by James Church
“At last, a good question, Lieutenant Han. Now I have one for you. Shall we get something to eat?”
Chapter Four
It was Sunday, but I went to the office anyway. Now that SSD had moved in on the case, it would be harder for us to drop. But there is always a hole in the clouds. If the case was actually supposed to be solved—which I still doubted—then SSD would fumble around and trip over evidence, but we might eventually pull some facts together. If it wasn’t supposed to be solved, I knew SSD would make sure we didn’t get ourselves in trouble by finding anything remotely like a concrete lead. It was unlikely we’d discover anything at the party Miss Chon had mentioned, and that was fine. A party is, after all, a party. No harm in standing around.
Meanwhile, I decided to drive over and nose around the neighborhood near the bank. There were a few residents in the old apartments who spent the whole day doing nothing but sitting around with their eyes open. Imagine my surprise when it turned out, on the day of the robbery, they had all been somewhere else. None of them knew a bartender with a high-pitched voice and a scar on his face, either, though a couple of them flinched when I told them they’d better believe I’d remember how they helped me out on this.
I went back to the office and made a few phone calls to my friends to see if anyone had heard anything out of the ordinary. None of them had. Han picked me up around five o’clock; he didn’t have much to say on the drive over. I’d never been to a party at a bank, but the festivities at the Gold Star were not what I had expected. There were several foreigners, mostly Europeans, mostly male, mostly sipping Scotch. A few of them stood talking to young Korean women whom the bank had rounded up to serve as hostesses. They were in traditional Korean dress, pale colors that made them look like the sky at dawn, quiet and calmly innocent. They laughed among themselves, smiled at the foreigners, and moved away when Han and I walked in the door. I didn’t recognize any of them.
Miss Chon acknowledged our presence with a nod but didn’t come over to greet us. Han felt put out immediately. “We shouldn’t have come. I knew we shouldn’t have come. There is nothing to learn at this sort of event.”
“Relax, have a drink, talk to one of the girls.”
“That may be your ministry’s style, Inspector, but SSD still has high standards. These people are all suspects, every single one of them. I don’t mingle with suspects.”
“Why are they all suspects?”
“Because they are all at the scene of a crime.”
“Good thinking, Han. My orders, on the other hand, are never to pass up a glass of good Scotch. One of these foreigners may have observed the robbery; so much the better. You pretend they’re suspects, I’ll pretend they’re witnesses, and we’ll see who gets to talk to the prettiest girl.”
Han scowled. “Don’t tell them who I am.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll pretend you’re not even here.” I picked up a drink and waved a girl over. “You may ignore him,” I said to her. “But you must not ignore me.”
“Why would I ignore you, Inspector?”
“Have we met?”
“Yes, but you seem not to remember.”
“Forgive me, truly. If we had met, surely I would remember your smile.”
She gagged but recovered nicely. “I used to supervise the Ministry’s guesthouse,” she said. “Your chief inspector, Pak, got me the job.” There was a pause, just a heartbeat, as she watched me. Speaking of a nonperson who had died in a nonevent wasn’t wise. “You were there for a lunch with a German delegation some years ago. Or perhaps it was Austrian. They were unhappy with their schedule. They kept saying they had requested a meeting with the Minister but that no one was paying any attention to them and all they were doing was sightseeing. My waitresses said they hardly ate a bite and talked the whole time about lodging a protest.”
“Your waitresses said that? They knew German? No one told me.”
“So, you remember the lunch, but you have forgotten me.” She took my arm and led me under the security camera. “This is better. The camera can’t find us here.”
“Some reason it shouldn’t?”
“What do you know about the manager?” She glanced at Miss Chon.
“She’s tough.”
“She has to be. She’s a woman. And she’s a foreigner.”
“I was positive about the first, and pretty sure about the second. But she looks Korean.”
“She isn’t. She’s Scottish.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Well, that’s what her passport says. I’m supposed to be watching her, but she is good at slipping away.”
