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The first letter Benjamin gets from Luo Fei cheers him up as he refamiliarizes himself with Germany, taking in the half-decade of changes. The university has nearly doubled since he’d seen it last, though thankfully he’s able to stay at the same lodging house he had when he’d studied here before. There are enough overseas students attending the conference series that he thinks he’ll know the best hole-in-the-wall restaurants for nearly every cuisine in the world by the time it’s over.
The second letter makes his reply to the first entirely useless, as it opens up with the news that Luo Fei has turned down an offered promotion to detective and has in fact quit the police force entirely.
Well, Benjamin thinks half-exasperatedly, at least he doesn't need to worry about his advice not going over well. Luo Fei’s already done the opposite. Truth be told, it’s a bit of a relief — suggesting that Luo Fei pretend to overlook the corruption in the department even if he couldn't let it go hadn’t sat well with Benjamin. Considering how many late nights after that case he’d spent sitting up with a brooding Luo Fei instead of sleeping, Benjamin is perfectly aware of the magnitude of this lie and of how convincingly Luo Fei would pull it off.
He'd still thought it prudent to try since this was Luo Fei's livelihood on the line, and while there were other options out there for supporting himself, Luo Fei had put five brilliant years of hard work into this one. Was he sure the way he wanted to respond was by removing himself from the picture?
Besides, Superintendent Ouyang was getting on in years, and the rumors around the station were that he might not stay in that position for long. Whether it was because higher-ups were unhappy with the deal he'd almost certainly cut with the serial suffocator or simply because he was looking to retire peacefully and wash his hands of everything, either way the police station was most likely going to be seeing new leadership soon. If Luo Fei could hold out until then…
But Benjamin can't really blame him for quitting. That last case had done a number on both of them, and was in fact most of the reason he'd immediately agreed to come to Germany for this round of medical conferences. It was true that developments in forensic pathology were helping break more cases open, and that brushing up on new techniques would undoubtedly help him provide more valuable information to his colleagues.
It was also true that the timing turned the learning opportunity into a longed-for reprieve from the sharp tensions within the department itself, and Benjamin had boarded the ship glad to temporarily leave those concerns behind. He certainly hadn’t approved of Superintendent Ouyang’s actions, but he’s also uncomfortably aware that his particular skillset doesn’t exactly lend itself to other jobs, so in a way the choice wasn’t much a choice at all. He’d chosen to go into this for some measure of job security, after all, and it seemed wasteful to throw all his training away.
It had been harder on Luo Fei, grappling with the reality of evidently not being fast enough or good enough or smart enough, and of Ouyang not having faith and going behind their backs in a perversion of justice to shut the case down.
Even worse, wondering if Ouyang would have done the same thing with Captain had Luo Fei been a little slower at connecting the dots. Benjamin had been there the moment that thought had occurred to Luo Fei, hadn't known what had suddenly made Luo Fei choke on his dinner before forcing it down, coughing through his nose, eyes watering and looking like he was about to be sick. Benjamin suspects he had been sick after, standing quickly and excusing himself to the restroom and returning a few minutes later looking pale.
Something haunted had entered his gaze then, and seeing it had felt like a handful of ice had been slipped down the back of Benjamin's shirt. The last time he'd seen that pinched expression of anguish on Luo Fei's face had been during the Captain case itself, after Luo Fei's sister...
He'd taken one look at the wan shock on Luo Fei's face and flagged a waiter down, taking Luo Fei home and letting him haltingly share the horrors he'd been turning around in his head. What was there to have stopped Ouyang from making a similar deal with Captain? It was impossible not to realize that it arguably would have been easier and more lucrative to cut a deal with Captain that to invest that much manpower and time into taking him down.
If anyone involved had been inclined to shove the Captain case under the rug, they would have easily been able to do so. It may have been the speed at which the case had come together at the end that had been the true deciding factor in his takedown. Of course at some point what-ifs had to stop being entertained, but it was nearly impossible to just move on from the revelation. After all, what was there to stop Ouyang from doing it again?
