Saigon River (3)
Tan Guhong was shaken awake by A-Mei. She had been leaning against the corner of the wall and, at some point, had drifted off into a daze. But she could not have slept for long. Outside, the first light of dawn was faint, the sky only just beginning to brighten.
A-Mei shook her with an expression of panic and urgency, pointing outside while her lips moved incessantly, saying something.
Tan Guhong’s heart sank. She suddenly realized that she could no longer hear a single sound.
After barely managing to steady herself, she followed A-Mei’s directions to the outside of the kitchen on the water. In the distance, she could see faint flames and smoke rising, while several helicopters circled high overhead, roaring past.
It was in the direction of the nightclub. Judging from A-Mei’s reaction, something earth-shaking must have happened, but unfortunately, she could not hear anything.
Could Luo Jingming have already arrived?
She lowered her head and glanced at the phone in her hand, only then noticing that, at some point, dozens of missed calls had appeared on the screen. She had not heard a single one of them. Besides that, there was one text message from Luo Jingming, containing only two words:
Wait for me.
At that point, the phone battery had finally reached its limit. The screen went dark, and the phone shut down automatically.
Suddenly, A-Mei grabbed her hand and frantically pointed toward the house. Tan Guhong looked up, only to see the door kicked open from outside. Several men dressed like the nightclub thugs from earlier burst in with guns, coming face-to-face with Tan Guhong.
The man leading them had previously been at Nguyen Thi Thuy’s side and had seen Tan Guhong before. He froze for a moment, then immediately recognized her. His face twisted viciously. He said something she could not hear, then raised his hand and fired.
Tan Guhong reacted with lightning speed, knocking A-Mei to the ground and dodging the bullet.
A-Mei cried out, broke free of her grasp, and ran inside to look after her younger brother. Tan Guhong reached out to grab her, but a bullet grazed her arm. Pain flashed across her eyes, and she nearly passed out.
Seeing that the men had already rushed over, she had no choice but to turn and jump into the river.
She was not particularly good at swimming, but at this moment, her life was at stake. She had to fight her way through somehow.
The instant she entered the water, she held her breath and plunged straight down. The cold river water surged in from all sides. Unable to hear anything, she could only judge from the disturbances in the water that someone was firing into it, while someone else had also jumped in after her.
She had already observed the terrain carefully when she was outside the house yesterday. These houses had been built over the water, with nothing beneath them. Maneuvering around the people searching for her, she swam beneath the wooden house, then, in the narrow gap between the floorboards and the water’s surface, raised her head and gasped for breath. Afterward, using the wooden posts sunk into the water as cover, she swam in the opposite direction.
She was already utterly exhausted. The wounds of all sizes covering her body throbbed painfully as they soaked in the filthy river water. She did not know how much longer she could hold out, but she kept swimming desperately through sheer force of will.
Suddenly, ripples in the water beside her announced someone approaching rapidly. Startled, she accidentally swallowed a mouthful of water, and in the next second, an arm wrapped around her waist and lifted her bodily from the water.
Although she was already close to losing all strength, she still instinctively struggled and fought back. The man blocked her attacks, restrained both her hands, and forced her to raise her head and look at him.
In the faint light reflected off the surface of the water, she finally realized that the person who had come was Luo Jingming.
In less than twenty-four hours, from heaven to hell, from the highest heavens to the depths of the underworld, it felt like an entire lifetime had passed.
Luo Jingming was in an equally disheveled state, his body covered in the smell and traces of gunpowder smoke. He gripped her shoulders with both hands, his expression tense as he said something, but to her ears, the world was nothing but a vast, dead silence.
The complicated emotions that had been suppressed in the depths of her heart for so long, grievance, anger, excitement, joy, fear... at this very moment, finally erupted in a hysterical flood.
Almost in an instant, tears spilled from her eyes. Crying, she shouted:
“I can’t hear! I can’t hear anything!”
Her right ear had already been rendered deaf by sudden hearing loss. Now she could not hear with her left ear either. She was completely deaf.
The next second, his kiss came down hard. It was forceful, almost fierce, a deep kiss carrying apology, tenderness, anger, self-reproach, and a profound affection that could not quite be put into words.
It was an extremely brief kiss, almost as fleeting as a flash of lightning, their lips barely touching before parting. Yet in that instant, his kiss left her lips and teeth aching, her soul trembling.
She finally gave up. She gave up resisting, and she gave up struggling, her body going limp as she leaned against him.
How strange. Just a few hours ago, she had still been calmly and rationally analyzing the situation, thinking, It’s impossible. He won’t come.
Yet the moment she saw him, everything felt so inevitable, so perfectly natural.
