The Ghost Shift Read online

  “Do you like your work, Comrade Song?”

  “Yes, Secretary. I have learned a lot.”

  “It is not easy to investigate the Party. People will resent you and tell you to look the other way. Sometimes, they will threaten you.”

  “It must be done, to earn the people’s trust.” She repeated the rote phrase that they had learned.

  “That’s right. How old are you now?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  He nodded.

  She felt his eyes on her in the gloom and thought of the first time she had seen him, a month before. She had been pulled out of a lecture to take notes at a Party meeting. It was an honor, of course, and she had rushed to the building, shaking with nerves. A delegation was visiting from Chongqing, and they had needed to fill the seats. The armchairs, topped with lace antimacassars, had been arranged in two lines of eight facing each other, with a pair of armchairs at the head for the leaders of the delegations. Shown into the room as the meeting started, she scurried to the junior place. All formal meetings were like this—they started with the careful filling of teacups by young attendants and polite expressions of good wishes to the other side.

  She had taken out a pen and listened as the Wolf had croaked his way through a welcome to the visitors before the business began. He had looked uneasy. Words did not come easily to him. That was why he hadn’t risen further, they said—the honey tongue belonged to Chen Longwei, the Party secretary for Guangdong. After his set piece, the Wolf had remained silent, interjecting occasionally to correct an official. But once, when she looked up, she had seen him gazing at her as if she intrigued him. Even after she had caught his glance, he had kept looking. She had bowed her head, embarrassed.

  The Wolf spoke again. “Song Mei, I’ve brought you here to show you something you have to see. It will be hard for you. It will require all of your strength. Do you understand?”

  “I understand, Secretary Lang.” She did not, but she felt the shock of being called by her name. She was alone, three months after she had been recruited, with an official so senior that many people who worked for the Commission served an entire career without ever speaking to him directly.

  “You cannot talk about what you see to anyone else, not even that eager young man. Promise me that.”

  “I promise.” She wondered at his casual dismissal of her partner, as if Yao’s family meant nothing.

  The Wolf gestured at her to follow, pulling another flashlight out of a pocket for her to use. As they walked, the leaves fell away, and they passed beyond the grove to a field that had been dammed at each side and flooded to form a fishpond. The Wolf turned right and tiptoed along the edge, his flashlight casting a glow on the water’s surface. Then he halted and looked back, illuminated by her beam. His face was rigid, and he looked desolate.

  Mei shone her light on the water where he was pointing. In the pool of white, she saw rushes and noticed a tubular shape a few feet from where she stood. She turned the beam on it.

  It was a leg, the ankle poking above the surface. Dark shapes moved against the leg in the water and she could see mud carp trawling the body in search of food, their fleshy lips open. Their scales glinted in the light; a large fish nearly the length of the corpse’s foot flicked its tail and swam off. It looked big enough to be harvested.

  Mei shuddered at the sight of the fish swimming mutely around the body and then stilled herself, afraid of looking frail in front of the Wolf. He had told her to be strong, and she was going to prove herself.

  She ran the light up the leg to the corpse’s buttocks, twin moons against a watery sky. The width and roundness of the hips indicated that it was a woman—a young one, her skin smooth and full, still with a faint echo of sexuality. She was naked.

  Mei had not breathed since directing her light on the water. Inhaling, she smelled, mingled with mud, the stench of ripe human.

  A tattoo marked the small of the corpse’s back, and Mei bent toward it. The blob was distended by the bloated skin, and she couldn’t make out the shape or the lettering. The body beyond the hips lay below the surface, twisted so that only one shoulder and arm were in view. Her hair on the water spread out around her head like a black halo. The woman was facedown, staring blindly into the pool. Her fingers were long and delicate, like Mei’s, and she was just as tall and slim. The wrist was marked with a welt, like a red bracelet.

  The Wolf wedged his foot on the slope, holding a branch with a rough fork at the end. Leaning forward, he lodged the fork under the armpit, and lifted, the corpse’s arm bending at the elbow as it twisted in the water. He executed the maneuver expertly, as if knowing exactly how to exert the minimum effort, and was already stepping back as the body rolled.

