Confident that Wang is no one of importance, passengers rarely exercise caution in his cab. Wang has been privy to the offering of bribes to men in suits. To the haggling down of the price of women, bought and sold in bulk. To the trading of forged passports and negotiation of human-smuggling fees. Once a guy in his twenties hired Wang out for an afternoon. When it became apparent, as they drove from address to address, that he was dealing drugs, Wang asked what he was selling. ‘Cocaine,’ the dealer had said. ‘How does it get to Beijing?’ Wang had asked. ‘Flown to Kazakhstan in drug mules,’ he was told. ‘Stuffed in condoms in stomachs. In the soles of shoes.’ ‘Aren’t you afraid of the death penalty?’ Wang asked, and the dealer had laughed: ‘When it comes to the police, there are ways of getting off the hook.’
Lovers quarrel in his taxi. They fight about sex and abortion and extramarital affairs. Sometimes they remember he is there: ‘Shush. . the driver. .’ ‘Fuck the driver! What does what he think matter?’ And they go on with their row. Wang knows how manipulative the lovesick can be. The recklessness of those afflicted with the mental illness of romantic love. Wang’s back seat has known more melodrama than any far-fetched TV soap.
Sometimes, late at night, when passengers are drunk and lonely and heading home to an empty bed, they unburden themselves to Wang, pouring out their unhappy personal lives to this safe, anonymous taxi driver. They ask his advice. Sometimes they ask for more than his advice. One woman in her thirties, whose boss had recently ended their affair, had said casually to Wang, ‘Can you take me somewhere and fuck me? I need cheering up.’ When Wang had protested that he had a wife and child, she had laughed and said, ‘That’s never stopped any man I’ve ever known.’ The woman was plain-looking, but fiery and bold, and Wang could see what had attracted her boss. He imagined driving her to an empty car park, and shifting back the driver’s seat so she could hitch up her skirt and straddle him, and he was tempted. But he couldn’t do it. The woman stared out at the drizzly night streets of Beijing as he drove her the rest of the way home, not saying a word. Wang offered to waive her fare, but she made a point of paying him in full.
They are careless, his passengers. Not only do they spill intimate secrets in his taxi, they leave possessions behind too. Umbrellas, gloves, scarves, tubes of lipstick, cigarettes, cough drops and keys. Vials of Viagra and strips of birth-control pills. Tickets to the Beijing opera. Maps and guidebooks in Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese. Minutes from the annual meeting of the Optometrists’ Society of Tianjin. More than once Wang has leapt out of his bones at a shrill ringing in the empty back seat.
The ID on the fare receipts means any theft would be traced back to him, so Wang turns everything in to the taxi company’s lost-property depot. In nearly a decade he has stolen only one thing: a self-assembly kite in a box, the frame slotting together to make a magnificent dragon with a one-metre wing-span. Wang saw the forgotten kite in the back seat. Then he saw the receipt of the old man who owned it, poking like a tongue from the meter at the journey’s end. A stroke of luck. That weekend Wang and Echo flew the kite together in Chaoyang Park, the crimson dragon fluttering its tail as it darted over the lakes and trees. As he watched Echo that day, smiling and gazing up to the kite in the sky, Wang thought of the old man and tried not to feel bad. What’s the good of one person clinging to his morals when everyone else is so corrupt? What’s the good of that?
Wang is driving east down Workers Stadium Road when, squinting in the sun, he flips down the visor above the driver’s seat and an envelope falls on to his lap. Must be Baldy Zhang’s, he thinks. Then he sees his name. Wang pulls over into the bicycle lane and slides his thumb under the adhesive seal. The letter is printed on four sheets of A4. As he reads a woman dragging a suitcase on wheels taps on the window. Wang switches off the for-hire sign and waves her away. After reading the letter he refolds it and stuffs it back in the envelope. Workers Stadium Road reverberates with engines as cars flow to the east and to the west. Ignitions growl, rickshaw bells brrring and horns beep. Migrant workers with greasy hair and padding spilling out of ripped jackets trudge up the pedestrian overpass, shouldering heavy bags. The street seems changed somehow. As though everything is a façade for something hiding beneath. He wants to call Baldy Zhang, but knows that he sleeps until dusk. Wang smokes a cigarette, then calls his wife instead.
Yida is at work and the phone rings and rings. Wang sees her in one of the private rooms at Dragonfly Massage, under the sensual, dimmer-switch-on-low lighting, standing over a customer on the massage table in her clinical white uniform. Wang sees her as a customer sees her. A pretty 29-year-old masseur with bronzed skin and a wilderness of curls that tumble and fall from any barrette or butterfly clip she uses to hold them back. Firm calves. Lips that don’t need lipstick. Hazel eyes flecked with gold. ‘Where are you from?’ customers ask when they hear her accent. And as she tells them, they nod and recoil slightly, as though the soil and toil of peasant life still clings to her skin. There are facts about his wife’s occupation Wang can’t stomach. The fact that her male clients strip to their underwear. The fact that with her bare hands (moisturized, the nails clipped) she kneads and caresses every part of the male flesh. Shoulders, lower back, buttocks, inner thighs. Her upper-arm muscles rippling with strength as she attends to her bare-chested customers in the aromatherapy-oil-scented room. Wang knows what’s on a man’s mind when he is massaged by a pretty girl. And so does Yida. When she was a teenager, new to Beijing and ripe for exploitation, she worked in a parlour where bringing a client to a climax with her hand was an ordinary part of the massage routine. She’d wiped up the semen afterwards, she confessed, as casually as a waitress mopping up a spilt drink in a café.
She answers on the seventeenth ring.
‘How come it took you so long to answer?’ asks Wang.
‘The phone was in my locker. .’
‘Were you with a customer?’
‘No. I’ve had no customers yet. .’
She sighs, weary of her husband’s jealousy. ‘What is it, Wang? Is something wrong?’
‘No. Nothing’s wrong. .’
And Wang changes his mind about telling her. He says, ‘I was thinking of you. That’s all.’
Yida softens. ‘Are you sure that there’s nothing wrong?’
‘Yes. I’m sure.’
In the Public Security Bureau in Tuan Jie Hu, there are three policemen behind the enquiries desk. Two of them are Wang’s age. Thugs with crew cuts, fogging the police station with wreaths of cigarette smoke. The third policeman is sixtyish with kind-looking eyes. Wang takes the letter to him. He tells him where he found it and describes the contents. The policeman reads the first page: ‘I don’t understand.’ Wang shows him the part where the writer confesses to stalking him.
‘Do you remember driving a fare to Purple Bamboo Park? After talking to the recycling collector?’ the policeman asks.
‘No. I don’t remember.’
The letter is put under the photocopier lid and reproduced for police records with mechanical whirrings and flashes of light. The policeman then asks for Wang’s ID card. He taps his ID number into the computer and Wang’s personal file comes up on the screen. When the policeman looks at Wang again, the kindness has gone from his eyes.