by James Church
Korea-Not-Good-Enough-for-You-Anymore?" He was glad I was being assigned on travel out of the country--it meant I was trusted--but he worried I would decide not to be Korean anymore. "Sand!" He snorted.
"Why would you use sand, anyway, on a piece of wood? Sand is fine for metal, maybe, but wood, wood, wood is like a beating heart."
"So now you're telling me that Koreans did not invent sandpaper because it is a bad idea."
"All I'm saying is that no one taught us how to smooth wood. We've known how to do it for a long time, longer than America has existed, and no American ever invented anything that I would want to use."
To please him, I said I would try the old way of smoothing wood.
"You wait," he said as he went into the back room and came out with the same simple scraping tool that I had dropped years ago. Heavy and unbalanced in my hand, it claimed its revenge by nicking the wood whenever my concentration drifted. When my grandfather took it from me, the damn thing assumed an intolerable grace, moving gently over rough spots with a soft "shhhusss." It sang so smoothly, he said, that the wood found its true shape and never wanted to be anything else.
Long after my grandfather died, I sanded wood in the evenings, alone in the back of the apartment house, as the stars came out. Constantly my fingers felt the wood; even in the dark I could tell if I was getting close to the heart. Concentrating on bringing the wood to life, listening for that song, my mind wandered until I was far away. My working alone like this annoyed our local security man, a tough veteran of the war. He limped from pieces of shrapnel still in his leg, dragging his left foot slightly behind him. Before he came around the corner of the apartment house, I knew it was him. He would stand silently watching me. Sometimes we would exchange a few words, but usually there was only the slight "shhhh-shhhh" of the sandpaper moving across the wood, not quite a song but tolerably close. Even on days when I was supposed to be in a study session, I was sanding, sometimes humming to myself. "Not healthy activity," said the paper they slipped under the door of my apartment. "Too solitary." Just to annoy them, when I finally did go to a study session, I told them that sandpaper had been invented by an American.
One night after work, I came back to the apartment and my stock of sandpaper was gone. Pak said it was my own fault for waving it under their noses. Then he told me he would help me build up a new stock. "Keep it in your office, but put it out of sight and don't invite other people to admire it. They won't care, believe me, and someone is liable to mention it to someone else."
The piece of sandpaper in my desk was worn but still had some life in it. I folded it carefully and put it in the third drawer of my filing cabinet, with the rest of my meager stock. Then I went back to my desk and stared at the sketch of the hotel room. I added the closet and drew a little button on the floor.
I was beginning to think that whoever had dumped the body had avoided the staff completely. No one was even trying to feed something tiny into the investigation, a crumb of a "clue" in an offhand answer that might have kept me chasing my tail for weeks. The whole staff saw "nothing," end and sum total of answer--except for Mrs.
Li, the floor lady, who had been nervous but surprisingly forthcoming, even indignant at what had happened in a room that was her responsibility.
The
flowers were a dead end. All that effort to get around the staff, and then leave a vase that didn't belong, on a cheap pine table that would have broken in two if someone had fallen against it hard enough to crush his skull. Anyway, pine tables don't crush skulls. The wood is too soft.
Pak yelled at me to come to his office. He was pacing, like a tiger.
"Inspector, I don't care how our corpse got in the room, or how he met his end. Or even who led him to it. Right now, I need to know who he is. Was." Pak had been at a meeting the whole morning. I could tell he'd been sleeping through some of it. His eyes were puffy. I only hoped he hadn't been dozing during the part where he was supposed to be alert and keep us in the good graces of the vice minister in charge.
"Rough session?" Without meaning to, I was looking at the piece of walnut while working it in my right hand.
Pak stopped pacing and pointed at me. "You haven't broken that dirty habit yet? They're starting to bitch about it. Last month something almost got into your file. Someone called it 'antisocial.' I blocked it." He started pacing again. "Why the hell can't you just smoke, like everyone else?"
The vice minister in charge was named Yun. No one liked him, which he didn't mind. He was one of those people who felt safer surrounded by enemies. Maybe he thought it enhanced his standing with the Minister, though nothing would ever do that. The Minister was elderly, not quite one of the revolutionary veterans but old enough to have known them personally. He'd known my grandfather. They came from the same mountain village. When the war broke out, the Minister, who was then only a young army recruit and a country boy, was assigned to a headquarters element. They were under constant air attack, moving practically every night, trying to keep some semblance of order and discipline.
The Minister became a noncommissioned officer when all the others were killed. By war's end, because the casualty rate was so high, he was a colonel. He often said he didn't know the first thing about commanding troops when he started and knew less when he finished, but he'd learned to yell convincingly into a field telephone so that whoever was at the other end stood at attention. When the war was over, he figured he'd go back to the village and farm. He got home and there was nothing. The village had been pulverized. No one could figure out why.
The bombs came out of nowhere; no one heard the planes arrive in the night sky, the survivors said.
