Justice System: I Litigate for the Whole City

Chapter 114 : He Doesn't Dare Say It

He Xiufen pushed the bowl toward her, her hand pausing half a second in front of her eyes.

"Two hours."

"Slept."

"Those shadows under your eyes didn't come from my stove." He Xiufen draped the rag over the pot's rim. "What did you get out of him last night?"

Shen Zhixia laid her chopsticks flat. She ran through two ways to start, then cut out all the preamble.

"He owes my dad a piece of testimony."

The rag stopped on the pot's rim. He Xiufen didn't turn around, didn't move her hand.

"Owes testimony." She said it flatly. "Owes who?"

"My dad."

"The one from Hengzheng."

"Yeah."

Someone downstairs called, "Auntie He, two ounces," and He Xiufen answered, her voice rattling the floorboards. She turned the flame down low and came over to sit across from her. The scallion-oil smell crept up the stairwell. Her phone buzzed under the bowl, then buzzed again—the riders' group chat was firing off voice messages, one after another, with Ma Jianjun's gravel voice in the middle of them: "Shen, anything else you need me to run? I got nothing but time these days."

"Answer him," He Xiufen said.

She picked up the phone and typed four characters: Wait for my call.

"Testimony isn't an object," He Xiufen said. "You can't store it and you can't hand it off. Someone has to ask, someone has to write it down, and there has to be a case holding it up. Without a case, he can say it a hundred times and it's just smoke."

"I know."

"Good." He Xiufen looked at her. "One more thing. If he really does dare to open his mouth, you figure out his exit route first. A lawyer who comes out talking about something from nine years ago—one word and he's standing under the light himself. The lamp you're holding right now is borrowed. What are you going to shine on him with?"

"I'm planning to pull my dad's file first."

"Pulling a file requires grounds." He Xiufen said. "What you've got right now is one sentence, not grounds. One sentence won't pull a nine-year-old file."

She didn't answer that.

"What else did he say?"

"Two things." She said. "The day I can find it, he'll give it to me. And that Hongyi account ledger—don't touch it with your bare hands."

"Find what?"

"He didn't say."

"That Hongyi account is frozen by the procuratorate," He Xiufen said. "He's warning you off because he's afraid you'll reach in yourself. What you pull out by reaching in with your own hands—that doesn't go up on the table."

"He didn't explain."

"He doesn't have to. You just keep it in your ledger."

He Xiufen didn't push further. "Then let it sit for now," she said. "This month, what matters in your hands isn't that one sentence. Behind you are a thousand and thirty-nine households, in monthly batches. You go to the civil court and pin down the asset freeze on the next batch, then come back with numbers. I want it on paper, not word of mouth."

"Okay."

"One more thing." He Xiufen stood and put her hand on the stove door. "Your dad had a line he used to keep on his lips too. He said, evidence speaks for itself."

Her chopstick clinked against the rim of the bowl.

"I told him it doesn't," He Xiufen said, switching off the fire. "He didn't argue with me. He said, then write the characters a little clearer."

"Which side do you believe?"

"I believe that transparency sheet in my hand." He Xiufen shook out the rag. "If the characters match, I'll open my mouth. If they don't, it doesn't matter who says what."

She lowered her head and drank the soup. A layer of oil floated on top; it rippled twice, then stilled.

She ate the noodles down to the bottom of the bowl, leaving the fried egg untouched. Before heading out she stacked the bowl and set it back by the stove. He Xiufen, back turned, said, "Scarf." She turned around and grabbed it.

The wind at the bottom of the stairs hit her, and she wound the scarf tight, stood still for a moment. The convenience store said the same thing. Two people, nine months apart, saying the same thing—one said it and walked away, the other said it and went to turn off the stove.

The civil division was on the fourth floor, a small window at the end of the hallway. She passed in the firm's letter, the photocopies of the effective documents, and the date of that Minanli Property transfer. The clerk inside flipped through it for a while, then looked up and reported three items.

"Three companies. Combined balance in their accounts: thirty-one yuan and forty-six fen. That eighty-three thousand from Minanli Property went into the special account on September thirtieth. Three households have already been paid out. Going forward it's monthly batches, first one in November. How many households per batch depends on what comes into the special account."

"The bank item."

The clerk's finger paused on the paper.

"The third judgment item says 'bear corresponding liability within the scope of fault.' How much that scope is—there's no number in the judgment. To move on this item, that number has to be figured out first." She said. "If it can't be calculated, it sits in front of that thousand and thirty-nine households. You wait for it, they wait for you."

"Where does the number get calculated from?"

"From that batch of loans it handled. Your side can do the math, or you can apply for us to organize the calculation."

"What do I submit?"

"The number, and the basis you used to calculate it." The clerk said. "If you just hand over an amount, we still have to come back to you for the basis. There and back, that's another ten days."

She folded the form and put it in the case file. A hundred and five receipts, a list of twenty-seven households, eleven pages of service-fee records—all of it in her hard-shell binder. She had the number; she just had to match it line by line against the bank's statements. Only once the lines aligned would she dare call it a number.

On the bench against the hallway wall sat Shi Lei, an old cap pulled over his head, a delivery box at his feet. He stood when he saw her.

"Shen."

"What are you doing here?"

"Came to ask about row eighty-seven." He said. "Me, I'm not in a hurry. Jiang Bo's people over in Chengxi are. Some of them got notices stuck to their doors. Landlord says if the money doesn't come, the lease goes."

