By Monday the swelling on Shang Zhitao's face still hadn't gone down, and the cut at the corner of her mouth hadn't healed either. Downstairs, she ran into Lumi, who for once had come in early. Lumi pinched her cheek and demanded, "Who the hell hit you?"
Zhitao hissed and pulled away. "Got into it with the rental agency."
"The black agency?" Lumi yanked off her hat. "I swear to god, which one? Tell me! If I don't smash the place I'm not living up to my own name!" She'd gone off like a lit fuse.
"Don't, don't, it's not that serious. We came out fine." Zhitao hadn't expected this reaction and instantly regretted letting the truth slip.
"You call getting your face beaten in fine?" Lumi was ready to explode. She kept ranting the whole way from the elevator to the desks, until Zhitao finally clapped a hand over her mouth. "Grandma, please! Teacher, please! Calm down!"
Zhitao could handle a fistfight without breaking a sweat, but talking Lumi down gave her a headache. And while she was busy trying, Lumi had already lost patience and was on the phone with her boyfriend, a tattooed, dreadlocked biker type. "Listen to me. My girl got beaten up and you're going to find out exactly what happened. Who did it? That black agency by the North Fifth Ring Road, go find out right now! They're bullying people all the way up to Grandma's doorstep. If Grandma doesn't dig up their graves for this, she's lived for nothing!"
The moment Zhitao heard Lumi was about to go start a fight, her legs went weak. "It's over already, we're fine, we called the police, they shut the place down, they even took us to get checked out, we got our money back. Isn't that winning?"
"Over? Nothing's over. You don't know how nasty these black agencies can be. You think moving out is the end of it? They'll come sneak around and jam your locks next. You know the police can't do a thing about their petty little tricks, right? If you don't take them down all at once, it never ends."
"Oh. When we filed the report, the officer said to come find them if anything else happened."
"The officer is the officer. Grandma is Grandma."
Zhitao quietly asked Yao Bei whether Lumi was right about all this, and Yao Bei confirmed it. Winning one fight didn't mean it was over, there'd be plenty of trouble to follow.
"So should we just move farther away?"
"Move where? Unless you all stop living together for good."
"Oh."
That gave Zhitao something to worry about.
On her way to the break room for water, she caught her reflection in the mirror and it looked bad, a little sore too. She was still rubbing her cheek when she ran into Luan Nian, who'd just come out of a management meeting. His brow creased and his eyes landed on her split lip and swollen cheek. "You got hit?"
She could tell he wasn't pleased.
A few coworkers were passing by. Lumi had been shouting about it all morning, so everyone already knew about the black agency, and now that the boss was asking, curiosity flared right back up. People slowed their steps to see how the boss would handle an employee getting bullied.
"I tripped and fell."
Zhitao didn't want Luan Nian to know about the fight with the agency. Somehow she just couldn't bring herself to tell him.
The truth was that starting tomorrow, she'd have nowhere to live. They'd spent two days looking at places without finding anything suitable. In the end, Sun Yu decided to sleep at the office, Sun Yuanzhu would stay with a classmate, and Zhitao told them she had a business trip coming up, so she'd find somewhere to store her luggage and figure things out when she got back.
She figured if worst came to worst, she'd just get a hotel for a while. A place would turn up eventually.
Luan Nian didn't push further. He gave her face one more glance and walked off. It wasn't until he was back in his office that he texted her: What happened?
"I really did trip and fall."
"Trip again right now and show me how you land on your mouth. How are you even that unlucky? Fell face first?"
Zhitao stubbornly refused to explain. Life was full of petty, tangled messes, and she didn't want to go through it all again. It was that afternoon, passing by the break room, that Luan Nian overheard coworkers talking about Zhitao's run in with the black agency.
The company break room really was a strange place. Luan Nian sometimes went there on purpose just to get water, and he always managed to catch a stray comment or two. It wasn't that he wanted to eavesdrop, but a person running a company needed some way to hear the truth now and then, and the break room worked better than anywhere else.
