Justice System: I Litigate for the Whole City

Chapter 79 : A Bolt of Red Cloth

The red cloth was rolled into a tube, bound with two plastic cords, one end sticking out with edges roughly trimmed.

Shi Lei tucked it under his arm, standing in front of the long table. Five people stood behind him—one holding a plastic water bottle, another holding his phone sideways, a group chat on screen with messages scrolling up one after another. Two more people were walking in from the far end of the alley, moving fast.

July 1st, 7:51 in the morning.

Shen Zhixia carried the last stack of registration forms down from upstairs and set them on the corner of the long table. She looked first at the shoes on those people's feet, then at the bolt of cloth under Shi Lei's arm.

"Planning to march?" Ma Jianjun was cutting number slips, didn't look up.

"Half past eight." Shi Lei said. "Four of us, in front of the bank in Chengdong. We'll stand there all morning."

"Which entrance."

"Jiangzhou Bank Chengdong Branch." He set the cloth on the table and untied the cords with steady hands. "That's where the money went out. So that's where we stand."

The cloth unfurled, covering half the table. Printed on it were white adhesive characters from a print shop, two lines. The top read "YOUYU APARTMENTS, RETURN MY HARD-EARNED MONEY," the bottom "JIANGZHOU BANK, STOP PRETENDING YOU DON'T SEE." The bottom-right corner of "SEE" was peeling up slightly.

Someone in the group stepped forward half a pace and read the two lines aloud, then went quiet after reading them.

Shen Zhixia looked at it for two seconds, then turned back to him.

"Three meters sixty." Shi Lei said. "The print shop wanted a hundred and twenty. I haggled down to ninety."

"Ninety yuan worth of cloth." She pushed the registration forms forward. "Last time you also stood here, saying you'd take over a hundred people to stand in front of the municipal building. What did I tell you that day?"

"Don't carry anything in your hands."

"That's still what I'm saying today." She pressed down one end of the cloth. "Now listen to the first thing. The day before yesterday, that bank printed three pages for me and stamped them themselves. This morning Director He is submitting another application, still asking about its own business."

"Then isn't that exactly why we should go."

"You stand in front of that door all morning, and the next time I walk through it, they'll have one line to throw in my face—we don't discuss documents with people who wave cloth banners."

Shi Lei didn't answer. The man with the water bottle stepped forward. "Sis, we're not troublemakers."

"I know."

"Which word on the cloth is wrong."

"The words aren't wrong." Shen Zhixia pointed at the top line. "I accept that line. But to me, it's still just 'what you say' until today. You say they took the money and ran. Do you have paper."

Shi Lei pulled a plastic bag from his pocket and shook out the contents: two pages of a contract, three transfer records, a printed screenshot of a payment demand text. He pressed them down on the red cloth.

"I paid twenty-four thousand a year, never missed a day. Last month on the twentieth I even paid that two thousand." He said. "The apartment has been without water for twelve days, and the landlord says he's changing the locks at the end of the month. Isn't that enough?"

"That proves you paid money and lost the apartment." She flipped over the transfer records and checked the backs. "The words 'took the money and ran'—someone else has to say those for you. The documents the bank printed under its own seal, the ledger in the landlord's hands, the phone call the store manager took."

A man in his forties in the group said, "I'll go with them."

A woman beside him tugged his sleeve. "If you go, who picks up the kid."

Wooden stairs creaked. He Xiufen came down, set her enamel mug on the corner of the table; the lid clinked against the rim.

"Roll up the cloth." She said.

"Director He."

"I'm not stopping you. If you want to march, I'll walk you to the alley entrance at six tomorrow morning." She pushed the mug toward Shi Lei. "But not today. Today, behind that door, someone is copying documents for us. The hand that copies documents can't afford people standing at the door."

Shi Lei stared at the cloth, his lips moved, but no sound came out.

Ma Jianjun put down the number slips and walked around to this side of the table. He picked up a corner of the cloth and shook it out, smoothing the folds, then folded it in half.

"I marched once too." He said. "Not in front of a building—in the hallway of their company. Stood there until noon. The door locked from the inside. The young guy with me shouted a couple of things, someone recorded it and posted it online. The next day they used that clip to say: these people aren't here for money."

