Chapter Five: The Casino in Myanmar (1)
Through the glass, Nan Bei could see another cruise ship out on the sea, following at a neither-near-nor-far distance.
As she ate breakfast, she secretly marveled at how cautious the Zhousheng family was. Even when taking a cruise out to sea, they had to prepare two ships.
There were several people beside her, men and women, who had been talking the entire time.
“These past few days, the various transactions have almost caught up to the total of the past five years,” a young man said, taking a sip of his drink. “No wonder everyone’s trying their damnedest to get in. With the three major families holding down this cruise ship, everything that’s usually hidden and concealed has been put right on the price list. Mineral deposits and parcels of land are being sold like cabbages at the market. If there’s some cop working undercover, they could wipe out this whole bunch of troublemakers in one fell swoop.”
Nan Bei was delighted to hear this.
With how much he hated evil and upheld justice, he really ought to become a volunteer with Médecins Sans Frontières. Joining the underworld was truly a waste of his talents.
“Do you know which people were the last to enter the game?” the young man suddenly asked.
The man at the head of the group had only three fingers left on his right hand, yet he still deftly used a knife to cut off a piece of beef. “Everyone knows which families they are. That night, when they were watching the old opera, whoever was in the private room sealed off on the third floor was one of the last to enter the game.”
“Why is it that whenever something good comes along, it can only be divided up among those few surnames?”
The man at the head laughed. “Because they have the capital. The wealth held by these four surnames absolutely cannot be measured in money, and the scope of the power they possess cannot be measured on a map either. You’ll understand gradually.”
The man suddenly fell silent.
Nan Bei sensed something strange and turned around to look.
In her line of sight, Shen Jiaming was coming around from behind several women in bikinis and walking into the restaurant. He swept his eyes over the surroundings, and when he saw Nan Bei in the farthest corner, he walked straight over and sat down right beside her.
“Why did you suddenly hang up last night?”
“I was so sleepy at the time. I hung up without really knowing what I was doing,” she said casually. “You know, whenever I catch a cold, I like to sleep.”
Shen Jiaming laughed. “I know. I know every single one of your ailments.”
She smiled and took a sip of milk.
Then, as though she had suddenly remembered something, she looked at him. “Shen Jiaming, are you particularly prone to, um... sleeping with women?”
Shen Jiaming froze. He genuinely froze.
“I suppose I’m all right. What are you trying to prove?” Shen Jiaming took out a cigarette. “That I don’t like you anymore?”
“No.” She thought for a moment. “I’m just curious. Take my brother, for example. He doesn’t want anyone to become his weak point, so he’s never had any serious woman. What about you?”
“Me?” Shen Jiaming thought about it. “Neither particularly easy nor particularly difficult. The key is whether I have the need for it at the time.”
Nan Bei raised an eyebrow slightly. “As expected, people really are different.”
Shen Jiaming looked at her. “But there is one woman whom I have no need for at all, yet I can’t bear to watch her suffer.”
“All right, I get it.” Nan Bei could not be bothered to humor him. “Other than my brother, you’re the best to me. Really. You’ve treated me so well that if I could do it all over again, I definitely wouldn’t have impulsively told you that we should break up. But Shen Jiaming, look at how long we’ve been apart. Stop pretending to be some lovesick saint.”
The two looked at each other and could not help laughing.
The feelings they had back then had been the most innocent and unworldly.
When she had first arrived at the Shen family’s home, she missed her brother and cried night after night. Shen Jiaming, helplessly, could only sleep beside her every night. Two ten-year-old children, holding hands as they slept. It had been truly beautiful.
Later, it had begun just as inexplicably. He had suddenly asked her, “Beibei, shall we kiss?”
At the time, she had no idea what she was thinking. She felt that it was something she could accept, so they kissed. They really had been so innocent. When the two of them kissed, even the hand Shen Jiaming had wrapped around her arm would tremble slightly.
Leaning back in the rattan chair, Nan Bei thought of some things from the past and felt only a lingering warmth.
She was wearing a white shirt with a somewhat wide collar, faintly revealing several dark-red marks. Shen Jiaming had been smiling, but when he caught sight of those ambiguous marks, he suddenly gave a soft cough.
Nan Bei looked at him in confusion.
“The question you just asked me, was it because of Cheng Muyang?”
She nodded.
“Beibei?”
She looked at him in confusion again.
“You know that even though Mexico and the United States share only 3,200 kilometers of border, it takes six major gangs to jointly manage it. Yet Russia, as a single country, shares more than 7,000 kilometers of border with China, and there’s only one Cheng family. They’re definitely not simple. What’s even less simple is that the entire north falls within their sphere of influence. There’s absolutely nothing we can do to intervene.”