  One breast came clear of the water as the arm flapped backward and fell with a splash behind the body, then the other. Mei was beginning to realize why the Wolf had brought her there. This wasn’t just a body in a field. The corpse’s shape was hers, she realized—the same length, the same curves. She gazed along it as it settled in the water, like a nymph rising from the deep, until she came to the face.

  Then she understood, and everything else—the slap of the wave against the bank, the laughter of the cops across the water, the moon dimming as a cloud obscured it—receded to nothingness. All she could see was a woman with the same nose, the same eyes, and the same face.

  Her twin.

  A drop of water trickled off Mei’s nose and splashed in the water by her feet, then another. She breathed normally, she did not weep, yet tears flowed out of her as if a pipe had burst. She stepped forward, descending the bank into the soft mud. The Wolf grunted, but she didn’t halt.

  She reached out, touching the cheek and stroking a lock of hair from across the girl’s left eye. Close up, she saw a green iris surrounded by blood vessels. Her eyelashes were long and her eyebrows neatly shaped. The head turned and the mouth opened as if the corpse were about to speak, but only water spilled out.

  The Wolf leaned forward with his branch and tapped Mei’s shoulder. Her mind was in such turmoil that she hardly noticed, but after a few seconds she came to her senses and climbed out of the pool to stand by him.

  “Do you see why I called you?” the Wolf asked.

  “Yes, Secretary Lang, I understand.”

  “Did you know this woman?”

  Mei gripped her palms to her ribs. “I didn’t know I had a sister. Nobody told me.”

  “Not even your parents?”

  “I never knew my parents.”

  The Wolf did not respond. Instead he threw the branch far into the darkness and rubbed his hands briskly to shed the dirt. Then he placed a hand on her shoulder to guide her back toward the police and Yao. He lit the way with his flashlight, while hers dangled at her side, and spoke over his shoulder.

  “Something happened here, Comrade Song. You can’t explain it and neither can I, but we will discover the truth. You see those people?”—the Wolf pointed at the cops in the arc light—“They don’t care. If we weren’t here, they’d have given up. Just a migrant girl lost in the city. Maybe a big man was involved, and they shouldn’t provoke him. Case closed. Am I too cynical?”

  “No, Secretary Lang.”

  “I’ve lived a long time. Too long, some people think. I’m an old head. I should retire. They say that, don’t they?”

  “They don’t,” Mei lied.

  They were two hundred feet from the police when the Wolf stopped, facing Mei in the banana field, amid the drooping leaves.

  “No one knows who she was. Not these fools, not those who did this. Remember that.”

  As they left the field and walked up the hill, Mei saw Yao laughing with a cop, having lost interest in where she had gone. The Wolf stopped by Inspector Wen, and pointed into the darkness.

  “You can take her now.”

  Before dawn, Mei dreamed of the water ghost.

  She was in a boat on the Li River, being drawn toward a cormorant fisher, with two of the birds perc
hed on the bamboo pole that rested on his shoulders, his face hidden by his conical hat. The man frightened her, and she paddled as hard as she could to evade him. She would be safe around the bend, but the tide flowed against her, pulling her back. Her shoulders ached, the paddle twisting in the stream. Somehow she made it to the bend, then drifted to the far edge of the river, where the water was still and clear. The pebbles were green and yellow, and fish swam across them in shoals, flicking from side to side.

  As Mei gazed at them, a woman floated under the boat and broke through the surface toward her. It was the spirit who lingered in rivers and lakes, waiting to seize the ankles of passersby and drag them down. The water ghost longed to be reborn, but she first needed a substitute to take her place. This story had scared Mei profoundly as a child. When the lights went out, she had imagined the ghost in the shadows.