Enough. Benjamin shakes his head. He’d come to Germany in part to avoid ruminating uselessly about the situation, and he has to finish copying over these notes before dinner. He can hear some of the other men on his floor talking in the common area, so he doesn’t have much time left.
Before he goes, he thinks a little wistfully that Luo Fei would’ve liked this group of people, especially their self-appointed leader, who seemed to think they collectively needed direction. Well, Luo Fei would’ve liked poking holes in the man’s haughty attitude, if nothing else. He’ll have to remember to mention it in his next letter.
ㅎㅎㅎ
Unemployment, Luo Fei reflects, staring into his glass, is dreadfully tedious. He’s sitting in a bar far too early in the afternoon, not because he wants to get drunk but because he has nothing else to do . He’s been eyeing the various other customers and idly trying to figure out how their conversations are going. The one couple over by the windows, clearly on an odd first date of sorts, judging by their introductions at the beginning, are painfully stilted with each other. Who had suggested meeting here of all places anyway?
Swirling his drink around, Luo Fei raises an eyebrow and wonders what he’s going to do with the rest of his life. He can’t keep sitting around in bookstores and dance halls, keeping odd hours and wandering the streets of Shanghai in between odd jobs for friends here and there. He’d helped his downstairs neighbor overhaul their account books just to have something to do with his time, though they had insisted on giving him proper compensation. (It helped that he’d discovered their oldest employee embezzling nearly a fourth of their revenue, of course.)
Well. At any rate, there’s only so much longer he can stand this kind of nebulous lifestyle, he thinks with a measure of cheerful fatalism. If it had been a bad day his mood would have been considerably blacker, but he’s been swinging back and forth all month and he’s more or less in an optimistic mood. He’s still young, he’s got brains, so it stands to reason he’ll find something to fill his time with. Of course he will.
Instead of pondering his life choices and wondering for the umpteenth time if he shouldn’t have quit the police force, he goes back to eavesdropping on the group of women seated close by.
”Isn’t it just such an awful pity? Really, I don’t know what I would do in your situation. Have they figured out who did it yet?”
That from a lady who had just entered and joined the group. Everyone who had joined after the first two ladies who had claimed the table had said something along those lines, alluding to some dreadful misfortune but not wanting to outright say what had happened. Luo Fei’s been listening to enough of their comments that he thinks he’s pieced most of the story together.
“Excuse me,” he says, turning in his seat. “I couldn’t help but hear — you have a problem you need to get to the bottom of?”
The woman at the center of both the gossip and the group of ladies lowers her handkerchief, blinking. “And what of it?” she asks directly, quick eyes flitting over him from top to toe and sizing him up immediately. He’s glad he bothered to wear his good shoes today. This woman is shrewd and has no room for flattery from a stranger just now.
He smiles winningly, tones it down a notch when her eyebrows twitch to skeptical, and lands on a mixture of genuine sincerity and well-earned confidence.
“Well, I’d like to talk to you first, of course, to understand more about the situation, but —”
He’s cut off by a laugh — she’s laughing at him, polite but still very amused.
“I’m flattered, young man, but that won’t work on me. I have bigger issues right now, not to mention I’m recently widowed.”
Luo Fei blinks, momentarily thrown as the other women titter and one adds, “Over a year isn’t exactly recent, jie.”
Not interested — “Wait,” he says stupidly, “wait, I meant the murder, isn’t that what — don’t you have a murder that needs to be solved?” He could’ve sworn that’s what they’d been talking around, trying not to come out and say it openly. But between comments about the authorities and the news damaging her reputation and one hushed whisper of ‘the body’, he’d thought it plain what the trouble was.
She looks at him appraisingly, ignoring the shocked gasps of her friends. “Perhaps. What’s it to you if I do?”
Thus begins his acquaintance with Wang Susu, former dancer and current landlord of the Sullivan Apartments. She does indeed have a murder she needs solved, an unfortunate case where one of her tenants was found dead in his bed with a dent in his head.
