Bamboo and Blood

by James Church

  “What?”

  “If a red car drives by on the road below and stops, it means we proceed as planned. If it’s a blue car, we abort. Sort of a double-check on the nice lady.”

  Jenö studied my face. “Not bad,” was all he said before falling silent again. “Not bad,” he said finally, “but we don’t use blue cars. It will be white. And since you have plenty of money, get a brioche for me, too.”

  3

  Saturday morning I wasn’t hungry, but I didn’t think Jenö would take that as an excuse to scrub his operation, so I did everything as directed. The taxi driver scowled, the nice lady in the patisserie popped the croissants into the bag. The note told the driver to take me to Le Pre Byron, the bench closest to the Villa Diodati. A red car, a Peugeot, stopped on the road below. I had just sat back to enjoy the view when a man appeared beside me. At first I didn’t recognize him.

  “Hand puppets,” he said.

  “Three-legged dogs.” I nodded. “You look different in the light.”

  “You’re supposed to have an extra brioche.”

  “You want some money back?”

  “I hope you remember operational details better than you do pastry orders.”

  “I owe you. Do we sit here until lunch?”

  “You get on a train, a local. Just past Flamatt there is a truck yard, on the left. There will be a blue truck at the far end.”

  “Jenö said you didn’t use blue.”

  “Cars. We don’t use blue cars. Trucks fall under different rules. Is that alright?”

  “Fine.”

  “If the blue truck has a red flag on its antenna, stay on the train until Bern. Not a bright red, sort of dirty. Like dried blood. That means it’s a go. The conductress will punch your ticket and give you the last-stage instructions. But remember, she has the final go-ahead, or not.”

  “And how does she let me know? A cross-eyed look?”

  “She’ll take your ticket, punch it, and hand it back. Might not be the same one. Look at it. Anything other than today’s date, it’s a bust. If she doesn’t like the way things smell, if she sees someone she doesn’t think belongs, she calls it off.”

  “Then what?”

  “You get off at whatever station tickles your fancy and look around. Get some dinner. Then just come back. Nothing lost, and whoever it was that stumbled into our midst will have wasted a day.”

  “This is the most elaborate, complicated, irritating operation I’ve ever heard of. I can see twenty points where it could fall apart.”

  “Oh, yeah? We’ve been through it twenty times. It works.” He stopped. “It works as long as everyone plays his part.”

  “Why? Why is it so complicated?”

  “You want me to simplify? Someone important is coming to meet you. He’s coming a long way and going to a lot of trouble. We don’t want anyone else to see the meeting. No one. If we could take you to Israel it would be better. Want some sun?”

  “Not on your life.”

  “I told Jenö you wouldn’t take that option. It’s not such a long flight. All the engines on the plane up to snuff.”

  “No.”

  “We could put a sack over your head, give you an injection, put you in a crate, and ship you by air freight.”

  “Try it, I dare you.”

  He shrugged.

  “What makes you think I want to see a visitor? Who is he, anyway? I don’t run after people I haven’t been properly introduced to. Someone high up in your organization, I imagine.” I didn’t wait long for a response, because I didn’t suppose there would be one. “Very flattering, that a mystery man would come all this way to meet me. If it’s not too late, you should tell him not to bother. We could say I have a prior appointment. That would save him a trip.” A blank look. “Or maybe he’s already here. A shame, busy man like him, having to come all this way for nothing. The Number Two in your organization? Not the Number One; surely no organization, not even yours, would set up a meeting for your Number One without first checking that the other party was available.”

  “Are you going to eat both croissants?”

  4

  If Sohn had still been alive, maybe he would have told me to go ahead and take the trip to Flamatt to meet whoever had traveled from Tel Aviv, probably to talk about the deal to stop missile sales. But Sohn wasn’t alive; he was dead. I was in Switzerland because Sohn had put me here. And even though he was dead, the orders he’d given me were not. They hadn’t changed. At least, no one told me they had been changed. No one had told me anything.

  So I bought a round-trip ticket and boarded the train. The scenery was fine; groomed beyond all possibility. Geneva at least had grime on some windows. The countryside looked like it was trimmed and inspected every morning. Nothing out of place; even the cows knew enough to stand in appropriate groups. An occasional farmhouse screamed out, painted in loud colors. A mark of rebellion, I thought. It surprised me that such paint was even available here; it must be smuggled in from Italy.

  About thirty minutes out of Geneva, a young couple came into the car and, without a word, sat down on the seat facing mine. They looked South Asian, the woman much younger than the man. I figured the Israelis would have someone, maybe a couple of people, watching me on the train, but otherwise I thought I would be left alone. No contact, other than with the conductor. So who was this couple?

