by James Church
When we got to the river he faced the water, his back to the hotel.
The water pounding over the rocks was even louder than it had been earlier in the morning and was throwing up a spray.
"I apologize, Inspector, for seeming rude, but I didn't want to speak until we were standing here. It makes it hard for them to calibrate the microphones up there on the balcony."
Alright, so I had misjudged him; his voice didn't detract from his critical faculties as much as I'd thought. "We don't go in much for technical stuff in the Ministry, so I assume they aren't our mikes," I said.
On a hot July day the spray might have been refreshing. Now it was just damp.
Song took out his handkerchief and mopped his face. "Gesture toward the river or up the mountain, would you? Otherwise they're going to become suspicious."
I stabbed my finger at the top of one of the hills. Song laughed, a rich baritone laugh. "No need to be too theatrical, Inspector. Now, you have some questions for me? You are quite an expert on our pine trees, I hear." Okay, so I had doubly misjudged him. He had already talked to the tall guide.
"I take it those mikes aren't here all the time. Something special going on?"
Song's hand pointed for a moment at the largest boulder midstream and then moved languidly in a smooth motion toward a bird in the trees, "See that rock?" I saw that the top had been chipped recently.
"I hose fools wanted to put a remote microphone on there, disguise it with some leaves or something. I told them it was crazy, that as soon as it rained and the river rose, it would wash away. Two of them tried it anyway. One of them fell into the river and broke his shoulder. Had to be carted away. The other five decided to take my advice."
That explained why the guide saw five, not six, Military Security monkeys climbing the hill. There were two whole teams originally.
"What are they doing up here now? They aren't checking up on tourists or the hotel staff with remote microphones." Song didn't respond. "So who is the target? And I'll know if you are screwing with me."
Song picked up a small stone from the riverbank and threw it into the water. "In the time I've been here, we had this sort of thing once before.
Two years ago." He paused. "No, three. You remember the nephew of a Politburo member who held some position in the party's Youth League? He was forever bouncing up here to 'rest,' but he never rested. He was always meeting people, Chinese businessmen in plaid shirts, Koreans from Japan with extra-oiled hair. Automobiles would come up from Pyongyang, carrying girls, always discreet, never more than one in each car." Song started moving up the riverbank, in small steps, keeping his back to the hotel. "About three or four months after the first visit by this guy, a captain from Military Security showed up.
Real mean son of a bitch."
Song's voice was too mellifluous for such vocabulary; it made his curses sound like compliments. "His name is Kim," I said. "Short haired snake, eyes sort of sharp, like little kitchen knives."
"Yes, that's the one." Song looked over at me and then pointed downstream. "You know him, I take it."
I was soaked from the spray; the sky was clouding over and the wind picking up. "I don't suppose there is someplace other than this riverbank where we can talk?"
Song pointed up the side of the hill. "We could go up there, if you don't mind the climb. That's where the other five security--"
"Finish what you were saying about Kim first." I didn't want to get onto the subject of the pine trees just yet. "And get to the point."
Song shrugged. "It's your session. Whatever you wish." He thought a moment. "Kim walked around the grounds. Sometimes he'd corner one of the staff members. They were all terrified, the way he stared at them.
I kept out of his way but picked up bits and pieces of what he was unearthing.
The nephew was involved in a smuggling operation. Cars mostly, used luxury cars from Japan that were driven across the border into China where they got double, even triple the price and paid no tax.
There were rumors the operation was greased with South Korean intelligence money, Kim figured he would set a trap for the nephew, bag a Politburo member, and take over the operation for himself."
My shoes were wet, and it was always hard to dry them out completely.
I'd be walking in these hills feeling that dampness for days.
"Then what?"
"Nothing."
"No, not nothing. The cars kept coming, didn't they?"
"Maybe."
"Every other Thursday, in the afternoon, another car."
"Who told you?"
"I do my job, you do yours, if you still have one when I'm through with you. When I ask you a question, don't tell me 'nothing.' "
Song's face got a funny look--some fear, a touch of loathing, then the sickening realization that his fate was in someone else's hands. Only I didn't want his fate in my hands.
"When did the cars stop coming?"
"Last week of June nothing showed up. Nothing at all in July.
That's when the Military Security teams arrived. I figured something was wrong."
"Kim's paying you off, isn't he?"
Song looked away.
"I asked you a question."
"I don't work for him."
"But you take his money."
"You think things are easy here, Inspector?"
"You've kept this to yourself until now, didn't even let the Ministry have a hint, didn't send in an anonymous report, didn't ask someone up here for a beer. Nothing." If I didn't get into a hot bath and some dry clothes pretty soon, I'd catch a cold that would stay with me until April.
I stepped over to Song, put my arm around his shoulder in what would look like a friendly gesture to whoever might still be interested in our conversation and squeezed until he winced. "I'm going back to my room. If you have anything else to tell me, anything you left out accidentally on purpose, you better spill it before I leave here, or you and your velvet throat are going to be singing with the canaries in a deep, dark mine with other greedy local police. They have a special place assigned for people who served in cushy spots like this."
