by James Church
This was not said sarcastically. It was with considerable boredom. He did not strike me as someone who was enjoying his job.
“I was thinking about a room.”
“Grandma Pak sent you, no doubt. People don’t show up here this time of day, unless she sends them.” I waited, but he stayed behind his book.
“She recommended you, said it was better here, more suited to me. Funny thing for an old lady to say to someone she’s just met.” I looked around the room again. “But she definitely had a low opinion of everywhere else.” The closer I studied it, the more I realized that the place was not as shabby as it seemed. It reminded me of Kang’s carefully scuffed shoes, like a safe house I had been assigned to watch a few years ago in Pyongyang: barely used, so someone had to kick the dust around and muss up the woodwork to give the place a lived-in look.
“That’s good. It means she likes you.” The book came down, and the clerk was suddenly watching me closely.
“A room?” I decided to get to the point. That seemed to bring him around.
“Got one. Got one with a view. Overlooks a pine tree. Very evocative.”
“Wonderful. I’ll take it.”
We stood eyeing each other. I broke first. “I believe it is customary at this point for you to tell me how much it is, for me to say that’s too much, and then for you to give me a registration paper, check my ID card, and so on.”
He shook his head. “Don’t have any registration forms left.”
I could see four or five of them on the desk. He followed my gaze, then picked up one of the forms and waved it over his head. “These? These? This paper is pathetic. It’s not even good for the toilet. I wouldn’t send a form like this in. It’s an insult to the nation.”
I leaned across the counter and looked directly into his eyes. “You always so patriotic about not keeping track of guests?”
He stared back. “If a record is what you want, that’s fine by me. But if I have it and the special police or a couple of lunkheaded colonels from Military Security come asking, then I have to give them the form, don’t I?”
“And what would you know about Military Security?” There was no sense in leaning into his face if he didn’t react. I turned to a TV set sitting in the corner nearest the door. If you weren’t paying attention, you could miss it when you first walked in, just like I had. It was new, big screen, a South Korean make with the name still on it. An oblong dish aerial perched on the top, nothing you’d need if all you could receive was the central TV channel, but something you’d want if you were looking for foreign broadcasts.
The clerk acted as if the TV were perfectly normal. “First, this is Kanggye, if you were wondering. The place is full of special sites which”—he shrugged his shoulders—“I have heard nothing about. This means it is full of military security. Second, I’m from Pyongyang myself. I know what I know.” He saw me look back at the TV. “Go ahead,” he said, “turn it on if you want. This time of the day we can’t get much, but in the morning and at night we can pull in Chinese stations. The game shows are pretty funny, even if you don’t understand the language. If that’s capitalism, I say it doesn’t look too difficult.”
“Been here long?”
“Three years. I was in the Foreign Ministry. They asked for volunteers to move out when they took cuts. I raised my hand and was cheered gloriously at the train station the afternoon I left, along with a few hundred others. Here I sit. It’s a life.”
The book he was reading was in English. It was a paperback, the cover nearly coming off and some of the pages hanging loose. It looked like it had been read and reread plenty. “A gift from a foreigner long ago. Don’t worry. It’s legal. I’m supposed to keep up my English. No one to talk to, so I read this.”
“Very literary town, is Kanggye,” I said. “You read English novels; the old lady at the station reads the Bible. She’s seems a tough bird, smarter than she lets on.”
He shot me a speculative glance; then his diplomatic training kicked in, and the shutters came down over his eyes. “Your room is up the stairs, down the hall, on the left. Number 7. The door doesn’t close all the way, nor the window. We lock the front door at 10:00 P.M. Be inside before that, or you sleep under the pine tree. No exceptions.”
“You lock the front door? Even out here in the countryside?”
“Got to. The town is full of robbers and thieves.”
I shook my head. “Don’t they have any regular police in this town?”
The clerk smiled grimly. “Sure, that’s why we lock the door.”
6
Maybe it was the cool wind coming through the open window, or maybe the voices from downstairs, but I woke at 2:00 A.M.
“Plenty of rope.” Suddenly the sleep fell away. It was Kang’s voice. “I want him to have plenty of rope. Just let him roam.”
“You’re the boss.” The desk clerk must have been asleep as well, because his voice had the irritated edge of someone who did not want to be awake.
“Say that one more time and I’ll get you transferred. Far out into the countryside. Without books.” Kang’s voice didn’t change pitch, and I was willing to bet that his face didn’t betray any emotion. “And tell Grandma Pak to forget she ever saw him.”
I sat up in bed.
“Don’t worry about her.”
“I worry about everyone.” Finally, Kang’s voice went up a notch, then fell back to normal. “That’s my job. It’s my calling. It makes me happy. If you haven’t noticed, I have perfected worry to a fine art.”
The front door slammed, and a car started up. It was an old Nissan, from the sound of it, badly in need of parts. So, Kang knew Grandma Pak. I wondered if she sent him to the Lotus. I wondered if he had filled out a registration form.
7
It was a bird in the pine tree that woke me at dawn, which came early. The bird warbled, waited a moment, then warbled some more. It could have been calling a mate, but mostly it seemed to be talking to itself. I was sure there would be no tea in the inn, and I wasn’t sure where I was going to get anything to eat at this hour.
