Stepping out through the doors of City Hall, the sunlight outside was somewhat glaring.
Leo and the community residents stood on the steps. No one spoke.
The residents, who had been filled with fighting spirit only moments ago, now had disappointment written all over their faces.
“I knew it. There’s no point trying to reason with those people in suits.” Frank was the first to break the silence, his voice filled with anger. “They’re all in it together.”
“Then what do we do now? Are they really going to sell off our center?” Rosa’s voice was choked with tears.
“That lawyer, Wexler, is too formidable.” George sighed. “We couldn’t argue against him at all.”
People began to grumble under their breath.
“We shouldn’t have pinned our hopes on some young punk in the first place.”
“Exactly. Aside from saying a few pretty words, what else can he do?”
Those words were neither loud nor quiet—just enough to reach Leo’s ears.
He sank into a deep sense of self-reproach and defeat.
This was the first time he had felt, so vividly, the coldness and cruelty of real-world politics.
Here, justice and morality were worth nothing.
He had thought that with nothing but hot-blooded passion and historical knowledge, he could change something.
But reality had slapped him hard across the face.
Margaret walked over to Leo’s side and patted him on the shoulder.
“Don’t take it to heart, child,” she said. “They’re just too disappointed. It isn’t aimed at you. You already did your best.”
Leo said nothing.
He knew that doing one’s best was the most useless excuse of all.
He had led this group of people who trusted him into a battle—and lost.
That night, Leo returned to his apartment alone.
He threw himself onto the sofa and stared at the ceiling.
The sense of defeat engulfed him like a tide.
Roosevelt’s voice rang out in his mind.
This time, there was no encouragement in that voice. Instead, it was extremely stern.
“Today, you made the kind of fatal mistake only a raw recruit makes on his first day on the battlefield!”
Roosevelt’s voice exploded through Leo’s consciousness.
“You treated the battlefield like a church. You treated the hearing like a sermon. You tried to use morality to move a pack of jackals who recognize nothing but profit!”
Leo felt a surge of grievance and defiance.
“Are we not standing on the side of justice?” he retorted. “Everything we’ve done is to protect this community. Is that wrong?”
“Justice?” Roosevelt’s voice carried a note of mockery. “At the card table of power, justice is something the victor uses to write history! The defeated have only the right to be defined and forgotten.”
“Did you think the law was your shield? You treated it like a Bible and prayed to it, hoping it would protect you. You were wrong! Completely wrong!”
“The law is a weapon! An iron rod you use to smash your opponent’s kneecaps! You must understand the rules better than they do, make better use of them than they do, and dare to walk the edge of those rules more than they do! Otherwise, you will be crushed to pieces by the rules themselves!”
This scolding jolted Leo awake from his wallowing in self-pity.
He sat up and turned on the light.
“Now wipe away your tears and put away that cheap sense of defeat.” Roosevelt’s tone returned to calm. “We’re going to conduct a postmortem.”
“Go through every detail of today’s hearing in your mind again, like watching a film—frame by frame.”
Under Roosevelt’s guidance, Leo forced himself to calm down.
He closed his eyes and began to recall.
Every scene from the hearing surfaced clearly in his mind.
“Start from the beginning,” Roosevelt said. “What was Wexler’s first move when he walked in?”
“He stood up, smiled at us, and nodded,” Leo replied.
“That was a show of force,” Roosevelt immediately analyzed. “He was using his politeness and refinement to highlight your crudeness and amateurism. Psychologically, from the very start, he wanted to define all of you as a group of intruders who didn’t know the rules.”
“What reason did he use when he interrupted your first statement?”
“He said the content of my statement was unrelated to the agenda.”
“That was a trap,” Roosevelt said. “Through the chair, he drew the battlefield in a way that was most advantageous to him. He successfully narrowed a public issue about the survival of a community into a dry debate about legal procedure. And in that field, he is the expert, while you are the novice.”
“Think again. When he produced that receipt for the letter, what was Chairman Jennings’s expression?”
Leo tried hard to recall.
“He only glanced at it, then immediately accepted it.”
“That means they had colluded long ago. That receipt was the first line of defense they had prepared. No matter what you said, they would use it to shut your mouth.”
Just like that, Roosevelt acted like the finest mentor, leading Leo through a frame-by-frame analysis of every word Wexler had said, every movement he had made, as well as every micro-expression and every exchanged glance among the municipal officials.
The more Leo analyzed, the more alarmed he became.
He realized that the seemingly plain hearing had actually been filled with countless carefully designed traps and psychological maneuvers.
And he himself had been like a naive child, plunging into it headfirst without the slightest defense.
The postmortem lasted several hours.
Leo’s brain had already been pushed to its limit. Just when he felt he was about to be unable to hold on, Roosevelt suddenly had him stop on a certain image.
It was the moment at the end of the hearing when Chairman Jennings announced the final decision.
“Repeat the last sentence he said,” Roosevelt ordered.
“He said… unless we can present decisive new evidence showing that there was a major flaw in the procedure of this auction,” Leo recalled.
“That’s the sentence.” There was a trace of excitement in Roosevelt’s voice. “Didn’t you notice? When he said that, he subconsciously glanced to his left. That was a micro-expression of guilty conscience and self-protection. He was leaving himself a way out.”
“Why would he need to leave himself a way out?” Leo asked, puzzled.
“Because he knows the entire procedure is not as flawless as Wexler made it appear. There must be some point where a defect exists—one even they cannot completely cover up.”
“Our breakthrough lies right there.”
Under Roosevelt’s direction, Leo turned his computer back on.
He pulled up Pittsburgh’s Regulations on the Disposal of Municipal Assets.
It was a document hundreds of pages long, filled with dull legal terminology.
“Don’t look at the general provisions. Jump straight to the section on ‘special-category assets,’” Roosevelt instructed.
Leo found the relevant section.
“Now, carefully read Article 11, Clause B.”
Leo saw the provision.
“For nonprofit institutional assets possessing the nature of ‘community public service,’ before deciding to conduct a public auction, City Hall must issue public notice of the disposal at least sixty days in advance through no fewer than three public media outlets local to Pittsburgh.”
“Three public media outlets…” Leo murmured.
At that moment, the first light of a counterattack shone into the apartment late at night.
He immediately began checking frantically.
He found the auction notice on the city government’s website. The publication date was forty-five days earlier, which did not meet the sixty-day requirement.
Then he searched the archival databases of every local newspaper.
In the end, he discovered that aside from the municipal government’s official website, this public notice had appeared only once in a community tabloid with a circulation of fewer than one thousand copies.
It did not meet the requirement of “three public media outlets” at all.
This was a procedural flaw that, while small, was fatal.
“We found it!” Leo was so excited he nearly jumped out of his chair. “I’ll draft a document right now and submit it to the City Council’s oversight committee first thing tomorrow morning!”
“No.”
Roosevelt stopped him.
“Now is not the time.”
“Why?” Leo did not understand. “This is decisive evidence!”
“A procedural flaw can, at most, delay them for a week and make them go through the notice process again.” Roosevelt’s voice returned to calm. “What we want is not delay.”
“What we want is complete victory.”
“Before the next hearing is convened, we must prepare a grand gift for them—one that can kill them off completely.”