The heart she had kept suspended in fear finally settled completely.
Luo Jingming lowered his head and kissed her forehead again. Without saying another word, he took her and swam forward. He was an excellent swimmer, and even with another person, he moved through the water without difficulty.
The two of them passed through layer upon layer of wooden house supports and finally reached the shore. Luo Jingming supported Tan Guhong and gestured for her to climb up first. Tan Guhong had barely raised half her body above the water when everything before her suddenly went dark. She saw a leather shoe come down hard on the hand Luo Jingming had used to grip the rocks at the shore.
She looked up in horror. Against the backlight, Luo Qingyang stood above them, looking down with a cold, vicious smile playing at the corner of his mouth.
“Little brother, you finally decided to show yourself?”
Tan Guhong was dragged out of the water by Luo Qingyang’s men. Two men seized both her arms and twisted them behind her back, while another grabbed her hair and forced her head up, pressing a gun against her temple.
Luo Jingming was still standing in the water, with seven or eight cold gun barrels trained on him, leaving him unable to move. On the shore, Luo Qingyang lifted his foot and kicked him directly in the face, saying mockingly:
“I never thought you’d really throw yourself into the trap for a woman. My little brother is actually such a lovesick fool!”
Luo Jingming’s fair face immediately showed a streak of blood where he had been kicked. Tan Guhong’s pupils contracted, and she instinctively struggled, only to have one of the thugs beside her immediately step on her back and force her down.
Luo Jingming saw it all. His expression instantly turned cold and rigid, and he was about to get up and rush toward her.
“You dare move?!”
Luo Qingyang raised his hand and fired a shot backward. The bullet grazed past Tan Guhong’s ear. If it had veered even another centimeter, her head would likely have been blown apart on the spot.
“If you want your girl to stay alive, then you’d better stay put!”
Luo Jingming forcibly stopped his movement. He took a deep breath, then looked up at Luo Qingyang, each word deliberate:
“Let her go, Luo Qingyang. Don’t make me say it twice.”
“Let go? Let go of who? New grudges, old grievances. It’s time the two of us brothers settled our debts properly.”
Luo Qingyang grabbed Luo Jingming by the collar and dragged him straight onto the shore, saying bitterly, “My father’s grudge, my entire family’s grudge! I haven’t even come looking for you yet, and you actually dared to come looking for me first? I raised a dog only to have the dog turn around and bite me. I should have tied you, you little bastard, to a target and shot you full of holes back then, just to put an end to future trouble!”
With every sentence, he kicked Luo Jingming once or swung a fist at him. Luo Jingming was knocked to the ground again and again, yet each time he climbed back to his feet. Mud and blood mingled all over his body, leaving him in an utterly wretched state.
Forced to watch all of this, Tan Guhong felt as though her chest was nearly suffocating.
Wasn’t he the one who always had everything under control, impervious to knives and bullets? Wasn’t he the one who could turn the tides while remaining calm and unruffled? Why did he have to end up like this? Why did he have to end up like this?!
At this moment, Luo Qingyang’s thoughts were strangely identical to hers. He threw back his head and laughed mockingly.
“Weren’t you pretty damn arrogant in Chinatown back then? Luo Jingming, huh? So you’ve got a day like this too!”
Tan Guhong could not hear their conversation, but at the very instant the words ended, she saw a faint, distant smile appear on Luo Jingming’s face.
He tried to stand, but staggered and failed to get up. Dropping to one knee, he leisurely wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and murmured to himself:
“Yes, I actually have a day like this too…”
He raised his head and looked toward Tan Guhong. Something deep and turbulent shifted in his eyes, tinged with self-mockery and a trace of pity for himself. Their eyes met. Though they were facing catastrophe, separated by mountains, water, people, and sea, suddenly there were so many things that no longer needed to be said.
Luo Qingyang took it as nothing more than a last-ditch resistance and sneered, “You want my life? I’ll send you to the underworld right now so you can reunite with your dead father and mother!”
As he spoke, he pressed the gun against Luo Jingming’s head and chambered a round. The next instant, he was about to pull the trigger—
“Don’t!”
The roar tore out of Tan Guhong before she could stop it. Even she was startled by how utterly heart-rending it sounded.
At the same time, a burst of gunfire suddenly swept across the ground in front of them. Motor engines roared, and everyone instinctively turned toward the sound, only to see several heavy-duty Jeeps barreling toward them, crashing through everything in their path. A large number of fully armed men jumped out with guns and attacked in their direction.