“I thought you were in charge of waitresses.”
“A man can’t follow a woman, Inspector.” She laughed at nothing and put her hand on my arm. “The Ministry finally figured that out. Isn’t that wise?”
“If you were going to buy some silk stockings, where would you go?” I made a point of not looking at her legs. I can stand around at parties alright, but small talk is not my forte. The first thing that came into my head was stockings. The wisdom of Ministry personnel matters could wait for another time.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what size I wear?”
“No, I am not. I’m sure it’s something very petite, and not my business. But I do need to know, do they sell them in the city? Or would you have to put in an order with someone going outside to bring them back?”
“It depends, Inspector. On the side of the train station, there is a Russian who is said to sell such things from a suitcase he is said to carry.”
“Okay, now I’ll ask. What size do you wear?”
“Smile, act like I’m a good hostess.” But after I smiled she said, “No, never mind. Just look interested.”
2
Han dropped me at my apartment around dinnertime. “I’m going to follow up some leads, Inspector. Question some sources that we have; just leave that all to me. Call me tomorrow and we’ll figure out our next move. I’ll even fix your cell phone, if we have time.”
“Wait a second, Han. You told me the Center wants this solved. What did you mean?”
Han took off his sunglasses so I could see he was scowling. “I never said such a thing.”
“My mistake, I apologize. I suppose you also didn’t say that SSD has the lead in this investigation.”
“That I did say.”
“Do you have orders or something showing you are supposed to take the lead? Forget protocol; I mean orders. If you do, I’ll just go back to my office and type a final report. SSD can have it.”
“I wasn’t speaking formally, Inspector. But one of us has to take the lead, wouldn’t you agree, and it might as well be the one with the equipment and the resources to solve the case. That’s no reason for you to drop out. It’s just the way things are.” This was not normal SSD gloating. At this point, he should have been suggesting I was barely good enough to shine his shoes.
“Why should I stay working on a case the Center doesn’t want solved?” It wasn’t an idle question. I was passing him a knife, handle first, and pointing out my vitals.
“No one said the Center doesn’t want it solved.”
“But no one said they did.” He didn’t want the knife, which worried me more than if he had. I was going to be his trussed pig, not ready for the slaughter.
3
The woman in the next apartment had left a bowl of rice and a small glass filled with old kimchi on the wooden chest inside my front door. I gave her money every week, and she would go to the market for me. She didn’t prepare anything elaborate, but there was always something waiting, no matter when I came home. The food sat by itself on the chest; there was no wallet—with or without euro notes. It hadn’t been knocked onto the floor by mistake, and she hadn’t tried to be helpful by putting it in the drawer. I opened the window and lay down. Han occupied my thoughts for a couple of minutes, then I thought about stockings and Miss Chon’s waist, and then I did what I sometimes do when I lie down. I fell asl
eep.
By the time I got back to the office, it was already dark, but I could see from the street that the lights were on. That meant Min was there; he always turned the lights on in every office when he worked at night. He said it was good if people on the street thought the Ministry never slept. It was the right moment to walk into his office and tell him to either give me everything he knew about this case or take me off of it. The Ministry had assigned someone, a former waitress for crying out loud, to follow the manager of the Gold Star Bank. No one informed me. Min had sent Yang to my apartment and then told me Yang had not seen the wallet, which had been in plain sight on the chest next to the door. How could he not see it? It certainly wasn’t there now. My neighbor wouldn’t take it; no one in the apartment house would.
Min was on the phone. He was seated at attention, which meant it was an important conversation. The way he waved me to a chair told me he was being chewed out. By the time he hung up, he was sweating slightly. “Inspector, this is not going well.”
“Complaints? More threats to drop the case?”
“Worse, orders from the Ministry to solve it immediately. How can we do that? We’re bogged down with SSD, you say no one will open their files, that fellow from the other night—”
“The well-connected one?”