So many stories fermented there before spreading through the whole office.
He pretended to be filling his cup while people talked about Zhitao and the black agency. Since it wasn't gossip about a coworker or the company, no one bothered hiding it from the boss. They greeted him and kept right on talking.
When Luan Nian heard that the black agency had surrounded Zhitao and beaten her, he turned and walked out.
He was furious.
Did Zhitao have no sense at all? Did her roommates have none either? A handful of them going alone to confront a black agency, did they think they were some kind of warriors storming a battlefield seven times over? What the hell were they thinking?
"Get in here!"
"?" Zhitao sent back a question mark. He never called her into his office alone, and today his tone was off. Had the efficiency project's test model failed?
Zhitao stood at his office door, puzzled, and knocked. She heard his impatient reply: "Come in!"
She went in, and then heard him say: "Shut the door."
"Okay."
She closed the door and stood by it. Luan Nian's expression looked like he'd swallowed something foul.
"What's the name of that agency?" he asked her directly.
"Huh?"
"Huh what? What's the company called?"
"It's already settled." Zhitao was baffled how he'd found out. She had no idea he made a habit of listening in at the break room.
"What's it called?" he asked again.
She still wouldn't say it. She didn't want to blow the thing up further. Luan Nian stared at her for a long moment before speaking. "It's the one to the left of your building, isn't it?"
She didn't answer, but her face said it all, and he read it in an instant.
"Get out." Luan Nian had no patience left to talk to her. Once she'd left, he called a friend. "I passed by a place yesterday and noticed the fire safety looked bad. Might be a real hazard, worth checking out."
"Address? I don't have the exact address, I'll take you there myself."
"Who's filing the complaint? Put my name."
Luan Nian put on his coat and left, meeting up with the friend who worked in fire safety enforcement. The friend said, "Hold on, this is out of my jurisdiction, I'll get someone from that district. What made you suddenly think of reporting them?"
"Ground floor commercial unit in a residential complex. I'm worried about fire risk. I walked past yesterday and saw them playing cards, smoking, cooking inside, and I don't even know where they got the gas canister from." Luan Nian remembered the agency well. Not one person in there had looked like a decent person when he'd first dropped Zhitao home and glanced inside.
His friend gave him a look, seeming to catch on, and let out a short laugh. "Well, if someone files a complaint, we have to act on it. But a fire code violation only gets them shut down for a month or two of correction."
"That's enough."
Could a black market agency's accounts be frozen too? Shut them down first, then report them for tax evasion. Deal with it slowly. Luan Nian had patience. He'd genuinely decided to go to war with them. They sat in the car waiting, but instead of the fire team showing up first, Lumi arrived, wrapped in a fur coat, gripping a stick, with a few others trailing behind her.
"Is this the place?" Luan Nian heard Lumi ask the dreadlocked man beside her.
"Yeah. Already checked."
"Knock."
Lumi, who'd grown up in the alleys, played the part so well at the office. Now all that street toughness was on full display.
Luan Nian found himself almost amused watching her, until his friend said beside him, "Who did this black company piss off? If you report them, that crew down there is going to smash the place up."
Luan Nian didn't answer him. He called Zhitao instead. "Get your reckless mentor to go home. If she doesn't, you'll be visiting her in a holding cell tomorrow."
Zhitao's heart dropped. Lumi had suddenly changed clothes that afternoon saying she had errands to run, and this was what she meant by errands. Zhitao called her right away. "Can you come with me to the police station?"
"What for?"
"The officer wants me to give a statement."
"Fine."
Luan Nian watched Lumi tell the man beside her, "I've got to go to the station. No one's here right now anyway, we'll deal with this bunch once there's someone home."
What kind of friends did Zhitao keep? Luan Nian cursed them all as idiots in his head as he watched them leave. The fire inspectors arrived, so did the police, and he made one more call to bring in the agency's manager. "Open the door."
