Thirty-Some Hours in Thirty-Seven Lines!

At 8:20 p.m. on Tuesday, December 8, two sheets of paper lay spread beneath the desk lamp in the rental apartment.

The envelope had been brought back from the conference room on November 26. Two pencil marks Zheng Haifeng had drawn still remained along the edge.

Submit it before the New Year. Today was the eighth.

Those words, before the New Year, meant it would count no matter which day he submitted it. But once the mid-December rectification campaign began, employees' linked accounts would all be reviewed. If he submitted this document then, whoever read it would inevitably give it an extra layer of scrutiny.

If he was going to submit it, he had to get ahead of it.

The second item under review concerned those thirty-some hours from November 2 to 4.

How those thirty-some hours had passed, he was the only person in the world who knew.

On the night the complaint came in, Ma Le had suggested finding an acquaintance and asking them to put in a word. He had not. He had squatted outside the typing and photocopy shop by the residential complex, scanned the three documents into images at one yuan per page, then uploaded them and waited in line like any other seller out there.

The next morning, he sat at his workstation verifying another company's business license while his own three images waited in a different queue in the same building. He did not know how many were ahead of him, nor did he know whether they would pass.

During those thirty-some hours, no one had done a single thing for him.

That was why this report had to be detailed—detailed down to the minute.

Once it was written and submitted, the second item would be dead.

There was another gain, one more valuable than killing the second item.

He had only gone through the evidence review process once before, and he had gone in blind. Which steps the system handled automatically, which steps would be pulled out for manual review, how long the deadline was, what happened if it passed—none of that was in the internal rules, and no one was willing to explain it in detail if asked. This time, Zheng Haifeng had told him to sort it out, so he had a reason to ask through every point.

His own store would still need to go through this process over the next six months.

On Wednesday morning, December 9, he did not write it at his workstation.

He did not have the circulation records. He called the review line and gave Zheng Haifeng's name.

The person on the other end asked him to read out the store number.

He could recite that string of digits with his eyes closed.

After he finished, the person typed for a while, then read the records to him one by one while he copied them into his notebook.

At 2:26 p.m. on November 2, the complaint came in and the system suspended sales.

At 8:51 that evening, three pieces of evidence were uploaded and entered the queue.

Throughout November 3, their position in the queue moved forward four times.

At 1:07 a.m. on November 4, the deadline arrived and the system cleared them.

At 1:11, the listing was restored.

Thirty-four hours and forty-one minutes.

Employee IDs involved: zero.

1:07 a.m.

There had not been a single person in the building at that hour.

If someone had really passed along a message and cut him into the line, someone would have had to be on shift. Someone would have had to do it manually. And any manual action would leave an employee ID. When he copied that field, it was blank—so blank that even he paused for a moment.

It was not as if he had not considered that there might be a name there. After he uploaded the documents on the night of November 2, perhaps someone might have casually clicked something. If that had happened, then it would no longer be a matter of whether the second item could be dismissed.

But now, that field was blank.

He asked one more question.

During the half month when this queue had been most backed up, how long did clearance take on average?

The person on the other end checked, then said that before Double Eleven, goods had piled up and the average was about two days, with the longest cases waiting four days.

A day and a half was not fast by comparison.

He remembered the line in the report: A no-name little shop's evidence could be cleared so quickly seven days before Double Eleven.

The person who wrote that thought it was fast because he had never queued in this line himself. For a company like his, if its evidence got stuck, one phone call would have someone pull it out. Measuring others by his own standards, of course it would look abnormal.

He would not put that sentence in the report.

There was only one line in the report: During this period, the average processing time for similar evidence was approximately two days. This case took thirty-four hours and forty-one minutes, within the normal range.

Not a single adjective.

At the end, he added a section no one had asked him to add.

The system operation records of the six people in the department from November 2 to 4, one line per person. His own line was the longest: verifying the business license of a power supply company on the morning of the third, then spending two hours arguing over a price-protection complaint involving headphones that afternoon. It was all sitting in the system.

The person under investigation had put himself at the very top.

Nothing else needed to be said.

The entire report came to thirty-seven lines.

Not a single word had been fabricated.