"Then what happened."

"In the end, the court transferred the money out." He folded the cloth again. "Not one cent of it came from standing somewhere."

The alley went quiet. An electric scooter passed outside, its bell ringing once. Half a minute later, Shi Lei looked up. "Then tell me what I should do."

"That group chat of yours—how many people."

"A hundred thirty-six."

"Report names to Tang Guo this afternoon. One name, one unit number, one contract each." Shen Zhixia turned the registration forms to a fresh page. "You can get a hundred people to see your cloth. You can also get a hundred people to stand in front of a judge."

"I'm not running errands for them."

"You're doing it for yourself." She handed him the pen. "First box. Write your own name."

Shi Lei gripped the pen and wrote hard. The paper was resting on the red cloth, and the strokes pressed faint impressions into it from underneath. When he finished he asked, "What about the cloth."

"Leave it with me." He Xiufen took the folded cloth and tucked it under the long table against the wall. "When the day comes, I'll call you."

"What day."

"When it's time, you won't need four people to carry it." She brushed the dust off her hands. "The whole building will carry it together."

[Thud. Banners don't collect documents.]

[Thud. What makes that door speak is a sentence written on someone else's paper.]

The line moved. Ma Jianjun straightened the number slips. Shi Lei retreated to the base of the wall and sat down, didn't leave. Tang Guo poured him a bowl of soy milk; he held it, drank half.

8:40. They reached the fourteenth person. Shi Lei set the bowl on the step, stood up, and walked to the side of the table.

"Sis."

"Yeah."

"Zhou Keming."

Her pen stopped.

"How do you know that name."

"I've seen him." Shi Lei flipped through his phone, found a photo of a delivery list with an address and floor number, the handwriting someone else's. "Last November, I was hauling goods for people at the Chengbei Building Materials Market. Someone hired me for three trips—beds and mattresses from a warehouse in Chengbei to a few residential buildings. A hundred fifty per trip. They paid me for one, still owe me for two."

"Who hired you."

"Them." He tilted his chin toward the cloth under the table. "The truck was theirs, the waybills were theirs. I only found out they'd run off when they didn't pay."

"Where did you see Zhou Keming."

"Wenchang Road, November 22nd." He said. "Second trip that day. I was hauling old furniture down from the fourth floor, worked late. When I came down, there was a black car parked at the entrance. He walked out of the building with someone behind him."

"How do you know it was him."

"The driver got out to open the door and called him Boss Zhou." Shi Lei said. "That's what those people called him."

"The one who came out with him."

"Half a head taller than me, glasses, thin black frames." He gestured in front of his eyes. "Carrying a black bag, hard-shell, could stand on its own. He didn't smoke."

"Boss Zhou did."

"He did. They offered, he waved it off." Shi Lei said. "Boss Zhou's cigarette was stubbed out halfway through. On the car door."

"What did they say."

"Stood by the car talking for ten-some minutes. I was seven or eight steps away, couldn't hear clearly." He paused. "Only caught two words: 'This batch.'"

Shen Zhixia wrote "This batch" on the back of the registration form and drew a box around it.

"Seen him since."

"Last week. I was delivering tiles to a shop—two trips a day on that Chengdong road. Around ten in the morning, I saw him come out of the Chengdong branch. Around four in the afternoon, saw him again. The security guard at the door nodded to him."

"Alone."

"Alone. This morning was the third time—I went past the side entrance and saw him walk in carrying a paper bag, about the size of an envelope."

"Which day? Remember?"

"Can't remember." He scratched the back of his neck. "The only thing I remember is he pushes his glasses up with his index finger."

Shen Zhixia tore a blank page from the notebook, smoothed it flat, laid the pen on it.

"Write it yourself."

"Write what."

"What time, where, where you were standing, what he was wearing, what he was carrying." She said. "Don't write guesses."

Shi Lei wrote two lines and stopped, asking how to write the character for "glasses." She spelled it out; he wrote slowly, the characters slanting right. When he finished, he signed and asked, "Should I press a fingerprint?"

"A signature is fine."

"Can this be used as evidence?"