I released my grip, turned toward the hotel balcony and nodded slightly, and then walked up the path to the hotel. By the time I reached the steps to the front door, it was raining hard. When I looked back at the river, Song was still there, gesturing now and then at the mountain in front of him. As far as I could tell, he wasn't singing.
3
There wouldn't be any hot water for a while, the floor lady said. She was in the elevator when I rode up. "How was the temple?" She pointed at my shoes. "Those are ruined," she said. "No way to dry them. And you'll have to find some way to keep warm. There's no heat this time of year." She could have sounded more apologetic, I thought. "The boiler went out this morning, again. They thought it was fixed, but they always say that. Spare parts this, and spare parts that. The guests aren't going to be happy. Bad for profits."
"Yeah, well, I'm a guest. I'm not happy. Do you have an extra towel, one that I can't see through when I hold it up to the light? You know, something that will actually absorb water?"
"I can find one, but meantime try not to drip on the furniture, would you? Every time you move, you drip. We'll have to take this mat out of the elevator and dry it." Someone at the hotel must have been overseas at a place where they put floor mats emblazoned with the day of the week in the elevator. In theory, the mats get changed every day.
If guests lose track of time, they only have to look down at their feet, assuming they can read English.
When I stepped into my room, the glass door to the balcony was wide open, letting in torrents of rain. A small lake had formed on the carpet. The desk lamp had fallen onto the floor, and the lampshade was soaking up water like a sponge. The balcony door latch couldn't have broken again; I'd watched the workman fix it. When I walked over to close the door, I could see that the latch had been pulled down. It had been snapped shut when I left for the temple.
>
The floor lady walked in with a towel. She looked at the window and then glanced around the room. "You going to stand there dripping all over the floor, like I asked you not to?"
"Funny how this window unlatched itself after I left," Frankly, I didn't give a damn about her floor. "In most hotels, things stay latched.
The laws of physics don't work around here, I guess."
She laid the towel on the bed. "I wouldn't know about any laws of physics. I don't control who comes and goes in these rooms." Her face was composed, as if she had made an important decision and felt comfortable with it. "The guide at the temple enjoyed talking to you. But I guess you didn't have time to finish your tour."
I decided to skip over what should have been a couple of sessions of questioning and get to the point. "Who is the maid on the fifteenth floor?" That got a blank look but no answer, so I repeated the question, this time with extra emphasis. "This hotel won't earn any profits if I have it closed, and I'll do that if I don't get cooperation. I can authorize a 'closure for cause' if necessary." I was making this up, but she wouldn't know it.
"No, you can't do that. This is a special tourist zone, and you people can't touch us without authorization." She had invented this on the spot, and it topped mine. The "you people" was surprising, but I figured it might be useful. She wouldn't be any more cowed by Military Security than she was scared of me, and with luck she might even be more annoyed at them.
"Let me rephrase my question. Do the guests on the fifteenth floor scratch the furniture with their equipment?"
"Damned right they do. Gear and boxes and wires all over the place.
Usually I don't work on fifteen, but the woman who normally does says she can't stand it with them around. One time she accidentally opened the door to their room and they nearly murdered her. She said she hasn't seen that many weapons since she was in the army."
I looked up at the ceiling, then glanced around the baseboard. The floor lady shook her head. "These rooms are clean, though no one believes it. Military Security can't put anything in without special permission.
We have to know. Otherwise we might rip the wires out by mistake. They tried it once and the manager nearly had a fit. Said they put back the baseboard so bad, the next guest in, an Iranian, filed a complaint. The only thing they are allowed are those gun mikes they set up on their balcony. We clean their rooms once a week."
"Rooms. Plural?"
"Yes, two rooms. The fifteenth floor has the best view, and the manager has called Pyongyang more than once to ask if they could be put on another floor."
"What about the rest of the fifteenth floor?"
"What do you think?" She put her hands on her hips and stood there defiantly. "We rent it out. They complained because you can see from one balcony to the next, but we told them if they didn't like it, they'd have to pay for the whole floor. That's a lot of rooms. And they'd have to disable the elevator button, too. You want to guess how many guests drink too much at the bar on the top floor, then stumble off the elevator on the wrong floor and end up fumbling with the knob to the wrong room? The halls are dark at night, so you can't read the numbers on the doors to save your life. Got to save electricity, you know what I mean?"
"Ah, yes, profits. Well, thanks for the towel. If the hot water comes on, maybe you can have someone ring me." From the way she frowned, I wasn't expecting hot water anytime soon.
There wasn't a sound as she shut the door behind herself. It occurred to me that if she could close a door so quietly, she probably could open one that way, too. Not like the Koryo, where the doors always clicked. I picked the lamp off the floor and set it up again on the desk, then unplugged it from the wall. Probably I should have done it the other way around. The chances of getting electrocuted were slim, but lately things weren't exactly working in my favor. I sat down on the bed and reviewed what I'd learned. Song was good and scared; I didn't trust him at all, but enough of what he told me fit with what the old farmer had described about the cars on the highway. Kim had taken over a car-smuggling operation. It had been regular, twice a month.