  The man was striking to look at, a very dark complexion and sharply defined features. He was also well dressed. The woman seemed uncomfortable, in physical distress of some sort, and leaned on his shoulder. He paid no attention to her, but looked out the window without much interest. At last he turned to me. “You are a traveler in this country?” His English was clipped, with a bit of a singsong to it. I might have enjoyed talking to him, but I had the feeling that was something I didn’t want to do. There were plenty of empty seats in the car. They shouldn’t be sitting knee to knee with me. He was waiting for me to reply.

  “You might say I’m a traveler. Would your companion like to stretch out on this seat? I can move.”

  The man ignored the offer. “From where do you come?”

  Briefly, I considered the possibilities. “I’m Mexican,” I said. “And you?

  “Sri Lanka.” He murmured something to the woman, who picked up her head and nodded to me. “My wife is from Pakistan. She has become quite homesick and a little feverish in this place.” He waved his hand at the passing landscape. “It’s very neat, wouldn’t you say?” The woman put her head on his shoulder again and closed her eyes. He closed his eyes as well for a moment, and then opened them suddenly. “Do you travel much?”

  “Some.” I realized I had seen him before. What was he doing on this train? How did he know me?

  “Some.” He repeated the word slowly. “Have you ever been to Pakistan?”

  “Me?” From anyone else, someone who hadn’t been in the second-row photo M. Beret had put on the table in the Sunflower café, someone who hadn’t been standing next to my brother, this all might have passed for polite conversation between strangers on a train. If he had been a Martian, he might have been asking innocently, “Have you ever been to Pluto?” But this wasn’t polite conversation. His presence was poison. I stood up. “Please excuse me; I can’t ride backward for very long. I’ve got to find another seat.”

  The man gave me an odd smile and looked out the window. “Should we ever visit Mexico,” he said, “no doubt we’ll run across each other.” I don’t know what sarcasm sounds like in Sri Lanka, but that must have been it.

  5

  Two cars ahead, I found a seat facing forward and sat down. I had the coach to myself. I didn’t bother to sit on the left side because I had a feeling there wasn’t any use looking for a flag on a blue truck. The man from Sri Lanka didn’t follow me. From the odd smile he gave me, though, I didn’t think this was in the script for Jenö?s operation. Maybe they should have gone through it twenty-one times. Jenö surely would have told me to expect the dark man. Who was he?
He might be working for M. Beret, at least he was in one of M. Beret’s photographs. But M. Beret’s file vaults probably contained miles of photographs. I was running through the list of possibilities from habit—even though I already knew the answer. The man knew my brother. Lots of people knew my brother, to their regret I imagined, but not that many would be photographed with him. It was always possible the man worked with Sohn, more likely against him. What if the man had murdered Sohn? Once you start making up lists of possibilities, they can go on reproducing and mutating for a while all by themselves. It’s like having the flu. You get better eventually, or you don’t. The last thing on the list isn’t necessarily right, but it tends to stick with you.

  At Flamatt, I glanced over and saw a blue truck flying a red flag, which surprised me. So they weren’t going to call it off after all. The conductress came through the door in the front of the car and walked to my seat. She was blond, a long braid down her back. She wore pants, and she moved provocatively in them. I gave her my ticket and a friendly smile.

  She smiled back. “Nice day to travel,” she said. Small lips. It was Margrit. I remembered to avoid any sudden moves. She handed back the ticket. It was stamped with tomorrow’s date. She’d scrubbed the operation. It could have been for any reason, but there was really only one that made sense. The dark man with the wistful Pakistani wife, the two of them close enough to kill me almost without moving a muscle.

  “Know a good place for dinner?” I wasn’t hungry, but I asked Margrit because it was something to say.

  “Only if you like cheese,” she said and walked away.

  I watched her reflection in the window as she moved into the next car. Good wig, I thought to myself. Nice trousers, too.

  6

  The next afternoon, a Sunday, the delegation leader went out for a walk in the park near the mission. He was alone and moving quickly, not like someone who was trying to think, more like someone who knew where he was going and thought he might be late.

  I was waiting for him. He had been nervous all morning, inattentive during most of the delegation meeting and then snapping at his deputy for lapses so minor they didn’t bear mentioning. Just before the session broke up, he went around the table and dissected each person’s performance. They were all going to face intense criticism when they returned home, he said. New instructions had arrived that the talks were to make progress. On what basis they were supposed to proceed had not been specified. All he had been told was that the delegation was supposed to create the proper atmosphere. He turned to Mr. Roh, who handed him a piece of paper. “Proper atmosphere,” he read the term aloud. “Is there one of you with a good idea?” No one looked at anyone else when they left the room.

