Back then I knew that so long as I followed that silhouette, I would never lose my way, and never be hurt.
—Years later, Heidi. Tang.
The gunfire never stopped. Every sound of it was lethal enough to snuff out a fragile human life, and now it boiled through the half-collapsed factory building like a string of firecrackers.
The Heidi who would one day grow into a great beauty was at this point still just a little girl—a scrawny little thing. She had spent a whole day on edge and a whole night terrified, and now, exhausted and hungry, she was sitting in the middle of a place crawling with danger.
The gunshots were nearly deafening, and the wall not far from her kept shedding chunks of concrete and plaster as bullets swept across it. Clutched tight against her mother in a dead angle out of the line of fire, the little girl was trembling all over, crying softly.
And within that narrow field of view, Jiaming stood at the edge of the corridor, two submachine guns aimed down at the floor below, sweeping the stair landing in precise, cold bursts. Several of the high-wattage halogen lamps in the plant had already been shot out, and most of the place had sunk into darkness, yet his fire was machine-precise: the instant any spot made the slightest sound, the next instant bullets would come snapping exactly into it.
On the other side, the surviving men of Tang Jingyao's crew were going practically mad. One man—a single man—had every one of them pinned down so tight they could not move. The plant was basically pitch-dark now, yet the other side's eyes seemed sharper than an owl's; anyone who dared risk leaving the cover of the junk and the dirt piles was finished the next instant. And if any of them did slip through and fire off a shot, the reply came back at once. The man over there is a marksman. We are not.
Knowing their boss was already dead, plenty of them were thinking only of hiding. Some wanted to throw grenades, but the enemy was up on a corridor more than ten meters high; the one man who took the risk had barely pulled the pin, without even throwing yet, when his hiding place was exposed and his arm was shot to pieces—and he was blown apart along with the two companions beside him. Another, in a panic, threw wild and wounded one of his own. After that, nobody dared try again.
Forget it, forget it. Just go. Let this demon just go...
In the end, that deep helplessness drove most of them to the same idea. Their boss might have wanted to build a Chinese Mafia, but when it came down to it, how could men like these possibly measure up?
Most were just street thugs who had been taken in after a relatively strict screening process; once they had a gun in hand they thought themselves desperadoes, when in truth they were still thugs at heart, bullying the weak and cowering before the strong.
Even the ones who, like Chen Junbin, were retired special forces had mostly had their will worn away by money—and even granting that a few still had the old skills, a handful of men was nothing worth mentioning in front of Pei Luojia's highest-grade assassin.
"Safe. Four steps along the wall—that's a blind spot..."
"Safe. Turn left with me, get behind the corner..."
"Safe. Follow me downstairs, keep three steps behind me..."
"Heidi, don't cry. It's all right..."
By the dim light, through the little girl's tear-filled eyes, that back was always steady and unhurried: turning, shifting, firing; a fresh magazine flying up from his side while the spent one dropped—and almost before the old magazine hit the floor the new one was already seated in the grip. Everything was impossibly quick and fluid. It was not a fight he was in, only a dance. And now and then he would glance back and, incredibly, still comfort her in a soft voice.
When they reached the second-floor corridor, the wall on this side had been blown open. Jiaming said mildly, "I need you to hold Heidi and jump down from here. Can you do it?"
Marilyn nodded, kicked off her high heels, and without a word jumped with Heidi in her arms. It was a full three meters down, with chunks of blasted rubble below and no easy way to judge the landing. As they hit, Heidi distinctly heard her mother give a soft grunt. Then Jiaming jumped down too.
"Find a car in that low shed over there and we're safe. Move fast."
Covering the rear with both guns, though no one inside dared come out after them for the moment. In the car shed, Jiaming spotted an Audi 100 with the plate 000035 and recognized it at once as the car of Tang Jingyao, who was already dead upstairs.
In '95, official cars were basically all that model, and for plate numbers within the first hundred, the traffic police did not dare touch a violation.
When he got in, Marilyn had wanted to take the driver's seat, but Jiaming simply yanked out two wires and touched them together and the car started, so she took Heidi to the back seat instead—though with Jiaming's small stature, the way he drove really did look rather funny.
The car howled to life and shot onto the road at a startling speed. Thinking of the night behind them, none of the three spoke: Jiaming had nothing he wanted to talk about, Marilyn's expression was somewhat blank, and Heidi simply sat in her mother's lap watching the side of Jiaming's face ahead.
While driving, he peeled off the disguise on his face and took off the suit, and had more or less returned to the state of an elementary schooler.
Before long they passed the stretch where the sports car had gone over into the ravine; the police had already blocked off half the road, with several cars pulled over for checks and a traffic cop waving them down ahead. Jiaming could not be bothered—he stepped on the gas and shot straight past.
"Did you twist your ankle?"
In the rearview mirror he had seen Marilyn turned sideways, rubbing her ankle. It was the only question he asked in the car. Marilyn nodded. "Mm."
The little car came back into Jianghai City at around ten at night. The main streets were still crowded, but elsewhere things had gone quiet. He stopped on an empty stretch of road, wiped the fingerprints off a few spots, and the three of them got out.