“You slept well?” The clerk stood behind the desk, reading the same book, with a cup of tea beside him when I came down the stairs. The test pattern filling the TV screen disappeared, replaced by a man and a woman waltzing across the floor, with the man counting in Chinese. He kept turning his face to the camera.
“It’s a dance program. They teach people to dance, Western style.” The clerk lowered the book for a fraction of a second. “You like to dance?”
“No, not something I’ve thought a lot about. I wouldn’t mind some tea, though, and maybe a bite to eat.”
“No one in this town dances.” The clerk returned to his book. “Might be some food down the street.” He didn’t look up. I couldn’t tell if he was really reading or just didn’t want to make eye contact. It was barely light, and I still wasn’t awake enough for an argument, but I like people to be friendly in the morning or it ruins my day, and this guy was pressing the limits. An invitation to dance didn’t count as being friendly, not from him, anyway.
“Down left, down right, any place special, or do I just wander until I bump into something edible?”
“I’ll draw you a map.” He handed me a piece of paper. His face was puffy and his cheeks sagged, as if he hadn’t slept much.
Out on the street, I held up the paper he had handed me. It was blank. I turned it over and saw two words: “Blue sky.” I began walking back toward the railway station. “Blue sky” was Pak’s emergency code. He had worked out a list one afternoon during a typhoon in the middle of a political storm when we had nothing else to do but watch the trees blow and keep out of trouble. “Just in case,” Pak had said when he handed it to me. “In weather like this”—Pak always said “weather” when he was talking about politics—“we need a way to communicate, just us.” There were five or six terms. “Blue sky” meant “Call the office, now.” Not so difficult in Pyongyang, but I didn’t know wh
ere to find a phone I could use without attracting attention in Kanggye. When he handed me the train ticket, Pak had told me to stay away from phones. Now he wanted me to get to one. And I knew Kang was around somewhere. He’d been at the inn last night, ordering around the clerk who had slipped me Pak’s message. It didn’t surprise me that Pak might have a way to get to hotel staff around the country; if the Ministry couldn’t do it, no one could. But Kang worked for an external intelligence group. What was he doing walking around Kanggye as if it were his territory? And how did he know where I was?
“Buy an apple.” It was Grandma Pak. The same collection of rice cakes, fruit, and cigarettes was spread in front of her. The book with the duck was gone, but the stack of newspapers was untouched. Nobody had bought the birthday edition.
“Good morning, Grandma. And thank you for sending me to that inn.” She sat there as if she didn’t know what I was talking about. Well, that’s what Kang had said she was to do, forget. The blank look on her face was very convincing. “Remember me? I was here yesterday.”
She shook her head. “Lots of people around. I don’t spend time memorizing faces, you know.”
If she was this tough now, I wondered what she’d been like before she got to be an old lady pushing foreign cigarettes. “Where can I find some tea? I haven’t had a drop in days.”
She picked out a small apple and two rice cakes. “Give one of these cakes to Comrade Dumbo in the station office.” I had no idea what she meant. “The old man,” she said, and then pointed at the sky. “Real blue today.”
An old man with big ears sat behind the stationmaster’s desk. He squinted at me, maybe from being in the sun too much, maybe from reading too many railway timetables without glasses. His mouth turned down at the corners, like Pak’s, but he didn’t look unhappy. I noticed that all his wrinkles went the right way. He had a cup of tea. “Next train isn’t until tonight. The freight derailed just after midnight in the Number 6 tunnel. What a mess. Scrap all over the place, and it’s black as pitch in there. You can bet they are stumbling over themselves trying to clean up. Nothing’s moving up or down the line.” He paused to take a sip from the cup, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You might as well relax.”
“How about a rice cake?” I put both of them on the desk. There was no response. When I reached to take one of them back, he nodded toward the corner of the office.
“Railway phone, to the rail switchboard. Tell them you want to route it through central, it’ll get you anywhere in the country. Even China, if you talk sweet to the operator.” He stood up, put one rice cake in his pocket, and walked out of the office holding the other.
The ancient phone was heavy, the weight itself a sign that only solemn matters of high importance to the people should be squeezed through the five unevenly spaced holes in the mouthpiece. You can say anything you want into a modern phone, an unending rush of lightweight, pastel words that float across continents. Not this phone. I clicked the cradle several times to get an operator. A voice from far off came on. “Okay, okay, you can’t be that important, just take it easy.”
“Sorry, I didn’t realize I was interrupting.”
“You want to be connected somewhere, or do you want to chat? Who is this, anyway? It isn’t the stationmaster.”
“No, he told me I could use the phone to call Pyongyang.”
“Lines to the Pyongyang rail switch are tied up. Always are at this time of day.”
“I need central.”
“This is a railway phone. I don’t do central without authorization, and the stationmaster doesn’t cut it.”
“Grandma Pak says hello.” It was all I could think of on the spur of the moment. The old lady sat at the train station all day; she watched who came and went. The hotel clerk knew her. Kang knew her. And she knew my grandfather. She certainly didn’t look like any street agent I’d ever seen. She didn’t act like one, either.
