The Ghost Shift (29 page)

Fuck eight generations of your ancestors
, thought Mei.

“I love my job,” she said.

Mei found him on her fourth evening, after the buzzer had signaled the end of the overtime shift. She had been moved to the start of the line, where her task was to clip a spring into the frame as it started its journey through many pairs of hands. The sound of the buzzer jolted her, so deep was the trance she’d trained herself to enter.

Her fingers were raw, but she’d learned to place the screw in the slot silently and efficiently, to avoid getting caught by the spring. She did her task as it had been designed, and the supervisors looked past her, on the hunt for other miscreants. A public apology to Long Tan, written by the woman who’d stood in her place before, was taped nearby. The offender had left, and in a few days, Mei had seen many faces come and go. The turnover was so rapid that she could hardly remember the faces of the departed—it was a shifting, fleeting community.

Nobody wanted to stay. They’d come there because it was easy to get a job, and it gave them a start in the city. But they all hoped for a better life: model, pop star, fashion designer—their dreams were impossibly big. She’d stopped worrying that somebody who had known Lizzie would recognize her, despite her tinted contact lenses, shorn hair, and makeup. She realized that being identified at Long Tan was as likely as being spotted in the street in Guangzhou.

Mei limped down the line to where Jun was gathering her things. Her feet and legs did not trouble her as long as she was concentrating on her assembly tasks. But at the end of the shift, they started to complain.
She longed to soak her muscles in a hot shower, but anyone who lingered provoked angry shouts from the crowd in the hallway. She sat by Jun on the golf cart to the dormitory, both silent until they’d had their food. They were in a line of buses and electric buggies whipping along the avenue. Mei was resting her eyes on the horizon at the day’s last light when she saw him.

It was a snapshot from the corner of her eye as he passed, but she knew it was him from his bearing. He sat erect in the front of a golf cart, by the driver, his hand wrapped around the handle of his cane.

“Stop!” Mei called to the driver.

“What?” Jun murmured. She was half-asleep, jolting awake only when they hit a bump.

“See you later.” Mei tripped in her rush to abandon the vehicle as it halted, running across the avenue to another vehicle that was heading back the way they had come. He’d disappeared into the distance and she pressed her foot to the floor, willing the driver to accelerate after him. His cart had passed out of sight beyond a row of trees, but she saw him as they caught up. He’d stepped from the vehicle and was walking into an apartment block.

The man had vanished again by the time she got inside. She stood in the lobby, listening to a ping-pong game echoing from a recreation room along a hallway. Then she heard the clicking of a cane in the distance. She circled the lobby to isolate the sound and found a corridor leading to a hall. As she ran along it, the door at the end closed behind him, the tip of his cane darting through.

It was a canteen, but not the kind she was used to, where hundreds of workers crammed around serving stations for meat and vegetables. Even as they ate, they were watched. Last night, an official had stopped Jun as she tipped her remains into a bin and told her to finish her rice. It was poor discipline to leave it because it was plentiful, he warned; Cao had gone hungry when he was a child.

There were no spies in this restaurant. It was for managers, who were allowed to eat in peace. Mei waited until he’d collected his food and settled at a table alone. Then she took her chance. When she sat opposite, he stared at her in shock as she took out a contact lens to
show him one green eye. His jaw fell open, showing a maw of half-chewed food. His face was as delicate as a butterfly, his eyelashes long and fine. He gulped in shock.

“They said you were dead.” As he spoke, he half-rose in his seat and Mei placed her hand on his to reassure him and hold him in his place. She looked around at the other seats, but nobody had noticed.

“I’m not dead. I’m here.”

“Who are you?” He reached across and plucked her badge. “Jiang Jia. This is crazy. This doesn’t make sense. You’re a spirit.” Panicked, he tried to stand again and she grasped his wrist.

“Listen to me. You wanted to talk after you rescued me. I had to go, but I’m here now. I’ll tell you everything.”

“Give me your badge.”

“Will you let me explain?”

He nodded, and she unclipped the badge and handed it across the table, studying him carefully in case he panicked. As he looked at it, he mouthed the words of her alias and stared at her.

“I knew it was wrong. I said it was those stupid strips—they couldn’t even get the date right. They said you’d died on the Monday night, but I’d seen you that week. I saved your life.”

“Liu was your friend, wasn’t she?”

“She was my dear friend. You’re not her.”

Mei saw his brain working slowly, piecing together evidence. “I’m a relative of hers. A close relative. I need you to come with me. There’s something very important I have to tell you. If you were Liu’s friend, if you loved her, you must do it in her memory. She would want you to.”

“I burned money at the temple. I prayed for her.” He talked to himself like an automaton.

“Thank you. Let’s take a walk.”

He nodded silently and, walking over to the bin, tipped his remaining food in. Nobody told him off for wasting it, and he was still chewing on his last mouthful in a trance as Mei led him out. She got him onto an electric cart and sat at the back, holding his hand. He gripped it blankly, as if his brain no longer understood but his body was set on cooperating. They stayed on board until the last stop, by
the compound gates, where she led him through to the street. It was nine o’clock, and a crowd of workers stood, chatting and smoking.

The
Hui Chun
poster was still in the apartment entrance opposite the Internet café, one corner flapping down. She ignored the elevator and climbed the stairs, with the man following her. On the second floor, she knocked on an apartment door, raising her face to a spy hole. An elderly caretaker with a long beard opened the door, nodded at Mei, and led them through to a room.