"Let me carry Heidi."
With the suit holding his disguise props in one hand and Marilyn limping along beside him, Jiaming took the sleepy-eyed little girl from her. A moment later the girl was asleep on his back, dead to the world, while Marilyn, with nothing but stockings on her feet now, followed alongside at a slow pace.
The streetlamps were a dim yellow, the night wind stirred ripples through the quiet street, and the three of them looked for all the world like a family of three...
By the time they were back in the second-floor room in that residential compound it was eleven at night. He laid the sleeping Heidi down in the small side bedroom, then had Marilyn take off her torn stockings and wash her feet, and treated her ankle, which had swollen up like a steamed bun.
In the bedroom the two of them sat on the edge of the bed. Marilyn braced her hands behind her, her teeth clamped hard on her lower lip, tears filling her eyes, and let Jiaming grip her injured foot and manhandle it roughly with the bottle of medicine.
On purpose. He is definitely doing it on purpose...
After a long while, Marilyn finally spoke. "Do you... still want to yell at me?"
"I already yelled." Jiaming's tone was flat as he kneaded hard at the swollen spot. "Are you still thinking about him?"
Marilyn tipped her head back, and only after a long time did she say quietly, "There's a plant called dodder. It has to lean on a tree to survive. I used to think I was that kind of person—that if I ever left that man, I definitely couldn't go on living...
Only now do I realize that what I wanted was never that man. It was the feeling of being in love. I don't think I hate him for having another wife, and I don't hate him for lying to me.
What I hate... is that I gave so much and got nothing back, and have nothing left to show for it..."
"You still have Heidi," Jiaming said, glancing at her. "So what you mean is, you've forgotten him."
"Yes."
Marilyn lifted her face and smiled—then the pain in her foot twisted her expression, and she shot a glare at the little boy who was so obviously taking his revenge.
"I used to think I loved him so much. For him I read Chinese novels, ate Chinese food, threw myself into everything Chinese—I even learned from the books to stay cooped up at home all day and hardly go out, to be a proper, well-behaved woman. But now I find that once I'd seen him clearly, I could let go so fast. Ten years, and I let go of all of it just like that..."
By the time she finished, tears were streaming down her face, and there was no telling whether it was from grief or from the pain Jiaming was deliberately inflicting. "From now on, I think my only concern will be Heidi. I'll raise her, until she marries, until she... doesn't need me anymore..."
"No way. Find yourself a good man and get married again. How old were you when you had Heidi?"
"When I had Heidi... I remember it perfectly. It was the day after my eighteenth birthday..."
Jiaming rolled his eyes. No wonder her old man had been against the two of them—pregnant at seventeen, a baby at eighteen. If he ever had kids who dared pull that, he'd beat them to death himself. Out loud he said, "Twenty-eight? You're still young. Plenty of men out there. To stay a widow for a Tang Jingyao—big tits and no brains, that woman..."
"But doesn't China put a lot of weight on chastity? A woman who's had a child—nobody wants her... Ah—"
For a moment Jiaming nearly wanted to pinch this woman to death—a devil's figure with the pure heart of a Jiangnan girl. She had wanted to kill herself over Tang Jingyao, and now she could still come out with something like this. Him, comforting somebody—that was rare enough to begin with; why did it have to land on her?
"Give me a break! You're an American! An American who's doing drugs at twelve, in bed at fourteen, pregnant at seventeen and a mother at eighteen! Aren't you people supposed to treat sleeping with somebody like an everyday thing? Don't go wrecking the beautiful image of America I hold in my heart, all right?"
"But... I think that Chinese idea is beautiful..."
"Face reality—the streets of China aren't full of horse carts, and we're not living in a thatched hut!" Jiaming's shoulders slumped, and then he sighed. "You big-titted, brainless woman. Women are for use. As long as they feel good to touch and good to screw, that's enough. Who wants a membrane in the way that you have to work to break through?"
His thoughts had always run wild, but as an assassin he had been bound to keep everything inside—no feelings, no expectations—and after his rebirth he'd had a child's identity to maintain. Now, saying all this in that odd, croaky voice, he felt thoroughly pleased with himself; after all, the woman in front of him had probably gotten used to him thinking like an adult, and she had basically neither the ability nor the motive to threaten his current situation.
Marilyn blushed, and the two of them were silent for a long stretch. Then Jiaming said, "Mm—I've already called your father. Within about a week, someone will come to take you home."
"Mm." Marilyn seemed to be thinking about something, nodding rather absentmindedly. After another while the swelling in her ankle finally began to go down, and Jiaming was just about to let go when he heard Marilyn say, "Gu... Jiaming..."
"Hm?"
"I was thinking..." She lifted her head and smiled. "You're actually an adult, aren't you? I mean, in your head you seem to be."
"My situation is very complicated, but you won't go wrong treating me as an adult like yourself."
"But you look like a little kid..."
"I know everything adults ought to know, and I know the things adults shouldn't know too. Satisfied?"
"Then—suppose... suppose I took off all my clothes in front of you right now. Would you look down on me? Think I'm a slut?"
"Uh?"
Jiaming's mouth fell open. He froze there, and for a long while could not produce a single word.