From inside the tent came a tremendous clamor — the crash of the pail, the splash of water, the bleating of the goat.
Then the tent flap was thrown open and Wei Lai came out, drenched from head to toe, clearly without a moment to dry off. He had pulled on a pair of shorts, and in his hand —
Yes, he had gripped both of the goat’s front legs in one hand, and with a darkened expression was dragging it outside. The goat wore a look of horrified outrage at this assault on its dignity; its two hind legs kicked and scrabbled in the sand, its rear end digging in stubbornly.
— What are you doing, what are you doing, I was only looking, what are you doing.
Cen Jin slowly fanned herself with the excess corner of her silk robe.
“Wei Lai, you’re a foreigner, newly arrived in someone else’s village. That goat is a villager’s property. If you injure or kill it, the villagers could band together and injure you — that would be a diplomatic incident.”
Wei Lai clenched his jaw. For a brief moment, he had genuinely entertained the thought of butchering it.
But simply letting it go felt deeply unsatisfying.
He kept dragging it outside.
Cen Jin’s gaze followed all the way: Wei Lai stopped outside the shack, picked out a thick, sturdy fence post, hauled the goat up to stand on its hind legs, crossed its two front legs over the post, and wound a rope around several times in a tight knot.
The goat stood there with its legs splayed, let out a single baa, its eyes filled with despair — according to Darwin’s theory of evolution, it was not supposed to achieve bipedalism this quickly.
Stand there then!
Wei Lai wiped the water from his face.
Fortunately he’d been nearly done washing. The pail had tipped, but not much water was lost. He went inside, unhooked the towel from the tent frame, and sat down beside Cen Jin, sulkily drying himself off.
She continued to fan herself.
Wei Lai couldn’t hold it in.
“You didn’t see that goat?”
“I didn’t,” Cen Jin said earnestly. “I was thinking about how to answer your question, so… I completely didn’t notice.”
Fine. He knew she wasn’t entirely innocent, but what could he do about it?
Wei Lai let out a breath: “So — back to Somalia. What’s the situation with the pirates?”
Cen Jin looked at him: “Something like that happens, and you just… move on?”
She would have expected at least two words of complaint, two curses — and here he was, completely unbothered, picking up the conversation about pirates as if nothing had happened. What a startlingly easy-going disposition.
Wei Lai said: “What of it? The goat just got a look at me.”
Cen Jin smiled: “Who knows — whatever happened in that tent, only you and the goat are aware of.”
Wei Lai’s teeth itched: “The moment it got in, I drove it out. A matter of seconds. What could possibly have happened?”
Cen Jin turned her head away from him, fanning herself at an unhurried pace, murmuring to herself: “Who knows — a single glance across eternity, the instant that contains infinity — the Big Bang, after all, only took a second or two, and then all things came into being.”
Wei Lai laughed out of pure exasperation.
The words came out through his teeth: “Cen Jin.”
Cen Jin turned back.
He reached out a finger and pointed at her — it didn’t quite land, which was at least some restraint.
He said: “You’re lucky you’re my client.”
The employer-employee relationship, the contract — these still had a binding effect on him.
If it were Milu, provoking him like this, he’d have long since dismembered her and thrown her in a pot for stew.
If it were Ke Ke Shu, he’d have long since chopped her into firewood to cook Milu.
You’re lucky — you can still sit here. If you were actually my girlfriend and you tried this, I wouldn’t waste words on you, I’d just drag you over and —
Cen Jin gave him a sideways glance: “So what if I’m your client?”
She tilted her head slightly, chin lifted, and the graceful line of muscle along one side of her neck led his gaze down to the shallow hollow above her collarbone and the curve of her rounded shoulder.
His throat went dry. When he spoke again, his voice came out low and rough, in urgent need of a basin of cold water poured both inside and out.
So he said: “Tell me about the pirates.”
---
It was time to get back to the pirates.
The glow sticks were nearly spent. The entire fishing village lay in darkness. A breeze carried in the sound of waves and a faintly briny smell.
Cen Jin said: “The pirates are fishermen. Very poor fishermen.”
“Since the civil war, Somalia’s social and education systems have collapsed. Illiteracy is very high — approaching eighty percent. English is not the official language, and sometimes a small pirate crew might not have a single English speaker among them. To negotiate with a shipowner, they’d have to pay to hire someone who spoke English, and then also foot the international phone bill themselves.”
Wei Lai almost laughed: that pirate who had called him, then, had spoken reasonably passable English — so the claim that Hu Sha was the biggest pirate boss in the region did hold up. His ranks of various “personnel” were relatively well-staffed.
“Their resentment had been fermenting for years: first, that the waters their families had fished for generations were now closed to them, and foreign fishing boats drove them away when they tried; second, that the extractive fishing policies had depleted the sea and cut off their livelihood; third, that amid the warlord fighting, with people already dying of starvation, the relief grain sent by the United Nations was still seized by whoever carried a gun…”
Wei Lai fell silent.
He remembered Bai Pao telling him that Hu Sha, in the beginning, had been nothing more than a refugee standing in a food relief line.
“A few years ago, the Indian Ocean tsunami accidentally exposed an ecological disaster: some European nations, exploiting the chaos here, had been shipping their nuclear radiation waste and toxic chemical byproducts to be dumped in these waters.”
“But the tsunami churned that toxic waste up onto the coastline — many of the local residents who went to scavenge through the debris were exposed to radiation. Within a single year, over 300 people had died.”