The Republic of Wine

time he looked back to see where it had come from, just in time to see the canopy of the ginkgo tree shudder and several yellow leaves flutter earthward in the reddish rays of sunlight. The old cemetery caretaker was still up against the tree, not moving a muscle. Blue smoke curled from both barrels of his shotgun. By then the big yellow dog had shambled over from the other side of the tree and was crouching beside the caretaker, its eyes reflecting the sun’s rays like gold nuggets.
    Before entering the block of buildings, he crossed a desolate sidewalk park where some old men were out airing birds in cages and some kids were jumping rope. Tucking his pistol into his waistband and acting as if he hadn’t a care in the world, he sauntered past them and headed for the buildings. But the minute he reached his objective, he discovered he’d made a big mistake, for he’d walked into the middle of an early morning flea market. Crowds of peddlers were hunkering down beside their secondhand goods, which included used clocks and watches, Mao Zedong badges and plaster busts from the Cultural Revolution, and things like old wind-up gramophones. Plenty of sellers, but not a single buyer. The peddlers eyed each infrequent passerby greedily. It felt like a trap to him, a lure for the unwary, and that the peddlers were actually plainclothes cops. And the more closely Ding Gou’er observed them, the more a lifetime of experience told him that’s exactly what they were. Alertly, he retreated to a spot behind a white poplar to observe the goings-on. He saw seven or eight youngsters, boys and girls, sneak out from behind one of the buildings, their expressions and demeanor telling Ding Gou’er that this was a group of kids involved in some unlawful activity. The girl in the center, wearing a knee-length gray coat, a red cap, and a necklace of Qing dynasty brass coins, was their leader. All of a sudden, he noticed the wrinkles in the girl’s neck and detected the acrid smell of foreign tobacco on her breath, so close it was as if she were nearly on top of him. He focused his attention on her, watching the lady trucker’s features slowly take form on the face of this unfamiliar girl, the way a cricket emerges from the thin casing of its cocoon. A trickle of rose-colored blood oozing from a bullet hole between her eyes ran down her nose and dripped from the tip to divide her mouth into two equal halves; from there it slid to her navel, down and down, neatly cleaving her body in two and forcing gurgles out of her internal organs. With a shout of alarm, the investigator turned and ran, but no matter how fast his legs churned, they could not take him out of the flea market. Finally, he hunkered down in front of a peddler selling used handguns and pretended to be a customer, as he examined the rusty old guns laid out in front of him. He sensed that the girl who had been cloven in half was standing behind him wrapping herself in green paper bindings. She worked very fast; at first she was wearing cream-colored rubber gloves as her hands flew through the air, but before long, they were yellow blurs that were quickly swallowed up in wet green paper the color and consistency of seaweed. The green was such a transcending green it exuded a powerful life force. And then the paper bindings began to move on their own, and in a matter of seconds had her wrapped in a tight cocoon. He felt a chill on his back, but tried to act nonchalant, picking up a beautifully crafted revolver and trying to spin its rusty cylinder. It wouldn’t budge. He asked the peddler, Do you have any aged Shanxi vinegar? The peddler said he didn’t. Disappointed, he heaved a sigh. The peddler said, You act like a pro, but you’re actually a rank amateur. I don’t have any aged Shanxi vinegar, but I do have some Korean white vinegar, which is a hundred times better at removing rust than the Shanxi stuff. He watched the peddler reach into his shirt with a pale, delicate hand and feel around as if looking for something. Ding Gou’er caught an occasional glimpse of two little glass bottles tucked into a lacy pink bra. They were green, but frosty, not see-through, the sort of bottle so many famous foreign liquors come in. The frosty green looked especially expensive; even though they were obviously made of glass, somehow they didn’t look it, which was why they were so precious. Capitalizing on the structure and logic of this sentence, he came up with a parallel: Even