Justice System: I Litigate for the Whole City

Chapter 113 : No One Asked a Second Time

The wind turned in from the mouth of the alley. A corner of the notice on the door curled up, tapped twice against the glass, and fell back.

The windows of 412 upstairs were dark. In June, the first time she'd found this building, she'd taken the elevator up and stood in front of that roll-up shutter; tonight she stood at the base of the building, farther from that window, the wind still rushing in from the alley's mouth.

Deeper in the alley, someone was frying something, the sound of the oil surging in waves, mixed with the clatter of someone hauling an e-bike battery upstairs, the metal handle banging against the stairwell. She pulled out her phone, glanced at it, and slid it back into her pocket. She waited for him to finish what he'd started to say.

He didn't answer the "why." He shifted the kraft envelope from his left hand to his right. The white edge at the top kept working its way out, and he kept tucking it back. She glanced at the white edge; he folded the top of the envelope inward again.

The streetlight came at them from the side. He looked thinner than he had last month, same jacket as before, the cuffs starting to fray.

"I know who you are," he said. "Earlier than you think."

The reddish glow of the streetlight at the foot of the steps faded, turned white.

"Yeah," she said.

"Your surname is Shen. Your father was Shen Qian." He was looking at the words someone had traced over twice on the glass door, not at her. "I knew those two things before you ever came to Jiangzhou."

"Who told you?"

"No one told me."

"Then how did you know?"

"That question gets set aside for now."

She slid her hands back into her coat pockets. The wind rushed in behind her, cold inside the sleeves.

"You only ever give half a sentence too."

"What you asked was why I gave you half a sentence." He said, "That one I answered."

"How I knew your surname—that's a different question."

"Then answer that one too."

"No."

She stared at him for two seconds, and then she understood why he was so clean in court: ask one question, get one answer, every extra word kept to himself.

"Then let me ask a different one." She said, "You keep bringing up my father. Before the hearing, at the convenience store, you said my father thought the evidence would speak for itself. Up above the noodle shop, you started a sentence and stopped halfway. The day you delivered the newspaper, you wouldn't give me one word more."

"The half-sentences you've been holding back." She said, "What are you saving them for?"

"Enough to keep you moving." He said, "If I give you more, you'll stop looking for yourself."

[Thud. The half he gave you was measured.]

"Then why are you willing to give more tonight?"

He looked at her for a while.

"Because tonight, what you're asking isn't about the case."

She didn't respond. An empty three-wheeler passed through the intersection, the iron panels of its bed rattling twice before fading away.

"Go on," she said.

"I owe your father a piece of testimony."

[Thud. He acknowledged a debt. The ledger entry reads: Testimony, one item, unpaid.]

She heard herself make a sound in her throat.

"Testimony isn't just a sentence," she said. "Testimony means someone asks, someone records, someone writes it into a transcript. Do you have a case in hand?"

"No."

"Then it's nothing."

"I know."

She could recite the procedural language on that judgment more fluently than her own internship evaluation form; in nine years, she had never once thought about it from the angle of the "witness" column.

"Then write it down now," she said. "One piece of paper, a few lines, you sign at the bottom, and I'll take it and ask."

"Ask who?"

"Whoever needs to be asked."

He shook his head. "A piece of paper no one's waiting for—no matter which window you hand it to, they'll tell you to go home and wait."

"Then what do I need?"

"What you need is for it to hold up."

That ledger in her heart—He Xiufen had already done half the math for her. A judgment nine years old, if you want to move it, only paper from two paths matters: someone applies for a retrial, or someone files a new case. Testimony has to hang on one of those paths to mean anything.

"Where do you want to hang this sentence of yours?" she asked.

"It hasn't been hung yet."

Not hung yet—meaning the time wasn't right. She pressed those four words into her chest.

"Is this connected to the case I'm handling now?"

"No."

"Then tonight was a waste."

"It wasn't."

"How wasn't it?"

He raised his hand and pressed the crease at the top of the envelope with his knuckle, didn't answer. The wind lifted an old flyer from the base of the wall, wrapped it against a lamppost, and let it fall.

"My father's case was decided nine years ago," she said. "I can recite the judgment from memory, but I've never pulled the file. When I do, the first thing I'll do is count how many people are in the transcripts."

He didn't respond to that.

"Everything that didn't make it into the judgment," she said, "is what nobody asked back then."

"In nine years," he said, "no one asked a second time."

Her hand clenched in her pocket, nails biting into her palm. The last time her father spoke to her was at the low table at home, stitching a strap on an old briefcase, the needlework crooked, saying the strap would hold for another three years.

"Who should have asked?"

He lifted the envelope slightly. The streetlight whitened the small patch of concrete at his feet; beside it lay a plastic stool with a folded leg, dust caught in the crack of its seat.

"Nine years ago," she said, "where were you?"

A bicycle rode in from the alley's mouth, its bell ringing behind him, and swerved around them. This one he didn't answer.

