John stops about halfway down the hall. Points at a blue construction panel. It’s a makeshift door, I finally realize, with holes drilled on one side and thick wire running through those and into the wallboard. Light leaks out around it like a glowing frame.
I think, Okay, there’s light. So she must be there, right?
Someone is anyway.
John raps on the door.
There’s a rustling sound, someone moving, and then, “Shi shei?” A young woman’s voice.
John jabs a finger at me.
Me? I mouth.
He nods, with that hint of irritation I’ve seen on him before, like I’m missing something obvious.
Whatever. “Ni hao. Wang Junyi ma?” Hello. You’re Wang Junyi?
The door rattles, then opens a crack. She’s got some kind of chain on it, which is pretty funny. A couple of good, hard shoves and you’d rip the wire “hinges” right off this “door.”
“Bushi. Ni yao shenme?” No. What do you want?
Shit. I really should’ve made something up ahead of time.
“A couple of nights ago, I went to a party,” I say in Mandarin. “Wang Junyi was working there. She left something. I wanted to give it to her.”
John nods, this time with something close to a smile. Like I’m not such a bad liar after all.
He should know.
“You saw her?”
“Yes.” Which, you know, I probably did.
The door opens a crack wider. “You’re a foreigner,” she says.
“Right.”
More rattling.
The door opens.
I can’t see her that clearly, with the light coming from behind her. She’s young, I’m pretty sure. Short, a little stocky. She takes a step back, her body rigid.
“Who’s he?” she asks.
“A friend.”
“He was at the party?”
“No.”
She hesitates. I can’t tell what she’s thinking. It’s hard to see her face.
“Come in,” she finally says.
It’s a little cubicle with white walls. The floor space is almost entirely taken up by a couple of twin mattresses. There’s a pole running above our heads from one side of the room to the other that’s hung with clothing, a couple of salvaged shelves piled with shampoo and cosmetics, stacks of magazines, some folded T-shirts, a laptop, and an electric kettle, the plug for that stuck into a power strip plugged into an extension cord that runs up to the single ceiling light. There’s stuff on the walls, a plastic poster-size slick ad for Lancôme cosmetics that looks like it came from a subway station, the face of a beautiful woman holding up a tiny bottle like it’s got a genie inside. A picture of Rain, the Korean pop star, next to a mountain landscape that looks familiar but that I can’t place.
“Huangshan,” she explains. “We both come from Anhui. Do you know Huangshan?”
“I’ve never been there, but I’ve heard of it,” I say.
“Most beautiful mountain in all of China. You know the saying in China: ‘Once you visit Huangshan, you would not want to visit any other mountain.’”
“I did not know that,” I say.
John and I sit on one of the mattresses while she makes tea. “Juliet is my English name,” she tells us. She has one, even though she doesn’t speak more than a few words of the language. “I saw the movie with Lai’angnaiduo Dicapuliao. Luomiou yu Zhuliye.”
It takes me a minute. “Oh. Leonardo DiCaprio. Romeo and Juliet,” I say in English.
She nods vigorously, smiles a little. “So romantic.” She hands me a glass with some loose leaves floating on top. “Be careful,” she tells me. “Hot.” It is, almost too hot to hold. “But I think I’ll change my name soon.”
“Why?”
She shrugs as she hands John his tea. “It is a silly idea. Dying like that for love.”
Finally she sits on the mattress across from us. “So Junyi’s belonging, what is it?”
I squirm a little. The glass really is hot. I put it on the floor in front of me.
“Her identity card,” John says. “So we want to give it to her personally.”
It’s a good lie. They use that card, the shenfenzheng, for all kinds of things in China. Buying train tickets. Opening a bank account. Applying for a job.
Juliet nods, staring at the floating leaves in her glass. She twists it around in her hands, which I notice are reddened and chapped. “I don’t know where she is,” she says at last. “She hasn’t come home since that night. I call her phone, I call her work, I call her friends. No one has seen her.”
I get that horrible, collapsing feeling in my gut. Because I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen her since that night. A picture of her anyway.
“Did you contact the police?” John asks.
Juliet snorts. “The police? What for? We don’t have Beijing hukou, why would they want to help us? Anyway, the police are useless.”
John blushes a little. I doubt Juliet would notice, but I do.
“But if she is missing…” he says, almost gently.
Then Juliet starts to cry. I hate it when people cry. I never know what to do.
“We are friends from Anhui,” she says between sobs. “We came to Beijing together to make money. I don’t know what to do.”
John reaches out and pats her on the shoulder. “I am sorry,” he says. “But you must go to the police. Tell them she is missing. I know a detective. You can go to see him.”
Juliet looks up. Her face, like her hands, is red and blotchy. Her body is suddenly tense, like she might bolt, or maybe attack. Fight or flight. I can’t tell which.
“Why do you care?” Her voice shakes, and I’m not sure how much is anger and how much is fear. We could be anyone, and maybe we’re not here to help. “What do you really want?”
“Justice,” John says.
“She called me from that party. She said if she worked late, she had a chance to make more money.”
I guess Juliet believed him. But then, John’s pretty convincing when he wants to be.
Maybe he even means it.
“When she said this, how did she sound?” John asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Angry? Happy? Scared?”
Juliet frowns a little, pursing her lips. “Just… normal. She said she was tired. But she was happy to have a chance to make more money. This is why we came to Beijing. To make money.”
John nods. “I understand. This company she works for. Do you know anything about it?”
“Just that they like pretty girls.” She shrugs. “Junyi is very pretty. Not like me. I could never work there.”
They were all pretty girls, the ones working at that party.
“How long has she worked there?”
“Not long. Maybe… two months.”
“Does she like it?”
Juliet snorts. “She likes the money. Much more than her last job. She says maybe we can get a better apartment soon, because the money is good.”
“Has she worked late before?” I ask. Because I’m wondering what that might have involved.
“Only once.”
I hesitate, because I really don’t know how to put this. And while my Chinese has gotten pretty decent when it comes to the basics of talking to people, I don’t exactly have much skill in the way of nuance.
“What did she say, after that first time?” I ask. “Did she tell you about it?”
“No,” Juliet mumbles, rubbing her roughened hands, not meeting my eyes. “I already went to sleep.”
“Huh.”
Her head snaps up. “Anyway, what does it matter? Why are you asking all these questions?”
“I told you,” John says. “I have a friend who is a detective.”