Shen Jiaming usually joked and laughed around her, so she never felt any sense of intimidation from him. But now that he was speaking seriously for once, it truly made her unable to help but take him seriously.
“If one day you really go to Moscow with Cheng Muyang and something happens, neither your brother nor I will have time to do anything. So think carefully. Is he really the best choice for you?”
Nan Bei was somewhat surprised. She did not know why he had suddenly said this.
Shen Jiaming reached out and pulled the collar of her shirt higher. “If you’re going to steal a taste outside, remember to wipe your mouth.”
Only then did she understand what he meant. She also fastened one more button on her shirt and joked with him easily, “See? You’re jealous. Whenever you get jealous, you start preaching.”
Shen Jiaming hesitated, wanting to say something but stopping himself. But seeing that she had ended the conversation with a joke, he knew that no matter what he said, he would not be able to get anything more out of her, so he simply remained silent.
Nan Bei patted his arm. “Come with me to take a look at the casino.”
This cruise ship was privately owned by the Zhou family, and its layout was different from that of an ordinary vacation cruise.
The fifth floor was exclusively for the Zhousheng family’s VIPs and was very quiet. The fourth floor, meanwhile, housed the casino, theater, and restaurants. It was also basically the only place where those inland criminal forces had any opportunity to encounter people from the four major families.
The decoration here was very distinctive. The entrance to the entire lobby was accessed through a specially constructed suspended corridor.
The reliefs featured poetry in which dragons flew and phoenixes danced, with works from every dynasty represented. After walking through the corridor, one had to follow the wooden staircase and pass through three narrow turns before reaching the actual lobby.
The passageway was only wide enough for two people at most. It could only be used going down, not going up.
The exit, meanwhile, was on the opposite side of the lobby.
“This is pretty good. If anyone wants to cause trouble here, I doubt they could even escape.” Nan Bei whispered to Shen Jiaming with a smile. Since the two of them were coming down, people had already been stationed above and below to keep watch, leaving them a quiet space.
Shen Jiaming made no comment. “Cause trouble? I really can’t imagine who could cause trouble here.”
She held onto the railing and stepped down the last stair. The space before her suddenly opened up.
The entire area was divided by strands of hanging bead curtains, enclosing one gambling table after another. There were shouts, the sounds of bets being placed, and the countless sounds of dice tumbling back and forth inside blue-and-white porcelain dishes.
Behind the bead curtains, people could be seen in hazy silhouettes.
Outside the bead curtains, there were only dozens of young female attendants, carrying drinks and incense as they moved back and forth everywhere.
Nan Huai had always been someone who valued substance and ignored formality, and he had always looked down on this sort of thing.
So all this pageantry seemed especially interesting through Nan Bei’s eyes. The people of the Zhousheng family really were interesting. From the theater to the casino, everything left a deep impression.
“There are two ways of doing things here. When a dispute that normally can’t be resolved comes up, they open a separate table, with the Zhousheng family acting as the banker to resolve the dispute between both sides. Whether it’s spheres of influence, business, revenge killings, or women, anything you want to settle at the smallest possible cost can be made the terms of the wager,” Shen Jiaming explained as he accompanied her around outside the various bead curtains. “The other way is simply taking advantage of an opportunity. The chips here can only be exchanged for physical assets. For example, if you have a shipment of gold or drugs, or if you have some construction project, anything that can be assigned a value can be exchanged for chips.”
“How do they value it?” she asked curiously. “How could the people coming aboard possibly bring that much stuff?”
Shen Jiaming pointed toward a huge counter in the northwest corner. “Just go there and sign for it. Once you leave the ship, someone will naturally go and exchange it for you.”
Nan Bei gave an “oh,” then thought for a moment. “Go get me some too. I want to play.”
“What do you have to exchange?” Shen Jiaming was rather surprised. He teased her, “Your dowry?”
Nan Bei smiled sweetly at him. “In Myitkyina, Myanmar, all three of the Nan family’s casinos are under my name. Is that enough?”
“Enough. More than enough.” Shen Jiaming nodded repeatedly.
Within the Golden Triangle, it was the most famous gambling haven. The amount of money flowing through it every minute was enough to make one’s blood race just thinking about it.
“All right, I won’t tease you anymore.” Nan Bei pursed her lips. “Which one do you know? Take me in to have a look.”
Shen Jiaming beckoned over a young girl. After asking her a couple of questions, he led Nan Bei around to the southeastern corner of the main hall.
