The Ghost Shift (12 page)

Above her, she could hear a bolt slide and the door push open so forcefully that it slammed up against the wall. She heard a drumbeat of steps—it had to be a dozen men—scrambling across the roof, with one shouting commands.

“Check there! And there! The tank!”

A man’s face poked over the edge. He wore a green helmet, and she caught a glimpse of PLA fatigues. She shut her eyes, waiting for a shout of alarm, but none was forthcoming. When she looked again, he was gone.

“Clear!” The man in command shouted and stamped his feet at attention, then the unit ran across the roof in unison. She could hear their footfalls, like a herd of cattle, as they disappeared down the stairs.

There was silence, and then she heard the door creak again, slowly this time, and someone stepped onto the roof. He had an unhurried gait, and his shoes crunched gently for a few steps. When he spoke, his voice was as gentle as his walk—it had a rich timbre.

“So, old comrade. What brings you here?”

“I could ask the same.” The Wolf’s voice was closer, not far from where she lay. In the moment when he’d pushed her off the roof—a few minutes ago, although it already felt like hours—she’d believed he was her murderer. Now he had become her guardian again.

“I heard you were here, and we haven’t spoken in so long. Not the two of us alone. Not like the old days.”

“And you always liked a view.”

“You don’t forget anything, do you? I’ve always envied your memory.” The voice turned sharp. “Where is the girl?”

“What girl?”

“The one you had fetched here. That one, Comrade Lang. Perhaps your memory’s fading, after all.”

“Her? I sent her away. I wanted someone to tell me about the boy who fell. She didn’t know him.”

“That is a pity.” The voice was soft. “One thing puzzles me, though. Why are you so interested? It’s not any of your business, is it? Some kid in a factory takes his own life. The Party’s got bigger things to worry about. Tramping around the marshes last night? It sounds like one of your obsessions.”

The Wolf laughed, the gurgle of phlegm in his throat.

“That’s my life. Chasing after stray incidents, trying to make them add up. Most of it comes to nothing. I don’t know why you’re interested.”

“A couple of sad kids, far from home? That’s trivial. It’s for the security bureau, if anyone. You’ve got more urgent matters to address—criminals and capitalist roaders. Eliminating antisocial elements in our society. The standing committee has warned of the threat to the Party. There are temptations in this world—not a simple life, like when we were young. You’ve always been loyal, but someone who didn’t know you might wonder if you’ve lost your way. Maybe it’s deliberate—vested interests have blinded you. That would be serious. We don’t mind you taking a red envelope here or there, but perhaps you’ve gone too far.”

“You needn’t worry. I do my job.”

“Oh, I trust you. I’m just worried in case others misunderstand your behavior. I’ve heard disturbing stories. Come, let’s take a walk.”

The two sets of footsteps receded. Mei heard a few more words and then an indistinguishable mumble, getting softer.

Without them to distract her, her senses focused again on her plight. Her hands tightened, fingering the tight threads wrapped and bound into squares. As the wind blew, they whistled softly. She felt paralyzed, afraid to let go in case she rolled over and fell. She had an image of the corpse far beneath, limbs twisted against hard earth. Where had he jumped from? How could he have evaded the net? Either he’d been hell-bent on dying, or someone had helped him into the air.

The voices returned, at first faintly and then louder. Eventually the murmurings turned back into words.

“Come. Let me take you back.”

“There’s no need. I can find my way,” the Wolf said.

“I insist.”

“Very well.”

“Come along.” The stranger’s tone of voice was somewhere between an invitation and a command.

The Wolf’s boots scraped on the gravel, and a burst of dust and stones tumbled over the roof onto Mei. She flinched as debris scattered on her face, one pebble bouncing against the ropes as it fell, making it hum like the string of an instrument. She listened to his steps—heavy, bearing the weight of age—follow the other man’s toward the door. The last thing she heard was the shuffle of boots and the scrape of the bolt.

Alone, Mei looked at the stars and calculated her chance of escape. It felt close to zero. She could not climb onto the roof. It was twenty feet above her, and the wall was smooth. She’d first have to clamber to her feet and try to stand on the cable mesh, an intolerable thought. There was no way down—she could not even dare to look.

For the time being, the darkness made her invisible. Nobody could see her from the ground; from below, she hadn’t spotted the net, even though it ran the length of the building. Come dawn she would be obvious. She was doomed, not just by where she was but by her status—a young woman with no connections. The Wolf had tried to shield her, but he couldn’t now. She lay in the web, waiting for the spider.

Lying there, she thought about what she’d overheard. It frightened her how easily the Wolf had submitted. She had thought of him as all-powerful, with the privileges that high Party rank brought. Yet he had followed meekly, as if he lacked the power to resist. Time passed slowly. She gripped the cables, holding tightly as the wind sent shivers through the net.

Above her, the bolt scraped and the door opened. Someone came through it and called out in a high voice.

“Liu! Liu! Are you here?”

She soon realized who was calling her. It was the man who’d stood excitedly by her in the crowd and then melted away at the guard’s approach. As if to confirm it, she could hear the click of his cane
striking the roof as he walked toward the edge. She wondered whether to give herself away and realized there was no choice.

“I’m here,” she called, quietly at first and then louder. “I’m over here. Beneath the ledge.”

The cane clicked more rapidly than the other men had walked, and the man’s face peered down.

“Shit, girl. You jumped?”

“Of course I didn’t.”