  The ghost’s fingers were long and elegant, the nails painted a deep red. Mei pried them off her ankle, but the hand fastened on her wrist instead. The ghost was too strong to resist. It dragged her into the water, her body scraping the side of the vessel. The water was inky green, impenetrable. She held her breath as the ghost pulled her deeper, its long hair in her face. Her lungs felt like they would burst.

  Mei awoke with a start. She was in her bed. Her coat was back on the door, her other garments scattered on the floor where she’d pulled them off only a few hours before. It was six-fifteen, and light was creeping past the edges of the blinds that were supposed to block it. Her shoes, spattered with mud, rested under the desk on the far side of the room. She flung an arm over her face, burying her eyes in the crook of her elbow, as much to block out reality as the dawn.

  One child.

  Until the moment she’d looked into her sister’s eyes, Mei had never known a relative. No brother, no sister, no cousin. Not even a parent. Everyone in her generation felt an absence, living in a country where siblings were banned in case the population grew even more, from one billion to two or three. Deep down, late at night, each of them was alone. Yet she had been the loneliest. Until now.

  It was a terrible discovery—that in the moment that she’d gained a twin, the woman had disappeared into the black water. Her companion, the sister who would have understood her the way that no one else did, was gone. She’d had to make her own way in life, with no background or family to give her the connections that Yao took for granted. Unknowingly, she had had a shadow.

  Breakfast was in less than two hours, and she yearned to lose consciousness again, but it was time to rise. All her life she’d forced herself to get up, to learn, never to be stuck where she was. She’d come so far, and she couldn’t give up now. As she swung her feet from the bed, she remembered her last sight of the Wolf, sitting stiffly in the back of the Audi A8 as it drove away, leaving the body behind. He’d looked older than when she’d first seen him in the marsh, half an hour before. His last act had been to bind her to secrecy. She wondered whether it was for her sake or his.

  “How old are you now?”

  That extra word—now—he’d used the night before had stuck in her head, unexplained. Not “how old,” the question a stranger would ask, but how old now—the phrase of a relative or an old family friend. Haven’t you grown? Are you enjoying school? How old are you now?

  She put on a tracksuit and ran down the stairs from the fourth floor of her apartment block—the old elevator was too slow and unreliable, and the noise would wake others. Then she stepped onto Yuexiu Bei Road, turning right toward Yuexiu Park along the red-tiled sidewalk. The road was nearly empty—only a woman squatting under a banyan tree, a yellow bus hauling early commuters, and a lone PLA soldier standing to attention by the entrance to the compound on the far side of the street. The sun was starting to gleam through the gaps in the apartment blocks.

  Crossing Xiaobei Road, she entered the park through the arched entrance and walked along the old city wall, which was covered by a scrambled mess of roots that had descended from the trees above, like upside-down climbing plants. Paddleboats lined the green lake on her right under the lattice cone of the old Television Tower, an ugly monument to the era when making steel had been an achievement in itself.

  Thirty people stood in formation on a lawn by a playground. She hurried to join them, slipping into place between two women amid lines of black-uniformed men. The imbalance did not matter, for this was Wing Chun, the Cantonese martial art invented during the Qing dynasty by a woman. The story went that Ng Mui, the female Shaolin monk, based it on a fight between a snake and a crane—the darting punch of the cobra’s strike and the soft blows of the crane’s wings. Yao laughed at her—“You want to be a prizefighter, Mei?”—but she was devoted to her twice-weekly sessions, under the stern eye of her sifu.

  They started with siu nim tau, the set of understated movements or “little ideas” that represented every kick and punch of full-blown combat as small, graceful wrist twists and knee bends. It was more like t’ai chi than kung fu, and she loved the elegant patterns the moves traced. It was a graceful discipline in which poise defeated strength. As you deflected a clumsy punch with one hand, you retaliated with a lightning thrust—defense and attack in one movement.

  Mei drew her feet into the character two—heels splayed outward and toes pointed in. She’d felt stupid the first time she’d tried the stance, her knees bent in as if holding a goat, but it was second nature now—it rooted her to the ground like a tree, and when she hit someone, they felt it. She crossed her arms, palms up, and started the twists and turns of siu nim tau in unison with the others. As her palm angled around her wrist in huen sau, her tension faded. She was a Wing Chun disciple again.

