Star of the North

by D. B. John

  She crossed the square toward the hard-currency store where the money changers hung about. She had no intention of changing the money. She wanted to know what she had. One of them led her to a corner to conduct business, and it was then that she received her biggest surprise of all. In exchange for her 300 yuan he was offering her more than four thousand won in tattered, rotting notes. She gasped incredulously. Two months of her husband’s labor equaled ten chocolate cookies from South Korea? She wanted to cry miserably and laugh at the same time. With a pang of shame she realized she would conceal this from Tae-hyon. She could not bear to see him lose face.

  She walked away from the money changer, clutching the yuan in her fist.

  “Hey, ajumma! All right, a special rate for you …”

  She returned to the market and walked with her head held high past the grandmother selling Koryo remedies.

  Life deals you three chances, she thought. This is one of them.

  Within an hour she had made her purchases. A five-kilo sack of rice and one of dried noodles, a liter of good-quality cooking oil, a bag of rice flour, jars of syrup, mustard sauce, fish stock, and soybean paste, and her biggest investment: a new steel pan.

  There are those who starve, those who beg, and those who trade.

  She was in business.

  7

  Hôtel Beau-Rivage

  Quai de Mont-Blanc

  Geneva, Switzerland

  “He vanished from the end of our street, near the beach. He’d just said good-bye to a friend after soccer practice and was on his way home to finish his homework before dinner. The streetlights had only just come on. He was fourteen. We were devastated.”

  Mrs. Ishido stirred her cup and took a sip. She and Jenna were the only guests in the modestly named tearoom, a high-ceilinged belle époque salon with gilt chairs and brocaded drapes. French windows gave a postcard view of the lake and the Jet d’Eau rising like a geyser. The alpine sky bathed the room in a crystalline light that refracted in the chandeliers. At the far end of the room a shaven-headed man, too big for his suit, sat watching the door. The Swiss authorities had insisted on providing a bodyguard, Mrs. Ishido said, to protect her from North Korean assassins while she gave evidence at the United Nations. “They’d have killed me long before now if they’d wanted to silence me. They don’t care what the world thinks of them.”

  She was about sixty, Jenna guessed, and dressed in an elegant navy suit with beautiful Japanese pearl jewelry. Her hair was an ashy white, and her face lined by sorrow, but there was something striking about her, the tatters of a remarkable beauty. She sat bolt upright like a queen, a posture in which Jenna saw the determined dignity of a mother who had endured the worst that could happen to her: having her child stolen. She could speak a little Korean, she explained, from her days working for the president of Hyundai Heavy Industries in Tokyo, but filled the gaps with English. On the table between them she had placed the school photograph of her son, Shuzo. Boyish, moon-faced. He was a cute kid.

  “My husband reported him missing almost immediately. The prefecture police searched day and night. After a week they put this photo in all the local newspapers. They didn’t find a single clue. It was as if the night had swallowed him up. Of course, we’d wondered if he’d run away, the way teenagers sometimes do. We always left the door unlocked and the lights on in case he returned when we were out.

  “One year turned into five; five years turned into ten, and without us ever saying so we’d both given him up for dead. Living in that town by the sea became insufferable. When my husband’s company offered him a transfer to Osaka it was what we had prayed for.

  “And then, eleven years after Shuzo’s disappearance, we got the phone call that turned our lives upside down. It was a reporter from the Tokyo Shimbun. He told me that a North Korean commando had been captured during a failed secret mission to Seoul. This commando was interrogated by South Korean intelligence officers. He admitted to being a part of a unit that had kidnapped dozens of people over the years and taken them to North Korea. One of them was a fourteen-year-old boy from our town.”

  She shook her head vaguely.

  “Our son in North Korea? We’d never in our dreams considered such a thing. But everything matched. The time and the date. It was Shuzo. This commando had snatched him from the sidewalk …” Mrs. Ishido paused for a moment and swallowed. “. . . bound and gagged him on the beach, zipped him into a body bag, and took him by dinghy … to a waiting submarine.”

  Hairs rose on the nape of Jenna’s neck.

