Shanghai, 19th year of the Republic of China.
The rainy season has just passed, and there is still a damp, musty smell in the air. In the operating room on the third floor of St. Mary's Hospital, the shadowless lamp was turned down, illuminating the wounds on the operating table.
Fu Xiaoran holds a knife in his right hand and tweezers in his left hand, handling a bullet embedded deep in his abdominal cavity.
The bullet grazed the edge of the spleen, missing the man's life by half an inch.
"Hemostatic forceps."
The nurse handed it over and he took it, his fingers as steady as a machine. The assistant next to me, Dr. Chen, had sweat all over his forehead and his hands were shaking. Fu Xiaoran glanced at him and said nothing.
The person lying on the stage is Wu Tianming, the famous shopkeeper of "Fuji" Trading Company in Shanghai. Last night I was shot at the entrance of the casino in the French Concession. When he was delivered, he had no pulse. Wu Tianming's wife knelt outside the operating room and cried all night, saying that as long as she was alive, she could go bankrupt.
Fu Xiaoran doesn't care about this.
What he was concerned about was—there was a thin note sewn into the lining of Wu Tianming's bloody vest.
It was a code list for port arms allocation.
He had already seen it when he was cleaning the wound. It was hidden and sewn into the interlayer of the lining, but it could not escape his eyes.
"Sew."
When the last needle fell, Fu Xiaoran took a step back, took off his bloody latex gloves, and threw them into the stainless steel basin. The moment he turned his gloves over, his fingertips had already felt the texture of the note - oily paper, waterproofed.
