263. Good and bad histories will be remembered

Four o'clock in the afternoon.

The sun was still drizzling, and the brief rain break seemed to come back after taking a breath, leaving a pool of glittering water on the street, and the golden light was scattered the moment the wheels passed, and then returned to its original appearance after a few moments. Pedestrians walking the streets with colorful umbrellas dotted in the drizzle.

Driving Ford through a slumpy, crowded slum with narrow streets, and across Financial Street, Ford stopped outside a quiet residential area, and Mo Lei got out of the car and walked to a public phone booth.

The place was already in the Cosby district, only six kilometers away from the place where the substitution had been agreed with Vokes at 5:30 p.m. He tossed a coin into the payphone, dialed the number, and roared loudly when the phone was connected.

"The Department of Public Health?"

"Yes, sir, what are you doing?" The person who answered the phone had a dull voice, an official tone, and a businesslike demeanor.

"South District, Santa Qui Hills, Botero Mansion, the sewers are clogged, and the dirt is spreading to the lawn in the front yard, oh my God!"

"Sir, please tell me the address."

"Fuck, I said it all, Botero Mansion, Santa Taky Hills, do you understand? Oh my, it's disgusting. Mo Lei cursed roughly.

"Oh okay, we'll send a repair truck right away." The man who answered the phone should have quickly searched for the address on the computer, knowing that the people living here were not trivial, and his voice immediately became much more tame.

"Thanks, please hurry up, okay?"

……

The Department of Public Health's white van slowly drove up the Santa Qui Hills road toward the intersection leading to Botero Estate. The driver was probably looking for traces of dirty water on both sides of the road, and at the turn, a man in a grass-green rainproof suit crossed his hands and signaled for the driver to stop.

Some of the exasperated drivers found themselves unable to get around the guy, who was running back and forth in the middle of the street, waving his hands and looking anxious. The driver pushed the door open and shouted loudly in the pouring rain, "Do you want to die? If you can't see clearly in this rainy weather, you'll be killed. ”

It was the last thing he said in a few hours.

……

At the gate of the Botero Estate, a heavily armed guard was standing on the telephone in front of the wall of the pine sentry box, and he instructed the operator at the exchange desk to give him an outside line, and he asked the Public Health Department of the Municipal Government of Medellín to ask about a white van with the words "Public Health Service" sprayed on the driveway in front of the Botero Mansion, stopping every few hundred meters.

"Sir, we received a report that there was a blocked sewer near the Botero Mansion in Santa Taky Hills, and we sent an emergency repair truck to overhaul it."

"Thank you!" The guard hung up the phone and pressed the button to talk to all the booths at the same time, sharing the message so that the rest of his colleagues would not be confused. Back in his seat, he wondered, what kind of idiot would make a living by checking sewers?

The driver wearing a black raincoat with the words "Medellín Municipal Public Health Agency" written on it was of course Mo Lei. He drove the DH's van unhurriedly on the private driveway of the Botero Mansion, clinging to the shoulder of the road and stopping at every gutter.

This section of the road is long, with about twenty or thirty drainage ditches. Every time he stopped, Mo Lei walked around with a six-foot-long scoop and various tools that seemed to fit the scene. But in ten of them, in addition to tools, he carried another item - a plastic container sprayed black with a capacity of about five liters. He shoved seven containers out of sight of the sentry over cast-iron railings and poked them into the bush with a scoop, while the other three hung under the pit with the remaining electric bell wires.

At 4:40 a.m., Mo Lei finished all the work, drove down the Santa Qui Hills, and quickly drove west along the Southern Ring Road, entering two manufacturing plants that had fallen into disrepair. The two arrowheads looked as if they had been hit by a few tornadoes, leaving only a few graffiti-covered walls that hadn't yet arrived, but they were pretty much there. Cement bricks are piled up under the tattered iron fence.

