A Corpse in the Koryo

by James Church

  The two of them stared at me. The younger one trembled until I thought he would fall over. The older one shook his head slowly. “We don’t want trouble.”

  “Well, trouble is what you’ve got, and you’ll have even worse if you tell anyone, anyone at all, what I just said to you.” I let that sink in. “Now help me get this car out of the ditch.” Neither of them moved. “I’ll put it another way for you. I’m your only hope of finding out who killed that boy, believe me. Or don’t. If I were you, I wouldn’t believe me. If I were you, I’d get to a phone and call the local security man, Li Min Sung. He and I were in the army together. We stayed in touch.” I could see from the face of the younger man that this made an impression. The locals liked Li; they trusted him. He had been around here a long time and was always fair with them, didn’t give them a lot of trouble over minor regulations. If Li and I were friends, then maybe they could trust me, too. “Tell him Inspector O says hello.”

  The older one spit on his hands. “Let’s get this car back on the road.”

  11

  “Where are you?” Pak was irritated.

  “I’m calling from a street phone.”

  “You’re supposed to be in here. People are looking for you.”

  “I gathered as much. Someone parked in my parking space, so I figured I’d take a ride.”

  Pak’s voice donned the cloak it wore when he wanted me to listen closely. “A couple of muscular types were here about a guy named Chong. You know anyone named Chong?”

  “Just a minute. Let me think.” I let a decent interval pass. “No. What are the odds? You go through your whole life and never meet a Chong. Isn’t that an Arab name?” I glanced out onto the street to see if anyone had stopped to watch. No one.

  “Who’s talking about Arabs? They wanted to know where you’ve been the past week. I told them you were jumpy so I gave you time off to rest. You felt rested when you came back to work, didn’t you?”

  “Rested isn’t the word for it.”

  “One more thing. They said your brother is joining the case. He’ll be here tomorrow to get briefed by you.”

  “Forget it.”

  There was a long silence. “Inspector, we weren’t asked for our opinion. We don’t get a vote. Your brother has been assigned to monitor this case. Do I make myself clear?”

  “I told you. Forget it. And I meant it. I’m not working near him. Five years ago, we reached an agreement. We’re not brothers anymore. We don’t meet. We don’t speak. We live on different planets. I’m sticking to the agreement. If he’s on the case, you’ll have to take me off.”

  “Family matters cannot interfere—”

  “Look, Pak, it’s not your business, it’s not the Ministry’s business, it’s not the party’s business. This is between me and my former brother. He’s dirtying my grandfather’s name. I won’t have it. Can I say it again for you? I won’t have it. Let’s drop it, alright?”

  Pak must have thought I was crazy, talking like that on the phone. Most of the time our line wasn’t monitored—too many other targets and not enough personnel—but we both knew that this case had probably put us on the Military Security Red List, meaning the office phones were near the top of some roving team’s weekly priorities. I was banking on it. What I’d said would get to my brother. I wanted him to hear it directly from me, even if it wasn’t face-to-face. And I wanted the transcript to get circulated in places where it would put a question mark after his name. Not a big one, but a nagging doubt. It wouldn’t destroy him, but he would be in limbo for a while. People wouldn’t return his phone calls; invitations would dry up. That would make him mad, maybe ruin his appetite for a few days as he tried to figure out why people were avoiding him. He might even lose some sleep, wondering if his name was on the short, black list of those who had unknowingly said the wrong thing, made the wrong decision, had their heads up when they should have been down.

  Pak was talking again, but the connection went bad and I missed the first part of what he said. “… so let’s not get off track over private feuds.”

  “This isn’t a private feud. It’s moral. It’s philosophical. It’s about lofty ideals and people who are so eager to serve the revolution that they step on friends, family, even little children.” I paused at that thought, but I didn’t want to follow it through. “My brother doesn’t know the first thing about murder investigations, only about murder, and he doesn’t care. Someone has transferred him onto the case to get to me. Guess what? It won’t work.”

  I heard Pak clear his throat. “Just get in here. We’ll have a cup of tea and see what the tea leaves say.”

  “I have a better idea. How about you push me on the swings?” I didn’t have the heart to tell him what I’d learned at the morgue, that tea was unhealthy in large doses.

  “Then you have to push me down the slide.”

  Pak was sitting under the willow tree near the swing set when I got there. “No one around at the moment. You realize, not meeting in the office is going to get the listeners annoyed. They hate dead time.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll make it up to them. I’ll read aloud from a book of poetry some afternoon. Meantime, we’ve got a problem.”

  Pak laughed out loud. “A problem.” He laughed again, a long, rolling laugh, so that pretty soon I joined in. The two of us, sitting by a rusty swing set, laughing. A few people walked by, but no one stopped.

  “Good, we both feel better now.” I grinned. “You want to know what the problem is?”

  Pak put on his sunglasses. “Sure. I don’t have enough problems. I need another one to round out my hand.”

