Chapter 395: The Name on the Wall

The wall clock in the first-floor reception room ran one minute ahead of her phone.

She checked twice: 14:46 on the phone, 14:47 on the clock. The wall clock had no second hand; the two hands ticked down one notch at a time, forcing you to wait on your own.

The reception room was small. A long table, four chairs, a white porcelain tea set on the table. Against the wall stood a row of bookshelves holding a dozen or so bound issues of the firm's newsletter, all deep blue on the spines, lined up neatly from first to last, the final two still stiff. The AC vent blew toward the corner of the table; the edge of the paper underneath kept lifting, never quite rising, never settling.

She chose the chair toward the back. Sitting there, her gaze only reached the tabletop and halfway up the glass door. The wall outside was behind and to one side of her. Not a single character of those names could slip into her line of sight.

The notebook lay open on her lap, turned to that page. All three lines were still blank: 1. Why my father confessed. 2. Who that night was. 3. What you want. The fourth question she kept in her head; she didn't write it down. A pen rested along the page edge, cap off. Her phone sat on the table, an arm's length away, screen up, fully charged, ringtone and vibration both off.

At first she'd placed it at the table corner near the door, tried it, then moved it back—set at that corner, the first thing the recording would pick up would be footsteps in the hallway.

She ran the order through her mind again. The order couldn't be reversed. Reversed, the person across from her would open by asking what she wanted, and everything after would carry a price.

At 14:52 she counted one round of her breathing. At 14:57 she flipped the notebook over to look at the blank back page, then flipped it back. Someone walked past outside; leather heels rapped the marble three or four times, paused, faded. From upstairs came the scrape of a chair leg against the floor—once, then nothing.

At exactly 15:00, a figure stopped outside the glass door. The door was pushed open. No knock.

"Traffic held me up. Sorry to keep you waiting." Han Chongli came in, glanced first at the table, then lifted his eyes to her.

"Not long," she said.

The door swung shut behind him. He approached in two unhurried steps. Dark shirt, no tie, cuffs buttoned; one hand nudged his watch up his wrist. He sat across from her, first drawing the tea set over. He set out two cups, poured both, and pushed the second half an inch toward her.

"Have some."

"Thank you." She didn't pick it up.

She turned the notebook slightly inward, the three lines facing herself.

He blew on his own cup, took a sip, and set it back on the saucer with a sound louder than a person's voice. There were age spots on the back of his hands, his knuckles thick, but not a tremor when he poured.

She nudged the phone forward a bit and pressed down. A red dot appeared on the screen; the first two seconds stayed empty—no voices.

"I'm recording."

He raised his eyelids a fraction and answered over his cup: "Record away. What I say today, you can play for anyone whenever you like."

He didn't look at the phone when he said it. He looked at her.

"Does that thing pick up clearly."

"Clearly."

He moved the tea tray aside a little, the phone facing him, not the wall. After that, both hands returned to the table. The two fingers of his right hand tapped the table edge three times and stopped.

"You brought paper."

"I don't want to misremember."

"Go ahead and write. I won't read what you write."

The pen resting along the page edge—she never picked it up.

"Lawyer Shen." He began with her title. "Does Director He know you came today?"

"You asked to meet me."

"Hm." His reply was soft, as if he'd been waiting for exactly that, and he leaned half an inch back in his chair. "He Xiufen has a sharp eye. She kept you on because she knows how to read people. In her whole life she never took on a ten-million case, but she's never made a single person leave empty-handed."

She didn't answer. The AC stirred faint ripples across the surface of the tea in her cup.

"The Qingshi Village matter closed in April." He switched topics with the ease of discussing weather. "I read the judgment. I read your remediation plan too. You wrote more than you needed to."

"That case has already taken effect."

"It has." He nodded. "I had them pay on schedule, every cent. If anyone drags their feet on enforcement, come back to me—I won't make you run in circles."

"No need," she said. "The court has an enforcement bureau."

"It does." He smiled, not unkindly. "You young people trust in these things. That's good."

She lifted her cup but didn't drink, just wrapped her hands around it; warmth seeped through the porcelain, then dissipated where she sat. He closed that section quickly, like setting an item back in its place on the table.

"When you came in, you passed under that wall," he said.

"I did."

"That year your father came once too. Stood under that same wall."

Her finger, pressed against the edge of the notebook, curled inward, creasing the page. The pen on her lap rolled half an inch, touched her fingernail, stopped.

He didn't wait for her; he just kept talking. Slowly, each sentence landing on someone else: how the front desk asked, how he answered, how the desk said they'd announce him, how he waved it off, how they told him to sit on the lobby sofa and wait a while, and how he said no need—he'd just stand there. All other people's movements, other people's words. About himself, from beginning to end, only a single "I."

