by James Church
2
“I thought you might come by, Inspector.” The man sat on the ground leaning against a gingko tree twice the size of the ones in the courtyard outside Min’s window. A jacket folded up behind his head served as a pillow. He had taken off his glasses, and he looked up at me with a squint. “It took you longer than I expected.” He hadn’t shaved for several days.
“Is that so? Who might have told you that I was interested?”
“I have friends, you have friends; sometimes friends talk to friends. Sometimes they are even the same person.” He searched around on the ground for his glasses. A little anxious, it seemed to me; the sort of person who feels off balance if he can’t physically see what he’s confronting. The sort of person who doesn’t like to be interrogated in a dark room.
“We could speak Russian, if you’d be more comfortable.”
“No, Russian is the one language that doesn’t make me comfortable. Korean is fine. Not especially melodic to my ears. But good enough; just ignore my grammar.”
“You mind if I sit?”
“Inspector, please, it’s your country, for thousands of years, all yours. Maybe you had the same problem for a while with the Mongols that we did, a slight break in the chain of national custody. But that was temporary, wasn’t it, thanks God.” He finally found his glasses. He studied me closely, taking in the details that the squint had missed, and as he did, he became less anxious.
“So, you don’t mind if I sit?”
He smiled and indicated a place beside him. “Please, do me the honor.”
I didn’t move, but stayed where I was, looking down at him. “You seem a little pale. Are you feeling alright?”
“Me? Kind of you to express concern. Not many people do. I’m fine. Sometimes the food here doesn’t agree with me. This is not a criticism, just a reality. I have what you might call a nervous stomach. And I wouldn’t mind a bath. Sit, please, sit. Sit, Inspector, my neck is cramping, having to look up at you.”
I sat. “Your hotel doesn’t have a bath?”
“I’m not in a hotel, I can’t afford it. I’m staying with friends.”
“Friends.” I paused. “Your friends made sure you registered, as they should?”
“When in Rome, Inspector.”
“I’ve only made it as far south as Switzerland.” Which was true, in a manner of speaking. “Italy intrigues me, though.”
“Perhaps you should read Goethe. He was intrigued, as well.”
“Thank you, there’s probably a copy in the office.” To his credit, he did not laugh out loud. I got down to business. “Where are your papers, if I might ask? The hotel would normally keep them, but in this case . . . ”
“Ah! Fortunately, I happen to have them with me.”
He extracted his passport from a pocket in the jacket and handed it to me. His name was Yakob Logonov, born in Odessa in 1942. The three most recent stamps in his passport were forged, I could see that immediately. For six months, soon after I got out of the military, I had worked in the office that forges stamps for Ministry travelers. It was not the sort of work I would choose for a career. Too meticulous, too fine grained for me. Very fussy, like those miniature trees people sometimes grow in tiny pots. I had transferred to another office—foreign liaison—as soon as there was an opening.
I glanced at his passport again, casually. These were good forgeries, too good to be Russian, unless he paid more money for them than his clothes suggested he was worth. Then again, it was possible he was here working for the Russian service. In that case, I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell the stamps were fake. But, to keep us guessing, sometimes they wanted us to notice the forgeries, so we wouldn’t think they were theirs. It was a complicated game. Foreign liaison was simpler, although dealing with foreigners could be painful.
“Now that I know who you are, or rather, who your passport says you are, let me introduce myself. Inspector O, Ministry of People’s Security—but it seems you already knew this, from a mutual friend.” He nodded solemnly. I continued. “About three weeks ago, you entered, is that right?” I took one last look, then handed back the passport; he put it in a different pocket. That was a little unusual. People tend to carry things like passports in the same pocket, all the time. When they get into the passport line, they sometimes move their documents to a more convenient place, but after they are past the immigration booth, they move them back again. You can stand at the airport and watch the line for hours; the only people who don’t follow that pattern are people who are going to forget where they put things. You see them off to one side, frantically going through their belongings. So, I could assume he had been waiting for me, just like he said, with his passport ready to offer. And now he figured he had passed through the line and could put it back in the accustomed place.
Alright, he wanted to make sure I saw his entry stamps. I had seen them. Whether he wanted me to react I wasn’t sure. In any case, my main interest at the moment was in stockings, not passport forgeries. If the stamps had been sloppy and obvious, I would have been forced to say something. But good work like that had a purpose, and there wouldn’t be any way to find out what it was if we took him into custody and packed him off back across the border. For sure, if I got bogged down in forged stamps, we would never get around to stockings.
“Not quite three weeks ago, that’s when I entered.” He spoke Korean well enough, though heavily accented. “It was still dusty then, millions of small grains of China swirling in the sky, blotting out the sun, reminding everyone that the central kingdom is a land not to be ignored. Russian soil tends to stay put, even that which is not permanently frozen.”
“Train?”
“Yes, I came through Dandong, via Beijing.”