A few people wanted to rebuild the village, but the forests were gone, the farmland had never been good for much, and the military decided to use the valley below for a special factory, so everyone in the surrounding hills was moved out. The Minister ended up in the capital.
He never got in anyone's way, and he was reliable. He carried out his orders. He was invariably cheerful, even when he was drunk. He trusted his subordinates, treated them with kindness, and established a loyalty that served him well in the bad years. Everyone in the ministry, including Pak and me, worried that he would retire and that Vice Minister Yun would get his job.
"The vice minister thinks he's going to use this case to knock the old man out, I can sense it." Pak walked over to the window and stared absently into the courtyard. I moved so I could look out, too. One of the gate sentries had left his post and was leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, trying to draw the last of the morning's coolness from the concrete blocks. Pak stood for a moment with his back to me, then turned and made a wry face.
"The vice minister is sure we'll screw up this murder investigation.
He asked if we needed help getting a camera that works. You know, in that bored tone of voice he uses before he sinks his fangs into someone."
"How much does he know? Who told him about the camera?"
"Not Kang. They hate each other. One of them isn't going to survive this." Pak gave me a funny look, then turned to stare out the window again. "So that leaves your favorite captain."
"You mean Colonel Kim? Does he know I was in Manpo?"
"He may have some sketchy report, but I doubt if he knows anything for sure. Just don't go to any fish restaurants with him."
"Humorous."
"What do we know about the corpse?" Pak rubbed at a spot on the window. "Can we get this washed, you think?"
"Nothing much. Dead. Caucasian. Male. Heavy blow to the temple crushed the right side of the skull. Never checked into the hotel. No papers. No identification. The name card in his pocket wasn't his, and the IAEA inspectors say they never met him."
"How hard can this be, Inspector?" Pak gave up on the window and moved over to his desk. "He didn't float down from the moon."
"Might have, for all we know at this point. It will take another day to run down the whereabouts of all foreigners in the count
ry. Everyone in the city is accounted for.'
"Autopsy report?"
"They won't do an autopsy."
"What are you talking about? By tomorrow morning, tonight even, the Ministry will be screaming at me, and then others will take it up, like a convention of jackals."
"At the hospital, they say their orders are not to start the autopsy until there is an identification."
"Sure, they want to know what set of knives to use."
I started to work the walnut again, then stopped myself and put it in my pocket. "Can't you get Kang to make a phone call?"
"This is our business, not Kang's. He won't touch it. Besides, the vice minister would like nothing better than to find Kang's fingerprints on what is supposed to be a criminal investigation, not an intelligence romp."
"What about the procurator's office? They are going to have to bring charges against someone, sooner or later."
"This is a foreigner. They don't want to know anything about it.
They say it is foreign policy."
"I knew it. We're stuck working with the Foreign Ministry."
"The liaison guy, the short one with the ruddy face and the bad shoes, is coming here this afternoon after lunch. You want to sit in?"
"Maybe. No, on second thought I'd better get back to the hotel and shake the tree again."
"Just a minute. Let's play a game, Inspector. It's called Continents. I name a continent, you tell me if the corpse is from there."
"You already said he was a Finn. Anyway, all I've seen is the pictures, and they aren't very clear. The crime scene camera needs a new battery."
"I don't know if it's a Finn. That was just a hunch, fed by the card in his pocket. Apparently it was planted. But let's proceed. Africa?"
"No. Well, maybe yes. Could be South African. Could be an expat, I suppose."
"South America."
"Could be, but the clothes are wrong, from what little I could see."
"North America."
"Not likely. Wrong haircut."
"Europe."
"Probably."
"Russian?"
"Nyet."
"Australia."
"Look, boss--"
"Humor me, Inspector. Australia."
"Yeah, sure, could be. But, I mean, he's white, too white, maybe.
Not ruddy enough."
"Asia."
I thought for a second. "No."
"Lots of territory, a couple of billion people if you count India.
Care to change your vote?"
I shook my head. "Not Asia. That doesn't narrow it much."
"Maybe yes, maybe no."
I stood for a moment, waiting to see if Pak was going to draw any conclusions from all of this. He sat calmly and quiet as a stone.
"Is the game over?" I moved toward the door. "If you need me, I'll be at the Koryo for a couple of hours."
Pak nodded. He looked pleased with himself, and I walked down the hall wondering what he knew that I didn't.
7
The floor lady at the Koryo was not happy to find me back in the room.
She tugged at the sleeve of her dress. She refused to look me in the eye. It wasn't hard to see that by now she had been talked to by someone who had warned her that it was a bad idea to answer my questions. There was no sense in pressing her at this point. I told her that I'd call her later. She was relieved. "I'm busy this morning," she said. "A bus load of Romanian basketball players is arriving. Some friendship tournament. They are the worst. Tall, skinny, they all think because they have such long legs they are comedians. You should see what they do to the rooms.
With luck, they'll go to twelve and above." She backed into the hall and slipped away like a shadow. Real quiet, well trained.
