Chapter 4: Thirty-Six Days

On the fourth morning Hanjing took Yu to Shanghai for the day, and nobody told Zhe he was free.

He worked it out when Lu Wen set the day's list on the annex table and the list was empty.

By ten he was on the 51 bus with a tool roll between his knees.

Qiu's Piano and Tuning stood at the bottom of Nanshan Road, between a noodle stall and a shop that sold dead people's clothes by weight.

The sign had lost its second Q years ago.

The shop smelled of felt and shellac and old tea, and Zhe stopped in the doorway to breathe it in.

"You're thin," Qiu Dehai said from under an upright piano with its front off.

He did not come out. He was sixty-three, and he had tuned half the pianos on the lake.

"They feed me," Zhe said.

"They feed you what they like."

"Master."

"Don't Master me. Come and hold this."

Zhe put down the roll and knelt and held the lamp while Qiu worked a bent hammer out of its flange.

It felt like putting a sore foot into warm water.

"Thirty-six days," Qiu said, to the piano.

"Thirty-six."

"The landlord's solicitor wrote again. The building goes to auction in January if the loan isn't cleared."

"It'll be cleared. The fee is paid on the thirtieth."

"The whole four?"

"The whole four."

Qiu's hands paused in the dark.

"I don't like it," he said. "A man doesn't pay four million to a boy to sit in a house."

"He pays it to a boy who looks like someone."

"Hm." Qiu slid out from under the piano and sat up with a crack of knees.

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