The Gentleman from Japan

by James Church

  “Anyway,” I said, “I don’t kiss my agents on the first date.”

  Tuya leaned over, put her arms around my neck, and pulled my face to hers.

  “Neither do I. But I value my skin. Kiss me, appassionato molto.”

  “Not on your life,” I said. “Maybe some other time.” I pulled away and turned to see who was watching. When I turned back, she was gone. A car passed by, very slowly. The engine needed tuning.

  6

  By the time I got to the office the next day, it was well after lunch. The duty officer said there was nothing new as far as the restaurant corpses went, but I could see he hadn’t even bothered to check the overnight log. When I got to my desk, there was a bulky, sealed envelope next to the phone. The envelope had no address on it, no indication of who it was from or to whom it was supposed to go. I picked it up carefully and brought it out to the duty officer.

  “When did this come in?”

  He looked at it as if it had dropped from another planet. “Honest, Major, I never saw it before, and no one has come in that door since I’ve been here.”

  “What about the door from the bank?”

  Our office was in an old, wooden two-story building. It had been built in the 1930s as a headquarters for the Japanese Imperial Army’s Manchurian sector. After the Japanese left, the place had fallen into disrepair, which meant the Ministry, with not much internal discussion and even less of a budget, considered it perfect for the regional office. The building was set back from the street, with a broad open area all around. That gave it an aura of unassailability. It also meant voices and other sounds from within the building were unlikely to be heard by anyone passing by. There was a decision not to build a security fence, since that would have looked like we had something to fear, whereas it was the general population that was supposed to be worried about us.

  A few years ago, someone—one rumor said it was the deputy minister—sold the open land to a developer, and not long afterward we were surrounded by tall buildings. One of them, with a Bank of China on the ground floor, came right up to our front door. “No sense in wasting good space,” the developer said when we protested. The Ministry sent a surveyor and a counterintelligence team up to look things over for a week, and they decided that going through the bank all the time to get to our office wasn’t very good. They recommended that we use the old kitchen door as our new entrance. That meant special locks and security cameras, all of which took months to install. The buzzer from the duty desk to unlock the door didn’t always work, and no one could remember the combination to the lock, which was very complex in order to defeat “the enemy,” so we spent a lot of time drinking tea at a little place on Dooran Street, around the corner. There were always some hookers there, especially in the afternoon. Most of them were happy to joke about their customers, so we kept our ears open. If anyone from Beijing Headquarters showed up on a surprise inspection visit and asked what we were doing drinking tea with hookers, we could say it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

  In the last couple of weeks, I’d gotten the impression that something was going on. The girls were quieter, smoking more, less eager to chat. Sometimes that was because they were having problems with the mayor’s demands that they work longer hours, or party with his crooked friends. This time the mood had seemed different, but no one would talk. And now there were the deaths of two of the girls—I didn’t know which two, yet—outside the dumpling shop. Technically, these weren’t my business, but if I could show the mayor was connected to the murders, I might finally be able to bring him down. Beijing liked us to bring in the heads of corrupt local officials. It made the minister look good.

  Chapter Three

  The envelope stared at me for twenty minutes or so as I thought about opening it. It ought to be scanned, I realized, but then I’d have to make a record of it. Whoever had slipped it into the office obviously didn’t want that. It didn’t look like a bomb, unless it was a noodle bomb. It might be poison, anthrax or something. They had problems like that in the west, Uighurs and so forth, but not here. Well, so far not here. They’d even had problems in Beijing with Uighur terrorists, and Beijing was far from their homes in Xinjiang. It wouldn’t take much for them to get a little farther, up here to Yanji. The owner of the noodle shop where the corpses had been found was a Uighur with a limp, so maybe we weren’t so safe up here in the northeast anymore. But why kill me? Equally, of course, why not? I represented the central authority, didn’t I? No matter to some angry Uighur that I wasn’t pure Han. Even if, as my uncle said, I had only a drop of Chinese blood, they’d be happy to spill even that drop. On the other hand, it could be the North Koreans. I was in charge of the office that was supposed to keep tabs on their security people, and from time to time, I made their lives difficult. Maybe they wanted to send Beijing a message. Or it could be they were still angry about what I’d done to one of their agents in Mongolia a few years back. Less likely, it could be to scare me into sending my uncle back home. The possibilities were endless. The outcomes, on the other hand, were few, none of them good.

  All of a sudden, I realized I needed to look up tosto. If Tuya used it again, I wanted to be ready. After she had lived in Italy and learned a little of the language, Tuya had gone back home to train as a contortionist at the Ulan Bator University of Contortionism. On graduation with honors, she was recruited by the Mongolian special police. Now she was here, in Yanji, working as my agent. Or, as she put it, “yes and no.” She must still be working for the Mongolians in some capacity. The Mongolians acted like they were off balance all the time. To hear them talk, the Russians and the Japanese and the South Koreans and the Chinese were all pushing them around. I didn’t buy it. From what I’d seen when I was there, the Mongolians had a good security organization. People who have conquered the known world usually do, even if it was a while ago. They knew how to watch their borders by going out and watching from some distance away. Yanji was a good place to watch a lot of other people’s operations and pick up early warning signs. Putting Tuya in Yanji made sense. In that case, it meant she was a double. On the other hand, given how she’d been assigned to me directly from Beijing, maybe not—unless the screening in Beijing was worse than normal.