  “The corpse is a Finn. He was moved to that eighth floor room from somewhere else. Someone doesn’t want an autopsy. His being a Finn means something to that particular someone. Maybe that’s why they messed with the labels in his clothes. And I’ll bet you anything this is all connected to the kid whose throat was cut near that black Mercedes with the scanner. You know, the car that ended up in the ditch.” I wasn’t sure this was the time to tell Pak about my conversation with the two farmers on the side of the road.

  “That’s it? That’s what you have?” Pak snorted. “You’re just dumping stray facts on me. All beads, no string.”

  “Wrong image. Don’t think of beads. Think of trees.”

  Pak groaned. “Here we go. Wood, I should have known.”

  “I’m not talking about wood, I’m talking about trees. You ever seen tree roots? They go everywhere. No pattern. Same thing with branches, when you think of it. But they all work together. One thing about you, Pak, you always look at facts as mechanical. Each one has to fit in a certain place.”

  “I do that, don’t I, Inspector? Try to see how things fit. That’s how we solve cases. It’s standard operating procedure. Proven, tested, gets results. Or after all of these years, do you have a better idea?”

  “Facts are organic. They don’t have to fit, they just have to work together. Think about it. A car doesn’t go out of control at high speed, blow a tire, and then end up in that ditch without getting pretty banged up. I know that ditch. I saw it.” I paused to see if Pak would react. If he did, the sunglasses hid it pretty well. “That car was planted there, same as the body in the hotel. What do you know about the eighth floor of the Koryo?”

  “Meaning?”

  “The hotel manager told me it was hard to rent on that floor. I’d guess that’s where some of the central monitoring closets are. It may even be a floor that Military Security has taken over. Can’t we check that?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But why would they plant a body there? And whose body is it?”

  I ignored the second question. “Maybe whoever did it was part of an out-of-town unit. What if it wasn’t planned but was a big mistake, a screwup by someone who didn’t check what he didn’t know? Those rooms on the eighth floor are never rented unless the hotel is full. It hasn’t been for weeks. It’s slack. The manager is worried that if word gets out about a dead body in his hotel, it
will ruin the Koryo’s reputation and he’ll lose business. That’s why he told me about the eighth floor. He wanted to tell me the murder didn’t happen in his hotel. Only he couldn’t say it directly.”

  “So we need an autopsy, something that might show the victim was dead before being moved to the room.”

  “Kim is going to block it every way he can; the warrior woman at the morgue made that abundantly clear. But she let me go through the effects bags, on the sly. The Finn’s trouser cuffs had pine needles in them. I took some. That gives us a place to begin.”

  “Good, you start with the pine trees on the west coast, I’ll start on the east coast, and we’ll work toward the center.” Pak’s head brushed the low-hanging willow branches as he stood up. “You done with this organic approach to crime solving? I’ve got paperwork up to here.”

  “They were short, fresh needles, not dry. Don’t ask me what that means yet. I don’t know. Also, I got two sets of keys from the Mercedes crash. Why two sets? The wallet of the driver had been stripped.”

  “So what’s the connection? What does two sets of keys get us?”

  “Do you want to know how those facts fit? Or how they work together?”

  “I don’t give a damn.”

  “Maybe they get us some more information on the cars that are part of this.”

  “Maybe. But people lose keys. Maybe this driver needed to carry a spare. Don’t give me a maybe.” Pak gave one of the swings a push. “I’m supposed to go to the Minister and say, ‘Maybe we’ve solved the case. There were two sets of keys. I know because one of my best men stole them from the morgue.’ Give me a fact, would you! And I don’t want to hear about roots.”

  “We know the guy’s a Finn.”

  “You keep saying that. What’s this thing with you and Finns, anyway?” Pak wasn’t mad at me; he was just behind in figuring out what was going on. At this point in a case, when we still had only loose facts and not much else, he tended to get cross.

  “One more thing.” I owed it to Pak to tell him what I knew, or thought I knew. “I had to talk to a couple of farmers.”

  Pak took his sunglasses off, very slowly, the way he does when he senses bad news. “Meaning?”

  “One of them was the uncle of the boy who was killed. Long story. Anyway, they’re on our side. I told them to call Li Min Sung if they wanted to check up on me.” I smiled, without much conviction. “We need a little help from somewhere.”

  Pak nodded. “Good, now we have the floor lady at the Koryo and a couple of farmers working for us. And on the other side, Kim and his band of snakes.” There was a pause. “You want to tell me about Chong?” Before I could open my mouth, Pak held up his hand. “Never mind. That’s all I needed to know, and I don’t want to know any more.” He shook his finger at me. “I’ll make a couple of phone calls. Can you please stay out of trouble for three or four hours until I get us some protection? The Minister likes you, but then, he doesn’t have to put up with your wood chips. If I can get through to him, he’ll throw up a shield for us, though how much good it will do against Military Security is anybody’s guess.”

  “I could start checking pine trees in the city, if you want.” Pak didn’t respond. I could see he was thinking of something else. “No, forget it. I’m not working with my former brother. I’m not going to talk to him. The only reason he’s on the case is to lead us over a cliff, I’m warning you.”