I went through the room again inch by inch. Pak had said his first priority was finding out the victim's identity, but that would only be a process of elimination. There were a limited number of foreigners in the country; each provincial unit would make an accounting based on the entry cards and then be told to do it again. Eventually, someone would come up one short, and that would be our man. Or rather, our corpse. My real problem was to figure out who did it, and we were drifting backward on that. So far, all we knew was that the body had been found in this room in the Koryo. Though we hadn't nailed it down as a fact, I was almost sure he was a Finn. At the very least, he was a European, but I pretty much ruled out southern Europe. He wasn't a Slav, either. According to the initial inventory report, all the clothes were from stores in Vienna. If that checked out, then it probably meant he worked for an international organization. Lots of nationalities did. So what made me think he was a Finn? A blue button. But I didn't even know it was his.
None of his clothing had buttons like that. Maybe it belonged to his killer.
Maybe the murderer was a Finn. But I didn't think so. I'd been through the hotel records. The room had seen scores of Koreans from Japan, a few Americans, and plenty of Chinese. Also newlyweds from Turkistan. There were no signs in the room of any of them, unless that button was part of a Turkistan wedding night custom. I doubted it.
The floor lady knocked softly on the door sill. "There's a call for you downstairs."
"You clean these rooms yourself?"
I could see her deciding whether this was the sort of question she could answer. It was. "Yes, each of us is responsible for an entire floor.
Two actually. We used to work in pairs, but last year they cut the staff.
We have to make a profit, they said. So I do all the cleaning myself here and on nine."
"The Turkistani couple, the honeymoon couple."
She rolled her eyes. "I don't talk about guests." I was into questions she'd been warned not to answer.
"When you clean, you clean the whole room?"
"Why not?"
"I ask, you answer. Try to remember that." I gave her what was meant to be a friendly look. "You're pretty busy. Two floors to clean.
Easy to miss a spot."
She smiled tightly.
"Okay. So you never miss a spot. But if you did, where do you think it would be?"
"Believe me, this room was spotless three days ago. I came in twice to make sure." She paused and gave a little frown. "Anything in here since then came with . . ." She didn't finish the thought.
"I'll get that call now."
turned toward him. "We're trying real hard to run a good hotel here."
He paused. "This won't help."
The first law of capitalism, I thought. Corpses are bad for business.
I tried to sound friendly and serious at the same time. "As soon as I get what I need and can clear out of here, I will. But if this isn't solved soon, you'll have a reputation, if you know what I mean. Bad for the honeymoon tours."
He thought a moment. "The eighth floor is hard to sell." I noticed his hands. They were folded. His knuckles were white, as if he were holding his fingers too tight.
"Thanks for the use of your phone." I got up and wrote down my number on a scrap of paper. "You probably won't remember anything.
Don't strain yourself."
The phone was in the manager's office behind the reception desk. The manager was sitting on a wooden folding chair at a small table, sipping tea, not even pretending to go through his papers. His teacup was cracked down the side. I thought about asking him to leave, but it didn't matter. All the hotel phones were tapped anyway.
It was Kang's voice on the other end. "You free tonight?"
"Depends."
"I'll buy dinner."
"No goat meat."
"That doesn't leave much."
"You'll think of something. Fish, maybe."
"How's life at the Koryo these days, Inspector?"
"Fine." It was clear that he knew who talked to the floor lady. "Best hotel on the peninsula."
"Nine o'clock, if that's not too late. I'll swing by your office."
"You do that." I hung up.
The manager cleared his throat and
gave me a sour smile when I 8
Kang showed up shortly past nine. He stopped in to see Pak for a few minutes. Then he came down to my office. "No dinner. Pak forbids it."
I put my feet on the desk. A headache was creeping up the back of my neck. "I knew it wouldn't happen. You're here. What do you want to say?
"Remember our friend Chong?"
"The stone head?"
"His body disappeared. They don't even know he's dead. They've convinced themselves he's planning to skip into China, if he hasn't already.
Kim is fit to be tied. He's put all of his people along the border on alert. He can't afford to have one of his men defect. Screws up the discipline."
"Bad for his reputation, too, I would think."
"We can hope. Meantime, he's distracted. He doesn't know you were up in Manpo."
"He must know by now."
"Then why have they issued a lookout for a guy from Wonsan, first name unknown, last name unknown?"
"What about the goat lady?"
"She won't help them much. All she knows is you were a little fuzzy about fish and flashed food coupons."
"That's what you came here about? Chong's corpse?" The headache had found itself a good home and was going to spend the night. I'd brought back a bottle of aspirin from Berlin but had used the last one a few weeks ago. Pak didn't have any; I checked.
"No. Your corpse. Kim's people talked to the Koryo staff."
"Thanks for nothing."
Kang started to say something, then stopped.
"What?"
"Not much. Only, Kim isn't mean, he's psycho. If he puts you on his list, there's not much I'll be able to do. He's watching me, waiting to move."
"So get out of the way."
"Not that easy."
"Why? One night, you just disappear."