“Big city. Beijing.”
“Too big. It has no idea where it is going or what it is becoming. Too many upscale stores, barely enough room anymore for vendors like me.”
“You came here to sell stockings?”
“Yes.”
“What made you decide to do that?”
“Let me put it in nontechnical terms, Inspector. Korean legs have reached the point where they need stockings. There is pent-up demand. I recognized it as soon as I arrived here for the first time a couple of years ago. But I didn’t just act blindly. No, I studied the situation. I looked at a lot of legs, believe me, and there was no other conclusion to be drawn. Young women wearing baggy trousers, a great waste. So now I come twice a year, sell out a suitcase or two of stockings, then go home and reinvest the profits. Capitalism, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, is wonderful on this small scale.”
“Where’s the suitcase with the goods?” I glanced around the tree, though I already knew there wasn’t a suitcase nearby.
“All sold, completely gone, even the ones with runs up the sides. For good measure, I sell the suitcases, too, when I’m done. That way, I don’t take a lot of time with customs officials when I get home.”
“You’re a good salesman.”
“I do my best.”
“Regular customers?”
“Some.”
“Women?”
He smiled. “Mostly.”
“Your grammar is impeccable, but we seem to have hit a low point in your vocabulary. Or have you become unnaturally guarded in your answers?”
“What a coincidence, Inspector, I was going to ask the same thing about your questions. They’re somewhat curt. That makes it difficult for me to figure out what you want to know.”
“When I want you to figure out what I want to know, I’ll give you written notice. Meantime, what I want right now is enlightenment. If you had any merchandise left and I had a pressing need to buy some stockings, what would I look for?”
“Depends on why you want them. Pressing needs come in all shapes and sizes.”
I lay back and looked at the very top of the tree. “You ever notice, Logonov, my friend, that trees know when to stop growing? A tree line tends to be pretty even. None wants t
o stand above the others.”
“Maybe the really tall ones get chopped down, so the others try to keep unobtrusive.”
“Yes, I suppose you have a point. That would be something a good salesman would notice.”
“What’s that, Inspector?”
“Behavioral norms, the flow of the ordinary.”
He was silent and took off his glasses again. For the moment, he had decided I wasn’t a threat. He didn’t have to watch me so closely. Slowly, he smiled to himself, and when he spoke, it was with a lighter tone. “A good salesman has a feel for many things, Inspector. We can sense desire, obviously. When someone has an unfulfilled need, it speaks to us.”
“Like stockings.”
“Like many things. Please understand, I’m not talking about some minor cultural bauble, Inspector. Material needs are not simply extraneous. Most people don’t realize that acquisitiveness is not a cultural trait; it is not imposed by society. It cannot be squashed by government fiat, you realize what I’m saying? Not a criticism, please understand. Purchasing, buying, bartering, trading—this satisfies a need, somehow, that has been carried over from before we were human.”
“Very philosophical, very deep; not to mention very convenient, for a salesman, to have identified such a universal basic human need. It must be a comfort, professionally, I mean.”
“You wanted to know about stockings?” His tone was a shade less light.
I sat up. “Not really. I thought I did. But you are a most observant man. I think you will save me a lot of time by answering just a few simple questions. Because you realize by now that I am also an observant man.”
“You want to know about my customers.”
I nodded.
“Mostly women, mostly young. They can’t afford much, but it gives them great pleasure when they buy even a single pair. A few people want to buy in bulk, twenty or thirty pair, but I don’t do that. They only want to resell them at a profit, and I do not consider myself a wholesaler.”
“What about the midrange?”
“You mean, between one pair and thirty.” He paused. “You mean, perhaps, five.”
“Five, or seven.”
“You want to know who bought singles, not pairs?”
I shrugged. “Man or woman?”
“Man. Unfriendly fellow, not very well mannered, and he seemed in a hurry.”
“Ugly.”
“You might say that.”
“A scar.” I drew a scar down the right side of my face.
He smiled. “Other side. It’s not nice to play games, Inspector.”
“Anything that stood out about the stockings he bought? Color? Style? Size? Very sheer?”
“They had club monograms. Bars have taken to ordering them for their girls. I might get the order on one visit, and by the time I return with the goods, the place that ordered them has gone out of business. Or they have decided they don’t want the whole order.”
“CB.”
“Club Blue. They ordered ten pair last fall when I was here. But they ended up only taking eight pair. And the way they had them monogrammed, sort of randomly on the ankle and up the inside of the thigh, a lot of girls don’t like them. So I had these two pair.”
“But the man in a hurry?”
“He took three.”
“You couldn’t sell him two pair?”
“He was adamant, said he was accountable for the funds, and that he was told only to buy three. That’s all he would take.”
“Why didn’t you just throw in the fourth for free?”
“Inspector, please, we are talking about universal forces, something like gravity. You think I’m a rug merchant?”
