The Ghost Shift (7 page)

Mei scanned the wall, trying to measure it. It had to be three or four miles—it held a city, not just a factory.

“Does she work there?”

“She comes home every month.” The boy’s resigned acceptance made her eyes water, blurring the image.

It was a long way from the jetty to Long Tan—a mile, maybe two. No road joined them, just a network of tributaries and streams. How could the body have gotten here, stripped of its uniform and left in a fishpond? How had she died in a marsh where no one but peasants and real estate developers ventured? She could easily have vanished altogether if the Wolf hadn’t taken an interest. For some reason, he’d risked himself to summon Mei and show her that she wasn’t alone.

The god of fortune was the only one that Lockhart believed in. He kept a figurine of the fat Buddha at home and rubbed its belly as he left his apartment whenever he was in need of luck. The little idol laughed back reassuringly, holding its golden ingots and promising wealth. Lockhart had always trusted fortune and, until now, it had worked for him. His gambles had paid off, or they hadn’t hurt too much when they had failed.
Don’t waste your life
, his mother had urged him when he was a child.
Take a chance.

By the temple, he rubbed his own belly. He was still in shape, only fifteen pounds heavier than when he’d left Yale. Few of his classmates could say that. Lockhart had seen them at a recent reunion, hair graying, stomachs bulging, content to lapse into middle age. He’d fingered his collar during the speeches, suffocated by the company. Once, he had caught the eye of a woman he’d tried to sleep with—now married with two children at college—and she’d smiled, as if it might not be too late. His spirits had lifted but, recalling it now, he cursed his stupid pride.

Once a resting place for Qing nobles, the temple had been abandoned for decades. It was still handsome, the entrance topped with red tiles that were arrayed in curves like an emperor’s boat. Mao’s destruction of temples and works of art during the Cultural Revolution was long finished; these days, the Party preferred to let temples decay. A guard waved him into the courtyard, past a eucalyptus tree strung with red lanterns. He walked by a bell tower and approached the main building. Tiles were missing from its roof, but its wood panels
shone with gold and blue lacquer. Stone lions guarded the steps, each with a foot resting on a ball. The yard was empty except for a middle-aged couple standing by an incense-burning brick oven.

The man placed a stack of fake paper bills in the oven, the red and gold sheets of joss tightly rolled and arranged in circular stacks, like a wedding cake. He struck a match and lit the pyre, sending smoke in spirals up the chimney. It was an offering of money to the ghosts of dead relatives, Lockhart knew, to make them comfortable in the afterlife. The woman pulled out a bundle from her bag—copper money for the recently deceased. She gave them to him to throw on the flames, and they watched the fire in silence, their heads bowed.

When the fire died out, they walked up the steps into the temple, Lockhart following. He had to bend his head to pass through the entrance, and he stood by a rear wall, feeling confined. The windows were low and the passages narrow. The space was crammed with four Buddhas, their heads in the temple eaves. They rested on a dais behind clusters of candles in glass jars, which emitted a watery light, offerings of fruit strewn in front of them. A smaller idol of the god of fortune sat to one side. The woman knelt, lighting candles and incense sticks.

Lockhart bowed his head; by the time he looked up, the man was staring at him. He left again, finding a place on a wall under the eucalyptus tree where he could wait in the shade. When the couple emerged, they walked across to where he sat, looking like strangers to the city. The woman wore a tunic and cotton pants, good for farm labor, and the man had cheap jeans and a zip-up jacket. Lockhart saw stoicism in their faces: they’d known bad times before.

Lockhart stood. “Mr. and Mrs. Wu. I’m very sorry for your loss. You have my condolences.”

“You speak Chinese.” Mr. Wu looked surprised.

“Not
Sichuanhua
, I’m afraid. Only Mandarin, and I need to practice. I learned it years ago.”

“What do you want with us?” The woman’s eyes were narrow. She was used to being misled by officials and did not expect any different from him.

“Please, let me explain.” He indicated the chairs he’d set by the
tree. He’d given the sentry twenty yuan to fetch them from a storeroom and to dust them off—it was ages since they’d been used. “May I ask you something first? Have you heard anything from Long Tan?”

“They told us nothing,” she said, bitterly. “We were sent a letter. They haven’t even sent back her things.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. I sympathize,” Lockhart said. He felt terrible, not only because of his task but also because of their story. Everything they said heightened his sense of anxiety. The man nodded once, embarrassed by the sympathy. Lockhart pressed on.

“That is why I am here. Poppy wants to treat you fairly. It is a matter of honor, although—” He hesitated in shame at the next words of the script. “Although the company bears no legal responsibility.”

The couple looked at him blankly.

“You understand? It is not responsible under the law.”

Lockhart felt physically sick. He was trying to force a waiver from a bereaved couple. What kind of man was he? Had he always been like this but had never noticed? Had never cared? Drops of sweat trickled down his forehead. Two nights before, the moon had broken from behind the clouds above Victoria Harbor, and its beam had shone through the blinds, searing his eyes as he lay awake, cursing his recklessness. He’d lost something so precious that his brain kept returning to the blunder he’d made, tormenting him. He waited desperately for the phone to ring or the ping of an email to break the deathly silence, but nothing came. All he needed, the thing that could restore his sanity, had vanished.

“She loved her Poppy phone,” Mrs. Wu said, smiling sadly. “She was happy to make them.”

“Tell me about her,” Lockhart said, gratefully.

“Ning was a good girl. She sent us money. She didn’t waste it, like some of them. She wanted to come back to Sichuan when she could—she said she’d find a husband here.”