“Yes, him. He has connections with the Central Committee.”
“What about the bank manager?”
“What about her?”
“She’s being followed.”
Min began to doodle on a file folder. I didn’t say anything, leaving the only sound in the room the moths fluttering around the light. “That’s it?” he finally asked. “Okay, I knew she was being followed. Well, no, I didn’t actually know that. I just knew she was already high on the Ministry’s list of suspects.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“I don’t trust Ministry lists. I had to see if you came to the same conclusion. I think the real reason they have their eye on her is that she’s a foreigner.”
“Yes, I got that. She’s Scottish.”
“Scottish? Are you crazy, Inspector? She’s Kazakh.”
I shrugged. “She could be anything, for all I care. But her tail told me she has a Scottish passport.”
“You talked to the guy who is tailing her?”
“Not a guy. A woman, a waitress actually, as if you didn’t know. Maybe I should retire.” Panic flashed in Min’s eyes, raw panic, the same emotion passengers on boats convey when the water is up to their knees and waves are breaking through the windows. Time to put another hole in the hull. “I thought after all these years I was respected for my ability. I do at least know how to tail people. But I take it I am wrong, my abilities in that regard are no longer respected, and perhaps the Ministry thinks I am no longer needed. Very well, my request for retirement will be on your desk by tomorrow. Good luck working with Han.”
Min quickly picked up the phone. “Go away,” he said to me before he started dialing. “It’s late. Go sit in your office and work on your bookshelves. Let me check a few things. I’ll be down in a few minutes. Don’t fill out anything.”
An hour later, around 10:00 P.M., Min was at my door. I was studying the plans for the bookshelf that would fit on the far wall in my office. The office was small enough so that there was little to distinguish the far wall from the near one. The ceilings were very high, which made for a lot of space, but all of it on the vertical. It was like being a farmer on a mountaintop. The bookshelf wasn’t anything I’d ever get done, I knew that. I had found some lumber, but never exactly what I needed. When I could get any wood screws, they were the wrong size. But I enjoyed studying the plans.
“Inspector, I’ve got my footing back. I apologize for not being overly forthcoming these past few days, but I had the feeling a typhoon was coming. The problem was, I didn’t know from which direction. Now I do. No need for you to retire.”
“If you didn’t know whether or not a typhoon was coming, why did you put me in its path with a silk stocking in my pocket?”
“I would have told you when to jump for safety, don’t worry. But I needed some clarity first. I had to have a better focus.”
“And now you have it?”
“I have focus. And you, you have that wallet? I thought I told you to bring it in.”
I opened my desk drawer. “Right here.” Actually it wasn’t; I didn’t know where it was. It had disappeared, but I couldn’t tell that to Min. He would demand a search of each apartment on each floor, and not a light dusting, either. These would be thorough searches, everything turned upside down. The neighbors wouldn’t talk to me for months. I closed the drawer. “We’re not going to give it back to Mr. Well-connected, are we?”
“No, he won’t bother us.”
“And why not?” I could see from Min’s expression that we were off the wallet onto something more troubling.
“He was found dead, with a knife in his back, in a dark alley near a certain drinking establishment.”
“Ah, I love it when the plot thickens.”
Chapter Five
Some people might have said a walk to the train station the next morning wasn’t the best use of my time, but efficiency was taking second place to survival. The investigation was becoming more complicated by the day. Murder does that. First the Ministry wanted the case solved, then they didn’t. And then they did. SSD was thrown in, so quickly it almost seemed to me that someone had planned their involvement all along—either to put pressure on us to get the matter solved, or to make sure it wasn’t solved at all. I was used to opaqueness in these things, but this exceeded what was normal. And now there were warning streamers attached to the normal little warning flags, all telling me that guessing wrong on this case would not be minor. Realizing I needed to stay on safe ground for the time being wasn’t much comfort; it just meant I had to worry about how to tell safe ground from a cesspool. I didn’t sleep much that night, until finally, about dawn, I decided that maybe the best course was still just plodding through the preliminary steps in a way that would make everybody happy. I would do enough to keep the Ministry off our necks if they really were panting for a solution. I would not do nearly enough to scare whoever might be watching from one of the darker corners of the city, if someone above the Minister was determined to keep us going through the motions without getting anywhere near the truth. Besides, I was still curious about the stockings.
