Sandalwood Death: A Novel (Chinese Literature Today Book Series)

air this time? You’re cooking dog’s legs again, so put me down for one.”
    “I’ll put you down for one of your damned mother’s legs!” she cursed loudly and banged the side of the pot with a spoon. In the space of a single night, she had recaptured Dog-Meat Xishi’s nature—easy to laugh and quick to curse—and had regained her looks. Where the enchanting gentility that had characterized the days of all encompassing yearning for Qian Ding had gone, no one knew, but it was gone. After polishing off a bowl of pig’s-blood gruel and a plate of chopped-up dog entrails, she brushed her teeth with salt, rinsed her mouth, combed her hair, and washed her face, then applied powder and dabbed on some rouge before changing out of her old clothes and taking a good look at herself in the mirror. She touched up her hair with wet fingers and placed a red velvet flower over one ear. Her eyes were moist and bright, her appearance one of grace and elegance. Even she was so taken by her own beauty that tender feelings made a reappearance. An assassin in the making? Hardly. More like a sexual provocateur. She nearly crumbled under the weight of her tender feelings, and hastily turned the mirror around so she could grind her teeth and let the hatred reignite inside her. In order to reinforce her confidence and keep her will from dissolving, she went inside to take another look at her father’s chin. The flour she’d spread on it had formed clumps and was giving off a sour, unpleasant odor that had drawn flies to it. Presenting an appearance that both nauseated and pained her, he awoke with a shout when she lightly poked his chin with a piece of kindling; obviously in pain, he gazed at her with a vacant look in his puffy eyes.
    “I want to ask you, Dieh,” she said coldly. “What were you doing in town at that hour?”
    “I went to a whorehouse,” he admitted frankly.
    “Pfft!” she uttered in a mocking tone. “Maybe some whore picked your beard clean to make herself a flyswatter.”
    “No, we’re all on good terms. They would never do that to me,” he insisted. “When I came out of the whorehouse, I was walking down the lane behind the county yamen when a masked man jumped out of the darkness, knocked me to the ground, and yanked out my beard, hair by hair!”
    “One man could do all that?”
    “He knew his martial arts. Besides, I was pretty drunk.”
    “How do you know it was him?”
    “He had a black bag hanging from his chin,” he said confidently. “Nobody but a man with a fine beard would take such care of it.”
    “All right, then, I’ll avenge you,” she said. “You may be a scoundrel, but you are my dieh!”
    “How do you plan to avenge me?”
    “I’ll kill him!”
    “No, you can’t do that. That is beyond your ability. If you can yank out a handful of his beard, that will be vengeance enough for me.”
    “All right, that’s what I’ll do.”
    “But that is impossible too,” he said, shaking his head. “With his powerful legs, he can jump three feet in the air, which is how I know he is a practiced fighter.”
    “Don’t you know the adage ‘When virtue rises one foot, vice rises ten’?”
    “I’ll wait here for good news,” he said sarcastically. “Except there is another adage that bothers me, and that is ‘Throw a meaty bun at a dog and it’ll never come back.’”
    “You just wait.”
    “Your dieh may be good for little, but I am still your dieh, and I’d rather you didn’t go. I’ve had a good long sleep, and that’s given me a chance to think some things through. Losing my beard like that is fit punishment for my misdeeds, and I cannot hold anyone else to blame. I’m going to head back, but no more singing opera for me. I’ve spent my whole life doing that, and it has turned me into an undesirable character. There is a line in opera that goes, ‘Cast off your old self and be a new man.’ Well, in my case let’s change it to ‘Lose your beard and be a new man.’”
    “I’m not doing this for you alone.”
    She went into the kitchen and scooped the cooked dog’s legs out of the pot with tongs, drained the liquid, and covered them with a layer of fragrant pepper salt. Then she wrapped them in dry lotus leaves and put them in her basket. From Xiaojia’s tool kit she removed a paring knife and tested the point on her fingernail. Satisfied that it was sharp enough, she slipped it into the bottom of her basket.
    “What do you need a knife for?” her