In that split second, Luo Jingming suddenly surged to his feet, seized the barrel of the gun pressed against his forehead, and twisted it around, driving it into Luo Qingyang’s chest. Luo Qingyang instinctively pulled the trigger, but the bullets all tore into his own body. His expression twisted as he stared at the man before him in disbelief, struggling to say something, only to be tossed aside without hesitation the next second. Luo Jingming immediately charged toward Tan Guhong without the slightest pause.
Only then did Tan Guhong finally witness Luo Jingming’s skill.
Perhaps it was the first time. Perhaps it would also be the last.
Unlike the restrained exchange in that little bar in Palermo, and unlike A-Kun’s brazenly exposed, vicious killing intent, Luo Jingming was utterly detached and composed when he struck.
Fists and feet landed with flesh-rending force, bullets poured forth. To him, it all seemed as natural as breathing and a heartbeat.
There was nothing but dead silence in Tan Guhong’s ears, yet she could clearly see the sparks bursting from the muzzles of the guns, smell the rusty tang of blood and earth mingling in the air, and feel the warmth of the blood sprayed onto her body by the man restraining her arms.
Luo Jingming seemed to have crossed mountains of blades and seas of fire, hacked his way through every obstacle, and stood before her in a state of utter disarray, bending down to hold her tightly in his arms.
“Go!”
The two sides exchanged fire amid a storm of bullets, fighting as they retreated.
Luo Jingming carried Tan Guhong and leapt into the back seat of one of the vehicles. The driver was Uncle Li, Li Zhengkai. In the passenger seat sat a fully armed foreign man holding a machine gun.
As soon as the two of them got into the car, Li Zhengkai immediately drove off, with the other vehicles following close behind.
Although Luo Qingyang had been shot, he was not dead. Tan Guhong vaguely saw his men helping him into a car and bringing people after them. She tried to look through the rear window, but Luo Jingming pressed her down. He wrote in the palm of her hand: They’re shooting. Dangerous.
The car jolted continuously. She raised her eyes and, sure enough, saw the man in the passenger seat lean his head out of the window, repeatedly firing backward. It was easy to imagine that everything outside must already have descended into chaos.
“What’s the situation now?” Tan Guhong asked. “Just tell me directly. I can read lips. Just speak a little slower.”
When her sudden deafness had first occurred all those years ago, she had learned to read lips. She had been afraid that one day she would not be able to hear with either ear. She had never expected that there would actually come a day when it would prove useful.
Luo Jingming therefore leaned over and pressed her down against the car seat, speaking slowly.
“Don’t worry. We’re working with the Vietnamese police. They’ve already surrounded the nightclub. They’ve had their eyes on Nguyen Thi Thuy for a long time. She’s the biggest drug lord operating underground along the Saigon River. It’s just that they have more men and more firepower. The last time the police moved against them, they suffered heavy losses. This time, we gave them a hand.”
“We? Who else?”
“Uncle Li’s old friends. Israeli mercenaries. Don’t worry. They won’t get away this time.”
No wonder she had seen even armed helicopters and Vulcan cannons being deployed.
“Of course, the most important thing is that you managed to escape. Otherwise, we would never have dared act rashly.” He gently touched the bite wound on her lips and said quietly, “I’m sorry.”
Tan Guhong stared fixedly at the man before her, looking at the wounds on his face and the blood at the corner of his mouth. For a long while, she said nothing.
By rights, all of this truly was an undeserved disaster for her. If she had not been dragged into it because of him, what did the Saigon River, Luo Qingyang, or any of this have to do with her?
But how could she fail to guess that he had planned everything so thoroughly and painstakingly, when he had originally been absolutely certain of victory, only to charge in alone and headlong into danger, ending up in Luo Qingyang’s hands and nearly losing everything? If it had not been for her, why would he have gone that far?
After all the things she wanted to say, in the end, she could only let out a long sigh.
“Three times is the limit. If you do something like this one more time, I really won’t be able to take it.”
He stared directly into her eyes and said, each word deliberate, “I promise. There won’t be a next time.”
Just now, he had followed behind Luo Qingyang’s men as they rushed in. He had shouted her name at the top of his lungs, but she had heard nothing.
He would never be able to describe how he had felt when he saw her jump into the river with his own eyes.
The sky collapsing, the earth splitting, his heart stopping.
He never wanted to experience it a second time in his life.
She looked at the man before her, vaguely sensing that something was off. After staring for a few seconds, she suddenly realized that he was not wearing his glasses. On top of that, he was very conspicuously wearing a baseball cap, which was completely unlike him.
“You... where’s your hair?”
She had originally wanted to ask about his hat, but after reaching up and taking it off, she discovered that all the hair beneath it had vanished without a trace.
“Did you become a monk?” she asked incredulously.