“She looked forward to that?”

“She was always happy and laughing. She talked about the New Year holiday when we last spoke.”

“When was that?”

“A month ago.”

“That is a long time, Mrs. Wu. Why didn’t she contact you again?”

Mr. Wu broke in. “It wasn’t her fault. She was assigned a new job, and she said she might not be able to call.”

“I see.” Lockhart looked over the temple wall toward an apartment block on the far side of the canal, and his throat went dry. It was as if Mr. Wu were telling him his own story.

“Your wife says that Ning was happy, Mr. Wu. I must ask: Do you know why she killed herself?”

“Ning did not kill herself.” Mrs. Wu stared at him fiercely. “We taught her how to work hard, and she wanted us to be proud. She would not have made us suffer like this.”

A few days before, he wouldn’t have believed them—he would have smiled and dismissed it as parental blindness.
Of course
it was suicide. Twenty of them—sixteen women and four men—had thrown themselves off roofs. What other explanation could there be but self-harm? Now, after his own nights of hell, he felt differently. However Ning had died, it wasn’t her doing. He knew it, and it scared him sick.

He lifted his briefcase and took out an envelope, putting it on the wall between them.

“I am sure you’re right, Mr. Wu. She sounds like a wonderful young woman, and this is a tragedy. Poppy is doing all it can to ensure nobody else suffers in that way. You have heard of Henry Martin?”

Mr. Wu nodded. Even a Chinese farmer without a mobile phone knew of Poppy’s founder.

“Mr. Martin trusts in Long Tan to manufacture his products responsibly and to keep all of the workers safe. He is very upset by what has happened. That is why he sent me to see you.”

Another lie. Lockhart doubted whether Martin gave the life of Wu Ning a single thought, except that it was trouble for his company. The Chinese media was filled with stories of the deaths and the price that migrant workers paid to build his devices.

He picked up the envelope. “Mr. Martin wants to offer you this. The sum of money Wu Ning would have earned in a year, with overtime. We hope you will accept a token of our respect.”

Mr. Wu glanced at his wife and, after a second’s pause, she closed her eyes and nodded.

“I am glad. There is just one thing to sign.” Lockhart’s hand trembled as he took a document from the envelope. It wasn’t possible to feel lower, dirtier. In the night, he’d imagined the dark tunnels of the Shenzhen subway, the trains shooting into stations, their lights blazing.
What would it be like to jump? How painful would it be?

“It is English, but let me explain. There is a lot of legal language, and I hardly understand it myself.” He smiled, his charm switching on automatically. He’d always been good at this. “It says you will accept this settlement and you will not take legal action.”

Mr. Wu looked at his wife again, and she nodded her consent.

“One other thing. You will not talk about it with anyone. Not to the media or others. You will be silent.”

This time, the man did not bother to check but reached forward and scratched his name on the paper, where Lockhart had indicated.

Lockhart left the couple under the tree and went back through the courtyard to the gate. The sentry had taped a rope across the entrance in a halfhearted effort to dissuade others from coming inside. In the evening light, he stepped down to the bank of the canal, where two barges were moored. He lit a cigarette, his hands shaking, and tried to calm himself by imagining the scene as it had been centuries before. The temple, the shacks lining the water, a boy fishing with a rod. No towers, no six-lane highway.

Taking a piece of paper from a pocket, he examined the characters with a frown. His calligraphy had deteriorated, the feathered strokes becoming crude lines. He folded it between his fingers and set off down the towpath, around a curve to where a bridge crossed a canal. Three families sat on the deck of a restaurant, under glowing lanterns. A waiter passed out dishes at one table—pork and marrow soup, goose with sour cherry sauce,
lai niao xia
shrimp.

Lockhart crossed a passage at the side of the restaurant and into a courtyard at the rear. Two waiters smoked on a bench and one called to him.

“Not here. The other side.”

He ignored them, walking through the kitchen door. It was filled
with steam, cooks rattling pans over open flames. Every surface and tile was coated with grime. If he’d been an inspector, he’d have wanted a bribe to ignore it. He passed a tank of lethargic eels, eyes bulging, as he made his way to the chef.

“We spoke,” he said.

The man looked up from the book he was reading. He leaned back in his chair, lifting the front legs from the floor, and grabbed a set of keys from a hook on the wall behind him. Then he walked into the dining room and unlocked a door under the stairs.

At the rear of the cellar, Lockhart stooped so that his head would not knock against a stone arch. The chef swung a sack of rice to one side and reached behind it to a pile of smaller ones. He pulled a sack from halfway down and delved into his pocket for a knife, slicing the cloth so that fat grains of rice burst out. The man let a portion spill onto the floor, then lifted the bag up onto a crate. Plunging a hand inside, he pulled out a package wrapped in two Ziploc bags.

As Lockhart unsealed them, he smelled the oil that had been rubbed over the object to keep it from rusting. It was a Sig Sauer P238, dark and squat, with a fluted polymer grip. Its six-bullet magazine lay next to the weapon. Lockhart raised the weapon and pulled back the Nitron slide. Then he squeezed the trigger, releasing the pin against the chamber. The German parts clicked together smoothly, despite their time at sea.

The badge was a mystery. Mei sat at her desk at dawn trying to understand it, but she kept running into the same problem—the number on it was wrong. She had examined it painstakingly the previous evening and thought she must be making a mistake, but a night’s sleep had changed nothing. The eighteen-digit identity code printed under the girl’s image made no sense.