Employee-Linked Accounts Had to Be Reviewed!

At 8:30 on Friday morning, December 4, on the sixth floor, when he sat down, his back pressed against the chair and he could not straighten up. He had spent those four hours on the night bus sleeping folded over.

A form was pinned beneath something on the desk.

It was not just his. Every desk in the room had one pinned down.

At the top was a line of text: Employee-Linked Account Declaration Form.

Last week's document had said they would conduct a review in mid-December. This form was for everyone to fill out themselves before that review.

There was not much to fill in. Name, employee number, ID number, then spouse, parents, children, listed row by row. Each row was followed by two boxes: whether they had registered a store on the platform, and whether they operated any business related to the categories under their charge. At the very bottom was a line of fine print: False declarations would be handled according to internal regulations.

Zhou Bin poked the form twice with his pen.

"Every year," he said, turning his chair around. "Lin, do you think this thing does any good?"

"You still have to fill it out."

"I'm asking whether it does any good." Zhou Bin twisted open his cup lid. "If someone really opened a store outside, would they write it on this form?"

The guy at the next workstation chuckled.

"Brother Zhou, the form's just procedure. The real thing comes afterward."

"What comes afterward?"

"They run a check on all the accounts under your name. ID number, phone number, linked bank cards—the system runs through them and it all comes up."

Zhou Bin screwed the lid back on.

"Then what am I afraid of? My wife can't even shop online."

Lin Fan picked up his pen.

He wrote down both his parents' names. He found their ID numbers in his phone, saved from when they had handled things back home. He checked no in both boxes. No spouse. No children.

Signature, date: December 4.

He did not need to make up a single word.

There was not a single field on this form from beginning to end labeled roommate.

When he had picked Ma Le to put his name on it in September, he had not been thinking about today's form. He had thought that the man was idle, his family owned a house, he wanted money, he was mild-tempered, and if anything happened, he would not talk. Those were the things that made him the right choice.

The real advantage of choosing right came later. The four words spelled out in the internal rules were direct family members. Whoever wrote those rules had wives, children, fathers, and mothers in mind. No one would think to include the person in the next room of a shared rental under that category.

But this loophole had not come for free.

For three months, anywhere a name could be left behind, none of it bore the surname Lin. The Wangwang account was registered with Ma Le's ID. The store license was his. The receiving Alipay was linked to his card. The customer service number was his. The goods were piled in an empty room at his mother's place. The sender field on the shipping labels was stamped with a rubber seal bearing the surname Ma.

On the company computer, he did not even click into his own store's page.

The system would trace everything to Ma Le and stop there. Ma Le had an online store under his name. Ma Le was Ma Le, with not a single thread connecting him to the man on the sixth floor filling out that form.

The system could not find it.

Forty-three thousand eight hundred yuan was on Ma Le's card. This morning, it had to be transferred to an account in Wenzhou belonging to a man surnamed Cai. Once the money went out, there would be a real person sitting on the other side of the counter.

Real people asked questions.

He was on the sixth floor.

At 10:15 that morning, at the bank diagonally across from the residential complex, the slip spat out by the ticket machine said there were still nine people ahead of him.

Ma Le crumpled the slip into a ball, then unfolded and smoothed it out again.

He took out the paper in his pocket and read it for the fourth time.

Recipient's name, opening bank, a long string of account numbers, and a figure on the line below: 43,800. His brother had written it sometime after six that morning, then ridden off on his bike as soon as he finished.

Nine people took over twenty minutes.

When his number was called, he passed his ID and card through the window.

The girl behind the counter was the short-haired one. When he had come last week to withdraw four thousand yuan, she had questioned him three times.

"Interbank transfer." The girl glanced at the slip. "That's a fairly large amount. Please wait a moment."

She tapped at the keyboard for a while.

"Mr. Ma, what is this payment for?"

"Purchasing stock."

"What kind of stock?"

"Shoes."

"What do you do?"

"My family runs a business." Ma Le leaned forward. "We sell shoes online."

The girl looked up at him.

"Do you know the recipient?"

Ma Le opened his mouth.

He did not. He did not even know what this Cai fellow looked like. Yesterday, his brother had spent the whole day in Wenzhou and come back saying only that the materials supplier was surnamed Cai, nothing else.

