by Paul Mason
“Good morning, Police Superintendent Xiao. To what do we owe the honour? Please join us in the special waiting room where...”
“Shut up!” Xiao bawled, his big body arched with fury. “Go away or I will put colour in your cheeks! You are sabotaging a crucial police operation!”
He watched the stationmaster’s face drain.
“Perhaps,” said that little shit the Railway Party Secretary, peering out from behind the Stationmaster, epaulettes covered in dandruff and his shirt buttoned wrong, “...perhaps, er, you need some help with your luggage? Do you have any more bags?”
“Don’t worry, I’m not headed to Geneva,” Xiao sneered, indicating the scruffy holdall that was his only luggage. “This is important business and you are compromising my immunity. Please disperse.”
He strode away from the Railway Team, resuming his disguise. But they huddled obstinately in a group on the platform, craning their necks after him like a family of Helan Pikas, which are like meerkats only more suspicious. The ragtag group of bored teenagers, old women and seedy bums milling about on the platform made a space around him as he walked, its circumference bigger than if he had swine flu.
“Hey Chief!” It was a group of retired coal miners with broad grins, waving their wooden chopsticks out of the open window of a Hard Class carriage.
“Come and join us: we are eating bream. Only one head per fish this year!”
~ * ~
2
He slept through Shizuishan and woke up in a world of starched white linen, plastic flowers, sunlight slanting through frosted windows. The sky outside was hyacinth blue. He had fugged-up the carriage with cigarette smoke, stale gym shoes and surreptitious farts. The tannoy was warbling a light-orchestral number that took his mind back to the seventies, Tibet and sentry duty?.
After a while Xiao slid the door open with his toe and bawled into the corridor for green tea. When nobody answered he stuck his head out and shouted at the concierge, who was lolling, bored, against the fire extinguisher:
“Hey, xiao-jie! Get me some tea and pumpkin seeds and be quick about it before I kick your fat arse!”
She slouched out of vision but no tea arrived. Instead a Mongolian train guard arrived and rapped on the door.
“Hey you! Show me your ticket!”
Xiao fumbled in his shoulder bag; his wife usually handled tickets. He fetched it out eventually, crumpled.
“Tickets remain state property,” the guard snapped after studying it, and studying Xiao. “Please take care in future.”
“Where is that waitress?” Xiao began, affecting matey-ness.
“In the train Discipline Section writing a complaint against you on the grounds of gender stereotyping and racial abuse,” the guard said curtly, turning on his heel.
Xiao had heard that the traditional Chinese term for waitress, “‘xiao-jie1’, technically synonymous with “prostitute”, had become politically incorrect east of the Yellow River, and that the correct term now was fuwuyuen, serving person. But he’d always dismissed it as an urban myth.
When the train pulled in to Linhe, Xiao noticed the crowd was ignoring the platform guards; the queues for the Hard Class carriages, always formed and orderly back in Tang Lu, were straggling and rowdy here. He lit a cigarette and slammed the door: there was no-one else in any of the three Soft Sleeper compartments and he was damned if he could think of anybody in Linhe who’d be able to afford a ticket.
But now the cacophony of platform attendants shouting into their tiny megaphones was drowned out by a small crowd of hard-voiced women arguing and complaining in Mongolian and clacking their high heels down the corridor of the train. After they’d filled up the other sleeper carriages, Xiao’s door slid open to reveal five moon faces, each female, each plastered with makeup, each wearing looks of disdain for Xiao and flaring their nostrils at the smell of his shoes. He scowled at them, and they slid the door shut again, chattering to each other now not just in Mongolian but what sounded like Russian.
Presently the door slid open again to reveal the train guard and a squat Mongolian kid wearing Oakley sunglasses, an oversize basketball shirt, plus a pair of jeans that seemed to be falling off his backside and gathering at the ankles around his gold-flecked training shoes.
“This carriage,” the guard began, deadpan, “has been re-booked.”
“What do you mean re-booked?”
