‘Mr Wang,’ he says, ‘why don’t I take a look at your car?’
The policeman checks the door handles and windows for signs of forced entry. He opens the glove compartment and, rummaging about, finds Baldy Zhang’s baijiu. He opens the brand-new bottle and sniffs, then pockets it without a word. He looks at Wang as though he is wasting his time.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘someone is having a joke with you.’
‘Whoever it is has been following me. They know where I live. They’ve been watching my wife and child.’
‘Unless a law has been broken, there’s nothing we can do.’
Passengers slide in, front seat or back, sighing with relief to be in the stuffy car-heater warmth. As Wang navigates the streets of Beijing, steering through the arrhythmic stop — start of traffic, they tap tap tap, messaging on phones. They crack knuckles, popping sockets of bone. They yawn and yawn again. They struggle in with backpacks, unfolding German maps, naming a street in strange Teutonic tones. They scowl at Wang, blaming him for slow traffic. A teenage girl points to a plastic bag cartwheeling in the wind and remarks dryly, ‘That bag will get there before us.’ The radio says, ‘There are 66,000 taxi drivers in Beijing. A figure the government intends to reduce by a third by 2010.’
The sky is stark and white as though bled dry. A woozy woman, her head swathed in bandages, staggers in from outside a plastic-surgery clinic. Mute, she hands Wang her address on paper. Throughout the journey Wang senses her watching him through the eyeholes in her gauze mask. He imagines the reconstructed face beneath. The surgeon’s stitches and the sag of age drawn taut. He longs to call it a day and go home.
The canteen is east of the Third ring road, between a carwash and a garage. Crowded around Formica tables, cabbies hunch over bowls, chopsticks tugging noodles to mouths. Smoke from the poorly ventilated kitchen and crimson-glowing cigarettes swirls above them in a stratum of clouds. Hacking coughs cut through the dinnertime clatter, and lighters spark and flare as though pyromania, not nicotine, is the addiction here. Wang stands in the doorway, his pupils dilating in the dimness. Cabbies are not a healthy breed; slouching and overweight and in the high-risk category for coronary thrombosis. Irritable from hours of grinding traffic and liable to fly off the handle at the slightest thing. Wang hopes he doesn’t look too much like these bad-tempered, wheyfaced men in the canteen. ‘It’s freezing! Shut the fucking door!’ shouts Driver Liang. Wang steps inside.
Baldy Zhang grunts at Wang, frowning beneath his bald, ridged cranium as he peels a clove of garlic and grinds it between his molars. Baldy Zhang can get through a bulb of garlic a night and leaves the taxi so pungent Wang has to wind the windows down before his shift to air it out. (‘Germ-ridden, passengers are,’ Baldy Zhang once explained. ‘Garlic protects me from the germs.’) Baldy Zhang has been a cabbie since the eighties, back when Beijing was a city of bicycles and driving a taxi a prestigious job, and though he is arrogant and rude, Wang likes co-renting with him. Baldy Zhang never works during the day, for one, which means Wang hasn’t worked a night in three years. Though fares are fewer, Baldy Zhang prefers the night-time, when there are less of the things that he loathes: traffic, policemen and people. (‘There’s too many people in China,’ he says. ‘The One-child Policy isn’t enough. They should ban childbirth for a few years.’) Baldy Zhang usually works from dusk until dawn, parks the Citroën outside Wang’s building, then goes home to down a few beers and sleep. Baldy Zhang isn’t married. ‘Women aren’t worth the hassle. Not even prostitutes. This right hand is all I trust,’ he says, waggling his fingers at Wang.
They each own a set of keys, and Wang avoids him most days. But today he texted, asking to meet.
‘Know anything about this? I found it in the sun visor.’
Wang tosses Baldy Zhang the letter, watching for a spark of recognition in his eyes.
‘What it is?’ Baldy Zhang asks.
‘Read it.’
Baldy Zhang skims a page, then tosses the letter back, lacking the patience to read on. ‘What is it?’
As Wang tells him, Baldy Zhang reaches for Wang’s pack of Red Pagoda Mountain, sticks a filter between his lips and sparks the lighter. ‘Mutton noodles!’ calls one of the Sichuan girls who works in the kitchen. ‘Who ordered mutton noodles with chillies?’
‘I once knew a driver who got a letter like this,’ Baldy Zhang says. ‘Driver Fan was his name. Few days after he got the letter he was found dead in his taxi. Murdered.’
‘Murdered?’
Baldy Zhang slits his eyes as he inhales, tobacco and cigarette paper crackling.
‘Stabbed fourteen times in the chest. The inside of his taxi was like an abattoir. Everything sprayed with blood. It was on the news. Never caught who did it. .’
Wang falls for it. Only for a second, but that’s long enough for Baldy Zhang. He wallops the table and guffaws. Other cabbies look over.
‘Very funny,’ says Wang.
He waits for the cackling to die down. He has a headache from the stale, recycled air and can’t wait to get out of the canteen and breathe in the cold winter sky.
‘Tell me the truth. Is this letter anything to do with you?’
‘’Course not. Do I look mad?’
‘How did it get there then?’
‘A piece of wire’s all it takes to pick the lock. Done it myself when I’ve locked in the keys.’
Tilting his chin, Baldy Zhang blows a plume of smoke to the ceiling, then smiles.
Yida is in the kitchen. Rice-cooker steam fogs the window and the radio talks of Beijing’s preparations for the Olympic Games. A cotton rag pulls back Yida’s tumbleweed curls, and one of Wang’s old T-shirts hangs loosely from her slender frame as she slices a green pepper on the chopping board. Standing in the doorway, Wang watches her move between the kitchen counter and stove, adding the peppers to the onions sizzling in the wok, as rings of flame blaze beneath. Wok handle in one hand, spatula in the other, Yida looks over her shoulder. ‘That you, Wang?’ Wang says that it is.
The TV is madcap with cartoons. A hyperactive playmate that Echo ignores as she sits in her Zaoying Elementary tracksuit, copying illustrations from an anime comic into her spiral-bound pad. She is pretty like her mother, but her eye-teeth have come through crooked. Little Rabbit, they call her at school, and Wang winces at the orthodontist’s bills yet to come.
‘Ba, you’re back,’ she says, not looking up from the spiral-bound pad.
Echo wants to be a comic-book illustrator when she grows up, an ambition of which Yida disapproves. ‘Stop praising her. Don’t encourage her to waste time on art,’ she tells Wang. ‘Not when her grades in every other subject are so poor.’ Yida is harsh on Echo. Back when she was pregnant, she had bribed a doctor to give her an ultrasound. When she was told the foetus didn’t have a penis, Yida had debated having an abortion. ‘But what if the ultrasound was wrong?’ she fretted. ‘What if I abort a boy?’ ‘Carry the baby to term then,’ Wang suggested, ‘and if you give birth to a girl, drown her in a bucket.’ Wang had shamed her into keeping the baby, and he suspects Yida is strict with Echo because she regrets not having a son. But Wang has no regrets at all. He couldn’t be prouder of Echo. He pats her messy hair, thinking he couldn’t have been blessed with a better child.
‘Not so close. You’ll ruin your eyes and need glasses. Then you’ll never get a husband,’ he says.