The banker was a girl in her twenties. She wore a qipao embroidered with blue-and-white patterns, and in both hands she held a pair of blue-and-white porcelain dishes, gently flipping them up and down.
There was the fine, scattered sound of dice colliding.
She stood at one corner of the gambling table and listened carefully for a while. She really could not hear anything suspicious or mysterious about it. It seemed this truly was a rare, clean casino.
Shen Jiaming lit a cigarette on his own. She frowned and turned her head away from the smoke he exhaled, and at that same moment, an arm wrapped around her.
Everyone went quiet for a moment. The people around this gambling table were all from the Shen family, so naturally they knew Nan Bei’s identity. Some had also heard about the relationship between the Shen family’s direct grandson and Nan Bei.
Only Shen Jiaming stared at the two pressed closely together with an extremely strange expression, a cigarette hanging from his mouth.
Cheng Muyang said nothing. He tossed a handful of chips onto the “big” side of the table.
One of his arms was around her, his hand resting on her lower abdomen.
Nan Bei felt the warmth of his palm and remembered how his fingers had once immersed themselves inside her body, leaving her tossing and turning, unable to break free. The young woman opened the porcelain dishes, and he won.
Amid the cheers, everyone regained their enthusiasm for betting. Shen Jiaming also shook his head with an expression that was neither quite a smile nor quite not a smile, and turned to watch the gambling table.
“Did you sleep well last night?” Cheng Muyang asked her quietly.
Nan Bei turned her head to look at him. “Not very well. What about you?”
“Not very well. I kept thinking about you.” Cheng Muyang still kept his voice low as he spoke in an unhurried, orderly manner. “If you could give me one more chance, I probably wouldn’t have left your room.”
She shushed him. “Keep your voice down.”
Without making a sound, Cheng Muyang took hold of the hand she had left at her side. Then he pulled her a little closer.
“I saw you just now, and suddenly I wanted to know what you were like in the casinos of Myitkyina, Myanmar.”
Nan Bei looked at him in surprise. “You’ve been to Myitkyina?”
Cheng Muyang gently shook his head. “I’ve only heard a little about it. The Wu family invested three hundred million to build a casino in Myitkyina, but in less than three years it was completely shut down, leaving them with nothing. The Nan family should have played no small part in that.”
His tone was flat, as though he were talking about something completely insignificant.
But all of this was connected to her. Nan Bei even had the illusion that this person had never been separated from her at all. He was like her shadow, following her everywhere and knowing everything about her.
Beneath the four major families, there were still nine surnames that could not be underestimated.
The Wu family was one of them.
After so many years of transformation, the four families were mostly involved in the upper levels of politics in various countries. They had little interest in petty profits from things like casinos. The world was so vast. They could not possibly make all the money themselves. Whatever had to be given up would eventually have to be given up.
But the casino in Myitkyina, Myanmar, was truly an exception.
“Two or three years ago, when casinos had just appeared in Myitkyina, you know, gamblers back then were very superstitious about ‘seeing red,’” Nan Bei whispered into his ear. “They believed that as long as they saw red, their luck would flourish and they could slaughter their way through the gambling tables. If you had gone to Myitkyina at that time, you would have seen neon lights flashing along all the streets. Everywhere there were signs advertising chongxi. In those filthy, crude rooms, people would prepare cheap drugs for you, as well as dark, skinny, underage virgins.”
Chongxi (冲喜) is a traditional Chinese belief in using an ostensibly auspicious event to dispel misfortune or bring good fortune, especially in connection with illness or other calamity. Here, the term is used in its darker gambling-world sense, referring to the practice of using blood, violence, or sexual exploitation as a means of “bringing luck” to gamblers.
She did not like it. Walking through those places, she could hear lewd sounds coming from behind the thin wooden walls at any moment. The most frightening thing was that there were never any cries of resistance.
Amid the clear sounds of dice being shaken, Cheng Muyang lowered his head and answered her, “I know. You don’t like it.”
Cheng Muyang’s hand continued to gently stroke her arm. It was as though he truly loved something dearly and only wanted to touch it again and again, confirming that it really existed.
Neither of their minds was here anymore.
Something was quietly spreading through their blood, poised to erupt at the slightest touch.
Suddenly, cheers erupted from the other side of the main hall, along with curses, drawing everyone’s attention. At the same time, accompanied by a cacophony of angry shouting, a figure came tumbling down the stairs at the entrance.
After a moment of silence, she finally saw clearly through the gap between the bead curtains the person sprawled on the floor.
It was a dark, skinny little girl, almost completely naked.
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