  “He cried and yelled all the way to North Korea. They put him to work straight away. Imagine it, a fourteen-year-old teaching Japanese customs and slang to North Korean spies being trained to infiltrate Japan. Maybe they also thought they could brainwash him and turn him into a spy. The young are malleable.

  “We demanded his immediate release. After a lot of pressure from our government, the North Korean regime finally admitted that they had taken Shuzo. Then they informed us that he had become mentally ill and had hanged himself four years ago, aged twenty-one.” Her voice broke on the word one. The effort to maintain her composure must have been tremendous, and Jenna saw how brittle the woman’s veneer was. “I don’t believe them,” she said, her voice ill controlled. “Why should I believe anything they say? I believe Shuzo is alive …”

  She took a handkerchief from her handbag and dabbed her eyes. Jenna looked away. She wanted to take her hand, but Mrs. Ishido did not invite familiarity. A silence opened between them, filled by the hum of traffic on the Quai de Mont-Blanc and the sound of a horn, the Lausanne ferry approaching the jetty. Jenna was reluctant to press but couldn’t help herself. “You said … a submarine.”

  Mrs. Ishido cleared her throat and when she spoke her voice was level again, her emotion quickly contained. “A naval spy submarine, Sango class, on a mission from the Mayangdo Naval Base in North Korea. Quite a large vessel, according to the commando.” She gave Jenna a sad smile. “No one was expecting a submarine. It was probably the same craft that took your sister. It would explain why she vanished so completely and undetected.”

  An electric current swept through Jenna, a feeling of exhilaration mixed with a sickening contraction in her stomach.

  So there it was. At last someone had said it.

  “And I’d always been told abduction was impossible,” she murmured.

  The bodyguard stood and gestured to his watch.

  “Forgive me,” Mrs. Ishido said, getting up. “I must catch my flight back to Osaka.” She gave a small bow and extended her hand for Jenna to shake. “I hope one day you are reunited with your sister.” She began walking toward the door.

  “This captured North Korean commando …” Jenna said. “What is his name?”

  Even from behind, Jenna could see her tense.

  “Sin Gwang-su,” she said quietly, and turned. “His name is Sin Gwang-su. He’s been detained at Pohang Prison, on the east coast of South Korea.” Her face darkened.

  “You’ve visited him?”

  “No …” She hesitated. “He is a Category A prisoner held in a high-security unit. He is not permitted visitors. But with the permission of the South Korean government I have spoken to him … That’s not an experience I would wish upon you. Or even one that might help you to find closure. But sometimes … it’s possible to extract some truth from the falsehoods evil tells.”

  When Mrs. Ishido had gone, Jenna paced alone around in the tearoom. She was feeling such extremes of shock, anger, and euphoria that she did not know what to do with herself. The moments in her life when she felt she needed a drink were so few she could count them on one hand. This was one of them.

  Amid the French and German chatter in the lobby bar she heard American voices. Keeping her back toward them she took a stool at the zinc bar near the piano, glanced in bewilderment at the rows of European liqueurs in backlit crystal, and asked for a tall Jack Daniel’s and Coke. The pianist seemed to notice her, and the melody he
was toying with modulated to a bluer key. Her drink was placed in front of her. She took a generous mouthful. Her hand was trembling.

  She was taken in a submarine.

  She shook her head as if this were simply incredible, as if someone had told her, “Your sister became a mermaid and swam away.” Not in any of the fateful scenarios she’d imagined over the years had she, or anyone, considered the possibility of a submarine.

  From deep inside her came a rage directed at herself. Did you lose hope so easily? Didn’t you listen to your instinct all this time? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?

  The bartender, polishing glasses, was watching her warily. She took another large gulp of her drink, feeling the trembling begin to calm, and exhaled slowly.

  She’s alive. Oh God, she’s alive.

  Jenna’s skin rose in goose bumps and something dark unfurled its wings inside her. If Mrs. Ishido had obtained permission to contact that North Korean abductor in prison, then so would she. She would speak to the fiend who took Soo-min and Jae-hoon. She would—

  “You know, there are cheaper joints for getting drunk in this town,” said a deep, familiar voice behind her.

  She closed her eyes. You have got to be kidding me.

  Jenna turned on her barstool. “Please don’t tell me this is a coincidence.”

