A Loyal Character Dancer

so Yu handed a pair to Pan.
     
    Pan picked up a loose crab leg with his fingers.            
     
    “I love crabs,” Yu shrugged his shoulders, “but I do not eat them raw.”
     
    “Don’t worry. There won’t be any problem. Soaking the crab in the strong liquor takes care of it.”
     
    “I just can’t eat uncooked crab.” It was not exactly true. In his childhood, a bowl of watery rice with a piece of salted crab had been his favorite breakfast. Peiqin had made him give up raw seafood. Maybe that was the price of having a virtuous wife. “You have all the crab, Manager Pan,” Yu reluctantly offered.
     
    The rice smelled pleasant, the pork had a special texture, and the small side dishes were palatable. Yu did not really miss the crab. They talked more about Wen.                      
    “Wen did not even have an account in the bank,” Pan said, “All her earnings were taken by Feng. I suggested that she keep some money at the factory. She did.”                     
    “Did she take it out before she disappeared?”             
     
    “No. I was not in the factory the day she disappeared, but she took none of her money,” Pan said, finishing the golden digestive glands of the crab with relish. “It must have been a decision made on the spur of the moment.”                
     
    “During all these years, has anyone come to visit Wen here?”
     
    “No, I don’t think so. Feng’s insanely jealous. He wouldn’t have encouraged visitors.” Turning the crab’s entrails inside out, Pan had something like a small old monk sitting on his palm. “The evil guy, you know.”
     
    “I know. In the White Snake legend, the meddlesome monk had to hide in the crab entrails—” Yu left the sentence unfinished as he heard a faint moan from Pan.
     
    Pan was already doubled over in pain, pressing a hand to his stomach. “Damn. It feels like a knife piercing me here.” His face was beaded with perspiration and had turned a livid color. He began to moan.
     
    “I’ll call for an ambulance,” Yu said, jumping up.
     
    “No. Take the factory pickup,” Pan managed to say.
     
    The pickup was parked in front of the hotel. Yu and a hotel janitor lost no time carrying Pan on to the truck. The county hospital was several miles away. Yu had the janitor sit beside him to give directions. Before he started the engine, however, Yu ran back to his room and picked up the urn of wine-soaked crab to take with them.
     
    * * * *
     
    Three hours later, Yu was ready to head back to the hotel, alone.
     
    Pan had to stay in the hospital, though he was pronounced out of danger. The doctor’s diagnosis was food poisoning.
     
    “In an hour,” the doctor said, “it would have been too late for us to do anything.”
     
    The result of the tests of the contents of the crab urn were highly suspicious. The crab contained bacteria—many times more than was allowable. The crab used must have been dead for days.
     
    “It’s strange,” the nurse said. “People here never eat dead crab.”
     
    It was more than strange, Detective Yu reflected, as he plodded along the country road. There was an owl hooting somewhere in the woods behind him. He spat a couple of times on the ground, a subconscious effort to ward off the evil spirits of the day.
     
    The moment he got back to the hotel, he checked at the hotel kitchen.
     
    “No, we didn’t send that food to you,” the chef said nervously. “We don’t have that kind of room service.”
     
    Yu dug out a hotel brochure. Room service was not mentioned. The chef suggested that the lunch might have been delivered by a nearby village restaurant.
     
    “No, we never got such an order,” the restaurant owner whined over the phone.
     
    They could have made the delivery by mistake, and were now trying to deny responsibility. But that was unlikely: the delivery man would have asked for payment.
     
    Detective Yu was sure that he had been the target. If he had stayed alone in the hotel and eaten all the food himself, he would have ended up in the hospital, or the morgue. No one would have bothered to test the leftovers in an urn. The gang would not have had to worry. Food poisoning accidents happened every day. The local police wouldn’t even have been called in. The schemer could not have known that Yu did not eat raw crab.