Stopping the truck, Mo Lei climbed into the back of the car to wake up the poor DH staff. He was pressed for time and didn't have time to treat this friend well, so he could only take off his black overalls and wake up the other party with a few slaps.

"What's wrong, what's wrong?" That guy was so frightened that he couldn't possess his body, and when he saw Mo Lei, he unconsciously curled up his body into a ball.

"I'm sorry I made a mistake." Mo Lei put one hand on the other party's shoulder, "You believe it or not, this explanation is up to you, but I didn't take your things, I didn't do anything bad, and the sewer was checked for you." ”

"Are you crazy?" Gradually, the staff became less afraid.

"It looks like so." Mo Lei took out four $100 bills from his trouser pocket, "I'll pay for the cost of repairing the car, God knows, you know me, four hundred dollars, how about it?" ”

"Four hundred?"

"In the past few tens of minutes, you have been carefully inspecting the Santa Qui Mountains, the Botero Mansion and the adjacent sewers nearby, it's as simple as that, your superiors have sent you, and you have done your job seriously. If you want the 500 dollars and use it well, you will answer when asked. ”

"You're crazy!"

"I don't have time to discuss life with you." Mo Lei's hand stretched out on the other party's shoulder pressed hard, "Accept, or not?" ”

The man's eyes lit up with greed, and he raised his hand to take Mo Lei's banknote.

Mo Lei stood in place, watching the white van pull out of the intersection and in the direction of the Department of Public Health. He looked down at his watch: it was almost five o'clock, thirty minutes before the scheduled exchange time, and it was time to communicate with Vaux.

Turning a corner, Mo Lei walked towards a path, his back disappearing between the weeds on both sides of the road.

……

Mexico City, at the intersection of Avenida Insurrectionist and Avenida de la Reforma is a famous historical street, in the middle of which there is a life-size bronze statue of a celebrity every two or three hundred meters, and between the two statues there is a large bronze vase nearly three meters high. The road is wide and full of pedestrians, even at five o'clock in the evening, there are still tourists who come here, but most of them are in groups of three or five, and there are few lone people.

On the right side of the road facing northeast of Historic Street, there is a row of historic gray buildings. In the innermost building, a bronze nameplate at the entrance is engraved with the words "Pioneer Shipping Company", and the font is very grand and beautiful. The courtyard was empty, and a cobblestone path led from the iron gate to three steps more than a dozen meters later, on which two Corinthian columns decorated with buttercups were closed, and the sides of the porch were inlaid with black glass.

In the basement of the small building, the stout Garner has a cigar in his hand, wearing a dark tight T-shirt, looking haggard, with wrinkles engraved by the years on his face and the vicissitudes of life, and there are already a lot of gray hair on his sideburns.

The young man next to him helped him hold a thin dark coat in his hands, and the two walked side by side along the brightly lit aisle in the basement. There were several wooden doors painted blue on both sides of the road, and there were heavily armed guards at the doors, who saw Garner ignoring them and still silently guarding their posts.

The door at the end of the corridor was black, and it was unattended, but when the young man went to push the door, his face was a little red, and he could see that the black door was very heavy. Garner reached out impatiently to help. Upon entering, the young man was waved out of the door by Garner, and he entered the room alone.

Dressed in a white shirt, Diggle sat on a soft sofa in the corner, with half a glass of red wine on the small table in front of him. The 20-square-meter room is luxuriously decorated: four black single sofas are scattered on either side of the glass coffee table, and a brown high-backed sofa chair at the top faces the large TV on the wall.

On the glass coffee table is a one-foot-square black plastic table with several buttons, and the traffic lights next to the buttons are flashing alternately. A box of cigars and a lighter and a half-foot-sized ashtray were neatly arranged next to the plastic table.

Seeing Garner coming in, Diggle didn't get up, but just raised his hand to signal, "Hi, Garner." ”

"Diggle!"

Garner walked over to the brown couch, moved the chair back and sat down sideways, smiling and looking at Diggle beside him with interest, "Brother, what do you think?" ”

"I'm sorry!"

