by James Church
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 horizon. 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.
“There’s too much territory for me to cover, even with the two trainees they threw at me last year when the highway started getting more traffic. I decided to do regular patrols but at irregular times. I remembered it from an old book on guerrilla tactics. We log the times and the particular run, so that theoretically we cover everything once a week. The whole point is, there’s no regular pattern, which means sometimes we do the same route two days in a row. What we lose in territory, we make up for in luck. This time we were lucky. We did the route that goes by this hillock twice.”
I put my boot on the stones and ground them into the dirt. “I thought we were friends, Li. We’ve known each other a long time. Maybe friendship doesn’t mean anything anymore.” Below, a convoy of dump trucks filled with people moved to the next section of fields to harvest. They turned down a road and in a moment were out of sight. “Do you really think I’m a fool? You don’t make regular runs through here, and even if you did, you’d never find anything in this corn. Two rows over could be a thousand kilometers away. So what is this about?” I motioned at the hill slightly higher and behind where we stood. “Let’s go.”
When we reached the top of the hill, Li squatted down peasant style and lit a cigarette. He puffed at it a few times, then pinched off the lit end and put what was left behind his ear. “You’re right. Someone told me to be here. From this spot, we were watching that guy watching you. He was no one from this side of the DMZ—too many gadgets. I’m not supposed to say anything, but I got to thinking about it. You may not believe me, but it’s true.”
“I didn’t even know where I was going to set up that morning. How could anyone else know where I’d be?”
“We didn’t, and neither did the other guy as far I can tell. Maybe they just guessed you wouldn’t drive too far down the highway. This hill and the next one over are the best surveillance spots for a couple of kilometers. All the other hills are too small or too bare, and there aren’t many spots to hide your car.”
“They? They guessed? Who are we talking about, Li?”
Li glanced at his watch. “Don’t ask me anything else. Won’t be but a few minutes. Just keep your eyes down on the road.”
“What am I looking for?” I knew the answer.
“A car.”
“What if I say I’m tired of watching highways?”
Li stood up and moved along the path down the hill. “That child, Inspector. He was my sister’s son.” He paused and looked up at me. “I know what happened. I think you do, too.”
The sound of two cars coming out of the tunnel and moving at
high speed made us both turn toward the road. The lead car, half a kilometer away and coming at us like an arrowhead, was deep blue, smaller than the one I’d seen on the first morning but just as clean. The second car was bigger, black, and right behind, so close it seemed attached to the first. I’d never seen two cars going so fast that close together. The driver of the black car must have taken his foot off the gas. The blue car pulled ahead suddenly, and as it came abreast of us, there was a muffled explosion, the road heaved into the air, and the car careened into the field across the way. The second car braked sharply and stopped just before the crater left by the explosion. The passenger-side door opened; a man got out and ran to the driver’s side of the blue car. He looked in the window, pulled a small machine pistol from under his jacket, and fired a burst into the car. He looked again, then fired another. As he ran back to the black car, he stopped and looked up the hill. He had short-cropped hair. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I knew they were like knives.
The black car drove on the dirt shoulder for a few yards, crushing the wildflowers. Once it eased back onto the highway, the driver accelerated so rapidly he fishtailed across the road, then regained control and moved north again. Just as the car disappeared over a small rise, I heard the horn blare. Li was shaking; I couldn’t tell whether it was with fear or with anger. “He wanted you to see that, Inspector. And he wanted me to see it, too. It’s a warning: If we get in his way, we’re dead men, for sure.”
6
“You hungry yet, Inspector?”
“It was your satellite dish, must have been. Your people were watching that highway. Or someone working for you. That radio scanner, in the black car the first time, it was yours, too?”
“Told you, I’m only a note taker. Mind if I fix a sandwich?” He walked into the kitchen and turned on the light. “Could make you a cup of tea—Irish tea, if you don’t mind.”
“I’ve had coffee already.” I heard him grunt in disappointment. “Okay, I’ll try the tea.”
“I thought you liked tea.”
“Lost my taste for it, I guess.”
“Cream?”
“Cream! Are you kidding? How about whiskey? I thought that was how you people drank tea.” I followed him to the kitchen.
“Some do. Not me. Cream and sugar.” He turned to watch me for a moment, just long enough to make sure I’d stopped at the kitchen door. “Only a habit, drinking tea like that, but it reminds me of home. You ever get lonely, Inspector, on the road?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know. If I did, it would take a lot of loneliness for me to drink tea with cream and sugar.” I took the cup from him and looked around the edge.
“No cranes, sorry.”
“Tell me, Richie, why were your people watching the highway? Is that when I wandered into your sights? Were you expecting Kang to be out there?”
The Irishman cleaned the counter, washed his cup, and wiped the faucets and then the cupboard handles. “Three questions, for which you already realize you won’t get answers. But you know what Kang was doing back there in Pak’s office, don’t you. He wanted to find out how much Kim knew. And, if Kang was operating true to form, he also wanted a good look at you. He’d been checking up, he told you that. But Kang doesn’t trust paper or other people’s reports. He wanted to see you for himself.”
