Every factory in Wenzhou swore it hadn't supplied a single pair! Lei Xiangdong placed an order at his store himself!

At eight thirty on the evening of November 12, Old Xu's truck sat outside the garage on its fourth run of the day.

Ma Le crouched beside the truck bed, stacking bags inside. After each layer, he stood up to catch his breath. He had slept only three hours the night before. His cousin had called in two more classmates to keep working, still paying each of them a hundred.

Lin Fan hadn't taken the listing down. Yesterday had brought 5,381 orders, and today had added over six hundred so far. The line on the page hadn't changed either: the first batch would ship within three days, the second before the twentieth.

He still owed customers over 4,400 pairs of shoes. The only stock he had secured was the thousand pairs from Factory Director Ye.

He knew exactly how big that hole was, but he couldn't take the listing down. Everyone online had helped push him into yesterday's position. That chance came only once a year. If he closed it today, he would drop to page five tomorrow.

By today, the other side had exhausted its tricks. The complaint had been rejected on the strength of his documentation. Unpaid orders couldn't tie up a single pair of his shoes. As for the promised two bad reviews a day, not one had appeared.

There was only one route left: trace the stock.

Last week, Factory Director Ye had mentioned two groups asking which warehouses in the area still held inventory. If those two groups couldn't find it, the people coming next would be bigger players.

The men stationed at those five or six factories in Wenzhou recorded the new stock coming off the production lines every day. Every pair made was hauled away, and every pair could be accounted for. Goods that had sat in a warehouse for a year had no entry in those notebooks.

At ten to nine, his phone rang. It was a Wenzhou number.

Factory Director Ye sounded bright and energetic. He said the goods had been loaded last night, and this morning he had personally escorted them to the freight depot for a direct-route shipment. He would send the tracking number shortly. With luck, Lin Fan could collect them the day after tomorrow.

"Factory Director Ye, I'll send the balance as soon as the payments come through over the next couple of days."

"Oh, stop saying that." The man on the other end laughed, then paused. "There is something I wanted to tell you, though. The west side of town was lively today. A group from Hangzhou came in two cars, knocking on doors and asking about leftover stock of fur-trimmed ankle boots. Said money was no object. Word travels fast in our trade. It had reached the south side by noon."

"Did they come to your place?"

"My place?" Factory Director Ye sounded as though he'd heard a joke. "This factory's been shut for over half a year. The workers scattered ages ago, and even the dog's wasted away. Who would come here looking for stock? I told the first two groups I had nothing. This time, I didn't even have to say a word."

Lin Fan stood at the garage entrance. Old Xu's truck was running, its headlights washing the wall white.

"Factory Director Ye, if anyone asks from now on, stick to that same answer."

"Don't worry. My factory's just an empty yard."

Earlier that morning, the lights in the factory building on the north side of town had been on since before dawn.

All six vehicles in the yard were making runs. Yesterday's orders were still backed up at the door, and twenty-odd of the forty-six customer service staff had stayed after working through the night.

The young order coordinator came in holding a printout.

"Mr. Lei, the figures for that store."

Lei Xiangdong was standing by the storage bays, watching the warehouse supervisor count stock. He turned.

"How many?"

"The number on the page went up by over fifty-three hundred yesterday alone."

Everyone in the room went still.

The operations manager rose from behind his desk, took the printout, and read it twice. Disbelief still showed on his face when he looked up.

"Fifty-three hundred? In one day?"

"Twenty-four hours."

Lei Xiangdong closed the inventory ledger in his hand and passed it back to the warehouse supervisor.

His own operation had moved over eighteen thousand pairs yesterday: a price of forty-nine in the event, slots for twenty-odd stores, six vehicles making a trip every two hours from morning until midnight. He had earned that day's results by stationing men at one factory after another since early October, stacking up bundles of cash, and buying out all their machine capacity through next March.

That store charged thirty-nine and took over fifty-three hundred orders in a day.

Three weeks earlier, that listing had sold only a hundred and fifty or sixty.

"What happened with the complaint?"

"His documentation passed. We kept watching. No points deducted." The operations manager's voice sank.

"What about the accounts tying up his stock?"

"They can't hold it anymore. He changed the listing so inventory only drops after payment. Our accounts place orders without paying, so they can't tie up a single pair."

"The bad reviews."

The operations manager said nothing.

"I'm asking about the bad reviews."

"We can't post them." The operations manager gripped the printout. "You need a completed purchase before you can review anything. Those accounts of ours never paid a cent. They don't have a single transaction, so they can't give him a rating."

Lei Xiangdong stared at him for five or six seconds.

Three assignments, and not one had delivered.

Complaints, unpaid orders, bad reviews—who in this business in Hangzhou didn't use those three tricks? Any one of them could make a store cry. This time, they had thrown all three at him together. His listing had stopped for a little over a day, then come back to life on its own the following afternoon.

He had documentation, knew how to change the inventory settings, and knew unpaid orders couldn't leave ratings. Tracing those counters back one by one revealed someone thoroughly familiar with the platform's rules.

Lei Xiangdong had met people like that before. They were all veterans with years in the business.

"Get the car ready."

"Where are you going, Mr. Lei?"

"Wenzhou."

Last week, he had said that if this store wasn't closed before Double Eleven, he would go to Wenzhou himself.

He left the city at ten in the morning and arrived in Wenzhou after two in the afternoon.