"Old Wei said you pulled a very old file once," she said. "Used one of the firm's older case-number series."

This time he didn't pretend not to understand. He took his hand out of his pocket, then put it back.

"That file," he said, "has nothing to do with the case in your hands."

"Which year does it have to do with?"

"That goes on the shelf with the other question."

He twisted the top of the envelope shut. "I'm not answering any of this tonight," he said. "The day you're able to find it out for yourself, I'll give it to you."

"What counts as finding it out?"

"The day you get that piece of paper in your hands."

"What piece?"

"You'll know it when you see it."

"Testimony has to be given in front of people," she said. "If you're going to give it to me, you have to stand up there and say it."

"When that day comes, I will."

"If you give me this, what does it cost you?"

"None of your concern."

"It is my concern."

He looked at her. There was no smile in the look, and he didn't pick the thread back up.

She let out a short laugh. "Fine," she said. "I'll remember it."

"The other 1,039 households," he asked, "where does the money come from?"

"The judgment puts it on the bank. The enforcement judge has to seize its accounts."

"Until those accounts get hit, the rest can't get a turn."

"I know."

"Those Hongyi accounts," he said, "don't touch them with your bare hands."

She didn't ask why.

He glanced toward the mouth of the alley. The streetlights stood one after another, all white.

"One more thing," he said. "What's said in this alley tonight stays in this alley."

"Can't tell anyone?"

"Not anyone."

"I'll remember."

She nodded, turned, and walked toward the intersection. Seven or eight steps out, she looked back: he was still standing at the foot of the steps, the envelope in his hand, motionless under the light.

Two people stood at the bus stop, both heads down at their phones. Her phone buzzed twice in her pocket. Ma Jianjun had sent a voice message in the riders' group, about thirty seconds long, talking about a sum they'd pooled at this month's meeting—who'd been hospitalized, whose scooter had been impounded. The last line: "Sis, if you need someone to run errands, just say the word." She listened to the whole message and replied: Get back to your orders.

The bus came. She boarded first and took a window seat. Two stops later, a crowd of elderly people loaded on with groceries, leek leaves poking from the tops of plastic bags and brushing her shoulder. She reached over and closed the window a bit; the wind died down.

The bus turned, and the building on Wenchang Road slipped past.

The group chat had piled up another dozen messages: Shi Lei asking when row eighty-seven would come up, Jiang Bo posting the names of the eight households in Chengxi again, Tang Guo counting down below, stopping at "the quiet ones go to enforcement." She read them all and didn't reply.

She was afraid of forgetting that sentence. Before she'd left, He Xiufen had warned her: don't bring the notebook; if you bring it, it becomes a ledger. All she had in her pocket was a bus card, and twice her hand came out empty. She broke the sentence into three pieces and recited them in her mind—I owe, your father, a piece of testimony. Recited it three times, and each time stalled at the same place.

The scallion-oil smell from the noodle shop drifted out from under the half-lowered shutter. The repair stall was closing up, someone folding tarps, empty crates stacked on a small truck. He Xiufen was gathering the plastic stools, each one knocked against the base of the wall.

"Did you get an answer?"

"He gave me a sentence himself."

"What sentence?"

"I'll tell you tomorrow."

He Xiufen looked at her, the look lingering longer than usual, and in the end asked nothing more, stacking the stool in her hands onto the pile.

"Soup's warming in the pot, get your own bowl," she said. "Tomorrow morning, first go to the Civil Division and ask about the asset search for the later batch. Everything else, we'll talk about when you're back."

The third step on the stairs creaked. She went up, clicked on the desk lamp, and lifted the glass desk pad. The papers underneath were the same ones, the blank sheet on top was one she'd pressed in at the end of September, not a single word on it.

That cut-paper strip lay at the very bottom. The edges were frayed, but the cut was straight. On it was only the first half of a sentence; where the second half was, she didn't know. She'd searched for it a long time and never found it.

She spread the strip flat under the lamplight and studied it for a while, then pulled a pen from the holder and wrote a line on the blank sheet:

He owes my father a piece of testimony.

She set the pen back in the holder and took the Unsettled Ledger from the drawer, flipping to the last page.

She knew every line in this book by heart: the first line was Ma Jianjun of Chengnan Station No. 1, the lines falling one after another down to the last page, where five characters stood at the top—Baixi Village · Shen Qian. Below them, a vast empty space. All this time, she'd treated that great blank space as blank.

She nudged the lamp half an inch closer. In the emptiness, a very faint impression surfaced—horizontal, extremely fine, pressing up from the back of the page, barely a shade darker than the paper.

[Thud. This line hasn't appeared yet. It comes through from the back of the page. It won't be rushed.]

She took the cut-paper strip and held it up to the light to compare: the half-sentence on the strip was short, but this impression stretched a full section longer.

She pressed the two sheets back under the glass together, the blank page on top, smoothing down the corner that had lifted.

She turned off the light, then turned it back on.

The impression was still there.