The Errand

The envelope arrived on his desk on Friday at four-twenty in the afternoon.

Lao Wei brought it across the room himself, which was unusual. He set it down beside Lin's right hand. The envelope was small, square, of the heavy cream-colored stock that the office used for inter-bureau correspondence. It was sealed with a small disk of red wax. The wax was faintly impressed with a character: 政. *Government.*

Lao Wei did not return to his desk immediately. He stood, hands clasped behind his back, looking out the window for a moment. Then he said:

"The Cloud Peak Teahouse, on Yu Street, near the river. The man who is to receive this will be there at five. He will be at the back table, by the window. He will have a copy of the *Qingyuan Daily* folded face-up beside his teacup. He will be wearing a grey cardigan with leather buttons. You will give him this envelope. You will say one sentence: *Director Pang sends his regards.* You will leave. You will not stay for tea. You will not allow him to give you anything to bring back. If he attempts to give you something, you will say: *Director Pang specified only the delivery.* You will then walk out. You will not look at the envelope on the way. You will not, on the way back, deviate from the most direct route. Do you understand?"

"I understand, Lao Wei."

"You will not be told who he is."

"I understand."

Lao Wei looked at him for a moment.

"Bring me coffee on the way back. Black. From the small place on the corner, not the chain. The one with the green awning. I will pay you tomorrow."

"Yes, Lao Wei."

"Go."

#

He went.

The Cloud Peak Teahouse was a small, old, quiet place on Yu Street. It occupied the second floor of a building that was, on the first floor, a calligraphy supplies shop. The teahouse had been in the same location for forty years. Its clientele was almost entirely men over fifty-five.

He arrived at four fifty-eight. He walked up the narrow wooden stairs. The interior was dim, smelled of pu'er and old wood, with perhaps eight square tables arranged across a low-ceilinged room.

The back table was at the far end, by the window. A man sat at it.

He was perhaps fifty, balding gently, with reading glasses pushed up onto his forehead and a small folded copy of the *Qingyuan Daily* lying face-up beside an unfilled teacup. His cardigan was grey. The buttons were leather. He looked up as Lin approached.

His face was alert, neutral, without curiosity. He had clearly been informed who would arrive and was simply waiting.

Lin bowed his head a fraction. He set the envelope on the table.

"Director Pang sends his regards."

The man took the envelope. He did not open it. He turned it over once, examining the seal — confirming, Lin realized, that the wax had not been disturbed — and set it down again on the table beside the teacup.

He said: "Please thank Director Pang for me."

"Yes."

The man gestured at the empty chair across from him.

"Have you eaten?"

"I have, thank you."

"Tea?"

"Director Pang specified only the delivery."

A small pause. The man's mouth moved very slightly. Not a smile. The acknowledgment of a polite refusal.

"Of course. Then I will not detain you. Thank you."

Lin bowed again. He turned. He walked back through the teahouse, down the wooden stairs, and out onto Yu Street.

It was now five-oh-five. The autumn evening had begun. The street had the soft grey-blue light of an October dusk, the lamps not yet on, the air cooling rapidly.

He walked north along Yu Street, on the most direct route back to the government compound.

He had walked perhaps twenty meters when he stopped.

He stood at the edge of the sidewalk, near the corner of Yu Street and Long Hua Lane, in front of a small shop window. The shop sold framed photographs and old maps. He looked into the window as if he had paused to consider buying one. He did not, in fact, see the photographs.

What he saw, very clearly, in his mind, was the back of the envelope as he had set it down on the table.

The back of the envelope had been blank. There had been no markings at all on the back. This was unusual. Inter-bureau correspondence within the municipal government generally had, in small print on the back near the bottom edge, a routing notation — a sequence of letters and numbers indicating originating office, classification, and date. Pang's office, in particular, used a rigid routing protocol. Lin had seen, in the past two weeks, perhaps thirty envelopes pass across the small office, and every one of them had had a routing notation on the back.

This one had not.

The seal had been the standard wax of the General Office. The size and weight of the envelope had been correct. The cream-colored stock had been the right stock.

But the routing notation on the back had been absent.

It meant one of three things. It meant the envelope had been prepared in such a hurry that the routing had been omitted by accident — possible, but unlikely, since Pang was meticulous. It meant the envelope was not a routine inter-bureau communication — possible, and likely, since Pang had not entrusted it to a regular messenger. Or it meant the envelope had been produced to *resemble* a General Office envelope without actually originating in the General Office — possible, and the most interesting.

He stood at the shop window for forty seconds.