He visited all five or six factories in a single day. No pleasantries when he entered. The moment he sat down, he asked for the records.

The first factory director flipped through the stationed young man's hardcover notebook from beginning to end, then spread it on the table. One page per day: pairs off the line, pairs loaded onto trucks. The two figures matched, and the driver's signature was on the last page.

"Mr. Lei, since October eighth, not a single pair from this factory has left except on your trucks. The man you sent eats and sleeps in my workshop. If I dared divert even one pair, you know better than I do how much the contract says I'd owe."

The third factory director grew agitated. He called the workshop foreman, warehouse keeper, and invoicing accountant into the office together, and each stood there in turn and said there had been none.

Wu Factory was the last stop. It was already dark.

Boss Wu poured him tea. The smile never left his round face, and his tone was softer than anyone else's.

"Mr. Lei, my factory has two lines. One makes goods for you, and so does the other. Where would I get stock to divert? Your young man sits beside the trucks every day. Even the tape sealing the cartons has your own lettering printed on it. I couldn't get an empty box out of this factory."

Over the course of the day, he heard the same thing six times.

The strange part was that he believed them.

He had sent his own men to keep those records day by day over the past month. The record keepers were his people, the notebooks were ones he'd bought, and the tape bore his company's lettering. The tighter he made that system, the more firmly it proved those goods hadn't come from there.

They hadn't come from those five or six factories.

That left only warehouses.

Every pair of fur-trimmed women's ankle boots made by legitimate factories for this winter was stacked in his storage bays. That other batch was genuine. Its documentation had passed the platform's checks, the pile stood upright, and the stitching was tight. If genuine stock hadn't come off a production line, it could only have been hauled out of some warehouse.

Wenzhou's export shoe factories clustered across the industrial parks on the west side of town.

After eight that evening, two cars turned into an industrial park. Boundary walls stretched out of sight on both sides of the road.

The old man in the first gatehouse didn't even open his window, only waved them away through the glass. At the second factory, they got into the office, but the salesperson's expression changed as soon as he heard they wanted to buy warehoused stock. Production was running perfectly well, he said. What leftover stock? At the third, the gatekeeper looked Lei Xiangdong up and down, spotted the two cars outside, then turned and called someone over. The man who emerged said the boss was away on business.

Factories sitting on unsold stock wouldn't admit they had it. He understood why. With hundreds of thousands tied up in a warehouse, the moment word got out, material suppliers and lenders would block the gates, while competitors waited to laugh.

After ten, the car stopped at the entrance to the industrial park, and the operations manager handed over the list from the previous two days.

Two sheets, thirty-odd factory names, each with a cross beside it.

Reasons were written after the crosses: none, no women's boots, men's styles only, closed down, couldn't find anyone.

He read down the list.

Near the bottom of the second page was an entry: old factory district, south side, Ye's Shoe Factory.

A cross. After it: production stopped six months ago, no stock.

His finger paused on that line.

A factory shut down for half a year, its workers gone, not a cent in its accounts—if it really had a few thousand pairs of good shoes sitting in a warehouse, it would have sold them cheap to a clearance dealer long ago. It couldn't have held on until today. That reasoning hadn't failed him in twenty years.

He handed the papers back and moved on.

After eleven, at the hotel outside the industrial park, the operations manager got out to book rooms. Lei Xiangdong stayed in the car.

Wenzhou was enormous, with over a thousand shoe factories and thousands of warehouses. He couldn't get through a single door. Knocking one by one, he wouldn't finish by next spring.

After an entire day, he hadn't even held one of those boots.

He had studied the picture on the listing for half a month. Fur trim, ankle height, rounded toe, the most common color. What could a picture tell him? Nothing.

But the actual boot was different.

Shoes couldn't hide their origins. The label on the tongue, the stamp beneath the insole, the foreign inspectors' paper cards tucked into cartons of export goods, the stitch spacing, the smell of the glue. Put a shoe in his hands, and he could tell which factory had made it and which country's order it had been made for.

Only so many factories in Wenzhou could produce goods like that. Find the factory, and one question would tell him who had bought the batch.

He rolled down the window and called to the operations manager.

"Buy a pair of boots from that store."

The operations manager stood outside the car door without moving.

"Buy them?"

"Buy them."

"Which account?"

"Your own account, your own name, shipped to your home," Lei Xiangdong said. "Pay for them."

The operations manager got into the car and tapped at his phone. After a while, he looked up.

"Mr. Lei, there's something."

"Go on."

"His page says orders ship in two batches. The first goes out within three days, the second before the twentieth. My order's in the second batch."

Lei Xiangdong said nothing.

His own operation still had over ten thousand unshipped orders piled up. Customers had been berating his service staff from last night through this afternoon. There weren't enough vehicles across the whole delivery network; none of them had room to criticize anyone else. The strange thing was that this store had stated the dates clearly on its page. In all his years in business, this was the first store he'd seen dare put shipping dates on a listing.

"How much?"

"Thirty-nine, plus five for shipping."

Forty-four yuan, and a wait until after the twentieth.

He took the folded printout of the listing from his jacket pocket, opened it across his knees, and pulled out a pen to write numbers in the blank space beneath the picture. The operations manager read them out, and he wrote each one down.

When he finished, he folded the paper in half and tucked it back into his pocket.

"Once I have that boot in my hands," he said, rolling up the window, "I'll know at a glance which factory made this batch."