Justice System: I Litigate for the Whole City

Chapter 34 : Twenty-Two Minutes

The ticket machine in the first-floor lobby of the Arbitration Office dispensed number seventy-one. By the time the screen jumped to seventy-one, the stack of papers had already been pushed through the window—bound with two rubber bands, tied so tight that the edges had been pressed into a groove.

The person at the window counted them one by one. "Application: one, with twenty names after it. ID card copies: twenty. Power of attorney: twenty. Representative nomination letter: one."

When she got to the fifth item, Shen Zhixia slid the printed stack forward.

"Account ban notices: twenty. On the back is written who captured each one, when, and on which phone."

The person at the window flipped through a couple of pages, then looked up. "Wait here a minute."

Shao Hong came out from inside, took the stack away, and led them into the innermost room. Inside was a long table and a turned-on computer. A damp knitted glove was drying on the radiator, and the air smelled of warm old paper. She pulled up the case entry page first and asked questions while typing.

"Respondents: three names," Shao Hong said. "Hurricane Express, Jiangzhou Sutong Delivery, Jianhua Delivery Service Department. Three names means three service address confirmation forms. If one's missing, I send you back."

"All three are in there. Two of them have the same street number."

"Same street number still has to be clear: which one has the sign on the door, which one is paying out money, and which one is dispatching orders in the system." She tapped the keyboard a couple of times. "If that line isn't clear, on the day of the hearing you'll be starting from the house number."

"Second thing: the money."

Shao Hong pulled out a copy of the settlement sheet and tapped the tip of her pen on the last line.

"Thirty-six thousand four hundred six. What do the twenty people add up to in the claim column?"

"The same. It's split by person. Whoever has what amount under their name gets exactly that written down."

"As long as it can be split apart. When it's bundled into one stack, the money can't be lumped onto one person." She looked down, and her pen stopped. "What are these three rows?"

The three rows each had a notation at the end: "merged," "stand-in," "stand-in."

"One person worked two accounts, so two payments are merged into one row. The second one is Lao Chang's; he was running his brother-in-law's account. The third, the account holder is listed under a family member's name."

Shao Hong circled the three rows.

"For these three entries, attach a separate explanatory statement. Who did the work, whose account the money should go into, whose account it is—three sentences per person, signed by that person themselves." She set the pen down. "On the day of the hearing, if the other side asks even one question—'The account isn't yours, so why are you claiming this money?'—and you don't have that paper in your hand, that line ends right there."

[Thud. This case isn't afraid of too many people. What it's afraid of is the account behind a name not matching the person.]

"One more question about the 'claim' column," Shao Hong said. "What you want is money. To get money, you first have to say clearly who should pay it."

"The platform should pay it," Shen Zhixia said. "The one with the sign on the door and the one paying out are both doing its legwork and dispatching orders."

"That's a reason, not a conclusion," Shao Hong said. "I can record the amount you're asking for. The 'who' you want to hold responsible has to come from your evidence. No matter how many people you have, none of them outweigh a single piece of paper."

"Third thing: the nomination letter," Shao Hong said. "Is your representative here today?"

Deng Wei stood up from the chair by the door. Before entering, he had buttoned his padded jacket all the way to the top; only now did he unbutton it, still gripping the hand-copied list in his palm.

"I'm here."

"What you can do for them is on this paper." Shao Hong turned the nomination letter around and pressed her index finger against that line. "I'm asking you something written on this paper. For anything they haven't told you, can you nod on their behalf?"

"No," Deng Wei said. "If they haven't nodded to it, I won't speak for them."

Shao Hong drew a line under the sentence "Waiving or changing claims requires the consent of all joint applicants," then set the pen down.

"Remember that line yourself. On the day of the hearing, I'll ask you again."

"Last thing." She glanced at the clock on the wall. "All twenty people have to come in person. IDs checked one by one. Signatures in their own hand. Before five o'clock this afternoon. If you're late, I'm off work."

"Everyone has to come."

"Everyone has to come," Shao Hong said. "Yesterday I said it would depend on whose desk the materials landed on. Today they landed on mine. The name on that application has to stand in front of the window itself."

After leaving the review room, Shen Zhixia sent Deng Wei a message from the hallway: Two o'clock this afternoon, everyone be there.

Deng Wei called back from the stairwell. "I'll go door to door right now. I'll keep an eye on Lao Chang."

At two in the afternoon, the row of plastic chairs in the first-floor lobby was half full. Twenty yellow uniforms squeezed together looked even more like a single object than the row of electric scooters outside the entrance. One clerk read out names while another checked faces against the ID cards. When the fourteenth name was called, no one answered.

"Lao Chang—"

Deng Wei ran down the list from top to bottom, then from bottom to top.

Ma Jianjun had been standing just inside the lobby doors, counting the yellow uniforms from left to right. When he finished, he said, "Nineteen."

"One short."

"I saw him on Back Street this morning," Xiao Duan said. "Squatting in front of the repair shop."

"Call him."

Xiao Duan dialed. The ringback tone played twice, then stopped. No one picked up.

Outside, a man stood on the steps. The last digits on his row belonged to a family member. He had come, but he stood at the foot of the steps, not entering the lobby and not looking at the window.

"Xu Li," Deng Wei called out to him.

"I'm not putting my fingerprint down," Xu Li said.

Her phone rang. The number was Hengzheng's landline.

"Attorney Shen." Lü Hang's voice was flat. "I'm passing along a message verbatim. Two applicants on your list have already stated that they no longer wish to participate in this arbitration. Please verify and amend the applicant list accordingly."

