Chapter 423: The One Who Saw

When she took the paper out of her bag, Pang Chunlai first carried his tea mug away from the table.

It was from the stack beside the printer at the firm. The top sheet had a printed header: time, place, interviewer, persons present, person interviewed. She smoothed the paper flat and turned it around so the header faced him.

"I'll fill in these first. Today's date, where we are, my name, where Director He is sitting, your name."

"You fill it in." He set the mug on the windowsill, turned back, and sat down, both hands resting on his knees.

She filled it in stroke by stroke: July 1, starting 10:20 a.m.; Baixi Village Committee building, third house along the back wall; interviewer Shen Zhixia, lawyer at Jiangzhou Zhengping Law Firm; person present He Xiufen; person interviewed, Pang Chunlai.

"It says 'lawyer' here." He leaned toward the paper.

"I am a lawyer."

"Your father, that year, he wrote the same thing."

"The same thing." she said.

He nodded once and asked nothing more.

"I'll write down what you say." She uncapped the pen. "Whatever you say, I write. What you didn't say, I don't add."

"If you added something, would anyone be able to tell?"

"If I added anything, then this paper would no longer be your words." she said. "When I finish, I'll read it back to you. If anything's wrong, you tell me, and I'll fix it."

He Xiufen moved a small stool closer to the door and sat down, hands folded on her knees.

"A few short ones first." She set the pen nib down. "Name."

"Pang Chunlai."

"Where do you live."

"Right here. Third house."

"What did you do before."

"I watched the pumps. Haven't in a long time."

"About that night. Tell it from the beginning." She looked up. "Go slow. I'll write stroke by stroke."

He did not speak fast, and she wrote even slower. After each sentence he stopped and waited for her pen. On the second line, she looked up to confirm a word with him. He said it again, and she crossed it out and wrote it over.

Q: What did you get up to do that night?

A: Reset the breaker. The pump cuts out once in the night, then starts again.

Q: What did you see?

A: A vehicle parked at the back gate. Headlights facing the gate. Lights off.

Q: How many people, doing what?

A: Two people. Offloading barrels from the vehicle.

He raised his hand and tapped lightly at the line she had just written.

"Carried."

"The same kind of thing."

"Not the same." he said. "Offloading is for boxes. They held them like this, stacked in their arms, afraid of knocking them." As he said this, both arms pulled in toward his chest, then dropped after half a moment.

"Then I'll write 'carried.'" She crossed out the word and wrote the new one beside it, the pen nib pausing on the paper. "Anything that's changed has to be fingerprinted. Press here."

The ink pad was the little round one from the firm, so nearly dry it had gone red. She first tested it on a scrap of paper, and the print came out with a piece missing at the edge. He pressed his thumb down, lifted it, then pressed it to the paper and held it, twice.

There were cracks in the pad of his thumb. The red ink sank into them, and the loops of his fingerprint showed through the red as white lines.

Q: How long?

A: About twenty minutes. I stood by the wall until my legs went numb.

Q: Any sounds?

A: Tearing tape. Long tears.

At this, her pen paused. The sentence from the stone steps on April 18 ran through her mind once more—the tape on one box opening, not the same strip as the night before. She moved the pen forward and added nothing. This paper held Pang Chunlai's words, not hers.

At the top of the second page, she set the pen down.

"Sir, there's one more thing." She took her phone from her bag and laid it on the table, screen up. "I'll record. You talk, I record it, and it gets submitted together with this paper."

He looked at the screen.

"Once recorded, can you change it?"

"If you want to change something on the paper, I'll change it for you." she said. "What's recorded can't be changed. If you don't want it, I'll put it away, and the paper still counts."

"Record it." he said. "If it's recorded, then I won't change anything."

She pressed the red dot and pushed the phone a little toward the middle of the table. "Keep going."

Q: Did you go look the next morning?

A: Water rings all over the ground. Two cardboard boxes gone from the base of the wall. Two tire tracks on the slope, tires still wet. Then it rained, and they were gone.

Q: Who came the day after?

A: Lawyer Shen. He'd come twice before. I didn't say much to him.

Q: What did he ask you, later, that one question?

A: (pauses for a moment) He asked me, Old Pang, do you have a piece of paper with a name written on it.

Q: How did you answer?

A: I said no. He said, then what about that blank one. I said I didn't dare.

Q: What did he do?

A: He took out a notebook and wrote. Wrote one line, looked up at me. I waved my hand. He crossed it out.

She stopped writing. "Crossed it out?"

"Crossed it out." He made a slashing motion in the air. "Scratched it hard. The ink went through the paper."

Q: Why didn't you dare back then?

A: That year, my son had been in the plant for three months.

Q: Why are you willing to talk today?

This one he did not answer right away. The room was quiet. Someone shouted something outside beyond the back wall, and the sound passed.

"He's dead." he said. "I'm still alive."

She finished writing and set the pen down. Three pages were full, with two lines still blank at the bottom of the last page. She read from the beginning.

She read slowly, sentence by sentence. When she reached "two people carrying barrels down from the vehicle," she put a little more weight on the word "carrying." When she reached "I said I didn't dare," she paused, then continued. He Xiufen moved her stool half a foot closer.

