and be in business. I’ve found a way to deal with Gong Xiaoyi.”
“How?”
“He’s shrewd when he’s sober but would call you grandpa if he needed a fix. I told him I could get Liu Yezi to sell him opium at a lower price. But of course I can have Liu jack up the price if I want, or refuse to sell him anything, even if he offers gold. So I told Liu to cut off his supply for ten days unless he brings out the scroll.”
“Who is this Liu Yezi, anyway? Be careful with opium dealers. You know it’s illegal.”
“Of course I know. I don’t smoke it and I don’t share in the profits. We were classmates. She and her husband have been in the opium-trafficking business for years, and they’re Gong Xiaoyi’s only supplier.”
“People in that kind of business treat money like their life. Why would she abide by your request to force Xiaoyi’s hand?”
“You’ll understand when I give you the whole story. Last year she sold a shipment of poppy pods to a guy named Ma on Dongyanshi Street. Ma owns a Chongqing hot pot diner, where he adds the pods to his soup to attract customers. Everyone was saying the hot pots at Ma’s place were so good that people felt terrible if they missed even one day. Someone suspected that he was adding poppy pods and, after observing him in secret, reported him to the police. The police shut him down and wanted to know where he got the pods. He ratted on Liu Yezi, who told the police that a doctor in the countryside had given her a package of them to make medicinal drinks for her father, who had stomach cancer. After he died, she didn’t want to throw away the pods, so she sold them to Ma. Of course the police didn’t believe her. The station chief is a buddy of mine, so I spoke to him on her behalf; in the end they noted her story in their report and released her. Why would she not listen to me now? Let’s go see her. Maybe Xiaoyi has already given her the scroll.”
They hailed a taxi and arrived at a traditional housing compound. Zhuang did not want to go in, saying it would be better if he didn’t meet Liu Yezi. Zhao told him to wait in a nearby bar while he went in to see Liu. He was pleased that she and her husband were both home. “Gong Xiaoyi is having a fix upstairs. He came with the scroll today but was afraid we wouldn’t give him anything, so he demanded that first. He said he’d hand it over after we sold him some opium. Let him have his smoke. We’ll take tea in the other room.” For reassurance, Zhao tiptoed upstairs and looked in through a crack in the door. Gong Xiaoyi was lying on the bed, out like a light, with the scroll beside his emaciated body. Zhao smiled and went down to have tea.
. . .
Gong Xiaoyi had been suffering from withdrawal symptoms for days. He went to see Liu Yezi several times a day, but she refused to sell him anything without the scroll. He went home and tried to cope, but soon returned when he could not stand it any longer. She turned him away each time, and the pattern was repeated. Again and again, five trips altogether, until his body ached so much that he rammed his head against the wall, slammed his arms against the bed boards, and pulled out handfuls of his hair. Eventually he took the scroll to Liu’s house. He fell to the floor the moment he got in, kowtowing to her and foaming at the mouth. She unrolled the scroll. It was indeed Mao’s calligraphy, with its elegant strokes, majestic and grand, the embodiment of a leader. No wonder Zhao Jingwu has to have it, she said to herself. She gave Xiaoyi some opium, which he took upstairs to satisfy his need first. As she had told Zhao, he would not part with the scroll until he was given more opium.
Once upstairs, he had begun smoking and lay down on the bed, feeling remorseful about his unseemly behavior in recent days. He had been a treasure to his father, smart, incisive, and good-looking. When the two of them had gone out together, people had praised both the father’s calligraphy and his son. Legions of families had wanted to marry their daughters to him, and countless pretty girls had smiled flirtatiously when they saw him. But none of them had been good enough for him at the time. Now he had no job, was ignored by his father, and was despised by friends and relatives. Even flat-nosed Liu Yezi showed him no pity. On his earlier visit, Liu and her husband were having sex and did not stop when they saw him. He was on the floor, sniveling and begging, while she pulled up her pants, talking to him as she took a kerchief out from between her legs. In her eyes he was subhuman. He fumed over how the world treated him when he was out of opium, which was why he resorted to seeking happiness in his opium-induced state, a way for him to exact revenge on the world. The thought inevitably created a beautiful scene before his eyes; he was his former self again, young, handsome, spirited. An ingenious idea came to him: stop the movements of the hour and minute hands on the wall clock, stop time, and let him grow a pair of wings to fly around the city and see what families were doing. Sure enough, the hands stopped moving; even a buzzing fly was halted in mid-flight. He sprouted wings and flew over houses by the west gate until he reached the east gate, then headed to the north gate and finished at the south gate. He saw everything: naked men and women were copulating in just about every house in the city, displaying a myriad of positions and body movements. He walked in and collected the filthy semen from the beds, filling three large tubs. When the tubs were full, he put them on one of the trucks that sprayed the streets with water, then drove up and down the streets. A pungent, putrid smell filled his nostrils.
“I’ve exterminated all your children!” he shouted.
Then he gathered up all the men and cut off their genitals, which he tossed into the city moat, quickly filling it up. So he razed the city wall to bury more of the human debris. He wanted to rape all the women in front of the men, to make the women scream and the men suffer. That would make him feel better. Finally, putting on a gigantic pair of straw sandals, he ran across eight hundred li of the Qin River, over the hilltop imperial tombs that were the pride of Xijing’s residents. He saw the Qian Mausoleum, which his father said had been built by Empress Wu Zetian to look like a woman lying on her back on the open plain. It was no longer a tomb, but a full-figured, beautiful, noble Wu Zetian lying there in the flesh. He raped her. Yes, he did. A wind blew, sending colorful clouds roiling in the sky. He turned to see that every one of the hilltop imperial tombs had sunk, and realized that the tombs had risen so high before because the emperors’ genitals continued to grow after their deaths. Now that he owned the world and had conquered Wu Zetian, their genitals wilted and died off, out of despair. Xiaoyi was euphoric: he was the mayor of a city where the residents were either men who could no longer copulate or women whose bodies he frolicked on, where all the money and all the treasures belonged to him, where he owned all of the opium…