  Charles Fisk was smiling paternally. He was in a suit but had taken off his tie, as if he’d just come from a long meeting. “Mrs. Ishido’s something, isn’t she?” He took the stool next to her. “Like a Japanese Meryl Streep.”

  “What are you doing here?” she said, failing to keep the annoyance out of her voice.

  “I just dropped by to say hello, that’s all. The World Economic Forum’s about to start.” He lowered his voice. “Between you and me, it’s a great chance to squeeze our esteemed allies for intel. Did you know this hotel was called the Beau-Espionage during the war? The bar would have been crawling with Gestapo spies and blonde double-agents hiding cyanide capsules in their garter straps.”

  Jenna sighed. “Look, sir, I’m grateful to you for connecting me to Mrs. Ishido, really I am, but right now I could use a little private time—”

  “There’s someone here I want you to meet.”

  It occurred to her that in another life, perhaps, she might have reveled in being an attractive young woman in the bar of a sublime hotel on Lake Geneva, in the company of a charming and erudite man, but she was simply feeling harassed. She did not want to encourage this evolving relationship with Fisk. He was undoubtedly trying to manipulate her to his own purpose. And yet, he seemed so obviously to like her and enjoy her company that she smiled, in spite of herself. She pondered his large nose and crinkled silver hair, his strong, intelligent, ugly face. His charm was a kind of seduction, she supposed, this bending to his will, and she was not as immune to it as she had believed.

  As he led her across the grand Habsburg lobby she realized what had been unsettling her ever since she’d entered this hotel. There were security types everywhere. Men in Oakley sunglasses talking into lapel microphones, standing in corners, observing. On the fifth floor they stepped into a thickly carpeted lobby, where there stood another two men with radio earphones. Fisk directed her along a hallway hung with spotlit nineteenth-century paintings toward a lacquered door with a security entry system. He buzzed, and it was opened by a brisk-looking woman holding a desk calendar. “Go in,” she said to him, “but please—five minutes only.”

  They were in a large, sumptuous suite filled with bouquets of flowers. Second Empire claw-and-ball armchairs and silk divans were arranged in each corner. Flanked by tall table lamps with tasseled shades, an outsized Napoleonic fireplace dominated an entire wall.

  From behind a door Jenna could hear a woman talking. She thought she recognized the chest tones of the voice but was too distracted to place it. The door opened and a sleek young black man wearing a three-piece suit beckoned them in.

  The woman had her feet up on a sofa, with her back toward them, and was talking on a cell phone. She had a full-throated voice, rather deep, that seemed too loud and abrasive for the room. Jenna glanced at Fisk, who signaled with his finger for her to say nothing. Patterns of light shifted across the ceiling, the sunlight bouncing off the lake. She heard the tick and whir of a fax machine. The woman’s blonde hair was stiffly coiffed. A young female hairdresser in a pink uniform was packing away a hairdryer and brushes, and left the room. Finally the woman ended the call, saying “Jesus Christ Almighty,” and tossed the cell phone to the young black man in the suit. Jenna smelt her perfume, which was citrusy and strong.

  She stood to face them, giving them a bright, embattled smile, and Jenna found herself shaking hands with the United States secretary of state.

  8

  The Ministry of Foreign Affairs

  Kim Il-sung Square

  Pyongyang, North Korea

  Lieutenant Colonel Cho’s day had begun routinely enough. A couple of tedious committees; rice balls and squid for lunch in the office of his superior, General Kang, where Kang had doggedly continued to practice English conversation with Cho. I did hike of a mountain with my two daughters and afterward we eat some pruits in a lestaulant. The afternoon was a logistics conference with Section One of the Guard Command to plan the Dear Leader’s official visit to China: cortège of three armored trains; a dozen timetables canceled to clear the line; armed detachments of the KPA deployed in every station he passed through; fresh fish and game to be flown out to him and the trash flown back. Small wonder the great man seldom left the country. (The Guard Command had also wanted the Leader’s urine and feces collected and returned to Pyongyang to prevent any foreign powers obtaining his DNA. Cho had cautiously suggested they solve that one themselves, as the task was too great a privilege for someone of his rank.)