Three pages read through. There was no other sound in the room, only the plastic sheeting over the window billowing up with the wind, falling, billowing up again.

"Same." he said.

At the bottom of each page she wrote the line: The above record has been read back to me and matches what I said. When finished, she handed him the pen. "Sign here. Just sign your name."

He took the pen, gripping it close to the nib, and wrote extremely slowly. The "Pang" came out crooked. He stopped at the last stroke, then went on to write "Chunlai." Three pages, three signatures.

"Thumbprint under your name, one per page." She pushed the ink pad over.

After the third print, he rubbed his thumb twice on his pant leg. It wouldn't come clean. A little red was left at the knee of his blue cloth trousers.

"I'll take this paper with me." She squared the three pages. "If you want to keep a copy at home, I'll photocopy it when I get back to the city and mail it up."

"No need." He wiped his hand on his knee. "You take it."

"Keeping it in the house would only be a piece of paper."

"A piece of paper in my house means people would come into my house." he said. "You take it."

She did not press further. She slipped the three pages into the hard-shell folder in her bag, closed it, and fastened the clasp.

When she stopped the recording, the screen showed forty-two minutes.

At noon, He Xiufen lit the stove and boiled the dried noodles. The other two talked in the room. He Xiufen laughed once, and he answered in a low voice. She carried a small stool to the threshold, sat with her back to the room, and opened her notebook.

The page for April 24. At the top, one line: "That night, someone saw." Below it, the sentence she had copied, the one about the tape on the box opening. Below that, one blank line.

She set her pen nib on that line and wrote: Pang Chunlai saw.

When she finished, the pen hovered over the paper, then she drew it back. No need to write the date; the date was above. The half-sentence she wanted to add, she did not add.

The noodles went into three bowls. His was small, with an old chip in the rim. He ate very slowly, and halfway through set down his chopsticks. "Next time, don't bring dried noodles."

"I will." said He Xiufen.

At one o'clock, they got up to leave. He walked them to the gate and stood by the stone stool, one hand on the doorframe, watching them circle around the village committee's two-story building. As they turned the corner, He Xiufen looked back and waved. He did not move.

The tricycle went down the mountain. The 4:30 bus from town, into the city at 7:00 p.m. at Chengxi Bus Station, home at 7:20.

Zhi'an was doing homework on the floor over the bamboo mat. He looked up at the paper envelope under her arm. "Sis, what's that?"

"A witness's words."

"About Dad?"

"About Dad."

He held his pen and thought for a moment. "Then for him to be willing to talk—it wasn't easy, was it."

She slid the envelope under the bed, and when she stood up, her knee cracked. "It wasn't easy."

The three original pages went into the envelope, the flap folded twice, pressed down. The recording on her phone went onto the computer and was burned onto two discs. On each disc face she wrote in marker: July 1, Pang Chunlai, interview recording. When she finished, she capped the marker, put one disc back in the envelope, and put the other in her bag, to bring to the Intermediate Court tomorrow.

The next day at 9:40, she took Chai Guizhi's call at the firm. The old woman's voice came close to the receiver.

"Little Shen, her dad called home. The money arrived. Fourteen thousand."

"Auntie Chai, have him screenshot the deposit alert on his phone and send it over."

"Sent, sent. He sent it to me, and I'll send it to you."

She hung up, opened that case file, saved the screenshot, and filled in the date in the receipt column.

[Thud. Ge Xiaoyu's matter—the money has arrived. Entry fully recorded.]

[Thud. On the last page of the Unsettled Ledger, one more line.]

[Thud. The one who saw—now has a name.]

The three lines passed quickly, but she lingered on the last one a moment longer. No one on the second floor was talking. Downstairs someone was shouting about a bowl of noodles to go.

At 12:50, the Application for Investigation and Evidence Collection was finished—one page. It requested the court to question and verify with witness Pang Chunlai the facts involved in the July 1 interview; the witness's address, physical condition, and means of getting there and back were all written out; at the end, one more line: Please forward to Judge Zhuo of the Trial Supervision Division. The three pages of the record were photocopied and clipped together with the disc and the application into a set.

At 2:00 p.m., Jiangzhou Intermediate Court Litigation Service Center. At the petition window, it was still the same woman.

"Which case?"

"The Shen Qian petition. Supplementary materials." She passed the three items in. "Three pages of photocopied record, one audio disc, one page of evidence-investigation application."

"What about the originals?"

"The original record is with me. If the court needs to see it or retrieve it, I'll bring it over at any time."

The woman counted the items, wrote on the receipt slip, and looked up. "Sign here."

She signed and watched her tear off the slip and pass it through the window.

"Forward it to the Trial Supervision Division."

The receipt slip was thin, much lighter than the three pages of the record. She stood on the steps outside the Intermediate Court's main gate, folded it twice, and tucked it into the paper envelope.

The sun bleached the steps white, and the wind came down from the top of the steps. She thought of the last of those three lines from the morning—the one who saw, now has a name. Not one word of that line had been written on paper. What was written on paper was the name Pang Chunlai, written by his own hand, stroke by stroke, crooked, sealed with three thumbprints.

She shifted the envelope tighter under her arm and walked toward the bus stop.