  I dreamed of a plain, flat to the horizon,

  As if the mountains had crumbled

  To dust around us; we were mad

  With sorrow, and howled at the moon to

  Bring back the soft rolling hills

  That had echoed with our laughter.

  —Pyon Kil Sun (1122–1145)

  My brother had lost weight since I last saw him. He didn’t look all that good. His face was empty, flat. Even when we were little, in the midst of the war when other children were thin and frail, his cheeks had been full. Mine would be dull and chapped in winter; his cheeks turned ruddy with the cold. People would stare, wondering where he got the extra food. But he didn’t eat extra, sometimes he even gave me a little of his portion. He just looked fuller than anyone else. When he got older, he got round, especially his face. At first, when he was moving up the ranks of the party and he was pleased with himself, it showed in his face: round and smooth, unmarked by all of those he rolled over. Later the roundness went to fat and then, with age, to a menacing, distorted mask.

  He was sitting in the beer hall in the Koryo, at the same table where I’d met Kang, tightening his fingers around a bottle of beer. He was annoyed because I was late, and he knew I was late on purpose. It annoyed him that I did most things on purpose. Then he spotted my reflection in the front window. He took a sip of beer, and I saw his body tense up.

  I walked over to the table and sat down without saying a word. We stared at each other. “This wasn’t my idea,” I said finally. “I told you five years ago I would never talk to you again, and as far as I am concerned, I’m not talking to you.”

  He rolled the beer bottle between his hands. I thought he might grab it by the neck and shove it into my face, but then he relaxed. “Let up, just for a minute, why don’t you?” he said. “We turned out different, that’s all. I believe in what I do. You don’t believe in anything. I’ve been assigned to this case, over my objections. You don’t like it. But we both have our orders.”

  “No, you’re wrong. We’re not working together on this. Not on anything, ever, not even in hell.”

  He glared at me, and I glared back. I deliberately took the piece of wood from my pocket and began working it over and over in the fingers of first one hand, then the other. Before I drove over, I’d retrieved the piece of persimmon from my out-box. I wanted to have it with me for our meeting. My brother wouldn’t know the difference between persimmon wood and balsa wood. But it wasn’t for him. It was for me.

  My brother was one of those people who was annoyed when I held a piece of wood in my hand. He said it was a character fault, and he didn’t have sympathy for people with faults. “If you’re doing that to get on my nerves, forget it.” He watched as I put the wood on the table, daring him to sweep it onto the floor.

  “It’s persimmon,” I said. “Very hard. Your friends in the Central Committee wouldn’t like it. They need something softer, more pliable.”

  Before my brother could say anything, the player piano started up: my piano roll with the Beatles on it. He grimaced. “Music like that is poison. Why do they play that garbage? No wonder the kids today are so unreliable.”

  “Unreliable.” I let the word sit between us, oozing like a sore. “Go ahead, give me the rest of the speech, about the socialist renegades who are undermining the revolution, diluting the Leader’s ideas, turning back the clock.”

  He went dead white. “You may be a blood relative”—he was hissing softly, like a lizard pinned by a rock—“but you’d better be careful. You can still be brought to justice, along with the rest of them.”

  “A purge? Are you going to launch a one-man purge?”

  “Don’t tempt fate. Things are happening. All this garbage will be swept away, along with everyone who has fostered it. I’m through protecting you.” His narrow, mean eyes were never his best feature, and they got uglier when he started talking like this.

  I leaned across the table, so I could stare into his ugly eyes. “Get your orders changed. I’m only going to warn you once. Get them changed, and get out of my way on this case.”

  “My brother, the police inspector, threatening me, a Central Committee department vice director?” He didn’t budge or back away. “The Heartbeat of the Revolution won’t be able to save you much longer, don’t you know that, you fool?”

  Pure rage must have flashed across my face almost before I felt it myself, because I saw him recoil. My voice was hoarse; I didn’t recognize it when I spoke. “Get out of my sight. If you ever speak that way about Grandfather again, I will kill you.” I sat
back and took a deep breath. “With my bare hands, I’ll rip your stinking heart from your chest.”

  He sipped his beer, a show of unconcern, but the glass was shaking when he put it down. Then he slid off the bench, stood up stiffly, and walked out the door. The doorman started to tip his hat but stepped back when he saw the expression on my brother’s face. The waitress at the bar, trying to make herself invisible, stood still as a deer when it smells trouble. She had heard the whole thing. When she noticed I was watching her, she started wiping the bar with a rag, on the same spot, over and over again.

  PART

  FIVE

  2

  For the next two days, the weather turned back toward summer, hot, humid, the air stifling under a heavy gray sky. It felt like a typhoon was coming, but there were no warnings on the radio for the farmers to make preparations. I went into the office each morning, followed at a distance by people who didn’t care if I noticed. Pak was gone most of the time, either in meetings at the Ministry or some other place, where he wouldn’t say. He didn’t do much more than mutter good morning, didn’t call me into his office, didn’t ask to review any files, just kept to himself. I could see he wasn’t sleeping much, but then, neither was I.