“Show me your ticket.”
“I already showed it to you.”
“I have concerns about your ticket; I suspect it may be fraudulent. Did you buy it from the station or from a ticket tout? It looks crumpled.”
Xiao leapt to his feet, red and angry.
“This ticket,” he held it up so close to the guard’s face that it was impossible for him to see beyond it, “was issued by the Tang Lu Station booking office of the People’s Republic of China and you are talking to...” he dropped his shoulders “to, to a decent, respectable, upright citizen.”
The guard grabbed the ticket and thrust it back into Xiao’s face, which had turned purple.
“Well citizen, you’ve got to obey the rules. This is a standby ticket. If a full-fare passenger requires the space, you have to vacate.”
“I will not,” Xiao muttered.
“It’s alright, man,” drawled the kid in the Oakleys. “I’ll just stand here in the corridor. It’s smelly in there.”
The Oakleys Kid started herding the girls in. They tutted and pulled the kind of face you pull if you have burning diarrhoea. They lit up pastel cigarettes with gold filters and dug into their tartan handbags for bottles of fake Western perfume to spray into the air.
Xiao wedged himself in the corner behind a copy of the Beijing Daily Messenger (five-column headline - “Japanese Cartoon Film Steals Ancient Chinese Sun God”) and pretended to read the personal ads, which were mostly placed by young women who had money to transfer to older men as a marriage incentive, if they would simply send their bank details.
The girls traded jokes and comments at each other in Mongolian and Russian, lapsing into Mandarin only to imitate sexual requests thrown at them by Chinese clients. Beneath the makeup their faces looked bitter, strained. Xiao noticed one had self-harm scars on her wrist. When they started swapping insults about each other’s private parts, tattoos and childhood sexual experiences Xiao decided it was time for lunch.
He grabbed his suitcase and clambered over their sprawled legs, cracked toenails and Vuitton luggage. The Oakleys Kid was leaning against the window in the corridor, having a cellphone conversation that required him to place his hand over his mouth.
Xiao took a seat in the restaurant car, now filling up with railway workers slurping tea and flicking ash onto the paper tablecloths. Two stewards settled next to him, taking their break. He ordered chicken and rice. They ordered chicken and rice. Theirs came. His didn’t.
“Hey fuwuyuen,” he pronounced it carefully, “where is my chicken?”
“Your ticket is forged, or standby, and you have insulted our colleague!” she shouted back. “You have to wait until the second serving!”
The stewards got him a paper plate and shared their dinner with him.
“D’you see those Mongolian ponies getting into the Soft Sleeper?” Xiao began, doing a good imitation now of a leery drifter. But they buried their noses in their rice.
“What’s the country coming to when that kind of...”
“What’s your game, pal?” one of the stewards interrupted. “You trying to spread rumours or something? Keep yourself to yourself!”
The stewards edged half a foot along the bench away from Xiao and started a loud conversation about how great Hu Jin-tao was, and how lucky they felt to be living in a mediumly developed social-market economy.
He toyed with the idea of revealing his true identity and busting the Oakleys Kid, but a tiny bowl of chicken and rice arrived at last and he ate it in a haze of cigarette smoke, staring at the blue-lit mountains flashing past and spitting bits of t
obacco.
At Baotou station there was a police ID check at the exit barrier; Xiao watched as the Kid paid a bribe to get the girls through. Xiao’s own ID was marked with his police rank and he wanted to stay undercover, so he hung around for twenty minutes in the men’s toilet, where ghostly heroin addicts started coming in and out doing their jerky shuffle in the hope that he was a dealer. There was blood on the walls plus graffiti: mostly offering fake ID, some requests for homosexual sex, some insults about a foreman on a building site plus, as in every male toilet in the world, a crudely drawn picture of a man’s cock with sperm coming out of the end.
He took a taxi to the coach station. Did the taxi driver know where he could buy a fake ID?