  They finished by boxing in pairs; one partner holding up a pad while the other launched a flurry of punches, throwing vertical fists forward with the full weight of arm and body. The sifu partnered with Mei; she tried to force him backward with punches, but he didn’t move. He looked at her impassively, absorbing the force with ease as her face reddened. He was an old man, small and white-haired, but it was like trying to shift a tank.

  “You’re shooting a cannonball from a bow, Song Mei. What is wrong this morning? You must be relaxed, like water flowing, then the force is in the punch. Hold this.”

  She held the pad against her chest, and he stretched out his right arm, resting his fingers against it. Then he straightened his arm from the elbow, forming a fist that flowed forward as though she weren’t there. She felt an explosion against her chest and found herself flattened on the grass.

  “No tension,” the sifu said.

  Yao was in his usual seat in the commissary, eating with the appetite of a man who had not seen a corpse the night before. He was dipping deep-fried youtiao into a bowl of rice congee, and he grinned at Mei as he stuffed the golden stick of dough into his mouth. Bile rose in her throat as she watched, dehydrated from exercise and haunted by the night.

  “Yao, you’re disgusting.”

  “What’s wrong?” His smile grew wider, and she looked away to avoid the sight of half-chewed dough.

  She sat next to him with a glass of orange juice and a bowl of congee and picked at the white gruel with a spoon.

  “Why so silent last night?” he said. “What’s the Wolf’s secret?” He sounded amused, but she knew it was killing him not to know.

  “Nothing.”

  “The cops said there was a body out there. Wen told them to wait for a guy from the Party, then the Wolf turned up and took over. Who was she?”

  Mei thought of the Wolf’s last words in the marsh. No one knows who she was. Remember that.

  “How should I know? Some girl who got herself into trouble. I didn’t ask questions.”

  “But he wanted you to see. You’re his special agent now?”

  “Get lost.”

  She shoved a spoonful of congee into her mouth, then regretted it and tried to ease the slimy rice down her throat without gagging. Yao looked dissatisfied, but he didn’t say any more. He always pushed as far as
he could until she got angry and then backed off. That had been the pattern since they’d been matched as interns.

  Mei had to fight the urge to be grateful for Yao’s friendship. She was a nobody and he was a chosen one—fresh out of Tsinghua University in Beijing, lanky and good-looking, charm to spare. She hadn’t known how to treat him at first because she’d never known anyone so privileged, anyone who took his status so much for granted. The cadres all laughed at his jokes, and the lecturers indulged him if he needed more time to complete an essay after a weekend home in Beijing. Yet without knowing why, she noticed that he was trying to please her—his eyes would rest on her as he told a story, waiting for her approval.

  Mei didn’t have a brother, but that was what he’d become. He asked for her help on assignments and she indulged him, feeling a glow of superiority. They wrangled over everything from how to handle cases to who would eat the last dumpling. For some reason, she caught his attention in a way others could not. Even if he had a girlfriend in tow, he would spend the evening talking mainly to Mei and neglecting the girl. He irritated Mei, often infuriated her, but his presence was reassuring.

  As she gulped down the last bit of gruel, Yao scrambled to his feet, his eyes on someone behind her. She followed his gaze and then stood up herself. Standing at her shoulder was Pan Yue, the deputy secretary in charge of training.

  “Comrade Song, come with me,” Pan said, walking toward the exit that led to her office.

  As Mei followed, the others watched out of the corners of their eyes, wondering if she was in trouble or being singled out for praise.

  Pan had been the first official to address the twenty recruits three months before, and they needed to satisfy her to get permanent jobs at the Commission at the end of their training. She had no life other than the Party: none that anyone knew about, anyway. She was the first one to her desk in the morning and never seemed to leave—her office light gleamed constantly. Her only respite was to the gym in the compound; her clothes hung on her as if she had lost weight and had never bought new ones.