I gave a mock salute. “I am impressed. You are obviously thorough, a trait too often overlooked. You’ve been watching Kang awhile, I take it.”
“Not long enough. We didn’t know about Kim, but we knew Kang was worried. He was jumping around, moving his people and collecting his cash, folding up networks. We couldn’t figure it out, until we got wind of this Japanese thing. Someone told me it looked like Kang was scared. Didn’t sound right to me.”
“Kang wouldn’t panic. He lacked that gene. Up in Manpo, he told me the deal with Japan was about to cause trouble internally. Do you know what he meant? Had you already figured out what he was doing on the border?”
“Let’s just say we knew that a settlement between your country and Japan after all these years strikes a lot of people as inconvenient.”
“They shouldn’t worry.”
“Oh?”
“Richie, compared with relations between my country and Japan, the Irish have a love affair with England. South Koreans, Chinese, Indonesians—no one likes the Japanese and no one ever will. I don’t know why. Pak and I would talk about it sometimes. Pak said it was irrational.”
“What happened to Pak? You said he’s dead. How?”
“Ask Kim.”
“Be serious.” His phone rang; he answered it quickly. “I think so.” He hung up. “You want to keep going?” He looked at his notebook, then frowned at the tape recorder. It had been running the whole time. “You had just seen a couple of cars.”
7
“Military Security mined the highway.” I had run up the stairs and was out of breath, standing in the doorway to Pak’s office. “They blew up a car, and Kim shot the driver in cold blood. He must have told Li to bring me out there to watch. The guy’s a fucking sadist.” Pak was looking at me curiously from behind his desk. I never run up the stairs. “This is Kang’s business, not ours. Remember, I told you this wasn’t my job, I told you when this whole thing started. It has something to do with that black car I was supposed to photograph. This time it was blue. Get Kang on the phone.”
“Let’s go to your office, Inspector.” He looked out his window at the Operations Building. “The view is better.”
When we got to my office, Pak pointed at my desk. “Inspector, sit down, shut up, and listen to yourself. Call Kang? You want me to use the telephone in the middle of this?” He picked up my phone and yanked the wire from the wall. If the phones were bugged, they would transmit even when they were hung up. We unplugged them from the wall receptacle on the rare occasions we didn’t want to risk being monitored. Yanking the wire from the wall was not the preferred method, but it did the job. “That’s much better.”
“What’s wrong with your office?”
“I think someone is keeping an eye on us, and maybe an ear, from the Operations Building. I just noticed it a day or so ago. Curtains moving in odd ways.”
“They’ve been watching me, too.”
“Kang and I are having lunch today, remember? You can join us. Make jolly at the noodle place. Lots of laughs. Afterward, we can go up to the monuments by the river to talk. A couple of drunken cadre going to snooze on the grass. They can’t get in too close, unless they’ve decided it’s time to throw a net on us.”
“This is no time for a picnic. Something is about to happen, and for all I know it’s going to happen today. You already know what it is, don’t you? You knew even before you sent me up to Manpo.”
“I don’t know what I don’t know, Inspector.” Pak was staring out my window. “Do you think Li really understands what is going on?” He didn’t sound like he was interested in the answer; his attention was still completely riveted on the street.
“He must have. He looked at his watch; he knew the schedule. I think he’s known for a long time something was going on. They had to bring the local security man in on it, at least enough to make sure the road was clear each time one of those cars came up the road. Something happened last month, though. Too many cars, on the wrong days. Li is quiet, but he’s smart. He must have figured it out. Maybe he said something to Kim. Maybe he told Kim to find another highway, it was too dangerous for the locals. To keep him quiet, they killed his sister’s son.”
Pak whirled around. “The boy who had his throat cut?” He closed his eyes and put his hand on the wall to steady himself. “Enough,” he said softly, and turned back to the window. “Enough.”
“I don’t think Li knew exactly what was going to happen when he told me to come out there. He seemed nervous, not like himself, but that could have been because he was planning to tell me something he had been told to keep secret. And he knew what happens when you cross Military Security. But the
y overreached if they thought they’d keep him quiet by killing the boy.” I waited for Pak to say something, but he didn’t. “You alright?” I asked.
“Fine, Inspector. Keep talking.”
“After he saw what Kim did, when Kim stopped and looked up the hill, he said to me that Kim was warning us not to get in the way or we’d be dead men.”
Pak kept staring out the window. “He didn’t say, ‘I’m a dead man.’ He said, ‘We.’ Why include you? Why does Kim think you’re getting in his way?”
I shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“Okay.” Pak finally convinced himself there was nothing happening outside. “We’re clear at the moment.” He moved back slowly from the window and leaned against my desk. “You’re right. We may not have much time before they get here. We need to lay out what we know and see what we can figure out. It doesn’t all have to fit, just enough to put them off balance for a few more hours. If they think we’ve filed a report implicating them, it will send them back to their cave while they figure out their next move. That’s long enough for me to call the Minister.”
“Why not call the Minister right now?”
“And tell him what? We’re scared? I need something concrete for him to issue an order throwing the Ministry in front of Military Security.”
“You want to start with the black car I couldn’t get a picture of?”