He thought: *Lao Wei said: do not look at the envelope on the way. He did not say: do not think about it.*

He thought: *I cannot now know what was in the envelope. The envelope is delivered. The wax was unbroken when I arrived. The wax was unbroken when I left.*

He thought: *But the absence of routing notation is — itself — a piece of information.*

He thought, slowly: *Whom did I see at the table.*

He walked on. He turned right at the corner, away from the most direct route, into Long Hua Lane. He had been instructed not to deviate. He was deviating. He understood that he was deviating. He calculated, briefly, the cost of being seen. It was Friday evening; the streets were busy; the chance of being noticed by any specific individual in this neighborhood was small. He continued.

Long Hua Lane was a narrow street of small shops. He walked along it for perhaps a hundred meters and then turned, abruptly, into a small noodle shop on the right.

He sat at a table by the front window. He ordered a bowl of plain noodles from the proprietor, who looked at him without interest. The proprietor brought the noodles in two minutes.

Lin sat at the window and ate slowly.

He could see, from this angle, the entrance to the building that contained the Cloud Peak Teahouse, two streets back, across a small open intersection.

He ate. He waited.

At five-twenty-eight, the man in the grey cardigan emerged from the building. He was carrying the envelope, now visibly opened, in his right hand. He paused on the sidewalk for a moment, looking left and right with the small careful glance of a man checking the street, and then he turned and walked north — north on Yu Street, back toward the river, in the same direction Lin had originally been instructed to walk.

But he did not go to the river.

At Yu Street and Pingsheng Road, he turned right.

Right was east. East from Yu Street, on Pingsheng Road, led — Lin knew this from the maps he had memorized in his first week — to the Provincial Bureau of Land Resources' Qingyuan branch office. The branch office was a four-story building of pale yellow stone three blocks east of Yu Street.

Lin watched the man's back disappear around the corner.

He sat at the table for another minute. He finished his noodles. He paid. He stood. He walked out of the noodle shop, north on Long Hua Lane, and rejoined Yu Street at the bridge intersection. He turned left and walked across the bridge over the Yu River, toward the government compound.

He was now, he calculated, approximately seven minutes off the schedule that a direct return would have produced. Seven minutes was within a margin that could be explained by ordinary delay.

He stopped at the small place with the green awning on the corner. He bought a paper cup of black coffee. He carried it the rest of the way to the office.

He arrived in the small office at five forty-six.

Lao Wei was at his desk. He set the coffee down beside Lao Wei's elbow.

"It is delivered, Lao Wei. The man took the envelope. He thanked Director Pang. He offered me tea. I refused. I came back."

"Mm. Sit down."

Lin sat. He bent over the document he had been working on before the errand. He worked for the next hour without looking up.

#

That night, in the boarding house, he lay on his bed in his clothes, with the light off, and he thought.

He had broken Lao Wei's instruction.

He had been told *not to deviate.* He had deviated. He had observed the man in the grey cardigan walking, after the delivery, in the direction of the Provincial Bureau of Land Resources' Qingyuan branch.

The man, therefore, was almost certainly an officer at the branch.

The envelope, which had not borne the General Office's routing notation, had been delivered to him from Director Pang of the General Office, on a Friday evening, at a teahouse two blocks from the Bureau's branch office, by a junior clerk who had been instructed to leave immediately.

The most economical interpretation: Director Pang was conducting a private communication with someone at the Provincial Bureau of Land Resources' Qingyuan branch. Private — meaning not going through the official inter-bureau channels.

He thought about whose father held a senior position in the Provincial Bureau of Land Resources. He thought about the lunch at the Tongqing Restaurant six weeks earlier, when Zhao Hongdao had said, in passing, *You will meet him eventually, I'm sure. He's very interested in the new young people.*

He thought, slowly: *The envelope was not from the General Office. The envelope was from Director Pang to the Provincial Bureau of Land Resources, conveyed off the books. Pang was communicating with someone in Zhao Hongdao's department. The communication did not pass through any system that would create a record.*

He thought: *This could be entirely innocent. Many communications, for routine reasons, are conducted privately rather than through channels.*

He thought: *Or it could not be innocent.*

He thought: *I have, by deviating from the route, learned a thing about my director that I was not supposed to learn. I cannot now unlearn it. I cannot tell anyone. I cannot even write it down, because writing it down creates evidence that I deviated.*

He thought: *I will keep it in my head. Until I know what it is for, I will not act on it. But I will not forget it.*

He turned his face to the wall.

He thought, last, before sleep: *Lao Wei told me not to deviate. Lao Wei did not tell me not to think. I have, perhaps, just acquired a second small piece of capital. I do not yet know what it can buy. I will hold it for now.*

He slept.

In his sleep he did not dream of his grandfather. He dreamed, for some reason he did not understand, of a long black river, flowing east through a narrow canyon, with one small lamp burning on the far shore.

In the morning, he rose. He went to work. He said nothing to anyone. The week ended. The autumn deepened.

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