Mo Du (默读) - Silent Reading

Humbert Humbert IV

Lang Qiao hadn’t had her fun yet; she was planning to follow on the heels of her victory, ganging up with her colleagues to continue encircling Luo Wenzhou. But unexpectedly she looked up and met the eyes of the portrait that had fallen on the ground and was so startled the alcohol flew out of her pores.

The public security system had people who specialized in making composite drawings. There was no lack of experts among them. Comparatively speaking, this portrait’s execution belonged to a beginner level. But the odd thing was that the person in the drawing had an uncommonly lifelike charm; this face seemed to have been traced over countless times in the artist’s mind, until the artist could resist no longer and had just applied their awkward technique to the paper.

“What is that?” said Lang Qiao.

Having been kicked over by Luo Wenzhou, Tao Ran had sobered up a little and noticed he had said something wrong. He stood up, leaning on the couch, and went out of the room to wash his face. When he returned, he and Luo Wenzhou cleaned up the stuff. “It must be Lotus Mountain. The old man went on about it all his life.”

“Lotus Mountain” wasn’t a mountain; it was the name of a place on the northern outskirts of Yan City. Earlier, it had fallen under the county seat administered by Yan City; over a decade ago it had been absorbed into Yan City and become a development zone.

On the page in the notebook, aside from the vivid portrait, there were several yellowed old photographs, stuck to the page with clear tape. It had been too long; they fell at a touch.

There were blurry casual snapshots, and there were photographic studio products typical of the era—all Dutch windmill backdrops and exaggerated lighting, the smiles of the young girls in them a little stiff, as in a staged photograph with too long an exposure period.

There were six photographs altogether.

There’s a very strange thing about old photographs. All photo paper will fade and yellow just the same when put away for a couple of decades. If the person in the photograph is happy and well, the yellowing marks of age will call to mind long recollections, the quiet passage of time; but if the person in the photograph later met with some mishap, then when others look back on their earlier appearance, they’ll get a strange, somber flavor from it, as if the person in the photograph’s anger and dissatisfaction are possessing the static image, declaring something from the unseen realm.

“It’s the Venerable Yang’s?” asked Lang Qiao. “What was he doing looking after a development zone?”

“The City Bureau had a policy back then, those who were under thirty-five all had to get basic experience—either go to a local police station or go to one of the counties. My shifu and some others went to Lotus Mountain and stayed there half a year or more.” Luo Wenzhou carefully pinched the edges of the photographs and stuck them back into the notebook. “They hadn’t been there long when they ran into this case—you may never have heard of it. I wasn’t old enough to attend school then.”

“At the beginning, there was a man who came to report a case. He said his child had gone missing.” Tao Ran flipped through the notebook. Aside from the photographs and the portrait, most of the notebook’s contents were purely handwritten. The old criminal policeman’s writing was quite beautiful, delicate, firm, and well-shaped. On the page before the photographs the characters “Guo Heng” were written; there was a triple-underline under the name. “Right, the person who reported the case was this Guo Heng. His eleven-year-old daughter had gone missing. Her nickname was ‘Feifei’.”

At this point, Luo Wenzhou’s hand paused on a thick sheaf of teaching materials, and he raised his head to give Tao Ran a puzzled look. “You’re this drunk and you still remember what the girl was called?”