At the Palace of Pleasure, Cí encountered women more beautiful than he ever could have imagined. He and Gray Fox and the other students were seated at a booth. Cí looked around at the whirl of rich young men, students, merchants—and the dancers. The painted “flowers” gyrated like water lilies on an eddying pool as lutes whipped up the excitement further. The women went around the room, giving men glimpses of their small, bound feet and driving them wild. Gray Fox greeted friends and staff as if he owned the place. Soon two smiling women joined them, and Gray Fox was pouring more drinks.
“Nice, aren’t they?” said Gray Fox as he stroked one of the girls’ legs. “Listen,” he told them, “this is Cí, the Corpse Reader, my new partner. He talks to ghosts, so be nice to him, very nice, or he’ll turn you into donkeys!”
Cí wasn’t entirely comfortable with his lusty thoughts when the two girls came and sat on either side of him. It had been a long time since he’d touched a woman, and he’d forgotten what their soft skin felt like, and what the caress of their perfumes could do to him.
The food arrived, and there was so much, and such variety, that the well-known saying about Lin’an—that here you could eat anything that flew except the comets, anything that swam except boats, and anything with legs except tables—seemed entirely apt. Snails in ginger, eight-gem pudding, pearl crabs, fried rice, ribs with chestnuts, freshwater fish, dragon-teeth oysters…The warm rice wine kept flowing, and Cí drank it all down. Gray Fox—the change in whom astonished Cí—kept encouraging Cí to indulge.
He hardly needed encouragement. The two “flowers” were seeing to that.
The first time he felt one of their hands slip between his legs, he spat out his drink. The second time, he tried to set them straight: their perfume and their red lips stirred him in all the right ways, but he didn’t have the money to thank them for their attentions. They didn’t seem to care, and they started kissing his neck.
Pleasure crackled down Cí’s spine and goose bumps spread over his flesh. Gray Fox and the others were laughing and cheering for him to go off with the girls.
It didn’t take him long to decide. The last couple of swigs of rice wine had transported him into a hazy, vertiginous world of caresses and sweet smells. He was about to kiss one of the girls when a hand clutched his shoulder.
“Let go of her and get yourself another one!” roared an older man carrying a stick.
Gray Fox intervened. “What? Leave him alone!”
But the man ignored Gray Fox, grabbing the girl by the arm as though he were going to rip it from her body and knocking the table of food over at the same time. Cí jumped up to stop the man, but in an instant the man struck Cí across the face with the stick. Cí fell to the floor, and just as the man was about to deliver another blow, Gray Fox leaped on him. Immediately five or six members of the restaurant staff dived in to separate them.
“Goddamned drunkard!” said Gray Fox, wiping blood from a cut on his hand. “They should be stricter about who they let in.” He helped Cí to his feet. “Are you all right?”
Cí wasn’t sure what had just happened, but whatever it was, it hadn’t cleared the alcohol from his brain. Some staff helped the two of them over to a quiet corner; the others in the group stayed with the two women.
“Buddha! That imbecile almost wrecked our whole night. Want me to call over one of the girls?”
“No…” said Cí. “It’s fine…” Everything was spinning.
“You sure? She seems to know what she’s doing, and she has the most delectable feet. I bet she wriggles like a frying fish. Don’t worry. We’re here to have fun!” And he signaled to a waiter to bring more drink.
Cí was soon enjoying himself again, and he and Gray Fox chatted as though they’d been friends their whole lives. Their commentary on the ridiculous old men drooling over the dancing girls, and the way the girls made mocking faces even as they took their money, had Cí in fits of laughter. They drank on until eventually their conversation lost all sense.
Then Gray Fox’s face changed, and he started talking about his loneliness. From a very young age he’d been sent to the best schools, so he’d always been surrounded by great wisdom, but he lacked the affection of his brothers, his mother’s kisses, and the intimacy of friendships. He’d learned self-esteem but also never to trust anyone. His life had been like that of a prize horse, shut up in golden stables, ready to kick the first person who came near.
“You have to forgive me,” said Gray Fox. “I’ve acted so badly toward you, but until you arrived at the academy the one thing I had was Ming’s admiration. When you came, all that attention shifted to you.”
Cí didn’t know what to say; the drink was making his thoughts blurry.
“Forget about it,” Cí said. “I’m not that good.”
“Yes, you are. Like this morning, you found something in the corpse’s ear—no one else noticed it. I feel like an idiot.”
“Don’t say that. Anyone could have found it.”
“I didn’t though,” said Gray Fox, hanging his head.
Cí understood Gray Fox’s feeling of defeat. He fished around in his bag and pulled out a small piece of metal.
“Watch this,” said Cí. He slowly moved the piece of metal closer to a small iron dish on the floor until suddenly the dish leaped up to meet it.
“A magnet?” asked Gray Fox, trying to pull the dish off.
“Yes, and if you’d had one at the examination you would have found what I found: the metal bar inserted in the ear. The metal bar that killed the sheriff because it was pushed straight through to his brain.”
“Killed? Sheriff? What are you saying?” Gray Fox became animated again and took another drink. “So…the flask of liquor he was clutching…”
Cí pointed to an old man passed out on a divan across the room from them. He had a cane.
“See how he isn’t gripping it? The cane is just resting lightly in his hands. When someone dies, it’s like that; their last breath takes all their life force with it. The only way he could have been gripping the flask was if someone had introduced it into his hands after death and waited for the onset of rigor mortis.”
“A red herring?”
“Essentially,” said Cí, draining the last of his drink.
“You really are a devil,” chuckled Gray Fox.
Cí didn’t know what to say. The drink was making him blurrier and blurrier. A toast, he thought.
“To my new friend,” he said, lifting his cup.
“To mine,” said Gray Fox.
When more drinks came, Cí said he couldn’t possibly. Cups, customers, dancers—everything was spinning. But then he saw a svelte figure approaching and thought he recognized the almond eyes on the face that leaned down to kiss him. And the wet lips full of desire.
As Cí let himself be pulled in by the woman, Gray Fox got up.
If Cí had watched his new friend go, rather than abandoning himself to caresses, he would have been surprised to see Gray Fox suddenly seeming entirely sober as he walked with determination to the door, handed some coins to the man who’d attacked them earlier, and left the Palace of Pleasure.
22
By the time Cí woke, the sun was high over the rooftops of Lin’an.
The noise of passersby felt like a thousand lightning bolts piercing his tender brain. He got up gingerly, and when he saw the sign for the Palace of Pleasure above the pile of rubbish he’d slept in, a shiver went through him. Clearly his companions from the previous night had left without him, and he began the walk back to the academy alone.