"Right now it's a path." She folded the page and slipped it into the notebook. "With this path, I know which document to ask about tomorrow. A judge won't just take your word for what you saw. But if you say it first, and then they lie, they have to keep their own story straight."

Shi Lei nodded, then remembered something. "Sis, for those three hauling jobs—they paid me by transfer."

"By transfer."

"WeChat."

"The person who paid—company or personal account."

He looked down at his phone, scrolled for a while, his brow furrowing. "Personal account. The profile picture is a car. Name's two characters, I can't remember."

"Screenshot it and send it to Tang Guo. Don't change phones, don't delete the records."

"A personal account—not the same as your document, right."

"Money still pays the same." She said. "What's different is whose name is attached to it."

When Shi Lei pushed the paper back he added, "My mom called last week, asking about that twenty-four thousand. I said I'm handling it. She asked where. I couldn't say."

"You can say it today." Shen Zhixia clipped the page into the notebook. "Say your name is written on the first page."

[Thud. Behind the bank's door, money stays put. Paper moves.]

4:00 in the afternoon, upstairs at Zhengping Firm.

Three items lay at one end of the long table: a photocopy of the payment transfer voucher, the "Handling Officer" field of which she'd transcribed yesterday; Shi Lei's handwritten page; and one line she'd copied herself—the sentence Xiao Ru had said yesterday: stop sending those batches of documents up.

She laid the three pages side by side with space between them.

He Xiufen came up with her mug and stood at the table, didn't sit.

"The application's been submitted." She said. "The court accepted it and told me to wait for a notice—maybe a day or two."

"The tenth is the deadline." Shen Zhixia said. "Before the deadline, there's still time for one more visit to the archive storage."

"Look at these three first." He Xiufen tapped the bottoms of the pages with her mug. "That hand inside the bank—you have to split it into two kinds. The one sitting behind the counter has an employee ID and a name. Every transaction leaves a record. Show your order and they'll give it to you. The other kind, the one who goes in from outside, leaves nothing behind—only footprints. You can't see his writing, but you can see where he's walking."

"You're afraid he'll tamper with the paper."

"Money lying in the vault, you can still trace it. But if the documents are touched, where do you go to verify." She set the mug down. "On the fifteenth, the people on the eleventh floor will want an explanation. The day after the tenth, that order is worthless. Squeezed between the two—how many days do you have left."

Shen Zhixia stared at the words "This batch" for a while, then looked at the line below. One heard at the storefront's reception desk, the other beside a car on Wenchang Road. She placed the two side by side but didn't merge them.

"I won't guess." She said.

"Guesses don't hold up in court." He Xiufen said. "What you need is the man himself—which door he enters, which window he goes to, what day he handles business. The bank has all that in its own records."

The inner office door opened. Tang Guo came out with her phone. "Shi Lei's group chat—a hundred thirty-six people. This afternoon nineteen households reported. Eleven have all three documents." She pressed a stack of forms onto the table. "He also said something in the group."

"What did he say."

"He said the cloth will wait for now, and nobody should go tomorrow."

Shen Zhixia picked up the handwritten page and held it to the window. The writing was crooked; the one character for "glasses" was written small and neat, as if traced over with special care.

When dusk was about to fall, her phone vibrated. A three-second voice message from Shi Lei: "Sis, I took another hauling job in Chengdong. Four thirty—saw him again."

She replayed it and pressed the button to hold it. Wind on his end, and the clatter of a metal truck bed.

"How many times today."

"Three."

"Going to Chengdong tomorrow."

"Going. Every day."

"If you see him again, send me one word." She said. "You know which one."

He laughed half a laugh on the other end and hung up.

The stove downstairs flared; the smell of scallion oil climbed up the stairwell. She stood in front of the glass desk pad. In the stack of papers beneath it, two lay side by side: one was the half-sentence from nine years ago, "The signature was mine,"; the other was the strip of paper she'd cut yesterday morning: "The bank isn't the last pocket, either." Today she didn't cut any paper. She pulled out a blank page and wrote two lines—10:00, 4:00. When she finished, she pressed her palm over it. The paper was still warm.

[Thud. The hand that copies documents and the hand that adds words share the same door.]