Judicious inquiry into her gossip network informs him that the man had been telling everyone he was a widower and bringing his girlfriend around. This understandably made it awkward when his wife came to Shanghai looking for him. Susu tells him she’d planned to tell him he needs to move out, because that kind of repeated drama was bad for business. Before she could, however, he’d been found dead by his wife and her parents. who’d come to browbeat him into repaying his debts.
It takes him the better part of two weeks to figure out what happened, mostly because he needs to keep tracking the wife down to get her statements. She keeps changing hotels but swears she’s not doing it to avoid his questioning. Either way, he manages to finally piece together that the girlfriend had come over one day when the couple was in the middle of a spectacular fight. There had been a three-way altercation, the evidence of which was plain on all of their faces —bruises and scratches and an ugly black eye on the wife’s part.
In the middle of it, the girlfriend had ended up shoving him against a standing wardrobe, trying to get away. Far from knocking the man out, it had just made him furious. The wife had fled, and her story afterwards had consistently been that when she had left, the other two had been alive and, if not well, at least still able to shout at one another. Luo Fei doesn’t tell her that the killing blow had actually shattered the man’s skull until the end of his investigation.
The girlfriend’s story lines up, and she admits to pushing the man. It still wouldn’t have been enough to do the kind of damage the police department’s backup coroner had found, and it stumps Luo Fei until he visits her one morning for further questions and happens to see his brother, who lives with her. He’s tall, strong enough to have dealt the blow, equipped with a grudge, and is left-handed as the attacker likely must have been.
He crumbles in the first five minutes of questioning. Luo Fei counts this as an unqualified success, and goes to tell Susu that her case has been solved. She’s very pleased, as it reduces the cloud of doubt and mistrust around her and her apartments. To show her gratitude, she offers him a flat on the first floor, for significantly cheaper than he’s paying currently.
Luo Fei accepts gladly, knowing it’s a win-win situation. Susu needs a tenant in order to help rehabilitate the reputation of her apartments. He could certainly benefit from cheaper rent, considering he doesn’t have a steady job right now. It’s a good arrangement.
He tells Benjamin everything about it, adding the letter to a carefully-packed parcel to be sent overseas. He hopes it'll arrive intact; he's done his best, but there's no accounting for shipping. On second thought, he takes the letter out and posts it separately, just in case something happens to the bulky package.
In the meantime, one of Susu's well-off friends has had a valuable painting vanish, and after hearing about how he cleared up the murder, Mrs. Ma wants him on the case. Luo Fei hadn't thought he'd be getting himself a steady stream of investigative work by listening in on that gossipy conversation, but he certainly has no complaints about how things have worked out.
ㅎㅎㅎ
Benjamin accepts the package addressed to him, slightly bemused. What sort of care package has Luo Fei sent him that it's got FRAGILE: HANDLE WITH CARE stamped on every side?
He finds out when he opens it and discovers a short stack of records, each one painstakingly wrapped and cushioned to keep from breaking. Some of them have labels on them; reading them, he recognizes names of some Shanghai singers and music groups. There's even one from the Shanghai French Concession's Municipal Orchestra.
One of them is unlabeled, so he pulls the note out from where it's tucked into the wrapping, eyes stinging. He'd mentioned off-handedly in one of his last letters that he was getting sick of hearing only German day in and day out, so much so that he and the only other person from Shanghai at the university now (a bespectacled man studying psychology) had taken to eating lunch together once a week even though they weren't exactly friends and had nothing in common except a shared language.
Luo Fei had done the best he could, sending a little slice of the world he's left temporarily. The note informs Benjamin that the unlabeled one contains recordings of him, talking a little and reading short stories from one of the local authors they both like. It's such a welcome surprise that Benjamin immediately goes to the common area to borrow the record-player and start playing Luo Fei's message.
It's so good to hear Luo Fei's voice again. Tension Benjamin hasn't even realized had settled into him drains away and, as he settles in to listen to Luo Fei's narration of (and side comments on) the first story, he thinks gladly that this will tide him over until he can get home. He can't wait.