"I'm sorry, that's it?" Garner still had a smile on his face, but his eyes were cold, and his hands on the armrests trembled slightly.

"Oh, the reason I'm sorry isn't because of the trouble this caused you, but because of Tina." Diggle took a sip of his wine and squinted at Garner, "So, you're mistaken. ”

"I want to hear about it."

"You've got two months left, your fiftieth birthday." Diggle picked up a cigar, picked out the cigarette butt, and slowly played with it in his hand, "I'll be forty years old soon." Ghana, I've been working with you since I was twenty-one, and now I can't tell if I'm black or white. ”

"Is this the reason you betrayed me?" The corners of Garner's eyes twitched, and his smile stiffened.

"Part of it." Diggle sighed, "What I respect is also your thoughts, the world has become chaotic, even if you and I give our lives, what can we change?" Getting rid of a gangster, knocking out a transportation channel, and killing a gangster leader are like this, we have been doing it for decades beforehand, but in the past few decades, we have paid all our efforts and spent time and family at the price, but the gangster organization has one less, and there is one more and more large; Transport corridors are becoming more and more advanced; Gang leaders are becoming more and more savvy. Tell me, what are we doing? ”

"Volks, you may still think he's a careerist who wants to be a power-hungry and self-conscious, but his proposal is the best way to get normal. Over the years, countless gangsters have been playing a sign for the people at the beginning, but have they really done it? ”

"They occupy territory, dead people; robbing customers, dead people; Forcing good people to become prostitutes and manufacturing drugs, where will no one die? Don't you know how many of the bones in the suburbs belong to those girls? Don't you know how old some of the skulls are? They themselves sit on private jets, live in luxury villas, hug top models, and are protected by bodyguards with loaded guns outside, and in the end, what they do is still the most vicious bad thing in the world. ”

Vaux's plan was simple and practical, and the government was complicit in the clamoring to expel and destroy these people, but over the years it had grown bigger and bigger. Then simply let the government control these businesses and legalize what can be done. Vaux is not going to be a savior, he is a simple businessman, and after the matter is over, he will continue to be the chairman of his Vaux Group, and Columbia will be different, and people like us should also be disarmed and reinstated. ”

Garner listened to Diggle's eloquent conversation, his eyes narrowed into a slit, and suddenly interjected, "How do you know that Volks, in the future, will not be like those original bosses, covering the sky with one hand, killing people and setting fires?" ”

"So what?" Diggle refused to give in, "Human civilization is always oscillating between progress and regression. We have learned a lesson, and in the blink of an eye we forget it completely, and the tragedy of history keeps repeating itself – the Holocaust. And then what? Humanity will soon forget about it, and soon there will be genocidal utensils, world wars, tyrants, and oppression of minorities. Humans seem to have stopped evolving. But now, we have a chance to change that, so what's the point of dying some people? If Volks' one day goes against his original intentions, won't anyone else sanction him? ”

Diggle nodded as if he had made up his mind to say that he was not firm, "Well, a corrupt and decaying government organization can no longer be allowed to do anything wrong, Volks's methods may not be able to accommodate the majority, but every major progress in human history has to come at the cost of many lives." ”

Garner picked up a cigar, tore the cigarette butt, lit it with a firelighter, and took a puff. He looked at Diggle with pity, heartache, and indescribable emotions in his eyes—nineteen years together, nineteen years of birth and death. When Diggle was chosen, he was so young that he was lonely and full of enthusiasm. By now, he was in no mood to debate with Diggle.

"Do you know what your results are?"

Diggle shook his head and lit his cigar in his hand, "No need to know, history will remember me." ”

"Then you just wait." Snuffing out the cigar he had smoked twice in the ashtray, Garner got up and walked towards the door, one hand on the doorknob, turned his head to look at Diggle again, and said, "If Tina doesn't come back, I'll peel you and use a knife." ”