The heating unit overhead blew downward, making the corners of the stack of papers flip up one after another.

"These two people," she said, "did they tell you themselves, or did you say it for them?"

There was a pause of two or three seconds on the other end.

"I'm just reading it as written," Lü Hang said. "Once I've read it, I've got nothing more on my end."

"The list stays unchanged."

"Then I've delivered it." He paused. "Also, the supplementary reconsideration opinion was filed yesterday. On procedure, I'll say one more thing: prepare whatever you need to prepare."

"Does Attorney Lu know you're putting this out?"

This answer came faster than the last one.

"Attorney Lu hasn't been in the office these past couple of days."

She hung up.

Xiao Duan walked over from the other end of the chairs, holding up his phone. A line of text was on the screen.

"Day before yesterday, someone pulled together another small group," he said. "Our old one disbanded last month. Somebody in it just sent this."

The line read: "The ones who withdraw get unblocked first. Only a few spots."

"Who sent it?"

"Don't know," Xiao Duan said. "There are more than twenty people in it, and right now nobody's saying a word."

She pushed the door open and went outside. The wind was hard. Half the frost on the steps had melted, leaving a wet shine.

"Xu Li."

"My wife had a fight with me this morning," he said. "She said if one account gets banned, it's banned. Don't go making more trouble."

"That account—who told you to work it in the first place?"

"The station," he said. "The station said one account can't take many orders. If there's another account in the family, run them together so you can take more."

"Was that ever said in the group?"

"It was. Said at meetings too."

"The account is your wife's, the work was yours, and the money went into her card," she said. "Put those three things on the table. You tell me: whose work was it?"

Xu Li didn't answer. His hands were shoved into his padded coat pockets, crumpling the wad of paper inside until it crackled.

"They said if I withdraw, it gets unblocked."

"Did they say which day it would get unblocked?"

"…No."

"Under that account ban notice, is there any channel to appeal?"

"No."

"The account is under her name. An appeal requires her to verify with her face," she said. "If you withdraw that paper today, what will you use tomorrow to ask them for the account?"

"What do I do about this month?"

"I can't produce money for you this month, either," she said bluntly. "I can only tell you one thing: if you withdraw that paper, this month you still won't have money, and that account still won't come back."

Xu Li stood motionless on the steps. After a while, he pulled his hands from his pockets and walked toward the lobby.

"I'll put my fingerprint down."

At ten to four, Deng Wei brought someone up. Lao Chang's padded collar was turned up, no hat, and his ears were red from the cold. He clutched his phone, scrolling through it one image after another.

"I got eleven screenshots," he said. "Anything earlier than that I can't find. Gone from the phone."

She took the phone and checked it against the last digits on the list. Each screenshot had those four digits in the corner.

"Eleven is enough. For anything earlier, just mark 'to be supplemented' for now."

"If I withdraw…"

"If you withdraw, these eleven screenshots were taken for nothing," she said. "The ledger recognizes the account, not the person. The money owed on that account is wages they should be paying you, not wages for your brother-in-law. If you withdraw, your name comes off this row."

Lao Chang lowered his head and pressed his thumbprint onto the explanatory statement. After he finished, he didn't leave. He stood by the window and watched the clerk square up the edges of the twenty sets of materials, tap them even, and clip them together. The clerk looked up at the clock, then looked back down and flipped through them once more.

"All set."

It was already past seven when she got back to the Zhengping Firm. Downstairs, the smell of scallion oil mixed with heat crowded into the stairwell and pushed its way up step by step. She carried the twenty account ban notices to the long table and laid them out in the order they had been received. He Xiufen came up with a bowl of noodles.

"You still haven't eaten."

"After I finish laying these out."

He Xiufen set the bowl at the corner of the table and bent over to study the row of papers. She looked slowly, from left to right, then from right to left.

"The reason column."

"Same. The wording is exactly the same."

"Twenty people, one line of reasoning," He Xiufen said. "And the time?"

"23:57 to 0:19."

"Twenty-two minutes. Twenty accounts."

Ma Jianjun sat on the windowsill, picked up the top notice, flipped it over to look at the back, then flipped it back.

"There's not even a place to appeal at the bottom," he said. "I tapped for ages, and all that popped up was this one line. I couldn't even find the word 'appeal.'"

"Did you call customer service?" Xiao Duan asked.

"Called," Ma Jianjun said. "A robot talked for three minutes, then transferred me to a human, and the line was busy."

She carried that paper over to the desk lamp. At the very bottom of the notice was a line of small print: the customer service number, a string of digits.

"What does it say at the very top of the notice?" she asked.

"Rider App," Xiao Duan said.

"Whose Rider App is it?"

"Hurricane Express."

The room went quiet for a moment. Outside, an electric scooter alarm blared once, then stopped.

"Those three sheets say how much they owe," He Xiufen said. "This one is different. This one says—they still have their hand on you."

"The money and the hand are both inside that machine," she said.

[Thud. The evidence of the debt is in that machine. The hand holding all twenty accounts down is in there too.]

She arranged the twenty pages into a line. The one farthest left was Ma Jianjun's, at 23:57; the one farthest right, at 0:19. Twenty-two minutes in between.

"Tomorrow, the first thing I'm not doing is going to East Suburb," she said. "I'm going to get one thing clear first."

"What?"

"Whose hand pressed down on these accounts."

She copied down the customer service number and capped the pen. Then she nudged the desk lamp to the left so all twenty pages fell inside the light.