  By six he was sitting in his workplace political study group—this evening’s lecture was on the revolutionary principles of Juche poetry—and focusing all his remaining energy into not yawning. He was shattered with exhaustion. His brain felt as if it were wrapped in wool. His eyes felt scoured and too small for their sockets.

  He had not had a good night’s sleep since the day of the parade, almost a week ago. His mood veered precariously every time he thought of Yong-ho’s imminent promotion, which was several times an hour. One moment he felt such a rush of excitement that he could hardly breathe. The next he was almost hysterical with worry. A background investigation into their real family? Their real family. The risk was insane! How could Yong-ho do this?

  That morning he’d awakened when it was still dark, soaked in sweat. He was listening for the thump of boots in the stairwell, a hammering at the door. The disappearances happened at night, always at night. He pictured Bowibu agents entering his bedroom, shining bright lights in his eyes, come to arrest him because his family, his real family, whose names and faces were unknown to him, had been class traitors, saboteurs, enemies of the Revolution, and that he and Yong-ho, brothers whose genes carried this ancestral criminality, had betrayed the trust of the noblest Leader alive. Then he’d rubbed his face, and breathed in, and breathed out. His real family would have been nothing but rice planters and shit shovelers. There was nothing to worry about.

  When his study group finished at seven thirty Cho came home for dinner with his wife and Books, and sat with Books for a while, helping him with his school homework. Then he managed a fitful, half-hour nap in his study before returning to the Ministry around ten, along with his colleagues, for the more important part of the working day—drafting reports and communiqués, analyzing intelligence, and being present late into the night. The hours of darkness were the Dear Leader’s most productive, and the man himself might telephone his bureaucrats at any time. That was an insight of Kim Jong-il’s that was lost on the capitalists: fear was every bit as incentivizing as greed.

  When Cho reentered the Ministry’s main doors at ten, his department supervisor was waiting for him in a corner of the vast lobby. The man stubbe
d out his cigarette the moment he saw Cho. “They’re asking for you on the top floor.”

  “What?” Fear breathed down Cho’s neck like a draft of icy air. “Why?”

  His supervisor’s eyes were checking him up and down. “Straighten your tie. I’m to take you up right away.” He put his hand in the small of Cho’s back and began propelling him across the lobby. “Quick. Chollima speed.”

  Cho felt almost suffocated with panic, as if someone had a rope around his windpipe. This is it! What have they found out?

  The supervisor followed Cho into the caged elevator; the gate was wrenched shut, and the slow rattle of their ascent was accompanied by the hum of a motor. The supervisor said nothing until they had risen clear of the lobby, then began to whisper.

  “Kang’s been arrested. At his home this evening.” The supervisor’s voice was hoarse with panic. “Accused of spying. The whole department’s in turmoil …”

  “General Kang?” Cho stared at him. “On what evidence?”

  The man shook his head. “What’s it matter? He’s been accused. He’s finished.”

  The wan electric bulb of the elevator flared with the current and dimmed again.

  Cho’s mind began to race. Spying was a vague and unspecific crime but it was highly contagious. The type of crime that was quickly found to exist in rings and factions, and to have infected whole departments.

  Was he about to be accused of spying, as an accomplice of Kang’s? Oh my dear fucking ancestors. Guilt by association, guilt by heredity. Or had they unearthed something in his real family’s past … and this something was providing corroborating proof … ?

  The elevator juddered to a halt at the top floor. The moment Cho was delivered, the gate shut behind him with a ferrous screech. He turned to see the supervisor descending into the floor, face lit like a Kabuki demon.

  Admit nothing, he mouthed.

  The silent white corridor led toward an anteroom. He’d seldom visited the leadership area of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and then only in the company of General Kang. He began walking slowly past a series of oil paintings on the walls. Large, classic pieces dating from the Three Revolutions. Farmers hailing one another across fields of bumper crops. A blast-furnace worker wiping his brow. His shoes echoed like gunshots on the heated parquet floor, and he felt his panic give way to a strange calm, an acceptance almost, like the profound resignation he’d seen on the faces of the condemned at public executions. The feeling was given depth and poignancy by the love he felt for his wife and son. Who would take care of them now?