One thing that had me more than a little worried was SSD’s involvement. I didn’t care if it smudged the Ministry’s image; that could be repaired. Something about Han’s approach suggested that somewhere at the core of this case were security concerns beyond what a simple bank robbery—even the first one on record—would warrant. As long as he was assigned to the case, I was supposed to check everything with Han first. Protocol gave SSD pride of place in a joint investigation. It was the main reason we made a point of leaving unopened any orders that had the word “joint” in the subject line. Apart from that, I was unsure about Han himself. He was smoother than he ought to be. His awkwardness was off; it was almost too practiced. It could be that he was from a new SSD breed trained to hide a level of competence that no one suspected they had. A new little warning flag, waving from its own rampart, didn’t think so. I had to admit, the SSD officers I knew didn’t spend a lot of time investigating. To them, everything was just bending thumbs. Han didn’t fit that mold. Anyone who could recognize a piece of oak was capable of learning; most of the people I’d met in SSD weren’t.
I got a little sleep and arrived at the office somewhat past the start of my shift. Min was gone, probably to a staff meeting at the Ministry. I had a few things left to do at my desk, some old paperwork to initial and send on, questions from an inspector in a sector at the other end of town to answer, a name trace file that had been on my chair for weeks. It was midmorning before I got out of the office and onto the street. Min was still stuck in his meeting, which was fine. My mobile phone was off, stuffed in the back
of my desk drawer. When he complained later he couldn’t find me, I could say that I needed to go out and think, that the area around the station was nice this time of year, lots of people walking around, most of them in a good mood because of the weather. What I didn’t have to say was that the reason I went over there was to find a Russian with a suitcase full of silk stockings.
Right away, there was a detour I hadn’t expected, because the sidewalks on the main route were torn up and new paving stones were being put down. There hadn’t been anything wrong with the old ones from what I could tell, but the city was being “beautified,” and that meant new sidewalks, new paint on the front of the buildings, even new windows for some of them. The work gangs didn’t mind being outside in this weather; only a few of them were actually working, anyway. The rest of them sat on the new curbs and watched. The detour took me onto a street with two or three new restaurants and a barber. The restaurants were still closed with the curtains shut, but the barber was in good spirits and waved me in. He thought he had found a “supplier” for new scissors and maybe even a hair dryer, at what he said was a “good price.” That meant it wasn’t legal, but I figured there were a few things higher on my list than stolen scissors.
The barber said the detour had increased his business and he hoped they would never get the new sidewalk finished. By the time he was through talking and started to cut my hair, one of the restaurants was open. It was too beautiful a day to eat near the station, so I hung around for another thirty minutes while they rearranged the tables to fit in more customers.
When I finally arrived at the station, it was early afternoon. The station and its neighborhood aren’t really in my area, and I had to make sure that the inspector with formal responsibility—an older man named Hyon, who had a keen sense for knowing when anyone crossed into his sector—didn’t get suspicious. If he did, he might file a complaint, and that could mean an exchange of angry memos followed by a meeting or two presided over by the lady with the shrill voice. The street patrols don’t give a damn, sometimes they don’t even know, when out-of-sector inspectors tiptoe through. But inspectors in charge keep careful track. They have to; otherwise, something funny might happen when they aren’t looking, and they could get blamed. Most people can be very territorial when their backsides are at stake. As it turned out, Hyon had been unable to come up with a good excuse why he shouldn’t “volunteer” for farm work and so had been sent out to the countryside for a week. His fill-in didn’t care what I did, as long as I was quiet about it.