“Mate, I can get you a Glock, a thirteen year old girl, a diplomatic passport or a PhD in materials fuckin’ science. Fake ID is no problem whatsoever - what do you wanna be? Mongolian?” He flipped open the glovebox. There was a thick wad of frayed and bent plastic ID cards, held together with a rubber band.
“I can tell you ain’t in construction, mate: what line are you in?”
“Fishing tackle.” The phrase came into Xiao’s brain a nanosecond after his mouth had said it.
“Ha! Ye’r on the wrong river pal - I used to go fishing here when I was a kid but its buggered up now. If you’re not trying to get a contractor’s licence you won’t need a Mongolian ethnicity -pity, ‘cos I’ve got plenty your age and size.” He threw the bundle of cards over his shoulder, yanking the car into a dangerous overtake with the other hand.
“Flip through these, mate: three thousand standard, five for police, army or medical.”
“You can buy police ID?”
“Har, har,” the driver cackled like a fifties-era comedian. “Where’ve you come in from pal? Gansu Province? Welcome to the 21st century! I can even get you a party card! You need a new cellphone? My brother’s got an unlocking shop right by the terminus. Hey, d’you hear about the Japs stealing one of our ancient gods for a fuckin’ cartoon? Fuckin’ ridiculous, eh?”
Xiao was mesmerised by the wad of ID cards, too thick to hold in one hand. There was an Anhui migrant with a curled lip, a surly student from Beijing, a widefaced docker from Tianjin Port, a migrant bricklayer from Gansu, a PLA corporal from Shenynang. Lots of pretty girls, too; always young, always with that just-out-of-school fringe that makes their photos look so similar to each other and so different to the actual girls plying their trade out of hotel rooms in Hohhot, adobe shacks in Hohhot, porn cinemas in Shenzhen. These are the photos you see in the papers when they disappear.
All of China was there. Frayed at its plastic edge, ripped off, impersonated, discarded. The thought occurred to Xiao to abandon going after Brough and simply bust this taxi driver’s ass into long-term detention, or better still, play along and get evidence to bust the whole gang that must be behind all this. A deeper worry played at the edges of his mind: there were IDs from public officials here-cops, soldiers, local government guys. Had they really all been lost or stolen? Or had they been sold?
And if it was this easy to get fake ID in Baotou, what about Tang Lu? Xiao had always made sure the only graffiti offering fake ID in Tang Lu was put up by undercover cops. They led straight to phone lines operated by Hard Man Han’s division, and from there to a kicking in the cells or pre-trial, depending on what kind of low-life you were dealing with.
“You found one yet? We’re nearly there.”
The biggest batch of cards was of middle-aged Han Chinese guys with dyed-black comb-over hairstyles and doleful faces. Put them in a row and you could collect the whole Politburo. He selected one at random - ha! decent likeness and - huh? - same surname! “Xiao Yi-ming, dotcom entrepreneur,” right age too, give or take five years.
“That’ll be three thousand mate and, hey look out, we’re here and the cops are fucking sticklers for parking in this place, so come on fella, hurry up!”
Xiao struggled to extract one of the wads of money he’d stashed inside his vest. There were horns blaring in the dense traffic around the coach station and the taxi cab’s sound system had begun a digital announcement in Mongolian, Mandarin and English wishing Xiao a safe onward journey and urging him to avoid spitting in a public place.
The crowd outside the station was full of faces just like the ones on the fake IDs: confused and powerless, pushing in many directions at once, slipping off the pavement, losing their offspring, spitting phlegm into the gutter. The cops were blowing whistles and banging on the roofs of taxis with their white-gloved hands to move them on.
“How do you get the police ID? It must take some doing?” Xiao said, handing over three thousand in 100 notes as the cab jerked to a stop.
“Har, har, if only I knew mate. I’m just the middle man, mind your back!”