Lockhart was there, sitting at a desk by a window with a view of a dingy interior courtyard. The desk was piled up with electronics—a desktop computer, a laptop, and two hard drives—but he was not using them. Instead, he scribbled on a pad of paper. When he noticed them, he walked over to lock the door and then hugged Mei. It was the first time she’d emerged from Long Tan since entering the factory.

“This is him,” she said in English.

“Are you okay?” he asked, holding her by the shoulders. She nodded.

“Great work, Mei. You’re good at this.”

“Wait,” the man said, rattling the handle of the door. “I should not be here. Let me leave.”

Lockhart stood in front of him. “You’ll be here a few minutes and then you can go. You’re not in danger.”

“If they catch me, I am,” the man said. He wrestled with the handle and opened the door, then stopped. Feng stood on the other side, in a dark coat and beret. She stared at him so fiercely that he retreated to the desk, sitting mutely with his eyes on her as she unbuckled her coat.

“Sorry. Traffic,” she said to Lockhart, pulling another chair from the corner and sitting astride it, her hands resting on the back. She was just two or three feet away from the cowering captive.

“Name?”

“I can’t. I can’t—” He stammered the words, glancing piteously at Mei as if she’d betrayed him.

Feng flourished her identity card. “I work for the Ministry of State Security. I asked your name.”

“Ma Tung.”

“Okay, Ma Tung. We’re going to talk, and then you’ll go back across the road and forget about our conversation. You will not mention it to anyone. It never happened. Is that understood?”

Ma gulped like a fish, wide-eyed.

“You understand?”

“I do.”

“We don’t want to hurt you. I’m grateful to you for saving me. I know you helped Tang Liu,” Mei said.

“We don’t want to, but we will, if you say anything. You will disappear. You will be forgotten.” Feng put on a slow, stupid voice.

“ ‘What happened to Ma Tung?’ ‘I don’t know. He vanished.’ We can do it easily. We have the power. You know that, don’t you?”

Ma trembled. “Yes.”

“We want to know one thing. Then you can go. Okay?”

Ma nodded, his trance-like state returning, as if he’d seen so many strange things that he’d slipped into a dream.

“Where did Tang Liu go?”

“I don’t know. She disappeared.”

“No,” Feng said with exaggerated patience, as if talking to an idiot. “Before. When you saw Jia, in the crowd near the boy who died. You said she’d ‘made it out.’ Where was she?”

“She—I don’t—”

Feng rocked forward on the chair and slapped Ma on the face, leaving a red mark on his cheek. He stroked it in shock.

“Don’t waste my time. Don’t lie.”

“The—I—”

“Where was she? Tell me
now
.”

“The ghost shift,” he said.

Mei saw the glow of the Internet café from beneath the window—the strip-light sodium and the liquid crystal of computer screens. She looked down into the alley’s darkness nervously.

“We don’t have long,” she said in English.

“How much time?” Lockhart said.

“They lock the dormitories at eleven-thirty and the lights go out at midnight. It’s after ten.”

Ma still sat at the desk, head down, resting on the hard surface. He’d started moaning after answering Feng’s question, as if he had injured himself. Feng ignored him, getting up from the chair and throwing her beret onto the desk by his head. She picked up his cane and examined it, running a painted nail over its glossy surface.

“This is nice. Malacca, with a sterling silver handle. Monogrammed. How old? Nineteenth century?”

Ma moaned again.

“I bet you picked it up in Hong Kong. How much?”

“It was my great-grandfather’s. He was a trader in Canton.”

“That’s quite a family. Tell me about the ghost shift.”

Ma pulled himself upright and groaned, louder and with more resentment. “You said I could go,” he sulked.

“When we’re finished, I said.”

“I answered your question. That’s all you said you wanted.”

“Explain what you meant.”

Ma looked tired, Lockhart thought. The excitement of being kidnapped was fading, and he was becoming irritable. Lockhart knew it
was the time in an interrogation when the subject could go silent and refuse to cooperate—not because it made sense but out of obstinacy, the urge to prove that he still had autonomy and had not been entirely crushed.

“Come, Ma Tung,” he said. “Then it will be over.”

Ma raised his eyes balefully. “There are five teams in Long Tan—white, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Everyone’s a member of one of the teams—it identifies where they work and sleep. Then there’s one more, red. We don’t talk about it much. I don’t know what they do, nobody does. They work in the north of the complex, factory P-1 and dormitory P-2. They’re sealed off from the rest. They call it the ghost shift.”

“What do they make there?” Feng asked.

Ma shrugged.

“Is it tablets? Poppy tablets?”

“Maybe.”

“How do you know about it?”

“I work in the management office. We arrange all the shifts for the facilities, even the break times. We choose the sports teams, who is allowed to take their holidays. I’ve got a lot of responsibility. Everything must run smoothly. They trust me.” Ma looked panicky again. “I took a very big risk for you. I saved your life,” he said to Mei. “Aren’t you grateful?”

“I really am.” She leaned forward to touch his arm.

“It sounds like an important job,” Lockhart said.

“It is.” Ma puffed up in his seat. “You know what it’s like. There are good jobs and bad ones, nice shifts and nasty ones. I can reward those who deserve it and make things easier for them.”

“In exchange for money? For a red envelope?” Feng asked.