“Who says hello?”
“Grandmother Pak.”
A brief silence. “I can give you central and you can ask the city girls to stop doing their nails long enough to connect you, or you can ask me to do it.”
So, I was right, Grandma Pak wasn’t just a street agent. Mentioning a street agent’s name wouldn’t get you the time of day from a switchboard operator, much less a phone call placed through a restricted line. Not even up here in the countryside. “I tell you what. I need Pyongyang.” I gave the operator seven digits, slowly, then repeated them.
“That’s a police number, and I heard you the first time.”
“You’ve got a sweet voice, like a sparrow. Sometime we should go for a walk, or we could have dinner. But at the moment, I need that number.”
“Delighted. Must be something they put in the Kanggye water that makes you so romantic, Inspector, but are you sure I’m your type?” It was Chief Inspector Pak at the other end.
I hadn’t even heard the click of the connection. “What are you doing on the line?”
“Phone rings, I pick it up, though from now on I’ll have my calls screened. Too many cranks around these days. How’s the weather?”
“Nice.”
“That’s it?”
“About like Pyongyang, only cooler in the morning—” Then I remembered he had something for me. “No clouds. Just nice, bright blue sky.”
“Splendid. Kang run into you?”
“Sort of. Wasn’t I was supposed to stay away from him?”
“Don’t worry.”
“Did you tell him where I was? Can I know what is going on? Are you related to everyone in this city?”
“No, just lots of friends. Listen, Kanggye isn’t your sort of town.”
“Fine. Can I get some breakfast now?”
“Screw breakfast, Inspector. Get up to the border. See what you can find out.”
“About what?”
“Catch the train for Manpo. All hell may break loose, so keep your head down.”
“I thought you wanted me to resign.”
“Forget it.”
“What about Kang?”
The phone went dead for a moment; then the operator came on again. “You want me to reconnect?”
“No.”
“What about that dinner?”
“Maybe later. Who do I ask for?”
“We don’t give out names. Bad for security. Just say you need ‘55.’ They’ll patch you through to me, if I’m on duty. ‘Bye.”
The stationmaster came back into the room. “You done?”
“What time is the train to Manpo?”
“When it runs, it gets here between ten in the morning and five in the afternoon.”
The door opened, and Kang walked in. “Going somewhere?”
“I thought you wanted me to have plenty of rope.”
For that I got a bleak look. “You have trouble sleeping at night?”
“No, but your car is pretty noisy.”
Kang strolled around the office, the way he had walked around the tower in Pyongyang the morning we met, looking for nothing, just force of habit. “Manpo is a boring little town.” He glanced along the baseboard. “You might not like it.”
“It’s a border town. From what I read in our reports, it’s filled with smugglers and smart people who think they have all the angles covered. They get hold of a new stereo for someone in Pyongyang, maybe some spare parts for a DVD player. If they make it past the checkpoints and finish the delivery, they get to coast for a couple of months. Nice.” I was getting a bad feeling about being in the same room as Kang. I looked past him, searching for unusual movement out in the square that fronted the train station. It was filling with people, a few bent under A-frames loaded with vegetables, several army officers, the rest nondescript, thin, tattered, and tired.
Kang kept his eyes on me. “No security goons moving in, Inspector. Just a crowd going to Manpo in hopes of making money. Some will cross into China after the sun sets. A few won’t come back.”
“Not my busin
ess.” What Kang said was right: There were no signs of a security squad moving through the crowd.
“True. It isn’t your business. So try another city if you want.”
“Look, I’m a little grumpy. Didn’t sleep all that well, not much to eat, and tea is a commodity beyond my reach. I don’t like trains a lot anymore, either. So you tell me, what is this all about?”
Kang nodded to the stationmaster, who backed out the door. “We have five minutes. Sit down and listen.” Kang unbuttoned his jacket. He had a shoulder holster with a 9 mm Israeli pistol. He saw my eyes flick to the holster and then back to his face. “Manpo isn’t the well-disciplined crowd of Pyongyang, Inspector. Kanggye’s not so bad, but just step up the line, and no one is in charge. They don’t like people they don’t recognize nosing around. Sometimes those people disappear. Poof. Vanish. We never find them again. Personally, I’ve stopped caring. I lost two men last year.” He reached for a train timetable on the desk and studied it for a moment. “So if that bothers you, I’d get back to Pyongyang as fast as my little legs could carry me.”
I stood up, angry at Pak for sending me up here, angry at Kang for playing me like a fish on a line, angry at myself for not just sitting in my office, sipping tea and letting the days pass. “Why does everyone insult my legs? I’ve got news for you. These legs are going to walk outside to find me something to eat. Nice talking to you.”
When I reached the door, Kang said in a low voice, barely above a whisper, “In back of the Manpo Inn, Friday, at sunset.”
I kept walking. The stationmaster was dozing on a bench, under a poster screaming about the Kanggye Spirit. His hat had slipped off, and his head was resting against a greasy spot on the wall, the same place he had slept for years, decades maybe. Posters came and posters went; he didn’t seem to pay attention as long as he could snore softly in the dusty light of a yet unspoiled day.