The thing was, he told himself, of course the market was up and down, of course he knew that—he wasn’t stupid. But the government would never let the market drop. It had happened before, three years ago, and people still talked about it. The market had dropped by more than 40 percent and people were panicking and rushing for exits, but then the government had ordered the country’s top hundred companies to buy up shares, push, push, push, make the line hold, and it had. No way the market would be allowed to fail. The government was not very good at a lot of things but it was very, very good at ensuring profits.

The problem was time. There were just two more weeks before the books would be tallied at the end of the quarter by Old Lou, who was drunk most afternoons and deficient at the job, but even he would notice if 100,000 yuan was missing. Two more weeks and four of those days were the weekend—okay, ten more days.