Although she could not hear a sound, she could still tell from his expression and demeanor just how loudly he was laughing.
“Didn’t you?”
“So that’s why you quit smoking and drinking? Why you cut ties with me?” This was the only explanation she could think of.
“Yes...” He admitted it readily, amusement in his eyes. “I had someone in my heart whom I could never have. So I saw through the ways of the world and withdrew into the Buddhist monastic life.”
By now, she could tell that he was joking too. She asked irritably, “Did the abbot accept you?”
“No. The abbot said my worldly attachments were still unsettled, so I had to come and settle my karmic knot.”
After a moment of silence, in those few breaths, the mountains and rivers in her heart shifted and the heavens and earth changed. After all, she had just walked through the gates of death and returned alive, had somehow summoned a thread of solitary courage amid the hail of bullets. In the end, she lowered her eyes and asked in a voice softer than soft:
“Then am I your karmic knot?”
His eyes darkened. He opened his mouth to answer, but the car suddenly braked, coming to an abrupt stop.
Thrown forward by the inertia, Tan Guhong nearly fell from her seat. Fortunately, Luo Jingming shielded them both in time.
Li Zhengkai turned around and said something, after which Luo Jingming led Tan Guhong out of the car.
The vehicle had now reached the agreed-upon encirclement point. It was a towering cliffside, surrounded by police cars and Vietnamese police officers armed with live ammunition and carrying riot shields. Farther away, numerous snipers could clearly be seen lying in ambush. Two helicopters equipped with machine guns had also caught up overhead. Luo Qingyang and the others were surrounded on all sides, with nowhere left to escape.
Two Vietnamese police officers escorted the handcuffed Nguyen Thi Thuy forward and shouted toward Luo Qingyang, urging him to put down his weapon immediately and stop resisting.
Luo Qingyang was hiding behind a Santana with a blown-out tire, clutching his bleeding wound while continuing to shout defiantly. From the looks the people around them were casting over, it seemed he was shouting something at Luo Jingming. But Luo Jingming remained expressionless and unmoved.
In the end, the police lost patience and moved in directly. Luo Qingyang resisted but failed, taking several bullets. He staggered a few steps before finally falling over the cliff.
All of this unfolded before Tan Guhong’s eyes like an old silent film: unexpected, yet inevitable, full of twists and turns, ending in a clichéd but satisfying resolution.
After any earth-shaking battle, the cleanup is always a complete mess.
The police successively loaded everyone they had captured into police vehicles. An ambulance rushed to the scene and began treating the wounded. Several medical workers also helped Tan Guhong onto a stretcher. But she refused to leave, her eyes fixed unwaveringly on Luo Jingming in the distance as he coordinated with the police.
After a while, he finally walked over and bent down, speaking gently to her:
“You go first. Get to the hospital and have your injuries treated. Don’t worry. Your hearing will recover.”
“What about you? You’re injured too!”
“Just superficial wounds. I need to stay and continue searching for Luo Qingyang with the police. The Saigon River is down there. He may have escaped with the current. He’s an excellent swimmer. When the seaside villa exploded back then, that was how he survived the blast and escaped.”
“You need to see his body with your own eyes?”
“That’s right. No one understands the consequences of failing to root out a problem better than I do.” His expression turned slightly cold. “Besides, he crippled A-Kun. I have to make him pay with his life.”
Something happened to A-Kun? When did that happen?
Tan Guhong’s heart clenched, an inexplicable anxiety rising within her, an overwhelming sense of unease.
She gripped his hand tightly and stared steadily into his dark eyes.
“Don’t go. The police will handle it. You’ve already left Chinatown. Don’t get involved in those things anymore.”
He heard the worry in her voice, and his heart could not help but soften. Yet he still slowly withdrew his hand.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. Go to the hospital. Be good.”
“No. You’re coming with me!”
Tan Guhong was unusually resolute. She did not even know where that determination had come from in that instant.
But Luo Jingming remained unmoved. He even ignored her struggles, allowing the medical workers to secure her to the stretcher with straps.
“Let me go, Luo Jingming, you bastard! Fuck your whole family! Fuck your mother!”
Tan Guhong could not take it anymore and cursed at him.
Luo Jingming could not help laughing. “You really only know how to swear in Cantonese.”
He lowered his head and kissed her lips. Looking up at her, he seemed to want to say something, but all the words he had became nothing more than a single sigh.
“Yes. You are my karmic knot, the only karmic knot I have in this life and the next. So as long as I have you, I still can’t let go of this mortal world.”
With that, he waved for the medical workers to carry Tan Guhong directly onto the ambulance. No matter how she called out to him from behind, he still walked away without looking back.
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