  It was clear to me that the delegation leader wasn’t planning to sit around and do nothing the rest of the day. He was anxious about something, and it wasn’t about creating “atmosphere.” That wouldn’t bother him. He could do that, fix the atmosphere, by just readjusting his smile, or looking like he was taking notes instead of taking off his glasses and pretending to ignore what the other side was saying. There was something more serious on his mind. For a moment—a very brief, uncomfortable moment—I worried that he was planning to defect. What if he’d received a warning that when he got home he would face serious problems, something beyond the routine, and so, rather than go back to the old home, he was going to jump to a new one? That’s what triggered most defections—people concerned that they’d been caught doing something they shouldn’t. That’s why we were constantly being warned by the Ministry to take it easy in investigations of people who were overseas. “Don’t squeeze what you don’t have to,” the Minister famously said at one meeting.

  When he came out the door and down the steps, the delegation leader didn’t look around or stop to take a breath. He just pointed himself in the direction he had already decided to go, and he went. Once he was out of the compound, he picked up the pace. He might have been running, he was moving so fast, but he still managed to give the appearance of someone just out for a brisk walk.

  I gave him a pretty good lead, not entirely by choice. I could barely keep up with the pace he had set. If he spotted me, it would be hard to pretend I was out for a leisurely stroll and happened to bump into him. I was panting with exhaustion; in another couple of minutes, I’d break into a sweat. My better judgment told me to break off. For once, I almost paid attention. The path turned a corner onto an unpaved track. I stopped. There was no one around, but the sound of tires on gravel was still in the air. Something large and white flashed through the trees, speeding down the road that led back out to the main avenue along the lake. I took a few deep breaths. Whatever it was, the engine was nicely tuned, though the muffler needed work.

  “Going somewhere?” The Man with Three Fingers appeared from nowhere in front of me. “You seem to be out of breath.”

  “You do have a habit of turning up, don’t you?”

  “Me? If you hadn’t been in such a hurry, you’d have noticed me.”

  “I’m busy.” I turned to go, then turned back. “Were you following me, or him? People don’t normally follow from in front. Or is there a new technique?”

  He grinned; the effect was deadly. If a hunting spider could grin, this would be it. “I was just out for a stroll in the park and remembered you liked wood, so I thought I’d become better acquainted with some trees. But somehow, they all look the same.” He walked over to a large chestnut tree. “This here, for example. I’d say in a couple of months, it will be flowering. It’s an ornamental, wouldn’t you say?”

  “It’s dead.”

  “Really?” He whistled and stepped back. “Dead. How do you like that? I wonder what killed it. Care to venture a guess, Inspector?”

  “Why were you following him?”

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “Or maybe you weren’t following him. Maybe you were trying to intercept him.”

  “And why would I want to do that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because you were afraid he was going away and wasn’t coming back.”

  “No, that’s why you were following him, Inspector.” He turned to look at the tree again. “What a shame. This thing happens a lot, I guess. Death, I mean.”

  7

  I thought Jenö would be put off by the cancellation of his operation, but he seemed cheery enough, sitting on the bench across from my hotel, reading a newspaper.

  “You owe me a croissant,” he said, “but don’t worry. We can settle later. Sit down and enjoy the spring air. Look at this light, will you? Soft as a Bedouin’s handshake.”

  I didn’t care about Bedouins. “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened. We called it off, that’s all.”

  “There was someone on the train you didn’t like.”

  Jenö?s eyebrows did a brief tango. “You picked up on that, did you?”

  “Hard not to. You think he was there by accident?”

  “He’s never anywhere by accident. That wasn’t his wife, by the way.”

  “How did he know I’d be on the train? You have a problem in your organization?”

  “No. He just showed up. Lucky break for us. We’ve been wondering where he was.”

  “How did he know I’d be there?”

  “He probably didn’t. He might have seen you at the station when you got on the train. There aren’t many Koreans around, and he must have been curious, sort of like a cat. He is careful where he steps, and if he sees anything new or out of place, he goes the other way.”

  “He didn’t go the other way. He came right to me and sat down. How could he know I was Korean?”

  “Well, it’s a cinch you’re not Mexican.”

  If Jenö was so happy to see the man, I figured it meant he must be a target, and that meant he had something to do with the weapons trade, missiles maybe. A perfect tab, a perfect slot. Geneva was a busy city. No wonder M. Beret looked so tired. “I hope we’re not going to try this again. On
ce is enough.”

  “Don’t worry, the person who was here to see you had to leave right away. You sure you won’t accept a trip to the land of milk and honey? We can do the whole thing in twenty-four hours.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you can. But I don’t like to rush my time on the beach, it’s bad for my tan.”

  Jenö folded his paper and tucked it under his arm. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “The man on the train, who was he going to meet?”

  “Guess.”

  I didn’t have to. What if my brother had even been sitting a few cars ahead, in the first class section? Same train, different dreams.