While the fire inspection was underway, Luan Nian tried to go in with them, but his friend held him back. "Not a good idea. What if they retaliate?"
Luan Nian said nothing, but slipped in behind them anyway.
The agency manager found a moment to approach Luan Nian, offered him a cigarette, and smiled in a way that tried too hard to please. "Talk outside for a minute?"
Luan Nian took the cigarette and followed him out. He heard the manager ask, "Are you an owner in this building? I don't think I've seen you before."
Luan Nian smoked and noticed two scratch marks on the manager's hand. "What happened to your hand?"
"Ah, some tenants came in causing trouble a couple days ago, ended up in a bit of a scuffle by accident."
"What tenants?"
"Two guys and two girls. A couple of the brothers here got carried away and ended up hitting one of the girls in the face. The police already lectured us good and hard about it these past few days. And honestly, no matter how tenants act up, we should just take it, right? We're not a black agency, why would we go around hitting people?" The manager launched into a whole sob story. "And the quality of tenants these days, honestly. Late on the electric bill by a little while and they're ready to smash the place. What kind of people do that?"
He sighed again. "Truth is, we've got it rough, stuck between tenants and landlords, can't please either side. We know the fire safety isn't up to code, but that's a company problem, not ours. If this place gets shut down, we're all out of work. If you'd be so kind, could you withdraw the complaint? Anything else, we can work out."
"We're both out here trying to make a living. How about we become friends?"
Luan Nian said nothing, just kept smoking quietly. When the cigarette was done, he took a few steps, dropped the butt in a trash can, then walked back to the manager's side and threw a sharp punch, steady, precise, brutal. The manager reeled, stunned, and pointed at him. "Why are you hitting me?"
Luan Nian still said nothing. He grabbed the man's collar with one hand and swung his other fist into the man's left cheek. The veins on his neck stood out. Whatever polished, refined mask he usually wore had been ripped away, leaving nothing but raw aggression. People rushed in from the sides trying to pull them apart. Two men grabbed at his coat, so he shrugged it off and drove a kick straight into one of them, sending him flying.
Whoever he got hold of, he went for the left cheek, and he didn't care who hit him back, he just kept hitting the left side, as if those men's left cheeks had personally wronged him. After nearly three minutes of silent, vicious fighting, the people inside finally noticed and came running out, shouting, "What are you doing! Stop it!"
Luan Nian threw one more punch at the manager before he finally stopped, then pointed at him. "He threatened me. Said if I reported them again, they'd kill me."
Everyone in this world had their own way of surviving. Black market agencies here in China, Luan Nian in New York, the tactics were all the same wherever you went, who didn't know how to play this game? He was better at it than any of them. Of course the police believed him. His story held together front to back, and no ordinary person would ever go up against a group like that alone.
Luan Nian rolled up his sleeve and showed the police. "I want to file a report. These men are organized criminals, they need to be arrested."
He looked every bit the street thug in that moment, and if it weren't for the fact that his savagery on the office floor was already something close to legendary, no one would have believed this was really him.
Even he didn't quite believe it.
Luan Nian was truly angry. Angry that Zhitao, that idiot, had run into something this serious and hadn't told him, had let herself get hit by strangers instead. Part of him wanted those men dead. Even after he'd finished giving his statement, the anger hadn't cooled. He drove down to the building and called Zhitao. "Come downstairs."
"Okay."
Zhitao checked the time. It was already this late? What had he been doing all afternoon?
She sensed something was off in his tone and dragged her feet getting into his car. Seeing his face dark as thunder, she didn't dare say a word.
"You don't have my number, is that it?"
"Nothing's worth telling me except when it's about sex or work, is that it?"
"You'd rather let someone else beat you up than tell me, is that it?"
"Do you have a brain in your head at all?"
"Is your brain just there for decoration?"
"I'm talking to you. Have you gone mute?"