At 2:30 in the afternoon, in the small meeting room on the sixth floor.

Zheng Haifeng pulled the door shut. Zhou Bin sat inside, holding his cup.

"The thing due before the New Year, and you're giving it to me today?"

"I submitted it as soon as I finished writing."

Zhou Bin twisted the cup lid open, then screwed it back on.

"Lin, you're certainly efficient." He said, "But writing something like this quickly is no use. What the higher-ups want to see is whether you investigated it thoroughly."

Zheng Haifeng had already turned to the second page.

He read slowly, his finger tracing down line by line. Halfway down, he stopped.

"1:07 a.m."

"The deadline arrived, so the system cleared it automatically."

Zheng Haifeng turned the page around and pushed it in front of Zhou Bin.

Zhou Bin lowered his head to read it.

After nearly half a minute, he looked up.

"There wasn't a single manual intervention?"

"No."

"The three pieces of evidence sat in the queue for a day and a half, and nobody reviewed them?"

"They were not selected for review before the deadline, so they cleared automatically when the time came," Lin Fan said. "Whether they get selected is random. This batch was not selected."

Zhou Bin lifted the sheet of paper, then put it down again.

"Someone could still have put in a word beforehand, telling them not to select it."

"Even putting in a word would require someone to do something." Zheng Haifeng pulled the paper back. "Any action leaves an employee ID. There isn't a single employee ID on here. At 1:07 in the morning, who do you think was in the building opening that door for him?"

Zhou Bin opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

At last month's team meeting, Zhou Bin had been the first to speak. He submitted three conclusions, the last of which had been that the shop would be gone before the New Year. Zheng Haifeng had taken that conclusion upstairs, only for it to be rejected at the end of the month. The report had to be rewritten, and Zheng Haifeng's name was still on it.

Zheng Haifeng remembered that score more clearly than anyone.

He flipped farther back and stopped at the final section.

"You listed this too?"

"Listing it saves people from asking again later."

"These are our own people's records."

"The second item is about our own people," Lin Fan said. "If I don't list them, someone will still come asking later who was on shift those two days. If I list them, this report ends here."

Zheng Haifeng stared at that page for two seconds.

He pulled off the pen cap and signed his name on the last page, dating it December 9.

"No changes needed."

Once he signed it, it became a department document.

No one upstairs would ask who had written it.

"I'll send it up this afternoon." Zheng Haifeng slipped the report into a folder. "Keep a copy of this format for me. If the department has to produce something like this again, we'll follow it."

"Okay."

Zhou Bin had remained seated without moving.

"Brother Zheng." He suddenly spoke. "The second item's done. What about the first?"

"The explanation for the first item was sent up at the end of last month."

"Then there's only one thing left."

Zhou Bin stood and set his cup down on the table with a thud.

"I asked around through contacts these past two days, with four merchants who make boots," he said. "Fur-trimmed ankle boots selling for forty-nine yuan, five thousand pairs a month—there isn't a factory in Hangzhou that can make them. This batch didn't come from Hangzhou."

"Then where did it come from?" Zheng Haifeng tucked the folder under his arm.

"Wenzhou."

The meeting room fell silent for two seconds.

He had moved in the right direction.

In October, Zhou Bin had focused on whether the shop was fake. Last month, he had focused on when the shop would die. Now, he was focused on the goods. From the shop to the goods, from Hangzhou to Wenzhou—both steps had been right.

But he could go no farther.

There were thousands of shoe factories in Wenzhou. Only five or six were actually producing goods, and those five or six had already been questioned one by one last month. The people doing the questioning knew the business far better than Zhou Bin, yet they had found nothing.

"How are you going to investigate thousands of factories?" Zheng Haifeng pulled open the door.

"Even among thousands of factories, I know a few people."

Zhou Bin left first.

The report was submitted a little after three. Until the end of the workday, no one upstairs asked another word.

That was the end of the second item.

Only one question remained in this building: where had the goods come from?

At that courtyard in southern Wenzhou, Old Chen was reopening the molds today. Sample shoes would be ready on the eleventh, and production would begin on the afternoon of the twelfth.

That batch of goods had not even been made yet.

His fifty thousand yuan was already tied up in it.