She spread the batch schedule out for him. He looked it over twice and handed it back. "Then we wait." He bent to pick up the box, walked two steps, then turned back. "The three companies' accounts—really just thirty-one yuan and forty-six fen?"

"Thirty-one yuan and forty-six fen."

"Alright." He said. "Now I know who we're waiting on."

He went downstairs. She stood in the hallway alone and unfolded the schedule again. The batch column had only months, no names. A thousand and thirty-nine names, lined up behind a range that still had no number.

It was dark when she got back to the noodle house. Three tables of customers still sat downstairs. He Xiufen stood at the stove without looking up, asked only for the numbers. She reported all three, tacking on the bank item at the end.

"Three parts to a judgment: who's at fault, what's owed, when it's paid." He Xiufen ladled a spoon of broth. "Their article wrote down who's at fault but never got to the amount. A column with no number can only be moved one step at a time."

"Yeah."

"Water's hot on the stove. Take it up."

The upstairs room was cold. She carried the water up and made a cup of instant coffee. Coffee was always bitter; she never thought to add anything to it. It wasn't until the second sip that she remembered—she always used to want sugar. She didn't add it. She sat down at the desk, holding the cup.

The cardboard box under the bed was the one she'd used nine years ago when moving out of the old house. The tape had been replaced three times, and the lid still bore an old address scrawled in marker, smeared by water.

She took the things out one by one and laid them in a row on the desk: a photocopy of a practice certificate, a photocopy of a judgment, a stack of yellowed business cards, an empty pen case, and the photocopy of that test report, its corners frayed to fuzz.

She picked it up, tilted it toward the lamplight for a look, then set it back down. What she wanted to look at was the handwriting. Her father's handwriting.

At the very bottom of the box lay a hardcover notebook, heavier than everything else. The title page bore his name, and below it a line of small characters, ink dark—written once, then traced over: Evidence speaks for itself.

She sat there looking at that line for a long time before turning the page.

The first several pages were other cases: a worksite injury, overtime pay at a factory. Every page ruled into columns—names, times, questions to ask, questions already asked—one column after another. The characters were small, dense, the cross-strokes hooked inward at the ends.

Around the middle, the place names above the lines changed. Baixi Village. The dates were spring, nine years ago.

The paper in this section was softer than the early pages, every corner curled. Page after page, her fingertips could feel the wear, deep and shallow.

On one page he'd drawn a table: head of household, the well's position, livestock, how many mouths in the family. Below that came the children—names, ages, and legs, written in the finest detail. Some names took up two lines. The first line read "cries of leg pain." The second: "refuses to take off shoes."

She kept turning. Sampling numbers copied from the first batch to the third, one by one, copied once across, then checked again down the column. In the margin there was a miscalculation, struck through and rewritten, a small note added beside it.

She copied the last digits of the first batch onto the corner of her own notebook, checked them once more, and marked the date. Her hands were steadier doing this than they had been all day—steadier than when she'd taken that form at the court window.

One page further, there was a name crossed out with a single stroke. Crossed out hard, the indentation bleeding through the back of the page. The name had been scrawled hastily to begin with; after the crossing-out only half of it remained. Impossible to tell whose it was.

Beside it, four tiny characters.

He doesn't dare say it.

She pressed her fingertip over those four characters. The paper was thin; the impression of that stroke underneath worked against her skin. She tried to sound the name out, got half a syllable, and stopped—half a name couldn't be spoken.

She flipped back, then forward, searching for the same name elsewhere. She finished the whole Baixi section. Only this one crossing-out. Nowhere else. As if he'd lifted this person out of the entire notebook and left only a scar.

One time nine years ago, her father spread the test report photocopies across the dinner table and pointed at them page by page. The signature is mine, he said. The report isn't. Back then she could only make out "mine" and "isn't"—everything else lay beyond the words.

She closed the notebook and pulled open the drawer for the Unsettled Ledger, flipping to the last page. Below "Baixi Village · Shen Qian," that faint impression was still there—no deeper, no lighter. She put it back in the drawer.

She pulled the lamp close. In her own notebook she wrote two characters: "Testimony." Looked at them for a moment, then crossed them out.

Below, she laid out three fresh lines. The first: "What case." The second: "Who." The third: "Why." After the second she filled in a name: Lu Jibai. The other two lines stayed blank.

She thought for a moment, then started a fourth line under the third and copied those four characters down exactly as they were.

He doesn't dare say it.

That line, too, was about a person who hadn't spoken.

[Thud. Justice Checklist Item Three: Money isn't back until it's in the bag.]

The words were floating up just as she was gripping her pen. She stared at the line for a long time.

That sentence on the title page still lay at the corner of the desk, ink dark, traced over twice. And the judgment from nine years ago—that was paper too. Paper with characters, with seals, with dates, all stamped neat and proper. What her family had gotten that year was nothing but that sheet of paper.

Money isn't back until it's in the bag.

Now she understood. That half-sentence wasn't just about the housing case.

Under the glass desk pad, the top sheet of white paper was in her own handwriting. The half-strip of cut paper still lay pinned at the bottom. She left both untouched. She slipped the hardcover notebook underneath, with the page that said "He doesn't dare say it" facing up.

The light went out. The glass reflected the streetlamp outside the window, and four small characters sat in a pool of light.