  Maybe she was not quite a double, sort of a 1.5. It was possible that Beijing was working with the Mongolians. They were developing good relations with Pyongyang, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if someone in the Ministry thought that the Mongolians could give us access we didn’t have but badly needed.

  It would have been better if they’d let me know she was in my region, but maybe not.

  Maybe, maybe, maybe. This couldn’t go on. I couldn’t concentrate when I was around her, and now I couldn’t concentrate when I wasn’t. Something had to give. I reached over and tore open the package. If it exploded, it would save me a lot of heartache.

  Nothing happened. There was a light wooden box, and inside of that, another box that had a yellow rose embossed on its lid. I lifted the smaller box to examine it under the lamp on my desk and looked at the four sides. It was nicely put together. The lid fit perfectly. It didn’t look as if it had been constructed in a factory. Uncle O would know what sort of wood it was. He would probably even be able to guess something about the person who constructed the box, maybe even when it was put together and where—assuming it didn’t blow up when I lifted the lid. Just as I decided to remove the lid, my special phone buzzed. I unlocked the drawer and picked up the receiver.

  “Major, did you get a package?” It was the chief of police. He was talking fast.

  “I did. From you? Very pretty, though I don’t think it’s my style.”

  “Don’t open it. Don’t rattle it. Don’t do anything. I’m sending the bomb squad over.”

  “You have a bomb squad handy? Since when?” I moved my chair back from the desk a little. “Calm down, will you? It’s just a box.”

  I heard a conversation offline. Someone shouted, and then the chief piped up again. “If ther
e is anyone in your building, get them out. You, too. Leave the box and get out!”

  “Walk, run, crawl?”

  “I’m not kidding, Major. I’ll explain later. Right now you need to evacuate your building. And I mean now!”

  “OK, see you later.”

  “Let’s hope so.” The chief hung up.

  I walked into the front office. “Time to leave,” I said to the duty officer casually. He was a nervous type, a good trait sometimes but not now. When his nerves jangled, he froze up. I needed him to stay unfrozen. “Send a message to Beijing telling them we’re evacuating the office.” I put my hands in my pockets and looked nonchalant. “Bomb scare.”

  The duty officer froze. “Huh?”

  “You heard me, type a close-down message and send it. Take you a couple of seconds.”

  “You want me to encrypt it?”

  I could see his eyes were getting a very nervous glint. “Sure, why not,” I said. He was going to need prodding. “Then we’ll put all the pieces of you we can find in the nice box someone sent me, and we’ll keep it in the file room for your replacement to bring flowers to every New Year’s Day. No! Forget encrypting it. Send the message in the clear.”

  I followed the duty officer into the communications room.

  “What do I say?” He had a funny look on his face.

  “Closing,” I said. “Closing, bomb scare. Will advise.” I saw him shut his eyes and turn to the keyboard. He typed one key, then stopped, his hands frozen in midair. “That’s good,” I said gently, “you’re doing real good. Go on, type another word. Then let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Just as we got to the street, I saw a car backing away. It did a 180-degree turn, the driver gunned the engine, and the car disappeared into a side street. A moment later, two cars came screaming at us from the other direction. The first one hurtled past and turned the corner with a screech of tires. The second one braked and spun around. The chief of police jumped out and shouted an order at two policemen in the backseat. “Get out, get out now and secure that package!”

  The two of them emerged from the car, but neither one took a step.

  “It’s OK, Po.” I ignored the two police statues. “The package is in my office. It looks harmless enough.”

  “Says you. Let’s not take any chances. My bomb squad is out back. They’ll handle it. These two”—he slapped one of them on the back of the head—“will be used as dog meat.”

  There was a muffled explosion, the sound of glass shattering, then black smoke curling out from one of the windows on the second floor of our building.

  “Odd,” I said.

  “Not odd,” the chief said, irritated. “I warned you it was a bomb.”

  “Yes, you did. The thing is, it was on my desk, and my desk is on the first floor. Why did it blow out a second-floor window?”

  “Physics,” the chief said. “Mechanics of bomb explosions. Who the hell cares! The main thing is we need to secure the place and gather evidence before it disappears.” He turned again to the statues. “OK, the damned thing went boom. The coast is clear. Now get in there and start looking for clues.”

  One of the two shook his head. “It was a bomb, Chief, everything blew the hell up. We’re not going to find anything.”

  The chief walked over and leaned so close into the man’s face that his hat fell off. “Did I ask your advice? No, I didn’t. Did I give you an order? Yes, I did. You want to discuss it? How about I put you in the hospital, maybe we can talk about it there.”

  “Po,” I interrupted. “A word if you don’t mind.”

  The chief glowered at his man for a moment longer, then turned to me. “What?”

  “A word in private.”