As Xiao opened the door he managed to knock an old geezer off his bike, which had a cage full of live chickens balanced on the back. Xiao tried his usual apology routine: he pulled a sycophantic smile and patted the old geezer on the head. But a passing streetsweeper remonstrated with Xiao and pushed him. Xiao was going to push him back when a pretty girl stepped in and grabbed his arm. The taxi screeched away from the curb as the cops approached and the girl hissed at him to scatter because the cops were on an arrest quota due to the twentieth anniversary of “those unfortunate events”.
Only when he was out of the crush and in the ticket hall, his blood pressure back to normal and methodically checking his pockets, did he realise something was wrong. He’d slipped the fake ID into his wallet and his real ID into the back pocket of his trousers. The wallet was still there. The real ID card of Superintendent Xiao Lushan had disappeared.
He let out an expletive towards the roof of the bus terminal then pushed his way back to the taxi stand, but the man with the chickens was gone; also the pretty girl and the streetsweeper. Instead of chaotic, the scene seemed calm. Instead of blaring horns, he could hear only announcements and peaceful music. One cop remained, and he cast a cold glare at Xiao, the only person betraying agitation in a scene of otherwise perfect social harmony.
~ * ~
3
A ticket taker shoved Xiao onto the coach headed for Ordos. Half the seats had been bought by a construction team on their way to break somebody’s strike. They sat at the back, having a raucous smoking session, playing dice for each other’s future wages. There were slovenly mothers staring out of the window and demure daughters fussing with shopping bags. One old man had a bucket of fresh-water lampreys balanced on his knee, their black tails flopping occasionally through the frothy scum.
The passengers were wedged up together, closer than necessary, because three massive guys had decided to take up two seats each, crashing out exhausted. They lay slumped, their sleeping heads rattling against the coach windows as the engine throbbed, legs splayed untidily into the aisle.
Xiao, who’d become sulky, resisted the urge to kick them and slid silently onto a half-vacant seat next to one of the sleeping slobs. This one had stubble, a fat belly showing from under his polo shirt and a Bluetooth headset wedged into his ear. When the coach set off, the slob woke up, yawned, farted, looked straight at Xiao and began speaking, as if in mid-sentence:
“Yeah and, then, last night we missed you mate, ha, down the Iced Nipple, your girlfriend was there, askin’ after you she was.” After a beat of incomprehension, Xiao realised this fat slob was talking to somebody else, through the earpiece.
Because the phone did not ring, but only made a tiny blue light in the earpiece blink, and because the calls always began in mid-sentence and never ended with goodbye, it took Xiao a few minutes to work out that it was not one person but a series of people calling up Fat Slob. Xiao also noticed that whenever they were awake, Fat Slob and his two slob companions caused the volume of the babble between the other passengers to go down a notch, out of respect:
“Blink, blink. Yeah, I do. But not individual items... Is it boxed? Sorry, going through an underpass. Is it boxed? Yeah well the
n.. .blink, blink.. .So yeah we were down the Iced Nipple club and your girlfriend was askin’ after you... you know! Yeah, you do, you cheeky bastard...blink, blink ... Oh, yeah, hello it’s Mister Han speaking actually. Yes that’s right, Flat 696 on the sixth floor. Nah, mate. Three hundred thousand is my maximum offer...blink, blink... Yeah, if it’s boxed: I’m not really in that business but I know somebody who might... wha’? At that price? Gotta be kidding, yeah...blink, blink...Hello love we’re on the fuckin’ coach! Yeah the fuckin coach! Is she? Is she there? Hello darlin’ - how was your trip to the Peach Festival? Have you been good? Put your mummy on again...blink, blink ...Yeah he’s just been onto me. What will they do if we just throw the keys at them and walk away? Huh-huh, huh-huh. Three hundred thousand. Let’s give it till next week ... blink, blink.. .Yeah well, she ended up fuckin’ lap-dancing for 1000 kwai note-rolls. Lumpfish put three of ‘em up her fanny! Ha, ha - said to give her a call next time! ...blink, blink...Nah, the fuckin’ car got impounded and the cops have whipped all our licences. Get the driver round to the coach station for half past three with the Merc, will ya, darling?”