"He's in Wenzhou. He does materials."

"Have you met him?"

"No."

The moment those two words left his mouth, he regretted them.

The keyboard tapping stopped.

"Mr. Ma, please take a seat for a moment."

The girl pressed a bell. A man in his thirties came out from the back, a badge hanging on his chest. He stood beside her and lowered his head to look at the screen.

Ma Le sat on the plastic chair, his palms drenched in sweat.

It was over.

If this transfer did not go through, the materials supplier in Wenzhou would not ship the materials today. They would not reach the factory tomorrow, the sample shoes could not be made, and the truck could not be loaded on the fifteenth. His brother had nailed down the date with them in Wenzhou yesterday.

He did not even know why he was so anxious over it. The money was not his.

But the card was.

"Mr. Ma."

The man spoke through the glass.

"There have been considerable sums moving in and out of this card since September. Could you tell us what kind of business you run?"

"An online store." Ma Le stood up. "I opened an online store selling women's boots. Around Double Eleven, we sold several thousand orders."

"Is the store yours personally?"

"My name is on the license." Ma Le pulled up the backend on his phone and pressed the screen against the glass. "Look, this is my store. It's even got a crown rating."

The man looked for two seconds.

"This payment is for a supplier?"

"Materials." Ma Le said. "The factory's in Wenzhou. I placed an order for three thousand pairs. They need to buy materials before they can start production."

"Why not send it to the factory? Why send it to this Mr. Cai?"

"The factory owes him for materials." Ma Le blurted out. "If the money passes through another hand, it might get withheld. I'm paying the materials supplier directly, so they'll release the materials."

After saying it, he froze.

His brother had told him that over the phone yesterday, word for word.

The man nodded, turned and said something to the girl, then left.

"Mr. Ma, please fill in the purpose field."

Ma Le took the pen and wrote two words on the form: payment for goods.

He entered the password twice. The first time, his hand shook and he pressed one digit wrong.

The receipt was pushed out through the window, a thin little slip.

"Please keep it safe."

It was ten to eleven when he walked out of the bank. The sunlight hurt his eyes.

Standing on the steps, he thought of something.

He had stood inside for twenty minutes, making things up sentence by sentence until his back was soaked in sweat. But thinking back, from "my family runs a business" to "the store is mine," to "the factory is in Wenzhou," "three thousand pairs," and "materials payment," not a single word had been false.

The license bore his name, the card was his card, and the crown rating was real too.

By the end, he could not understand it himself. If that was the case, what had he been panicking about?

A little after one that afternoon, Lin Fan received a text from Wenzhou at the cafeteria entrance. Six words: Money received. Truck loaded.

When he returned to his workstation, the form on his desk had already been collected, stacked in a pile on the corner of the team leader's desk.

There was a little over twenty-eight thousand left on the card, and just over fifty thousand sitting in Alipay, dropping away one payment at a time.

The remaining balance was six thousand, to be paid before the truck was loaded on the fifteenth.

Forty-three thousand eight hundred. For the first time in three months, his money had not turned into goods. It had turned into materials at someone else's factory.

The materials would arrive at the factory tomorrow afternoon. Two days for the sample shoes.

Saturday, Sunday, Monday—the sample shoes should be shipped out on Monday.

A little after seven that evening, he returned to the residential complex. Ma Le was sitting on a stool by the garage entrance, eating an apple with the receipt spread over his lap.

"Brother."

"It went through."

"I know it went through." Ma Le held up the receipt. "I stood at the counter for twenty minutes today, and they called out a supervisor."

"What did they ask?"

"They asked if I knew that Cai fellow. They asked where all the money moving in and out of this card since September came from." Ma Le took a bite of his apple. "I even pulled up the store backend for them."

"What did you say?"

"I said the store was mine, my name was on the license, I placed the order, and I paid for the materials."

"That wasn't wrong."

"Wrong my ass." Ma Le tossed the apple core into a bag. "I stood outside afterward and thought about it for ages. Everything I said was true, so why was I shaking in there?"

He folded the receipt and tucked it into his back pocket.

"I'm keeping this."

"What for?"

"I don't know." Ma Le patted his back pocket. "I'm keeping it anyway."