  Po looked around. “You want to go somewhere else? A noodle restaurant, perhaps? I think we’ve closed them all down. We can talk there in private.”

  “No, down the block will be fine.” When we were about thirty meters away, with no one in earshot, I stopped. “I saw a car leaving just as I got out onto the street.”

  “So?”

  “It was going in reverse, very fast.”

  “Did you get a good look at it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t tell me. You know whose it was, but I’m supposed to guess.”

  “It was the mayor’s car. The one he uses when he thinks no one knows it’s him. The right driver’s-side tire doesn’t match the other three.”

  2

  “That was going to be my first guess.” The police chief made a face. “Maybe the mayor was out for one of his surprise inspections.”

  “Yeah, surprise. His driver whipped the car around in a hurry. Here’s what I want you to do, Po. Just wait. Watch and wait. You know as well as I do that he is up to something.”

  “No idea what you’re talking about, Major. None.” The chief turned to go, then turned back. “You sure you’re OK? I can plant some people in the neighborhood to keep watch. Nothing elaborate. A couple of guys dressed like street sweepers.”

  “Not necessary.” The day the local police had to guard one of the Ministry’s field offices would be a bad day in hell and an even worse day for me. “Headquarters will send a team up here to find out what is going on. They’re probably already packing. They’ll arrive in a few hours, and once they’re here, they won’t want your people hanging around.” The last thing I needed was a team from Headquarters snooping in my sector because of a bomb, two bombs if you counted the one in the countryside. I had to come up with a way to wave them off.

  “We don’t call it hanging around.” Po was annoyed with my choice of words. “We call it collecting evidence. It makes good paperwork for the files, long lists of things and people and events. Sometimes we even catch criminals with evidence. Hard to believe, Major, but it happens, even with the sad bunch working for me.”

  There was no sense going back and forth with him over theories of evidence, especially now. “Just say it was a gas line explosion, why don’t you? Routine incident, that sort of thing, barely even rates a written report. You can fill in the evidence later.”

  The police chief looked doubtful. “I don’t think I can sell that. There are no gas lines on your second floor.”

  “Maybe there are, maybe there aren’t. How the hell would you know what’s in a State Security building? How does anyone know what’s on the second floor? No one ever goes up there.” I thought about it. Not no one. “OK, don’t try to sell that explanation if you don’t think you can do it with a straight face. Maybe just try renting it out for a couple of days. Long enough for me to make a few enquiries.”

  “But if this is terrorism…”

  “It’s not. We both know it isn’t terrorism, not the normal kind, anyway. If you have to, go ahead and pretend to conduct an investigation so you don’t seem to rule things out too soon. But I don’t have to pretend. I’m telling you it’s not terrorism.”

  “OK, if you’re so sure, then what is it? If it’s not terrorism, what do we call it?” Po held up his hand. “Never mind. I’m just the police chief. I don’t have to know what State Security thinks. I don’t even want to know. I tell you what. I’ll pull everyone off this incident for three days. That’s all I can give you. I can explain three days as normal incompetence, personnel shortages, failure of communications equipment, or even the need to concentrate on those seven bodies. Then someone will talk to someone else and my phone will ring and the mayor will be on the other end telling me to have a report finished on a certain building explosion within twenty-four hours or find myself in Hubei directing traffic.”

  “Three days is fine, Po.”

  As the chief climbed back into his car, I looked around for my duty officer. He was on the corner talking to a woman. When she saw me coming over, she lowered her face and hurried away into an alley.

  “You know her?” I watched the woman disappear.

  “Yeah.” The duty officer had no guile, which was good. “She’s the manager of some sort of fish restaurant
I go to when I get off late. The place is open all night. It’s new. Sometimes I need a break from Indian food.”

  “Curry from hell.”

  “Yeah.” He grinned.

  “How’s the fish at the lady’s place?”

  “Nothing special.”

  “She just happened by after the explosion?”

  “Could be. I think she lives in the neighborhood.”

  “You think so?”

  “Look, Major, I don’t know exactly. She’s not my type.”

  “That’s good. You wouldn’t like her type.”

  “Sure, if you say so.”

  “I say so. You know where she’s from?”

  “She’s local as far as I can figure, though once in a while I catch an accent.”

  I hadn’t caught an accent when I was in the restaurant, but the duty officer had a good ear for that sort of thing.

  “You stay away from her place,” I said, “until I tell you it’s OK. There are other fish in the sea.”

  “If you say so. The fish are from the river, but if you say so.”

  “I do. And keep away from her, too.”

  He shrugged. “Sure, I told you, she’s not my type. She’s too tough for me.”

  “Good, then we understand each other. Let’s get back to work.”

  The duty officer scratched his nose. “How come only the second-floor windows blew out?”

  “Physics,” I said. “Bodies in motion.” I gave him a hard look. “Understand?”

  He shrugged. “What do we tell Headquarters?”

  “Nothing. We don’t tell them anything. Send an all-clear as soon as you can, before they start to worry. Tell them it was a false alarm. Maybe they won’t order anyone up here. I don’t know about you, but I could do without those smug faces poking into our quiet existence.”