Then something happened to throw off the routine. There were more cars than there should have been, at times they weren't supposed to appear.
At least one of the drivers wasn't from Military Security. No one working for Military Security could be described as skinny. Muscular, maybe. Ugly, burly, thuggish. Not skinny. They all got plenty of food and plenty of exercise. This was starting to point in one direction.
Kang. That car I was supposed to photograph, the reason Colonel Kim had arranged for me to sit on that hillside at dawn--Kang. The reason I was in Manpo--Kang.
I lay down. A few minutes later, as I was sinking into sleep, I heard the river thundering over the rocks, tearing at its banks, willing itself away to the freedom of the ocean far to the west.
4
Pak walked into my office and sat on the only chair not piled with papers.
"I scrounged you a filing cabinet. Why don't you use it?" This was always his opening line, and he no longer expected an answer. He knew the first drawer held my vase, the one with the flying cranes, and the second drawer my collection of sandpaper. In the third drawer were the pieces of a simple bookshelf I kept hoping to build.
"We are near a dead end on this case. The hospital says it can't justify the refrigeration and is going to have to dump the corpse. The Minister says it's time to file this in the Unsolved drawer and let it be." Pak looked over at the file cabinet. "Where do you put the unsolved stuff, in the drawer with your bookshelf plans?" He put his feet on my desk and then pulled them off again. "Sorry, rude of me. I was trying to think."
When he walked in, I'd been making another rough sketch of a bookshelf on the back of another Ministry memo. We both knew there might never be time or materials enough to build anything. I put the sketch to the side and found my notepad. "We both know the Minister wants us to solve this case," I said. "The fact that the vice minister doesn't think we can do it makes it doubly important to the old man."
Pak made a noncommittal noise. "And we both know who has ordered the Minister to close the file. My brother. My former brother."
Pak stared off into space. He didn't blink, and for a while I thought he had stopped breathing.
"Not much we can do, Inspector," he said finally. "We're spending our time shuffling a pretty pile of facts that don't add up, and I can't justify keeping you on this much longer."
I didn't have to reply, because my phone rang. It was the local security man, Li, who handled the countryside district south of Pyongyang.
One of the farmers had found something, he said, and he wanted me to take a look before he made a formal report. I thanked him, said I would be right there, and hung up.
Pak had heard only my half of the conversation, but he didn't ask any questions. "Use my car again," he said. "Get back here by noon, though. Kang and I are having lunch. Noodles. He's paying. About damn time."
5
Li was waiting on the side of the highway, not far from the spot where I had been staked out with the camera. He waved me over and pointed to a small side road. It was only a wide dirt path that led through the cornfield and up into the hills, but it would hide a car from the highway.
"Back in," he said. "You may want to get on the highway again and into town real quick." He looked into my car and then clucked his tongue.
"You armed? Probably not. We have some old automatic weapons in the security building, but the local commander has the keys to the gun locker. He and I are on pretty good terms." Li paused, thinking over what he'd just said. "I guess not good enough, though, not yet."
"Why would I need to be armed? What's this about?"
"Get the car out of the road first." There was a ripple of urgency in his voice that caught me by surprise. It was not like Li. Even when we were in the army together, he never showed emotion. Older than the rest of us, he never sang or danced or drank. Sometimes he sat by himself, looking off at the hori
zon. When we went on patrol, he was serious and wouldn't let us joke about anything. If I ever heard him laugh, I don't remember, but I don't think I ever heard him complain, either.
After we got out of the army, we lost touch, but one day, going through reports by local security officers, I spotted his name, and after that we saw each other from time to time. Whenever he came to Pyongyang, which wasn't often, he'd drop by the office.
Li watched the highway while I backed the car into the field. Then he led me along a second narrow path up a hill until we were above where I had sat the morning I watched the black car speed away.
"You want to tell me why I need to be armed? Or why you mentioned your gun locker?"
Li didn't reply. If he'd looked out at the horizon, like he used to do in the army, I'd have figured he was absorbed in his own thoughts. That used to happen: One of us would say something to him, and there'd be no reply, so after a while we'd just go away and leave him alone. Now, though, he was staring down at the ground. He shook his head slightly, but I knew he wasn't replying to my questions. He was having a conversation with himself. He'd called and asked me to come out here, and now he wasn't sure what to say. Finally, he sighed, and that worried me more than anything else he might have said or done at that moment.
"You need to know this. Otherwise I wouldn't be telling you." He looked up but at that instant turned his head slightly, so his eyes never met mine. "The whole time you were watching, you were being watched." Li pointed to the remains of some food, a couple of cigarette butts, and a small pile of rocks. "That's a support for a field dish, holds a little satellite relay system. Someone was up here, watching you and relaying the info to someone else. Must have been quite a distance away.
Otherwise he could have used a regular transmitter."
I remembered the stone coming down the hill, and the bird. "How do you know someone was here when I was down there?" I already knew Li was involved--that's how he got the money to pay the farmers to keep quiet--but I couldn't believe he was working for Military Security.