“What happened, then?”

“Just help me.” She no longer bothered to disguise her accent.

“As easy as that?” He laughed suddenly, as if tension had been released from him. “You’re the same, even down there. Push me around, dangle me from your finger. You know I’m your puppet.”

The head vanished and she heard him clicking away, then an echo on the stairwell. Mei lay back, her fingers slackening a notch. There was something about his laugh that reassured her. She heard the bang of a door and the tap of his cane from beneath her position. As she twisted to look down, a rush of vertigo made her head snap back again.

“Look this way. Crawl toward me.” His voice sounded from somewhere below, but at least a hundred feet distant, at a diagonal. It appeared to be coming from midair, as if he were a sprite.

“I can’t do it,” she cried. “I’m scared.”

“Scared? Not the woman I know. Come on, we don’t have time to mess around. They’ll be back from the overtime shift soon.”

Mei took a deep breath and calmed herself: She would do this if it killed her, and indeed, she felt as if it might. Clenching her eyes, she lifted her arm and rolled onto her stomach, making the cables sway. Then, counting to three, she forced her eyes open. The lights of the city and the vision of the delta spilling toward the Pearl River disoriented her, but she peered across to see him standing below the net. A line of balconies was punched into the side of the building, hung with laundry. He gripped the rail with one hand and waved his cane.

She had to obey. Pushing her arms, she got herself up on all fours and crawled, climbing the incline toward one of the poles. That part was bearable, but she now faced the drop on the other side. She
grunted to block her thoughts, placed her palm on the downward slope, and slithered her hips over the pole. Her left hand went down, missing the cable and plunging through the gap into space, making her cry out in terror.

The young man laughed, closer now. “God, girl. You’re making a mess.”

“You try it,” she called out in pain, making him laugh again.

She inched her way slowly across until she was suspended about ten feet above him, with a view of his upturned face from the balcony. He climbed on a tattered chair and reached out with his cane, rattling the small gap between the building and the net.

“Through here.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You said you couldn’t do
this.
Pull yourself over and twist.”

Mei obeyed, letting her legs slide until her butt hit the wall. Then she thrust herself into the gap, feet first. She slowly wiggled her hips past the cable and squeezed it over her breasts, then hung there, trying to calculate a soft way down. Finding no way to do so, she twisted her face sideways and let go of the wires, falling into his arms. She landed with a painful crack on one ankle and sprawled on the balcony.

Hopping off the chair, he bent down and kissed her, then clapped his palms, hands upright.

“Baby, you made it.”

Mei pulled herself to her haunches, with her arms wrapped around her knees for comfort. She was on a solid surface—still a dozen stories up, on a balcony that she’d never have ventured onto by choice, but safe. She felt faint with the shock of what she’d achieved.

“Thanks,” she croaked. Her voice wasn’t working properly.

“So?” The young man’s face was still lit up with excitement at the escapade, as if it had been a game he’d invented.

“So?”

“You’ve got a lot to tell me. Remember the last time we saw each other before you went? What I said?”

“How could I forget?”

“Let’s get out of here.”

He grabbed her hand and pulled her up so that she was standing in front of him, his face tilted. Then he pulled her through the door to the balcony, into a dimly lit room. It was a women’s dormitory, in which a lamp glowed softly from behind a pink and white sheet veiling a bottom bunk. There were eight bunks, crammed top to bottom in the room, lining the walls on both sides and leaving a narrow path through the middle. As they passed, a row of teddy bears stared at them.

He didn’t pause, pulling open the door and emerging onto a long corridor, empty apart from two green-uniformed workers gossiping at its end. He trotted toward them, tugging Mei in his wake. Despite his cane and three-legged walk, she had trouble keeping up. Her wounded ankle made her limp, and the scrape in her cheek was starting to burn—she was beginning to feel sensations other than terror. The two women turned, staring at her red tunic, then turned away, sensing trouble and not wanting to get involved. The young man nodded to them as he pushed the elevator button.

She stood at the back of the elevator until the doors opened on the first floor and her companion peered out. Satisfied, he took her hand and they limped hurriedly past the same array of workers in front of the same television show, as if nothing of interest had happened, and emerged onto the road, where normality had resumed. The crowd and the guards had dispersed, and the corpse had been taken away. Mei saw the flickering headlights of an electric cart in the distance.

“Stop.” She pulled her hand from his.

“What, baby?”

“I can’t talk now.”

“We must. You made me sick with worry.”

She grasped his soft, downy cheek.

“We’ll chat tomorrow. Look at me, I’m a mess, and I need a shower. I have to clean up. I’m a woman, silly.”

He nodded and she seized the opening, limping across the road as the cart stopped for passengers on its path to the exit.

Mei’s head ached and her ankle throbbed. She squinted at her alarm clock, which she had set to seven o’clock after returning to the compound in the early hours. Nodding to the guard, she had tried to look like she’d been out on a job. She figured it was true, in a way.

Pipes shuddered as a hundred taps were turned on at the same time and the water spurted out unpredictably, first icy, then burning. You had to be ready to jump to avoid being frozen or scalded. She let the jets strike the back of her neck, appreciating the force this time, and examined her body as the water ran down it in rivulets. A scrape on one wrist and bruises on her hips, others down her back where she had been trapped by the mesh. She tested her ankle as she stepped out. It made her wince, but the bones were intact. She’d have to bear it for a couple of days.