"The old comrade on lobby duty that day has retired now. She mentioned it to me later—said the man stood there for over twenty minutes and never once pushed." Han Chongli placed both hands flat on the table. "It was hot that day. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, empty-handed, standing very straight. I went down to receive him. He wouldn't come up, wouldn't even come into this room. He stood under that wall, head tilted back, looking for his own name. Looked for a long time."

"A man searching for his own name that long," he said, "means he knew exactly which row that name belonged in."

She lifted her gaze, letting it settle on the wood grain of the table.

At 14:40 she'd entered the lobby and done the same: from the bottom row up, counting one by one, until the second name from the right in the third row from the bottom rose out of the brass sea. A spot on the plaque had been wiped, brighter than the rest, the smudge marks uneven.

He stood and walked to the glass door, one hand behind his back, face turned toward the far end of the hallway.

"He said two things to me." Through the glass, his voice lowered a fraction, somehow clearer. "He asked, is the plaque still up? I said, it is. He asked, until what day. I said, until the day it should come down. Just those two sentences. When he finished he turned and left. Didn't drink a sip of water. I stood at the door and watched him go down the steps. On the last step he turned and looked back."

"He called me Director Han." He added: "By then nobody called me that anymore. He still did."

She released her grip on the notebook edge and pressed the crease flat again. It wouldn't press flat—a white line remained.

"That old comrade on lobby duty—can she still be found?"

"I don't even remember her surname." The answer came fast. "Retired is retired. People like that aren't easy to find."

"Which department did she retire from?"

"Lawyer Shen." He turned back and walked to the table, sat down. "I have a rough idea why you're asking. But I can't give you a second person's name from this building."

Someone came down the hallway—a suit, phone glued to his ear—stopped at the glass door, waved inside while still talking, looking like a greeting or just a hand switching sides. That half of the glass door was blocked for a moment; the wall disappeared from view. Only then did she realize she'd been searching for that wall the whole time in the faint reflection on the glass.

"He had something on him," Han Chongli said once settled.

"What something."

"He didn't show me. He said if that thing came out, he could walk out of the courthouse."

"He didn't say which thing."

"He didn't. I didn't ask." His own cup was empty. "Ask, and he'd stop talking. Your father—you know him better than I do. What he wanted to give, you never had to reach for."

"Did he ever bring it out?"

"Had he brought it out," Han Chongli said, "you wouldn't be sitting here today."

"Then why did he keep it."

"I never once saw what your father had. He said that one line in front of me, and I've remembered it to this day. Don't ask me about what I've never seen."

She caught the measure in that phrasing: what he had seen, he wouldn't confirm; only what he hadn't seen could be discussed. In the entire account, he never once said the name "Shen Qian"—always "your father."

What the recording held so far could prove only one thing: that he'd said these words today. As for who went into that room in the village committee office that night, there wasn't a word of it here.

The tea in her cup no longer steamed. She remembered the three-step stoop in April; remembered reading those two pages aloud under the lamp that night, pausing at the line about sample delivery. She had those pages memorized. That line was pressed heavier than the rest.

"The tea's gone cold." Han Chongli picked up the kettle and topped off his own cup, the spout tilting back. "Pour you a fresh one?"

"No need."

He didn't drink from his cup. He turned his head to glance at the wall clock and said, "Still early."

She looked at the two hands too: 15:20. The clock ran fast, so it must be 15:19 on her phone.

"But if he had brought it out," he said, voice unchanged, "the intern who signed the sample delivery form would have had to stand in the defendant's seat for that night."

She swallowed; her throat was dry. The notebook still lay open on her lap to those three lines, not a word added, the pen still on the page edge, cap off.

"If he didn't bring it out, then that person never had to stand there."

"You can count it that way too." His reply was flat, not the least bit surprised. "The ledger's in your hands. Count it however you like. I'm only returning to you the two sentences he said under that wall."

"Which night was it," she said. "You say it so smoothly."

"You listened smoothly too." He answered, "Two boxes of samples sat one night in the village committee office in March. Who moved them the next morning, who signed the form—you have the paper in your hands. There's a name on the paper. You've read it aloud."

She didn't answer.

Han Chongli didn't push either. The sentence he was waiting for and the sentence she was waiting for were clearly not the same one.

"Who signed the sample delivery form—you already know."

The phone screen turned back toward her. The red dot was still running, the seconds climbing one notch at a time, unbroken. The wall beyond the glass door lay behind and to one side of her, across a stretch of hallway, past a pane of glass, where the bronze plaque caught the light in a thin film.

She did not look back.