“The man was in a hurry, he was unfriendly, you said. You noticed a lot more. He paid in dollars?”
“Euros. Big bills. I couldn’t make change, and he absolutely refused to go to a bank to do so. Finally, we went over to another vendor, a seller of undergarments, a fine gentleman, who could get his hands on some change.”
“You remember when this was?”
“The last week in March, a few days after I arrived and made the deliveries of the orders from last year. I do that first, make the deliveries, renew acquaintances, that sort of thing. Then I set up shop and sell the remainder of my inventory. Then it’s time to go home.”
“I’m happy to say this time you don’t need to hurry home.”
“It’s not a problem. I can be on the train tomorrow.”
“No, you’re welcome to stay another week, maybe even two.”
“Stay? Here? Inspector, I appreciate the offer but cannot possibly accept.”
“You cannot possibly refuse. I’m forbidding you from leaving. I may have more questions, and I can’t wait until you return six months from now.”
“I’m happy to give you my phone number in Russia.”
“If you try to leave, you will be apprehended. You may think the border controls are lax and a little money will make them even more so. Don’t make that mistake.”
“What will I do for the next few weeks? I can’t just loiter in the streets.”
“You can sit and watch for signs of more pent-up demand.”
“What about a bath?”
“I don’t think I can help you there. I’d advise you try checking into a hotel for a few days. Give the front desk my name if they make any trouble, but I don’t think they will.”
“That will take all of my profits.” He leaned back against the tree again. “Will you have me followed every day?”
“If you want.”
“How can I get in touch with you?”
“Just tell our mutual friend. If you don’t mind my asking, what did you do with that single, last stocking?”
Logonov looked surprised. “What else could I do? I sold it to a woman with one leg.”
3
When I got back to the office, my phone was ringing.
“O here.”
“I’ve been calling all afternoon. Your mobile phone is switched off, and no one knew where you were. Is that how your ministry operates?”
It was Han, and he didn’t sound happy. “This isn’t the complaint line, Han. What do you want?”
“You were talking to a Russian near the train station. I want to know why and, more important, why you didn’t tell me you were going there.”
“I was out for a stroll, that’s all. There are some big gingko trees near the station, have you noticed?”
“You weren’t talking to trees. You were talking to a Russian. He sells stockings. We have our eye on him, and I don’t want you sticking your nose in the middle of it.”
“Eyes, noses, that’s a lot of body parts, Han. Easy to get them confused, if you’re not careful.” So, apparently someone else had seen the fake stamps, too. It could be Yakob wasn’t really from Odessa. “Well, don’t worry, I told him not to leave the country for a few weeks.”
“You what? Hold on.” There was a brief conversation off-line, not very pleasant, from what I could tell. Han’s voice came back on. “Listen carefully, Inspector, I’m not kidding around. You have nothing else to do with that Russian, or any Russian, until I tell you it’s alright. Meantime, you figure out a way to get back to that stocking salesman and let him know that you’ve changed your mind. He can leave.” Again, some shouting from off-line, nothing I could make out. “In fact, tell him it would be better if he left.”
“I don’t suppose you want to tell me what this is about?”
“You don’t want to know, you don’t need to ask.”
“Difficult to stay clear, Han, if I don’t know where my business ends and yours begins.”
“For instance.”
“The Russian. I don’t need details. But he’s part of my investigation. I just can’t give him up on your say-so. Is he your body?” There was silence. “Look, I don’t care if he’s yours or not, but he’s already in my report”—not true—“and if I just cut off contact with him, it will raise questions.” Another silence,
then again a conversation in the background. Not a conversation really, more like someone had lost a vital body part, then some very blunt words, though I couldn’t catch everything; Han must have had his hand over the phone. When he came on the line again, it didn’t sound like he was in the mood to chat.
“Inspector, this conversation is over. And keep your mobile phone on all the time. If I call, you’d better answer.”
I put the phone down and looked at my thumbs. They had warning flags all over them.
Chapter Six
What makes us different, O?”
Rarely am I at my desk after midnight; rarely does the Sad Man say more than a word or two if we run into each other in the morning when the shifts change.
“Some of us stay out of other people’s apartments unless they’re asked in.” My mood was not the best, all things considered.
Yang shrugged. “The chief told me to go, so I did. That’s not what I meant.”
“But you never went in, did you?”
“No. It wasn’t my idea to snoop around your place without your permission. So why are you mad at me? Especially if I kept out.”
“But you would have gone in if you could have.”
“Meaning?”
“You didn’t turn around on your own. It was the old lady kept you out, wasn’t it?”
Yang frowned. “She’s tough.”
“Why didn’t you just go to the side entrance?”
“I did. She was waiting for me.”
“She moves pretty fast for someone her age. She’s smart, too. What did she say?”
“She didn’t say anything. When I opened the door, she was standing there with her arms crossed. I told her she could be cited for interfering with the work of an investigation. She snorted.”